proofreading team at www.pgdp.net all he knew a story by john habberton author of "helen's babies," "brueton's bayou," etc. meadville penn'a flood and vincent chautauqua=century press matthews, northrup & co., art-printing works, buffalo and new york. all he knew. chapter i. as the capital express train dashed into the village of bruceton one bright afternoon, a brakeman passing through a car was touched on the shoulder by a man, who said,-- "the man that left this in the seat in front got out three stations back. you don't s'pose he'll want it again an' send back for it, do you?" the brakeman looked at an object which the speaker held up as he spoke: it was a small fig-box, such as train-boys sometimes succeed in imposing upon the traveling public, and it still contained several figs. "want it again?" said the brakeman, with a scornful curl of the lip that gave his black moustache a mephistophelian twist, "of course not. he left it there so's to get rid of it, like most of 'em do. i wouldn't buy one of them boxes of--" the brakeman suddenly ceased talking, and put both hands on the passenger's shoulders with the movement peculiar to train-men whose duty it is to rouse sleeping passengers, the effect always being to make the victim throw his head slightly backward. then the brakeman looked a moment into the face before him,--it was small, weak-eyed, and characterless,--and continued,-- "why, sam kimper, i didn't know you from adam! that broad-brimmed low hat makes you look like somebody else. when did you get out?" "this mornin'," said the passenger, dropping his eyes. "did, eh? well, you needn't feel so bad about it, old man. anybody's likely to get in trouble once in a while, you know. you got catched; some other folks 'most always don't; that's about the difference. let's see; how long was you--how long have you been away?" "i was _sent_ for two years an' a half," said the passenger, raising his head again and looking almost manly, "but, mr. briggs, i got all the shortenin' of time that's allowed for good conduct,--ev'ry day of it. if you don't believe it, i'll prove it to you. my term begun on the th of august, eighteen hundred an'--" "never mind the figures, old man: i'll take your word for it." "but i wanted you to be sure; i thought mebbe you'd tell other folks about it, seein' you're a good-hearted feller, an' know ev'rybody, an' i never done you no harm." "i'll tell 'em anyway," said the brakeman, cheerily; "i ain't no saint, but i'm always ready to help a fellow up when he's down. i've got to get to the rear now, to uncouple a car we have to leave here. s'long, sam." "say, mr. briggs," said the passenger, hurrying along behind the brakeman, "you don't s'pose there's any chance for me to get a job in the railroad-company's yard, do you?" the brakeman turned with a sharp look which speedily softened as he saw an earnest appeal in the little man's face. "well, sam," he replied, his words dragging slowly along, "the yard's always full, an' men a-waitin'. you'd have to give bonds for good behavior, an' honesty, an'--" "never mind the rest, mr. briggs," said the ex-convict, shrinking an inch or two in stature. "i didn't know about that, indeed i didn't, or i--" "well, you needn't be a-mr.-briggs-in' me, anyhow," said the brakeman. "i was only jim before--you left town, sam, an' i want you to go on callin' me jim, just the same. do you understand that, confound you?" "yes, mr.--jim, i do; an' may god bless you for sayin' it!" "here we are; good luck by the car-load to you, sam." then the brakeman looked back into the car and roared,-- "bruceton." the discharged prisoner consumed a great deal of time and distributed many furtive glances as he alighted, though he got off the train on the side opposite the little station. the train remained so long that when finally it started there was no one on the station platform but the agent, whose face was not familiar to the last passenger. a gust of wind brought to the platform a scrap of a circus-poster which had been loosened by recent rain from a fence opposite the station. the agent kicked the paper from the platform; sam picked it up and looked at it; it bore a picture of a gorgeously-colored monkey and the head and shoulders of an elephant. "ain't you goin' to put it back?" he asked. "not much," said the agent. "i don't rent that fence to the circus, or menagerie, or whatever it is." "can i have it?" "findings are keepings," said the agent, "especially when they ain't worth looking for; that's railroad rule, and i guess circus-companies haven't got a better one." the finder sat down on the platform, took a knife from his pocket, and carefully cut the monkey and the elephant's head from the paper. then he walked to the end of the platform and looked cautiously in the direction of the town. a broad road, crossed by a narrow street, led from the station; into the street the little man hurried, believing himself secure from observation, but just then the door of a coal-yard office opened, and judge prency, who had been county judge, and deacon quickset emerged. both saw the new arrival, who tried to pass them without being recognized. but the deacon was too quick for him; planting himself in the middle of the sidewalk, which was as narrow as the deacon was broad, he stopped the wayfarer and said,-- "samuel, i hope you're not going back to your old ways again,--fighting, drinking, loafing, and stealing?" "no, deacon, i ain't. i'm a changed man." "that's what they all say, samuel," the deacon replied, not unkindly, "but saying isn't doing. human nature's pretty weak when it don't lean on a stronger one." "that's how i'm leanin', deacon." "i'm glad to hear it, samuel," said the deacon, offering his hand, though in a rather conservative manner. "sam," said the judge, "i sentenced you, but i don't want you to think hard of me and take it out of my orchard and chicken-coop. it wasn't your first offence, you know." "nor the tenth, judge. you did just right. i hope 'twas a warnin' to others." "i think it was," said the judge, thrusting both hands into his pockets and studying the wall of the station as if it were the record of his own court. "i think it was; and here's my hand, sam, and my best wishes for a square start in life." as the judge withdrew his hand he left behind a little wad of paper which sam recognized by sense of touch as the customary american substitute for the coin of the realm. the poor fellow did not know what to say: so he said nothing. "hurry along to your family, sam. i hope you'll find them all well. i've told my wife to see to it that they didn't suffer while you were away, and i guess she's done it: she's that kind of woman." sam hurried away. the deacon followed him with his eyes, and finally said,-- "i wonder how much truth there was in him--about leaning on a higher power?" "oh, about as much as in the rest of us, i suppose." "what do you mean?" the deacon snapped out this question; his words sounded like a saw-file at work. "merely what i say," the judge replied. "we all trust to our religion while things go to suit us, but as soon as there's something unusual to be done--in the way of business--we fall back on our old friend the devil, just as sam kimper used to do." "speak for yourself, judge, and for sam, if you want to," said the deacon with fine dignity, "but don't include me among 'the rest of us.' good-morning, judge." "good-morning, deacon. no offence meant." "perhaps not; but some men give it without meaning to. good-morning." "i guess the coat fits him," murmured the judge to himself, as he sauntered homeward. chapter ii. sam kimper hurried through a new street, sparsely settled, crossed a large vacant lot, tramped over the grounds of an unused foundry, and finally went through a vacancy in a fence on which there were only enough boards to show what the original plan had been. a heap of ashes, a dilapidated chicken-coop, and a forest of tall dingy weeds were the principal contents of the garden, which had for background a small unpainted house in which were several windows which had been repaired with old hats and masses of newspaper. as he neared the house he saw in a cove in the weeds a barrel lying on its side, and seated in the mouth of the barrel was a child with a thin, sallow, dirty, precocious face and with a cat in her arms. the child stared at the intruder, who stopped and pushed his hat to the back of his head. "pop!" exclaimed the child, suddenly, without moving. "mary!" exclaimed the man, dropping upon his knees and kissing the dirty face again and again. "what are you doin' here?" "playin' house," said the child, as impassively as if to have had her father absent two years was so common an experience that his return did not call for any manifestation of surprise or affection. "stand up a minute, dear, and let me look at you. let's see,--you're twelve years old now, ain't you? you don't seem to have growed a bit. how's the rest?" "mam's crosser an' crosser," said the child; "joe's run away, 'cause the constable was after him for stealin' meat from--" "my boy a thief! oh, lord!" "well, we didn't have nothin' to eat; he had to do it." the father dropped his head and shuddered. the child continued: "billy's goin' to school now; jane's servant-gal at the hotel; tom plays hookey all the time, an' the baby squalls so much that nobody likes her but billy." the man looked sad, then thoughtful; finally he put his arm around his child, and said, as he kissed and caressed her,-- "you're to have a better dad after this, darlin'; then maybe the mother'll feel pleasanter, an' the baby'll be happier, an' tom'll be a good boy, an' we'll get joe back somehow." "how's you goin' to be better?" asked the child. "goin' to give us money to buy candy an' go to all the circuses?" "maybe," said the father. "i must go see the mother now." the child followed her father to the house; there was not much excitement in the life of the kimper family, except when there was a quarrel, and mary seemed to anticipate some now, for she drawled, as she walked along,-- "mam's got it in for you; i heerd her say so many a time sence you war took away." "the poor thing's had reason enough to say it, the lord knows," said the man. "an'," he continued, after a moment, "i guess i've learned to take whatever i'm deservin' of." as sam entered his house, a shabbily dressed, unkempt, forlorn looking woman sat at a bare pine table, handling some dirty cards. when she looked up, startled by the heavy tread upon the floor, she exclaimed,-- "i declare! i didn't expect you till--" "wife!" shouted sam, snatching the woman into his arms and covering her face with kisses. "wife," he murmured, bursting into tears and pressing the unsightly head to his breast,--"wife, wife, wife, i'm goin' to make you proud of bein' my wife, now that i'm a man once more." the woman did not return any of the caresses that had been showered upon her; neither did she repel them. finally she said,-- "you _do_ appear to think somethin' of me, sam." "think somethin' of you? i always did, nan, though i didn't show it like i ought. i've had lots of time to think since then, though, an' i've had somethin' else, too, that i want to tell you about. things is goin' to be different, the lord willin', nan, dear--wife." mrs. kimper was human; she was a woman, and she finally rose to the occasion to the extent of kissing her husband, though immediately afterward she said, apparently by way of apology,-- "i don't know how i come to do that." "neither do i, nan; i don't know how you can do anythin' but hate me. but you ain't goin' to have no new reason for doin' it. i'm goin' to be different ev'ry way from what i was." "i hope so," said mrs. kimper, releasing herself from her husband's arms and taking up the cards again. "i was just tellin' my fortune by the keerds, havin' nothin' else to do, an' they showed a new man an' some money,--though not much." "they showed right both times, though keerds ain't been friends to this family, confound 'em, when i've fooled with 'em at the saloon. where's the baby, though, that i ain't ever seen?" "there," said the woman, pointing to a corner of the room. sam looked, and saw on the floor a bundle of dingy clothes from one end of which protruded a head of which the face, eyes, and hair were of the same tint as the clothing. the little object was regarding the new arrival in a listless way, and she howled and averted her head as her father stooped to pick her up. "she's afraid you're goin' to hit her, like most ev'ry one does when they go nigh her," said the mother. "if i'd knowed you was comin' to-day, i'd have washed her, i guess." "i'll do it myself now," said the father, "i've got the time." "why, you ain't ever done such a thing in your life, sam!" said mrs. kimper, with a feeble giggle. "more's the shame to me; but it's never too late to mend. when'll billy get home, an' tom?" "goodness knows; billy gets kep' in so much, an' tom plays hookey so often, that i don't ever expect either of 'em much 'fore supper-time. they talk of sendin' tom to the reform school if he don't stop." "i'll have to stop him, then. i'll try it, anyway." "it needs somebody that can wollup him harder'n i can; he's gettin' too big for my stren'th. well, if here they don't both come! i don't know when i've seen them two boys together before, 'less they was fightin'. i wonder what's got into 'em to-day." the two boys came through the back yard, eying the house curiously, billy with wide open eyes, and tom with a hang-dog leer from under the brim of his hat. their father met them at the door and put his arms around both. "don't do that," said tom, twitching away, "that sort o' thing's for women, an' gals an' babies." "but i'm your dad, boy." "needn't make a baby of me, if you be," growled the cub. "i'd give a good deal, old as i am, if i had a dad to make a baby of me that way, if 'twas only for a minute." "oh, don't be an old fool," said tom. "i heerd in the village you'd been let out," said billy, "an' so i found tom an' told him, an' he said i lied, an' so we come home to see. did you bring us anythin'?" "yes," said the father, his face brightening, as he thrust his hand into his pocket and took out the fig box. "here," as he gave a fig to each of the children and one to his wife, "how do you like that?" "good enough," growled tom, "only i don't care for 'em unless i have a whole box. i lift one out of a train-boy's basket at the station once in a while." "don't ever do it again," said the father. "if you want 'em any time so bad you can't do without 'em, let me know, an' i'll find some way to get 'em for you." "an' get sent up again for more'n two year?" sneered the boy. "i don't mean to get 'em that way" said the father. "but i've got somethin' else for you." here he took the circus pictures from his breast, where they had been much flattened during the several demonstrations of family affection in which they had been involved. "here's a picture for each of you." billy seemed to approve of the monkey, but tom scowled and said,-- "what do i care for an elephant's head, when i seen the whole animal at the show, an' everythin' else besides?" "s'pose i might as well get supper, though there ain't much to get," said the wife. "there's nothin' in the house but corn-meal, so i'll bile some mush. an'," she continued, with a peculiar look at her husband, "there ain't anythin' else for breakfast, though deacon quickset's got lots of hens layin' eggs ev'ry day. i've told the boys about it again an' again, but they're worth less than nothin' at helpin' things along. the deacon don't keep no dog. now you've got home, i hope we'll have somethin'." "not if we have to get it that way," said sam, gently. "no more stealin'; i'll die first." "i guess we'll all die, then," moaned mrs. kimper. "i didn't s'pose bein' sent up was goin' to skeer all the spirit out of you." "it didn't, nan, but it's been the puttin' of a new kind of spirit into me. i've been converted, nan." "what?" gasped mrs. kimper. "thunder!" exclaimed tom, after a hard laugh. "you goin' to be a shoutin' methodist? won't that be bully to tell the fellers in the village?" "i'm not goin' to shout, or be anythin' i know of, except an honest man: you can tell that to all the fellers you like." "an' be told i'm a blamed liar? not much." mrs. kimper seemed to be in a mournful revery, and when finally she spoke it was in the voice of a woman talking to herself, as she said,-- "after all i've been layin' up in my mind about places where there was potatoes an' chickens an' pigs an' even turkeys that could be got an' nobody'd be any the wiser! how will we ever get along through the winter?" "the lord will provide," croaked tom, who had often sat under the church window during a revival meeting. "if he don't, we'll do without," said sam, "but i guess we won't suffer while i can work." "dad converted!" muttered tom. "dad converted! d'ye hear that?" said he, hitting his brother to attract attention. "i must go down to the hotel an' tell jane; she'll steal me a glass of beer for it. converted! i'll be ashamed to look the boys in the face." chapter iii. the kimper family thinned out, numerically, as soon as the frugal evening meal was despatched. tom and billy disappeared separately without remark; mary put on a small felt hat which added a rakish air to her precocious face, and said she was going to the hotel to see if sister jane had any news. half an hour later, the cook, all the chamber-maids, waiters, bar-keepers, and stable-boys at the hostelry were laughing and jeering, in which they were led by jane, as mary told of her father's announcement that he had been converted and would have no more stealing done in the interest of the family larder. the fun became so fast and furious that it was obliged to end in sheer exhaustion; so when tom came in an hour later, he was unable to revive it sufficiently to secure the stolen glass of beer which he had coveted. sam kimper did not seem to notice the disappearance of the more active portion of the family. taking the baby in his arms, he sat with closed eyes while his wife cleared the table. finally he said,-- "nan, ain't you got nothin' else to do?" "nothin', that i know of," said the wife. "come an' set down alongside o' me, then, an' let me tell you about somethin' that come about while i was in the penitentiary. nan, a man that used to come there sundays found me a-cryin' in my cell one sunday; i couldn't help it, i felt so forlorn an' kind o' gone like. i'd felt that way lots o' times before, when i was out an' around, but then i could get over it by takin' a drink. there's always ways of gettin' a drink,--sweepin' out a saloon, or cuttin' wood agin' winter, when the saloon'll need it. but there wasn't no chance to get a drink in jail, an' i was feelin' as if the under-pinnin' of me was gone. "well, the man said he knowed a friend that would stand by me an' cheer me up. his name was jesus. i told him i'd heerd of him before, 'cause i'd been to revival meetin's an' been preached to lots by one man an' another. he said that wasn't exactly the way he wanted me to think about him,--said jesus used to be alive and go around bein' sorry for folks that was in trouble, an' he once comforted a thief that was bein' killed in a most uncomfortable way, though jesus was havin' a hard time of it himself about that time. "that hit me where i lived, for i--well, you know what i was sent up for. he said jesus was god, but he came here to show men how to live, an' he wanted me to think about him only as a man, while i was in trouble. he said the worse off a man was, the more sorry jesus was for him: so i said,-- "'i wish he was here now, then.' "'he _is_ here, my friend,' said the man. 'he's here, though you can't see him. he ain't got nothin' to make out of you: neither have i: so you needn't be afraid to take my word for it. i'll tell you some of the things he said.' then he read me a lot of things that did make me feel lots better. why, nan, that man jesus was so sorry for men in jail that he went back on some high-toned folks that didn't visit 'em: just think of that! "after a while the man said, 'you seem to be feelin' better.' "'so i am,' said i. "'then believe in him,' says he, 'an' you'll feel better always.' "'i've been told that before,' says i, 'but i don't know how.' "the man looked kind o' puzzled like, an' at last says he,-- "'what's yer politics?' "'i'm a jackson democrat,' says i. "'all right,' says he, 'but andrew jackson's dead, ain't he?' "'so i've heerd,' said i. "'but you still believe in him?' says he. "'of course,' said i. "'well,' says he, 'just believe in jesus like you do in andrew jackson, and you'll be all right in the course of time. believe that what he said was true, an' get your mind full of what he said, an' keep it full, remindin' yourself over an' over again for fear you forget it or other things'll put it out of your mind, an' you'll be happier while you're in jail, an' you won't get back here again, nor in any other jail, after you've been let out.' "well, that was encouragin', for i didn't want to get in no jails no more. when the man went away he left me a little book that didn't have nothin' in it but things jesus himself said. i read it lots; some of it i didn't understand, an' i can't get it through my head yet, but what i did get done me so much good that i found myself kind o' changin' like, an' i've been changin' ever since. nan, i want you to read it too, an' see if it don't do you good. we ain't been what we ought to be; it's all my fault. the children ain't had no show; that's all my fault too, but it'll take all that two of us can do to catch up with 'em. i want you to be always 'side o' me, nan." "we can't let 'em starve," said the wife; "an' if what you're believin' is goin' to keep you from pickin' up a livin' for 'em when you get a chance, what are we goin' to do?" "i'm goin' to work," said sam. "sho! you never done three days' work hand-runnin' in your life." then mrs. kimper gave a hard laugh. "i've done it over two years now, an' i guess i can keep on, if i get the chance. i can stick to it if you'll back me up, nan." "there ain't much to me nowaday," said mrs. kimper, after a moment or two of blank staring as she held her chin in her hands and rested her elbows on her knees. "once i had an idee i was about as lively as they make 'em, but things has knocked it out of me,--a good many kind of things." "i know it, poor gal," said sam; "i know it: i feel a good deal the same way myself sometimes; but it helps me along an' stren'thens me up, like, to know that him that the visitor in jail told me about didn't have no home a good deal of the time, an' not overmuch to eat, an' yet was cheerful like, an' always on his nerve. it braces a fellow up to think somebody's who's been as bad off as himself has pulled through, an' not stole nothin', nor fit with nobody, nor got drunk, but always was lookin' out for other folks. say, nan, 'pears to me it's gettin' dark all of a sudden--oh!" the exclamation was called out by the cause of the sudden darkness, which was no other than deacon quickset, who had reached the door-way without being heard. the deacon's proportions were generous; those of the door were not. "samuel," said the deacon, "you said this afternoon that you were a changed man, and that you were leaning on a strength greater than your own. i want to see you make a new start and a fair one; and, as there's a prayer- and experience-meeting around at the church to-night, i thought i'd come around and tell you that 'twould be a sensible thing to go there and tell what the lord's done for you. it will put you on record, and make you some friends; and you need them, you know." sam was pallid by nature, more so through long confinement, but he looked yet more pale as he stammered,-- "me--speak--in meetin'? before folks that--that's always b'longed to the church?" "you must acknowledge him, samuel, if you expect him to bless you." "i hain't no objections to acknowledgin' him, deacon, only--i'm not the man to talk out much before them that i know is my betters. i ain't got the gift o' gab. i couldn't never say much to the fellers in the saloon along around about election-times, though i b'lieved in the party with all my might." "it doesn't take any gift to tell the plain truth," said the deacon. "come along. mrs. kimper, you come too, so samuel will have no excuse to stay home." "me?" gasped mrs. kimper. "me?--in meetin'? goodness, deacon, it gives me the conniptions to think of it! besides,"--here she dragged her scanty clothing about her more closely,--"i ain't fit to be seen among decent folks." "clothes don't count for anything in the house of the lord," said the deacon, stoutly, though he knew he was lying. "meeting begins at half-past seven, and the sun's down now." "nan," whispered sam, "come along. you can slip in a back seat an' nobody'll see nothin' but your face. stand by me, nan: i'm your husband. stand by me, so i can stand by my only friend." "deacon ain't no friend o' yourn," whispered the trembling woman in reply. "i'm not talkin' about the deacon, nan. don't, go back on me. you're my wife, nan; you don't know what that means to me now,--you reelly don't." mrs. kimper stared, then she almost smiled. "i mean it, nan," whispered the man. mrs. kimper rummaged for a moment in the drawers of a dilapidated bureau, and finally folded a red handkerchief and tied it over her head. "good!" said the deacon, who had been watching the couple closely. "we'll go around by the back way, so nobody'll see either of you, if you don't want them to. i'll take samuel along with me, and you can drop in wherever you think best, mrs. kimper. i'm not going back on any man who is going to turn over a new leaf. come along." chapter iv. the church at which deacon quickset worshipped was not large, nor was it ever well filled when prayer and experience were the only attractions. when sam kimper entered, however, the place seemed so immense and the throng so great that nothing but the bulk of the deacon, which had been prudently placed in the rear of the new convert, kept him from turning about and escaping into the darkness. even when placed in a seat the outer end of which was occupied by the deacon, the frightened man cast his eyes appealingly towards his keeper,--for such was the relation he felt the deacon bore towards him. finally he slipped slowly along the seat and whispered,-- "deacon, i can't speak; i can't think of a word to say. it's a shame to have a fellow like me talkin' to good church-members about what they know more about than him." "you'll have to acknowledge him before men, samuel, if you expect him to acknowledge you." "well, i hain't any objections to ownin' up to ev'rybody i know. didn't i tell you an' the judge? didn't i tell nan and the children? i ain't seen anybody else yet, or i'd told them too. but i can't say nothin' to a crowd like this; i don't know how." "he'll give you words, samuel, if you've got the right heart in you." "is that a dead-sure thing?" "certainly." further argument and protest were ended by the formal opening of the meeting. it appeared to the deacon that the first hymn was sung with more sound and spirit than usual, and on looking around he saw the cause: it was literally a "packed house,"--the first one the church had ever known on a prayer-meeting night. the deacon immediately let his own voice out a little more, for he felt personally complimented by the large attendance. he had told a number of persons of sam's conversion and of his own intention to have the man "put himself on record" before a number of witnesses; evidently this word had gone about and caused the great gathering. prayers, hymns, and short speeches and confessions succeeded one another for a little while, and the deacon, glancing aside frequently, saw his charge look more and more uncomfortable, helpless, and insignificant as the exercises continued. this would not do; should the fellow become thoroughly frightened, he might not be able to say anything; this would be disappointing to the assemblage, and somewhat humiliating to him who had announced the special attraction of the evening. sam's opportunity must come at once; he, the deacon, did not doubt that his own long experience in introducing people to the public in his capacity of chairman of the local lecture committee would enable him to present sam in a manner which would strengthen the weak knees and lift up the feeble heart. "brethren," said the deacon, arising during the closing cadence of a hymn, "the consolations of our blessed religion often reach a man in most unexpected ways, and we have among us to-night a living example of it. one of our fellow-citizens who left us, against his will, i may say, about two years ago, found the pearl of great price in the cell of a prison. he has come here to-night to testify to the hope that is within him. he feels that he is weak and halting of speech, but, blessed be the spirit of our master, that makes all of us brothers, it does not take eloquence or superfluity of words to let out anything that the heart is full of. i ask the attention and sympathy of all present for our brother samuel kimper." as the deacon sat down he put his powerful arm under the shoulder of his companion, and sam kimper found himself upon his feet. the frightened man looked down at the cushion of the seat in front of him; then he tried to look around, but there was so much hard curiosity in each face upon which his eyes fell that he speedily looked down again and leaned heavily upon the back of the bench upon which his hands rested. finally he cleared his throat and said,-- "ladies an' gentlemen, i've been in state prison nearly two years. i deserved it. lots of folks talked kind to me before i went; some of 'em's here to-night, an' i thank 'em for what they done. a good many of 'em talked religion to me, but the more they talked the less i understood 'em. i guess 'twas my fault; i never had much head-piece, while some of them had. but when i was in the prison a man come along that talked to me about jesus like i never was talked to before. somehow i could understand what he was drivin' at. he made me feel that i had a friend that i could foller, even if i didn't keep up with him all the time, owin' to things in the road that i hadn't knowed about. he told me if i'd b'lieve in jesus as i b'lieved in andrew jackson, i'd pull through in the course of time. i've been tryin' to do it, an' while i was in the jail i got lots of new idees of how i ort to behave myself, all from a little book that man left me, that didn't have nothin' in it but jesus' own words. i'm a-goin' to keep on at it, an' if i can't live that way i'm goin' to die a-tryin'. i b'lieve that's all i've got to say, ladies and gentlemen." there was an awkward silence for a moment after sam sat down. the minister in charge of the meeting said afterwards that the remarks were not exactly what he had expected, and he did not know, at such short notice, how to answer them. suddenly a hymn was started by a voice which every one knew, though they seldom heard it in prayer-meeting. it belonged to judge prency's wife, who for years had been the mainstay of every musical entertainment which had been dependent upon local talent. the hymn began,-- am i a soldier of the cross, and the assemblage sang it with great force and spirit. the meeting was closed soon afterwards; and as sam, in spite of an occasional kind greeting, was endeavoring to escape from the hard stare of curious eyes, mrs. judge prency, who was the handsomest and most distinguished woman in the village, stopped him, grasped his hand, and said,-- "mr. kimper, you gave the most sensible speech i ever heard in an experience meeting. i'm going to believe in you thoroughly." deacon quickset, who was closely following his new charge, listened with fixed countenance to the lady's remark. he followed sam from the church, snatched him away from the wife who had joined him, and said,-- "samuel, that experience of yours rather disappointed me. it wasn't all there. there was something left out,--a good deal left out." "i guess not, deacon. i said all i knowed." "then you ought to know a good deal more. you've only got at the beginning of things. no church'll take you into membership if you don't believe more than that." "maybe i'll know it in the course of time, deacon, if i keep on a-learnin'." "maybe you will,--if you do keep on. but you didn't say anything about your hope of salvation, nor the atonement, nor your being nothing through your own strength." "i couldn't say it if i didn't know about it," sam replied. "all my troubles an' wrong doin's have come of not livin' right: so right livin' is all i've had time to think about an' study up." "you need to think about dying as well as living," said the deacon. "him that took care of another thief that was dyin' 'll take care of me if i get in that fix, i guess, if i hang on to him tight." "not unless you hang on in the right way," said the deacon. "you must believe what all christians believe, if you want to be saved. you don't feel that you're prepared to die, do you?" "i felt it a good many times, deacon, when i was in that jail; an' sometimes i half wished i could die right away." "pshaw!" muttered the deacon. "you don't understand. you're groping in darkness. you don't understand." "that's so, deacon, if you mean i don't understand what you're drivin' at." "don't you feel christ in you the hope of glory?" "i don't know what you mean, deacon?" "don't you feel that a sacrifice has been made to atone for your sins?" "i can't follow you, deacon." "i thought not. you haven't got things right at all. you haven't been converted: that's what's the matter with you." "do you mean, deacon," said sam, after a moment, "that what i'm believin' about jesus is all wrong an' there ain't nothin' in it?" "why, no; i can't say that," the deacon replied, "but--but you've begun wrong end first. what a sinner needs most of all is to know about his hereafter." "it's what's goin' on now, from day to day, that weighs hardest on me, deacon. there's nothin' hard about dyin'; leastways, you'd think so if you was built like me, an' felt like i have to feel sometimes." "you're all wrong," said the deacon. "if you can't understand these things for yourself, you ought to take the word of wiser men for it." "s'posin' i was to do that about everythin': then when judge prency, who's a square man an' a good deal smarter than i be, talks politics to me, i ought to be a republican instead of a jackson democrat." "no," said the deacon, sharply, for he was a jackson democrat himself. "i'll have to talk more to you about this, samuel. good night." "good night, deacon." "he knows more'n you do about religion," said mrs. kimper, who had followed closely behind, and who rejoined her husband as soon as the deacon departed. "he ought to, seein' his head-piece an' chances; an' yet i've heerd some pooty hard things said about him." when the couple reached home, sam looked at the long heap of straw and rags on which his children should have been sleeping, but which was without occupant except the baby. then, by the light of the coals still remaining in the fire-place, he looked through some leaves of the little book which the prison visitor had given him. when he arose from the floor, he said to himself,-- "i'll stick to him yet, deacon or no deacon,--stick to him as if he was andrew jackson." chapter v. sam kimper spent several days in looking about his native town for work. he found many sympathetic assurances, some promises, and no work at all. everybody explained to everybody else that they were sorry for the poor wretch, but they couldn't afford to have a jail-bird around. meanwhile, sam's stock of money, accumulated by overwork in the state prison, and augmented by judge prency's present, was running low. he kept his family expenses as low as possible, buying only the plainest of food-material and hesitating long to break a bill, though it were only of the denomination of one dollar. nevertheless the little wad of paper money in his pocket grew noticeably thinner to his touch. his efforts to save the little he had in his possession were not assisted by his family. his wife, thanks and perhaps blame to the wifely sense of dependence upon her husband, had fallen back upon him entirely after what he had said about his intention as to the future of the family, and she not only accepted his assurances as bearing upon the material requirements of several mouths from day to day, but she also built some air-castles which he was under the unpleasant necessity of knocking down. the poor woman was not to blame. she never had seen a ten-dollar bill since the day of her marriage, when, in a spasm of drunken enthusiasm, her husband gave a ten-dollar treasury note to the clergyman who officiated on that joyous occasion. one evening sam took his small change from his pocket to give his son tom money enough to buy a half-bushel of corn-meal in the village. as he held a few pieces of silver in one hand, touching them rapidly with the forefinger of the other, his son tom exclaimed,-- "you're just overloaded with money, old man! say, gi' me a quarter to go to the ball game with? i'm in trainin', kind o' like, an' i ain't afeard to say that mebbe i'll turn out a first-class pitcher one of these days." "tom," said his father, trying to straighten his feeble frame, as his eyes brightened a little, "i wish i could: i'd like you to go into anything that makes muscle. but i can't afford it. you know i'm not workin' yet, an' until i do work the only hope of this family is in the little bit of money i've got in my pocket." "well," said tom, thrusting out his lower lip, slouching across the room, and returning again, "i don't think a quarter's enough to trouble anybody's mind about what'll happen to his family afterwards. i've heard a good deal from the mother about you bein' converted, and changin' into a different sort of a man, but i don't think much of any kind of converted dad that don't care enough for his boy to give him a quarter to go to a ball game." "food before fun, tom," said the father, resolutely closing his hand upon such remaining silver as he had, and then thrusting the fistful into his pocket,--"food before fun. ball isn't business to this family just now, an' money means business ev'ry time. when i was away an' couldn't help it, things mebbe didn't go as they ort to have gone, but now that i'm back again, there shan't be any trouble if i know how to stand in the way of it." this expression of principle and opinion did not seem to impress favorably the eldest male member of the second generation. master tom thrust out his lower lip again, glared at his father, took his hat, and abruptly departed. there was no dinner at the kimper table that day, except for such members of the family as could endure slices of cold boiled pork with very little lean to it. late in the afternoon, however, tom returned, with an air of bravado, indulged in a number of reminiscences of the ball game, and at last asked why supper was not ready. "tom," asked the father, "why didn't you come back to-day with what i gave you money to buy?" "well," said the young man, dipping his spoon deeply into a mixture of hasty pudding, milk, and molasses, "i met some of the boys on the street, an' they told me about the game, an' it seemed to me that i wouldn't 'pear half a man to 'em if i didn't go 'long, so i made up my mind that you an' the mother would get along some way, an' i went anyhow. from what's in front of me, i guess you got along, didn't you?" "tom," said the father, leaving his seat at the table and going around to his son's chair, on the top bar of which he leaned,--"tom, of course we got along; there'll be somethin' to eat here ev'ry day just as long as i have any money or can get any work. but, tom, you're pretty well grown up now; you're almost a man; i s'pose the fellers in town think you _are_ a man, don't they? an' you think you're one yourself too, don't you?" the young man's face brightened, and he engulfed several spoonfuls of the evening meal before he replied,-- "well, i guess i am somebody now'days. the time you was in jail, i thought the family had a mighty slim chance o' countin'; but i tumbled into base-ball, an' i was pretty strong in my arms an' pretty spry on my feet, an' little by little i kind o' came to give the family a standin'." "i s'pose that's all right," said the father; "but i want you to understan' one thing, an' understan' it so plain that you can't ever make any mistake about it afterwards. when i put any money into your hands to be used for anythin', it don't matter what, you must spend it for that, or you must get an awful thrashin' when you come back home again. do you understan' me?" the feeding motions of the eldest male of the kimper collection of children stopped for an instant, and master tom leered at his father as he said,-- "who's goin' to give the thrashin'?" "i am, tom,--your father is,--an' don't make any mistake about it. he'll do it good an' brown, too, if he's to die used up right away afterwards. this family is goin' to be decent from this time on; there ain't to be no more thieves in it, an' any member of it that tries to make it diff'rent is goin' to feel so bad that he'll wish he'd never been born. do you understan'? don't go to thinkin' i'm ugly: i'm only talkin' sense." the cub of the family looked upward at his father from the corners of his eyes, and then he clinched his fists and turned slightly in the chair. before he could do more, his parent had him by both shoulders, had shaken him out of the chair, thrown him upon the floor, and was resting upon him with both knees. "tom," said sam to his astonished son, "you was the first boy i ever had, an' i'd give away my right hand rather than have any real harm come to you, but you've got to mind me now, an' you've got to do it until you're of age, an' if you don't promise to do it now, right straight along, from this time forth, i'll give you the thrashin' now. that ain't all, either, you've got to be man enough to stand by your dad an' say somethin to the fellers, an' explain that you're goin' to stop bein' a town loafer, an' are goin' into decent ways." tom was so astonished by this demonstration of spirit that he made all the desired promises at once, and was released. but tom was not the only juvenile member of the family who was in need of reformation. mary, little mary, not far beyond twelve years of age, demanded money to replenish her own wardrobe. "mary," said her father, "we're poor; we can't afford fancy fixin's. this ain't very cold weather. you've good enough clothes on you to keep you warm: what d'you want o' somethin' else?" "what do i want o' somethin' else?" echoed the child, going to the door and tossing an imitation doll into the ash-heap, "why, i want better clothes, so't the fellers about town'll pay some 'tention to me, like they do to sister jane." the slight, bent form of the father straightened up, as he asked, quickly,-- "does the fellers around town pay attention to your sister jane?" "why, of course they do," said little mary, entirely unable to translate the gaze which her father bent upon her. "jane never gets through her work at the hotel before there's a lot o' fellers hangin' round the door an' wantin' to see her, an' takin' her out to get ice-cream or sody-water, or to go to the circus if there's one in town, or to go to the dramatic representation,--that's what they call it on the bills,--if there happens to be one in the village that night." "wife," said sam, turning to his helpmate, "what wages does jane get?" "six dollars a month," said the wife. "does she bring any of it home? does the family get the good of any of it?" "not one cent," said mrs. kimper, with a pitiful whine. "she says she has to wear decent clothes at the hotel or they won't keep her there any more." sam kimper stayed awake all that night, although his manners to his family next morning were those of a staid and respectable citizen who had nothing upon his mind but the ordinary duties of the day. nevertheless, he was out and about soon after breakfast, and he wandered through every street of the village in which any business was being done. again and again he asked for work, and as often the offer was refused or declined or relegated into the uncertain future for a decision. the surplus in his pocket had grown lamentably small. as he made his way homeward in a physical and mental condition which made it impossible for him either to argue to himself or to express a sense of hope to any extent, he passed the shop of larry highgetty. larry was a shoemaker. sam had worked at shoemaking while he was in state prison. he felt, although larry might have been offended at the imputation, that there ought to be a fellow-feeling between them; so he ventured into the shop. larry was sitting at his bench with a lady's shoe in one hand and with his head leaning against the wall of the room. from the stertorous noise which escaped his nostrils, it was quite evident that he was asleep, and an odor which filled the room left the visitor in no doubt as to the nature of the opiate which had induced larry's mid-day nap. "you seem to be takin' business very easy, mr. highgetty," said sam, with an apologetic air, as he closed the door behind him, and larry awoke. "pay must be gettin' better?" "better?" said larry, rubbing his eyes. "i don't want it to be any better than it is now. besides, people's comin' in all the time faster than i can tend to 'em; ev'rybody wants his work done first an' is willin' to pay extra price to get it. better, is it? well, yes; i should say that no such luck had struck shoemakers in this town in a long while." "you haven't half finished what you're on now, larry," said sam, taking the shoe from the cobbler's hand and looking at it. "that isn't all of it," said the cobbler, with a maudlin wink at his visitor. "i don't know when i'll have it finished, if i keep on feelin' as i do now. it's pretty tough, too, bekase that shoe belongs to mrs. judge prency, an' she's comin' for it this afternoon; but i'm that sleepy that--" larry's head gently sought the wall again. "an' a very good woman she is, larry. brace up, my boy, why don't you, an' finish your work?" "eh? say 'brace up' to somebody that's not got anythin' in him to brace him down. she kin wait for her shoe while i'm havin' my aise an' forgettin' all about work." "when did you promise the shoe to her?" asked sam. "oh, sometime this afternoon," said larry, "an' she hasn't come in here yet. sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, ye know the good book says, sam. maybe she won't come in till to-morrow; she's a busy woman; nobody knows where she's goin' or what she's doin' throughout the day, an', to tell ye the truth, i thought to myself i'd shut up the shop an' go home, so if she came there'd not be anybody here to tell a loie about it." "well, larry, wouldn't it do just as well if there was somebody here to tell the truth about it?" "oh, there, now, sam," said the shoemaker, rallying himself for an instant; "they tould me that you was converted in jail, an' that sounds a good deal like it. now, sam, i want to tell ye if ye want to argy on the subject of the truth, or any other of the moral sintiments, with any man whatsoever, ye don't want to come to a shoemaker's shop an' find a fellow who's just had three drinks in him at somebody else's expense. now go 'way; come 'round here to-morrow when i'm sober, an' i'll own up to everything you say, no matter what it is." "that won't get mrs. prency her shoes," said sam. "go home an' go to bed, an' let me finish that shoe in your hand, an' if she comes here it'll be ready for her, an' if she don't you won't have anything on your conscience,--not so far as she's concerned." the cobbler took possession of himself with a tremendous effort, and looked sharply from his bleared eyes for an instant as he said,-- "an' what do you know about shoemakin'?" "as much as two years in state prison could learn me, larry; though i don't think you need to have asked me." "it's all right, me boy; i take it back; an' if ever i'm sent to state prison myself you may ask it of me ten times over; that's the bible rule, i belave. now i'll go home to my wife an' family, an' if you choose to finish that shoe an' stay here until mrs. judge prency comes in to get it, why, you're quite welcome to do the work an' keep the pay; i tould her fifty cints." sam began work upon the bit of repairing which he had taken from the shoemaker's hands, and although it was not of the routine nature which all of his jail-work had placed in his hands, he knew enough of the requirements of an ordinary shoe to do what was necessary. while he was working, the room suddenly darkened, and as he looked up he saw mrs. judge prency herself. "why it's mr. kimper! are you working here?" "only to finish a job that was promised for this afternoon, mrs. prency." "where's larry?" "he felt very badly," said sam, "an' he wanted to go home, an' i promised to finish his work for him. i believe this is your job, ma'am?" said he, holding the shoe in the air for an instant. "yes," said the judge's wife. "i will sit down for a moment, if you will allow me, while you finish it." "certainly, ma'am," said sam, plying the needle and awl vigorously. he looked up only for a second at a time during the next few moments, but what he saw impressed him very favorably. mrs. prency was not a young woman, but apparently she had a clear conscience and a good digestion, for she sat with an entirely satisfied and cheerful air, with her shoulders against the back of the chair, as if it were a real pleasure to rest against something, while her cheeks flushed, probably from the exertion of a rapid walk from some other portion of the town. like any other woman of good health, good character, and good principles, she was a pleasing object to look upon, and the ex-convict looked at her as often as he dared, with undisguised and respectful admiration. but suddenly the uplifting of his eyes was stopped by a remark from the lady herself, as she said,-- "sam--mr. kimper, i've heard some remarks about your speech at the experience-meeting the other night. you know i was there myself; you remember i spoke to you as you came out?" "mrs. prency, i know it; an' that isn't all; i'll remember it just as long as i live. i'd rather have been the dyin' thief on the cross than said what i said in that church that night, but i was asked to do it, an' the more i thought about it the more i thought i couldn't say no. but i didn't know what else to say." "you did quite right, mr. kimper: you spoke like a real, true, honest man. if it's any comfort to know it, i can tell you that my husband, the judge, thinks as i do. i told him what you said,--i remembered it all, word for word,--and he said to me,--these are exactly his words,--'i believe that is an honest man, and that he is going to remain an honest man.'" sam bent over the shoe a little closer, and said, in a faint voice, as if he were talking to himself,-- "what judge prency says about human natur ort to be true. if there's any other man in this county that's had more opportunities of knowin' all about it, i don't know who he can be." there was silence for a moment or two. sam quickened his labors upon the shoe, and the lady bent her gaze closely upon the shoemaker. at last she said,-- "mr. kimper, don't mistake the meaning of what i am going to ask you. i am a member of the church, myself, and i have as hearty an interest in you and sympathy for you as the best friend you have. but i want to ask you one thing, merely out of curiosity. has any one questioned you, since, about what you said that evening?" "nobody but deacon quickset, ma'am." "ah? deacon quickset? did he say anything that annoyed you in any way?" "i can't say that he did, ma'am; though he kind o' filled my mind with doubts an' gave me a sort o' sleepless evenin'." "i'm very sorry for that. there's some one else who may trouble you somewhat, and i'm sorry to say that if he does i shall be to blame for it. he is a young lawyer. his name is reynolds bartram." "i know him, ma'am; at least, i know him by sight. he's of very good stock, ma'am. his folks have been in this county a longtime, from what i've heerd, off an' on." "very true," replied mrs. prency; "but he has peculiar views, and when he hears of any one who believes--believes in religion as you do, he is quite likely to visit him and to ask a great many questions." "well, ma'am, if he comes in on me anywhere, an' asks any questions, an' they're on the subject i talked about that night at the church meetin', why, i'll say anythin' i know an' everythin' i believe, an' if he says anythin' on the other side, why, all i've got to say is, he can't change my mind the least bit." "i'm very glad to hear you say so," said mrs. prency. "ah, is the shoe done, entirely done? good. very much obliged. it's quite as good as mr. highgetty himself could have made it. fifty cents, i believe? is that satisfactory?" "quite satisfact'ry, ma'am," said the substitute, as he rose from his bench and removed his hat, which had been on his head during the interview. mrs. prency started towards the door, but stopped suddenly and turned back. "mr. kimper, the young man, mr. bartram, of whom i spoke to you,--i really believe he is inclined to come and talk to you, and perhaps talk a great deal, about what you seem to believe very sincerely and what he doesn't believe at all. i hope you won't change your mind through anything that can be said to you by a person of that kind, or by any person whatever?" "mrs. prency," said the cobbler's substitute, taking his hat from the bench on which he had placed it and circling it in his hand as if he were endeavoring to stimulate his mental faculties, "whatever i believe on that subject i'm goin' to stick to, an' nobody, not even if he is the best lawyer in the county, or your husband himself, or the judge of the biggest court in the united states, is goin' to change my mind about it." "thank you, mr. kimper. i might have known as much from what i heard during your remarks the other night. i only wanted to say to you that mr. bartram is a very smart talker and very quick to see whatever mistakes any one else may make." "if i make any mistakes," said sam, "it's because of somebody who's a great deal smarter than i am, who don't back me up as much as i need for the time-bein'." "good-day, mr kimper," said the lady. "good-day, ma'am," said the ex-convict. he stood in the dingy shop looking out of the window at the retreating form of the lady, and then at the gathering clouds over the evening sunset, and at the houses on the opposite side of the street, apparently that he might divert his mind from something. then he looked at the coin which he had received for the work, as if it were an amulet or a charm. suddenly his attention was distracted by the appearance, on the other side of the street, of a very pretty young woman, accompanied by a young man in good attire and of fine bearing. "well, well," said the ex-convict, "i wonder if that's what it means? that's bartram himself, as sure as i'm born, an' with him is mrs. prency's only daughter an' only child. well, well!" chapter vi. as the summer lengthened into early autumn, sam kimper became more and more troubled by the necessities of his family. he had been working day after day in the shop of his acquaintance the shoemaker, when there was work enough for two, and earned enough to pay for the plainest food. but casual pay was not sufficient to all the necessities of a family as large as that for which sam was responsible, particularly as the return of the head of the family had reminded every one, from the mother down to the youngest child except the baby, of a number of needs of which no one seemed to have thought before. mrs. kimper herself, who was a feeble creature at best, shivered at every wind that penetrated the broken windows, and insisted that unless she had some warm clothing very soon she would fall into a decline. tom, who had not yet got his growth, was protruding physically from the ends of his shirts and trousers, and assured his father that he never again could get into his last winter's jacket without subjecting himself to a series of remarks by the boys in the town, which would make him feel very uncomfortable. billy, who had gone barefooted all summer, as was the custom with the boys in town, came home late one evening and announced triumphantly,-- "dad, you needn't bother yourself about me any more about shoes. i've got a pair. see here!" the head of the family took the new shoes into his hand and examined them. then he dropped them with a sort of shiver, for they were of a well-remembered pattern,--that upon which he had worked for two years in the penitentiary. "how did you get 'em, billy?" the father asked, at length. "oh, i found 'em," said the boy, with a wink at his elder brother,--a wink which was returned to him in the shape of an evil leer. "found 'em! where? tell me all about it," said the father, very sharply and sternly, for he remembered a time when he had "found" things himself. billy looked appealingly at his brother tom, but the elder brother put on a hang-dog look and sauntered out of the room and was afterwards seen disappearing rapidly through the back yard. "well," said billy, at last, with the air of one who was entirely unbosoming himself, "i'll tell you how it was, dad. down at price's store there's a long string of shoes out at the door. they use 'em as a sign, don't you know?" "yes," said the father carelessly; "i've seen such signs. go on." "well, i need shoes awfully, you know, an' i've been tellin' the mother about it for a week or ten days, an' she said she was tellin' you. but my feet gets awful cold late at nights and early in the mornin's. an' i didn't want to bother you, knowin' that you hadn't any money to spare, 'cause the mother told me 'bout that too, an' cried about it. well, it blowed like ev'rythin' this afternoon as i was goin' towards price's, an' that string of shoes just whirled around like a kite-tail, an' at last the bottom pair flew off into the street. an' i picked 'em up." "findin's is keepin's," said mrs. kimper. "give me them shoes, my boy," said the ex-convict. "you're goin' to take 'em away from me? have i got to have cold feet some more?" said billy, appealingly. sam thrust his hand into his trousers-pocket, took out a very thin wad of green paper, looked at it, and finally said, "no, i s'pose not." nevertheless he and the shoes disappeared from the house. in a short time mr. price, the owner of one of the village stores, received a call from the ex-convict, who said,-- "mr. price, one o' my boys found a pair o' shoes in the street in front o' your store this afternoon durin' the hard blow, an', as they just fitted him, i came around to pay you for them. how much are they?" several men were standing about the stove in price's store, the fire having just started for the autumn and winter season, and, as they heard sam's remark, one of them uttered a long combination of word and whistle that sounded very much like "whew-w?" sam turned quickly, recognized the man as one whom he knew to be not over-honest, and said,-- "when _you_ pay for ev'rythin' you get it'll be time to make fun of somebody else. but, mr. price, what i asked you was, what's the price o' them shoes?" the storekeeper was so astonished at such a question from a member of the kimper family that, looking at shoes of the same quality which were lying in a box behind the counter, he actually mistook the cost-mark for the selling-price, and replied, "only a dollar and a quarter, mr. kimper." sam laid down the money, received some change, and departed, while the men who were lounging about the store began an active conversation as to whether that man was the fool he looked or whether he was not perhaps a regular sharper whose natural abilities and inclinations had been cultivated during the two years he was in state prison. they understood, those evening loafers, that prisons were nominally for the purpose of reforming criminals, but they had known a great many criminals themselves, and their astonishment at seeing one who apparently desired to do better than in his past life, and to make amends for the misdeeds of his family, was so great that the conversation which ensued after the exit of the ex-convict was very fragmentary and not at all to the point. the next morning sam appeared bright and early at the shoe-shop of larry highgetty. he had made an arrangement with the cobbler to do whatever work might be assigned him and to accept as full payment one-half the money which would be charged, most of it being for repairs. as nearly as he could discover by a close questioning of the proprietor of the establishment, the entire receipts did not exceed two dollars per day, and the owner had so few responsibilities and so much surplus that he would be quite glad if he might lounge at one or other of the local places of entertainment while some one else should do the work and keep the establishment open. consequently sam went at the work with great energy, and little by little nearly all the work came to be done by him. he had hammered away for a few minutes on a sole to be placed on the bottom of a well-worn shoe belonging to a workingman, when a new customer entered the shop. sam looked up at him and saw reynolds bartram. he offered a short, spasmodic, disjointed prayer to heaven, for he remembered what the judge's wife had said, and he had known reynolds bartram as a young man of keen wit and high standing as a debater before sam's enforced retirement; now, he knew, bartram had become a lawyer. "well, sam," said bartram, as he seated himself in the only chair and proceeded to eye the new cobbler, while the blows of the hammer struck the sole more rapidly and vigorously than before,--"well, sam, i understand that you have been turning things upside down, and instead of coming out of the penitentiary a great deal worse man than when you went in, as most other men do, you have been converted." "that's my understandin' of it, mr. bartram," said the ex-convict, continuing his inflictions upon the bit of leather. "sam," said bartram, "i am a man of business, and i suppose you are from what i see you doing. i wish to make you a proposition: i will pay you cash for two or three hours' time if you will tell me--so that i can understand it--what being converted really amounts to." the new cobbler did not cease an instant his attention to the work in his hand. he merely said,-- "mr. bartram, you're a very smart man, an' i'm a very stupid one. if there's a stupider man in town the democratic local committee has never yet been able to find him. you want to know what bein' converted means? you'd better go to deacon quickset, or the minister of some one of the churches hereabouts. i can't explain anythin', i don't know anythin' but what i feel myself, an' the more i feel it the more i don't know how to talk about it. deacon quickset says it don't 'mount to much. i s'pose it don't--to him, he bein' so much smarter than me. but, so far as it goes, i can't be paid for talkin' about it, for it didn't cost me nothin'." this was not what the visitor had expected; nevertheless, it is a lawyer's business to know more than one way of putting a thing. "see here, sam; i need a new pair of shoes,--soft leather, thin soles, good cut; do you suppose you know how to measure me for them?" "well, i guess i've found out that much, mr. bartram." "go ahead, then; don't let me interfere with the measurement; but i want to ask you some questions; tell me what you can as you go along. you've been converted, they say, and you say so too." "yes, sir," said sam, dropping the tape-line for a moment; "what other people say i'm not responsible for, but i say it myself that i'm a different man. that's all i can say, mr. bartram; an', as i said before, if you want to know more, you'd better ask somebody that's been in that sort o' life longer than i have." "nonsense, sam! you are too modest. as they say in churches, the newest convert has the strongest opinions. now, you know what my business is. strong opinions amount to everything in the legal business, and so i have come to you, just as squarely as i could go to any man in the world about anything else that he understood, to ask you plainly what you know about this new life that you are said to be leading now. tell it to me, out and out. don't be afraid to keep back anything. take all the time you like at it. if you can't say just what you want to, try to put it as clearly as you can. i didn't come in to worry you. remember that i really want some distinct information on the subject." sam looked up keenly, and said, "mr. bartram, are you in earnest?" "sam kimper," said the young lawyer, "if i were not in earnest do you suppose i'd come into this shop during the business hours of the day and ask questions of this kind, when there are plenty of other people i could go to and get the information i want, and perhaps a good deal more? no, sir; i have come here to ask you because i thought that whatever you could say you would say in the fewest possible words and say it right to the point." "but, mr. bartram, i'm not used to talkin' to lawyers. i never talked to any but once, you know, an' then i don't think they had very much respect for what i said. i wasn't in a fix where anybody could have any respect for me." "this hasn't anything to do with those times, sam," said the lawyer. "a friend of yours, who is a friend of mine, has told me that you talked very straightforward and honestly on this subject a few nights ago. that's more than i have been able to find anybody do in this town in a long time. i don't mind saying to you that, according to what the people who are the most prominent in the church say, i'm a pretty hard character. therefore whatever you have to say you needn't be afraid to put very plainly. i simply want to know about myself; that's all." "mr. bartram," said the cobbler, "as i've already said, you had a good deal better talked to somebody else. but, seem' you've come to me, i've only this to say to you, an' i hope you can make somethin' out of it, because i give you my word i've made more out of it than ever i did out of anythin' else on the face of the earth. i went to jail for stealin'. i hadn't ever been an honest man in my life. the only reason i hadn't been in jail all my life was that i hadn't been caught. at last i was caught, an' i was sent up, an' i don't mind sayin' that i think my sentence was mighty light, considerin' all the heavy mischief that i'd done durin' my life. while i was in jail i was talked to by a man that used to come through there to talk to the prisoners on sundays. an' about all he said to me was to read me a lot o' things that jesus christ said when he was alive in this world, an' told me to go ahead an' do all them things just as well as i knowed how to, an' if i did 'em all well as far as i could i'd find out a good deal more in the course of time." "go on," said the lawyer. "i haven't anything to go on with, mr. bartram," said the cobbler, "except that i took his advice, an' ain't ever been sorry for it, an' i wish i'd got it a good deal sooner. i'm just the same old two-an'-sixpence that i was before i went away. that is, i'm always tired an' always poor an' always wishin' i didn't have to do any work. but when there comes a time when i get a chance to do somethin' wrong an' make somethin' by it, i don't do it, although there was a time when i would have done it. i don't keep from doin' it for anything that i can make, 'cause i always go home a good deal worse off than i might have been. i hope you get something out of what i'm tellin' you, mr. bartram?" "but, sam, my dear fellow," said the young man, "all this doesn't mean anything; that is, so far as religion goes. you are simply trying to live right, whereas you used to live wrong. haven't you learned any more than that?" "well, mr. bartram," said sam, ceasing to jot down measurements, and looking at his stubby pencil as if he had a question to ask, "that's all i've learned. an' i s'pose you bein' the kind o' man you are,--that is, well born an' well brought up, plenty o' money an' never done nothin' wrong that you know of,--i s'pose that don't seem much to you; but i tell you, mr. bartram, it's a complete upset to my old life, an' it's such a big one that i've not been able to get any further since, an' i don't mind talkin' honestly to any fellow-man that talks about it to me. i don't mind sayin' honestly that it's so much more than i'm equal to livin' up to yet that i haven't had any time to think about goin' any further along. see here, mr. bartram, can you tell me somethin' i can do besides that?" "why, sam," said the lawyer, "that's an odd question to ask me. i have seen you in church frequently since you were first a young man, ten years older than i. you have been told frequently what else you ought to do; and what i came in particular to ask you was as to how far you've done it, or been able to do it, or were trying to do it." "you come to the wrong shop, then, mr. bartram," said the cobbler. "when a man's been livin' wrong all his life an' has had somethin' put into him to make him feel like turnin' round an' livin' right, the change that's gone on in him is so big that it'll take him about half a lifetime to get to where he can think about anythin' else." "pshaw!" said the lawyer. "you said you wanted these shoes made out of soft leather an' with pretty thin soles, mr. bartram?" "yes, yes; make them any way you please." then the lawyer left the room and closed the door with a crash that caused the new cobbler to look up apprehensively. chapter vii. little by little the kimper family was made more comfortable and put in better condition for the coming winter. broken window-panes were mended, though frequently only with bits of board closely wedged, cracks in the wall were stuffed with dried grass and plastered with mud, and clean straw replaced the dirty substitutes for beds and mattresses. the head of the family worked hard at the cobbler's shop, yet did not cease working when he reached home. yet week by week sam looked better than in old times. conrad weitz, the manager of the most popular drinking-place in the town, predicted that there would soon have to be a change for the worse. "he ain't drinkin' noding," said conrad; "and a feller dat's been drinkin' all his life can't get along midout it afterwards." the vender of stimulants said this to deacon quickset, for the two men were incessantly arguing over the liquor question, and never lost an opportunity of bringing up a new point about it when they met by any chance. weitz was a public-spirited and intelligent citizen, and the deacon believed that if his opinions about the moral nature of his business could be changed there would be a great gain for the temperance cause in bruceton. besides, weitz was a well-to-do man and saved a great deal of money, some of which the deacon had invested for him, and all of which the deacon desired to handle, for he was a man of many enterprises, and, like most other men of the kind, always had more ways than money. "you're all wrong about that, weitz," said the deacon, sitting upon an empty beer-barrel in front of the liquor-store. the deacon was accustomed to say, with a grim smile, that he was one of the very few men in business whose reputation would allow him to sit upon a beer-barrel without giving rise to any suspicions. "deacon," said the liquor-dealer, "you hadn't ought to talk about vat you don't understand. how long since you stopped drinkin'?" "now, see here, weitz, what do you mean, to ask me a question like that? you ought to know well enough that i never drank in my life. if i haven't told you so again and again, i should think other people could have done it." "never drank anyding, eh? never in your life? vell, vell!" said the proprietor, caressing the beer-shop cat for a moment, "dat explains a good many dings about you dat i never understood before. i tell you vat i tink, deacon: if you'd been brought up in my country, mit all de brains you've got in your head, and yoost could'a'had a lot of german beer put inside of you besides, you'd been about de finest man in de united states now. den, besides dat, of course, you ought to belong to my shurch, too." "your church!" sneered the deacon. "come, now, deacon," said the shopkeeper, abruptly dropping the cat, "you can turn up your nose at my ideas all you vant, but you mustn't turn it up at my shurch. i don't do dat to you, and don't you forget it, eider." "that's all right, conrad; i didn't mean to do it. of course, every man will believe the way he is brought up. but i hope you won't go to telling anybody else in this town that that poor convict ought to be drinking and will have to do it again; because it might get to his ears, you know, and if it did it might break him down, and then he'd go to lying and stealing and loafing and fighting again, and there is no knowing whose chicken-coops and wood-piles would have to suffer. yours might be one of the first of the lot." "vell," said the german, "is dat de vay you look at the question?" "it's a fact, isn't it?" "yes, i s'pose it is. but i didn't tink dat vas de first ding for a man like you to tink about ven you vas talkin' about a feller dat has broke off all his bad habits and is tryin' to be yoost right." the deacon felt awkward for a moment. he did not like to be reminded of any of his faults by a neighbor, much less by one who belonged to a church so widely different from his own. "why, of course not," said he; "of course, i am thinking about the man's eternal salvation and about his future; but, to tell you the truth, i haven't got much faith in his professions. a man that don't get any further than he has done, and that don't seem willing to learn from them that's his betters and has gone into such things a good deal deeper than he has, ain't very likely to hold out. and the last condition of that man will be worse than the first." "vell," said the shop-keeper, "a good deal depends on dat. you vas a member of von shurch and i vas a member of anoder, deacon, and we can talk togeder like brudders,--a little vay, anyhow. now, i tell you vat it is: dere's a good many men in dis town dat's behavin' very decent dat don't belong to any shurch at all, and you'd yoost as lief discount deir notes as you vould any oder man's, and you'd go into business mit dem yoost as qvick, and you'd take deir word for anyding yoost as qvick. if dat's de vay mit dem men, vy isn't it true dat sam kimper is a good deal better off mit vat he's got dan he vould be midout anyding at all in de vay of religion?" "oh, conrad," said the deacon, "you were brought up in darkness and error! you don't understand. i've got that sam kimper on my mind so much that i'm just keeping our minister after him all the time." "vell," said the shopkeeper, "i tell you vat i'll do, deacon. you let your minister do all he can mit him, and ven he finds he can't do noding yoost you come an' tell me, an' den i'll send our priest after him. he's a good man. you can't say noding against him; you know you can't. neider can anybody else in dis town." "no," said the deacon, "i don't mind saying, for i've said it a good many times before, that if father black belonged to my church, instead of the one he does, i couldn't find a single thing to say or think against him. he is certainly a very good man, and doing a great deal of good among a lot of people that i didn't suppose ever could be kept out of mischief; but--" "but he didn't keep 'em out of mischief in your vay. dat's de trouble, isn't it? come now, own up, like an honest man, and i von't go tell nobody else about vat you say. own up, now; isn't dat de trouble? dem people dat you talk about as behavin' demselves is a good deal better dan some dat's smarter and has got more money an' more advantages an' more friends, an' dey don't make nobody any trouble, an' yet you ain't satisfied mit 'em; an' mit deir shurch, yoost because dey don't do everyding your vay." "conrad," said the deacon, putting on a lofty air, "you're a good man to do business with; you're a respectable citizen, except that you sell rum. but there's some things you can't understand, and it's no use for me to waste time talking to you about them. if your mind was clearer, if it had been enlightened in the true way, you would not be selling rum, for instance." "vouldn't i, dough? vell, i yoost vant you to understand dere's no better business in dis town dan i am a-doin' right in dis shop. but if i didn't tink it vas right, i vouldn't be doin' it at all. you talk in dis country as if de rum-sellers vas de very vorst people in de vorld. i vant you to understand over in my country, dat's a good deal older dan dis, and vere de peoples has had a good deal more experience, a man don't get no right to sell liquor unless he is a first-class citizen in every respect. it's a sign dat a man is honest an' sensible an' knows how to manage oder men, if he gets de right to sell liquor. dat's more dan you can say about _your_ business, deacon quickset. any rascal can go in de business dat you is doin' now." "well," said the deacon, beginning to feel that he was on dangerous ground, "this wasn't what we were talking about, anyhow. we began to talk about sam kimper; and i want you to promise me that you won't talk to anybody else about his needing liquor, and about his breaking down in the course of time unless he gets it." "of course i von't talk about it, deacon. do you s'pose i'm a fool? do you s'pose i vant to see people get drunk? no, sir; people dat gets drunk don't come to my shop. dey know dey couldn't get anyding if dey did." meanwhile sam kimper went on, after the humble manner in which he had begun, to try to bring his family to his new standard of respectability. he introduced family prayers, much to the disgust of his son tom and the amusement of his daughter mary. the privacy of family affairs was not entirely respected by the kimper family, for sam soon heard remarks from street loafers, as he passed along, which indicated that the devotional exercises of the family had been reported, evidently by his own children, and he heard quotations from some of his weak and halting prayers pass from mouth to mouth and elicit peals of coarse laughter. nevertheless he found some encouragement. his son tom was not quite so much of a cub at home as he had been, and actually took to trying, in a desultory way, to find work, although his father's offer to teach him the trade which had been learned in the penitentiary was declined very sharply and without any thanks whatever. billy, the younger boy, had an affectionate streak in his nature, which his father succeeded in touching to such an extent that complaints of billy's truancy were nowhere near so numerous as they had been just after his father's return. mary, the youngest daughter, was a less promising subject. her precocity was of a very unpleasant order, and caused her father a great deal of annoyance. when everything else failed him, sam had the baby for consolation. the little wretch had been so utterly uncared for since its appearance that it seemed surprised for some time by its father's demonstrations of affection, but finally the meaning of this seemed made known to it, probably in the way the same meanings are translated to babies everywhere else, and from being a forlorn and fretful child it gradually became so cheerful that its own mother began to display some interest in it and make a plaything of it, to her own manifest advantage. but jane, the elder daughter, who was a woman in stature and already knew more of the world than is good for women in general, was a constant source of anxiety to sam. many a night the unhappy father lingered in the neighborhood of the hotel, seeking for an opportunity to see his daughter and talk with her; not that he had much to say, but that he hoped by his presence to keep more congenial company away from her. when he heard any village gossip in the house, he always could trace it to his daughter jane. whenever mary broke out with some new and wild expression of longing, he understood who put it into her mind. whenever his wife complained that she was not so well dressed as some other women whose husbands were plain workmen, and expressed a wish for some tawdry bit of finery, sam could trace the desire, by very little questioning, back to his daughter jane. he prayed about it, thought about it, groaned over it, wept over it, and still saw no means within his power to bring the girl back to an interest in her family and to bring her up so that she should not disgrace the name which he was trying to rehabilitate. but the more thought and effort he gave to the subject, the less seemed his chance of success. chapter viii. eleanor prency was the handsomest girl in all bruceton. indeed, she so far distanced all other girls in brilliancy and manners, as well as in good looks, that no other young woman thought of being jealous of her. among her sex she occupied the position of a peerless horse or athlete among sporting men; she was "barred" whenever comparisons were made. as she was an only child, she was especially dear to her parents, who had bestowed upon her every advantage which their means, intelligence, and social standing could supply, and she had availed herself of all of them apparently to the fullest extent. she was not lacking in affection, sense, self-control, and a number of virtues which some girls entirely satisfactory to their parents possessed in less measure. nevertheless the judge and his wife were deeply anxious about their daughter's future. she was good--as girls go; she attended regularly the church of which the family, including herself, were members; she had no bad habits or bad tastes; her associates were carefully selected; and yet the judge and his wife spent many hours, which should have been devoted to sleep, in endeavoring to forecast her future. it was all a matter of heredity. at middle age the judge and his wife were fully deserving of the high esteem in which they were held by the entire community. they were an honest, honorable, christian couple, living fully up to the professions they made. in their youthful days they had been different--in some respects. well off, handsome, and brilliant, they had both been among the most persistent and successful of pleasure-seekers. reviewing those days, mrs. prency could say that utter selfishness and self-love had been her deepest sins. her husband, looking back at his own life, could truthfully say the same, but the details were different. he had looked upon the wine-cup and every other receptacle in which stimulants were ever served. he had tried every game of chance and gone through all other operations collectively known as "sowing one's wild oats." respect for his wife caused him to break from all his bad habits and associations, at first haltingly and with many relapses, but afterwards by joining the church and conforming his life to his faith. but the inheritance of the child was from her parents, as they were, not as they afterwards became. therefore the couple became anxious anew when they discovered that their daughter had become very fond of reynolds bartram, for the young man forcibly reminded both of them of the judge himself in his early days, yet without prency's strong and natural basis of character, while the daughter was entirely devoted to the pleasures of the day. if bartram were to remain as he was, and his self-satisfaction to continue so strong as to be manifest upon all occasions and in all circumstances they foresaw a miserable life for their daughter. hence mrs. prency's solicitude about young bartram. one day mrs. prency made a business excuse to call again on the cobbler's assistant. "mr. kimper," said she after leaving a dainty boot with some instructions about repairs, "reynolds bartram came to see you, i suppose, as i warned you he would?" "yes, ma'am, he came," said the cobbler, selecting some buttons from a box and beginning to affix them to one of the lady's boots. "did he talk with you on the subject that i supposed he would." "yes," said sam, "he did; quite a long time." "did you change your views at all under his arguments?" "oh, no, ma'am," said the man, looking up with an eager expression of countenance. "how could i?" "i'm so glad," murmured the woman. "well, what did he say?" "i can't repeat all his words, mrs. prency, because he talks a good deal better than i do, you know, an' maybe i wouldn't give them the sense that they had,--the way that he meant them." "how did he seem to take what you said to him?" "i'm afraid, ma'am," said sam, "that what i said didn't entirely suit him; because when i got through all he said was, 'pshaw!'" mrs. prency looked at the shoe through which the needle was rapidly passing back and forth, and finally said,-- "he hasn't come again, i suppose?" "oh, yes, ma'am, he has,--several times. i never knew any other man to be so much interested in the makin' of one pair of shoes as he has been about them that he ordered of me that day. he says they're not in any hurry, an' yet he comes in every day or two to talk about them." "indeed!" said mrs. prency, her face brightening. "doesn't he talk of anything but his shoes?" "yes, ma'am," sighed sam; "he comes back to the old subject always; an' it does seem to me as if the one thing he was thinkin' about an' tryin' to do was to break me down in what i've learned to believe. it don't seem, ma'am, to me that it's very big business for a smart feller like him to be in, when he knows what a common sort of a feller i am, an' what little i've got, an' how much i need all that i've got, if i'm goin' to keep straight any more." "mr. kimper," said the lady, "try not to look at it in that way. he is not trying to break you down; he is trying to satisfy himself. don't give way, and he dare not. if he did not believe a great deal of what you have been saying to him, he would not keep up his interest in it. mr. kimper, it may not seem possible to you, but there is a chance of your doing better work in the missionary cause for that young man than anybody and everybody else in this town has yet been able to do." "oh, nonsense, mrs. prency!" said the cobbler, dropping the shoe and looking up incredulously. "he's got a thousand times as much head-piece as i have, an' if he can't learn what he wants to from other people there ain't the slightest likelihood of my ever learnin' him anythin'." "sam," said mrs. prency, earnestly, "in the book that you have been reading so industriously, from which you have learned so much, and from which i hope you will continue to learn a great deal, don't you remember something that is said about the lord having selected the feeble ones of this world to confound the wise?" sam looked down meditatively at the dropped shoe, and replied in a moment,-- "well, now you speak of it, ma'am, i think i do." "you certainly will believe that as much as everything else you have read there?" "why, of course; i'll have to." "very well, then; apply it to yourself, and try to be patient the next time that young man comes to annoy you." sam rested his elbows on his knees and dropped the shoe again for a moment, and at last, resuming his work, said,-- "well, i'll take your word for it, ma'am: you know a good deal more about such things than i do." gradually the cobbler's face began to contract. his needle and thread moved more and more rapidly through the buttons and the leather. at last he laid the shoe aside with an air of desperation, looked up defiantly, and said,-- "mrs. prency, i don't mean no offence, an' i ain't the kind of person that meddles with other people's business, an' i hope you won't feel hurt or angry at anythin' that i'm goin' to say to you, because there is somethin' behind it. so i hope you won't think i'm meddlin' with your affairs, if you'll listen to me just a little while. i--i--" "well?" said the lady, for sam seemed to be hesitating about what he wanted to say. "i don't hardly know how to say it, ma'am, an' i'm awfully afraid to say it at all; but--well, there, mrs. prency, i guess i know why you are so very much interested in the religious welfare of that young lawyer." the judge's wife had naturally a very good complexion, but her face flushed deeper as she looked inquiringly at the cobbler but said nothing. "i've seen him," said sam,--"i can't help seein' things when i'm goin' along in the street, you know, or happen to look out through the windows,--i've seen him in company once in a while with that daughter of yours, mrs. prency,--with that young lady that seems to me to be too good to talk to any young man that lives in this town. he is very fond of her, though; nobody can help seein' that." "i suppose he is," said mrs. prency, with an embarrassed manner. "young men have very quick perceptions and correct tastes in matters of that kind, you know." "yes, ma'am," said the cobbler, "and they don't differ much from young women. seems to me your daughter, ma'am, seems to think a good deal of him, too. well, i don't wonder at it, for he's the finest lookin' young feller anywhere about here; an' if they go to thinkin' more and more of each other as they go on, you would like him to be a good deal better man than he is." the judge's wife dropped her eyes and seemed in doubt for an instant as to whether to be angry or only amused. finally she looked up frankly and said, "mr. kimper, you're a parent and so am i. i see you have been putting yourself in my place. it is quite natural that you should do so, and it is very creditable to you that you have done it in the way you have. you are quite right in your surmise; but may i ask why you have spoken to me about it in this way?" "that's just what i was comin' to, ma'am," said the cobbler. "i've got a daughter, too. i suppose you think she ain't fit to be mentioned in the same day with that glorious gal of yours." "oh, mr. kimper!" murmured the lady. "well if you don't, i don't see how you can help doin' it; that's all. your daughter is a lady. she shows in her everythin' that there is in her father and mother, an' everybody knows that they're the finest people hereabouts. my child is the daughter of a thief an' a brawler an' a loafer, an' she's a servant in a common hotel, which is about as low down, i s'pose, as any gal can get in this town that don't go to the bad entirely. mrs. prency, that gal has broke my heart. i don't have no influence over her at all. you want me to help you out about your daughter. i am goin' to do it just as far as heaven will give me the strength to do it. now i want to throw myself right at your feet an' beg you, for the love of god, to try to do somethin' for _my_ child." "why, mr. kimper, certainly," said the judge's wife. "i am very glad you spoke to me about her. but, really, i have tried to do a great deal for her. while you were away i used to send clothing to your wife for her, so that the child might be able always to make a proper appearance at school." "yes, ma'am, so you did," said the cobbler, "an' it's a shame that i should ask anythin' else of you, for i know you're generous-hearted, an' the lord knows there's enough other poor an' wretched people in this town that needs lookin' after, an' i know you're doin' a good deal for all of 'em. but this ain't a matter of poverty, mrs. prency; it goes a good deal deeper than that. i'm not thinkin' about her appearance; she's better dressed now than she ort to be, though i don't think she shows much good taste in what she buys to put on her. but i want to have somebody take some interest in her that'll make her change her thoughts an' feelin's about the way she's livin' an' the kind o' company she's keepin'." the judge's wife looked thoughtful, and sam contemplated her with wistful eyes. there was a long silence. when at last mrs. prency spoke she said,-- "mr. kimper, i think i know what you mean, but i am puzzled as to what i can do and how i can do it. can you suggest anything?" "that's just the trouble, ma'am," said sam; "i can't; i don't know how. i've thought an' cried an' prayed about that gal more than anybody'd ever believe, i s'pose,--anybody that knows me an' knows her too. but i can't get no light nor no sense about it. but i'm only a man, mrs. prency, an' you're a woman. she's a woman too, an' it did seem to me that maybe you, with all you're good sense an' all your good-heartedness, could think of somethin', some way, that would bring that gal back to what she ort to be before she goes an' does what her mother done--marry some worthless fool before she's old enough to marry at all, an' then be helpless and downcast all the rest of her life." "i might," said the lady, after musing a little while, "i might possibly make her a place among my own servants, but i imagine she would not care for such a position, for i have always discovered that the servants who have been in hotels are dissatisfied with any other sort of service. besides, you probably do not wish her to associate with the servant class, and it would be far better for her if she did not." "she'd have to go, ma'am, if you was willin' to take her," said the cobbler, "but, as you say, whether she'd stay or not is a question. oh, mrs. prency," said he, resuming his work again with violent energy, "it's the hardest question that ever come up to me in all my life. it's harder than bein' in jail or breakin' off drinkin' or anythin' else that i ever tried. it's even harder than goin' to work; i give you my word it is." "mr. kimper," said the lady, "i'll tell you what i'll do. i give you my word that i will think earnestly on the subject, and do it at once, and give myself no rest until i have devised some plan to do what you have asked me." "god bless you, ma'am! god bless you!" said the cobbler, dropping a tear upon one of the grimy hands at work upon the shoe. chapter ix. reynolds bartram was greatly annoyed by the results of the several interviews he had imposed upon the new assistant cobbler at bruceton. he had silenced, if not conquered, all the other religious controversialists of the town, and found the weak spots in the armor of many good people not given to controversy, whom he had beguiled into talking on religious themes. why he should want to converse at all upon such subjects puzzled the people of the town, all of whom had known him from boyhood as a member of a family so entirely satisfied with itself that it never desired any aid from other people, to say nothing of higher powers. sometimes the bartrams went to church for social purposes, but always with an air of conferring a favor upon the power in whose honor the edifice was erected. but bartram had good enough reasons for his sudden interest in religion. he was in love with eleanor prency, and, after the manner of his family regarding everything that interested them, he was tremendously in earnest with his wooing. like a judicious lawyer, he had endeavored to make his way easier by prepossessing the girl's parents in his favor; but when he began to pass the lines of pleasing civility, within which he had long known the judge and his wife, he was surprised to find an undercurrent of seriousness, the existence of which in the prency family he never had suspected. the judge appeared to estimate everything from the stand-point of religion and righteousness; so did his wife; so, though in less measure, did the daughter. such nonsense, as the self-sufficient youth regarded it, was annoying. to visit a pleasant family with the intention of making a general conquest and find himself confronted by a line of obstacles which he always had regarded as trifling, yet which he was unable to overcome, and to be told that religion was a reality because it had changed sam kimper, one of the most insignificant wretches in town, from a lazy, thievish drunkard to an honest, sober, industrious citizen,--all this was to make war upon reynolds bartram's constitutional opinions as to the fitness of things. a change of opinion somewhere was necessary: so it must occur in the prency family, and as soon as it could be brought about. this was bartram's first conclusion, after an hour of deep thought. he had started upon a love-making enterprise, and he objected to a complication of interests. if the prencys chose to talk theology in the privacy of their family life, they were welcome to do so, but he wished none of it, and, unless his head had lost its cunning, he believed he could devise a method of preventing further inflictions of it. he convinced himself that his best method would be to discover and expose the weakness, perhaps hypocrisy, of the wretched cobbler's professions. maybe kimper meant all he said, and thought he believed something which was essential to religion; but had not scores of other common fellows in the town done likewise, during "revivals" and other seasons of special religious effort, only to fall back into their old ways soon afterwards? it was all a matter of birth and training, argued bartram to himself: the feeblest and most excitable intellects, the world over, were the first to be impressed by whatever seemed supernatural, whether it were called religion, spiritualism, mesmerism, or anything else. it was merely a matter of mental excitement: the stronger the attack, the sooner the relapse. sam kimper would lose faith in his fancies sooner or later; it might be somewhat cruel to hasten this result, but what was a little more or less of the life of such a fellow, compared with the lifelong happiness of one of the bartrams,--the last of the family, and, as the young man fully believed, the best? should the cobbler's fall be hastened, bartram would make it right; indeed, he would volunteer in his defense the first time he should again be arrested for fighting or stealing. but his plan did not work. day after day he had made excuses to drop into the cobbler's shop and worry the ex-convict into a discussion, but not once did he depart without a sense of defeat. as he said to himself,-- "what can be done with a man who only believes, and won't argue or go to the bottom of things? it's confoundedly ridiculous." during his last visit, he said,-- "sam, if the power you profess to believe in can really work such a change as you think he has done in you, he ought to be able to do almost anything else. don't you think so?" "that i do," said the cobbler, working away. "you believe he has power to any extent, i suppose?" "you're right again, mr. bartram." "of course you think he loves you dearly?" "i'm ashamed to think it,--that any such bein' should love a good-for-nothin' feller like me. but what else can i think, mr. bartram, after all that's gone on in me, an' what he's said himself?" "very well; then, if he is so powerful and cares so much for you, i suppose he brings you more work and better prices than any one else in your business?" sam did not reply to this at once, but after a while he said,-- "it amounts to the same thing: he makes me work harder than i ever knowed how to do before. that brings me more money an' gives me a hope of gettin' along better after a while." "oh, well, you have a family,--quite a large family, i believe. does he do as much for your wife and children as for you?" "whatever he's doin' for me is done for all of us, mr. bartram." "just so. but do you mean to say that what you're making enables you to do for your family all that you should?" the cobbler's face contracted, under the shade he wore over his eyes. an evil smile overspread the lawyer's countenance. a little time passed; the discussion was becoming sport,--such sport as the angler feels when a wounded fish, a hundred times smaller than he, is struggling and writhing in agony on his hook. "you don't seem certain about it, sam," the tormentor finally said. "mr. bartram," the cobbler answered in a little while, "what he done for me came about so quiet an' unknown like that i don't know what he may be doin' for the wife an' children. god knows they need it; an', as he came to look after them that was needy, i don't believe he can make a mistake an' pass by my house." "but i should think you would be sure about it. you're so sure about your own affairs, you know,--what are called your spiritual affairs." "i don't know, though," said sam, simply. "have all the children got good shoes and stockings and warm clothes? winter is almost here, you know." "no, sir, they haven't," sam sharply replied. the lawyer quickly caught the change of tone, and made haste to explain: "i didn't mean to disturb your peace of mind, sam; i asked only in order to learn how much foundation there was to your faith. they haven't them, you say. how will they get them?" "i'll earn 'em," said the cobbler, with a savage dash of his awl which one of his fingers barely escaped. "but suppose you can't; suppose trade slackens, or larry takes a notion to a new helper." "then i'll beg, rather than have 'em suffer." "and if folks won't give?" "then my folks'll have to go without." "in spite of your new, loving, strong friend,--your saviour? if he's all you take him to be, aren't you sure he'll look out for your family?" "mr. bartram," said the cobbler, resting for a moment, and straightening his weary back, "if i was in trouble,--been doin' somethin' wrong, for instance, an' was hauled into court, an' had you for my lawyer,--though of course i couldn't expect to have so smart a man,--i'd ort to believe that you'd do everythin' that could be done an' ort to be done, ortn't i?" "certainly, sam, certainly," said the lawyer, with his customary professional look of assurance. "but i wouldn't know all about it in advance, would i? even if you was to tell me all you meant to do an' how you'd do it, i couldn't take it in. if i could, i'd be just as smart as you,--the idee!--an' wouldn't need you at all." both suppositions were so wildly improbable that the lawyer indulged in a sarcastic smile. "well, then," continued sam, "here's somebody helpin' me more than any man ever could,--somebody that's smarter than any lawyer livin'. i s'pose you'll own up to that?" the idea that any being, natural or supernatural, could be wiser than one of the bartrams was not pleasing to the lawyer, when suggested so abruptly, but it was conceded, after a moment of thought, by a condescending nod of the head. "then," sam continued, "how am i goin' to be supposed to know all that he's doin' an' not doin' for me, an' when he's goin' to do somethin' else, or whether he's goin' to do it at all. if i was as smart as a lawyer, i wouldn't need one; if i was as smart an' good as him that's lookin' after me, there wouldn't need to be any god or saviour, would there?" "then you are satisfied he is god and saviour, eh? some wiser men have believed differently." "i only know what i was told an' what i've read for myself, sir. the man that put me up to it told me not to try to believe everythin' that everybody else did, but to believe as much as i could an' live up to it, bein' extra particular about the livin' up." "but you ought to know something--have some distinct idea--as to whom you're believing in. what do you know about him, after all?" "i know," said the cobbler, "just what i've told you before, when you've asked me the same question. i know he was once in the world, an' didn't do anybody any harm, an' done a good deal of good, an' taught folks to do right an' how to do it. everybody believes that, don't they?" "i suppose it's safe to admit that much." "well, sir, i'm tryin' to foller him an' learn of him. i'm believin' in him just like i believe in old andrew jackson." "is that all?" "that's enough,--as far as i've got. you're a good deal smarter than i be, sir: won't you tell me how to go further?" the lawyer shook his head and departed. the cobbler fell on his knees and buried his face in his hands. the lawyer, chancing to look in the window, saw the movement; then he drew his hat down over his eyes and sauntered off. chapter x. the genuineness of the change which had come over sam kimper slowly became the subject of general conversation in bruceton. judge prency frequently spoke of it; so did his wife; and, as the prencys were leaders of village society, whatever interested them became the fashion. people with shoes which needed repairing visited the new cobbler in great numbers, each prompted as much by curiosity as by business, for they seldom haggled about prices. sam's family, too, began to receive some attention. mrs. prency, having first secured a promise from sam that the children should go to sunday-school if they could be decently clad, interested several ladies to the extent of bestowing some old clothing, which she hired a sewing woman to make over into becoming garments for billy and mary. mrs. kimper, too, was enabled to dress well enough to appear in church, though she stipulated that she should go only to evening services. "i don't 'mount to much, mrs. prency," said she to the family's benefactor; "there ain't much left of me as i once was, but i ain't goin' to have people look at me the way they do, any more than i can help." "the feeling does you credit, mrs. kimper," said the lady, "but you won't long be troubled that way. the oftener you let people see you, the less curious they'll be." sam's new way of life, too, began to be discussed where men most congregated. loungers at stores, the railway station, and the post-office talked of the town's only ex-convict who had not yet gone back to his old ways. most of the men who talked of him did it in about the manner of spectators of the gladiatorial combats in ancient rome: they admired the endurance and courage of the man, but seldom did it occur to them to stretch out a hand to help him. there were exceptions to this rule, however. an old farmer who had brought a load of wheat to the station listened to the tale, asked a great many questions about the case, and said, finally,-- "i s'pose you're all doin' all you can to help him along?" the by-standers looked at one another, but no one answered in the affirmative. one man at last found words to say, "why, he's tryin' to help hisself along, and we're watchin' to see how he'll succeed. now, i was along by his place this mornin', an' seen him carryin' in the last wood from his wood-pile. 'sam,' i hollered, 'don't you want to buy a load of wood? i've got some i want to sell.' 'i need it,' said sam, 'but i ain't got a cent.' well, mebbe i'd have trusted him for a load if he'd asked me, but it occurred to me to stand off an' see how he'd manage it. it's cold weather now, an' if he don't get it some way, his family'll go cold. i went by there again at noon-time, but he hadn't got none yit." "he's as independent like," said another, "as if he hadn't never been in jail." "you're a pack of heartless hogs!" roared the farmer, getting into his wagon and driving off. "can't see that he's any different from the rest of us," muttered one of the by-standers. could the group have known the trouble in the new cobbler's heart, as he bent all day over his work and thought of the needed wood, their interest in the subject would have been enhanced. sam's wife was a cold-blooded creature; the baby was somewhat ailing; it would not do for the fire to go out, yet the fuel he had carried in at morn could not more than last until evening. the little money that had come into the shop during the day would barely purchase some plain food, of which there was never in the house a day's supply. he had not the courage to ask credit for wood; his occasional attempts to "get trusted" had all failed, no matter how small the article wanted. he looked for larry highgetty, his employer, to beg a small loan, but larry, though he came into the shop every morning for his share of the previous day's earnings, could not be found that afternoon. suddenly, when the sun was almost down, sam remembered that a house was being built several squares away. carpenters always left many scraps behind them, which village custom allowed anyone to pick up. the cobbler devoutly thanked heaven for the thought, closed the shop, and hurried away to the new building. the men were still at work, and there was a great deal of waste lying about. "may i have some of these leavin's?" asked sam of the master builder. the man looked down from the scaffolding on which he stood, recognized the questioner, turned again to his work, and at last answered, with a scowl,-- "yes, i suppose so. it would be all the same, i guess, if i didn't say so. you'd come after dark and help yourself." sam pocketed the insult, though the weight of it was heavy. so was that of the bits of board he gathered; but he knew that such thin wood burned rapidly, so he took a load that made him stagger. as he entered the yard behind his house, he saw, through the dusk which was beginning to gather, a man rapidly tossing cord-wood from a wagon to a large pile which already lay on the ground. "my friend," gasped sam, dropping his own load and panting from his exertion, "i guess--you've made a--mistake. i ain't ordered a load of wood from nobody. guess you've come to the wrong house." "guess not," replied the man, who was the farmer that had freed his mind at the railway station during the afternoon. "this is sam kimper's," explained the cobbler. "just where i was told to come," said the farmer, tossing out the last sticks and stretching his arms to rest upon them. "who was it told you to bring it?" asked the resident. the farmer stooped and took a large package from the front of the wagon and threw it on the ground; then he threw another. "won't you tell me who sent it?" sam asked again. the farmer turned his head and shouted,-- "god almighty, if you must know; and he told me to bring that bag of flour and shoulder of bacon, too." then the farmer drove off, at a gait quite unusual in farm-teams. the cobbler burst into tears and fell upon his knees. when he arose he looked in the direction from which came the rattle of the retreating wheels, and said to himself,-- "i wonder if that man was converted in the penitentiary?" the story, when sam told it in the house, amazed the family, though little mary giggled long on hearing the name of the supposed giver. no sooner was supper ended than the child slipped out of the house and hurried to the hotel to tell her sister jane all about it. within half an hour the story had passed, through the usual channels, to all lounging-places that were open, and at one of them--the post-office--it was heard by deacon quickset. it troubled the good man a great deal, and he said,-- "there's no knowing how much harm'll be done the fellow by that speech. if he thinks the lord is going to take care of him in such unexpected ways, he'll go to loafing and then get back into his old ways." "didn't the lord ever help you in any unexpected way, deacon?" asked judge prency, who nearly every evening spent a few moments in the post-office lobby. "why, yes,--of course; but, judge, sam and i aren't exactly the same kind of men, i think you'll allow." "quite right," said the judge. "you're a man of sense and character. but when jesus was on earth did he give much attention to men of your general character and standing? according to my memory of the record,--and i've re-read it several times since sam kimper's return,--he confined his attentions quite closely to the poor and wretched, apparently to the helpless, worthless class to whom the kimper family would have belonged had it lived at that time. 'they that are whole need no physician,'--you remember?--'but they that are sick.'" "according to the way you seem to be thinking, judge prency," said the deacon, coldly, "them that's most deserving are to be passed by for them that's most shiftless." "those who deserve most are those who need most, aren't they, deacon?--that is, if anyone is really 'deserving,' as we use the word." "your notions would break up business entirely, if they were carried out," asserted the deacon. "not at all; though i've never discovered that business is the first interest of the almighty." "you mean to say that because i work hard and get a little fore-handed i ought to take a lot of shiftless folks and teach them to be lazy and dependent on me?" "certainly not, deacon. how you do jump at conclusions! there aren't a lot of shiftless people in this town; there are very few; and even they might be helped, and shamed into taking care of themselves, if you and i and some more fore-handed people were to follow our master's example." "i've spoken to every unbeliever in this town about his soul's salvation," said the deacon; "i've always made it a matter of duty. christ came to preach salvation, and i'm following his example, in my humble way." "didn't he do anything else?" asked the judge. "you remember what answer he sent to john in prison, when the baptist seemed to have lost heart and wondered whether jesus were really he who should come? he said that to the poor the gospel was preached, but he gave half a dozen other proofs, each of them showing special care for men's bodies." "judge, you're talking materialism," said the deacon. "it's a spirit that's getting too common everywhere." "oh, no, i'm not; i'm talking the words of jesus himself. aren't they good enough for you? or are you like children at the table who will take only what suits them, and ignore everything else?" "such talks never do any good, judge," said the deacon, buttoning his overcoat and turning up the collar. "i've spent a good deal of my life thinking about sacred subjects and trying to lead my fellow-men in the right way. you're not going to make me believe at my time of life that i've been all wrong, and that jesus christ came on earth only to start a charity society." "nor to teach people to live right?" "he wants them first to know how to die right. i should think, judge, that sam kimper had been converting you over again and doing it backwards. that fellow has only got hold of one end of the scripture--one little jag end of it." "too small an end to be worthy of your attention, i suppose, deacon?" "this is all wasted time and idle talk, judge prency," said the deacon, leaving the place so quickly that he forgot to ask for his letters. chapter xi. one bright, breezy october afternoon, sam kimper's daughter jane got "an hour off" from her duties at the hotel, and proceeded to devote it to her highest ideal of possible enjoyment. there were many other pleasures for which she longed, but, as they were unattainable just then, she made the most of that which was within her reach for the time being. it was to array herself in her best and saunter to and fro in the principal streets, look into shop windows, and exchange winks and rude remarks with young men and women with whom she was acquainted. although her attire was about what one would expect of a drunkard's child who had spent her later years in the kitchen and corridors of a hotel, jane was not an unsightly creature. there must have been good physical quality in one side or other of her family, in past generations, which was trying to reappear, for jane had a fine figure, expressive eyes, and a good complexion. had any one followed her during her afternoon stroll, and observed her closely during her successive chance meetings with young men and women of her acquaintance, he would have seen hard lines, coarse lines, ugly lines, in her face; yet when in repose the same face was neither unwomanly nor without an occasional suggestion of soul. it was a face like many others that one may see on the streets,--entirely human, yet entirely under the control of whatever influence might be about it for the time being,--the face of a nature untrained and untaught, which would have followed either jesus or satan, or both by turns, had both appeared before it in visible shape. during a moment or two of her afternoon out, jane found herself approaching mrs. prency and eleanor, those ladies being out on one of those serious errands known collectively as "shopping." "do see that dreadfully dowdy girl!" exclaimed miss eleanor, whose attire was always selected with correct taste. "she has never had any one to teach her to dress properly, my dear," suggested the mother. "she might have some one who cared enough for her to keep her from appearing in public in red hair and a blue ribbon," said the daughter. "such girls have no one to keep them from doing anything they like, my dear. let us try to be sorry for them, instead of being disgusted." "but, mother--" "sh-h! she'll hear you. i'm going to bow to her; i wish you'd do the same." "mother!" "to oblige me; i'll explain afterwards." the couple were now within several steps of jane, who, with an odd mixture of wistfulness and scare, had been studying eleanor's attire. when she saw both women looking at her, she began to take a defiant attitude, but the toss of her head was met by one of mrs. prency's heartiest smiles, accompanied by a similar recognition from eleanor. short as was the time that could elapse before the couple had passed her, it was long enough to show a change in jane's face,--a change so notable that eleanor whispered,-- "did you ever see any one alter looks so quickly?" "never; but i sha'n't lose any opportunity to see it again," said mrs. prency. "mother, dear," said eleanor, "i hope you're not suddenly going to recognize every common person you may meet on the street. you're so enthusiastic." "and so different from my daughter in that respect,--eh, dear?" "but, mother, you've always been so careful and fastidious about your associations and mine. i remember the time, only a year or two ago, while i was at school, when you would have been horrified if i'd had anything to do with a creature like that." "you were a child then, my dear; you're a woman now. that girl is the daughter of the poor fellow--" "sam kimper?--that you and father talk of so frequently? yes, i know; she was a horrid little thing in school, two classes below me. but, mother, i don't see why we ought to recognize her just because her father has been in the penitentiary and behaved himself since he came back." "because she _needs_ recognition, dear child; because she gets it from plenty of people of her own class, and if she has it from no others she never will be any better than she is; perhaps she will become worse." "oh, mother!" exclaimed eleanor, with a toss of her handsome head, "such people never change. there were plenty of such girls in the same class with me in the public school, and they've all gone off and married common low fellows. some of them were real pretty girls while they were young, too." "all the more reason why others of the same kind should have some encouragement to do better, my child." "but, mother," persisted eleanor, "what possible good will it do that kimper girl for us merely to recognize her in the street?" "you may do as much more for her as you choose, if you think mere courtesy is not enough. eleanor, you are a healthy, happy girl; you know--and i remember--all a girl's natural fancies and longings. do you imagine that being badly born and reared can keep that girl from having the same feelings? she probably wishes she could dress as well as the best, attract attention, be respected, have a real fine fellow fall in love with her--" "the idea!" exclaimed eleanor, laughing merrily. "but suppose it were all true; how can mere notice from us help her? i'm sure the minute we passed her she made a face and envied me my better clothes." "you will think differently when you have more experience, my dear. when i was as young as you, i thought--" "oh, mother, there she is again," said eleanor, "crossing the street; she's turning right towards us. and," murmured the young lady, after assuring herself that it was really the same combination of red hair and blue ribbon, "how different she looks!" "because two women of some standing and position chanced to notice her. let's help the good work along, daughter." then, before miss eleanor had time to object, and just as the cobbler's daughter was in front of them, mrs. prency stopped, extended her neatly gloved hand, and said, with a pleasant smile,-- "how these girls do grow! you were little jane only a year or two ago, miss kimper." never before had jane kimper been addressed as "miss." the appellation sent color flying into her face and brightness into her eyes as she stammered out something about growing being natural. "you haven't grown fast enough, though, to neglect good looks," continued mrs. prency, while eleanor, endeavoring to act according to her mother's injunctions, drawled,-- "no, indeed!" then the cobbler's daughter flushed deeper and looked grateful, almost modest, for girls read girls pretty fairly, and jane saw that eleanor was regarding her face with real admiration. "you girls of the new generation can't imagine how much interest we women who used to be girls have in you," said the judge's wife. "i'm afraid you'd be vain if you knew how much eleanor and i have looked at you and talked about you." "i didn't s'pose any lady that was anybody ever thought anything about girls like me," jane finally managed to say. "you're greatly mistaken, my dear girl," said the lady. "nearly every one in this world talks a good deal about every one else whom they know by sight. you really can't imagine how much good it does me to see you looking so well and pretty. keep right on looking so, won't you? the girls of to-day must be our women a few years hence; that's what i keep impressing upon my daughter day by day,--don't i, dear." "indeed you do, mother." eleanor said it with a look at jane which was almost a signal for sympathy: the cobbler's daughter was greatly mystified by it. "i don't see," said jane, after standing awkwardly for a moment in meditation, "how a girl's goin' to be much of a woman that amounts to anything one of these days if she's nothin' to do now but dirty work at a hotel." "maybe she could change her work," suggested the lady. jane's lips parted into some hard and ugly lines, and she replied,-- "some things is easier sayin' than doin'." "should you like a different position?" asked mrs. prency. "i'm sure it could be had if people knew you wanted it. for instance, i need some one every day for weeks to come to help my daughter and me with our sewing and fitting. there are always so many things to be done as winter approaches. i sometimes feel as if i were chained to my sewing-machine, and have so much to do. but i'm afraid such work would seem very stupid to you. it would mean sitting still all day, you know, with no one to talk to but eleanor and me." jane looked wonderingly at the two women before her. no one but them to talk to! she never had imagined an opportunity to talk to such people at all. she supposed all such women regarded her as part of the scum of the earth, yet here they were speaking pleasantly to her,--mrs. prency, a woman who naturally would fill the eye of an impulsive animal like jane,--eleanor, the belle of the town,--two women whom no one could look at without admiration. no one but them to talk to! all her associates faded from jane's mind like a fleck of mist under a sunburst, as she answered,-- "if there's anything you want done that i can do, mrs. prency, i'd rather work for you for nothin' than for anybody else for any money." "come to my house as soon as you like, then, and we'll promise to keep you busy: won't we, daughter?" "yes, indeed," murmured eleanor, who saw, in her mind's eye, a great deal of her work being done without effort of her own. "you sha'n't do it for nothing, however; you shall earn fully as much as you do now. good day," mrs. prency said, as she passed on, and eleanor gave jane a nod and a smile. the hotel drudge stood still and looked after the couple with wondering eyes. the judge's wife dropped something as she walked. jane hurried after her and picked it up. it was a glove. the girl pressed it to her lips again and again, hurried along for a few steps to return it, stopped suddenly, thrust it into her breast, and then, passing the back of her ungloved hand across her eyes, returned to the hotel, her eyes cast down and her ears deaf to occasional remarks intended specially for them. chapter xii. deacon quickset was entirely truthful when he said to the keeper of the beer saloon that he had worried his pastor again and again to call on the repentant thief and try to bring him into the fold of the church; but he probably did not know that the said pastor had opinions of his own as to the time and manner in which such work should be done. dr. guide, under whose spiritual ministrations the deacon had sat every sunday for many years, was a man of large experience in church work of all kinds, and, although he was extremely orthodox, to the extent of believing that those who already had united with his church were on the proper road to heaven, he nevertheless realized, as a practical man, that frequently there is more trouble with sheep in the road than with those who are straying about. he had devoted no little of his time since he had been settled over the bruceton church to the reclamation of doubtful characters of all kinds, but he frequently confided to his wife that one of the most satisfactory proofs to him of the divine origin of the church was that those already inside it were those most in need of spiritual ministrations. he had reclaimed some sad sinners of the baser sort from time to time with very little effort, but people concerning whom he frequently lay awake nights were men and women who were nominally in good standing in his own denomination and in the particular flock over which he was shepherd. he had therefore made no particular haste to call on sam kimper, being entirely satisfied, as he told his wife, his only confidante, that so long as the man was following the course which he was reported to have laid down for himself he was not likely to go far astray, whereas a number of members of the congregation, men of far more influence in the community, seemed determined to break from the straight and narrow way at very slight provocation, and among these, the reverend doctor sadly informed his wife, he feared deacon quickset was the principal. the deacon was a persistent man in business,--"diligent in business" was the deacon's own expression in justification of whatever neglect his own wife might chance to charge him with,--but it seemed to some business-men of the town, as well as to his own pastor, that the deacon's diligence was overdoing itself, and that, in the language of one of the store-keepers, he had picked up a great deal more than he could carry. he was a director in a bank, agent for several insurance companies, manager of a land-improvement company, general speculator in real estate, and a man who had been charged with the care of a great deal of property which had belonged to old acquaintances now deceased. that he should be very busy was quite natural, but that his promises sometimes failed of fulfilment was none the less annoying, and once in a while unpleasant rumors were heard in the town about the deacon's financial standing and about his manner of doing business. still, dr. guide did not drop sam kimper from his mind, and one day when he chanced to be in the vicinity of larry highgetty's shop he opened the door, bowed courteously to the figure at the bench, accepted a chair, and sat for a moment wondering what he should say to the man whom he was expected by the deacon to bring into his own church. "mr. kimper," said the reverend gentleman, finally, "i trust you are getting along satisfactorily in the very good way in which i am told you have started." "i can't say that i've any fault to find, sir," said the shoemaker, "though i've no doubt that a man of your learnin' an' brains could see a great deal wrong in me." "don't trouble yourself about that, my good fellow," said the minister: "you will not be judged by my learning or brains or those of any one else except yourself. i merely called to say that at any time that you are puzzled about any matter of belief, or feel that you should go further than you already have done, i would be very glad to be of any service to you if i can. you are quite welcome to call upon me at my home at almost any time, and of course you know where i can always be found on sundays." "i am very much obliged to you, sir," said the cobbler, "but somehow when i go to thinkin' much about such things i don't feel so much like askin' other people questions or about learnin' anythin' else as i do about askin' if it isn't a most wonderful thing, after all, that i've been able to change about as i have, an' that i haven't tumbled backwards again into any of my old ways. you don't know what those ways is, i s'pose, dr. guide, do you?" "well, no," said the minister, "i can't say that my personal experience has taught me very much about them." "of course not, sir; that i might know. of course i didn't mean anything of that kind. but i sometimes wonder whether gentlemen like you, that was born respectable an' always was decent, an' has had the best of company all your lives, an' never had any bad habits, can know what an awful hole some of us poor common fellows sometimes get down into, an' don't seem to know how to get out of. i s'pose, sir, there must have been lots of folks of that kind when jesus was around on the world alive: don't you think so?" "no doubt, no doubt," said the minister, looking into his hat as if with his eyes he was trying to make some notes for remarks on the succeeding sunday. "you know, sir, that in what's written about him they have a good deal to say about the lots of attention that he gave to the poor. i s'pose, if poor folks was then like they are now, most of them was that way through some faults of their own; because every body in this town that behaves himself an' always behaved himself manages to get along well enough. it does seem to me, sir, that he must have gone about among folks a good deal like me." "that view of the matter never occurred to me," said the reverend gentleman, "and yet possibly there is a great deal to it. you know, mr. kimper, that was a long time ago. there was very little education in those times, and the people among whom he moved were captives of a stronger nation, and they seem to have been in a destitute and troubled condition." "yes," said sam, interrupting the speaker, "an' i guess a good many of them were as bad off as me, because, if you remember, he said a good deal about them that was in prison an' that was visited there. now, sir, it kind o' seems to me in this town--i think i know a good deal about it, because i've never been able to associate with anybody except folks like myself--it seems to me that sort of people don't get any sort of attention nowadays." the minister assumed his conventional air of dignity, and replied, quickly,-- "i assure you, you are very much mistaken, so far as i am concerned. i think i know them all by name, and have made special visits to all of them, and tried to make them feel assured of the sympathy of those who by nature or education or circumstance chance to be better off than they." "that ain't exactly what i meant, sir," said the cobbler. "such folks get kind words pretty often, but somehow nobody ever takes hold of them an' pulls them out of the hole they are in, like jesus used to seem to do. i s'pose ministers an' deacons an' such folks can't work miracles like he did, an' if they haven't got it in 'em to pull 'em out, why, i s'pose they can't do it. but i do assure you, sir, that there's a good deal of chance to do that kind of work in this town, an' if there had been any of it done when i was a boy, i don't believe i'd ever have got into the penitentiary." just then dr. brice, one of the village physicians, dropped into the shop, and the minister, somewhat confused, arose, and said,-- "well, mr. kimper, i am very much obliged to you for your views. i assure you that i shall give them careful thought. good day, sir." "sam," said dr. brice, who was a slight, nervous, excitable man, "i'm not your regular medical attendant, and i don't know that it's any of my business, but i've come in here in a friendly way to say to you that, if all i hear about your working all day and most of the night too, is true, you are going to break down. you can't stand it, my boy: human nature isn't made in that way. you have got a wife and family, and you seem to be trying real hard to take care of them. but you can't burn the candle at both ends without having the fire flicker out in the middle all of a sudden, and perhaps just when you can least afford it. now, do take better care of yourself. you have made a splendid start, and there are more people than you know of in this town who are looking at you with a great deal of respect. they want to see you succeed, and if you want any help at it i am sure you can get it; but don't kill the goose that lays the golden egg. don't break yourself up, or there won't be anybody to help. don't you see?" the shoemaker looked up at the good-natured doctor with a quick expression, and said,-- "doctor, i'm not doin' any more than i have to, to keep soul and body together in the family. if i stop any of it, i've got to stop carryin' things home." "oh well," said the doctor, "that may be, that may be. but i'm simply warning you, as a fellow-man, that you must look out for yourself. it's all right to trust the lord, but the lord isn't going to give any one man strength enough to do two men's work. i have been in medical practice forty years, and i have never seen a case of that kind yet. that's all. i'm in a hurry,--got half a dozen people to see. don't feel offended at anything i've said to you. it's all for your good, you know. good day." the doctor departed as rapidly as he had entered, and the cobbler stole a moment or two from his work to think. how his thoughts ran he could scarcely have told afterwards, for again the door opened, and the room darkened slightly, for the person who was entering was father black, the catholic priest, a man whose frame was as big as his heart, he being reputed to be one of the largest-hearted men in all bruceton. everybody respected him. the best proof of it was that no one in any of the other churches ever attempted to do any proselyting in father black's flock. "my son," said the priest, seating himself in the chair and spreading a friendly smile over his large, expressive features, "i have heard a great deal of you since you came back from your unfortunate absence, and i merely dropped in to say to you that if it's any comfort to you to know that every day you have whatever assistance there can be in the prayers of an old man who has been in this world long enough to love most those who need most, you may be sure that you have them." "god bless you, sir! god bless you!" said the cobbler, quickly. "have you connected yourself with any church here as yet?" asked the priest. "no, sir," sighed the cobbler: "one an' another has been pullin' an' haulin' at me one way an' another, tellin' me that it was my duty to go into a church. but how can i do it, sir, when i'm expected to say that i believe this an' that, that i don't know nothin' about? some of 'em has been very good tryin' to teach me what they seem to understand very well, but i don't know much more than when they begun, an' sometimes it seems to me that i know a good deal less, for, with what one tells me in one way, an' another tells me in another way, my mind--and there's not very much of it, sir--my mind gets so mixed up that i don't know nothin' at all." "ah, my son," said the good old priest, "if you could only understand, as a good many millions of your fellow-men do, that it's the business of some men to understand and of others to faithfully follow them, you would not have such trouble." "well, sir," said the cobbler, "that's just what larry's been sayin' to me here in the shop once in a while in the mornin', before he started out to get full; an' there's a good deal of sense in what he says, i've no doubt. but what i ask him is this,--an' he can't tell me, an' perhaps you can, sir. it's only this: while my heart's so full that it seems as if it couldn't hold the little that i already believe an' am tryin' to live up to, where's the sense of my tryin' to believe some more?" father black was so unprepared to answer the question put thus abruptly, accompanied as it was with a look of the deepest earnestness, that there ensued an embarrassing silence in the shop for a moment or two. "my son," said the priest, at last, "do you fully believe all that you have read in the good book that i am told you were taught to read while you were in prison?" "of course i do, sir; i can't do anything else." "you believe it all?" "indeed i do, sir." "and are you trying to live according to it?" "that i am, sir." "then, my son," said the priest, rising, "god bless you and keep you in your way! far be it from me to try to unsettle your mind or lead you any further until you feel that you need leading. if ever you want to come to me, you are welcome at any time of the day or night, and what you cannot understand of what i tell you i won't expect you to believe. remember, my son, the father of us all knows us just as we are, and asks no more of any of us than we can do and be. good day, my son, and again--god bless you!" when the priest went out, sam rested again for a moment, and then murmured to himself,-- "two ministers an' one doctor, all good people, tryin' to show me the way i should go, an' to tell me what i should do, an' me a-makin' only about a dollar a day! i s'pose it's all right, or they wouldn't do it." chapter xiii. reynolds bartram and eleanor prency rapidly became so fond of each other that the people of the village predicted an early engagement. the young man had become quite a regular attendant at church,--not that he had any religious feeling whatever, but that it enabled him to look at his sweetheart for an hour and a half every sunday morning and walk home with her afterwards. although he had considerable legal practice, it was somehow always his fortune to be on the street when the young lady chanced to be out shopping, and after he joined her there generally ensued a walk which had nothing whatever to do with shopping or anything else except an opportunity for two young people to talk to each other for a long time on subjects which seemed extremely interesting to both. nevertheless, there were occasional clouds upon their sky. the young man who loves his sweetheart better than he loves himself occasionally appears in novels, but in real life he seems to be an unknown quantity, and young bartram was no exception to the general rule. in like manner, the young woman who loses sight of her own will, even when in the society of the man whom she thinks the most adorable in the world, is not easy to discover in any ordinary circle of acquaintances. bartram and eleanor met one afternoon, in their customary manner, on the principal street of the village, and walked along side by side for quite a way, finally turning and sauntering through several residence streets, talking with each other on a number of subjects, probably of no great consequence, but apparently very interesting to both of them. suddenly, however, it was the young man's misfortune to see the two kimper boys on the opposite side of the street, and as he eyed them, his lip curled, and he said,-- "isn't it somewhat strange that your estimable parents are so greatly interested in the father of those wretched scamps?" "nothing that my father and mother do, mr. bartram," said miss prency, "is at all strange. they are quite as intelligent as anyone of my acquaintance, i am sure, and more so than most people whom i know, and i have no doubt that their interest in the poor fellow has very good grounds." "perhaps so," said the young man, with another curl of his lip, which exasperated his companion. "i sometimes wonder, however, whether men and women, when they reach middle life and have been reasonably successful and happy in their own affairs, are not likely to allow their sympathies to run away with their intelligence." "it may be so," said eleanor, "among people of your acquaintance, as a class, but i wish you distinctly to except my parents from the rule." "but, my dear girl," said the young man, "your parents are exactly the people to whom i am alluding." "then do me the favor to change the subject of conversation," said the young lady proudly: "i never allow my parents to be criticised in my hearing by anyone but myself." "oh, well," said the young man, "if you choose to take my remarks in that way, i presume you are at liberty to do so; but i am sure you are misunderstanding me." "i don't see how it is possible to misunderstand anything that is said so very distinctly: you lawyers have a faculty, mr. bartram, of saying exactly what you mean--when you choose to." "well, i can't deny that i meant exactly what i said." "but you can at least change the subject, can't you?" "certainly, if you insist upon it; but the subject has been interesting me considerably of late, and i am really wondering whether my estimable friend, the judge, and his no less estimable wife may not be making a mistake which their daughter would be the most effective person in rectifying." "you do me altogether too much honor, sir. suppose you attempt to rectify their mistakes yourself, since you seem so positive about their existence. to give you an opportunity of preparing yourself to do so, i will bid you good day." saying which, the young woman abruptly turned into the residence of an acquaintance to make an afternoon call, leaving the young man rather more disconcerted than he would have liked to admit to any of his acquaintances. he retraced his steps, moodily muttering to himself, and apparently arguing also, for the forefinger of one hand was occasionally touching the palm of the other, and, apparently without knowing in what direction he was walking, he found himself opposite the shop of the shoemaker who had been the indirect cause of his quarrel with his sweetheart. "confound that fellow!" muttered bartram, "he's in my way wherever i move. i've heard too much of him in the stores and the courts and everywhere else that i have been obliged to go. i have to hear of him at the residence of my own sweetheart whenever i call there, and now i find eleanor herself, who has never been able to endure any of the commoner specimens of humanity, apparently taking up the cudgels in his defence. i wish i could understand the fascination that fellow exerts over a number of people so much better than himself. hang it! i am going to find out. he is a fool, if ever there was one, and i am not. if i can't get at the secret of it, it will be the first time that i have ever been beaten in examining and cross-examining such a common specimen of humanity." thus speaking, the lawyer crossed the street and entered the shop, but, to his disgust, found both the cobbler's sons there with their father. the boys, with a curiosity common to all very young people, and particularly intense among the classes who have nothing in particular to think of, stared at him so fixedly that he finally rose abruptly and departed without saying a word. the boys went out soon after, and billy remarked to tom, as the two sauntered homeward,-- "tom, what do you s'pose is the reason that feller comes in to see dad so much?" "gettin' a pair of shoes made, i s'pose," said tom, sulkily, for he had just failed in an attempt to extract a quarter of a dollar from his father. "the shoes that dad was makin' for him," said billy, "was done two or three weeks ago, 'cause i took 'em to his office myself. but he comes to the shop over an' over again, 'cause i've seen him there, an' whenever he comes he manages to get talkin' with dad about religion. he always begins it, too, 'cause dad never says nothin' about it unless the lawyer starts it first." "well," said tom, "seems to me that if he wants to know anythin' on that subject he could go to some of the preachers, that ought to know a good deal more about it than dad does." "can't tell so much about that sort o' thing," said billy. "there's lots of men in this town that don't know much about some things that knows a good deal about some others. you know when that dog we stole last summer got sick, there was nobody in town could do anythin' for him except that old lame nigger down in the holler." "well, you're a sweet one, ain't you?" said tom. "what's dogs got to do with religion, i'd like to know? you ought to be ashamed o' yourself, even if you ain't never been to church." "well," said billy, "what i was meanin' is, some folks seem to know a good deal about things without bein' learned, that other folks will give their whole time to, an' don't know very much about. every place that i go to, somebody says somethin' to me about dad an' religion. say, tom, do you know dad's mighty different to what he used to be before he got took up?" "of course i do. he's always wantin' folks to work, an' always findin' fault with everythin' we do that ain't right. he didn't use to pay no attention to nothin'; we could do anythin' we wanted to; and here i am, a good deal bigger, an' just about as good as a man, an' he pays more attention to me than he ever did, an' fusses at me as if i was little bit of a kid. an' i don't like it, either." "well, as he said to me t'other day, tom, he's got to be pretty lively to make up for lost time." "well, i wish, then," said tom, meditatively, "that he hadn't never lost no time, 'cause it's takin' all the spirit out o' me to be hammered at all the time in the way he's a-doin'. i just tell you what it is, billy," said tom, stopping short and smiting the palm of one hand with the fist of the other, "i've half a mind, off and on, to go to steady work of some kind, an' i'll be darned if i don't do it, if dad don't let me alone." "mis' prency was talkin' to me the other day about dad," said billy, "an' she asked me whether he wasn't workin' awful hard at home after he left the shop, an' i said, 'yes,' an' she said, 'i hope you all do all you can to help him?' an' i kind o' felt ashamed, an' all i could say was that i didn't see nothin' i could help him about, an' she said she guessed if i'd think a little while i could find out. say, tom, let's go to work a-thinkin', an' see if there ain't some way to give dad a lift. seems to me he's doin' everythin' for us all the whole time, an' we ain't doin' nothin' at all for him." "oh, now, quit your preachin'," said the elder brother, contemptuously. "if you don't, i'll lamm you." the younger brother prudently lapsed into entire silence, and the couple soon reached home. tom strolled about the room, his lower lip hanging down, bestowing glares of different intensity upon every individual and object present, and even making a threatening motion with his foot towards the baby, who had crawled about the floor until it was weary and fretful and was uttering plaintive cries from time to time. his mother was out of the house somewhere, and the baby continued to protest against its physical discomforts until tom indulged in a violent expletive, which had the effect of temporarily silencing the child and causing it to look up at him with wondering eyes. tom returned the infant's stare for a moment or two, and then, moved by some spirit which he was not able to identify, he stooped and picked up the infant and sat down in a chair. when his mother returned, she was so astonished at what she saw that she hurried out of the house, down to the shop, and dragged her husband away and back to his home. when the door was opened, sam kimper was almost paralyzed to see his big son rocking the youngest member of the family to and fro over the rough floor, and singing, in a hoarse and apparently ecstatic voice,-- "i'm captain jinks of the horse marines." chapter xiv. "well, doctor," said deacon quickset to his pastor one morning, "i hope you have persuaded that wretched shoemaker to come into the ark of safety and to lay hold of the horns of the altar." "my dear sir," said dr. guide to his deacon, "the conversation i had with that rather unusual character has led me to believe that he is quite as safe at present as any of the members of my own congregation." "oh, doctor, doctor!" groaned the deacon, "that will never do! what is the church to come to if everybody is to be allowed to believe just what he wants to, and stop just when he gets ready, and not go any further unless he understands everything before him? i don't need to tell you, a minister of the gospel and a doctor of divinity, that we have to live by faith and not by sight. i don't have to go over all the points of belief to a man of your character to show you what a mistake you are making, thinking that way about a poor common fellow that's only got one idea in his head,--one that might be shaken out of it very easily." "deacon," said the minister, "i am strongly of the impression that any belief of any member of my congregation could be as easily shaken as the one article of faith to which that poor fellow has bound himself. i don't propose to disturb his mind any further. 'milk for babes,' you know the apostle says, 'and strong meat for men.' after he has proved himself to be equal to meat, there will be ample time to experiment with some of the dry bones which you seem anxious that i should force upon him." "dr. guide," said the deacon, with considerable dignity, "i didn't expect this kind of talk from you. i have been sitting under your ministrations a good many years, and, though sometimes i didn't think you were as sharp-set as you ought to be, still i knew you were a man of level head and good education and knew everything that was essential to salvation; otherwise, why did the best college of our own denomination make you a doctor of divinity? but i've got to let out what is in my heart, doctor, and it is this, that there is no stopping-place for any one that begins to walk the straight and narrow way; he has got to keep on as long as he lives, and if he don't he is going to be crowded off to one side." "you are quite right, deacon," said the minister; "and therefore i object to putting any stumbling-blocks in any such person's way." "do you mean to say, dr. guide," asked the deacon, earnestly, "that all the articles of faith that you have always taught us were essential to salvation are to be looked at as stumbling-blocks when they are offered to somebody like that poor dying sinner?" "i mean exactly that, deacon," said the minister, "and i mean still more, and i mean to preach earnestly on the subject in a short time, and at considerable length, that they have been stumbling-blocks to a great many members of my congregation who should by this time be better men and women than they are. for instance, deacon," said the minister, suddenly, looking very stern and judicial, "mrs. poynter has been to me several times to explain that the reason that she does not pay her subscription to the last collection for the missionary association is that she cannot get the interest on the mortgage that you have been holding for her for a long time, and which, she says, you have collected." "dr. guide," said the deacon, icily, "religion is religion, and business is business. you understand religion--to a certain extent; though i must own that i don't think you understand it as far as i once thought you did. but about business, you must excuse me if i say you don't know anything, especially if it's business that somebody else has to carry on. if mrs. poynter don't like the way i'm doing business for her, she knows a way to get rid of me, and she can do it easily enough." "deacon," said the minister, "i don't wish to offend you, but matters of this sort may develop into a scandal, and injure the cause for which both of us profess to be working with all our hearts. and, by the way, the browning children are likely to be sent away from the academy at which they are boarding, because their expenses are not paid, according to the terms of the trust reposed in you by their father. i have been written to several times by the principal, who is an old friend of mine. can't the matter be arranged in some way so that i shall not hear any more about it? i have no possible method of replying in a manner that will satisfy the principal." "tell him to write to me, doctor; tell him to write to me. he has no business to put such affairs before anybody else. he will get his money. if he didn't believe it, he wouldn't have taken the children in the first place. but i will see that you don't hear any more about either of these matters, and, as i am pretty busy and don't get a chance to see you as often as i'd like, i want to say that it seems to me that now is just the time to get up a warmer feeling in the church. it's getting cold weather, and folks are glad to get together in a warm room where there's anything going on. now, if you will just announce next sunday that there's going to be a series of special meetings to awaken religious interest in this town, i think you will do a good deal more good among those who need it than by worrying members of your own congregation about things that you don't understand. i don't mean any offence, and i hope you won't take any; but when a man is trying to do business for a dozen other folks and they are all at him at once, there are many things happening that he can't very well explain." "i already had determined on a special effort at an early date," said the pastor. "and still more: after two or three conversations with the man whom you were so desirous that i should call upon, i have determined to invite him to assist me in the conduct of the meetings." "what?" exclaimed the deacon, "bring in that thief and drunkard and ignorant fellow, that is only just out of jail, to teach the way of life to people that need to know it? why, dr. guide, you must be losing your mind!" "as you intimated about your own business affairs, deacon, that is a subject upon which i am better qualified to judge than you. the meetings will be held, and mr. kimper will be asked to assist. in fact, i already have asked him. i trust that his presence will not cause us to lose such valuable assistance as you yourself may be able to give." "well, i never!" exclaimed the deacon; "i never did! it beats all! why, if there was another church of our denomination in this town, i believe i'd take my letters and go to it. i really would!" nevertheless, the special meetings were immediately announced, and they began directly afterwards, and, according to the pastor's announcement, the ex-convict was asked to assist. his assistance did not seem to amount to much to those who came through curiosity to listen. but after he had made a speech, which, at the suggestion of dr. guide, had been carefully prepared, but which was merely a rehearsal of what he already had said to numerous individual questioners, there was impressive silence in the lecture-room, in which the meetings were to be conducted. "my friends," said the pastor, rising soon afterwards, "when our lord was on earth, he once raised his eyes to heaven and said, 'i thank thee, father, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent and revealed them unto babes.' i confess to you that i never was able to understand the full meaning of this expression; but, as i have become more and more acquainted with our friend who has just spoken to you, and have learned how fully his faith is grounded, and how entirely his life has been changed by what seems to us the mere beginnings of a religious belief, i am constrained to feel that i have yet a great deal to learn about my own profession and my own duty as a minister. what has just been said to you contains the essence of everything which i have tried to preach from my pulpit in twenty years. i wish it were in my power to re-state it all as clearly as you have heard it this evening, but i confess it is not. i fear to add anything to what you have already heard, for i do not see how in any way i could make this important subject any more clear to your comprehension. i will therefore say no more, but ask, as is the custom, that anyone here present who desires to change his life and wishes the assistance of the prayers of god's people will please rise." as is usual in all such meetings, there was a general turning of heads from one side to the other. in an instant a single figure in the midst of the little congregation arose, and a second later a hoarse voice from one of the back seats, a voice which most persons present could identify as that of sam kimper's son tom, exclaimed,-- "great lord! it's reynolds bartram!" chapter xv. the story that reynolds bartram had "stood up for prayers" went through bruceton and the surrounding country like wildfire. scarcely anyone believed it, no matter by whom he was told: the informer might be a person of undoubted character, but the information was simply incredible. people would not believe such a thing unless they could see it with their own eyes and hear it with their own ears: so the special meetings became at once so largely attended that they were held in the body of the church instead of the little basement called the "lecture-room." the most entirely amazed person in the town was deacon quickset. never before had he been absent, unless sick, from any special effort of his church to persuade the sinners to flee from the wrath to come; but when dr. guide announced that he should ask sam kimper to assist him in the special meetings, the deacon's conscience bade him halt and consider. dr. guide was wrong,--there could be no doubt of that: would it be right, then, merely for the sake of apparent peace and unity, for him, the deacon, to seem to agree with his pastor's peculiar views? the deacon made it a matter of prayer, and the result was that he remained at home. that reynolds bartram had been the first-fruits of the new special effort was a statement which the deacon denied as soon as he heard it. frequent repetition of the annoying story soon began to impress him with its probability, and finally a brother deacon, who had been present, set all doubt at rest by the assertion that bartram had not only been converted, but was assisting at the meetings. when, however, the attending deacon went on to inform his absentee brother that bartram had attributed his awakening and conversion to the influence of sam kimper, deacon quickset lost his temper, and exclaimed,-- "it's all a confounded lie! it's a put-up job!" "brother quickset!" exclaimed the astonished associate, with a most reproving look. "oh, i don't mean that _you lie_," explained the angry defender of the faith. "if you heard bartram say it, he _did_ say it, of course. but there's something wrong somewhere. the minister's rather lost his head over sam kimper, just because the wretch isn't back in his old ways again, and he's got a new notion in his head about how the gospel ought to be preached. new notions have been plenty enough ever since true religion started; there's always some man or men thinking out things for themselves and forgetting everything else on account of them. there were meddlers of that kind back to the days of the apostles, and goodness knows the history of the church is full of them. they've been so set in their ways that no sort of discipline would cure them; they've even had to be hanged or burned, to save the faith from being knocked to pieces." "but, brother quickset," pleaded the other deacon, "every one knows our pastor isn't that sort of a person. he is an intelligent, thoughtful, unexcitable man, that--" "that's just the kind that always makes the worst heretics," roared the deacon. "wasn't servetus that kind of a person? and didn't calvin have to burn him at the stake? i tell you, deacon, it takes a good deal of the horror out of those times when you have a case of the kind come right up before your eyes." "what? somebody being burned?" exclaimed the other deacon, raising his hands in horror. "no, no," testily replied the defender of the faith. "only somebody that ought to be." "but where does the lying come in, that you were talking about?" "i tell you just what i believe," said deacon quickset, dropping his voice and drawing closer to his associate; "i believe dr. guide believes just what he says,--of course nobody's going to doubt that he's sincere,--but when it's come to the pinch he's felt a little shaky. what does any other man do when he finds himself shaky about an important matter of opinion? why, he consults a lawyer, and gets himself pulled through." "but you don't mean to say that you think dr. guide would go to a rank, persistent disbeliever in anything--but himself--like ray bartram, do you, in a matter of this kind?" "why not? ministers have often got lawyers to help them when they've been muddled on points of orthodoxy. what the lawyer believes or don't believe hasn't got anything to do with it: it's his business to believe as his client does, and make other folks believe so, too. ray bartram is just the sort of a fellow a man would want in such a case. he's got that way of looking as if he knew everything, just like his father had before him, that makes folks give in to him in spite of themselves. besides, he'll say or do anything to carry his point." "isn't that putting it rather strong, brother quickset?" "of course it isn't. don't i know, i should like to ask? don't i always hire him myself?" "oh!" that was the only word the other deacon spoke, but his eyes danced, and he twisted his lips into an odd grin. "oh, get out!" exclaimed the pillar of orthodoxy. "you needn't take it that way. of course what i ask him to do is only right: if i didn't think so, i wouldn't ask him." "of course not, brother. but think a moment: do you really believe that any form of professional pride would persuade that young man--proud as lucifer, and just as conceited and headstrong, a young man who always has argued against religion and against every belief you and i hold dear--to rise for prayers in an inquiry meeting, and afterwards say it was the christian life of sam kimper,--a man whom a high-born fellow like bartram must believe as near the animals as humanity ever is,--to say it was the christian life of sam kimper that convinced him of the supernatural origin and saving power of christianity?" "i can't believe he put it that way: there must be something else behind it. i'm going to find out for myself and do it at once, too. this sort of nonsense must be stopped. why, if men go to taking everything jesus christ said just as he said it, everything in the world in the way of business is going to be turned upside down." away went deacon quickset to bartram's office, and was so fortunate as to find the lawyer in. he went right at his subject: "well, young man, you've been in nice business, haven't you?--trying to go up to the throne of grace right behind a jail-bird, while the leaders and teachers whom the lord has selected have been spurned by you for years!" reynolds bartram was too new a convert to have changed his old self and manner to any great extent: so he flushed angrily, and retorted,-- "one thief is about as good as another, deacon quickset." then it was the deacon's turn to look angry. the two men faced each other for a moment with flashing eyes, lowering brows, and hard-set jaws. the deacon was the first to recover himself: he took a chair, and said,-- "maybe i haven't heard the story rightly. what i came around for was to get it from first hands. would you mind telling me?" "i suppose you allude to my conversion?" "yes," said the deacon, with a look of doubt, "i suppose that's what we will have to call it, for want of a better word." "it is a very short story," said bartram, now entirely calm, as he leaned against his desk and folded his arms. "like every other man with any brains, i've always been interested in religion, intellectually, and have had to believe that if it was right, as i heard it talked, it had sometimes got away from its founder in a manner for which there seemed to be no excuse. everything was being taught by the servants, nothing by the master. when i want to know your wishes, deacon, about any matter in which we are mutually interested, i do not go to your back door and inquire of your servants: i go to you, direct. but when people--you among the number--have talked to me about religion, they've always talked peter and paul and james and john,--never jesus." "the apostle paul--" began the deacon, but the lawyer snatched the words from his lips, and continued: "the apostle paul was the ablest lawyer that ever lived. i've studied him a good deal, in past days, for style." "awful!" groaned the deacon. "not in the least," said the lawyer, with fine earnestness. "he was just the man for his place and his time; 'twas his business to explain the new order of things to the hard-headed jews, of whom he had been so notable a representative, that to convert him it was necessary that he should be knocked senseless and remain so for the space of three days: you remember the circumstance? he was just the man, too, to explain the new religion to the heathens and pagans of his day, for those greeks and romans were a brainy lot of people. but why should he have been quoted to me, or any other man in the community? we don't have to be convinced that jesus lived: we believe it already. the belief has been born in us; it has run through our blood for hundreds of years. do you know what i've honestly believed for years about a lot of religious men in this town, you among the number? i've believed that jesus was so good that you've all been making hypocritical excuses, through your theology, to get away from this!" "get away from my saviour!" gasped the deacon. "oh, no; you wanted enough of him to be saved by,--enough to die by; but when it comes to living by him--well, you know perfectly well that you don't." "awful!" again groaned the deacon. "when i heard of that wretched convict taking his saviour as an exemplar of daily life and conduct, it seemed ridiculous. if better men couldn't do it, how could he? i had no doubt that while he was under lock and key, with no temptations about him, and nothing to resist, he had succeeded; but that he could do it in the face of all his old influences i did not for an instant believe. i began to study him, as i would any other criminal, and when he did not break down as soon as i had expected, i was mean enough--god forgive me!--to try to shake his faith. the honest truth is, i did not want to be a christian myself, and had resisted all the arguments i had heard; but i was helpless when dear friends told me that nothing was impossible to me that was being accomplished by a common fellow like sam kimper." "nothing is impossible to him that believes," said the deacon, finding his tongue for a moment. "oh, i believe; there was no trouble about that: 'the devils also believe,'--you remember that passage, i suppose? finally, i began to watch sam closely, to see if perhaps he wasn't as much of a hypocrite, on the sly, as some other people i know. he can't make much money on the terms he has with larry, no matter how much work reaches the shop. i've passed his shop scores of times, early and late, and found him always at work, except once or twice when i've seen him on his knees. i've hung about his wretched home nights, to see if he did not sneak out on thieving expeditions; i've asked store-keepers what he bought, and have found that his family lived on the plainest food. that man is a christian, deacon. when i heard that he was to make an exhortation at the meeting, i went there to listen--only for that purpose. but as he talked i could not help recalling his mean, little, insignificant face as i'd seen it again and again when i was a younger man, dropping into justices' courts for a chance to get practice at pleading, and he was up for fighting or stealing. it was the same face: nothing can ever make his forehead any higher or broader, or put a chin where nature left one off. but the expression of countenance was so different--so honest, so good--that i got from it my first clear idea of what was possible to the man who took our saviour for a model of daily life. it took such hold of me that when the pastor asked those who wanted the prayers of god's people to rise, i was on my feet in an instant; i couldn't keep my seat." "then you do admit that there are some god's people besides sam kimper?" sneered the deacon. "i never doubted it," replied the lawyer. "oh, well," said the deacon, "if you'll go on, now you've begun, you'll see you've only made a beginning. by the way, have you got that bittles mortgage ready yet?" "no," said the lawyer, "and i won't have it ready, either. to draw a mortgage in that way, so the property will fall into your hands quickly and bittles will lose everything, is simple rascality, and i'll have nothing to do with it." "it's all right if he's willing to sign it, isn't it?" asked the deacon, with an ugly frown. "his signature is put on by his own free will, isn't it?" "you know perfectly well, deacon quickset," said the lawyer, "that fellows like bittles will sign anything without looking at it, if they can get a little money to put into some new notion. a man's home should be the most jealously guarded bit of property in the world: i'm not going to deceive any man into losing it." "i didn't suppose," said the deacon, "that getting religious would take away your respect for the law, and make you above the law." "it doesn't: it makes me resolve that the law shan't be used for purposes of the devil." "do you mean to call me the devil?" screamed the deacon. "i'm not calling you anything: i'm speaking of the unrighteous act you want done. i won't do it for you; and, further, i'll put bittles on his guard against any one else who may try it." "mr. bartram," said the deacon, rising, "i guess i'll have to take all my law-business to somebody else. good-morning." "i didn't suppose i should have to suffer for my principles so soon," said the lawyer, as the deacon started; "but when _you_ want to be converted, come see me and you'll learn i bear you no grudge. indeed, you'll be obliged to come to me, as you'll learn after you think over all your affairs a little while." the deacon stopped: the two men stood face to face a moment, and then parted in silence. chapter xvi. when eleanor prency heard that her lover had not only been converted but was taking an active part in the special religious meetings, she found herself in what the old women of the vicinity called a "state of mind." she did not object to young men becoming very good; that is, she did object to any young man of whom she happened to be very fond becoming very bad. but it seemed to her that there was a place where the line should be drawn, and that reynolds bartram had overstepped it. that he might sometime join the church was a possibility to which she had previously looked forward with some pleasurable sense of anticipation. she belonged to the church herself, so did her father and mother, and she had long been of the opinion that a little religion was a very good thing for a young man who was in business and subject to temptation. but, as she regarded the events of the past few evenings as reported by people who had been to the meetings, she became more than ever of the opinion that a little religion would go a long way, and that reynolds bartram had more than was necessary. to add to her annoyance, some of her intimate acquaintances who knew that if the two young people were not engaged they certainly were very fond of each other, and who regarded the match as a matter of course in the near future, began to twit her on the possibility of her lover becoming a minister should he go on in his present earnest course of trying to save lost souls. the more they talked about her, in her presence, as a minister's wife, the less she enjoyed the prospect. minister's wives in bruceton were sometimes pretty, but they never dressed very well, and miss eleanor was sure, from what she saw of their lives, that they never had any good times. fuel was added to the fire of her discontent when her mother announced one morning that jane kimper had arrived and would assist the couple at their sewing. to eleanor, jane represented the kimper family, the head of which was the cause of reynolds bartram's extraordinary course. eleanor blamed sam for all the discomfort to which she had been subjected on account of bartram's religious aspirations, and she was inclined to visit upon the new seamstress the blame for all the annoyances from which she had suffered. like a great many other girls who are quite affectionate daughters, she neglected to make a confidante of her mother; and mrs. prency was therefore very much surprised, on entering the room after a short shopping-tour, to discover the two young women in utter silence, eleanor looking greatly vexed and the new sewing-woman very much distressed about something. the older lady endeavored to engage the couple in conversation. after waiting a little while for the situation to make itself manifest, but getting only very short replies, she left the room and made an excuse to call her daughter after her. "my dear child, what is the matter? doesn't jane know how to sew?" "yes," said eleanor, "i suppose so; but she knows how to talk, too, and she has done it so industriously and made me feel so uncomfortable that i have not had any opportunity to examine her sewing." "my daughter, what can she have said to annoy you so much?" "oh," exclaimed eleanor, savagely snatching to pieces a bit of delicate silk she held in her hand, "what every one else is talking about. what does any one in this town have to talk about just now, i wonder, except reynolds bartram and the church? why is it that they all think it necessary to come and talk to me about it? i am sure i am not specially interested in church work, and i don't believe any one who has talked to me about it is, but i hear nothing else from morning till night when any visitor comes in. i was congratulating myself that i had an excuse to-day, so that i need not see any one who might call, but that dreadful girl is worse than all the rest put together. she seems to think, as her folks at home haven't anything else to talk about, and as her father is so delighted at the 'blessed change,' as she expresses it, that has come over bartram, that i should feel just as happy about it." "well, daughter, don't you?" "no, mother, i don't. i suppose it's perfectly dreadful in me to say so, but i don't feel anything of the kind. it's just horrid; and i wish you and father would take me away for a little while, or else let me go off on a visit. people talk as if ray belonged entirely to me,--as if i had something to do about it; and you know perfectly well i haven't." "well, dear, is that any reason why you should be jealous of poor sam kimper?" "jealous!" exclaimed eleanor, her eyes flashing: "he is the worst enemy i ever had. i haven't had so much annoyance and trouble in all my life as have come to me during the past two or three days through that wretched man. i wish him almost any harm. i even wish he had never gone to the penitentiary" mrs. prency burst out laughing. the young woman saw the blunder she had committed, and continued, quickly,-- "i mean that i wish he had never got out again. the idea of a fellow like that coming back to this town and talking and working on people's sympathies in such a way as to carry intelligent people right off their feet! here you and father have been talking about him at the table almost every day for a long time!" "well, daughter, you seemed interested in everything we said, and thought he might do a great deal of good if he were sincere and remained true to his professions." "great deal of good? yes; but, of course, i supposed he'd do it among his own set of people. i had no idea that he was going to invade the upper classes of society and make a guy out of the very young man that--" then eleanor burst into tears. "my dear child," said the mother, "you are making altogether too much of very little. of course, it's impossible that everybody in the town sha'n't be surprised at the sudden change that has come over mr. bartram, but it ought to comfort you to know that all the better people in the town are very glad to learn of it, and that his example is making them very much ashamed of themselves, and that, instead of the meetings being conducted almost entirely by him and sam kimper, hereafter--" "him and sam kimper! mother! the idea of mentioning the two persons in the same day!--in the same breath! how can you?" "well, dear, they will no longer manage the meetings by themselves, but a number of the older citizens, who have generally held aloof from such affairs, have resolved that it is time for them to do something, so reynolds will very soon be a less prominent figure, and i trust you will hear less about him. but don't--i beg of you, don't visit your displeasure on that poor girl. you can't imagine that she had anything to do with her father's conversion, can you, still less with that of mr. bartram? now, do dry your eyes and try to come back to your work and be cheerful. if you can't do more, you at least can be human. don't disgrace your parentage, my dear. _she_ has not even done that as yet." then mrs. prency returned to the sewing-room and chatted a little while with the new seamstress about the work in hand. eleanor joined them in a few moments, and the mental condition of the atmosphere became somewhat less cloudy than before, when suddenly a stupid servant, who had only just been engaged and did not entirely know the ways of the house, ushered directly into the sewing-room mr. reynolds bartram. eleanor sprang to her feet, spreading dress-goods, and needles, and spools of silk, and thread, and scissors, and thimbles, all over the floor. jane looked up timidly for an instant, and bent her head lower over her work. but mrs. prency received him as graciously as if she were the queen of england sitting upon her throne, with her royal robes upon her. "i merely dropped in to see the judge, mrs. prency. i beg pardon for intruding upon the business of the day." "i don't suppose he is at home," said the lady. "you have been at the office?" "yes, and i was assured he was here. i was anxious to see him at once. i suspect i have a very heavy case on my hands, mrs. prency. what do you suppose i have agreed to do? i have promised, actually promised, to persuade him to come down to the church this evening and take part in the meetings." eleanor, who had just reseated herself, flashed an indignant look at him. the young man saw it; but if the spirit of regeneration had worked upon him to a sufficient extent to make him properly sensitive to the looks and manners of estimable young women, he showed no sign of it at the moment. "i am sure i wish you well in your effort," said the judge's wife; "and, if it is of any comfort to you, i promise that i will do all in my power to assist you." then eleanor's eyes flashed again, as she said,-- "mother, the idea of father--" "well?" "the idea of father taking part in such work!" "do you know of any one, daughter, whose character more fully justifies him in doing so? if you do, i shall not hesitate to ask mr. bartram to act as substitute until some one else can be found." then eleanor's eyes took a very different expression, and she began to devote herself intensely to her sewing. "if you are very sure," said bartram, "that your husband is not at home, i must seek him elsewhere, i suppose. good day! ah, i beg pardon. i did not notice--i was not aware that it was you, miss kimper. i hope if you see your father to-day you will tell him that the good work that he began is progressing finely, and that you saw me in search to-day of judge prency to help him on with his efforts down at the church." and then, with another bow, bartram left the room. if poor jane could have been conscious of the look that eleanor bent upon her at that instant, she certainly would have been inclined to leave the room and never enter it again. but she knew nothing of it, and the work went on amid oppressive silence. mrs. prency had occasion to leave the room for an instant soon after, and jane lifted her head and said,-- "who would have thought, miss, that that young man was going to be so good, and all of a sudden, too?" "he always was good," said eleanor, "that is, until now." "i'm sorry i mentioned it, ma'am, but i s'pose he won't be as wild as he and some of the young men about this town have been." "what do you mean by wild? do you mean to say that he ever was wild in any way?" "oh, perhaps not," said the unfortunate sewing-girl, wishing herself anywhere else as she tried to find some method of escaping from the unfortunate remark. "what do you mean, then? tell me: can't you speak?" "oh, only you know, ma'am, some of the nicest young men in town come down to the hotel nights to chat, and they take a glass of wine once in a while, and smoke, and have a good time, and--" eleanor looked at jane very sharply, but the sewing-girl's face was averted, so that questioning looks could elicit no answers. eleanor's gaze, however, continued to be fixed. she was obliged to admit to herself, as she had said to her mother several days before, that jane had a not unsightly face and quite a fine figure. she had heard that there were sometimes "great larks," as the young men called them, at the village hotel, and she wondered how much the underlings of the establishment could know about them, and what stories they could tell. jane suddenly became to her more interesting than she had yet been. she wondered what further questions to ask, and could not think of any that she could put into words. finally, she left the room, sought her mother, and exclaimed,-- "mother, i'm not going to marry reynolds bartram. if hotel servants know all about his goings-on evenings, what stories may they not tell if they choose? that sort of people will say anything they can of him. i don't suppose they know the difference between the truth and a lie; at least they never do when we hire them." the mother looked at the daughter tenderly and shrewdly. then she smiled, and said,-- "daughter, i can see but one way for you to relieve your mind on that subject." "what is that?" asked the daughter. "it is only this: convert jane." chapter xvii. as the special meetings at the church went on, deacon quickset began to fear that he had made a mistake. he had taken an active part in all previous meetings of the same kind for more than twenty-five years. the results of some of them had been very satisfactory, and the deacon modestly but nevertheless with much self-gratulation had recounted his own services in all of them. "whoso converteth a sinner from the error of his ways shall save a soul from death and cover a multitude of sins; that is what the good book says," said the deacon to himself one day, as he walked from his house to his place of business; "and considering the number of people that i have helped to snatch as brands from the burning, it does seem to me that i must have covered a good many sins of my own,--such as they are. i'm only a human being, and a poor, weak, and sinful creature, but there's certainly a good many folks in this town that would not have started in the right way when they did if it hadn't been for what i said to them. now, here's the biggest movement of the kind going on that ever was known in this town, and i'm out of it. what for? just because i don't agree with sam kimper. i mean, just because sam kimper don't agree with me. i don't suppose the thing would have come to anything, anyhow, if it hadn't been for that fool of a young lawyer setting his foot in it in the way he did. everybody likes excitement, and it's a bigger thing for him to have gone into this protracted meeting than it would be for a circus to come to town with four new elephants. it's rough." the deacon took a few papers from his pocket, looked them over, his face changing from grave to puzzled and from puzzled to angry and back again through a whole gamut of facial expressions. finally, he thrust the entire collection back into his pocket, and said to himself,-- "if he keeps on at that work, i may have as much trouble as he let on that i would. i don't see how some of these things are going to be settled unless i have him to help me; and if he's going to be as particular as he makes out, or as he did make out the other day, there's going to be trouble, just as sure as both of us are alive. of course, the more prominent he is before the public, the less he'll want to be in any case in court that takes hard fighting, particularly when he don't think he's on the popular side. and there's that mrs. poynter that's been bothering me to death about the interest on her mortgage: i keep hearing that she's at the meetings every night, and that she never lets an evening pass without speaking to bartram. maybe all she's talking about is some sinner or other that she wants to have saved; but if she acts with him as she does with me, i'm awfully afraid that she's consulting him about that interest. "i didn't think it was the right time of the year to start special meetings, anyhow; and i don't know what our minister did it for without consulting the deacons. he never did such a thing in his life before. it does seem to me that once in a while everything goes crosswise, and it all happens just when i need most of all to have things go along straight and smooth. gracious! if some of these papers in my pocket don't work the way they ought to, i don't know how things are going to come out." the deacon had almost reached the business street as this soliloquy went on, but he seemed inclined to carry on his conversation with himself: so he deliberately turned about and slowly paced the way backward towards his home. "i shouldn't wonder," said he, after a few moments of silence, in which his mind seemed busily occupied,--"i shouldn't wonder if that was the best way out, after all. i do believe i'll do it. yes, i will do it. i'll go and buy out that shoe-shop of larry highgetty's, and i'll let sam kimper have it at just what it costs, and trust him for all the purchase-money. i don't believe the good-will of the place and all the stock that is in it will cost over a couple of hundred dollars; and larry would take my note at six months almost as quick as he'd take anybody else's money. if things go right i can pay the note, and if they don't he can get the property back. but in the meantime folks won't be able to say anything against me. they can't say then that i'm down on sam, like some of them say now, and if anybody talks about bartram and the upper-crust folks that have been helping the meetings along, i can just remind them that talk is cheap and that it's money that tells. i'll do it, as sure as my name's quickset; and the quicker i do it the better it will be for me, if i'm not mistaken." the deacon hurried off to the shoe-store. as usual, the only occupant of the shop was sam. "where's larry, sam?" asked the deacon, briskly. "i don't know, sir," said sam, "but i'm afraid he's at weitz's beer-shop." "well, sam," said the deacon, trying to be pleasant, though his mouth was very severely set, "while you're in the converting line,--which i hear you're doing wonders at, and i'm very glad to hear it,--why don't you begin at home and bring about a change in larry?" "do you know, deacon," said sam, "i was thinkin' about the same thing? and i'm goin' to see that priest of his about--" "oh, sam!" groaned the deacon. "the idea of going to see a catholic priest about a fellow-man's salvation, when there's a special meeting running in our own church and you've taken such an interest in it!" "every man for his own, deacon," said sam. "i don't believe larry cares anythin' about the church that you belong to, an' that i've been goin' to for some little time, an' i know he thinks a good deal of father black. i've found out myself, after a good deal of trouble in this world, that it makes a good deal of difference who talks to you about such things. now, he thinks father black is the best man there is in the world. i don't know anythin' about that, though i don't know of anybody in this town i ever talked to that left me feelin' more comfortable an' looked more like a good man himself than that old priest did one day when he come in here an' talked to me very kindly. why, deacon, he didn't put on any airs at all. he talked just as if he was a good brother of mine, an' he left me feelin' that if i wasn't good i was a brother of his anyhow. that's more than i can say most other folks in this town ever did, deacon." the deacon was so horrified at this unexpected turn of the conversation that for a little while he entirely forgot the purpose for which he had come. but he was recalled to his senses by the entrance of reynolds bartram. his eyes met the lawyer's, and at once the deacon looked defiant. then he pulled himself together, and, with a mighty effort, remarked,-- "sam, some folks say i am down on you, and that i don't sympathize with you. some folks talk a good deal for you, and to you, and don't do anything for you. but i just came in this morning for the sole purpose of saying this: you've had a hard row to hoe, and you've worked at it first rate ever since you got out of jail. i've been watching you, though perhaps you don't know it, and i came here to say that i believe so much in your having had a change--though i do insist you haven't gone far enough--i came around to say that i was going to buy out this place from larry, and give it to you at your own terms, so that you can make all the money that comes in." sam looked up in astonishment at the lawyer. the lawyer looked down smilingly at the deacon, who was seated on a very low bench, and said,-- "deacon, we're all a good, deal alike in this world in one respect: our best thoughts come too late. i don't hesitate to say that some good thoughts, which i have heard you urge upon other people but which you never mentioned to me, have come to me a deal later than they should. but, on the other hand, this matter of making sam the master of this shop has already been attended to. i've bought it for him myself, and made him a free and clear present of it last night in token of the immense amount of good which he has done me by personal example." "bless my soul!" exclaimed the deacon. "i don't mind saying," continued the lawyer, "that if _you_ will go to work and do me half as much good, i will buy just as much property and make you a free and clear present of it. i am open to all possible benefits of that kind nowadays, and willing to pay for them, so far as money will go, to the full extent of my income and capital." the deacon arose and looked about him in a dazed sort of fashion. then he looked at the lawyer inquiringly, put his hand in his pocket, drew forth a mass of business papers, shuffled them over once more, looked again at the lawyer, and said,-- "mr. bartram, i've got some particular business with you that i would like to talk about at once. would you mind coming to my office, or taking me around to yours?" "not at all. good luck, sam," said the lawyer. "good day." the two men went out together. no sooner were they outside the shop than the deacon said, rapidly,-- "reynolds bartram, my business affairs are in the worst possible condition. you know more about them than anybody else. you have done as much as anybody else to put them in the muddle that they're in now. you helped me into them, and now, church or no church, religion or no religion, you've got to help me out of them, or i've got to go to the devil. now, what are you going to do about it?" "is it as bad as that?" murmured the lawyer. "yes, it's as bad as that, and i could put it a good deal stronger if it was necessary. everything has been going wrong. that walnut timber tract over on the creek, that i expected to get about five thousand dollars out of, isn't worth five thousand cents. since the last time i was over there some rascal stole every log that was worth taking, and the place wouldn't bring under the hammer half what i gave for it. i have been trying to sell it, but somehow everybody that wanted it before has found out what has been going on. this is an awfully mean world on business-men that don't look out for themselves all the time." "i should not think you had ever any right to complain of it, deacon," said the lawyer. "come, come, now," said the deacon, "i'm not in any condition to be tormented to-day, reynolds,--i really ain't. i'm almost crazy. i suppose old mrs. poynter has been at you to get her interest-money out of me, hasn't she?" "hasn't spoken a word to me about it," said the lawyer. "well, i heard she was after you every night in the meeting--" "she was after me, talking about one sinner or another of her acquaintance, but she didn't mention you, deacon. it's a sad mistake, perhaps, but in a big town like this a person can't think of everybody at once, you know." "for heaven's sake, bartram, shut up, and tell me what i have to do. time is passing. i must have a lot of ready cash to-day, somehow, and here are all these securities; the minute i try to sell them people go to asking questions, and you're the only man they can come to. now, you know perfectly well what the arrangements and understandings were when these papers were drawn, because you drew them all yourself. now, if people come to you i want you to promise me that you're not going to go back on me." the deacon still held the papers in his hand, gesticulating with them. as he spoke, the lawyer took them, looked at them, and finally said,-- "deacon, how much money do you need?" "i can't get through," said the deacon, "with less than nine hundred dollars ready cash, or first-class checks and notes, this very day." "humph!" said the lawyer, still handling the papers. "deacon, i'll make you a straightforward proposition concerning that money. if you will agree that i shall be agent of both parties in any settlement of these agreements which i hold in my hand, and that you will accept me as sole and final arbitrator in any differences of opinion between you and the signers, i will agree personally to lend you the amount you need, on your simple note of hand, renewable from time to time until you are ready to pay it." "ray bartram," exclaimed the deacon, stopping short and looking the lawyer full in the face, "what on earth has got into you?" "religion, i guess, deacon," said the lawyer. "try it yourself: it'll do you good." the lawyer walked off briskly, and left the deacon standing alone in the street. as the deacon afterwards explained the matter to his wife, he felt like a stuck pig. chapter xviii. "tom," said sam kimper to his eldest son one morning after breakfast, "i wish you'd walk along to the shop with me. there's somethin' i want to talk about." tom wanted to go somewhere else; what boy doesn't, when his parents have anything for him to do? nevertheless, the young man finally obeyed his father, and the two left the house together. "tom," said the father, as soon as the back door had closed behind them, "tom, i'm bein' made a good deal more of than i deserve, but 'tain't any of my doin's, and men that ort to know keep tellin' me that i'm doin' a lot o' good in town. once in a while, though, somebody laughs at me,--laughs at somethin' i say. it's been hurtin' me, an' i told judge prency so the other day; but he said, 'sam, it isn't what you say, but the way you say it.' you see, i never had no eddication; i was sent to school, but i played hookey most of the time." "did you, though?" asked tom, with some inflections that caused the cobbler to look up in time to see that his son was looking at him admiringly; there could be no doubt about it. sam had never been looked at that way before by his big boy, and the consequence was an entirely new and pleasurable sensation. after thinking it over a moment, he replied,-- "yes, i did, an' any fun that was to be found i looked after in them days. i don't mind tellin' you that i don't think i found enough to pay for the trouble; but things was as they was. now i wish i'd done diff'rent; but it's too late to get back what i missed by dodgin' lessons. tom, if i could talk better, it would be a good thing for me; but i ain't got no time to go to school. you've been to school a lot: why can't you come to the shop with me, an' sit down an' tell me where an' how i don't talk like other folks?" tom indulged in a long and convulsive chuckle. "when you've done laughin' at your father, tom," continued sam, "he'll be glad to have you say somethin' that'll show him that you ain't as mean an' low down as some folks think you be." "i ain't no school-teacher," said tom, "an' i ain't learned no fancy ways of talkin'!" "i don't expect you to tell me mor'n you know," said the parent, "but if you've got the same flesh an' blood as me, you'll stand by me when i'm bothered. the puppies of a dog would do that much for their parent in trouble." tom did not answer; he sulked a little while, but finally entered the shop with his father and sat down, searched his mind a few moments, and then recalled and repeated two injunctions which his last teacher had most persistently urged upon her pupils,--that they should not drop letters from the ends of words, nor say "ain't" or "hain't." then sam devoted himself to practice by talking aloud, and tom became so amused by the changes in his father's intonation that he finally was obliged to go home and tell his mother and mary. "stop that,--right away!" exclaimed mrs. kimper, as soon as tom got fairly into his story. "your father ain't goin' to be laughed at in his own house, by his own family, while i'm around to stand up for him." "oh, stuff!" exclaimed tom, in amazement. then he laughed as he reverted to his father's efforts at correct pronunciation, and continued his story. suddenly he was startled by seeing his mother snatch a stump of a fire-shovel from the hearth and brandish it over his head. "you give up that talk right away!" exclaimed the woman. "your father is astonishin' the life out of me ev'ry day by the new way he's talkin' an' livin'. he's the best man in this town; i don't care if he _has_ been in the penitentiary, i'm not goin' to hear a bit of fun made of him, not even by one of his own young ones." all the brute in tom's nature came to the surface in an instant, yet his amazement kept him silent and staring. it was such a slight, feeble, contemptible figure, that of the woman who was threatening to punish him,--him, tom kimper, whom few men in town would care to meet in a trial of strength. it set tom to thinking; he said afterwards the spectacle was enough to make a brickbat wake up and think. at last he exclaimed, tenderly,-- "mother!" the woman dropped her weapon and burst into tears, sobbing aloud,-- "you never said it that way before." tom was so astonished by what he saw and heard that he shuffled up to his mother and awkwardly placed his clumsy hand upon her cheek. in an instant his mother's arms were around his neck so tight that tom feared he was being strangled. "oh, tom, tom! what's got into me? what's got into both of us? ev'rythin's diff'rent to what it used to be. it's carryin' me right off my feet sometimes. i don't know how to stand it all, an' yet i wouldn't have it no other way for nothin'." tom could not explain, but he did something a great deal better; for the first time since he ceased being a baby and his mother began to tire of him, he acted affectionately to the woman who was leaning upon him. he put his strong arm around her, and repeated the single word "mother" often and earnestly. as for mrs. kimper, no further explanation seemed necessary. after mother and son had become entirely in accord, through methods which only heaven and mothers understand, mrs. kimper began to make preparations for the family's mid-day meal. while she worked, her daughter jane appeared, and threw cold water upon a warm affectional glow by announcing,-- "i'm fired." "what do you mean, child?" asked her mother. "just what i say. that young ray bartram, that's the prency gal's feller, has been comin' to the house almost ev'ry day while i've been workin' there, an' he's been awful polite to me. he never used to be that way when him an' the other young fellers in town used to come down to the hotel an' drink in the big room behind the saloon. miss prency got to askin' me questions about him this morning, an' the less i told her the madder she got, an' at last she said somethin' that made me get up an' leave." "what's _he_ ever had to do with _you_?" asked mrs. kimper, after a long, wondering stare. "nothin', except to talk impudent. mother, what's the reason a poor gal that don't ever look for any company above her always keeps findin' it when she don't want it?" mrs. kimper got the question so mixed with her culinary preparations that she was unable to answer, or to remember that she already had salted the stew which she was preparing for dinner. as she wondered and worked, her husband came in. "wife," said sam, "everything seems turning upside down. deacon quickset came into the shop a while ago. what do you suppose he wanted? wanted me to pray for him! i said i would, and i did; but i was so took aback by it that i had to talk to somebody, so i came home." "why didn't you go talk to the preacher or ray bartram?" asked mrs. kimper, after the natural expressions of astonishment had been made. "well," said sam, "i suppose it was because i wanted to talk to somebody that i was better acquainted with." mrs. kimper looked at her husband in astonishment. sam returned his wife's gaze, but with a placid expression of countenance. "i don't amount to much, sam," mrs. kimper finally sighed, with a helpless look. "you're my wife; that's much--to me. some day i hope it will be the same to you." there was a knock at the door, and as soon as sam shouted "come in!" judge prency entered. "sam," said he, "ever since i saw you were in earnest about living a new life, i've been trying to arrange matters so that your boy joe--i suppose you know why he ran away--could come back without getting into trouble. it was not easy, for the man from whom he--took something seemed to feel very ugly. but he has promised not to prosecute." "thank god!" exclaimed sam. "if now i knew where the boy was--" "i've attended to that, too. i've had him looked up and found and placed in good hands for two or three weeks, and i don't believe you will be ashamed of him when he returns." sam kimper lapsed into silence, and the judge felt uncomfortable. at last sam exclaimed,-- "i feel as if it would take a big prayer and thanksgiving meeting to tell all that's in my mind." "a very good idea," said the judge; "and, as you have the very people present who should take part in it, i will make haste to remove all outside influence." so saying, the judge bowed in his most courtly manner to mrs. kimper and jane, and departed. "let us all pray," said sam, dropping upon his knees. chapter xix. eleanor prency was a miserable young woman during most of the great revival season which followed the special meetings at dr. guide's church. she did not see ray bartram as much as of old, for the young man spent most of his evenings at the church, assisting in the work. he sang no wild hymns, nor did he make any ecstatic speeches; nevertheless his influence was great among his old acquaintances and upon the young men of the town. to "stand up for prayers" was to the latter class the supreme indication of courage or conviction; and any of them would have preferred to face death itself, at the muzzle of a gun, to taking such a step. but that was not all; bartram had for some years been the leader of the unbelievers in the town; the logic of a young man who was smart enough to convince judges on the bench in matters of law was good enough for the general crowd when it was brought to bear upon religion. as one lounger at weitz's saloon expressed himself,-- "none of the preachers or deacons or class-leaders was ever able to down that young feller before, but now he's just the same as gone and hollered 'enough.' it's no use for the rest of us to put on airs after that; nobody'll believe us, and like as not he'll be the first man to tell us what fools we be. i'm thinkin' a good deal of risin' for prayers myself, if it's only to get through before he gives me a talkin' to." when, however, the entire membership of the church aroused to the fact that work was to be done, and judge prency and other solid citizens began to take part in the church work, bartram rested from his efforts and began again to spend his evenings at the home of the young woman whom he most admired. a change seemed to have come over others as well as himself. mrs. prency greeted him more kindly than ever, but eleanor seemed different. she was not as merry, as defiant, or as sympathetic as of old. sometimes there was a suggestion of old times in her manner, but suddenly the young woman would again become reserved and distant. one evening, when she had begun to rally him about something, and quickly lapsed into a different and languid manner, bartram said,-- "eleanor, nothing seems as it used to be between you and me. i wish i knew what was wrong in me." the girl suddenly interested herself in the contents of an antiquated photograph album. "i must have become dreadfully uninteresting," he continued, "if you prefer the faces in that album, of which i've heard you make fun time and again. won't you tell me what it is? don't be afraid to talk plainly: i can stand anything--from you." "oh, nothing," said eleanor, continuing to pretend interest in the pictures. "'nothing' said in that tone always means something--and a great deal of it. have i said or done anything to offend you?" "no," said eleanor, with a sigh, closing the book and folding her hands, "only--i didn't suppose you ever could become a prosy, poky old church-member." the reply was a laugh, so merry, hearty, and long that eleanor looked indignant, until she saw a roguish twinkle in bartram's eyes; then she blushed and looked confused. "please tell me what i have said or done that was poky or prosy," asked bartram. "we lawyers have a habit of asking for proof as well as charges. i give you my word, my dear girl, that never in all my previous life did i feel so entirely cheerful and good-natured as i do nowadays. i have nothing now to trouble my conscience, or spoil my temper, or put me out of my own control, as used frequently to happen. i never before knew how sweet and delightful it was to live and meet my fellow-beings,--particularly those i love. i can laugh at the slightest provocation now, instead of sometimes feeling ugly and saying sharp things. every good and pleasant thing in life i enjoy more than ever; and as you, personally, are the very best thing in life, you seem a thousand times dearer and sweeter to me than ever before. perhaps you will laugh at me for saying so, but do you know that i, who have heretofore considered myself a little better than any one else in the village, am now organizing a new base-ball club and a gymnasium association, and also am trying to get enough subscribers to build a toboggan slide? i never was in such high spirits and in such humor for fun." eleanor looked amazed, but she relieved her mind by replying,-- "i never saw religion work that way on other people." "indeed! where have your blessed eyes been? hasn't your own father been a religious man for many years, and is there any one in town who knows better how to enjoy himself when he is not at work?" "oh, yes; but father is different from most people." "quite true; he must be, else how could he be the parent of the one incomparable young woman--" "ray!" "don't try to play hypocrite, please, for you're too honest. you know you agree with me." "about father? certainly; but--" "'about father?' more hypocrisy. you know very well what i mean. dear little girl, listen to me. i suppose there are people scared into religion through fear of the wrath to come, who may become dull and uninteresting. it is a matter of nature, in a great many cases. i suppose whatever is done for selfish reasons, even in the religious life, may make people uncertain and fearful, and sometimes miserable. but when a man suddenly determines to model his life after that of the one and only perfect man and gentleman the world ever knew, he does not find anything to make him dull and wretched. we hear so much of jesus the saviour that we lose sight of jesus the man. he who died for us was also he whose whole recorded life was in conformity with the tastes and sympathies of people of his day. do you imagine for an instant that if he had been of solemn, doleful visage, any woman would ever have pressed through a crowd to touch the hem of his garment, that she might be made well? do you suppose the woman of samaria would have lingered one instant at the well of jacob, had jesus been a man with a face like--well, suppose i say deacon quickset? do you think mothers would have brought their children to him that he might bless them? do you imagine any one who had not a great, warm heart could have wept at the grave of his friend lazarus, whom he knew he had the power to raise from the dead? didn't he go to the marriage jollification at cana, and take so much interest in the affair that he made up for the deficiency in the host's wine-cellar? weren't all his parables about matters that showed a sympathetic interest in the affairs which were nearest to the hearts of the people around him? if all these things were possible to one who had his inner heart full of tremendous responsibilities, what should not his followers be in the world,--so far as all human cheer and interest go?" "i've never heard him spoken of in that way before," said eleanor, speaking as if she were in a brown study. "i'm glad--selfishly--that you hear it the first time from me, then. never again will i do anything of which i think he would disapprove; but, my dear girl, i give you my word that although occasionally--too often--i have been lawless in word and action, i never until now have known the sensation of entire liberty and happiness. you never again will see me moody, or obstinate, or selfish. i'm going to be a gentleman in life, as well as by birth. you believe me?" "i must believe you, ray; i can't help believing whatever you say. but i never saw conversion act that way upon any one else, and i don't understand it." bartram looked quizzically at the girl a moment, and then replied,-- "try it yourself; i'm sure it will affect you just as it does me." "oh, ray, no; i never can bring myself to stand up in church to be prayed for." "don't do it, then. pray for yourself. i don't know of any one to whom heaven would sooner listen. but you can't avoid being prayed for by one repentant sinner: have the kindness to remember that." "ray!" murmured eleanor. "and," continued bartram, rising and placing an arm around eleanor's shoulders, "the sooner our prayers can rise together, the sooner you will understand me, believe me, and trust me. my darling,--the only woman whom i ever loved,--the only woman of whom i ever was fond,--the only one to whom i ever gave an affectionate word or caress--" there are conversations which reach a stage where they should be known only to those who conduct them. when bartram started to depart, his love-life was unclouded. "ray," said eleanor, at the door, "will you oblige me by seeing sam kimper in the morning and asking him to tell his daughter that i particularly wish she would come back to us?" chapter xx. the revival into which were merged the special meetings at dr. guide's church continued so long that religion became absolutely and enthrallingly fashionable in bruceton. many drinking men ceased to frequent the bar-room of the town, some old family feuds came to an end, and several couples who should have been married long before were joined in the holy bonds of wedlock. nevertheless, the oldest inhabitants agreed that never before had life in bruceton been so pleasant. everybody was on good terms with everybody else, and no one, no matter how poor or common, lacked pleasant greetings on the street from acquaintances of high degree. there had been some wonderful conversions during the meetings; hard-swearing, hard-drinking men had abandoned their evil ways, and were apparently as willing and anxious as any one else to be informed as to how to conform their lives to the professions which they had made. all the other churches sympathized with the efforts which dr. guide's flock had been making, for they themselves had been affected to their visible benefit. dr. guide himself became one of the humblest of the humble. always a man of irreproachable life and warm heart, it never had occurred to him that anything could be lacking in his church methods. but he also was a man of quick perceptions: so, as the meetings went on, and he realized that their impetus was due not at all to anything he had said or done, but solely to the personal example of sam kimper, he fell into deep thought and retrospection. he resolutely waived all compliments which his clerical brethren of other denominations offered him on what they were pleased to call the results of his ministrations, and honestly insisted that the good work was begun by the example set by sam kimper, the ex-convict. dr. guide was an honest believer in the "church universal," but he had been trained to regard the church of rome as the "scarlet woman" of revelation, and whenever he met father black in the streets he recognized him only with a dignified bow. the day before the closing meeting, however, he encountered the priest at the turning of a corner,--too suddenly for a change of manner. "my dear brother!" exclaimed father black, extending both hands and grasping dr. guide's hands warmly, "god bless you for the good work you have been doing!" "my dear sir," said the pastor, rallying all his powers to withstand the surprise, "i am very glad that you are pleased to regard the work as good." "how can i help it?" said the priest, impetuously. "the spirit which your church efforts have awakened has spread throughout the town and affected everybody. there are men--and some women--of my flock whom i've been trying in vain for years to bring to confession, so as to start them on a new life. i've coaxed them, threatened them, prayed for them with tears of agony, for what soul is not dear to our saviour? the worse the soul, the more the saviour yearns to reclaim it. you remember the parable of the ninety-and-nine?" "who can forget it?" said the reverend doctor, tears springing to his eyes. "no one, my dear brother,--no one," replied the priest. "well, my lost sheep have all come back. the invisible church has helped the visible, and--" "is my church, then, invisible?" asked dr. guide, with a quick relapse into his old-time manner. "my dear brother," exclaimed the priest, "which is the greater? which exists only for the other?" "i beg your pardon," said dr. guide, his face thawing in an instant. "again i thank you from the depths of my heart," said the old priest, "and--" "father black," interrupted the pastor, "the more you thank me the more uncomfortable i feel. whatever credit is awarded, except to heaven, for the great and unexpected experiences which have been made manifest at my church, belongs entirely to a man who, being the lowest of the low, has set forth an example of perfect obedience." "that poor cobbler? you are right, i verily believe, and i shall go at once to pour out my heart to him." "let me go with you, father--_brother_, black. i--" here dr. guide's face broke into a confidential smile,--"i want to go to confession myself, for the first time in my life, if you will allow the cobbler to be my priest. i want a reputable witness, too." then the two clergymen, arm in arm, proceeded to sam kimper's shop, to the great astonishment of all the villagers who saw them. that night, at the closing meeting of the revival series, dr. guide delivered a short but pointed talk from the text, "verily i say unto you, the publicans and harlots go into the kingdom before you." "my friends," said he, "these words were spoken by jesus one day when the chief priests and elders, who were the types of the clergymen and formal religious people of our day, questioned him about his works and his authority. they had a mass of tradition and doctrine by which they were justified in their own eyes, and the presence, the works, the teachings and the daily life of jesus were a thorn in their flesh. it annoyed them so that they crucified him in order to be rid of his purer influence. we, who know more of him than they, have been continually crucifying our lord afresh by paying too much attention to the letter and ignoring the spirit. 'these things should ye have done, and not left the others undone.' i say these words not by way of blame, but of warning. heaven forbid that i ever shall need to repeat them!" as the congregation looked about at one and another whom the cap might fit, everybody chanced to see deacon quickset arise. "my friends," said the deacon, "i'm one of the very kind of people jesus meant when he said the words that our pastor took for his text to-night; and, for fear that some one mayn't know it, i arise to own up to it myself. nobody's stood up for the letter of the law and the plan of salvation stronger than i, and nobody has taken more pains to dodge the spirit of it. the scales have fallen from my eyes lately, but i suppose all of you have been seeing me as i am for a long, long time, and you've known me for the hypocrite that i now can see i've always been. i've done a good many things that i oughtn't to have done. i've told half-truths that were worse than lies. i've 'devoured widows' houses, and for a pretence made long prayers,' as the gospel says. but the worst thing i've done, and the thing i feel most sinful about, is that when an unfortunate fellow-citizen of ours came back to this town and tried to live a right life i did all i could to discourage him and make him just like myself. i want right here, encompassed about by a mighty cloud of witnesses, to confess that i've done that man an awful wrong, and i'm sorry for it. i've prayed to god to forgive me; but i'm not going to stop at that. right here before you all i want to ask that man himself to forgive me, as i've asked him in private. i'm not going to stop at that, either. that man's life has opened my eyes, in spite of myself, to all the faults of my own; and i want to show my sincerity by promising, before you all, that i am that man's brother from this time forth until i die, and that whatever is mine is his whenever and however he wants it." the deacon sat down. there was an instant of silence, and then a sensation, as every one began to look about for the ex-convict. "if brother kimper feels inclined to make any remarks," said dr. guide, "i am sure every one present would be glad to listen to him." people were slowly arising and looking towards one portion of the church. dr. guide left the pulpit and walked down one of the aisles towards the point where all eyes were centred. in a seat in the back of the church he saw the ex-convict, with one arm around his wife and the other around his daughter jane: sam looked smaller and more insignificant than ever, for his chin was resting on his breast and tears were chasing one another down his pale cheeks. dr. guide hurried back to the altar-rail, and exclaimed, in his loudest and most impressive voice,--"sing 'praise god, from whom all blessings flow!'" the end. to him that hath by leroy scott _author of "the walking delegate"_ new york doubleday, page & company copyright, , , by leroy scott copyright, , by doubleday, page & company published, july, all rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the scandinavian to those whom the world has made ugly and whose ugliness the world cannot forgive contents book i. the highest price i. an injustice of god ii. what david found in morton's closet iii. the bargain book ii. the closed road i. david re-enters the world ii. a call from a neighbour iii. the superfluous man iv. an uninvited guest v. guest turns host vi. tom is seen at work vii. a new item in the bill of scorn viii. the world's denial ix. the open road book iii. toward the light i. the mayor of avenue a ii. the saving ledge iii. a prophecy iv. puck masquerades as cupid v. on the upward path vi. john rogers vii. hope and dejection viii. rogers makes an offer ix. the mayor and the inevitable x. a bad penny turns up xi. a love that persevered xii. mr. chambers takes a hand xiii. the end of the deal book iv. the soul of woman i. helen gets a new view of her father ii. david sees the face of fortune iii. helen's conscience iv. the ordeal of kate morgan v. the command of love vi. another world vii. as love apportions viii. a partial release ix. father and daughter x. the beginning of life principal characters david aldrich an author alexander chambers a king of finance helen chambers his daughter henry allen a lawyer with a political future carl hoffman the mayor of avenue a carrie becker an admirer of the mayor william osborne a publisher rev. joseph franklin director of st. christopher's mission rev. philip morton dead, but a living memory john rogers a real estate agent kate morgan a nurse-maid jimmie morgan her father tom (last name uncertain) whose parents were the street lillian drew of the sisterhood of magdalene book i the highest price chapter i an injustice of god the reverend philip morton, head of st. christopher's mission, had often said that, in event of death or serious accident, he wished david aldrich to be placed in charge of his personal affairs; so when at ten o'clock of a september morning the janitor, at order of the frightened housekeeper, broke into the bath-room and found morton's body lying white and dead in the tub, the housekeeper's first clear thought was of a telegram to david. the message came to david while he was doggedly working over a novel that had just come back from a third publisher. he glanced at the telegram, then his tall figure sank back into his chair and he stared at the yellow sheet. never before had death struck him so heavy a blow. the wound of his mother's death had been dealt in quick-healing childhood; and though his father, a western mining engineer, had died but seven years before, david had known him hardly otherwise than as a remotely placed giver of an allowance. morton had for years been his best friend--latterly almost his only friend. for a space the blow rendered him stupid; then the agony of his personal loss entered him, and wrung him; and then in beside his personal sorrow there crept a sense of the appalling loss of the people about st. christopher's. but there was no time for inactive grief. he quickly threw a black suit and a week's linen into a travelling bag, and within an hour after the new york train pulled out of his new jersey suburb, he paused across the street from st. christopher's mission--a chapel of red brick, with a short spire rising above the tenements' flat heads, and adjoining it a four-story club-house in whose windows greened forth boxes of ivy and geraniums. the doors of the chapel stood wide, as they always did for whoso desired to rest or pray, but the doors of the club-house, usually open, were closed against the casual visitor by the ribboned seal of death. david held his eyes on the fourth-story windows, behind which he knew his friend lay. minutes passed before he could cross the street and ring the bell. he was admitted into the large hallway, cut with numerous doors leading into club-rooms, and hung with prints of raphaels, murillos, angelicos and other holy master-painters. overwhelmed though all his senses were, he was at once struck by the emptiness, the silence, of the great house--by its strange childlessness. as he started up the stairway he saw at its top a tall young woman dressed in black. his mounting steps quickened. "miss chambers!" he said. she came down the stairway with effortless grace, her hand outheld, her subdued smile warm with friendship. he quivered within as he heard his name in her rich voice, as he clasped her hand, as he looked into the sincerity, the dignity, the rare beauty of her face. there were none of those personal questions with which long-parted friends bridge the chasm of their separation. death made self trivial. at first they could only breathe awed interjections upon the disaster that so suddenly had fallen. then david asked the question that had been foremost in his mind for the last two hours: "what caused his death? i've had only a bare announcement." she gave him the details. "his doctor told me he had a weak heart," she added. "'in all likelihood,' the doctor said, 'the shock of the cold bath had caused heart failure. perhaps the seizure itself was fatal; perhaps on the other hand the seizure was recoverable but while helpless he drowned.' "as soon as i learned of his death i hurried here--i happened to be in town for a few days," she went on, after a moment. "i thought i might possibly be of service. but bishop harper has sent a dr. thorn, and mrs. humphrey told me you were coming, so it seems i can be of no assistance. but if there's anything i can do, please let me know." david promised. they spoke of the great misfortune to the mission--which she felt even more keenly than he, for her interest in st. christopher's had been more active, so was deeper; then she bade him good-bye and continued down the stairway. he followed her with his eyes. this was but the second time he had seen her since her mother's death, six months before; and her beauty, all in black, was still a fresh marvel to him. when the door had closed upon her, he mounted stairs and passed through hallways, likewise hung with brown prints and opening into club-rooms, till he came to the door of morton's quarters. mrs. humphrey answered his ring, and the housekeeper's swollen eyes flowed fresh grief as she took his hand and led him into the sitting-room, walled with morton's books. "the noblest, ablest, kindest man on earth--gone--and only thirty-five!" she said, between her sobs. "millions might have been called, and no difference; but he was the one man we couldn't spare. and yet god took him!" the same cry against god's injustice had been springing from david's own grief. mrs. humphrey continued her lamentations, but they were soon interrupted by the entrance of a clergyman, of most pronounced clerical cut, whom she introduced as dr. thorn. dr. thorn explained that bishop harper, knowing morton had no relatives, had sent him to take charge of the funeral arrangements; and he went on to say that if david had any requests, he'd be glad to carry them out. it was a relief to david to be freed of the business details of his friend's funeral. he replied that he had no wishes, and dr. thorn withdrew, taking with him mrs. humphrey. alone, memories of his friend lying in the next room rushed upon him. morton had been some kind of distant cousin--so distant that the exact fraction of their kinship was beyond computation. after the death of david's mother, morton's father had stood in place of david's far-absent parent; and morton himself, though david's senior by hardly ten years, had succeeded to the guardianship on his own father's death nine years before. this formal relation had grown, with david's growth into manhood, into warmest friendship. david had given morton the admiring love a younger brother gives his brilliant elder, and had received the affection such as an older brother would give a younger, who was not alone brother but a youth of sympathy and promise. it had been morton who had insisted that he had a literary future, morton who had tried to cheer him through his five years of struggling unsuccess. and so the memories and grief that now flooded david were not less keen than if morton's blood and his had indeed been the same. after a time david moved to a window and looked out over the geraniums and ivy into the narrow street, with its dingy, red-faced tenements zig-zagged with fire-escapes. his mind slipped back six years to when morton had taken charge of st. christopher's, which then occupied merely an old dwelling, and when he, a boy of twenty, had first visited the neighbourhood. the neighbourhood was then a crowded district forgotten by those who called themselves good and just, remembered only by landlords, politicians and saloonkeepers--grimy, quarrelsome, profane, ignorant of how to live. now decency was here. there was still poverty, but it was a respectable poverty. men brought home their pay, and fought less often. shawled wives went less frequently with tin pails to the side entrances of saloons. it was becoming uncommon to hear a child swear. david's mind ran over the efforts by which this change had been wrought: morton's forcing the police to close disorderly resorts; his eloquent appeals to the public for fair treatment of such neighbourhoods as his; his unwearied visiting of the sick, and his ready assumption of the troubles of others; his perfect good-fellowship, which made all approach him freely, yet none with disrespectful familiarity; his wonderful sermons, so simple, direct and appealing that there was never an empty seat. he was sympathetic--magnetic--devoted--brilliant. thus he had won the neighbourhood; not all, for the evil forces he had fought, led by the boss of the ward, held him in bitter enmity. but in three or four hundred families, he was god. david turned from the window. mrs. humphrey had asked if she should not take him in to see morton, but he had shrunk from having eyes upon him when he entered the presence of his dead friend. he now moved to the door of morton's chamber, paused chokingly, then stepped into the darkened room. on the bed lay a slender, sheeted figure. for the first moment, awe at the mystery of life rose above all other feelings: monday he had seen morton, strangely depressed to be sure, but in his usual health; this was saturday, and there he lay! his emotions trembling upon eruption, david crossed slowly to the bed. with fearing hand he drew the sheet from the face, and for a long space gazed down at the fine straight nose, at the deeply-set eyes, and at the high broad forehead, the most splendid he had ever seen, with the soft hair falling away from it against the pillow. then suddenly he sank to a chair, and his grief broke from him. soon his mind began to dwell upon the contrast between morton and himself--what a great light was this that had been stricken out, what a pitiable candle flame was this left burning. in the presence of these dead powers he felt how small was his literary achievement, how small his chance of future success, how comparatively trivial that success would be even if gained. david had felt to its full the responsibility of life; he had longed, with a keenness that was at times actual physical pain, that his life might count some little what in advancing the general good. but he realised now, as he gazed at the white face on the pillow, that in the field of humanitarianism, as in the field of literature, his achievement was nothing. he burnt with a sudden rush of shame that he was alive, and he clenched his hands and in tense whispers cried out against the injustice of god in taking so useful a man as morton and leaving so useless a cumbrance as himself. but this defiance soon passed into a different mood. he slipped to his knees, and a wish sobbed up from his heart that he might change places with the figure on the bed. this wish was present in his thoughts all that evening and the next two days as he did his share in the sad routine of the funeral arrangements. the service was set for the evening so that the people of the neighbourhood could be present without difficulty or financial loss. at the hour of beginning the chapel was packed to the doors, and david learned afterwards that as large a crowd stood without and that many notables who had come at the appointed time were unable to gain any nearer the chapel than the middle of the street. bishop harper himself was in charge, and about him were gathered the best-known clergymen of his persuasion in the city--a tribute to his friend that quickened both david's pride and grief. bishop harper was ordinarily a pompous speaker of sonorous platitudes, ever conscious of his high office. but to-night he had a simple, touching subject; he forgot himself and spoke simply, touchingly. when he used an adjective it was a superlative, and yet the superlative did not seem to reach the height of morton's worth. morton was "the most gifted, the most devoted" man of the bishop's acquaintance, and the other clergymen by their looks showed complete and unjealous approval of all the bishop's praise. david's eyes flowed at the tribute paid morton by his peers. yet he was moved far more by the inarticulate tribute of the simple people who crowded the chapel. whatever was good in their lives, morton had brought them; and now, mixed with their sense of loss, was an unshaped fear of how hard it was going to be to hold fast to that good without his aid. never before had david seen anything so affecting; and even in after days, when he saw morton's death with new eyes, the picture of the love and grief of this audience remained with him, unsoiled, as the strongest, sincerest scene he had ever witnessed. the women--factory girls, scrub-women, hard-working wives--wept with their souls in their tears and in their spasmodic moans; and the men--labourers, teamsters, and the like--let the strange tears stream openly down their cheeks, unashamed. the chapel was one great sob, choked down at times, at times stopping the bishop's words. it was as if they were all orphaned. all through the service, one cry rose from david's heart, and continued to repeat itself while the audience, and after them the crowd from the street, filed by the open casket--and still rose as, later, he sat with bowed head in a front pew beside the coffin: "if only i could change places, and give him back to them!" chapter ii what david found in morton's closet david was sitting in morton's study, looking through the six years' accumulation of letters and documents, saving some, destroying others, when he came upon a dusty snap-shot photograph. hands and eyes were arrested; morton sank from his mind. four persons sat in a little sailboat; their faces were wrinkled in sun-smiles; about and beyond them was the broad white blaze of the sound. the four were miss chambers and her mother, morton and himself. the day of the photograph ran its course again, hour by hour, in david's mind, and slowly rose other pictures of his acquaintance with helen chambers: of their first meeting three years before at a dinner at st. christopher's mission; of later meetings at st. christopher's, where she had a club and where he was a frequent visitor; of the summer passed at st. christopher's two years before, during the early part of which he, in morton's stead, had aided her in selecting furnishings for a summer house given by her father for the mission children; of two weeks at the end of that summer which he and morton had spent at myrtle hill, the chambers's summer home on the sound. since then he had seen her at irregular intervals, and their friendship had deepened with each meeting. she had interested his mind as no other woman had ever done. she had been bred in the conventions of her class, the top strata of the american aristocracy of wealth; all her friends, save those she had gained at the mission, belonged in this class; and her life had been lived within her class's boundaries. given these known quantities, an average social algebraist would have quickly figured out the unknown future to be, a highly desirable marriage, gowning and hatting, tea-drinking, dining, driving, calling, europe-going, and the similar activities by which women of her class reward god for their creation--and in time, the motherhood of a second generation of her kind. but there was her character, which by degrees had revealed itself fully to david: her sympathy, her love of truth, a lack of belief in her social superiority, an instinct to look very clearly, very squarely, at things, a courage unconscious that it was courage, that was merely the natural action of her direct spirit--all these dissolved in a most simple, charming personality. it was these qualities (a stronger reprint of her mother's), in one of her position, that made david think her future might possibly be other than that contained in the algebraist's solution--that made him regard her as a potential surprise to her world. and helen chambers had interested not only david's mind. in moments when his courage had been high and his fancy had run riotously free, he had dared dream wild dreams of her. but now, as he gazed at the photograph, he sighed. in place and fortune she was on the level of the highest; he was far below--still only a straggler, obscure, barely keeping alive. yes--he was still only a struggler. he nodded as his mind repeated the sentence. now and then his manuscripts were accepted--but only now and then. his english was admirable; this he had been told often. but there was a something lacking in almost all he wrote, and this too he had been often told. david had tried to write of the big things, the real things--but of such one cannot write convincingly till he has thought deeply or travelled himself through the deep places. david's trouble was, he did not know life--but no one had told him this. so in his ignorance of the real difficulty, he had thought to conquer his unsuccess by putting forth a greater effort. he had gone out less and less often; he had sat longer and longer at his writing-table; his english had become finer and finer. and his people had grown more hypothetical, more unreal. the faster he ran, the farther away was the goal. he sighed again. then his square jaw tightened, his eyes narrowed to grim crescents, his clenched fist lightly pounded the desk; and to a phalanx of imaginary editors he announced with slow defiance: "some of these days the whole blamed lot of you will be camping on my door-steps. you just wait!" he was returning to the sifting of the letters when the bell of the apartment rang. he answered the ring himself, as mrs. humphrey was out for the afternoon, and opened the door upon a shabby, wrinkled man with a beery, cunning smile. his manner suggested that he had been there before. "is mr. morton at home?" the man asked. "no," david answered shortly, not caring to vouchsafe the information that morton was in his grave these two days. "but i represent him." "then i guess i'll wait." "he'll not be back." the man hesitated, then a dirty hand drew an envelope from a torn pocket. "i was to give it only to him, but i guess it'll be all right to leave it with you." david closed the door, ripped open the envelope, glanced at the note, turned abruptly and re-entered morton's study, and read the lines again: "you paid no attention to the warning i sent you last friday. this is the last time i write. i must get the money to-day, or--you know! "l. d." he was clutched with a vague fear. who was l. d.? and how could money be thus demanded of morton? his mind was racing away into wild guesses, when he observed there was no street and number on the note. in the same instant it flashed upon him that the note must be investigated, and that the address of its writer was walking away in the person of the old messenger. he caught his hat, rushed down the stairs, and came upon the old man just outside the club-house entrance. "i want to see the writer of that note," he said. "give me the address." "do better'n that. i'll go with you. i'm the janitor there." david was too agitated to refuse the offer. they walked in silence for several paces, then the old man jerked his head toward the club-house and knowingly winked a watery eye. "lucky they don't know where you're goin'," he said. "but i'm safe. safe as a clam!" he reassured david with his beery smile. the vague dread increased. "what do you mean?" "innocent front! oh, you're a wise one, i see. but you can trust me. i'm safe." david was silent for several paces. "who is this man l. d.?" "this man?" he cackled. "this man! oh, you'll do!" david looked away in disgust; the old satyr made him think of the garbage of dissipation. all during their fifteen-minute car ride his indefinite fear changed from one dreadful shape to another. after a short walk the old man led the way into a small apartment house, and up the stairs. he paused before a door. "here's your 'man,'" he said, nudging david and giving his dry, throaty little laugh. "thanks," said david. but the guide did not leave. "ain't you got a dime that's makin' trouble for the rent o' your coin?" david handed him ten cents. "safe as a clam," he whispered, and went down the stairs with a cackle about "the man." david hesitated awhile, with high-beating heart, then knocked at the door. it was opened by a coloured maid. "who lives here?" he asked. "miss lillian drew." david stepped inside. "please tell her i'd like to see her. i'm from mr. morton." the maid directed him toward the parlour and went to summon her mistress. at the parlour door david was met with the heavy perfume of violets. the room was showily furnished with gilt, upholstery, vivid hangings, painted bric-a-brac--all with a stiff shop-newness that suggested recently acquired funds. an ash-tray on the gilded centre-table held several cigarette stubs. on the lid of the upright piano was the last song that had pleased broadway, and on the piano's top stood a large photograph of a man with a shrewd, well-fed face, his derby hat pushed back, his hands in his trousers pockets, a jewelled saddle in his necktie. across this picture of portly jauntiness was scrawled, "to lovely lil, from jack." david had no more than seated himself upon a surface of blue chrysanthemums and taken in these impressions, when the portieres parted and between them appeared a tall, slender woman in a trained house-gown of pink silk, with pearls in her ears and a handful of rings on her fingers. she looked thirty-five, and had a bold, striking beauty, though it was perhaps a trifle over-accentuated by the pots and pencils of her dressing-table. possibly her nature had its kindly strain--doubtless she could smile alluringly; but just now her dark eyes gazed at david in hard, challenging suspicion. david rose. "is this miss drew?" "you are from phil morton?" she asked. he shivered at the implied familiarity with morton. "i am." she crossed to a chair and, as she seated herself, spread her train fan-wise to its full display. her near presence seemed to uncork new bottles of violet perfume. "why didn't he come himself?" she demanded, her quick, brilliant eyes directly upon david. it was as her note had indicated--she didn't read the papers. obeying an unformed policy, david refrained from acquainting her with the truth. "he's not at home. i've come because his affairs are left with me." her eyes gleamed. "so he's run away from home!" she sneered, but the sneer could not wholly hide her disappointment. "that won't save him!" she paused an instant. "well--what're you here for?" "i told you i represent him." "you're his lawyer?" "i'm his friend." "well, i'm listening. go on." the fear had taken on an almost definite shape. david shrunk from what he was beginning to see. but it was his duty to settle the affair, and settle it he could not without knowing its details. "to begin with, i shall have to ask some information from you," he said with an effort. "mr. morton left this matter entirely in my hands, but he told me nothing concerning its nature." she half closed her eyes, and regarded david intently. "you brought the money?" she asked abruptly. "no." "then he's----" she made a grim cipher with her forefinger, and stood up. "if there's no money, good afternoon!" david did not rise. he guessed her dismissal to be a bit of play-acting. "whatever comes to you must come through me," he said, "and you of course realise that nothing can come from me till i understand the situation." "he understands it. that's enough." "oh, very well then. i see you want nothing." david determined to try play-acting himself. he rose. "let it be good-afternoon." she stopped him at the portieres, as he had expected. "it's mighty queer, when morton's been trying hard to keep this thing between himself and me, for him to send a third person here." "i can't help that," he returned with a show of indifference. "but how do i know you really represent him?" "you must take my word for it. or you can telephone st. christopher's and ask if david aldrich is not in charge of his affairs." she eyed him steadily for a space. "you look on the square," she said abruptly; then she added with an ominous look: "if there's no money, you know what'll happen!" david shrugged his shoulders. "i told you i know nothing." she was thoughtfully silent for several minutes. david studied her face, in preparation for the coming conflict. he saw that appeal to her better parts would avail nothing. he could guess that she needed money; it was plainly her nature, when roused, to spare nothing to gain her desire. and if defeated, she could be vindictive, malevolent. in her inward struggle between caution and desire for money, greed had the assistance of her pride; for a woman living upon her attraction for men, is by nature vain of her conquests. also, david's physical appearance was an element in the contest. her quick bold eyes, looking him over, noted that he was tall and straight, square of shoulder, good-looking. greed and its allies won. "well, if you want to know, come back," she said. david resumed his seat. she stood thinking a moment, then went to a writing-desk. for all his suspense, david was aware she was trying to display her graces and her gown. she rustled to his chair with the unhinged halves of a gold locket in her hand. "suppose we begin here," she said, handing him one half of the locket. "perhaps you'll recognise it--though that was taken in eighty-five." david did recognise it. it was lillian drew at twenty. the face was fresh and spirited, and had in an exceptional measure the sort of beauty admired in the front row of a musical-comedy chorus. it was not a bad face; had the girl's previous ten years been otherwise, the present lillian drew would have been a very different woman; but the face showed plainly that she had gone too far for any but an extraordinary power or experience to turn her about. it was bold, striking, luring--a face of strong appeal to man's baser half--telling of a girl who would make advances if the man held back. david felt that she waited for praise. "it's a handsome face." "you're not the first to say so," she returned, proudly. she let him gaze at the picture a full minute, keenly watching his face for her beauty's effect. then she continued: "that is the picture of a girl in boston. and this"--a jewelled hand gave him the locket's other half--"is a young man in harvard." david knew whose likeness was in the locket, yet something snapped sharply within him when he looked upon the boyish face of morton at twenty-one. it was the snap of suspense. his fear was now certainty. "she probably wouldn't have suited you"--the tone declared she certainly would--"but phil morton certainly had it bad for four or five months." david forced himself to his duty--to search this relationship to its limits. "and then--he broke it off?" he asked, with a sudden desire to make her smart. "no man ever threw me down," she returned sharply, her cheeks flushing. "i got tired of him. a woman soon gets tired of a mere boy like that. and he was repenting about a third of the time, and preaching to me about reforming myself. to live with a man like that----it's not living. i dropped him." "but all this was fifteen years ago," david said, calm by an effort. "what has that to do with your note?" she sank into a chair before him, and ran the tip of her tongue between her thin lips. she leaned back luxuriously, clasped her be-ringed hands behind her head, and regarded him amusedly from beneath her pencilled eye-lashes. "a woman comes to new york about four months ago. she was--well, things hadn't been going very well with her. after a month she learns a man is in town she had once--temporarily married. she hasn't heard anything about him for fifteen years. he is a minister, and has a reputation. she has some letters he wrote her while they had been--such good friends. she guesses he would just as soon the letters should not be made public. she has a talk with him; she guessed right.... now you understand?" david leaned forward, his face pale. "you mean morton has been paying you--to keep still?" she laughed softly. she was enjoying this display of her power. "in the last three months he has paid me the trifling sum of five thousand." david stared at her. "and he's going to pay me a lot more, or--the letters!" his head sank before her bright, triumphant eyes, and he was silent. he was a confusion of thoughts and emotions, amid which only one thought was distinct--to protect morton if he could. he tried to push all else from his mind and think of this alone. a minute or more passed. then he looked up. his face was still pale, but set and hard. "you are mistaken in at least one point," he said. "and that?" "about the money you are going to get. there'll be no more." "why not?" she asked with amused superiority. "because the letters are valueless." he watched her sharply to see the effect of his next words. "philip morton was buried two days ago." her hands fell from her head and she stood up, suddenly white. "it's a lie!" "he was buried two days ago," david repeated. her colour came back, and she sneered. "it's a lie. you're trying to trick me." david rose, drew out a handful of clippings he had cut from the newspapers, and silently held them toward her. she glanced at a headline, and her face went pale again. she snatched the clippings, read one half through, then flung them all from her, and abruptly turned about--as david guessed, to hide from him the show of her loss. in a few moments she wheeled around, wearing a defiant smile. "then i shall make the letters public!" "what good will that do you? think of all those people----" "what do i care for those people!" she cried. "i'll let them see what their saint was like!" david stepped squarely before her; his tall form towered above her, his dark eyes gleamed into hers. "you shall do nothing of the kind," he said harshly. "you are going to turn over the letters to me." she did not give back a step. "oh, i am, am i!" she sneered. at this close range, penetrating the violet perfume, he caught a new odour--brandy. "you certainly are! you're guilty of the crime of blackmail. you've confessed it to me, and i have your letter demanding money--there's proof enough. the punishment is years in prison. give me those letters, or i'll have a policeman here in five minutes." she was shaken, but she forced another sneer. "to take me to court is the quickest way to make the letters public," she returned. "you're bluffing." he was, to an extent--but he knew his bluff was a strong one. "if you keep them, you will give them out," he went on grimly. "between your making them public and going unharmed, and their coming out in the course of the trial that will send you to prison, i choose the latter. morton is dead; the letters can't hurt him now. and i'd like to see you suffer. the letters, or prison--take your choice!" she slowly drew back from him, and her look of defiance gave place to fear. she stared without speaking at his square face, fierce with determination--at his roused, dominating masculinity. "which is it to be?" she did not move. "you choose prison then. very well. i'll be back in five minutes." he turned and started to leave the room. "wait!" he looked round and saw a thoroughly frightened face. "i'll get them." she passed out through the beflowered portieres, and in a few minutes returned with a packet of yellow letters, which she laid in david's hand. "these are all?" he demanded. "yes." a more experienced investigator might have detected an unnatural note in her voice that would have prompted a further pursuit of his question; but david was satisfied, and did not mark a cunning look as he passed on. "here's another matter," he said threateningly. "if ever a breath of this comes out, i'll know it comes from you, and up you'll go for blackmail. understand?" now that danger was over her boldness began to flow back into her. "i do," she said lightly. he left her standing amid her crumpled, forgotten train. as he was passing into the hall, she called to him: "hold on!" he turned about. she looked at him with fear, effrontery, admiration. "you're all right!" she cried. "you're a real man!" * * * * * as david came into the street, his masterful bearing fell from him like a loosened garment. there was no disbelieving the prideful revelation of lillian drew--and as he walked on he found himself breathing, "thank god for philip's death!" had philip lived, with that woman dangling him at the precipitous edge of exposure, life would have been only misery and fear--and sooner or later she would have given him a push and over he would have gone. death comes too late to some men for their best fame, and to some too early. to philip morton it had come in the nick of time. one thought, that at first had been merely a vague wonder, grew greater and greater till it fairly pressed all else from david's mind: where had philip got the five thousand dollars for which lillian drew had sold him three months' silence? david knew that philip morton had not a penny of private fortune, only his income as head of the mission; and that of this income not a dollar had been laid by, so open had been his purse to the hand of distress. he could not have borrowed the money in the usual manner, for he had no security to give; and sums such as this are not blindly loaned with mere friendship as the pawn. david entered philip's study with this new dread pulsing through him. it was his duty to his friend to know the truth, and besides, his suspense was too acute to permit remaining in passive ignorance; so he locked the study door and began seeking evidence to dispel or confirm his fear. he took the books from the safe--he remembered the combination from the summer he had spent at the mission--and turned them through, afraid to look at each new page. but the books dealt only with small sums for incidental expenses; the large bills were paid by cheque from the treasurer of the board of trustees. there was nothing here. he looked through the papers in the desk--among them no reference to the money. he scrutinised every page of paper in the safe, except the contents of one locked compartment. no reference. knowing he would find nothing, he examined morton's private bank-book: a record of the monthly cheque deposited and numerous small withdrawals--that was all. and then he picked up a note-book that all the while had been lying on the desk. he began to thumb it through, not with hope of discovering a clue but merely as a routine act of a thorough search. it was half engagement book, half diary. david turned to the page dated with the day of morton's death, intending to work from there backwards--and upon the page he found this note of an engagement: " p. m.--at mr. haddon's office--first fall meeting of boy's farm committee." he turned slowly back through the leaves of september, august, july, june, finding not a single suggestive record. but this memorandum, on the fifteenth of may, stopped him short: "boy's farm committee adjourned to-day till fall, as mr. chambers and mr. haddon go to europe. money left in third national bank in my name, to pay for farm when formalities of sale are completed." instantly david thought of an entry on the first of june recording that, with everything settled save merely the binding formalities, the farmer had suddenly broken off the deal, having had a better offer. here was the money, every instinct told david. but the case was not yet proved; the money might be lying in the bank, untouched. he grasped at this chance. there must be a bank-book and cheque-book somewhere, he knew, and as he had searched the office like a pocket, except for the drawer of the safe, he guessed they must be there. after a long hunt for the key to this drawer, he found a bunch of keys in the trousers morton had worn the day before his death. one of these opened the drawer, and sure enough here were cheque-book and bank-book. david gazed at these for a full minute before he gained sufficient mastery of himself to open the bank-book. on the first page was this single line: may . by deposit , this was the only entry, and the fact gave him a moment's hope. he opened the cheque-book--and his hope was gone. seven stubs recorded that seven cheques had been drawn to "self," four for $ each, and three for $ , . even amid the chill of horror that now enwrapped him, david clearly understood how morton had permitted himself to use this fund. here was a woman with power to destroy, demanding money. here was money for which account need not be rendered for months. in morton's situation a man of strong will, of courageous integrity, might have resigned and told the woman to do her worst. but david suddenly saw again morton's dead face upon the pillow, and he was startled to see that the mouth was small, the chin weak. he now recognised, what he would have recognised before had the fault not been hidden among a thousand virtues, that morton did not have a strong will. he recognised that a man might have genius and all the virtues, save only courage, and yet fail to carry himself honourably through a crisis that a man of merest mediocrity might have weathered well. if exposure came--so temptation must have spoken to morton--all that he had done for his neighbours would be destroyed, and with it all his power for future service. he could take five hundred dollars, buy the woman's silence, and somehow replace the money before he need account for his trust. but she had demanded more, and more, and more; and once involved, his only safety, and that but temporary, was to go on--with the terror of the day of reckoning before him. and then, while he sat chilled, david's mind began to add mechanically three things together. first, the engagement philip had had on the day of his death with the boys' farm committee; at that he would have had to account for the five thousand dollars, and his embezzlement would have been laid open. second, the certainty of exposure from lillian drew, since he had no more money to ward it off. third, was it not remarkable that morton's heart trouble, if heart trouble there had been, with fifteen hundred minutes in the day in which to strike, had selected the single minute he spent in his bath? as david struck the sum of these, there crawled into his heart another awful fear. would a man who had not had the courage to face the danger of one exposure, have the courage to face a double exposure? had morton's death been natural, or---- sickened, david let his head fall forward upon his arms, folded on the desk--and so he sat, motionless, as twilight, then darkness, crept into the room. chapter iii the bargain david was still sitting bowed amid appalling darkness, when mrs. humphrey knocked and called to him that dinner waited. he had no least desire for food, and as he feared his face might advertise his discoveries to dr. thorn and mrs. humphrey, he slipped out of the apartment and sent word by the janitor that he would not be in to dinner. for an hour and a half he walked the tenement-cliffed streets, trying to force his distracted mind to deduce the probable consequences of morton's acts. at length one result stood forth distinct, inevitable: morton's death was not going to save his good name. in a few days his embezzlement would be discovered. there would be an investigation as to what he had done with the money. try as the committee might to keep the matter secret, the embezzlement would leak out and afford sensational copy for the papers. lillian drew, out of her malevolence, would manage to triple the scandal with her story; and then someone would climax the two exposures by putting one and one together, as he had done, and deducing that morton's lamented death was suicide. in a week, perhaps in three days, all new york would know what david knew. he was re-entering the club-house, shortly after eight o'clock, when the sound of singing in the chapel reminded him that the regular thursday even prayer-meeting had been turned into a neighbourhood memorial service for morton. he slipped quietly into the rear of the chapel. it was crowded, as at the funeral. dr. thorn, who was temporarily at the head of the mission, was on the rostrum, but a teamster from the neighbourhood was in charge of the meeting. the order of the service consisted of brief tributes to morton, brief statements of what he had meant to their lives. as david listened to the testimonies, uncouth in the wording, but splendid in feeling, the speaker sometimes stopped by his own emotion, sometimes by sobbing from the audience--his tears loosened and flowed with theirs. and then came a change in his view-point. he found himself thinking, not of morton the individual, morton his friend, but of morton in his relation to these people. what great good he had brought them! how dependent they had been upon him, how they now clung to him and were lifted up by his memory! and how they loved him! but what would they be saying about him a week hence? the question plunged into david like a knife. he hurried from the chapel and upstairs into morton's study. here was the most ghastly of all the consequences of morton's deeds. what would be the effect on these people of the knowledge he had gained that afternoon? they were not discriminating, could not select the good, discard and forget the evil. he still loved morton; morton to him was a man strong and great at ninety-nine points, weak at one. impregnable at all other points, temptations had assailed his one weakness, conquered him and turned his life into complete disaster. but, david realised, the neighbourhood could not see morton as he saw him. they could see only the evils of his one point of weakness, see him only as guilty of larger sins than the most sinful of themselves--as a libertine, an embezzler, a suicide. and they would be helped to this new view by the elements he had fought. how old boss grogan would rejoice in morton's fall--how his one eye would light up, and triumph overspread his veinous, pouched face! how he and his henchmen, victory-sure, would return to their attack on the mission, going among its people with sneers at morton and at them! there was no doubt in david's mind of the effect of all this upon them. the words of a shrivelled old woman who had given tribute in the chapel stayed in his memory. "he has been to me like st. christopher, what this place is called from," she had quavered. "he holds me in his arms and carries me over the dark waters." exactly the case with all of them, david thought. morton, who had lifted them out of darkness, was supporting them over the ferry of life--till a few days ago by his presence among them, now and in the future by the powerful influence in which he had enarmed them. once they saw their st. christopher as baser than themselves [and what a picture grogan would keep before their eyes!], they would call him hypocrite, despise his support and the shore whither he carried them; his strength to save them would be gone, and they would fall back into the darkness out of which they had been gathered. david's concern was now all for these unsuspecting hundreds mourning and praising morton in the chapel. presently, amid the chaos in his mind, one thought assumed definite shape: if the people were kept in ignorance, if morton were kept pure in their eyes, would not their love for him, the saving influence he had set about them, remain just as potent as though he were in truth unspotted? yes--without doubt. and then this question asked itself: could they be kept in ignorance? yes, if the embezzlement could be concealed--for morton's relations with lillian drew and his suicide would come before the public only by being dragged, as it were, by this engine of disgrace. david's whole mind, his whole being, was suddenly gripped by the thought that by concealing the embezzlement he could save these hundreds of persons from falling back into the abyss. but how conceal it? the answer was ready at his mind's ear: by replacing the money. but where get the money? he had almost nothing himself, for the little fortune from his father with which he had been eking out his meagre earnings was now in its last dollars, and he had hardly a friend in new york. again the answer was ready: take into the secret some rich man interested in the mission--he'd gladly furnish the money rather than have st. christopher's dishonoured. this idea rapidly shaped itself into a definite plan. at half-past nine david left the study and descended the stairs, with the decision to complete the lesser details of his scheme that night, leaving only the getting of the money for the morrow. the moment he stepped into the never-quiet street, he pressed back into the shadow of the club-house entrance, for out of the chapel was riling the mourning crowd--some of the women crying silently, some of the men having traces of recent tears, all stricken with their heavy loss. yes, their loss was grievous, but, god helping him, that which was left them they should not lose!--and david gazed upon them till the last was out, with a tingling glow of saviourship. half an hour later he was standing before the apartment house he had visited that afternoon. a dull glow through lillian drew's shades informed him she was at home; and, glancing through the open basement window into the janitor's apartment, he saw his guide of the afternoon stretched on a shabby lounge. he was not proud of the part he was about to play; but for lillian drew to remain in town--danger was in this that must be avoided. that afternoon he had noticed there was a telephone in the house. he now walked back to a drug store on whose front he had seen the sign of a public telephone. he closed himself in the booth, and soon had lillian drew on the wire. "this is a friend with a tip," he said. "i just happened to overhear a man ask a policeman to come with him to arrest you." "what was the man like?" came tremulously from the receiver. david began a faithful description of himself, but before he was half through he heard the receiver at the other end of the wire click into place upon its hook. he returned to where he had a view of the entrance of the apartment house, and almost at once he saw lillian drew come hurriedly out. he then walked over to broadway, asked a policeman to arrest a woman on his complaint, and led the officer to the apartment house. he rang the janitor's bell, and after a minute it was answered by his "safe" friend. he put on his most ominous look. "is lillian drew in?" he demanded. "no; she just went out," the janitor answered, glancing in fear at the policeman. the officer gave him a shove. "bluffin' don't work on me. you just take us up, you old booze-tank, and we'll have a look around for ourselves." they searched the flat, followed about by the frightened black maid, but found no lillian drew. as they were leaving the house david again directed his ominous look upon the janitor. "don't you tell her we were here," he ordered; and then he whispered to the policeman, but for the janitor's ears, "i'll get her in the morning." he walked away with the officer, but quickly returned to his place of observation. he saw the janitor come furtively out and hurry away, and in a little while he saw lillian drew enter--and he knew that the janitor, who had summoned her, had told of her narrow escape and of the danger in which she stood. he wandered about, passing the house from time to time. toward twelve o'clock, when he again drew near the house, the great van of a storage warehouse was before it, and men were carrying out furniture. beside the van stood an express wagon in which was a trunk, and coming out of the doorway was a man bearing on his back another trunk, from the end of which dangled a baggage check. as the man staggered across the sidewalk, david stepped behind him, caught the tag and read it by the light that streamed from the entrance. the trunk was checked to chicago. lillian drew would make no trouble. one part of his plan was completed. half an hour later david was back in morton's study, beginning another part of his preparation. to prevent suspicion when the boys' farm committee discovered the replaced money, to make it appear that the drawing of the fund was no more than a business absurdity such as is normally expected from clergymen, david had determined to surround the presence of the money in the safe with the formality of an account. at the head of a slip of paper he wrote, "cash account of boys' summer home," and beneath it, copying from the stubs of the cheque-book: "june , drawn from bank $ "; and beneath this, under their respective dates, the six other amounts. then at the foot of these he wrote under date of september fifteenth, the day before morton's death, "cash on hand, $ , ." these items he set down in a fair copy of morton's hand, not a difficult mimicry since their writing was naturally much alike and had a further similarity from their both using stub pens. he wrote with an ink, which he had secured for the purpose on his way home, that immediately after drying was of as dead a black as though it had been on paper for weeks. he put the slip, with the bank-book and cheque-book, into the drawer of the safe. to-morrow the five thousand dollars would go in there with them, and morton's name, and the people of st. christopher's, would be secure. he had not yet disposed of the letters lillian drew had given him. he carried the packet into the sitting-room, tore the letters into shreds and heaped them in the grate between the brass andirons. then he touched a match to the yellow pile, and watched the destroying flames spring from the record of morton's unholy love--as though they were the red spirit of that passion leaping free. he sat for a long space, the dead hush of sleep about him, gazing at where the heap had been. only ashes were left by those passionate flames. a symbol of morton, thus it struck david's fancy. just so those flames had left of morton only ashes. the next morning david had before him the task of getting the money. he had determined to approach mr. chambers first, and he was in the great banking house of alexander chambers & company, in wall street, as early as he thought he could decently appear there. he was informed that mr. chambers had gone out to attend several directors' meetings--not very surprising, since mr. chambers was a director in half a hundred companies--and that the time of his return was uncertain, if indeed he returned at all. david went next to the office of mr. haddon, treasurer of the mission and of the boys' farm committee, and one of the mission's largest givers. mr. haddon, he was told, had left the office an hour before for st. christopher's. david hurried back to the mission, wondering what mr. haddon's errand there could be, and hoping to catch him before he left. as he was starting up the stairway the janitor stopped him. "mr. haddon was asking for you," the janitor said. "and miss chambers, too. i think she's in the reception room." david turned back, walked down the hall and entered the dim reception room. she was sitting in a flemish oak settle near a window, her hands clasped upon an idle book in her lap, gazing fixedly into vacancy. her dress of mourning was almost lost in the shadow, and her face alone, softly lighted from between the barely parted dark-green hangings, had distinctness. he paused at the door and gazed long at her. then he crossed the bare floor. she rose, gave him her firm, slender hand, and, allowing him half the settle, resumed her seat. now that he could look directly into her face, he saw there repressed anxiety. "i came down this morning on an errand about the flower guild," she said. "i'm going back to the country this afternoon. i've been waiting to see you because i wanted to tell you something." she paused. david was conscious that she was making an effort to keep her anxiety out of her voice and manner. "it's not at all important," she went on. "just a little matter about mr. morton. oh, it's nothing wrong," she added quickly, noticing that david had suddenly paled. "i'm sure nothing unpleasant is going to develop. but i wanted you to know it, so that if there was any little difficulty, you wouldn't be taken by surprise." david's pulses stopped. "yes?" he said. "yes?" she had become very white. "it's about the money of the boys' farm committee. day before yesterday morning mr. haddon went to the third national bank to arrange for withdrawing the funds he had deposited in mr. morton's name. he found--mr. morton had withdrawn it." "yes?" "please remember, i'm sure nothing's wrong. of course mr. haddon acted immediately. he called a meeting of the committee; they decided to make a quiet investigation at once. father told me about it. so far they haven't found the money, but of course they will. the worst part is, the newspapers have somehow learned that five thousand dollars is missing from the mission. the sum is not so large, but for it to disappear in connection with a place like this--you can see what a great scandal the papers are scenting? several reporters were here just a little while ago. i sent them upstairs to mr. haddon." he stared at her dizzily. his plan was come to naught. morton's shame was about to be trumpeted over the city. the people of st. christopher's were about to topple back into the abyss. "what is mr. haddon doing upstairs?" "it occurred to him that possibly mr. morton had put the money in the safe in his study. i'm certain the money's there. mr. haddon's up in the study with a safe-opening expert." for a moment david sat muted by the impending disaster. then he rose. "come--let's go up!" he said. they mounted the stairs in silence, and in the corridor leading to morton's apartment passed half a dozen reporters. david unlocked the apartment with his latch-key, led the way to morton's study, and pushed open its door. before the safe sat a heavily spectacled man carefully turning its dial-plate and knob. on one side of him stood dr. thorn, his formal features pale, and on the other side gray-haired mr. haddon, his hard, lean face, milled with financial wrinkles like a dollar's edge, as expressionless as though he was in the midst of a wall street crisis. mr. haddon recognised the presence of david and helen with a slight nod, but dr. thorn stepped to david's side. "you've heard about it?" he asked in an agitated voice. "yes--miss chambers told me." at that moment the safe door swung open. "there you are," said the spectacled man, with a complacent little grunt. mr. haddon dismissed the man and knelt before the safe. helen and dr. thorn leaned over him, and david, still stunned by the suddenness of the catastrophe, looked whitely on from behind them. a minute, and mr. haddon's search was over. he looked about at the others. "it's not here," he said quietly. a noise at the door caused all to turn in that direction. there stood the reporters. they had edged into the apartment as the safe-expert had gone out. "will you gentlemen please wait outside!" requested mr. haddon, sharply. "we've got to hurry to catch the afternoon editions," one spoke up. "can't you give us the main facts right now? you've got 'em all--i just heard you say the money wasn't here." "i'll see you in a few minutes," answered mr. haddon, and brusquely pressed them before him into the corridor. when he reëntered the study he looked at them all grimly. "there's absolutely no keeping this from the papers," he said. "but there must still be another place the money can be!" helen cried. "i've investigated every other place," returned mr. haddon, in the calm voice of finality. "the safe was the last possibility." they all three stared at each other. it was dr. thorn that spoke the thought of all. "then the worst we feared--is true?" mr. haddon nodded. "it must be." david could not speak, nor think--could only lean sickened against the desk. the exposure of morton--and a thousand times worse, the ruin of st. christopher's--both inevitable! "won't you please look again!" helen cried, with desperate hope. "perhaps you overlooked something." mr. haddon knelt once more, and slowly fluttered the pages of the books and scrutinised each scrap of paper. soon he paused, and studied a slip he had come upon. then he rose, and david saw at the head of the slip, "cash account of boys' summer home." it was the paper he had prepared to hide morton's embezzlement. mr. haddon's steady eyes took in david and dr. thorn. "could anybody have been in the safe since mr. morton's death?" "it's hardly possible," returned dr. thorn. "mr. aldrich has been in the study almost constantly." mr. haddon's eyes fastened on david; a quick gleam came into them. david, unnerved as he was, could not keep his face from twitching. there was a long silence. then mr. haddon asked quietly: "could you have been in the safe, mr. aldrich?" david did not recognise whither the question led. "why, yes," he said mechanically. mr. haddon held out the slip of paper. "according to this memorandum in mr. morton's hand, the money was in the safe the day before his death." his eyes screwed into david. "perhaps you can suggest to us what became of the money." david stared at him blankly. "the money--was there--when morton died!" said dr. thorn amazedly. he looked from one man to the other. then understanding came into his face, and a great relief. "you mean--mr. aldrich--took it?" "i took it!" david repeated stupidly. he turned slowly to helen. her white face, with its wide eyes and parted lips, and the sudden look of fear she held upon him, cleared his head, made him see where he was. "i did not take the money!" he cried. "no, of course not," returned mr. haddon grimly. "but who did?" "if i'd taken it, wouldn't i have disappeared? would i have been such a fool as to have stayed here to be caught?" "if the thief had run away, that would have fastened the guilt on him at once. to remain here, hoping to throw suspicion on mr. morton--this was the cleverest course." "i did not take the money!" david cried desperately. "it's a lie!" helen moved to david's side, and gazed straight into mr. haddon's accusing face. indignation was replacing her astoundment; her cheeks were tingeing with red. "what, would you condemn a man upon mere guess-work!" she cried. "merely because the money is not there, is that proof that mr. aldrich took it? do you call this justice, mr. haddon?" mr. haddon's look did not alter, and he did not reply. the opinion of womankind he had ever considered negligible. helen turned to david and gave him her hand. "i believe you." he thanked her with a look. "it must have been mr. morton," she said. her words first thrilled him. then suddenly they rang out as a knell. if he threw off the guilt, it must fall on morton; if morton were publicly guilty, then the hundreds of the mission-- mr. haddon's hard voice broke in, changeless belief in its tone: "mr. aldrich took it." david looked at mr. haddon, looked whitely at helen. and then the great thought was conceived, struggled dizzily, painfully, into birth. he stood shivering, awed, before it.... he slowly turned and walked to a window and gazed down into the street, filled with children hurrying home from school. the thought spoke to him in vivid flashes. he had no relatives, almost no friends. he loved helen chambers; but he was nobody and a beggar. he had not done anything--perhaps could never do anything--and even if he did, his work would probably be of little worth. he had wanted his life to be of service; had wanted to sell it, as it were, for the largest good he could perform. well, here were the people of st. christopher's toppling over the edge of destruction. here was his great bargain--the chance to sell his life for the highest price. as to what he had done with the five thousand, which of course he'd be asked--well, an evening of gambling would be a sufficient explanation. he turned about. "well?" said mr. haddon. david avoided helen's look. he felt himself borne upward to the apex of life. "yes ... i took it," he said. book ii the closed road chapter i david re-enters the world the history of the next four years of david's life is contained in the daily programme of croton prison. at six o'clock the rising gong sounded; david rolled out of his iron cot, washed himself at the faucet in his cell, and got into his striped trousers and striped jacket. at six-thirty he lock-stepped, with a long line of fellows, to a breakfast of hash, bread and coffee. at seven he marched to shoe factory or foundry, where he laboured till twelve, when the programme called him to dinner. at one he marched back to work; at half-past five he marched to his cell, where his supper of bread and coffee was thrust in to him through a wicket. he read or paced up and down till nine, when the going out of his light sent him into his iron cot. multiply this by fifteen hundred and the product is david's prison life. it would be untruth to say that a sense of the good he was doing sustained a passionate happiness in david through all these years. moments of exaltation were rare; they were the sun-blooming peaks in an expanse of life that was otherwise low and gloom-hung. david had always understood that prisons in their object were not only punitive--they were reformative. but all his intelligence could not see any strong influence that tended to rouse and strengthen the inmates' better part. occasional and perfunctory words from chaplains could not do it. monotonous work, to which they were lock-stepped, from which they were lock-stepped, and which was directed and performed in the lock-step's deadening spirit, this could not do it. constant silence, while eating, marching, working, could not do it. the removal for a week of a man's light because he had spoken to a neighbour, this could not do it. nor could a day's or two days' confinement, on the charge of "shamming" when too ill to work, in an utterly black dungeon on a bit of bread and a few swallows of water. rather this routine, these rules, enforced unthinkingly, without sympathy, had an opposite energy. david felt himself being made unintelligent--being made hard, bitter, vindictive--felt himself being dehumanised. one day as he sat at dinner with a couple of hundred mates, silent, signalling for food with upraised fingers, a man and woman who were being escorted about the prison by the warden, came into the room. the woman studied for several minutes these first prisoners she had ever seen--then the dumb rows heard her exclaim: "why look,--they're human!" to david the discovery was hardly less astonishing. he had been forgetting the fact. yes, moments of exaltation were rare. more frequent were the dark times when the callousness and stupidity of some of the regulations enraged him, when the weight of all the walls seemed to lie upon his chest--when he frantically felt he must have light and air, or die;--and he cursed his own foolishness, and would have traded the truth to the people of st. christopher's for his freedom. prometheus must often have repented his gift of fire. but the momentum of david's resolve carried him through these black stretches; and during his normal prison mood, which was the restless gloom of all caged animals, his mind was in control and held him to his bargain. but always there was with him a great fear. was morton's memory retaining its potency over the people of st. christopher's? were they striving to hold to their old ideals, or were they gradually loosening their grip and slipping back into the old easy ways of improvidence and dissipation? perhaps, even now, they were entirely back, and his four years had paid for nothing. the long day carrying the liquid iron to the moulds would have been easier, the long night in the black cell would have been calmer, had he had assurance that his sacrifice was fulfilling its aim. but never a word came from st. christopher's through those heavy walls. and always he thought of helen chambers. he could never forget the stare of her white face when he had acknowledged his guilt, how she had first tried to speak, then turned slowly and walked away. the four walls of his mind were hung with that picture; wherever he turned, he saw it. he had wanted to spring after her and whisper his innocence, but there had flashed up a realisation that his plan was feasible only with a perfect secrecy, and to admit one person to his confidence might be to admit the world. besides, she might not believe him. so, silent, he had let her walk from the room with his guilt. he often wondered if she ever thought of him. if she did, it was doubtless only to despise him. more likely, he had passed from her mind. perhaps she was married. that thought wrung him. he tried to still the heavy pain by looking at the impassable gulf that lay between them, and by telling himself it was natural and fitting that she should have married. he wondered what her husband was like, and if she were happy. but the walls were mute. long before his release he had decided he should settle in new york. life would be easiest, he knew, if he were to lose himself in a new part of the world. but st. christopher's, where four prison years and the balance of his dishonoured life were invested, was in new york; helen chambers was in new york. the rest of the world had no like attractions; it could hide him--that was all. but save at first while he was gaining a foothold--and could he not then lose himself among new york's millions?--he did not desire to hide himself. he did not care to hide himself because the prison had given him a message, and this message he intended speaking publicly. he had pondered long over society's treatment of the man who breaks its law. that treatment seemed to him absurd, illogical. it would have been laughably grotesque in its deforming incompetence had it not been directed at human beings. it was a treatment bounded on one side by negligence, on the other by severity. it maimed souls, killed souls; it was criminal. david's sense of justice and humanity demanded that he should protest against this great criminal--our prison system. he knew it as prison reformers did not--from the inside. he could speak from his heart. and as soon as he had gained a foothold, he would begin. at length came the day of his liberation, and he found himself back in new york, twenty dollars, his prison savings, in his pocket, the exhaustion of prison life in his flesh, and in his heart a determination to conquer the world. he knew but one part of new york--the neighbourhood of st. christopher's mission--and that part drew him because of his interest in it, and also because he must live cheaply and there life was on a cheap scale. he hesitated to settle in the immediate neighbourhood; but he could settle just without its edge, where he could look on, and perhaps pass unnoticed. he at length found a room on the fifth floor of a dingy tenement, seven or eight blocks from the mission. the room had a chair, a bed, a promise of weekly change of sheets, and a backyard view composed of clothes-lines, bannered with the block's underwear, and the rear of a solid row of dreary tenements. five years before the room would have been unbearable; now it was luxury, for it was freedom. after paying the first month's rent of five dollars and buying a few dishes, a little gas stove and a small supply of groceries, he had nine dollars left with which to face the world and make it give him place. if he spent twenty cents a day for food, and spent not a cent for other purposes, he could eat for six weeks. but before then rent would again be due. four weeks he could stand out, no longer; by then he must have won a foothold. well, he would do it. by the time he had made a cupboard out of the soap-box the grocer had given him and had set his room in order, dusk was falling into the gulch-like backyard and the opposite wall was springing into light at a hundred windows. he ate a dinner from his slender store, using his bed as a chair and his chair as a table, and after its signs were cleared away he sat down and gazed across the court into the privacy of five strata of homes. he saw, framed by the windows, collarless men and bare-armed women sitting with their children at table; the odours of a hundred different dinners, entangled into one odour, filled his nostrils; family talk, and the rumble and clatter of the always-crowded streets, came to his ears as a composite murmuring that was an inarticulate summary of life. but none of these impressions reached his mind; that had slipped away to helen chambers. the question that had asked itself ten thousand times repeated itself again: was she married? he tried to tell himself quietly that it was none of his affair, could make no difference to him--but the suspense of four years was not to be strangled by self-restraint. the desire to know the truth, to see her if he could, mounted to an impulse there was no withstanding. and another oft-asked question also came to him. was the mission still a power for good? and this also roused an uncontrollable desire to know the truth. he left his room and set out for st. christopher's, wondering if he would be recognised. but, though often morton's guest, he had mixed but little in the affairs of the mission, and not many from the hard-working neighbourhood had been able to attend his brief trial; so he was known by sight to few, and no one now gave him a second look. as he came into the old streets, with here and there a little shop that had been owned by one of morton's followers, and here and there among the passers-by a face that was vaguely familiar, his suspense grew and grew--till, when st. christopher's loomed before him, it seemed his suspense would almost choke him. he paused across the street in the shadow of a tenement entrance, and stared over at the club-house and at the chapel with its spire rising into the rain-presaging night. light streamed from the open door of the chapel; on the club-house window-sills were the indistinct shapes of flower-boxes; boys and girls, young men and women, parents, were entering the club-house. everything seemed just the same. but were the people the same? had his four years been squandered--or spent to glorious purpose? he slipped across the street and looked cautiously into the chapel. there were the three rows of pews, the plain pulpit bearing an open bible, behind which morton used to preach, the organ at which a stooped girl, a shirt-waist maker, used to play the hymns and lead the congregation's singing--all just as in other days. the chapel was empty, save the corner of a rear pew in which sat a troubled, poorly-dressed woman, and a gray-haired man whose clerical coat made david guess him to be morton's successor. the voice of his advice was gentle and persuasive, and when the woman's rising to go revealed his shaven face, david saw that it had strength and kindness, spirit and humility--saw that the man's vigour remained despite his obvious sixty years. david entered the chapel and approached the director of the mission. the old man held out his hand. "i'm glad to see you," he said. "is there anything in which i can serve you?" david strove for a casual manner, but prison had made him too worn, too nervous, to act a part requiring so much control. "i was just--going by," he stammered, taking the hand. "i used to know the mission--years ago--when mr. morton was here. so i came in." "ah, then you knew mr. morton!" said the director warmly. "a--a little." "even to know him a little was a great privilege," he said with conviction, admiration. "he was a wonderful man!" david braced himself for one of the two great questions of his last four years. "does the neighbourhood still remember him?" "just as though he were still here," the director answered, with the enthusiasm an unjealous older brother may feel for the family genius. "he has left an influence that amounts to a living, inspiring presence. that influence, more than anything i have done, has kept the people just as earnest for truer manhood and womanhood as when he left them. i feel that i am only the assistant. he is still the real head." david got away as quickly as he could, a mighty, quivering warmth within him. on the other side of the street, he gave a parting glance over his shoulder at the chapel. he stopped short, and stared. while they had talked, the director of the mission had turned on additional lights, among which had been an arc-light before the great stained-glass window at the street end of the chapel. the window was now a splendid glow of red and blue and purple, and printed upon its colours was this legend: [illustration] david stared at the window, weak, dizzy. there was a momentary pang of bitterness that morton should be so honoured, and he be what he was. then the glow that had possessed him in the chapel flowed back upon him in even greater warmth. the window seemed to david, in his then mood, to be the perpetuation in glowing colour of morton's influence. it seemed to throw forth into the street, upon the chance passer-by, the inspiration of morton's life. yes,--his four years had counted! half an hour later he took his stand against the shadowed stoop of an empty mansion in madison avenue, and gazed across at a great square three-story stone house, with a bulging conservatory running along its left side--the only residence in the block that had re-opened for the autumn. all thought of morton and the mission was gone from him. his mind was filled only with the other great fear of his last four years. if she came out of the door he watched, if he glimpsed her beneath a window shade, then probably she still belonged in her father's house--was still unmarried. a cold drizzle had begun to fall. he drew his head down into his upturned collar, and though his weakened body shivered, he noticed neither the rain nor the protest of his flesh. his whole being was directed at the house across the way. slow minute followed slow minute. the door did not open, and he saw no one inside the windows. his heart beat as though it would shake his body apart. the sum of four years suspense so weakened him that he could hardly stand. yet he stood and waited, waited; and he realised more keenly than ever how dear she was to him--though to possess her was beyond his wildest dreams, and perhaps he might not even speak to her again. at length a nearby steeple called the hour of ten. presently a carriage began to turn in towards the opposite sidewalk. david, all a-tremble, his great suspense now at its climax, stepped forth from his shadow. the carriage stopped before the chambers home. he hurried across the street, and a dozen paces away from the carriage he stooped and made pretense of tying his shoe-lace; but all the while his eyes were on the carriage door, which the footman had thrown open. first a man stepped forth, back to david, and raised an umbrella. who? the next instant david caught the profile. it was mr. chambers. after him came an ample, middle-aged woman, brilliantly attired--mrs. bosworth, mr. chambers's widowed sister, who had been living with him since his wife's death. a moment later mr. chambers was helping a second woman from the carriage. the umbrella cut her face from david's gaze, but there was no mistaking her. so she still lived in the house of her father! she paused an instant to speak to the footman. for a second a new fear lived in david: might she not come with her father to her father's house, and still be married? but at the second's end the fear was destroyed by the conventional three-word response of the footman. david watched her go up the steps, her face hidden by the umbrella, watched her enter and the door close behind her. then, collapsed by the vast relief which followed upon his vast suspense, he sank down upon the stoop, and the three words of the footman maintained a thrilling iteration in his ears. the three words were: "thank you, _miss_." chapter ii a call from a neighbour the next morning david was awakened by the ringing of a gong. he tumbled out of bed in order to be ready for the march to breakfast at half past six; and he had begun to dress before it dawned upon him that he was a free man, and that the ringing was a prank a four-year habit had played upon him--a prank that, by the way, was to be repeated every morning for many a week to come. he slipped back into bed, and lay there considering what he should first do. he had to find work quickly, but he felt his four walled years had earned him a holiday--one day in which to re-acquaint himself with freedom. so, after he had eaten, he felt his way down the dark, heavy-aired stairways, stepped through the doorway, and then paused in wonderment. all was as fresh, as marvellous, as yesterday. the narrow street was a bustle of freedom--pounding carts, school-going boys and girls, playing children, marketing wives--no stripes, no lock-steps, no guards. and the yellow sun! he held his bleached face up to it, as though he would press against its sympathetic warmth; and he sucked deeply of the september air. and the colours!--the reds and whites and browns of the children, the occasional green of a plant on a window sill, the clear blue of the strip of sky at the street's top. he had almost forgotten there were colours other than stripes, the gray of stone walls, the black of steel bars. and how calmly the streetful of people took these marvels! at first he expected the people he threaded among to look into his face, see his prison record there, draw away from him, perhaps taunt him with "thief." but no one even noticed him, and gradually this fear began to fade from him. as he was crossing the bowery, a car clanged at his back. he frantically leaped, with a cry, to the sidewalk, and leaned against a column of the elevated railroad--panting, exhausted, heart pounding. he had not before known how weak, nerveless, prison had made him. he found, as he continued his way, that the sidewalk undulated like a ship's deck beneath his giddy legs; he found himself afraid of traffic-crowded corners that women and children unhesitatingly crossed; he found himself stopping and staring with intensest interest at the common-places of street life--at hurrying men, at darting newsboys, at rushing street cars and clattering trucks, at whatever moved where it willed. old-timers had told him of the dazedness, the fear, the interest, of the first free days, but he was unprepared for the palpitant acuteness of his every sensation. after a time, in broadway, he chanced to look into a mirror-backed show-window where luminous satins were displayed. between two smirking waxen women in sheeny drapery he saw that which brought him to a pause and set him gazing. it was his full-length self, which he had not seen these four years. the figure was gaunt, a mere framework for his shoddy, prison-made suit; the skin of his face snugly fitted itself to the bones; his eyes were sunken, large; his hair, which he uncovered, had here and there a line of gray. he was startled. but he had courage for the future; and after a few moments he said to himself aloud, a habit prison had given him: "a few weeks, and you won't know yourself." as he walked on, the consciousness of freedom swelled within him. if he desired, he could speak to the man ahead of him, could laugh, could stand still, could walk where he wished, and no guard to report on him and no warden to subtract from his "good time." more than once, under cover of the rattle of an elevated train, he shouted at his voice's top in pure extravagance of feeling; and once in fifth avenue, forgetting himself, he flung his arms wide and laughed joyously--to be suddenly restored to convention by the hurried approach of a policeman. all day he watched this strange new life--much of the time sitting in parks, for the unaccustomed walking wearied him. when he came to his tenement's door--flanked on one side by a saloon, and on the other side by a little grocery store before which sat a basket of shrunken potatoes and a few withered cabbages and beans, and in which supplies could be bought by the pennyworth--a hand fell upon his arm and a voice called out with wheezy cordiality: "good evenin', friend." david glanced about. beside him was a loose bundle of old humanity, wrapped up in and held together by a very seedy coat and stained, baggy trousers frayed at the bottom. the face was covered with gray bristle and gullied with wrinkles. over one eye hung a greasy green flap; the other eye was watery and red. "good evening," returned david. "excuse me for stoppin' you," said the old man with an ingratiating smile that unlipped half a dozen brown teeth. "but we're neighbours, and i thought we ought to get acquainted. me an' my girl lives just across the hall from you. morgan's my name--old jimmie morgan." "aldrich is mine. i suppose i'll see you again. good evening." and david, eager to get away from the nodding old man, started through the door. his neighbour stepped quickly before him, and put a stubby hand against his chest. "wait a minute, mr. aldrich. i'm in a little trouble. i've got to get some groceries, and my daughter--she carries our money--she ain't in. i wonder if you couldn't loan me fifty cents till mornin'?" david knew that fifty cents loaned to him was fifty cents lost. he shook his head. "mebbe i could get along on twenty-five then. say a quarter." "i really can't spare it," said david, and tried to press by. "well, then make it a dime," wheedled the old man, stopping him again. "you'll never miss a dime, friend. come, what's a dime to a young man like you. and it'll get me a bowl of soup and a cup of coffee. that'll help an old man like me a lot, for katie won't be home till mornin'." merely to free himself david drew out one of his precious dimes. "thank you, thank you!" the dirty, wrinkled hand closed tightly upon the coin. "you've saved an old man from goin' hungry to bed." david again turned to enter. he almost ran against a slight, neatly-dressed girl, apparently about twenty, who was just coming out of the doorway. her black eyes were gleaming, and there were red spots in her cheeks. at sight of her the old man started to hurry away. "jim morgan! you come here!" she commanded in a ringing voice. the old man stopped, and came slowly toward her with a hang-dog look. "you've been borrowing money of that man!" she declared. "no i ain't. we were talkin'--talkin' politics. honest, katie. we were just talkin' politics." "you were begging money!" she turned her sharp eyes upon david. "wasn't he?" the old man winked frantically for help with his red eye, and started to slip the dime into his pocket. the girl, without waiting for david's answer, wheeled about so quickly that she caught both the signal for help and the move of the hand pocketward. she pointed at the hand. "stop that! now open it up!" "nothin' in it, katie," whined her father. "open that hand!" it slowly opened, and in the centre of the grimy palm lay the dime. "give it back to him," the girl ordered. old jimmie handed david the coin. the girl's eyes blazed. her wrath burst forth. "now, sir, you will borrow money, will you!" her sharp voice rang out. "you will lie to me about it, will you!" david hurried inside and heard no more. he made a pot of coffee and warmed half a can of baked beans over his little gas stove. of this crude meal his stomach would accept little. his condition should have had the delicate and nourishing food that is served an invalid. his appetite longingly remembered meals of other days: the fruit, the eggs on crisp toast, the golden-brown coffee, at breakfast; the soup, the roast, the vegetables, the dessert, at dinner--linen, china, service, food, all dainty. he turned from the meals his imagination saw to the meal upon his chair-table. he smiled whimsically. "sir," he said reprovingly to his appetite, "you're too ambitious." he had placed his can of condensed milk and bit of butter out on the fire-escape, which he, adopting the east side's custom, used as an ice-chest, and had put his washed dishes into the soap-box cupboard, when he was startled by a knock. wondering who could be calling on him, he threw open the door. kate morgan stood before him. "i want to see you a minute. may i come in?" "certainly." david bowed and motioned her in. her quick eyes noted the bow and the gesture. he drew his one chair into the open space beside the bed. "won't you please be seated?" she sat down, rested one arm on the corner of his battered wash-stand and crossed her knees. david seated himself on the edge of the bed. he had a better view of her than when he had seen her in the doorway, and he could hardly believe she was the daughter of the old man who had stopped him. she wore a yellow dress of some cheap goods, with bands of bright red about the bottom of the skirt, bands of red about the short loose sleeves that left the arms bare from the elbows, a red girdle, and about the shoulders a red fulness. the dress was almost barbaric in its colouring, yet it suited her dark face, with its brilliant black eyes. there was neither embarrassment nor over-boldness in the face; rather the composure of the woman who is acting naturally. there was a touch of hardness about the mouth and eyes, and a touch of cynicism; in ten years, david guessed, those qualities would have sculptured themselves deep into her features. but it was an alert, clear, almost pretty face--would have been decidedly pretty, in a sharp way, had the hair not been combed into a tower of a pompadour that exaggerated her face's thinness. she did not lose an instant in speaking her errand. "i want you to promise not to lend my father a cent," she began in a concise voice. "i have to ask that of every new person that moves in the house. he's an old soak. i don't dare give him a cent. but he borrows whenever he can, and if he gets enough it's delirium tremens." "he told me he wanted a bowl of soup and a cup of coffee," david said in excuse of himself. "soup and coffee! huh! whiskey. that's all he thinks of--whiskey. his idea of god is a bartender that keeps setting out the drinks and never strikes you for the price. if i give him a decent suit of clothes, it's pawned and he's drunk. he used to pawn the things from the house--but he don't do that any more! he mustn't have a cent. that's why i've come to ask you to turn him down the next time he tries to touch you for one of his 'loans.'" "that's an easy promise," david answered with a smile. "thanks." her business was done, but she did not rise. her swift eyes ran over the furnishings of the room--the bed, the crippled wash-stand, with its chipped bowl and broken-lipped pitcher, the dishes in the soap-box cupboard, the gas stove under the bed, the bare, splintered floor, the walls from which the blue kalsomine was flaking--ran over david's shapeless clothes. then they stopped on his face. "you're a queer bird," she said abruptly. he started. "queer?" she gave a little jerk of a nod. "you didn't always live in a room like this, nor wear them kind of clothes. and you didn't learn your manners over on the bowery neither. what's the matter? up against it?" david stared at her. "don't you think there may be another queer bird in the room?" he suggested. she was not rebuffed, but for a second she studied his face with an even sharper glance, in which there was the least glint of suspicion. "you mean me," she said. "i live across the hall with my father. when i'm at work i'm a maid in swell families--sometimes a nurse girl. nothing queer about that." "no--o," he said hesitatingly. she returned to the attack. "what do you do?" "i'm looking for work." "what have you worked at?" the directness with which she moved at what interested her might have amused david had that directness not been searching for what he desired for the present to conceal. "i only came to new york yesterday," he said evasively. "but you've been in new york before?" "not for several years." she was getting too close. "i'm a very stupid subject for talk," he said quickly. "now you--you must have had some very interesting experiences in the homes of the rich. you saw the rich from the inside. tell me about them." she was not swerved an instant from her point. "you're very interesting. the first minute i saw you i spotted you for a queer one to be living in a place like this. what've you been doing since you were in new york before?" david could not hold back a flush; no evasive reply was waiting at his lips. several seconds passed. "pardon me, but don't you think you're a little too curious?" he said with an effort. her penetrating eyes had not left him. now understanding flashed into her face. she emitted a low whistle. "so that's it, is it!" she exclaimed, her voice softer than it had been. "so you've been sent away, and just got out. and you're starting in to try the honesty game." there was no foiling her quick penetration. he nodded his head. he had wondered how the world would receive him. she was the first member of the free world he had met who had learned his prison record, and he waited, chokingly, her action. he expected her face to harden accusingly--expected her to rise, speak despisingly and march coldly out. "well, you are up against it good and hard," she said slowly. there was sympathy in her voice. the sympathy startled him; he warmed to her. but straightway it entered his mind that she would hasten to spread her discovery, and to live in the house might then be to live amid insult. "you have committed burglary on my mind--you have stolen my secret," he said sharply. "oh, but i'll never tell," she quickly returned. and david, looking at her clear face, found himself believing her. she tried with quick questions to break into his past, but he blocked her with silence. after a time she glanced at a watch upon her breast, rose and reached for the door-knob. but david sprang quickly forward. "allow me," he said, and opened the door for her. the courtesy did not go unnoticed. "you must have been a real 'gun,' a regular high-flyer, in your good days," she whispered. "why?" "oh, your kind of manners don't grow on cheap crooks." she held out her hand. "well, i wish you luck. come over and see me sometime. good night." when he had closed the door david sat down and fell to musing over his visitor. she was dressed rather too showily, but she was not coarse. she was bold, but not brazen; hers seemed the boldness, the directness, of a child or a savage. perhaps, in this quality, she was not grown up, or not yet civilised. he wondered how a maid or a nurse girl could support a father on her earnings, as he inferred she did. he wondered how she had so quickly divined that he was fresh from prison. he remembered a yellow stain near the ends of the first two fingers of her left hand; cigarettes; and the stain made him wonder, too. and he wondered at her manner--sharp, no whit of coquetry, a touch of frank good fellow-ship at the last. presently a hand which had been casually fumbling in the inside pocket of his coat drew out a folded paper. it was the bulletin of the work at st. christopher's, and he now remembered that the director of the mission (dr. joseph franklin, the bulletin gave his name) had handed it to him the night before and that he had mechanically thrust it into his pocket and forgotten it. he began to look it through with pride; in a sense it was the record of _his_ work. he read the schedule of religious services, classes, boys' clubs and girls' clubs. toward the middle of the latter list this item stopped him short: whittier club--members aged to . meets wednesday evenings. leader, miss helen chambers. this was wednesday evening. david put on his hat, and ten minutes later, his coat collar turned up, his slouch hat pulled down, he was standing in the dark doorway of a tenement, his eyes fastened on the club-house entrance twenty yards down the street. after what seemed an endless time, she appeared. dr. franklin was with her, evidently to escort her to her car. david gazed at her, as they came toward his doorway, with all the intensity of his great love. she was tall, almost as tall as dr. franklin; and she had that grace of carriage, that firm poise of bearing, which express a noble, healthy womanhood under perfect self-control. david had not seen her face last night; and he now kept his eyes upon it, waiting till it should come within the white circle of the street lamp near the doorway. when the lamp lifted the shadows from her face, a great thrill ran through him. ah, how beautiful it was!--beauty of contour and colour, yes, but here the fleshly beauty, which so often is merely flesh for flesh's sake, was the beautiful expression of a beautiful soul. there was a high dignity in the face, and understanding, and womanly tenderness. it was a face that for seven years had to him summed up the richest, rarest womanhood. she passed so close that he could have touched her, but he flattened himself within the doorway's shadow. after she had gone by he leaned out and followed her with his hungry eyes. could he ever, ever win her respect? chapter iii the superfluous man the next day the search for work had to be begun, and david felt himself squarely against the beginning of his new career as an ex-convict. he saw this career, not as a part to be abandoned when it wearied him, like a rôle assumed for a season by a sociological investigator, but as the part he must play, must _live_, to the end of his days. his immediate struggle, his whole future, would not be one whit other than if he were in truth the thief the world had branded him. writing for the magazines was not to be thought of, for he needed quick, certain money. he was friendless; he had no profession; he had no trade; he had never held a position; he had no experience of a commercial value. all in all his equipment for facing the world, barring his education, was identical with the equipment of the average discharged convict. david did not look forward into this career with resignation. there was nothing of the willing martyr in him. the life he must follow was not going to be easy; it would demand his all of courage and endurance. he longed to stand before the world a clean man, and the longing was at times a fierce rebellion. he had bought a great good, but he was paying therefor a bitter price, and every day of his life he must pay the price anew. yet he faced the future with determination, if not with happiness. he believed that earnest work and earnest living would regain the world's respect--would slowly force the world to yield him place. he tried to forbid himself thinking of helen chambers as having the slightest part in his future. she was a thousand times farther removed than four years before, when his name had been fair, and then the space of the universe had stretched between them. and yet the desire some day to appear well in her eyes was after all the strongest motive, stronger even than the instinct of self-preservation, that urged him upon the long, uphill struggle. david had determined first to seek work on a newspaper. some of the things he had written in that far-away time beyond the prison, came back to him. they were not bad--they were really good! if he could get on one of the papers, and could manage to hold his place for a few months without his story being learned, perhaps by then he would have so proved his worth that he would be retained despite his prison record. he would do his best! who knew?--life might have a very endurable place for him somewhere in the years ahead. he grew almost excited as he gazed at the dimly-seen success. before starting out upon his first try at fortune, he gazed into the mirror above his wash-stand and for a long time studied his face, wondering if the men he was going to meet would read his record there. the forehead was broad, and about the grey eyes and the wide mouth were the little puckering wrinkles that announce the dreamer. the chin was the chin of the man of will. in health the face would have suggested a rare combination of idealism and will-power; but now there brooded over it that hesitancy, that blanched gloom, which come from living within the dark shadows of prison. no one looking at his thin, slightly stooping figure would have ever guessed that here was dave aldrich, the great half-back of ' . after filling the forenoon by writing for his belongings, which his new jersey landlady had promised to keep till he should send for them, and by dreaming of the future, david set out for the hurly-burly that seethes within and without the sky-supporting buildings of park row. at the entrance to the first newspaper office, his courage suddenly all flowed from him. would he be recognised as a jail-bird? his ill-fitting prison-made suit, that clothed him in reproach, that burned him--was it not an announcement of his record? he turned away in panic. but he had to go in, and fiercely mastering his throbbing agitation, he returned to the office and entered. the city editor, a sharp-faced young man, after hearing that david had no newspaper experience, snapped out in a quick voice, "sorry, for i need a man--but i've got no time to break in a green hand," and the following instant was shouting to a "copy" boy for proofs. at the next place the slip on which david had been required to write his business, came back to him with the two added words, "nothing doing." at the third place the returned slip bore the statement, "got all the men i need." the fourth editor, whom he saw, gave him a short negative. the fifth editor sent word by mouth of the office boy that his staff was full. it required all david's determination to mount to the sixth office, that of an able and aggressively respectable paper. the boy who took in his request to the city editor returned at once and led david across a large dingy room, with littered floor, and grime-streaked windows. young men, coatless, high-geared, sat at desks scribbling with pencils and clicking typewriters; boys, answering the quick cries of "copy!" scurried about through the heavy tobacco smoke. the room was a rectangular solid of bustling intensity. the city editor, who occupied a corner of the room, waved david to a chair. again david repeated the formula of his desire, and again he was asked his experience. "i've had no experience on a paper," he replied, "but i've done a lot of writing in a private way." "you're practically a new man, then." the editor thought for a moment, and david eagerly watched his face. it was business-like, but kindly. "why, i guess i might take the trouble to lick a man into shape--if he seemed to have the right stuff in him. anyhow, i might give you a trial. but you're not very young to be just beginning the game. what've you been working at?" david felt the guilty colour warming his cheeks. "writing." "all the time?" he tried to speak naturally. "the last few years i have been trying to do some--manual work." "here in the city?" "no. out of town." the editor could not but notice david's flushed face and its strained look. he eyed david narrowly, and his brow wrinkled in thought. david strove to force a natural look upon his face. "aldrich," the editor said to himself, "aldrich--david aldrich you said. that sounds familiar. where have i heard that in the last few days?" "i don't know," said david, his lips dry; but he thought of a paragraph he had read on the ride from prison announcing his discharge. "o-o-h!" said the editor, and his eyes sharpened. david understood. the editor had also remembered the paragraph. the editor's gaze dropped to his desk, as though embarrassed. "i'm very sorry--but i'm afraid i can't use you after all. i really don't need any men. but i hope you'll find something without trouble." the blow was gently delivered, but it was still a blow--one that, as he walked dazedly from the office, made his courage totter. he told himself that he had counted upon just such experiences as this, that he had planned for a month of rebuffs--and gradually, as the evening wore away, he preached spirit back into himself. however, he would make no further attempts to find newspaper work. even should he be so lucky as to secure a place, some one of the score or two score fellow-workers would be certain to connect him with the newly-liberated convict, as the editor had done, and then--discharge. for the present, it would be better to seek a position among the large business houses. at dawn the next morning david was reading the "help wanted" columns of a newspaper, and two hours later he was sitting in the office of the superintendent of the shipping department of a wholesale dress-goods house that had advertised for a shipping clerk. the superintendent scrutinised david's face, making david feel that the prison mark was appearing, like an image on a developing plate, and then demanded: "why do you want a job like this? this ain't your class." "because i need it." "had any experience as a shipping clerk?" "no. but i'm mighty willing to learn." "well, let's see your letters from previous employers." david hesitated. "i have none." he felt the red proclamation of his record begin to burn in his cheeks. "have none!" the superintendent looked suspicious. "no references at all?" david shook his head; his cheeks flamed redder. "who've you worked for?" to mention here his four years of writing would be absurd. "no one," he stammered--"that is, i've had no business experience." the superintendent's reply came out sharply: "no experience--no references--can't use you. good morning." david stumbled out, not noticing the relief his dejection gave the other applicants waiting outside the office. he saw the difficulty of his situation with a new, startling clearness; the superintendent had summed it up with business-like conciseness--"no experience, no references." a sudden fear, a sudden consternation, clutched him. would he ever be able to pass that great wall standing between him and a position?--that wall builded of his prison record, of no experience, of no references? whether or not, he must try. he hurried to another office that had advertised for help, and to another, and to another--and so on for days. usually he was turned away because there was really no work, but several times because to the penetrating questions he could return only his distrust-rousing answers. his courage tried to escape; but he caught it and held it, desperately. saturday evening an expressman delivered a box sent by his old new jersey landlady. the charge was a dollar, and the dollar's payment was a tragedy. the box contained only a few of the things he had left behind him. his landlady, though kind, was careless, his things had become scattered during the four years, and the contents of the box were all she had been able to get together. there were a few of his books, a few photographs and prints, a few ornaments, a pair of boxing gloves, most of his manuscripts, and an overcoat. the overcoat at least was worth having, with cool weather but a few weeks off. the second week was an elaboration of the first few days, and the first half of the third was the same. then he had three days' work at addressing envelopes--girls' work and boys' work, for which he was paid eighty-five cents a day. then the search again. at length he found a place. it was in a small department store in one hundred and twenty-fifth street--a store that in fifteen years had developed from a notion shop occupying a mere hole in the wall. the proprietor was one of those men who do not see the master chances, the thousands and the millions, but who see a multitude of little chances, the pennies and the dollars. he squeezed his creditors, his customers, his shopgirls--kept open later than other stores to squeeze a few last drops of profit from the day. his success was the sum of thousands of petty advantages. when david came to him he saw that here was a man in cruel need. the labour of a man in cruel need is yours at your own price--is, in fact, a bargain. he had had enough experience with bargains in merchandise to know that when a rarely good bargain offers it is best to snap it up and not question too closely into the reasons for its cheapness. so he offered david a place in the kitchen furnishing department. salary, five dollars a week. david accepted. his first week's salary, minus ten cents a day for car fare and ten cents for luncheon, amounted to three dollars and eighty cents. he had begun a second month in his room, and his landlady, seeing how poor he was, again demanded her rent in advance. after paying her, david had a dollar and a quarter left. but he had a job--a poor job, but still a job. the following sunday afternoon, as he sat at his window, pretending to read, but in reality staring dreamily down through the spider's-web of clothes lines into the deep, dreary backyard, kate morgan came in. it was the first time he had seen her since her visit of a month before, though he had called several times at her flat, to be told by her father that she was away at work. "good afternoon!" she cried, and giving him her hand she marched in before he could speak. "take the chair yourself this time," she said, and sat down on the bed, her feet hanging clear. she wore a black tailored suit and a beplumed hat. evidently she had just come in from walking, for the warm colour of the late october air was in her cheeks. there was no doubt about it this time--she was pretty. and there was a lightness, a sauciness, in her manner that had not showed on her previous visit. "well, sir, how've you been?" she demanded, after david had taken the chair. he tried, somewhat heavily, to fit his mood to hers. "i can't say i've cornered the happiness market. you haven't noticed a rise in quotations, have you?" "nope," she said, swinging her feet--and david had to see that they were very shapely and in neat patent leather shoes, and that the ankles were very trim. "i just got back this morning. how's dad been? and how many loans has he stuck you for?" "to be exact, he's tried seven times and failed seven times." "good! but dad's better now than he used to be. when i first began to go away i'd leave him enough money to last for a week, or till i'd be home again. he always went off on a spree--never failed. so now i mail him thirty cents every day. it ain't quite enough to live decent on, and at the same time it ain't quite enough to get drunk on. see? so i guess he keeps pretty sober." "i guess he does," said david, not quite able to restrain a smile. "but how've you been?" "me?" she shook her head with a doleful little air. "i've been having a regular hell of a time. i've been nurse girl in a swell house on fifth avenue. it's built out of gold and diamonds and such stuff. the missus was one of these society head-liners. you know the sort--good shape, good complexion, swell dresses, and that's all. somebody made the dresses, her make-up box made her complexion, and her corset made her figure. soul, heart, brain--pst! once every day or two she'd come to the nursery just long enough to rub a bit of her complexion on the children's faces. and she treated me like i wasn't there. oh, but wouldn't i like to wring her neck! but i'll get square with her, you bet!" she gave a grimly threatening jerk of her little head, then smiled again. "but what's your luck? got a job yet?" "yes." "what doing?" david shrunk from telling this brilliantly-dressed creature how lowly his work was, but he had to confess. "clerking in a department store." "how much do you make?" that awful inquisitiveness! "five dollars a week." her black eyes stared at him, then suddenly she leaned back and laughed. he reddened. she straightened up, bent forward till her elbows rested on her knees, and gazed into his face. "five--dollars--a--week!" she said. "and you a king crook!" she shook her head wonderingly. "and, please sir, how do you like being honest at five dollars a week?" "hardly as well as i would at six," he answered, trying to speak lightly. she was silent for almost a minute, her eyes incredulously on him. "mr. david aldrich," she remarked slowly, "you're a fool!" he was startled--and his wonderment about her returned. "i've often said the same," he agreed. "but do you mind telling why you think so?" "a man that can make his hundreds a week, works for his living at five." he assumed such innocence of appearance as he could command. "i'm a little surprised to hear this, especially from a woman who also works for her living." her look of wonderment gave place to a queer little smile. "hum!" she straightened up. "d'you mind if i smoke?" she asked abruptly, drawing a silver cigarette case from a pocket of her skirt. the women david had known had not smoked. but he said "no" and accepted a cigarette when she offered him the open box. she struck a match, held the flame first to him, then lit her own cigarette. she drew deeply. "to-day's the first time i've dared smoke for a month. ah, but it's good!" she stared again at david, and now with that penetrating gaze of her last visit. a minute passed. david grew very uncomfortable. then she announced abruptly: "you're on the dead level!" the queer little smile came back. "yes, i work for my living. and i keep my flat, keep my father, dress myself, have plenty of money for good times, and put aside enough so that i can knock off work whenever i like--all on a maid's twenty a month. and how do you suppose i do it?" david wondered what was coming next, but did not answer. a fear that had been creeping into his mind suddenly grew into definiteness. "people around here think i've got a rich old lover," she said. he felt a sinking at his heart. this had been his sudden fear. and she took the shame in such a matter-of-fact way! "i let 'em think so, for that explains everything to them. but they're wrong." the queer smile broadened. "what do you think?" "i could never guess," said david. she leaned forward, and her voice lowered to a whisper. "you and me--we're in the same trade." "what! you're a----" he hesitated. "that's it," she said. "a nurse girl or a maid in a rich house sees a lot of things lying around. or, if she wants to, she can stay for two or three weeks or a month, learn where the valuables are kept, make a plan of the house, get hold of keys. then she gets a pal, and they clean the place out. that's me." there was a glow of excitement in her eyes, and pride, and a triumphant sense of having startled him. for the moment he merely stared at her, could make no response. "there, we know each other now," she said, and took several puffs at her cigarette. "but ain't you tired of the honesty life at five per?" "no." "you soon will be!" she declared. "then you'll go back to the old thing. all the other boys that try the honesty stunt do. they're up against too stiff a proposition. you're way out of my class, but when you get tired, mebbe i can put something in your way that won't be so bad. by-the-by, you ain't ready for something now, are you?" a vindictive look came into her face. "mrs. make-up-box gets it next. and she'll get it, too!" "i'm going to stick it out," said david. she gave a little sniff. "we'll see!" her eyes swept the room, fell upon the little heap of photographs and prints lying on the box in which he had stacked his books. "why don't you put those things up?" "i don't know--i just haven't." "we'll do it now." she slipped to her feet, went out the door, and two minutes later reappeared with a handful of tacks, a hammer, and a white curtain. she took off her hat and coat, and for the next half hour she was tacking the pictures upon the scaling walls--first trying them here and there, occasionally asking david's advice and ignoring it if it did not please her. then she ordered him upon the chair, and made him, under her direction, fasten the curtain into place. "well, things look a little better," she said when all was done, surveying the room. then, without so much as "by your leave," she washed her hands in his wash-bowl and arranged her hair before his mirror, chatting all the while. hat and coat on again, she opened the door. "mister," she said, nodding her head and smiling a keen little smile, "i give you two months. then--the old way!" she closed the door and was gone. on the third morning of the new week, as david left the elevated station to walk the few blocks to the store, he noticed that a policeman's eyes were on him. david thought he recognised the officer as one who had been present at his trial, and hurried uneasily away. a block further on he glanced over his shoulder; the policeman was following. the uneasiness became apprehension, and the apprehension would have become consternation had he, a little after entering the store, seen the officer also come in. a few minutes after he had begun to dust his tinware, he was summoned to the office. the proprietor's little pig-eyes were gleaming, his great pig-jowl flushing. he sprang to his full height, which was near david's shoulder. "you dirty, lying, cut-throat of a convict!" he roared. "get out o' my store!" "what's that?" gasped david. the proprietor shook a fat fist at david's face. "get out o' here! you came to me as an honest man! i hired you as an honest man! you deceived me. you're nothing but a dirty, sneaking jail-bird! you came in here just to get a chance to rob me! you'd have done it, too, if a policeman hadn't give me a tip as to what you are! get out o' here, or i'll have you kicked out!" david grew afire with wrath. it was useless to plead for his place; but there was a dollar and seventy cents due him. for that he choked his anger down. "very well, i'll go," he said, as calmly as he could. "but first pay me for my two days." "not one red cent!" david's two days' pay was one of the kind of atoms of which his success was composed. "not a cent!" he roared. "you say another word about pay, and i'll have you arrested for the things you've already stolen from me. now clear out!--you low, thieving jail-bird you!" a wild rage, the eruptive sum of long insults and suffering, burst forth in david. he took one step forward, and his open hand smacked explosively upon the flesh-padded cheek of the proprietor. the proprietor tottered, sputteringly recovered his balance--and again the hand smacked with a sharp report. when the proprietor gained his balance a second time, it was to find david towering over him, face inflamed, fists clenched. "my money, or by god i'll smash your head off!" david cried furiously. the proprietor blanched, trembled. a fear-impelled hand drew silver from his pocket and gave david the amount. david glanced at it, and obeying an impulse that he was to regret again and again, flung the hard coins straight into the man's face. then he walked out of the office, secured his hat from the cloak-room near by, and marched through the store. at the door the frantic proprietor, who had rushed ahead to call for the police, tried to block david's way, but david bore down upon him with so menacing a look that he stepped aside. fortunately the street was filled with people, and the next instant david was lost among them. for half an hour he aimlessly walked the streets with his wrath. then the realisation of his situation began to cool him. however unjust had been his discharge, and however brutish its manner, the great fact was not thereby changed. he was discharged, and he had in his pocket less than a dollar. then the wearying, heart-breaking search for work began anew. that he had found one situation made him think he might find another, but at the end of a week he had met with nothing but failure. he still kept on the march, but the spirit was gone out of him. the search for work became purely an affair of the muscles: his legs carried him from office to office, at each his lips repeated their request. muscle, that was all--muscle whipped to action by the fear of starvation. but though his spirit was worn weak, his resentment was not. he raged--at times frantically. why did the world refuse work to the poor beings the prisons sent back to it? some of them were inspired by good resolutions; to them life was dear; they were worth saving. how did the world expect them to live and be honest, if it refused them means of life and of honesty? he could find but one answer to his questions: the world was selfish, heartless. he cursed the world, and he cursed the god that made it. and he cursed himself, his foolishness that had brought him here; and he cursed morton and st. christopher's. at times he burned with the desire to clear his name, come what might to the people of the mission. it is so hard for one, unfed, cold, hopeless, to be heroic. but his judgment told him that the truth from him would go unbelieved; and the great resolution behind his bargain, the long habit of silence, also restrained his declaration of innocence. but even amid these gloomy weeks there were gentler periods. he often slipped at night into the neighbourhood of st. christopher's, and stealthily gazed at the club-house, its windows aglow with friendliness to all but himself; at the chapel, with the morton memorial window sending its warm inspiration into the streets--as it did, so he had learned, throughout the night. he told himself, when he thus stood with his work before his eyes, that he should be content. his struggles were hard--yes; his suffering was great. but that his suffering, the suffering of one man, should hold these hundreds a little nearer to the plain decencies of life, to truth and purity and honour, a little nearer to god--this was worth while. yes, the bargain was a great bargain. and every wednesday evening he looked forth from the shadow of a doorway upon helen chambers as she left the mission. and at the moment she passed his door he each time felt the same supreme pang. three feet away!--as far away as the stars! chapter iv an uninvited guest black day followed black day, and grudged penny followed grudged penny, till at length there came a day when it seemed the blackness could become no blacker and when his remaining pennies were less than his fingers. on this day he sat long at his window, his wasted, despair-tightened face looking out upon the patched undergarments swinging from lines and upon the boxes and barrels and bottles and papers and rags that littered the deep bottom of the yard, grimly thinking over the prophecy of kate morgan. one of the two months she had given his honesty was gone. by the time the second had passed----? he shiveringly wondered. this day he ate no evening meal. for a week now one meal had been his daily ration, and that meal pitiably poor and pitiably small. he sat about his room till his nickel clock--which kate morgan had brought in one day and deposited upon the wash-stand with her undebatable air of finality--reported quarter past nine, when he rose and walked down into the street. it had been one of those warm days that sometimes come in mid-november--benign messages of remembrance, as it were, from departed summer--and now the people of the tenements filled the streets, for on the packed east side the street, on warm days, is parlor to the parent and the lover, and nursery to the child. as david stepped forth he did not notice that he was watched by a pair of keen, boyish eyes from under the rim of a battered slouch hat, and had he noticed he would not have been aware that these same eyes had watched him before. it was a wednesday evening and david, entangled among the people, like a vessel in a sargasso sea, pursued a slow course toward the mission, never observing that a boy in a battered hat followed him a way then turned back. he took his place in the shadowed doorway and waited for helen chambers to appear. in a few minutes she came out, dr. franklin with her as usual. there was also a second man, gray-haired and slightly stooped, whom david recognised as an older brother of mr. chambers, and whom he remembered as a clear-visioned, gentle old philosopher greatly loved by his niece. as they passed, david leaned from the shadow to follow her with his eyes, and the light from the street lamp fell across his face. dr. franklin, chancing this instant to look in david's direction, excused himself to helen and her uncle, who moved forward a few paces, and stepped to the doorway. david pressed frantically back into the shadow. "good evening," said dr. franklin, holding out a firm, cordial hand, into which david laid his limp fingers. "i've seen you about several times since the evening you called. i've been looking for a chance to invite you to the mission." david hardly heard him. he was thinking, wildly, "suppose she should step to his side? suppose he should draw me into the light?" it was a moment of blissful, agonising consternation. "perhaps i'll come," he managed to whisper. he feared lest his whisper had reached her, and lest she had recognised his voice. but she did not look around. "i shall expect you. good night." dr. franklin rejoined helen and her uncle, and david's hearing, which strained after him, heard him explain as they moved away: "a man who came to the mission in mr. morton's time. he often stands about the mission, looking at it, but he never comes in." as soon as they were out of sight david, a-tremble at the narrowness of his escape, slipped from the door and hurried away. as he went, the old question besieged him. if, a minute ago, he had been drawn into the light, would she have spoken to him? and if she had, would it not have been coldly, with disdain? by the time he reached his tenement he had regained part of his lost composure. as he slipped the key into his door, he heard a sudden scrambling sound within. all his senses were instantly called to alertness. he threw open the door, and sprang into the darkened room. in the same instant a vague figure leaped through the open window out upon the landing of the fire-escape. david crossed the little room at a bound, caught the coat-tails of the escaping figure, dragged it backwards. the figure turned like a flash, threw something over david's head--a sack, david thought--sprang upon david, and tied the something round his neck with a fierce embrace. david staggered backward under the weight of his adversary, and the two went to the floor in the narrow space between the bed and the wall. instantly the figure, with a jerk and a catlike squirm, tried to break away, but david's arms, gripped about its body, held it fast. then it resumed its choking embrace of david's neck. the sack about his head was heavy; the air hardly came through it. he began to gasp. he tried frantically to throw the figure off, but it held its place. then one hand fell upon a mop of hair. he clutched it and pushed fiercely upward. the embrace broke, and two fists began to beat his face through the sack. an instant later david managed to scramble to his feet and throw off the sack--and he then saw that the writhing, kicking figure he had captured reached midway between his waist and shoulders. his right hand still fastened in his captive's hair, david lighted the gas. there, at the end of his arm, was a boy with the figure of fourteen and the face of twenty. his clothes, baggy and torn, were for the latter age; the trousers were rolled up six years at the bottom. the face was wrinkled in a scowl, and the eyes gleamed defiance. he was panting heavily. on the floor lay what david had thought was a sack; it was his own overcoat. "why you're nothing but a boy!" david cried. "a boy! nuttin'! if i'd been in form, i'd 'a' showed you!" david locked the door, cut off escape by standing before the window, and disentangled his fingers from the boy's locks. he then saw that the boy's dirty yellow hair flowed upward from his forehead in a cow-lick. the boy put his hands in his pockets and continued his defiant stare. "now, sir, what were you doing in here?" david demanded. "what you t'ink?" the boy returned coolly. "you t'ink i come to collect de rent?" "you tried to steal my coat." "gee, you're wise! how'd you guess it?" david regarded the little fellow steadily for a minute or more. he now noticed that the figure before him was very thin, and he remembered that once the embrace had been broken the boy had been a mere child even to his own weak strength. "what did you want that coat for?" he asked. "it's like dis, cul," the boy answered in a tone of confidence. "i owns a swell clo'es-joint on fift' avenoo, an' i'm out gittin' in me fall stock." "what's your name?" david demanded. "reggie vanderbilt." david did not try another question. he scrutinised the boy in silence, wondering what he should do with this young thief who, instead of showing the proper caught-in-the-act penitence, persisted in wearing the air of one who is master of the situation. david now took note that the boy's coat-collar was turned up and that the coat was held closed by a button near the throat and a safety pin at the bottom. the gaping front of the coat showed him a white line. he stepped forward, and with a quick hand loosened the button at the throat. it was as he had guessed--nothing but a mere rag of an undershirt that left the chest half bare--and the bare chest was rippled with ribs. "keep out o' dere!" the boy snapped, jerking away. david was silent; then he said accusingly: "you're hungry!" "well, if i am--it's me own bellyache!" "you tried to take that coat because you're hungry?" "i did, did i?" "didn't you?" "oh, come stop jabbin' me in de ear wid your questions," the boy returned sharply. "what you t'ink i took it for? to buy me goil a automobile?" he was silent for several moments, his bright eyes on david; then he threw off his defiant look. "hungry?" he sniffed. "you don't know what de woid means! me--well, me belly don't have to look it up in no dictionary. i ain't chawed nuttin' but wind for a mont'." "you were going to sell it?" "nix. pawn it." david looked from the boy to the coat, and from the coat to the boy. one hand, in his pocket, mechanically fingered his fortune--seven coppers. after a minute he picked up the coat, put it across his arm, and opened the door. "come on," he said. the boy did not budge. "where you goin' to take me?" he asked suspiciously. "nowhere. you're going to take me." "where?" "to the pawnshop," said david. the boy gave a sneer of disgust, and an outward push with an open, dirty hand. "oh, say now, cul, don't feed me dat infant's food! d'you t'ink i can't see t'rough dat steer? i'm wise to where--to de first cop!" he shuffled from his place against the wall. "well, you got me. come on. let's go." he stepped through the door and stood quietly till david had the key in the lock. then suddenly he darted toward the stairway. david sprang after him and caught his coat-tail just as he was taking three stairs at one step. david fastened his right hand upon the boy's sleeve, and side by side they marched down the four flights of stairs and into the street. "now take me to the pawnshop," david directed. the boy gave a knowing grunt but said nothing. he walked quietly along till they sighted a policeman standing on a corner half a block ahead. then he began to drag backward, and david had fairly to push him. as they came up to the officer david glanced down, and saw tenseness, alertness, fear--the look of the captured animal that watches for a chance to escape. the officer noticed david's grip on the boy's sleeve. "what you caught there?" he demanded. "just a friend of mine," david answered, and passed on. after a few paces the boy peered stealthily up, an uncomprehending look in his face. "say, pard, you're a queer guy!" he said; and a moment later he added: "you needn't hold me. i'll go wid you." david withdrew his hand, and a little further on the boy led david for the first time in his life into a pawnbroker's shop. david threw the coat upon the counter and asked for as much as could be advanced upon it. a large percentage of pledges are never redeemed, and the less advanced on an unredeemed pledge the greater the pawnbroker's profit when it is sold. the money-lender looked the coat over. "a dollar and a half," he said. "ah, git out wid your plunk and a half!" the boy cut in. "dat's stealin' widout takin' de risks. t'ree." "it ain't worth it," returned the usurer. the boy picked up the coat. "come on," he said to david, and started out. "two!" called out the pawnbroker. the boy walked on. "two and a half!" the boy returned and threw the coat upon the counter. twenty minutes later they were back in the room, and several grocery parcels lay on the bed. with a gaze that was three parts wonderment and one part suspicion, the boy watched david cooking over the gas stove. he made no reply to david's remarks save when one was necessary, and then his answer was no more than a monosyllable. at length the supper was ready. the table was the soap-box cupboard, so placed that one of them might have the edge of the bed as his chair. on this table were a can of condensed milk, a mound of sliced bread, and a cube of butter in its wooden dish. on the gas stove stood a frying-pan of eggs and bacon and a pot of coffee. after the boy, at david's invitation, had blackened a basin of water with his hands, they sat down. david gave the boy two eggs and several strips of bacon, and served himself a like portion. then they set to--one taste of eggs or bacon to three or four bites of bread. the boy never stopped, and david paused only to refill the coffee cups from time to time and to pour into them a pale string of condensed milk. and the boy never spoke, save once there oozed through his bread-stuffed mouth the information that his "belly was scairt most stiff." presently the boy's plate was clean to shininess--polished by pieces of bread with which he had rubbed up the last blotch of grease, the last smear of yellow. he looked over at the frying-pan in which was a fifth egg, and an extra strip of bacon. david caught the stare, and quickly turned the egg and bacon into the boy's plate. the boy looked from the plate to david. "you don't want it?" he asked fearfully. "no." he waited for no retraction. a few minutes later, after having finished the egg and meat and the remaining slices of bread, he leaned back with a profound sigh, and steadily regarded david. at length he said, abruptly: "me name's tom." "thanks," said david. "what's your last name?" the boy's defiance and suspicion had fallen from him. "jenks i calls meself. but i dunno. me old man had a lot o' names--jones, simmons, hall, an' some i forget. he changed 'em for his healt'--see? so i ain't wise to which me real name is." under david's questioning he became communicative about his history. "you had to be tough meat to live wid me old man. me mudder wasn't built to stand de wear and tear, an' about de time i was foist chased off to school, she went out o' biz. i stayed wid me old man till i was twelve. he hit de booze hard, an' kep' himself in form by poundin' me. he was hell. since den i been woikin' for meself." it was now twelve by kate morgan's clock--an hour past david's bed-time. "where do you live?" he asked tom. "in me clo'es," tom answered, grinning. david found himself liking that grin, which pulled the face to one side like a finger in a corner of the mouth. "where are you going to stay to-night?" "been askin' meself de same question." he stood up. "but i guess i'd better be chasin' meself so you can git to bed." "don't go just yet," said david. he looked at his narrow bed, then looked at tom. "suppose you stay with me to-night. i guess we can double up in the bed there." tom's mouth fell agape. "me--sleep--in--your--bed?" "of course--why not?" the boy sank back into his chair. "well, say, you are a queer guy!" he burst out. he stared at david, then slowly shook his head. "i won't do it. anyhow, i couldn't sleep in a bed. it'd keep me awake. but i'm up agin it, an' i'll stay if you'll let me sleep on de floor." "but there are no extra bed-clothes." "wouldn't want 'em if dere was. i'd be too hot." so it was settled. ten minutes later the room was dark, david was in bed, and tom was lying in the space between the bed's foot and the wall, with david's coat for extra covering and with browning's poems and a volume of molière as a pillow. there was deep silence for another ten minutes, then a cautious whisper rose from the foot of the bed. "are you asleep?" "no," said david. "say, why didn't you have me pinched?" the voice asked. no answer. the voice rose again. "why did you gimme dat extry egg?" no answer. "why did you ask me to stay here? ain't you afraid i'll skin out wid your clo'es?" again there was no answer. but presently david said: "better go to sleep, tom." there was a brief, deep silence; then once more the voice came from the foot of the bed. "i ain't just wise to you," said the voice, and there was a note of huskiness in it, "but say, pard, you gits my vote!" chapter v guest turns host the first object david's eyes fell upon when they opened the next morning was tom, sitting beside the bed, a look of waiting eagerness on his pinched face. the instant he saw david was awake he sprang up, and david perceived the boy had on one pair of the boxing-gloves. "can you use de mitts?" tom asked excitedly. "a little. i used to, that is," david answered, smiling at the odd figure the cow-lick, the eager face, the baggy coat and the big boxing-gloves combined to make of the boy. "come on, den!--git up! let's have a go." david slipped out of bed, and while he was dressing tom entertained him with an account of the corbett-britt fight, kinematograph pictures of which he had seen at one of the bowery theatres. tom danced about the narrow space between the bed and the wall, taking the part of one man, then of the other, giving blows and receiving blows, feinting, ducking, rushing and being rushed against imaginary ropes, and gasping out bits of description: "corbett breaks in an' lands like dis--jimmie hands back dis poke--corbett goes groggy--dey clinch--bing! bang! biff!--den jimmie gits in dis peach--corbett kerplunks--one, two, t'ree, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten--an' corbett's a has-been!" by this time david was half-dressed, and had drawn on the other pair of gloves. they gravely shook hands and drew apart. "be careful, and don't make me a has-been," david cautioned. "oh, mudder! fetch me a step-ladder!" besought tom, looking upward at david's head. he spat from one side of his mouth, drew his head down between his shoulders, rushed in, and began directing a fury of blows at david's stomach, which was near the level of his fists; and it took all david's long-rusted, but one-time considerable, skill to ward off the rapid fists. he made no attempt to get in a blow himself, and this soon drew on him tom's wrath. "i ain't no baby!" the boy yelled in disgust. "punch me!" david proceeded to land a few light touches about the slender body. "a-a-h, punch me!" tom gasped. "harder!" david obeyed, and landed a chest blow that sent tom to his back. david dropped to his knees beside him, alarmed, for the boy's face was white and dazed. but tom rose to an elbow and pushed david away. his lips moved silently, then with sound: "seven, eight, nine, ten." at "ten" he sprang to his feet and rushed at david again. but david threw up his hands. "that's enough for to-day. and finish fights are against the new york law." tom grumblingly drew off the gloves. after their breakfast of bread and coffee david asked him what he was going to do that day. "look for odd jobs." "where will you stay to-night?" "dunno." "how did you like the floor?" "bully!" "well, suppose you come back and try it again to-night. be here at six. will you?" "will i!" gasped the boy. "you can just bet your gran'mudder's suspenders dat i will!" when david returned at six, after another day of hopeless search, he found tom sitting in the doorway of the tenement. the boy's face lighted up with his lop-sided smile; david felt a quick glow at having someone to give him a welcoming look--even though that someone were only a ragged, stunted boy in an old slouch hat that from time to time slipped down and eclipsed the sharp face. they had dinner, and after it they set forth on a walk. david left the guidance to tom, and the boy led the way down the bowery, where, to the hellish music of elevated trains, and by the garish light that streamed from restaurants, pawnshops, music-halls and saloons, moved the all-night procession of thieves and thugs, cheap sports and cheap confidence men, gutter-rags of men and women, girls whose bold, roving eyes sought markets for their charms--all those whom we of sheltered morals are wont to consider the devil's irretrievable share, without thinking much, or caring much, as to why they should be his. tom's tongue maintained a constant commentary on everything they passed; to talk was clearly one of his delights. what he said was interesting, and was given a grotesque vivacity by his snappy diction of the streets; but david shivered again and again at the knowledge he had where he should have had ignorance. the boy was erudite in the wickedness of this part of the city. that innocent-looking second-hand store, which was run by the fat old woman in the doorway, was in reality a "fence;" that laundry was an opium den; in the back of that brilliantly-lighted club-room, whose windows were labelled "the three friends' association," there was a gambling joint; that saloon was the hang-out of a gang of men and women thieves; in that music hall, through whose open door they glimpsed a dancer in a red knee-skirt doing the high kick, the girls got their brief admirers drunk and picked their pockets;--and so on, and on, missing nothing that he should not have known. at chatham square they turned into the jewish quarter and shouldered homeward through narrow streets that from wall to wall were a distracting entanglement of playing children, baby carriages, families on door-steps, promenading lovers, hurrying men, arguing groups, flambeau-lighted pushcarts whose bent and bearded proprietors offered the chaotic crowd every commodity from cucumbers to clothes. the latter part of their walk took them by st. christopher's, through the glowing colours of the morton memorial window; and the mission came in for a few of tom's sentences. it was a great place to steal women's pocketbooks. "a lot o' swell ladies from fift' avenoo comes down dere to monkey wid de kids--hell knows what for. dere easy fruit. i pinched two or t'ree fat leathers dere meself." david marvelled at the boy's intimacy with wickedness, yet he understood it. evil was the one thing tom had had a chance to become acquainted with; it had for him the familiar face that virtue has for children raised amid happier circumstances. the conditions of its childhood, whether good or bad, are the normal conditions of life to the child. so to tom wickedness was normal; he talked of stealing, of gambling, of women, with the natural vivacity that another boy might have talked of his marbles. david saw, as definitely as the calendar sees to-morrow, the future of this boy if there were no influence counter to the influence that was now sweeping him toward his fate. he saw arrest (tom had boasted that he had been arrested once)--prison--a hardening of the boy's nature--a life of crime. he heard little of the rest of the boy's chatter, and presently he came to a decision--a very unpretentious decision, for he was poorer than poverty, and what confidence he once had in his personal influence had slipped away. but the little he could do for the boy, that he would do. "how would you like to stay with me for awhile, tom?" he asked when they were back in his room. "i can't offer you anything but the floor for a bed--and perhaps not that after a few weeks." "d'you mean i can stay wid you?" tom cried, springing up, his eyes a-gleam. "say, dat'll be great! we'll divide on de price! an' we'll have a little go wid de mitts ev'ry day!" "very well. but i want to place one condition on your staying. you're to be strictly honest with me, and you're not to steal. you understand?" the boy made a grimace. "all right--since you ask me. but say, you're queer!" the next morning david bought tom a red cotton sweater and advanced him a quarter with which to buy a stock of papers. two weeks passed, every day very much like the one before it. david found no work, and tom made but little. during the two weeks the rent fell due, and most of david's library went to a second-hand book dealer and the proceeds went to the landlady. then, two or three at a time, the rest of the books were carried to the second-hand store. at length there came a morning when there was not a cent, and when, to perfect the day's despair, david woke with a burning soreness throughout his body--the consequence of having been caught the day before in a cold rain and having walked for several hours in his wet clothes. he crawled out of bed, but soon crept in again. his muscles could make no search for work that day. tom proposed a doctor. david dismissed the suggestion; doctors required money. but, money or no money, tom saw there had to be one thing--food. he sat gazing for several minutes at the boxing-gloves, their last negotiable possession, which his favour had thus far kept out of the pawnshop; then with a set face he put them under his arm and walked out of the room. he returned with fifty cents. that night tom came home discouraged. he had hunted work all day, but no one wanted him. "dey all wanted to hire a good suit o' clo'es," he explained to david. but the next morning he seemed confident. "i t'ought of a place where i t'ink i can git a job," he said, as he started away after having prepared for david a breakfast that david's feverish lips could not touch. his confidence was well founded, for that evening he entered the room with an armload of bundles. "look at dis, will you!" he cried, dropping the parcels on the bed. "bread, an' butter, an' eggs, an' steak--ev'ryt'ing. you got to git well, now! you're goin' to git fat!" david in his surprise sat up in bed. "why, where did you get all those things?" "didn't i say i'd git a job? well, i did! in a big hardware store. i'm errand boy--ev'ryt'ing! de boss say, 'tom do dis; tom do dat.' i do 'em all, quick! de next minute i say to de boss, 'anyt'ing else?' he pays me six a week, i'm so quick." "but you've only worked a day. you haven't been paid already?" "sure. i hands de boss a piece o' talk: me mudder's sick, an' i needs ready coin bad. so he pays me a dollar ev'ry day." david made a mental note that later there must be a few more remarks on the subject of lying; but this was not the time to reprove tom's fib. he took the boy's hand in his hot, weak grasp. "you're mighty good to me, tom," he said, huskily. tom's face slipped to one side and twitched. his blinking eyes avoided david's gaze. "oh, dat's nuttin'," he gruffly returned. "nobody goes back on his pal." at the end of the first week of david's illness kate morgan returned home, having given up her position, and thenceforward she prepared most of his meals, chatted much with him, and lent him ten-cent novels. one result of their chats was that kate became strengthened in her conviction that david had been a thief of great skill and daring. contradiction availed him nothing. "your last haul was a big one--you told me so yourself," she would say. "and only the top-notchers have your kind of talk and manners." one day she returned to the matter of her former prophecy. "you've had enough of this," she said. "when you get out of bed, and get your strength back, you'll be at the old game again. you see!" during this time tom left for work regularly at half-past seven, and returned regularly at half-past six; and each evening he insisted on turning his dollar in to david, to be spent under david's direction. one night, as tom was giving frightful punishment to an imaginary opponent with the boxing gloves--he had redeemed them with part of his second day's pay--several coins slipped from his pocket and went ringing upon the floor. when tom rose from picking them up david's thin face was gazing at him in sorrowful accusation. the boy paled before the look. he was silent for a moment. then he asked mechanically, almost without breath: "what's de matter?" "haven't you been stealing from your employers?" david asked, in a low voice. the boy's colour came back. "no i ain't. honest." "then where did you get that money?" "why--why, kate morgan give it to me. she t'ought i might want to buy a few extry t'ings." david was unconvinced, but from principle he gave tom the benefit of the doubt. he had the instinctive masculine repugnance to accepting money from a woman; so a moment later, when kate came in, he said to her: "i want to thank for you for loaning that money to tom. i understand and appreciate--but i don't need the money. you must take it back." "what money?" she asked blankly. she turned about on tom, who was sitting at the foot of the bed where david could not see him. the boy's face was very white, and he was hardly breathing. he looked appealingly at her. kate's face darkened. "tom," she said sharply, "i told you not to tell that!" when she had gone, david called tom to him and took his hand. "i beg your pardon, tom," he said. tom made no answer at all. all these days, when david was not chatting with kate, or reading about the love of the fair mill-girl and the mill-owner's son, he was wanly staring into his future. he longed for the day when he could begin search again--and that day was also his great fear. often he lay thinking for hours of helen chambers. he thought of the lovers she must have; of her marriage that might not be far off; of the noble place she would have in life--honoured, admired, a doer of good. he would never meet her, never speak to her--never see her, save perhaps as he had been doing, from places of shadow. well ... he prayed that she might be happy! chapter vi tom is seen at work it was toward four o'clock of the day before thanksgiving--an afternoon of genial crispness. the low-hung sun, visible in the tenement districts only in westward streets, was softened to a ruddy disk by the light november haze. before the entrance to the club-house of the mission were massed two or three hundred children. here was childhood's every size; and here were rags and dirt--well-worn and well-mended decency--the cheap finery of poverty's aristocracy. there was much pushing and elbowing in a struggle to hold place or to gain nearer the entrance, and the elbowed and elbowing pelted each other with high-keyed words. but, on the whole, theirs was a holiday mood; the faces, lighted by the red sunlight that flowed eastward through the deep street, were eagerly expectant. across the way stood a boy, near the size of the largest children in the crowd. he wore a red sweater, and his hands were thrust into the pockets of baggy trousers voluminously rolled up at the bottom. he was watching the nervous group, with curiosity and a species of crafty meditation in his gleaming, black-browed eyes. it was tom. had david seen him there, he might have thought the boy had paused for a moment while out on an errand for his employer; but if tom was on an errand it was evidently not one of driving importance, for he remained standing in his place minute after minute. presently he crossed the street and drew up to a be-shawled girl whose black stockings were patched with white skin. he gave her a light jab with his elbow. "hey, sister--what's de row?" he asked. she turned to him a thin face that ordinarily must have been listless, but that was now quickened by excitement. "it's the children's thanksgiving party," she explained. "what you wearin' out de pavement for? why don't you go in?" "it ain't time for the doors to open yet." tom fell back and stood in the outskirts of the crowd, occasionally sliding the tip of his tongue through the long groove of his mouth, the same meditative look upon his watchful face. soon the door swung open and the crowd surged forward, to be halted by a low, ringing voice: "come, children!--please let's all get into line first, and march in orderly." two middle-aged women, enclosed in a subdued air of wealth, appeared through the door, and marched down the three steps and among the children. the boy's eyes closed to bright slits, his lips drew back from his teeth. the next instant a third woman appeared at the top of the steps--young, tall, fresh-looking, gracefully dignified. "ain't she a queen!" tom ejaculated to himself. she paused a moment and bent over to speak to a child, and the boy discovered that the rich, low-pitched voice he had heard was hers. as she stood so, the front of her tailored coat swung open, and the boy caught a glimpse of a silver-mounted bag, hooked with a silver clasp to her belt. a brighter gleam sprang into his eyes. she came down the steps, pushed in among the children, and with the two other women began to form the group into a double line. tom, with quick-squirming movements, edged through to the inner circle of the excited crowd, in which she was tightly buried up to her shoulders. at intervals he gave sharp upward glances at her face; she was entirely absorbed in making ordered lines of this entanglement. the rest of the time his eyes were fastened on her belt. presently the children were thrown turbulently about her by one of those waves of motion that sweep through crowds, and he managed to be pressed against her, the left side of his coat held open to shield off possible eyes. his right hand crept deftly forward under her coat--found the bag--loosened it. but suddenly a child's shoulder was jammed against his closed hand, driving it against the young woman's side, and for an instant holding it captive. she glanced down and saw tom's arm. instantly her firm grasp closed about the wrist and jerked out the hand, which dropped the bag. like a flash tom delivered a blow upon her wrist. she gave a sharp cry of pain, but her grip did not break. as he struck again she caught him about the wrist with her free hand. he jerked and twisted violently, but her hands had a firm, out-of-doors strength. he was prisoner. startled cries of "pick-pocket!" and "get a cop!" sprang up in the shrill voices of the children. the young woman, very pale but composed, looked sternly down at tom. "so, young man, i've caught you in the very act," she said slowly. he looked sullenly at the pavement. "what shall i do with you?" tom raised his shoulders. "dat's your biz," he answered gruffly. "arrest him!" "they've gone for a policeman!" shouted the childish voices. at this the boy sent up a quick glance at the young woman. despite its severity, kindness was in her face. he dropped his head, the sullenness seemed to go out of him, and his body began to tremble. the next instant his sleeve was against his face and he was blubbering. "i couldn't help it!" he sobbed. "you couldn't help it!" she exclaimed. "no! it was because o' me brudder. i've never stole before. honest, lady. but me poor brudder's been sick for t'ree mont's. i tried to find a job. i can't find none. our money's all gone, an' dere ain't no one but me. what can i do, lady?" the young woman looked at him questioningly. one of tom's sharp eyes peeped up at her, and saw sympathy struggling with unbelief. his blubbering increased. "it's de god's trut', lady! you can send me to hell, if it ain't. me brudder's sick--dere's nuttin' to eat, an' no medicine, an' nobody'd gimme work. so help me god!" at this instant the cry rose, "here's the policeman!" and almost at once the officer, pressing through the alley that opened among the children, had his hand on tom's collar. "so you was caught with the goods on," he cried, giving the boy a rough shake. "well, you chase along with me! come along, lady. it's only two blocks to the station." he jerked tom forward and started away. but the young woman, who still held one of tom's wrists, did not move. "will you wait, please?" she said quietly, a flash in her brown eyes. "what right have you to touch this boy?" "why, didn't he nab your pocket-book?" "i'm not saying," she said, looking at him very steadily. "you can arrest him only on complaint. i am the only one who can make a complaint. and i make none. please let go!" the policeman stared, but his hand dropped from tom's collar. "thank you," she said. she called one of the women to her side. "you can easily get on without me, mrs. hartwell," she said in a low voice. "the most important thing for me is to look into this boy's case. i'm going to have him take me to his brother--if there is a brother." tom overheard the last sentence. his face paled. "please don't take me to me brudder," he begged, a new ring in his voice. "he t'inks i'm honest. he'll t'row me out when you tell him! don't take me. what's de use? i told you de trut'." "if there is a brother, i want to talk with him," she answered. she requested the policeman to follow at a distance, and then asked tom to lead them to his home. "an' see that you take us to the right place, too," said the officer, with a warning look. "an' don't try to get away, for i'll be watchin' you." they started off. the young woman did not take tom's arm, for the same reason that she asked the policeman to follow several yards behind--that there might be no apparent capture, and no curious trailing crowd. tom's body palpitated with the dread of facing david--of what david would say to him, of the way david would look at him, but most of all of the change in david's attitude toward him, when these accusers should make plain to david that for two weeks he had been lying and stealing. he thought of escape--to get away from this young woman would be an easy matter; but a glance at the officer behind assured him that to try would mean merely the exchange of a kind captor for a harsh one. he preferred his chances with the young woman. so he led them on, his dread swelling with every step that brought them nearer to david. the policeman was left waiting at the tenement entrance. tom guided the young woman to his door, paused chokingly there, then led her into the little, dingy room, which was filled with a deeper hue of the coming twilight. david was lying in a doze, his face turned upward. she glanced at the bed, saw only that a man was sleeping there, then glanced about. the poverty of the room and the sick figure confirmed tom's story. she put a gentle hand on the boy's shoulder. "please waken your brother," she whispered. she stepped nearer the bed, but tom hung fearfully back. and now she saw for the first time david's face with some distinctness. she started--bent over him--stared down at the face on the pillow. she trembled backward a pace. one hand reached out and caught a chair. tom, seeing his chance to escape, slipped out and took refuge in the morgan's flat. the closing door roused david from his light sleep. he slowly opened his eyes--opened them upon the white face looking down upon him. the face seemed unreal, merely the face in a frequent dream. he closed his eyes, then opened them. the face was still there.... a great, wild, dizzy thrill went through him. slowly his haggard face rose from the pillow and he rested upon his elbow. "miss chambers!" he whispered, at length. for moments she could only stare back at him--the friend once admired, who by his own confession had stolen the money of tenement children, had gambled it away, had counted on the guilt falling upon morton. then her voice, straining at steadiness, came out, and haltingly spoke the nearest thing that did not require thought--an explanation of her presence. her words hardly reached his mind. there was only one thing, the dizzy, impossible fact--she was before him! his body was chill, fire; his mind was chaos. "you have been sick long?" she asked. he took control of himself by a supreme effort. "for two weeks. it's nothing--just the grip." "the boy told me for three months." "that's just an invention of tom's." he was conscious that, at his words, a look of doubt flitted across her face. she had wondered, as he had done, what her attitude toward him should be, if chance ever brought them together--what it should be if he were striving to live honorably--what, if he had slipped down and were living by thievery. at this moment, without conscious thought, her attitude was established. but, though decision was against him, he was helpless, in need. "is there anything at all that i can do for you?" she asked. he shook his head. if there was one person above all others from whom he could not accept service, that person was the woman he loved and who, he was certain, beneath her courteous control, must despise him. he had always known she believed him guilty, yet he had not half fore-measured the pain the eye-knowledge of it would give him. he longed to tell her the truth, as he often had longed before, and as he often would again--but he dared not, for to tell one person was to endanger, perhaps destroy, all the good of his act. besides, even if he were to tell, who would believe him? she? no. she would believe, as the rest of the world would believe, that his statement was a dastardly attempt to whiten himself by blackening the memory of his sainted friend. "you are certain i can do nothing?" "nothing," he said. "pardon me for being insistent, but--" she hesitated, white with the stress of the situation, then forced herself to go on--"the boy said that--that you had--nothing. are you sure i can not do some little thing for you?" at this moment david forgot that he was penniless, forgot that he had no work for the time when he left his bed, and probably could find none; remembered only how he loved this woman, and how low he was in her eyes. "the boy was not telling the truth," he said. "we have plenty. we need nothing--thank you." she could not speak of the past; her delicacy forbade her. she could not query into his present intentions; her judgment on him, subconsciously rendered upon circumstantial evidence, and supported by his past, made that unnecessary. and, furthermore, the whirling confusion within her made speech on both impossible. the one surface fact her emotions could allow her speech upon, that she had spoken of. she felt she must get away as quickly as she could. she rose. his wide, love-hungry eyes gathered in every one of her last motions and expressions. he did not know when, if ever, he would see her again. there was a sharp knock at the door. she held out her hand to him. he was not expecting this, but he laid his wasted hand tremblingly within it. "good-bye," she said. impulsively his soul reached out for some shred of her regard. "i'm trying to live honest now!" he burst out, in subdued agony. she regarded him an instant. "i'm glad of it," she said quietly. the sharp knock sounded once more. "good-bye," she repeated. "good-bye," he said in a dry whisper. she turned toward the door, his love-hungry eyes gathering in the last of her.... yes, he was utterly beyond the pale. chapter vii a new item in the bill of scorn but before helen's hand reached the knob, the door opened gently, pushing her to one side. kate morgan's head slipped cautiously in, and was followed at once by the rest of her body when she saw that david was awake. "i didn't hear an answer, so i thought you must be asleep," she said. "i looked in to see if i couldn't do something." the same instant her eyes fell upon helen. "oh!" she said sharply, and her glance, as quick as a snap-shot camera, took in every detail of helen's appearance, and besides read helen's character and her approximate position in the world. "i thought you were alone," she said to david. "miss chambers was just going," he returned. he heavily introduced the two. kate acknowledged the introduction with a little bow and a "pleased to meet you," and turned upon david a rapid, suspicious look, which demanded, "how do you come to know a woman of this kind?" "as mr. aldrich said, i was just going," helen remarked, reaching again for the door-knob. "so i wish you good afternoon." if david's wits had been about him, he would have seen the flash of sudden purpose in kate's face. "you're sure i can't do anything?" she asked quickly. "nothing," he returned. she turned to helen, her manner hesitating, and in it a touch of humility--the manner of one who is presuming greatly and knows she is presumptuous. had david been observant at this instant, he could have understood a thing over which he had often wondered--how this aggressive personality could hold positions where servility was the first requisite. "i was just going out too," she said with a little appealing smile. "if you don't mind, i'll--i'll walk with you." helen could not do other than acquiesce, and kate hurried from the room with, "i'll put on my hat and meet you in the hall in just a second." helen looked again upon david, and again he felt, beneath her perfect courtesy, an infinite, sorrowful disdain. "good-bye once more," she said; and the next instant the door had closed upon her. david gazed at the door in wide-eyed stupor ... and gazed ... and gazed. he had hardly moved, when, half an hour later, kate morgan re-entered. the humble bearing of her exit was gone. she was her usual sharp, free-and-easy self, and she had a keen little air of success. "that miss chambers is one of the swells, ain't she?" she asked, dropping into the chair and crossing her knees. david admitted that she was. "i sized her up that way the first second. i walked with her to a church-looking place, and told her a lot about myself--a maid, out of work and looking for a job, you know." she gave david a sly wink. "she didn't say much herself, and didn't seem to hear all i said. she's got some kind of a club over at that church place and she asked me to visit the club, and said perhaps later i might care to join. and she promised to see if some of her friends didn't need a maid." her keen little smile of triumph returned, and she added softly, "jobs in swell houses ain't so easy to pick up." "see here!" said david sharply, "are you planning a trick on one of miss chambers's friends?" instantly her face was guileless. "oh, she'll forget all about me," she said easily. "but see here yourself! how do you happen to know a woman of her sort? she told me how tom brought her up here"--she smiled at memory of the story--"but you must have known her before?" david had foreseen the question, and his wits had made ready an answer--for to bare to kate's inquisitive mind the truth of his one-time friendship with helen, this for a score of reasons he could not do. "she's one of these philanthropic women. she's interested in all sorts of queer people. i'm one of them. she's tried to reform me." if kate discredited his explanation she did not show her unbelief. she went on to question him about helen and his acquaintance with her, and it was a terrific strain on his invention to return plausible answers. he prayed that she would go, or stop, and when tom crept fearfully in a few minutes later, his arms full of bundles, the boy's appearance was as an answer to his prayer. she turned upon tom and began quizzing and joking him about his recent adventure, but the boy, hardly answering her, kept his eyes fixed upon david in guilty apprehension. presently, to the relief of david but not of tom, she went out. tom stared at david from near the window where he had stood all the while, pulsing with fear of the upbraiding, and perhaps something worse, that he knew was coming. david gazed back at him through narrow eyes that twitched at their corners. "tom," he said, "you lied to me about the job." "yes," the boy returned in a whisper. "and you lied to me about miss morgan loaning you money?" "yes." "and you've been stealing all this time." "yes. but--" david's thin right hand stretched across the faded comforter. tom came forward in slow wonderment and took it. david's other arm slipped about his shoulders and drew tom down upon the bed. "it was wrong--but, boy, what a heart you've got!" he said huskily. a tremor ran through tom's body, as though sobs were coming. then the body stiffened, as though sobs were being fought down. "is dat all you're goin' to say?" asked a gruff, wondering whisper. david's arm tightened. "what a heart you've got!" the thin body quivered again, and again stiffened. but the eruption was not to be controlled. sharp sobs exploded, then by a tense effort were subdued. tom struggled up, and david saw a scowling face, tightly clenched against the emotion that makes you lose caste to show. the boy's look was a defiant declaration of his manhood. suddenly another sob broke forth. his emotion was out--his manhood gone. he turned abruptly. "a-a-h, hell, pard!" he whispered fiercely, tremulously, then snatched his hat and rushed out. all the rest of the afternoon, and all during the time tom, who slipped back a little later, was shamefacedly busy with the dinner, and all during the evening, david thought of but one thing--helen chambers. he was dizzily weak; collapse had quickly followed the climacteric excitement of being beside her, of speaking to her. her visit had brought him no hope, no encouragement; if anything, an even blacker despair. before, he had only guessed how thoroughly she must despise him--her disdain had been but a vague quantity of his imagination. now her scorn had been before his own eyes. and he had seen its wideness, its deepness, even though the merest trifle of it showed upon the surface of her courtesy. a warm spring, though amid the serenity of overhanging leaves and of an embracing flower-set lawn, is full token of vast molten depths beneath the earth's controlled face. he did not feel resentful toward her. knowing only what she knew, she could not regard him other than she did. twice he had caught a look of doubt upon her face--once when he had spoken of his three months' illness as being an invention of tom's, and again when he had declared to her that he was trying to live honestly. the looks now recurred to him. they puzzled him. he strained long at their meaning; and then it entered him like a plunging knife, and he gasped with the sudden pain. she believed that the invention was _his_, that his honesty was a lie, that he was the master of tom's thefts! chapter viii the world's denial that night tom confessed he had privately saved a few dollars; and from the morgans' flat he brought david's overcoat and several of the other articles they had pawned. david's conscience demanded that the savings should not be used, and he wondered what right they had to their own property, redeemed with stolen money. but need conquered ethics. a day or two later the landlady demanded her rent, giving the choice between payment and the street; the money went to her. hunger pressed them; the redeemed articles began to return one by one to the pawnshop. in a few days the grip left david, and though still weak, he began to creep about the streets, looking for work. he believed success impossible--and immediately success came. the great stores were enlisting armies of temporary employes for the holiday season, and as at this time there are not enough first-class men and women to fill the ranks, they were accepting the second-class and the third and the tenth, examining no one closely. david heard of this chance, and, quailing at heart and expecting nothing, joined the line of applicants at the big department store of sumner & co. "what experience?" demanded the superintendent when david reached his desk. "none," said david. the superintendent glanced him over, saw that his face was good. "work for nine a week?" "yes." he scratched on a slip of paper and handed it to david. "start in at once in the check-room." david reeled away from the desk. that evening he and tom celebrated the advent of the impossible by eating twenty cents' worth of food; and his excited hope, fearful, daring, kept sleep from his eyes all night. he knew he was only a temporary man, but his hope reasoned that if he gave exceptional satisfaction he might be retained after the great post-christmas discharge. if retained permanently, he might work his way up in the store; and if he could remain only a few months, at least he would then be able to say, when seeking a new place and asked for his record, "i worked last for sumner and company; i refer you to them." his hope told him this position might prove the foothold he sought--and he determined to exert all that was in him to make it so. toward the end of his fourth day here, a woman for whom he had just laid upon the counter several packages she had checked two or three hours before, declared that a small parcel containing gloves was missing. weary and exasperated from her day among the jostling shoppers, she berated david in loud and angry voice. he suggested that possibly she had not checked the parcel, that she might have checked it in some other store, that perhaps she had ordered it delivered and had forgotten it, that possibly she had dropped it. nothing of the kind! she knew what she'd done with it! they'd been careless, and given it to some other woman! david, still very courteous, suggested that possibly it had been picked up and taken to the lost-and-found desk. she might inquire there. she would not! she had left it here! she had been robbed! she was departing ragefully, but david followed her and by using his best persuasion secured her grudging consent to wait till he himself should inquire at the lost-and-found desk. a few minutes later he returned with the package. she could say nothing more, for on the wrapper was the stamp of the desk and the hour the parcel had been turned in. she made a curt apology--it came hard, but still it was an apology--and went out. david had his reward. the superintendent over him, attracted by the woman's angry voice, had drawn near and looked on unseen. he now came forward. "that was well done, aldrich," he said. "i couldn't have handled her better myself." david grew warm. yes, this place might prove his foothold! a similar thought came to one of the other four men in the check-room. this man, a regular employe in the room, had recently been reproved several times for negligence and discourtesy, and he knew his hold on his place was precarious. the fear now struck him, at the great discharge might not he be sent away and this new man aldrich be kept? his wits set to work. he now remembered that david had evaded questions about his past. perhaps in it there was something that would change his chief's opinion. that night he followed david, warmed by his strengthened hope, from the store, and made inquiries in the little grocery shop in david's tenement. just a poor man who had been having a hard time--this was all he could learn. he hung around the tenement, and presently david came down and walked away. he followed. after several blocks david stopped before st. christopher's and gazed across the street at it. the shadowing man wondered. then it occurred to him that in there they might know something about this man aldrich. he entered. the next morning david was summoned to the office of the superintendent of his department. he was still aglow from the commendation of yesterday. but the superintendent's face struck him cold. "are you the david aldrich who stole five thousand dollars from st. christopher's mission?" the superintendent asked quietly. for a minute david could not speak. his foothold--lost! again the abyss! "i am," he said. but here was a man different from the other employer that had discharged him. here a plea might be effective. "i am," he repeated. and then he went on desperately: "but whatever i may have done, i'm honest now. as honest as any man. and i'll work hard--nothing will be too hard! i ask only a chance--any sort of a chance. a chance to earn my living!--a chance to remain honest!" "i have not acted hastily," the superintendent returned. "i have called up the mission and confirmed a report i had from another source. i know your whole story. your pay is in this envelope. that is all." david went out, dizzily falling ... falling ... falling into depths he felt were hopeless. and as he fell, in the sickened swirl of his mind one sudden thought stood forth, sharp, ironic: it was st. christopher's that had pushed him from his foothold, that had sent him plunging back into the abyss! once more began the search for work. but now fewer men were needed; there was time to question. but he tramped on, and on, looking always for a man who would not question, and always rebuffed--his clothes growing shabbier and shabbier, his shoes growing thinner, his little money wasting away--foot-sore, heart-sore, gripped by despair. he had chanced upon at intervals in the bowery and on broadway several of his croton prison-mates. all of them that had tried to be honest had been conquered by the difficulties, and had gone back to their old trades. he now, on his despairing walks, met two of them again, and both urged him to quit his foolish struggle and join with them. nothing during the three terrible months had revealed to him how his moral instincts had suffered as did the fact that he was now tempted. during these black days he saw little of tom. david did not want to talk, did not want to box, there were no meals; so the boy came home only to sleep. david was certain tom was stealing again, but he had not the heart for reproof. one can hardly seek to convert a thief to honesty when one can only offer starvation for reform. since helen chambers's call david had now and then had a faint hope that he might in some way hear from her. but no word came. he understood. she scorned him for the deed of four years ago, she believed he was now regularly practising theft and was directing the thefts and lies of a boy. her sympathy, her instinct to aid, might impel her to establish friendly relations with a repentant thief, but never with such a thief as she considered him. on his recovery david had resumed his wednesday evening visits to his accustomed doorway near st. christopher's. one night he saw that which poured a new agony into the cup he had thought already overbrimming. when helen chambers stepped from the mission a man he had never before seen was beside her--a tall man, of maturity and dignity. with the instant instinct of the lover he recognized here another lover; and he read, in a smiling glance she turned up as they passed the doorway, that this man had her admiration and her confidence. the next morning--the night had held the cup constantly to his lips--he went to the astor library and secured a copy of the _social register_. the man's name, as it had come to him across the darkness in helen's low resonant voice, was allen. there were many allens in the _register_, but only one that could possibly be the allen he had seen the night before. the _register's_ data, and deductions therefrom, informed david that mr. henry allen was forty, a member of half a dozen clubs, a man of wealth and social standing, and a lawyer of notable achievement. just the sort of husband helen chambers deserved! david closed the book and crept out. the evening of the day before he found work in the department store, kate morgan had told him she had just secured a new place. "did you get it through miss chambers?" he had suspiciously demanded. "no," she had answered, smiling defiantly. at parting she had said with sharp decision, standing at his door: "you've had enough of the honest life. you're going to be with me on this job. set that down." without giving him a chance to reply, she had stepped out and closed the door. he did not see her again till the middle of december, when one sunday evening she knocked, walked in and promptly sent tom on an errand. "i can only stay for two minutes," she said, speaking rapidly and in a low voice. "this is supposed to be my sunday off, but one of the maids is sick, so instead of a day i get an hour and a half. say, it's certainly a swell house. the family is just a man and his mother. just them two in a house big enough for a town--and think of the way we rub ribs down here! they've got carloads of silver, all of it solid; and the old lady has simply got barrels of jewelry. they're going to have a big blow-out on christmas, so none of the servants get a holiday then. but almost all of them are going to get new year's eve and new year's day out. the house will be almost empty new year's eve. that's when we'll clean it up." "you seem to have no doubt that i shall join you," david said dryly. "none at all!" she answered promptly. "well, i shall certainly not!" "you may think you'll not," she returned, undisturbed. "but you will. anybody but a fool would have come to his senses long ago. you've found you can't get a job. you've got to live. it's steal or starve. of course you're going to be in." "i shall not!" david returned doggedly. the days of the second half of the month moved slowly by. david continued walking the streets, occasionally daring to ask for work. his money was all gone, and everything was in the pawnshop except his overcoat, from which he hardly dared part at this season. his clothes were now so worn and shapeless as of themselves to insure the refusal of any place but that of a labourer. a labourer's place he possibly could have found--for a labourer's character is not questioned, since usually there is opportunity for him to steal no more than the value of a pick and shovel, and the wages left behind would more than cover such a loss. but for a labourer's work david had not a labourer's strength. he was forced down ... down; finally to those low services by which the dregs of the city's population keep a decrepit life within themselves. the odd jobs about saloons which are usually done for beer-payment he performed under the inspiration of the free-lunch counter. he peeled potatoes in bowery restaurants where dinners are fifteen cents, his work to pay for a meal; and when the dinner, which he had seen cooked in a filthy kitchen and served in half-washed dishes, was put before him, his stomach so revolted that he often turned from the untasted food and hurried into the street. he was at the bottom of the abyss. light, hope, were far above--the walls were smooth and high--his climbing strength was gone. he could not last much longer. he wondered, darkly, fearfully, what would be the end. yet he had not given up; there was still bitterness, rebellion, in him, and still an automatic, staggering courage. three days before new year's kate morgan called again. "i'm home to stay; my father's so sick i had to throw up my job," she said with a wink. she drew a ring of keys from the pocket of her skirt and silently held them before david's eyes; then, with a sharp little smile, she slipped them back, and drew out five sheets of paper, on each of which was a rough diagram of one of the floors of her late employer's house, with the doors and stairways marked and the location of the valuables. she explained the plans to him, adding details not charted, and on rising to go she handed him the sheets that he might familiarise himself with the house. "but i shall have nothing to do with this," he said desperately, thrusting back the papers. "oh, yes you will," she returned, putting her hands behind her back. he let the sheets fall to the floor, but she went out without giving them another glance. he looked at the papers, picked them up, stared at them whitely; and then, in a sort of frenzy, as though he would annihilate temptation, he tore the sheets into a thousand flakes and thrust them into his pocket. the next morning he set forth with the despairing energy of the man who has a new fear, who has fiercely summoned all his resources for a last struggle. but mid-winter is a season when even a skilled man of blameless reputation has trouble in finding work; for david there was no chance whatever. and then, in his extreme desperation, he determined on a new course--in asking for work he would openly tell his record. perhaps some one, out of sympathy for the struggle he was making, would give him an opportunity. he had thought of this plan before, but he had put it aside, because, he had reasoned, to avow himself a thief was to murder his chances. but the old course had brought him nothing; the new plan held at least a possibility. david walked the streets half the day before he could drive himself to try this plan. at length a superintendent consented to see him and listen to his story and appeal. "i appreciate your frankness," the superintendent replied, not unkindly. "but i am under strict orders on this point; i can take only men of the straightest records. but i hope you'll find something." david was left without courage to try the plan again that afternoon. the next day he could find no one willing to hear him. in the evening kate morgan called again. everything was in readiness for their venture of the following night, she told him. once more he declared that he would have nothing to do with the affair. but to himself his words sounded only of the lips; and his indignation did not quicken the least trifle when kate flung a dry laugh into his face. the following morning, the last day of december, he spurred his spent courage on to another attempt. he at length found a wholesale notion store where a packer was wanted. the head of the packing department was large and powerful, with coarse, man-driving features; but, undeterred by this appearance, david recited his story. the superintendent stared amazedly at david, and swore. "well if you ain't got the nerve!" he roared. "you admit you're a crook, and yet you ask me for a job! what d'you think we're runnin' here?--a reform school? not on your life! now you see if you can't find the door out o' here--and quick!" david had neither the strength nor the spirit to reply to this man as he had replied to the owner of the department store in one hundred and twenty-fifth street. when he reached the open air he walked a few paces, then paused and leaned against the front of a building. he felt an utter exhaustion--there was not another effort in him. he was like a horse, driven to the last ounce of its strength, that lies down in its tracks to die; the whip can only make it quiver, cannot make it rise. he chanced to turn his head, and saw himself in the mirror that backed the show-window--a thin, stooping figure with a white line of a mouth and a gray, haggard face. he was so numb, so spiritually spent, that this spectre of himself stirred not a single emotion within him. that evening he swept a saloon, and ate of the cheese and corn-beef sandwiches at the free-lunch counter till the bartender ordered him out. then he wandered aimlessly through the night, which was balmy despite the month, with no desire to return to the dingy four walls of his unheated room. he remembered in a vague way that this was the night kate morgan had set for the robbery; and perhaps his staying from home was due to the unfelt guidance of his conscience. he had no definite thoughts or sensations; only a vast, stunning sense of absolute defeat. a little after eleven o'clock he found himself wandering along the east river, and presently he turned upon a dock and walked toward the water between two rows of trucks, facing each other, their shafts raised supplicatingly to the stars. he seated himself at the end of the dock, and his chin in his two hands, looked out upon the river. save for the reflection, like luminous, writhing arms, that the few lights of brooklyn reached toward him on the water's surface, and save for the turbulent brilliance under the williamsburg bridge's great bow of arc lights, the river, which the tide was dragging wildly out to sea, was as black as blindness. he gazed forth into the darkness, forth upon the swirling water--dully, without thought, in the flat stupor of unrising defeat.... presently a bell began to send down the hour from a neighbouring steeple. mechanically he counted the strokes. twelve. the number at first had no significance, but after a moment its meaning thrilled him through. this was the new year!... the new year!... and how was he beginning it? penniless--friendless--without work--with little strength--with no courage--without hope. a happy new year, indeed! suddenly all the bitterness that had been gathering and smouldering within him these last four months, burst out volcanically. and his passion was not alone in his own behalf; it was in behalf of the thousands of others who had made a similar struggle, and to whom the world had similarly denied the privilege of honesty. starved and hopeless! why? because he could not work?--because there was no work?--because the world had decided the moral development of such as he required further punishment? no. because the rich, powerful world was afraid!--afraid of its dollars! because, if he were taken in, given a chance to live honestly, he might steal a bolt of cloth, or a coat, or a vase, or a shawl! there was the reason--the only reason. a bolt of cloth against a human life, begging to live! a coat against a human soul, agonising to be honest! cloths and coats mean dollars--mean carriages, and diamonds, and wines. cloths and coats must be guarded. but the human life? the human soul? in his wild rage david rose, turned his back upon the dark river, and shook his fist at the great indifferent city. chapter ix the open road at one o'clock david, still aflame with bitterness, was entering his room when a door across the hall opened and kate morgan looked out. "come into my house!" she snapped in a whisper. david could not see her face, but her voice told him she was angry. he followed her. actresses' photographs on the walls, a rug of glaring design, cheap red-and-green upholstered furniture that overcrowded the little room--such was kate morgan's parlour. she closed the door, then turned, her eyes blazing, and swore at him. "a nice time to be getting home! i've been waiting two hours for you!" for a moment he looked at her uncomprehendingly. "oh, you're thinking of that robbery. you needn't have waited. i told you i'd have nothing to do with it." "drop that bluffing! you know you're in it!" he started toward the door. "where you going?" she demanded. "to bed." she seized his arm, stepped between him and the door and stared wrathfully up at him. she now saw how pale and drawn his face was. her wrath slowly left her. "you're tired--blue," she said, abruptly, but softly. he nodded. "so i'm going to bed." "let's chat a minute first," she said, and drew him to the largest of the chairs, and pushed him down into it. "and we'll have something to eat, just you and me. i've made dad go to bed. it's all ready. i'll bring it in here." she moved a little table before him and went out. could david have seen the look she held upon him through the door, he would have been puzzled, perhaps startled. after she had made three trips into the rear of the flat there were upon the table a plate of sandwiches, a dish of olives, a pie, and two cups of coffee, all served with a neatness that, after the bowery restaurants, was astonishing to david. "now, we'll begin," she said, and sat down on the opposite side of the little table. the food had a wonderful taste to david, and the coffee--it was real coffee--warmed his chilled body. for several minutes they both ate in silence, then kate pushed back her chair, lighted a cigarette, and sat regarding him with eyes that grew very soft. when he had finished she leaned suddenly forward and laid a hand on one of his. "i don't like it for you to look this way, david," she said. he started at the touch and at the "david." she saw the start and drew her hand away. "why shouldn't i call you david? we're good pals, ain't we? i'm tired of this miss and mister business. call me kate." he was still too surprised to make an immediate answer, and she went on softly, "you look very bad!" the remark brought flooding back to him all his misery and hopelessness, all his rebellion, and he forgot his wonder at her overture. "why shouldn't i?" he asked bitterly. she nodded. "i understand," she said. "the world's got no use for a man that's been a crook. he's got no chance. i've seen a lot of boys come back, and swear they'd never touch another job. they tried--some of 'em hard, but none as hard as you. but nobody wanted 'em. what way was open? only one--to go back to cracking cribs. they all went back." she paused, then added: "now i want to ask you one square question: what's the use trying?" david was remembering his four months' futile struggle when he involuntarily echoed, "what's the use!" "yes, what?" she continued quickly. "the world may not owe you a living, but it owes you the right to live. it owes you that much. if it won't let you live by working, why, you've got to live by stealing. there's no other way. you've tried the first--" she went on, but david heard no more. his bitterness, his resentment, were making a fiercer plea. yes, he had tried! could any man try harder? and what had he gained? rebuff--insult--uttermost poverty. there was no use in trying further--none whatever. there was left only the second way--the one road that is always open, that always welcomes the repentant thief whom the world refuses. why should he not enter this only road? he had no single friend who would be pained. he had no faintest hope of a future. all that could be lost was lost. the thief's trade promised him the necessities of life. he had offered to pay the world in work for these necessities, but the world had refused his payment. what could he do, then, but take them?--besides, would it not be just treatment of the world--of the world that had destroyed him, of the world that cared more for dollars than for souls--if some of its all-precious wealth were taken from it? he looked up; his face was tight-set, vindictive; his eyes glittered. kate's gaze was fixed upon him, waiting. "it's time we were starting," she said. "it's almost two." he breathed deeply, almost convulsively. "come on," he said. she reached across and seized his hand. "i knew you'd come in!" she cried triumphantly. "we'll turn a lot of tricks together, you and me!" he gripped her hand so hard that she gave a little gasp, but he did not answer. for a minute or more they looked silently into each other's face. "come, we must go," she said.... "you have your diagram of the house?" "no. i tore it up." she drew some sheets from the front of her flannel waist. "here's another, then. you may need it." from beneath the red-and-green sofa she took a suit-case, which she threw open. in it were a full set of burglar's tools. "we really don't need 'em, for i've got keys to almost everything. but we'll take 'em along and twist the locks a bit, so they'll never suspect the job may have been done by someone who'd been in the inside--that is, by me. we'll bring the swag back in the suit-case." she looked at david, as at a superior artist, for commendation of her plan; but he silently regarded the strange instruments in the bag. she slipped on a pair of rubbers, fastened on a little hat, and had david help her into a short jacket which had large pockets in the lining. david drew on his overcoat, picked up the suit-case, and together they crept down the black stairways and out into the street. she chattered softly all the while, as though fearing david, if left to his own thoughts, might withdraw from the adventure. shortly before three o'clock kate paused, in one of the seventies near fifth avenue, before a flight of broad steps leading up to a broad stoop and a broad entrance. "here we are," she whispered. they searched the street in both directions with quick glances. not a soul was in sight. then they slipped to the shadowed servants' entrance beneath the stoop, and in less than a minute kate had unlocked a door of iron grating and a second door of wood, and they were standing in a dark hallway. she opened the grip, handed david a lantern, took one for herself, tied a handkerchief over his face so that all below the eyes was hidden, and masked herself likewise. then with a jimmy and a wrench she hurried away. two minutes later she reappeared. she was inspired with the desire to impress david with her skill as a thief, as another woman might be inspired to attract male attention by the display of her beauty. "i just opened a back window and broke the latch," she whispered. "we'll lock these doors when we go out, and they'll think we got in through the window. now, come on. but hadn't you better take off your shoes? they're pretty heavy." david sat down upon a chair, and she turned her lantern's bar of light upon his feet, so that he could better manage the laces. when the shoes came off, there were his heels and toes gleaming whitely. in the confusion of strange sensations that had begun to flow in upon him, he had forgotten that his stockings were only tops. he quickly shifted his feet out of the embarrassing rays. "that's all right," said kate. "there'll be plenty of new ones to-morrow." they went up a narrow stairway, then a broad one, stealthily following the guidance of the lantern's white finger, pausing breathless at every three or four steps to reach forth with their ears for any possible stir of life--kate tense and alert with excitement, david giddied by a choking, throbbing, unshaped emotion. after a dozen of these pauses, when to david the rubadub of his heart seemed to resound through the house, kate led him across deep rugs and through a broad doorway hung with tapestries. "the drawing-room," she whispered, and slowly sweeping it with her lantern she revealed to him its gorgeous fittings. then her lantern sought out a curio cabinet, of glass sides and gilded frame, standing in a corner. "that's what we want in here," she said. at her order david set down the suit-case he had carried, and they tiptoed to the cabinet over rugs worth hundreds of dollars a step. "you get the good things in there, i'll go upstairs after the old lady's sparklers, and then we'll both go down and get the silver," she whispered, as she unlocked the cabinet with one of her keys. "i'll meet you here in a little while." a sudden fear of being alone leaped up in david. he clutched kate's arm and threw the lantern's light into her face. of the face he saw only a narrow slit between her handkerchief and hat-brim, amid which her eyes gleamed like black diamonds. "what's the matter?" she asked. "you're trembling." "it must be--my nerves are gone," he whispered, with an effort. "oh, you'll be all right when you've been fed up and done another job or two." he watched her little figure glide out of the room behind its headlight, then he turned to the contemplation of the miniature portraits in gem-set frames, the old hand-painted fans, the heavy old-fashioned lockets and earrings and bracelets, that lay upon the glass shelves of the cabinet. he had no distinct thought toward the articles--there was no thought, not even a vague one, in his mind. his throat and lips were dry, his eyes were wide and fixed. his dizzy, unpowering emotion had so increased that he would not have been surprised had he slipped to the floor and spread out like a boneless sea creature. he was mental and emotional incoherence. the intention to steal had brought him here. that intention was over an hour old, but since it had been neither fulfilled nor countermanded, it was stored energy; and presently it began to move his will-less members, as the stored energy of a coiled spring sets an automaton at its appointed task. he took from the floor the plunder-bag kate had given him, and holding the lantern and the edge of the bag's mouth in his left hand, he swung open the plate-glass door of the cabinet. his eyes selected a golden bracelet, and his hand moved slowly forward and took it up. then suddenly his fingers unclosed, the bracelet clicked back upon the glass shelf, and his hand withdrew from the cabinet. the coiled spring of his intention had snapped. the touch of what was another man's had readjusted his confused senses. his blurred feelings became definite, his dumb brain articulate. he saw what he was doing, saw it clearly, as a bare act, unjustified by the arguments his bitterness had urged upon him an hour before--saw that he was committing a theft! a chill swept through him and he sat stiffly upright in his chair and stared at the bracelet he had dropped. in the mood he had been in an hour or two hours before david would not have drawn back from theft, any more than any other normal starving man, could it have been committed quickly, upon impulse. but the hour that had passed, the deliberation which was surrounding the theft, had given opportunity to his moral being to overthrow the impulse and assert itself. he rose, forgetting even to take the cabinet key. he would leave the house at once. but as he passed out of the drawing-room it came to him that he could not go away without telling kate of his purpose. before him he saw a flight of stairs; she was somewhere above. he stealthily mounted, passed through a doorway and found himself in a library. he stood a moment with strained ears, but got no sound of her. he must go through the floor, and perhaps through the floor above; but before proceeding further he must get the lay of the house. he moved noiselessly toward the library table, drawing out the plan kate had given him. he set the lantern on the table beside a telephone, spread out the sheets and was sitting down when cautious footfalls sounded without. the next instant a blade of light stabbed the room's darkness. "kate?" he whispered. "yes." they came toward each other and each threw his light into the other's masked face. "i've got the old lady's twinklers," she said. "where's your swag?" "i didn't take it," he whispered. "i've changed my mind. i'm leaving." "what!" "i'm not going to take anything. i'm going away. i came to tell you that." she drew a step nearer and for a space her black eyes gazed up into his in amazement. the deep night silence of the great house flooded over them. "you mean it?" she demanded. "yes." "why?" "i cannot. it was a mistake, my coming." her eyes suddenly gleamed like knife points, she trembled with passion, and she plunged her whispered words in up to the hilt. "so that's the kind of nerve you've got! oh, my god!... what a damned coward you are!... well, get out! i don't want you!" she brushed him wrathfully by, and tensely erect, her free hand clenched, walked out of the room behind the shaft of light. he stood motionless where she had left him, alone amid the great hush. her words had pierced to the seat of life. he quivered with the pain--deserved pain, he realised, for it was not a noble part to leave a comrade at such a time. but he had made a mistake in coming, and the only way to correct it was to go. he wished she would go with him, but he knew the result of asking her. she would stab him again, and walk away in contempt. he sighed, set his lantern on the table, and folded and pocketed the plans of the house. as he laid hold of his lantern to start away he saw on the table, in the lantern's ribbon of light, three or four letters that had evidently been written during the evening and left to be mailed in the morning. he started, sank to a chair, and gazed fixedly at one of the envelopes. the name on it was "miss helen chambers." amid all the sensations that swirled within him, his mind instantly made one deduction: kate morgan had, after all, secured a place through helen chambers, and they were now in the home of one of her friends. for a minute or more he sat staring at the envelope. it was almost as if helen herself had surprised him in his guilty presence here. then, across the darkness of the room, there came the faintest of sounds. he thought it was kate. "is that you?" he whispered. there was no answer; only dead quiet. in sudden fear he sprang up and directed the lantern's pointer of light toward whence the sound had come. the white spot fell upon the skirt of a dressing-gown. he jerked the pointer upward. the luminous circle enframed the square-jawed, clean-shaven face of a man--of the man he had seen with helen chambers--of mr. allen. instantly the room was filled with a blinding glare, and david saw mr. allen standing in the doorway, his left hand still on the electric-light key, his right holding out a revolver. "yes, it's i," said mr. allen in a quiet, grim voice. "suppose you remove your mask and give me the equal pleasure of seeing whom i'm meeting." there was no disobeying, with a revolver's muzzle staring coldly at him. david drew the handkerchief down and let it fall about his neck. mr. allen gazed a moment at david's face, thin, haggard, yet rare in its fineness. "h'm. a new variety." his gaze shifted till its edge took in the telephone on the table, and there it rested reflectively. then he remarked, as though completing his thought aloud, "i guess it will be safer for you to do the telephoning. will you please call up central and ask her to give you police headquarters?" wild, contrary impulses tugged at david, but man's primal instinct, self-preservation, controlled him the first moment. "i have been near starvation," he said, forcing his words to calmness. "i came here to steal--yes; but when i tried to steal, i could not. i--i did not steal!" his plea snapped off harshly. the world had driven him here, and with a rush he realised the world would not forgive him for being here. bitterness swept into him in a great wave, and the recklessness that feels that all is lost. besides, he could not ask mercy of helen chambers's lover. mr. allen gave an ironic laugh. "i've been hearing that sort of story for fifteen years. there never was a guilty man.--call up central." the natural animal hatred of a rival flared up. david looked mr. allen defiantly in the face. "if you want central, call her yourself!" he said slowly. mr. allen was surprised, but his surprise passed immediately under his control. "of course you are aware," he said quietly, "that you have the choice between calling up and being shot." "and you are aware," david returned, "that you have the choice between calling up and shooting." mr. allen was silent a moment. "the killing of a man who enters your house is justified by law," he warned grimly. "well--why don't you shoot?" "are you going to call up?" "so then--you're afraid to shoot!" taunted david. mr. allen remained silent. he gazed at david over the pistol barrel, and david gazed back at the pistol and at mr. allen. their wills had locked horns, stood braced. "i'm getting very tired," said david, throwing a leg over a corner of the table. "if you don't shoot soon i'll have to go." at this instant david saw in the doorway behind mr. allen the small figure of kate morgan. in her right hand there shone a little pistol, in her left she held a heavy walking-stick. mr. allen broke his silence. "if you make a move toward your pocket while i cross the floor, it'll be your last move." david's will had conquered, but his exultation did not speak. he was watching kate morgan, fascinated. her pistol rose, then fell, and the pistol and walking-stick exchanged hands. mr. allen took the first step toward the telephone. the stick came up, whizzed down upon mr. allen's pistol hand. the weapon went flying upon the rug, and mr. allen let out a sharp cry and started to whirl around. as the stick struck flesh david sprang forward, and with the skill of his old boxing-days, with all his strength and weight focussed in the blow, he drove his fist against mr. allen's unguarded chin. mr. allen fell limply upon the deep carpet. "come on! out of here!" cried david, seizing kate's arm. she jerked away and stood tensely erect, glaring at him. "go, you coward! i stay here!" "but you'll get caught!" "that's my business!" she blazed. "get out!--i'm going to finish the job." she whirled about, jerked the handkerchief from her face, thrust it into allen's mouth, and tied this gag securely in place with a handkerchief which she took from the pocket of allen's dressing-gown. then she tied his feet with the dressing-gown's rope girdle, and his hands with one of the silken ropes that held back the hangings in the broad doorway. this done, she sprang to the electric-light key, and the room filled with blackness. she flashed her lantern on david, who had stood watching her rapid actions in amazement. "why don't you go? get out!" "see here, it's crazy to stay here. you know it. you've got to come with me." his lantern, which he had taken up, showed a face that darted scorn and rage. "go with you?--i'll die first!" she returned in a low, fierce whisper. and then she added, each slow word edged with infinite contempt: "oh, what a poor damned coward!" he quivered, but he said quietly, "if you won't go, i'll stay with you." "stay with me? you'll not! i won't have you!" she turned abruptly and left the room. he stood thinking for a space; then he went out and crept down the stairway. as he passed the drawing-room door he saw kate bending in front of the open curio cabinet. he crept down another flight to the first floor and hid himself behind a palm in an angle of the great hall. he strained his ears for trouble, ready to rush upstairs at the first sound. after a time a wand of light was thrust down the stairway. then came kate, the suit-case in one hand, feeling her way with the wand like a blind man with a cane. for a moment the searching light pierced through the palm into his face, and david thought he was discovered; but she glided on and down the basement stairs. he let several minutes pass; then he too slipped out into the street. * * * * * perhaps it was chance, perhaps it was the direction of the subconscious, that led david in his circuitous homeward journey, past st. christopher's mission. he was walking slowly along, the caution of the first part of his flight forgotten in the mixture of despair and shame that now possessed him, when he waded into pools of coloured light that lay upon the sidewalk and the street. he looked up. there, aglow with its inspiration, was the window to the memory of philip morton. he involuntarily stepped back a pace or two, and leaning against a stack of bricks designed for repairs in the mission's basement, alone in the deserted street, he gazed steadfastly at the luminous words. he had often looked at that tribute, as he had upon the whole mission, with a sense of thankfulness that his life was counting. but now there was no thankfulness within him. anger began to burn, revolt to rise. that sainted man there was the cause of all his misery, all his degradation. the shame of his trial, the loss of his four prison years, the refusal of work, his insults, his lost strength, his lost character, his ragged clothes, his starving, his uttermost poverty, his uttermost despair--all these rushed upon him in one hot turbulent flood of rebellion. of all these inflictions that man was directly the cause! and more--that man had made him a thief! and yet that man was worshipped as a saint--while he, he was a starving outcast! his resentment culminated in a wild impulse. his right hand clutched one of the bricks on which it rested, and he took a quick step forward. the brick crashed through morton's glowing name. book iii toward the light chapter i the mayor of avenue a three or four blocks east of the bowery and lying north of the jewish quarter is a little region somewhat less crowded, somewhat quieter, somewhat more clean, than the rest of the tenement country that lies about it. it is held by germans--americanised germans. but poles and magyars, jews of roumania, hungary and russia, are edging their way into it; such frequent signs as "_gyogyszertár_," which, evil as it strikes the eye, signifies nothing more malignant than "drugstore," announce this invasion even to casual passers-by. some day the region will know the children of germany no more; it will be a babel of the tongues of central europe. but as yet, if you walk along its four avenues, a, b, c and d, all lined with little shops, or lounge about its shady tompkin's square, you will see many a face that will carry your memory back to berlin and cologne and the beer-gardens and sunday promenades of their work-people and petty bourgeois. it was the evening after david's adventure with kate morgan. from the snowy air of broad avenue a a good-natured crowd was turning into a gilded entrance, over which incandescent lights pricked the words "liberty assembly hall." the crowd was chiefly german, but in it were many of the newer peoples of the neighbourhood. there were broad husbands and broad wives; children led by hand, babies carried in arms; young people in couples and in hilarious groups; solitary and furtive men and women. most were in their finest, and some of the finery would not have made the opera ashamed; but many were dressed in shabbiness--though they, too, wore their best. david, who had wandered into avenue a, as he often did in his aimless night walks, paused momentarily and listlessly watched the in-going stream of people. a new year's ball, he decided; but the word "mayor" recurred so often in the bits of conversation he overheard that his inert curiosity prompted him to draw near a friendly-looking man who stood without the entrance. "what's going on in there?" he asked. "installing the mayor of avenue a," the man returned. david had vaguely heard of the "mayors" who exercise an unofficial authority in several districts of new york. "how's the mayor chosen?" he asked. "by election?" "no. carl hoffman's the most popular man on the avenue; he's got coin and influence; we all want him. that's how it is." "what does he do?" "if you need a dollar, and ain't got it, you go to carl. if a poor woman ain't got any coal, she lets carl know and she's got it. if you're dispossessed or in trouble with the police, carl fixes you up. if you can't get work, you go see carl. he's the poor man's friend--everybody's friend." for several moments david was silent. then he asked abruptly, "is this a private ceremony?" "oh, no; go on in, if you want to." david joined the entering crowd, mounted a broad flight of stairs, passed through a short hallway, and came into a large hall. every chair was taken and people stood in the aisles and along the sides. three electric-light chandeliers, wound in bunting and loaded with glass pendants, were each a glittering sun. the maroon walls were relieved by raised gold-and-white scroll work, and by alternate mirrors and oil-paintings set into the plastering. these paintings were tyrolean scenes, cascades and moon-lit seas--such as the art-fostering department store supplies at a dollar or two, golden frame included. at the further end of the hall was a stage, draped with american flags. at the stage's back a band, in purple and gold braid, was blowing out its brass instruments; and at the stage's front, beneath "_our mayor_" in evergreen letters that hung from the proscenium arch, sat four rotund men in a row. david slipped into a corner at the rear, where his shabbiness saw more of its own kind. a moment later "the watch on the rhine" thundered from the stage and rolled among the alps and the cascades and over the moon-lit seas. then "the star-spangled banner" sent forth its reverberations, and when its last echo had been lost far down an alpine gorge, the most rotund of the four rotund men--they were the mayors of avenues a, b, c and d, a neighbour told david--stepped to a table and rapped for order. he assumed his most impressive attitude, gazed slowly over the polyglot audience, drew a deep breath, and began in a sonorous voice that, now swelling, now softening, was the perfect servant of his eloquence. "it is not within the power of human speech to express how much i, as mayor of avenue b, feel the great honour of acting as master of ceremonies on this brilliant and distinguished occasion, graced by so much fairness of the softer sex, made by the creator as the greatest reward and adornment of life, when your honourable mayor is to be installed to serve his eleventh successive and successful term." but despite the impotence of speech, the mayor of avenue b filled ten minutes in an attempt to suggest faintly the contents of his prideful breast. then he swept onward into a eulogy of the mayor of avenue a, ending with, "and now, carl hoffman, rise and receive the oath of office." cheers and hand-clapping echoed through the alps. the tallest of the four mayors stepped forward. the applause doubled and the band thundered into "hail the conquering hero." the mayor of avenue a bowed and smiled and smiled and bowed, and swept his arm, now to this side, now to that, in magnificent salutation. his face was inflated with good feeding, and was as smooth as a child's balloon; a few hairs lay in pencil lines across his shiny head; from pocket to pocket athwart his snow-white vest hung a heavy golden chain--in lieu of a hoop, one could fancy, to hold fast the bulging flesh. it was well that his face was broad; a thin face would have cramped the wide, shining smile he held upon his uproaring constituency. when the tumult had somewhat abated, the master of ceremonies, his portly dignity replaced by portly lightsomeness, caught the mayor's arm. "here he is, ladies and gents!" he shouted. "look at him! the champion heavyweight, catch-as-catch-can philanthropist of new york. i am authorized to challenge any other philanthropist of his class in the city for a match, the gate receipts to the winner, and a thousand dollars side bet!" the crowd again broke loose. a deep, gruff, joyous voice rose from the mayor's interior. "moxie, get your wife to sew a button on your mouth!" the hall was one gleeful roar at this sally. "raise your right hand," said the mayor of avenue b, when there was partial quiet. "now repeat after me: i, carl hoffman, do hereby promise to the best of my ability--" "why, sure!" approved the deep voice. "to be a friend to any man, woman or child that needs a friend. so help me god!" "sure thing!" responded a hearty rumble. the crowd once more applauded, and david noted that the hands which clapped longest were feminine. the mayor of avenue a beamed upon the audience. "that's me," he said, with a grand upward sweep of his right arm. "i don't need to tell you what i'm goin' to do. i been doin' it for ten years. i guess my record'll do all the talkin' that's needed. but this much i'll say for myself: if anybody durin' this new year needs a friend and he don't chase himself around to the pan-american café and ask for carl hoffman--well, he deserves a lot more trouble than he's got!" he went on and told how glad he was to see his friends, and how proud he was to be their mayor, but through it all david was hearing only the oath of office and the mayor's first few sentences; and when later the ushers began to clear away the chairs for dancing, and david slipped down to the street and walked homeward through the swirling snow, he still thought only of the mayor's offer to the man who needed a friend. the next day at eleven o'clock--he had figured the morning rush would be over by then--david approached the pan-american café. on the café's one side was a delicatessen store, displaying row on row of wurst to entice the germans within, and on the other side a costumer's shop, its windows filled with suits of armour, night-mare masks, and gorgeous seventeenth-century court gowns of sateen, spangles and mosquito netting. the long glass front of the café was hung with holiday greens, among which appropriate signs informed the street that a hungarian orchestra played nightly, that real german beer and indubitable rhenish wine were purchasable within, and that a superlatively good dinner was to be had for only thirty cents. david came to a pause at the café's storm-door. doubts and fears that had been rising now stampeded him: the mayor's talk was only platform talk; the mayor was doubtless like all others who had refused him, insulted him. he walked up and down the avenue, passing and repassing the café and the narrow little shops that edged the sidewalk. then he told himself that he had nothing to lose; another refusal would be merely another refusal. he summoned back his courage, delivered himself into its hands, and entered. he found himself in a wide, long room, whose green walls were hung with signs of breweries and with placards announcing the balls of "the carl hoffman association," "the twin brothers," "the lady orchids," and a dozen other social organisations of the neighbourhood. six rows of tables, some marble-topped, some linen-covered, with chairs stacked upon them, stretched the length of the room. among these black-jacketed waiters, armed with long mops, were scrubbing the linoleum-covered floor. one of the waiters quickly cleared the chairs from a table and came forward to meet david. "nothing to eat, thank you," david said. "i want to see mr. hoffman." "sorry--he's out. but he's likely to be in any minute. just sit down. no, wait--there he is now." david looked about. coming in from the street was the ample form of the mayor of avenue a, his cheeks pink with the cold. "got four discharged and paid two fines," the mayor announced to the waiters who had all looked up expectantly. "and when i got 'em out o' the court-room i lined 'em up and gave 'em gentle hell. they'll keep sober for awhile--yes, sir!" he turned to david. "why some decent men ain't never sure the new year's really begun till they've poured themselves neck-full o' whiskey--mebbe the god that made 'em understands, but carl hoffman certainly don't." david admitted that no more did he, and then asked for a few minutes' talk--in private. "hey, john, take these things," and the mayor burdened david's waiter with overcoat, muffler and hat; and david saw that a waistcoat of garlanded silk had replaced the white one of last night. "and, say, boys," he shouted to the others, "suppose you let the rest o' that scrubbin' go for a bit and get busy at somethin' out in the kitchen." he led david to a rear corner where, enclosed by heavy red ropes, was the platform from which the hungarian orchestra administered its nightly music. they lifted the chairs from a table and sat down facing each other. "well, now, what can i do for you?" the mayor asked. david did not give his courage time to escape. "i was at your inauguration last night," he began, quickly, "and i heard you say that if any man needed help--" "the poor man's friend--that's me," broke in the mayor with a quick nod, folding his plump hands, on one of which burnt a great diamond, upon the table. "and the poor man--that's me," said david. "well, you've come to the right doctor. what's ailin' you?" the mayor's eyes became sharp, and his face became as stern as its pink fulness would permit. "but one word first. some people think i'm an easy mark. i ain't. i've got two rules: never to give a nickel to a man that don't deserve it, and never to give the icy mitt to the man that deserves the warm hand. i guess i ain't never broke either rule. a grafter ain't got no more chance with me than a lump o' lard in a fryin' pan. i ain't sayin' these things to hurt your feelin's, friend. only just to let you know that if you ain't all on the level you're wastin' your precious time. if you are on the level--fire away. i'm your man." this was rather disconcerting. "i can only tell you the truth," said david. "it wouldn't do you no good to tell nothin' else," the mayor said dryly. "i can generally tell when the chicken in a chicken pie is corned beef." david gathered his strength. "i shall tell you everything. to begin with, i've been a thief--" "a thief!" the mayor ejaculated. he stared. "tales o' woe always begin with the best thing a fellow can say about himself. if you start off with bein' a thief, lord man, what'll you be when you get through!" "i'm beginning with the worst. i'm out of prison about four months. i was sent up for--for stealing money from a mission--from st. christopher's mission--four or five years ago." again the mayor stared, and again his face took on its stern look. "so you're that man!" he said slowly. "i remember about it. the mission ain't far from here. well, friend, one o' my waiters'd fire me out o' here for disorderly conduct if i told you in plain english what i think o' that trick. but it was a dirty, low-down piece o' business, and what came to you is only a little part o' what you should 'a' got." david rose. it was as he had expected--another refusal. "i see you care to do nothing for me. good morning." "did i say so? set down. you're talkin' the truth--that's somethin'. at least it don't sound much like one o' them fancy little lies a fellow makes up to make a good impression. well, what d'you want from me?" david sat down. he spoke quickly, desperately. "i came back from prison determined to live honestly. i've been trying for four months to get work. no one will have me. i won't tell you what i've been through. i must have work, if i'm to live at all. i've come to you because i thought you might help me get work--any kind of work." for a minute or more the mayor silently studied david's thin features. then he said abruptly: "excuse me for leavin' your troubles, but i been out in this cold air and i'm as empty as my hat. i've got to have a bite to eat, or i'll all cave in. and you'll have some with me. i don't like to eat alone. "oh, john!" the deep voice roared out. "say, john, fetch us some eggs. how'll you have your eggs? scrambled? scrambled eggs, john, bacon, rolls and coffee for two. "now back to your troubles, friend." he shook his head slowly. "you're up against a stiff proposition. there ain't much of a demand for ex-crooks right now." he once more began to scrutinise david's face. "don't let this bother you, friend; i'm just seein' what's inside you," he said, and continued his stare. one minute passed, two minutes, and that fixed gaze did not shift. david grew weak with suspense. he knew he was on trial, and that the next moment would hear his sentence. suddenly the mayor thrust a big hand across the table and grasped david's. "it ain't the icy mitt for you. jobs are scarce, but--let's see. what kind o' work have you done? i remember readin' about you; wasn't you a professor, or somethin' in that line o' business?" david swam in a vertigo of vast relief; his hand instinctively clutched the edge of the table; the mayor's face looked blurred, far away.... "i was a writer ... for magazines." "my pull wouldn't help a lot with the literary push." the mayor's eyes again became keen. "and i suppose you now want somethin' o' the same sort--somethin' fancy?" the dizziness was subsiding. "anything--so it's work!" the mayor meditated a moment. "well, i only know o' one job just now, and you wouldn't have it." "what is it?" demanded david, tensely. "the agent o' the house where i live told me a couple o' days ago he wanted a new janitor." "i'll take it!" "sweepin'--scrubbin'--sortin' rubbish--everybody cussin' you--twelve dollars a month." the wages made david hesitate. he calculated. "i'll take it--if the agent will have me." "he'll have you. rogers's got a special interest in chaps that're makin' the fight you're makin'." david half rose. "hadn't i better see him at once?" he asked, anxiously. "the job may be taken any minute." "set down, young man. that job ain't goin' to run away. here comes breakfast. i'll go with you when we're through. gee, i could eat a house." david made no boasts, but when he rose from his first meal since the midnight supper with kate morgan thirty-three hours before, he had effaced his share of the breakfast. he noted that the mayor's portion had hardly been touched, and the mayor saw he observed this. "i had a sudden turn o' the stomach," the mayor explained. "i never know when it's goin' to let me eat, or when it's goin' to say there's nothin' doin'." they walked away through a deep cross street of red tenements with fire-escapes climbing the walls like stark, grotesque vines. david was filled with dread lest he might find the position already occupied. he wanted to run. but despite his suspense he had to notice that the mayor was smiling at all the women on both sides of the street, and that every pretty one who passed was followed by a look over the mayor's shoulder. at the end of five minutes they turned into a tenement of the better sort, on the large front window of whose first floor david read in gilt letters, "john rogers--real estate." "here's where i live--on the floor above," said the mayor. "you just wait here in the hall a minute or two while i have a chat with rogers." the mayor entered the office, and david paced the narrow hallway. would he get the job? no--this rogers would never hire a thief. anyhow, even if rogers would, someone else had the job already. it couldn't be true that at last he was to gain a foothold--even so poor a foothold. no, this was to be merely one more rejection. at length the mayor came out, carefully smoothing the few hairs that lined his crown like a sheet of music paper. "rogers is waitin' for you; go right in. see you soon. good-bye." he shook hands and went out, cautiously replacing his hat. david entered, palpitant. the office was bare, save for real estate maps on the walls, a few chairs and a desk. mr. rogers turned in his swivel chair and motioned david to a seat beside him. "mr. hoffman has told me about you," he said, briefly, and for a moment he silently looked david over; and david, for his part, did the same by the man whose "yes" or "no" was about to re-create or destroy him. mr. rogers was a slight, spectacled man with dingy brown hair and a reddish pointed beard; and his plain wrinkled clothes were instantly suggestive of mediocrity. his face had the yellowish pallor of old ivory, and its apparent stolidity would have confirmed the impression of his clothes, had there not gleamed behind his spectacles a pair of quick watchful eyes. "do you mind if i ask you about yourself?" mr. rogers said, quietly. "ask anything you please." "mr. hoffman has told me of your--unfortunate experience of the last four or five years. since coming out you have made a real effort at finding work?" david outlined the struggles of the past four months. mr. rogers heard him through without show of emotion other than an increased brightness of the eyes, then asked: "have you not, under such hard circumstances, been tempted to steal again?" david paled, and hesitated. a reformed thief who had attempted theft no later than yesterday, would certainly not be employed. he saw his chance, so near, fade suddenly away. but he had determined upon absolute frankness. "yes," he admitted in a low tone. then his voice became tremulous with appeal: "but i yielded only once! i was in the act of stealing--but i stopped myself. i could not. i took nothing!--not a thing!" david expected to see the yellow face harden, but it did not change. "you know the character of the work," mr. rogers resumed. "it is not pleasant." david's hope rushed back. "that makes no difference to me!" "and the pay is small--only twelve dollars a month and your rent." "yes! yes! that's all right!" "then," concluded the low, even voice, "if it's convenient to you, i should like to have you begin at once." chapter ii the saving ledge david, in a kind of trance, followed mr. rogers over the six-story house, hardly hearing the agent's discourse upon his duties and the tenants. twenty-four families and a considerable number of boarders lived in the tenement--in all, close to a hundred and a half souls. they were mostly germans and jews--tailors, furriers, jewellers, shop-keepers; people who were beginning to gain a fair footing in their adopted country. david's work was to be much as the mayor had outlined. the halls were to be daily swept and frequently scrubbed, minor repairs to be executed, the furnace to be attended to, and ashes, waste-paper and kitchen-refuse to be separated and prepared for the city's ash and garbage wagons. the tour of installation ended, david started for his old home to begin the removal, armload at a time, of his few belongings. as he walked among the school-hurrying children, over snow grimed by ten thousand feet, he felt dazed for fear that this world of hope he had entered might suddenly vanish. failure had been his so constantly that this beginning of success seemed unreal. he dared allow himself to feel only a tentative exultation. at the entrance of his old tenement he met kate morgan coming out. he had not seen her since she had glided past him through mr. allen's hall, suit-case in hand. he stopped, at a loss what to do or say, wondering how she would receive him. "good afternoon," he said, heavily. she paled, looked him squarely in the face and passed without a word. with a pang he watched her walk stiffly away. her friendship, save for tom's, was the only friendship he had known since he had left prison. now it was lost. an hour later, as he was coming from his room with his last armload, he met her again. she sneered in his face. "coward!" she snapped out and brushed him by. he called after her, but she marched on and into her door without looking back. david had thought his "rent" would be a single room, but it had proved to be a five-room flat in the basement. in the front room of this, during the odd moments his afternoon's work allowed him, he arranged his belongings, to which mr. rogers had added a bed, a table and a couple of chairs. when all was in order he found the room looked bare, beyond his needs. after all, his "rent" might as well have been but a single room. little good to him were the four rooms behind, locked and vacant. darkness had fallen and he was sitting in his room wondering how he would live through the month that must elapse before his salary would be due, when mr. rogers came in. "it has occurred to me that perhaps you could use a little ready money," mr. rogers said in his low voice, and he laid several bills upon david's table. "there's one month's wages in advance." and before david had recovered from his surprise, mr. rogers was out of the room. while david was still staring at this money, there was another knock. he opened the door upon the mayor of avenue a. the mayor walked in and lowered himself into the one rocking-chair. "well, i see you've landed with rogers," he called out, as though david were a block away. "you'll find rogers quiet, but the real thing. he's got a heart that really beats." he looked about. "just usin' this one room, i see. what're you doin' with the others?" "nothing." "why don't you rent 'em?" "d'you think i can?" "can? you can't help it. why, only yesterday a family was askin' me to help 'em find a cheap flat. le's see how much them four rooms would be worth. i pay thirty a month up on the second floor; this might fetch sixteen or eighteen. you've got the best room; take that off and say--well, say twelve a month. how'd that suit you?" "if i could only get it!" the mayor drew out a fat wallet. "that fixes my family up, then. here's your twelve." "you're in earnest?" david asked, slowly. "sure. the family'll be in to-morrow." "but i can't take the money in advance--and from you." "it ain't my money. it's theirs. and advance!--nothin'! rent's always in advance. and if i don't cinch the bargain now, somebody'll come along and offer you thirteen, and then where'll i be? here, stick this in your pants and shut up!" david took the money. "mr. hoffman, i don't know how i can ever thank you for your favours--" "oh, this ain't no favour. this's business. but if you think it's a favour--well, some day i may be on my uppers. remember it then." a pillowy hand drew forth his watch, lit up with diamonds. "well, by george, if i don't chase right over to my joint i won't even have any uppers. my blamed waiters's always forgettin' to water the soup!" when he was alone david sat with eyes looking at his fortune, which he had heaped upon the table, and with mind looking at the situation in which he now found himself. five years before he would have regarded this janitor's position much as a man on a green, sun-lit bank of a cliff-walled torrent would regard a little bare ledge below against which the water frothed in anger--as something not worth even a casual thought. but he had been in that stream, which sweeps its prey onward to destruction; his hands had slipped from its smooth walls; and just as he had been going down he had caught the little ledge and dragged himself upon it--and now this bare rock to him was the world. he did not think of the green fields and the sun above, toward which he must try to climb; he could only, as it were, lie gasping upon his back, and marvel at the miracle of his escape. he was still sitting so when there was still another knock. he had asked his landlady to send tom over when the boy returned, and as he crossed the room he hoped he would find tom at the door. sure enough, there stood the boy. he came in quietly, with hesitation, for during the past week and more the two had hardly spoken--they had merely been aware of one another's existence. "what's all dis mean?" he asked slowly, looking round in amazement. in a rush of spirits david clapped his hands on tom's shoulders. "it means, my boy, that we're going to begin to live! see this room? the rent's paid for as long as we stay here. and look at the table!" tom looked instead at david's face. "gee, pard, if you ain't got a grin!" he cried. forthwith a grin appeared on his own face. he turned to the table--and stared. "say, look at de bank!" he gasped. "that's something to eat, tom. and new clothes. there's twenty-four dollars in that pile, and twenty-four coming in every month, with no rent to pay." "don't say nuttin, pard. if dis is a dream, just let me sleep. but what's de graft? how did you get next to all dis?" david related his day's experience. when he had ended tom did a few steps of a vaudeville dance, then seized david's hand. "well, ain't dis luck! it's like god woke up. but what you goin' to do wid all de coin?" "oh, buy railroads and such things!" david held on to the hand the boy had given him and took the other. "tom," he said gravely, looking down into the boy's face, "i've got an idea neither of us is very proud of all the things he's done lately. d'you think so?" the boy's eyes fell to the floor. "i shouldn't care to tell you all i've done. should you care to tell me?" the tangled head shook. "well, from now on we're going to be straight--all on the level. aren't we?" tom looked up. "i guess we are, pard," he said in a low voice. they looked steadily into each other's eyes for a moment. then david gave tom a quick push. "on with your hat, my boy! let's see if the grocery man won't take some of this money." after their dinner had been bought, eaten, and the dishes cleared away, david began to tack up prints. tom meditatively watched him for several minutes, then suddenly announced: "i seen her to-day." david turned sharply. he knew the answer, but he asked, "saw who?" "you know. de lady what i fetched up. i seen her on de street." david tried to appear unconcerned. "did she say anything?" "she asked how you was." "what did you tell her?" "i didn't know what to say. i was afraid o' queerin' somet'ing you might 'a' told her. i just said you was better." david tacked up another print, during which time tom again watched him thoughtfully. then tom asked, abruptly: "she's a friend o' yourn, ain't she?" "no." "i t'ought she was!" his voice was disappointed. "why ain't she?" "well--i guess she don't like me." "don't like you!" cried tom indignantly. "den she's had a bum steer!" he thought. "i wonder what's queered her agin' you?" "oh, several things," david answered vaguely. then obeying an impulse, born of the universal craving for sympathy, he went on: "for one thing, she believes i put you up to stealing." "she t'inks you knew anyt'ing about dat!" he cried, springing up excitedly. "she believes you were stealing regularly, and that it was all done under my direction." "is dat de way she sizes up de facts? well, ain't dat just like a woman! wouldn't it just freeze your eyeballs, de way goils do t'ings! "but see here, pard. swell friends can do a guy a lot o' good. why don't you hang on to her? why don't you put her wise?" "she wouldn't believe me. my boy--" the tone tried to be light--"when the world is certain to regard your truth as a lie, it's just as well to keep still." david went on with his tacking, and a minute or more went by before tom asked, quietly: "but wouldn't you like her to know de facts? wouldn't you like her to be your friend?" "oh, yes--why not?" david responded in his voice of affected unconcern. tom gazed steadily at david's back, his thin face wrinkled with thought. at length his head nodded, and he said to himself in a whisper: "so she t'inks he put me up to it, does she?" chapter iii a prophecy at the end of the afternoon, a few days later, a fierce battle was being waged in the basement room that was the aldrich home, when a knock made david lower his defensive fists. "ah, don't stop, pard," tom begged of his cornered enemy. "let 'em pound. it's just somebody else kickin' about de heat." "we'll only stop a second. ask what they want, and say i'll attend to it at once." tom, grumbling fiercely, opened the door. "what's de matter?" he demanded. "ain't you got no heat?" but it was not an angry tenant who stepped in from the darkness of the hall. it was helen chambers. she was flushed, and excitement quivered in her eyes. she looked from one pillow-fisted belligerent to the other, and said, smiling tremulously: "i had thought there was no heat, but after looking at you i've decided there's plenty. is this the way you always receive complainants?" tom glanced guiltily at david, then darted behind helen and through the door. david gazed at her, loose-jawed. suddenly he remembered his shirt-sleeves. "i beg your pardon," he said, and in his bewilderment he tried to thrust his huge fists into his coat. "perhaps you can do that"--again the tremulous smile--"but i really don't think you can." "i should take the gloves off, of course," he stammered. he frantically unlaced them, slipped into his coat, and then looked at her, throbbing with wonderment as to why she had come. she did not leave him in an instant's doubt. she stepped toward him with outstretched hand, her smile gone, on her face eager, appealing earnestness. "i have come to ask your forgiveness," she said with her old, direct simplicity. "i believed that you and the boy were--pardon me!--were stealing together; that you were letting yourself slip downward. this afternoon the boy came to me at st. christopher's and told me the real story. i could hardly wait till i was free so that i could hurry to you and ask you to forgive me." "forgive you!" david said slowly. "forgive me for my unjust judgment," she went on, a quaver in her voice. "i judged from mere appearance, mere guess-work. i was cold--horrid. i am ashamed. forgive me." her never-expected coming, her never-expected words, rendered him for the moment speechless. he could only gaze into her fresh face, so full of earnestness, of appeal. "you do not forgive me?" she asked. david thrilled at the tremulous note in her voice. "i have nothing to forgive. you could not help judging as you did." her deep brown eyes, looking straight into his face, continued the appeal. "i forgive you," he said in a low voice. "thank you," she said simply; and she pressed his hand. "and i came for something else," she went on, "i came to assure you of my friendship, if it can mean anything to you--to tell you how much i admire your brave and bitter upward struggle. i'd be so happy if there was some way i could help you, and if you'd let me." "you want to help me!" was all he could say. "yes. won't you let me--please!" he throbbed with exultation. "then you believe i am now honest!" "you have proved that you are--proved it by the way you have resisted temptation during these four terrible months." his eyes suddenly sank from hers to the floor. her words had brought back new year's eve. she had come to him with friendship because she was certain of his unfallen determination to make his new life an honest life. if she knew of that night in allen's house, would she be giving him this praise, this offer? the temptation to say nothing rose, but he could not requite frankness and sincerity such as hers with the lie of silence--he could not accept her friendship under false pretenses. he looked up and gazed at her steadily. "i am innocent where you thought me guilty, but"--he paused; the truth was hard--"but i am guilty where you think me innocent." she paled. "what do you mean?" she asked in a fearing voice. "i have not resisted temptation." he saw that his words had hurt her, and there was a flash of wonder that a lapse of his should give her pain. an appeal, full of colour, of feeling, that would justify himself to her was rising to his lips, but before it passed them he suddenly felt himself so much the wronged that his confession came forth an abrupt outline of his acts, spoken with no shame. "i had been starved, rebuffed, for over three months. i grew desperate. temptation came. i yielded. i entered a house--entered it to steal. but i did not steal. i could not. i came away with nothing." he paused. his guilt was out. he awaited her judgment, fearful of her condemnation, with resentment ready for it if it came. "is that all!" she cried. vast relief quivered through him. "you mean then that--" he hesitated. "that you have been fiercely tempted, but you are not guilty." "you see it so!" "yes. had you conquered temptation on the outer side of the door, you would certainly have been guiltless. since you conquered temptation on the inner side of the door, i cannot see that those few more steps are the difference between guilt and innocence." they were both silent a moment. "but don't you want to tell me something about yourself--about your plans?" she asked. the friendship in her voice, in her frank face, warmed him through. "certainly," he said. "but there's very little to tell." he now became aware that all the while they had been standing. "pardon my rudeness," he said, and set a chair for her beside the table, and himself took a chair opposite her. "there is little to tell," he repeated. "i am what you see--the janitor of this house." as he spoke the word "janitor" it flashed upon him that there had been a time when, in his wild visions, he had thought of winning this woman to be his wife. he flushed. "yes, i know. but you have other plans--other ambitions." "a week ago my ambition was to find work that would keep me alive," he returned, smiling. "i have just attained that ambition. i have hardly had time to dream new dreams." "but you will dream them again," she said confidently. "i had them when--when i came back, and i suppose they will return." "yes. go on!" he had thought, in his most hopeful moments, that some day she might regard him with a distant friendliness, but he had never expected such an interest as was shown in her eager, peremptory tone. "there were two dreams. one was this: i wondered, if i were honest, if i worked hard, if i were of service to those about me, could i, after several years, win back the respect of the world, or its semi-respect? you know the world is so thoughtless, so careless, so slow to forgive. and i wondered if perhaps, after several years, i could win back the respect of some of my old friends?" "i was sure that was one dream, one plan," she said, quietly. "for myself----" she gave him her hand. "thank you!" he said, his voice low and threaded with a quaver. "and though the world is thoughtless, and slow to forgive, and though the struggle will be hard, i'm certain that you are going to succeed." her rich voice was filled with quiet belief. "and the other dream?" "it's presumptuous in me to speak of the other dream, for to work for its fulfilment would require all the things i've lost and many things i never had--a fair name, influence, some money, a personality, ability of the right sort. besides, the dream is vague, unshaped--only a dream. it is not new, and it is not even my own dream. thousands have dreamt it, and many are striving to turn it into a fact, a condition. yes, it would be presumptuous for me to speak of it." "but i'd like very much to hear about it--if you don't mind." "even though it will sound absurd from me? well, if you wish me to." he paused a moment to gather his thoughts. "one thing the last four months have taught me," he began, "is that the discharged criminal has little chance ever to be anything but a criminal. many come out hardened; perhaps the prison hardened them--i've seen many a young fellow, who had his good points when he entered, hardened to irreclaimable criminality by prison associates and prison methods. these have no desire to live useful lives. some come out with moderately strong resolutions to live honestly, and some come out with a fierce determination. if these last two classes could find work a large proportion of them would develop into useful men. but instead of a world willing to stretch to them a helping hand, what do they find? they find a world that refuses them the slightest chance. "what can they do? they persist as long as their resolution lasts. if it is weak, they may give up in a few days. then, since the upward road is closed against them, they turn into the road that is always open, always calling--the road of their old ways, of their old friends. they are lost. "a week ago i was all bitterness, all rebellion, against the world for its uncaring destruction of these men. i said the world pushed these men back into crime, destroyed them, because it feared to risk its worshipped dollars. i feel bitter still, but i think i can see the world's excuse. the world says, 'for any vacancy there are usually at least two applicants; i choose the better, and let the other go.' it is a natural rule. so long as man thinks first of his own interest that rule will stand. against such a rule that closes the road of honesty, what chance does the discharged convict have? none!--absolutely none! "since the world will not receive back the thief, since there is no saving the thief once he has become a thief, the only chance whatever for him is to save him before he has turned to thievery--while he is a child. "have you ever thought, miss chambers, how saving we are of all material things, and what squanders, oh, what criminal squanderers! we are of human lives? how far more rapidly the handling of iron, and hogs, and cotton, has developed than the handling of men! the pig comes out meat and soap and buttons and what not, and the same rigid economy is observed with all other materials. nothing is too small, too poor, to be saved. it is all too precious! "there is no waste! but can we say the same about the far more important business of producing citizens? look at the men in our prisons. wasted material. had they been treated, when they were the raw material of childhood, with even a part of the intelligence and care that is devoted to turning the pig into use, into profit, they would have been manufactured into good citizens. and these men in prisons are but a fraction of the great human waste. think of the uncaught criminals, of the stunted children, of the human wreckage floating about the city, of the women who live by their shame!--all wasted human material. and all the time more children are growing up to take the places of these when they are gone. why, if any business man should run his factory as we conduct our business of producing citizens, he'd be bankrupt in a year! "this waste _can_ be saved. i do not mean the men now in prison, nor the women in the street, nor those on whom ill conditions have fastened disease--though even they need not be wholly lost. i mean their successors, the growing children. if the production of citizens were a business run for profit--which in a sense it is, for each good citizen is worth thousands of dollars to the country--and were placed in the hands of a modern business man, then you would see! had he been packer, steel manufacturer, goldsmith, not a bristle, not an ounce of steel, not the infinitesimal filings of gold, escaped him. do you think that he would let millions of human beings, worth, to put a sordid money value upon their heads, ten thousand dollars apiece, be wasted? never! he would find the great business leak and stop it. he would save all. "and how save? i am a believer in heredity, yes; but i believe far more in the influence of surroundings. let a child be cradled in the gutter and nursed by wickedness; let wickedness be its bedfellow, playfellow, workfellow, its teacher, its friend--and what do you get? the prisons tell you. let the same child grow up surrounded by decency, and you have a decent child and later a decent man. could the thousands and thousands of children who are developing towards criminality, towards profligacy, towards a stunted maturity, be set amid good conditions, the leak would be stopped, or almost--the great human waste would be brought to an end. they would be saved to themselves, and saved to their country. "nothing of all this is new to you, miss chambers. i have said so much because i wanted to make clear what has become my great dream--the great dream of so many. i should like to do my little part towards rousing the negligent, indifferent world to the awfulness of this waste--towards making it as economical of its people as it is of its pigs and its pig-iron. that is my dream." he had begun quietly, but as his thought mastered him his face had flushed, his eyes had glowed, and he had stood up and his words had come out with all the passion of his soul. helen's eyes had not for an instant shifted from his; her's too were aglow, and glow was in her cheeks. for several moments after he had stopped she gazed at him with something that was very like awe; then she said, barely above a whisper: "you are going to do it!" "no, no," david returned quickly, bitterly. "i have merely builded out of words the shape of an impossible dream. look at what i dream; and then look at me, a janitor!--look at my record!" "you are going to do it!" she repeated, her voice vibrant with belief. "the dream is not impossible. you are doing something towards its fulfilment now--the boy, you know. you are going to grow above your record, and above this position--far above! you are going to grow into great things. what you have been saying has been to me a prophecy of that." he grew warmer and warmer under her words--under the gaze of her brown eyes glowing into his--under the disclosure made by her left hand, on which he had seen there was no engagement ring. her praise, her sympathy, her belief, thrilled him; and his purpose, set free in words, had given him courage, had lifted him up. as from a swift, dizzy growth, he felt strong, big. a burning impulse swept into him to tell her his innocence. for a moment his innocence trembled on his lips. but the old compelling reasons for silence rushed forward and joined battle with the desire of his love. his hands clenched, his body tightened, he stared at her tensely. at length he drew a deep breath, swallowed with difficulty. "may the prophecy come true!" his dry lips said. "it will!" she studied him thoughtfully for a minute or more. "something has been occurring to me and i'd like to talk to you about it." she rose. "but i must be going. won't you walk with me to the car, and let me talk on the way?" a minute later they were in the street, from which the day had all but faded and into which the shop-windows and above them the tier on tier of home-windows, were stretching their meagre substitute. david's blood was leaping through him, and in him were the lightness and the all-conquering strength of youth. the crisp winter air that thrust its sting into many of the stream of home-coming workers, tinglingly pricked him with the joy of living. "have you thought again of writing?" she asked. "about as much as a man who has leaped from a house-top to try his wings, thinks again of flying." "i am speaking seriously. if the impulse to write should return, would you have time for writing?" "i think i could manage three or four hours a day." "then why not try?" "the ground where one alights is so hard, miss chambers!" "but perhaps you did not soar the other time because you had over-worn your wings. perhaps they have grown strong and developed during their rest. many of us used to believe they would carry you far up. why not try? you have nothing to lose. and if you succeed--then the dream you have told me of will begin to come true." for several paces david was silent. "i, too, have thought of this. as you say, there is nothing to lose. i shall try." "why not take an idea in the field of your dream?" she pursued eagerly. "why not write a story illustrating how the criminal is to be saved?--say, the story of a boy amid evil surroundings that urged him toward a criminal life; the boy to come under good influence, and to develop into a splendid citizen." "that may be just the idea," said david. they discussed the suggestion warmly the remainder of their walk to the car. a little farther on, as they were coming out upon the bowery, the mayor of avenue a swayed into view. astonishment leaped into his pink face when he saw who david's companion was. his silk hat performed a wide arc, and david had a sense that backward glances over the mayor's shoulders were following them. "and you really believe in me?" david asked, as helen's car drew to a stop. "i do--and i believe all the other things i have said." she gave the answer with a steady look into his eyes and with a firm pressure of her hand. "i hope you'll not be disappointed!" he breathed fiercely, exultantly. he retreated to the sidewalk and standing there, the clanging of the elevated trains beating his ears, he watched the slow passage of her car through the press of jostling, vituperating trucks, volleying over the cobble-stones, till it disappeared beyond cooper union. then he turned away, and strode the streets--chin up, shoulders back, eyes straightforward--powered with such a hope, such a determination to do, as he had not known since his first post-college days. perhaps he would conquer the future. he would try. yes ... he _would_ conquer it! chapter iv puck masquerades as cupid david had suggested school to tom, but the boy would none of it. "what, set in one o' dem agony seats, biffin' your brain wid books, a skinny lady punchin' holes t'rough you wid her eyes! not for mine, pard!" a job was what he wanted, and david at length concluded that after tom had been tamed by the discipline of a few months of regular work, he would perhaps be more amicable toward education. there were but two men of whom david could ask aid in finding a place for the boy, mr. rogers and the mayor of avenue a. mr. rogers was beginning to be something of a puzzle to david. one thing that made david wonder was the smallness of mr. rogers's business compared with his ability. they had had a few short talks and david had discovered there lurked behind that reserved exterior a sharp intelligence which now and then flashed out unexpected poniards of bitter wit. david contrasted him with another rental agent he had met, doing several times rogers's business, and the second man seemed a nonentity. yet rogers was the agent of but half a dozen tenements, and made no effort to extend his clientage. david also wondered at what he could regard only as idiosyncrasies. the dingy brown of rogers's hair seemed to him hardly a natural colour; he guessed hair dye. but hair dye he associated with vanity, with the man who would falsify his gray hair to extend his beauship, and vanity rogers apparently had not. and one day, while sweeping out rogers's office, david had tried on rogers's spectacles, which had been left on the desk, and had discovered he could see through them as well as with his naked eyes. the lenses were blanks. why should the man wear blank spectacles, why should he dye his hair? mere idiosyncracies of course--yet rather queer ones. rogers was always kind and courteous to david, and david heard from tenants and neighbours many stories of the agent's warm heart--of rent advanced from the agent's own pocket when a tenant was out of work, of food that came covertly to fatherless families, of mysterious money and delicacies that came to the sick poor. yet he was invariably cold and distant to david, and cold and distant to all others; so much so that to try to thank him was an embarrassment. sometimes, when musing about rogers's business restraint, his colourless dress, his reserve, his stealthy generosity, it seemed to david that rogers sought obscurity and anonymity with the zeal that other men seek fame and brass tablets. it was the reserve of rogers and the constraint david felt in his presence, and even more the knowledge of the greater influence of the mayor of avenue a, that made david choose to ask the latter's aid in seeking work for tom. so about four o'clock of the afternoon following helen's call, he walked into the pan-american café. at a large table in a front corner sat the mayor, two other men, and half a dozen women, all drinking of coffee and eating of cake, and all shaking with full-voiced laughter that bubbled straight from the diaphragm. david was in no hurry, so he sat down in the opposite corner of the almost empty café to wait the departure of the mayor's friends. the ladies about the mayor were hearty beauties of from ten to twenty years' acquaintance with womanhood; and among them there was an abundance of furs and diamonds. most of them were misses, david learned from the way the mayor addressed them. the mayor, david soon perceived, was the center of their interest. their pleasantries, their well-seasoned smiles, their playful blushes, were all directed at him, and now and then one of his sallies was reproved by a muff's soft blow upon his mouth. the rôle of target seemed to please him; he bent now to this one, now to that, made sweeping flourishes, made retorts that drew upon him more of the same pleasant missiles. it began to dawn upon david that his saviour was very much of a gallant. presently the mayor, rising to greet a newcomer, noticed david. after a few moments he excused himself and took a chair at david's table. a silk vest that was a condensed flower garden made the mayoral front a gorgeous sight to behold. there was a new respect in the mayor's manner. "i see you're flyin' in high society these days," he began, in a whisper. "you refer to miss chambers? she's merely interested in me as you are--in my reform." david said this quietly, as though the subject was closed. his dignity was not lost on the mayor. "say, you've taken an all-fired brace to yourself in the last ten days, ain't you! as for your lady friend--well, if the way she was talkin' to you is the way reformers talk, gee i wish some one like her'd try to make a man out o' me! she's all right, friend. i've seen her before and i've heard a lot about her. but her old man--lord, but i'd like to set for a week or so on his windpipe! real estate is one o' his thousand lines, you know. he owns a lot o' tenements in this part o' town--none near st. christopher's, o' course--and as a landlord, say, he's just partic'lar hell!" "i've come to ask another favour of you," david cut in, quickly. "you've seen the boy that stays with me. i want to get him a job if i can. i thought possibly you might be able to help me." "i've seen the kid, yes. somethin' of a sleight o' hand performance, ain't he?--now he's there and now he ain't. where'd you pick him up?" "we just fell in with each other a couple of months ago. there's a man in him." "i see. and you're trying to dig it out. you'll have to do a little blastin' on the job, don't you think? as for gettin' him work"--he shook his head slowly--"there's about five thousand families on avenue a, and each family's got five boys, and about once in so often the street out there is blockaded with their mas beggin' me to get 'em jobs. there's how i'm fixed." "you can't help me then?" "you've sized it up. sorry. wish i could." after a moment david asked hesitantly: "you couldn't use a boy here, could you?" "here! nothin' i could use a boy for." "help in the kitchen, carry things up from the cellar, clean up," david suggested. the mayor shook his head. "it would be great for the boy if he could work a while for some one like you that would understand him, make allowances, and break him in properly," david went on eagerly. "he's never held a job, and a stranger wouldn't have much charity for his shortcomings, wouldn't keep him long. you don't need him, but still you can make things for him to do. in three or four weeks i'll have found another job for him, and by then you'll have him worked into shape to hold it. of course i'll pay his wages myself--say three dollars a week; only he must think it's coming from you." the mayor's look changed to that sharp, penetrating gaze with which he had searched david's interior on his first visit. "yes, you're in dead earnest," he grunted after a few seconds. he raised a fat forefinger. "see here, friend. you're cuttin' into my business. i'm an octopus, a trust--you understand?--and any man that tries any philanthropic stunts in my part o' town, i run him out o' business. see? now you send the kid around and i'll let him bust things here for a while. but keep your coin. i reckon three dollars ain't goin' to put carl hoffman on the bum." david thanked him warmly. "but you don't need the boy," he ended in a determined voice, "so i can't let you pay him." the mayor regarded david steadily for a moment. "have it your own way," he said abruptly; and suddenly his big fist reached across the table, and to david it was like shaking hands with a fervent pillow. "friend, i've sized you up for the real thing. you made your mistake, and it was a bad one--but we all make 'em. you belong 'way up. i'm proud to know you." david flushed and was stammering out his appreciation, when the mayor interrupted with, "oh, a friend that's good enough for miss chambers is good enough for me." he glanced over his shoulder at the group he had left, then leaned confidentially across the table and asked in a whisper: "what d'you think o' the bunch?--the ladies i mean." "why, they seem to be very fine," david answered, surprised. "and they admire you." "friend," said the mayor with an approving nod, "you certainly ain't been lookin' on with your blind eye. they do that! and every afternoon it's the same--either them, or some other bunch. and d'you know what they're after?" "no." "me. they want to marry me. and there ain't a girl on the avenue between fifteen and seventy that ain't tryin' to do the same. friend, i can't help bein' pop'lar with the ladies. i like 'em--god bless 'em! but when you've got a whole avenue tryin' to marry you, it's hell!" he shook his head with an air of sadness. "i don't want to marry. i was married once for about a year. it was when i was a kid. i guess she was a pretty nice girl, but she was too much like her mother, and when she went i swore i'd keep out o' that kind o' trouble. but they're closin' in on me. one of 'em's sure to get me. i don't know which one, or mebbe i could head her off. i ought to keep away from 'em, but i can't leave 'em alone, and they won't leave me alone. oh, hell!" he rose with a groan. "well, send round the kid," he said, and carefully pulling down his vest and smoothing his dozen hairs, he rejoined his friends. as david left the café he heard a deep roar from the mayor, and had a glimpse of a fair suitress of forty rebuking the mayor's mouth with her muff. david sent tom to the mayor, and walked over to a hardware store on the bowery to order some new ash cans. as he was returning through the bowery a man stepped to his side with a quiet, "hello, pal." startled, david looked about. beside him was a wiry, gray man, with deep-lined face and a keen, shifty eye. it was a man david had known in prison--a cynical, hardened gentleman who had been running counter to the law for thirty years, during which time he had participated in scores of daring robberies and had known most of the country's cleverest criminals. bill halpin was his name--at least the most recent of his dozen or two. halpin had taken a fancy to david while they were prison-mates, why david could not understand; and his greeting was warm to come from one of his contemptuous nature. the two walked on together, and david, in response to halpin's queries, told that he had gone to work with the determination to live honestly. halpin gave a sneer of unbelief--he sneered at all things save the frankly evil--but said nothing. when they reached david's tenement, david asked him in, but he said he had an engagement with a pal, and went away after promising to come around some other time. david shovelled the furnace full of coal and was beginning his preparations for dinner, aglow with his new hopes and with the thought that he had regained helen for his friend, when there was a knock at his door. he opened the door, expecting his usual caller--a tenant with a grievance. kate morgan stepped into the room. david had seen her in finery before, but never in such finery as now. there was a white velvet hat with two great black plumes that curled down upon her back hair; a long black coat, through whose open front glowed the warm red of a gown; a black fur scarf round her neck and a black muff enclosing her white-gloved hands. she stepped into the room and her eyes--brighter than ever were the eyes of the furs' original owners--gleamed over the scarf with hard defiance. "good evening, _mister_ aldrich." david flushed. "good evening." he drew his one rocking-chair toward her. "won't you sit down?" she sank into the chair, threw open the coat so that the full glory of its white satin lining and of the red dress were displayed, and thrust out a little patent-leathered foot. "i saw you with miss chambers last night," she said, her brilliant eyes darting contempt at him. "of course you told her all about that allen affair. you're not only a coward. you're a squealer." david was standing with his back to his mantel, and kate had to see the erectness, the confidence, the decision, that had come to him since the night of their adventure. "i don't know why you're saying these things," he returned quietly, "but if saying them pleases you, go on." "well, ain't we got high and dignified since we became a janitor!" she sneered. "a janitor! sweeping--scrubbing--listening to the kicks of dirty tenants--digging with your hands in the garbage to separate paper, tin cans, greasy bones. lord, but ain't you high up in life!" "go on," said david. she drew out her cigarette box--she knew he disliked to see her smoke--lighted a cigarette, and blew a little cloud toward him. "a janitor! what a poor, weak, miserable soul you've got. think of a man turning from excitement, an easy life, good things, and taking up this! but you're not a real man. you'd rather do dirty work for a year than earn a year of good times by a night's work. wouldn't you like to know what i cleaned up the other night after you sneaked out?" "what you wanted, i suppose." "that's it--i got all i went after! i'm on easy street for a year. and i'm enjoying life, too. you set that down. while you clean up other people's dirt, and live in a basement, and cook yourself three-cent dinners!" all her fierceness, all her scorn, were in her words, gave them a jagged edge; and she thrust them in deep and twisted them vindictively. david, very white, looked steadily down at her, but made no reply. "and besides, you're a squealer!" he continued silent. she sent out a puff of smoke, her eyes blazing at him, and thrust again: "and a damned coward!" david grew yet paler, but he continued his steady, silent gaze. she sat looking up at him for several moments, without speaking again. then slowly something of the fierce scorn, the wild desire to pain him, went out of her face. "and so you're going to stick to honesty?" she presently asked, abruptly, her voice still hard. "as tough as it is?" "yes," said david, quietly as before. "and nothing can change you?" he shook his head. she continued staring up at him. for an instant faint twitches broke her face's hard surface, but it tightened again. suddenly, to david's astoundment, she whirled about in her chair, presenting him her back; and he saw a white hand clench and her little body grow rigid. then suddenly she sprang up, hurled her cigarette box across the room, and turned upon him with a deep gasp, her face convulsed. "here i am!" she cried, stretching out to him her open hands. "i tried to get you to come to my way. you wouldn't come. i've come to your way. here i am!" this whizzing from one pole to the other was too great a speed for david. "what?" he gasped. "i lied about new year's night! i took nothing--not a thing! you wouldn't let me. i've acted to you like a devil. you're not a coward. you did not leave me in allen's house. i saw you waiting behind the palm. i've tried to keep away from you. i didn't want to give in. but i've come! i've give in! i'll be whatever you want me to be, david!--whatever you want me to be!" david was not yet at the other pole. "whatever i want you to be?" he said dazedly. "yes! yes! i'll be honest--be anything!" she answered, breathless. she moved a quick step nearer, and went on in an appealing, breaking voice: "but don't you see, david? don't you see? i love you! take me!" david was there. a wave of pain, of self-shame, of infinite regret, swept through him. for a moment, while he tried to get hold of himself, he looked down into the quivering, passionate, tear-lit face; then he took the hands outstretched to him. "kate," he said imploringly, "i'm so sorry--so sorry! forget me. i am nobody--nothing." "i love you!" "think how poor i am, how far down." "i love you!" the low tensity of that iterated cry shamed out of existence all evasive reasons--drove david straight to what he thought his uttermost answer. "forgive me," he said, sick with loathing of himself. "but you've forced me to say it.... i don't love you." "i love you!" she had paled at his words, and her cry was only a whispered gasp; but her fixed upward gaze, passionate, appealing, mandatory, did not waver an instant. david had but one word left--and that, he had thought, was to be forever unspoken. but it had to be spoken now. after a moment, in which her face seemed to swim before him, he said, huskily: "i love someone else." she drew suddenly back, there was a sharp indrawing of the breath, the face hardened, the eyes above the fur neckpiece gleamed fiercely. "who?" he shook his head. "who?" "i cannot say." the eyes narrowed to slits, and she looked him through as on the day she had guessed he was just from prison--only now her intuition was quickened a hundred fold. they stood motionless a few seconds, he trying to parry her instinct; then from her came a low, sharp "a-a-h!" and, after a second, "so it's her!" he shivered. there was another moment of tense silence. then she said, abruptly: "it's miss chambers?" he did not move an eyelash. "you love miss chambers!" she announced decisively. her hands clenched. "i hate her! why shouldn't she stay in her own world! why should she come mixing in my affairs! oh! i could----!" she finished with a tensing of her whole figure. she glared silently at david for a moment; then a harsh, mocking laugh broke from her. "so, you're in love with miss chambers! miss chambers--a janitor. what a lovely match! of course you've told her, and she's said yes!" "i shall never tell her," david said quietly. the bitterness and mockery began to fade slowly from her face, and meditation came in their stead; and when she spoke again her tone was the tone of argument. "don't you know that she's far, far above you? you're a fool to think of her! why, you can never get her--never! you see that, don't you?" "yes." he raised a peremptory, entreating hand. "please!--let's not speak of her." her whole body quickened. "after her, do you like any woman better than me?" she demanded. he shook his head. "no." "she's out of the question for you--she doesn't live!" she crept slowly toward david, her eyes burning into his. "there's no one between us," she said in a low, choked voice. then her voice blazed up, her words rushed out. "you do not want me now, but you will! i'll make you love me. i'll be anything you like--i'll be honest!--i'll work! yes, yes, i'll make you love me, david!" her hands had clutched his, and she now held up her quivering face. "i'm going to be honest for your sake, david. kiss me!" david was agonised with the pang of her tragedy, with the shame of his own great part in it. "forgive me," he whispered huskily; and he stooped and pressed his lips to hers. she gave a little cry and flung her arms about his neck and held him tight. then breathing against his cheek, "you'll love me yet, david!" she abruptly withdrew her arms, and the next moment was out of the room. chapter v on the upward path kate's last sentence, "you'll love me yet, david!" recurred to him constantly during the next two days. he would not, of course--yet he could but muse upon the possibility. we are all creatures of change. our views of to-day may not be our views of to-morrow, our dislikes of this year may be our desires of next. since, as kate had said, helen chambers did not live for him, might there not take place within him such a change as would make him yearn for the love he now could not accept? david looked forward with dread to his next meeting with kate. he feared another such scene, so painful to them both, as the one they had just passed through. but his fear was needless. kate's nature was an impetuous one, little schooled to control, but her will was strong and she was capable of restraint as well as of abandon. she knew enough of character to see that david could be eventually won to be more than friend only by now asking and giving no more than friendship; and she was strong enough to hold herself to this course. when she came in three evenings later, both manner and dress were sober, though her eyes showed what was behind her self-control. they greeted each other with constraint; but she at once said abruptly, "i'm going to behave," and went on to tell david that, after two days' searching, she had found a position in a department store and had begun work that morning. "i'm a soap saleslady," she said. "lace-box soap, a three-cake box for nine cents, takes off skin and all--you know the kind. i get five dollars a week. that's two hundred and sixty dollars for a year's work. i've made that, and more, in a night. oh, it pays to be honest!" she had broken the constraint, but nevertheless david was grateful for the entrance of rogers who just then chanced in. david introduced the two, and after a few moments of chat rogers invited david and kate to dine with him at the mayor's café, where he had all his meals; and a little later they set out for the pan-american. the restaurant was filled with diners--fair germans sitting behind big glass steins, olive-skinned jews and hungarians, and women in plenty of both hues. most were more or less americanised, but many announced by the queer cut of their clothes that they were recent pilgrims. some tables were quiet with a day's weariness, some buzzed with business, some (and most of these were jewish) were eager with discussion on music, literature, politics, religion. above the buzz of four tongues rose a wild, wailing air of the carpathians that the orchestra, in red velvet jackets, were setting free with excited hands from their guitar, mandolin, xylophone and two violins. the mayor, in vest of effulgent white, was circulating among his guests, joking, wishing good appetites, radiating hospitality from his glowing face. his well-organised kitchen and dining-room apparently ran themselves, so during the dinner hours there was nothing to interrupt his being merely host. he beckoned rogers's party, who had paused at the door, toward him with a grand wave of his jewelled hand, and led them to a table at the rear of the room. "well, friends, if your appetites are as good as my dinner, you've certainly got a good time comin'," he said, and moved on to other guests. on the way over kate had announced that she was going to do some studying at home--reading was one of david's interests, so she had decided it must be one of hers--and had asked for advice; and this now led to a discussion upon books between david and rogers. david discovered that his employer had no use for poetry, had a fair acquaintance with fiction, and in history and philosophy was much better read than himself. rogers, in his unexcitable way, talked well. at times his remarks were brilliant in their analysis, and at times there came those quick, caustic thrusts of wit that pierce like a sword to the heart of pretense and false ideas. he expressed himself with ease in a wide vocabulary, though many of the less common words he mispronounced--a fault that to david was elusively familiar. he spoke always in a quiet, even tone, that would have led a casual hearer to believe that he was merely a cold mentality, that he had not the fire of a soul. but david had the feeling now, as he had had before and as he was often to have again, that in looking into those glowing eyes he was looking into the crater of a volcano. during this play of wits kate could only look silently on. she had known that david was in education above the level of her friends, but the side of himself he was now showing she had not before seen. his richness where she had nothing seemed to remove him to an impossible distance. her face became drawn with sharp pain. but presently the talk shifted from books to life, and she forgot her despair. here she was at home. she knew life, her impressions were distinct and decided, and her sentences seemed pieces of her own vivid personality. the presence of the two men inspired her. david, who thought he knew her, found himself being surprised at the quickness and keenness of her mind, and rogers watched her little sparkling face with more and more interest. she was surprised at herself, too; talking on subjects of broader interest than personalities was a new experience to her, and she discovered in herself powers never before called out. as they were sipping their coffee to the frenzied music of a gypsy waltz, tom, who had spied them from the kitchen, darted in to their table. his appearance was much improved by a haircut and a complete new outfit which a small amount in david's cash, and a larger amount in the mayor's credit, had enabled him to purchase on the instalment plan. he shook hands all around, unabashed by rogers's habitual reserve. "how'd you like de feed?" he demanded eagerly. "if anyt'ing's wrong, i'll fix it. nuttin'? o' course not. say, de grub here's swell, ain't it? t'irty cents is a lot for a dinner, but it's wort' it. we buys only de best, we cooks it right, an' we serves it proper, wid table-clot' an' napkins. d'you take notice o' dem? it ain't many places you gits table-clot' an' napkins! "was your waiter all right? shall i call him down for anyt'ing? no. well, i'm glad i don't have to say nuttin' to him, for he's a friend o' mine. say, mebbe you t'ink it's easy to run a place like dis. t'ink again! first, dere's what're we goin' to have to-day, den dere's gettin' it ready, den dere's servin' it, an' de dishes, an' washin' 'em, an' everyt'ing. it's hustle, an' worry, an' t'ink from when you gets up till when you goes to bed." and on he went, picturing the responsibility under which he tottered, till they told him goodnight and went out. kate was in a glow of spirits when david and rogers left her at her door. she whispered appealingly to david as they parted, "please talk with me this way again, david." it had been in his mind that, under the circumstances, it would be better for kate if they should cease to meet; but he frankly realised he was the only link which held her to her new honesty, and to break their friendship would be to snap that link. and so he answered, "yes--often;" and this was in fact the first of many such hours spent together, in which they were often joined by rogers. it seemed to david that kate's cynicism and sharpness were beginning slowly to wear away. since his talk with helen david's hope of conquering the future had been constantly high. he did not underestimate the struggle before him, but strength and courage had been flowing into him since food and shelter had ceased to be worries, and he now felt that under helen's inspiration he could do anything. one of his aims he had already achieved, helen's respect, though how still seemed to him a miracle. his heart yearned even more eagerly than ever for something higher than friendship, but he knew this desire to be, as always, unattainable. he could not hope for a second miracle, and one that would sink the first to a commonplace. her suggestion that he should write a story of the man-making of a boy whom surroundings had forced toward destruction, laid immediate and powerful hold upon him. he saw, as she had said, that a story of the right kind might contribute in some degree to awakening the public's sympathy for, and responsibility toward, the hundreds of thousands of children that are going to waste. and he saw, too, that such a book might lift him toward the world's respect, where he would be happier, more effective. selfishly, altruistically, the story was the thing for him to do. during the days after their talk, all his spare time, and even while he went about his work, his imagination was impassionedly shaping characters and plot. he had a note from helen saying she wanted to see him the following friday, and he could hardly wait for it to come, he was that eager to ask her judgment on his story's outline. when friday afternoon did finally arrive, he began to look for her an hour before she could be expected, excitedly pacing his room, and every minute glancing through his window up to the sidewalk. * * * * * when helen, after leaving her club of schoolgirls that afternoon, entered the reception room on her way out, she found mr. allen waiting for her in the flemish oak settle. "you were not expecting me, but i hope you're not displeased," he said in his grave, pleasant voice, and with the ease of long-accustomed welcome. she could not wholly restrain a little air of vexation as she gave him her hand. "of course i'm glad. but i'm afraid i'll have to disappoint you if you've come to go home with me. i've promised to make a call--in the neighbourhood. of course you can walk with me there, if you like." "oh, the neighbourhood!" he gave a humorous groan of mock complaint, but down in his heart the complaint was very real. the neighbourhood was coming too often between her and his desire to be with her. "very well. i'll take what i can get." she threw her sable scarf about her throat and they stepped forth into the narrow street, paved with new snow that the day had trodden to a dirty glaze. he had talked with her before about his ambitions, for his future had been part of his offering when he had offered himself. he now told her that he had just been appointed chief counsel of the committee of the legislature for investigating impure foods. she knew how great a distinction this was, how great a token of the future, and she congratulated him warmly. "if these good things you see really do come, you know i don't want to share them alone," he said in a low voice, when she had finished. she shook her head slowly. "the more i think, the more i see how unsuited i am for you. our ideas are so different. you face one pole, i another. we would never pull together; we could only achieve the deadlock of two joined forces that struggle in opposite directions." "but you know my hope is that we shall not always face in opposite directions." she turned upon him a smile that was touched with irony. "you mean you expect some day to look toward my pole?" he shrugged his shoulders and laughed. "you know i mean you will some day see the futility of such work as you are doing, and the wrongness of many of your ideas--and then you will turn to the true pole." "your pole? no. i do not believe, as you do, that only the fit should survive. i do not believe, as you do, that the hard conditions of life are necessary as a kind of sieve, or a kind of civil service examination, to separate the fit from the unfit. i do not believe, as you do, that the great mass who have failed to pass the meshes of this test, who are down, have by the mere fact of their being down proved their unfitness, shown that they are worthy to be neglected. your belief, summed up, is that the world is made for the strong--for the rich man born to opportunities, and for the poor man born with the superior brains and energy to create them. to that belief i can never come. i believe the world is made also for the weak. rather, i believe all should be made strong." with a sweep of her hand she indicated the two rows of tenements whose dingy red walls stretched away and away till they and the narrow street disappeared into the wintry twilight. "all these people here--they are weak because they have never had a chance to be otherwise. give them a fair chance and they will become strong--or most of them. that is what i believe--a fair chance for all to become strong." "and i believe the same. only i believe that chance exists at present for all who are worthy. if there is good stuff in a man, he rises; if not, he belongs where he is. the struggle is selective, it develops. make it easier and you lower the quality of your people." "ah, yes, i know you are an unalterable individualist," she sighed. "when i realise the great part you are going to have during the next twenty or thirty years in shaping the conditions under which we all must live, i wish you could be brought to a broader concept of the human relationship." "if i am to play such a part, my own concept is quite broad enough." "but in ways it is so hopeless! it consigns all these people to outer darkness. it holds no chance for the man whom circumstances are pressing down, no chance for any of those helpless people who are reaching vainly upward, or those who would be reaching upward if their consciousness were roused." they were drawing near to david's house, and the sight of it prompted a specific instance. "no chance for the man who has stolen, who repents, who struggles to reform." "the repentant thief!" he gave a low laugh. "the one that repented on the cross is the eternal type of the thief that repents. if he repents, it's at the last minute--when he can steal no more!" his words half angered her. "i wish you could talk with the one i'm going to see now!" he looked at her in surprise. "that aldrich fellow you were telling about!" he ejaculated. he felt a further astonishment--that she should be calling upon a man, and evidently in his room. he did not put this into words, but she read it in his face. it angered her more, and she answered his look sharply: "to have him call at my house or to see me at the mission would be embarrassing to him. i feel that i can be of some service, and since i must choose between an uptown convention and helping save a man, i have decided to sacrifice convention. it seems strange, doesn't it?" he did not reply to her sarcasm, but he still disapproved. there were so many things of which he disapproved that even had he been free to criticise he would have felt the futility of striking at any single fault. he prayed for the eradication of all this part of her life, and her restoration to normal views; first, because he honestly disbelieved in the work that interested her; second, because he reasoned that while she gave so much interest to the poor she was likely to have little interest left to give to his suit. they paused before david's window. david, glancing out, saw allen not ten feet away and heard helen say, "i wish so much you would talk with mr. aldrich." for a moment his heart stood still. then he sprang toward the door, intending to escape the back way, but it occurred to him that perhaps allen might not come in, and that to avoid him by running away was also to miss helen. he left the door ajar, to aid a quick flight if allen started in, and peered through the window at the couple, as alert as a "set" runner waiting the pistol-shot. they were a splendid pair, david had to admit to himself--both tall, she with the grace of perfect womanhood, he with the poise and dignity of power and success. she was a woman to honour any man's life; he--david now knew of allen's brilliant achievements and brilliant future--had a life worth any woman's honouring. yes, they were a splendid pair. presently allen bowed and went away, and the next moment david opened the door for helen. he was grateful to the dusk for muffling his agitation; and doubly grateful to it when she said, after giving him a firm pressure from her hand: "i've been trying to arrange with a friend--mr. allen--to have a talk with you some day. i hope you may soon meet." "thank you," said david. she suggested that they walk, and a few minutes later, david reciting the outline of his story, they entered second avenue, the east side's boulevard, always thronged with business folk, shoppers, promenaders, students. they forgot the crowds through which they wove their way, forgot even that they walked, and it was a surprise to both when they found themselves, just as david finished, before her home. she looked at his erect figure, at his glowing, excited face. "i think it's going to be splendid!" she cried. "i think so myself," he returned, with an exultant little laugh. "so a man always feels at first. but when the cold and clammy days have come, when your fires have all gone out and there's nothing but ashes left in your imagination----" "then," she broke in quickly, "you must just keep going. '----tasks in hours of insight will'd, can be through hours of gloom fulfill'd.' that's worth remembering. but let's walk on for a few minutes. there's something i want to say." she was silent for the greater part of a block. "one of our friends that we see much of is a publisher. he tells me that, though a novel may not sell enough to pay for the type-writing, it is pretty certain, if it has any merit, to yield several hundred dollars. if it has an active sale it may yield several thousand, and if it gets to the front of the big sellers it may yield a small fortune. i was thinking that if your book should go even moderately well, what a great deal it would help--toward--i mean what a great deal it would help you." she looked at him expectantly. her voice and her manner had had a background of constraint, and david vaguely felt that her meaning was not in her words, but was lurking behind them. "yes?" he said, wonderingly. the constraint was more marked as she continued, with an effort: "perhaps you might get--five thousand dollars for it." "yes?" he said, his wonderment rising. the constraint and effort were even greater as she replied: "well, that would do so much toward clearing your name!" her meaning leaped forth from its lurking place. for a moment he was completely stupefied.... she wanted him to repay the stolen money to st. christopher's! he felt her eyes upon him, waiting. "yes--it would help," he said, mechanically. they turned back. she saw he was far away. she did not speak. first came to him the absurdity of his trying to repay with his present earnings--fifty years of utmost saving. but he pressed down the bitter laugh that rose. she was right; if he was ever to clear his name he must refund the money to the mission. perhaps the book would repay it; perhaps years and years of work would be required. but repay it he must. there was no other way. he looked up as they paused again before her house. "yes--i will repay," he said. she reached out her hand. its grasp was warm, tight. "i knew it," she said, with a directness, a simplicity, that thrilled him. "i'm so glad!" chapter vi john rogers david flung himself at the story as though it were a city to be taken by storm. he was full of power, of creative fury. his long-disused pen at first was stubborn, but gradually he re-broke it to work; and he wrote with an ease, a surety of touch, a fire, that he had never felt before. he had half-a-dozen separate incentives, and the sum of these was a vast energy that drove him conqueringly through obstacle after obstacle of the story. these early days of the story were high days with him. he forgot, when writing, his basement room, his janitor's work, his dishonour. infinity lay between the end of december and the end of january; in a month his spirits had risen from nadir to zenith. the world was his; nothing seemed beyond him. he even dared dream of passing allen upon some mid-level and winning to the highest place in helen chambers's regard. the exhaustion of spirit at the end of each day's writing quenched this dream; but it was nevertheless enrapturing while it lasted, and at times david came near believing in it. david had asked both rogers and the mayor to aid him in securing tom a _bona-fide_ position, and after the boy had been running the pan-american café for a month, a place was found. tom's wages had been a heavy drain upon david's meagre income, and it was with a feeling of relief that david announced the coming change one night as they were preparing for bed. "i've got some great news for you, tom," he began. "what's dat?" asked the boy, dropping the shoe he had just taken off. "a new job!" cried david, trying to infect tom with enthusiasm. "delivery-boy on a wagon. you're to get four dollars a week--a dollar more than you're getting. think of that! you're in luck, my boy--you're getting rich!" but david's enthusiasm did not take. there came no sparkle into the boy's eyes, no eagerness into his manner. he looked thoughtfully at david a moment, then shook his head. "i don't t'ink i'll take it." "what!" cried david. the possibility of refusal had not occurred to him. he plunged into a fervent portrayal of the advantages of the new place. "mebbe you're right," tom said, when the picture had been painted. "but i'm gettin' used to t'ings at de pan-american; i likes de boss an' i likes de woik. an' i don't need de extry dollar. no, i don't want no better job dan what i got. it suits me right up to de chin." he walked, in one shoe and in one stocking, across to david and held out his hand. "but, pard"--a note of huskiness was in his voice--"pard, i appreciate dat you was tryin' to do de fine t'ing by me. shake." there was nothing more to be said. tom went back to the mayor, and david continued dropping in saturdays an hour before pay-time. one evening in early february, just after david had coaled the furnace and settled down to his story, he had a call from bill halpin, whom he had not seen since their first meeting. halpin leaned against the door, after it had been closed, and silently regarded david, a sneering smile upon his face. "honest!" he shot out at length, with a short, dry laugh. it was his first word since entering. david stared at the sarcastic, saturnine figure. "what do you mean?" "honest! and i half believed you!" again the short laugh. "you almost fooled bill halpin--which is sayin' you're pretty smooth." he jerked his head upward. "what's your game?--yours and this man _rogers_?" "see here, halpin, what are you talking about?" "oh, i suppose you'll say you don't know him. but since i met you on the bowery i've been around here twice, and both times i saw you two with your noses together. you're a smooth pair. come, what's your game?" "i don't understand you!" "don't try to fool me, aldrich," he drawled. "you can't. but don't tell me the game unless you want to. you know i wouldn't squeal if you did. all i want is for you to know you can't throw that honesty 'con' into me." david strode forward and laid sharp hold of halpin's shoulders. "see here, bill halpin, what the devil do you mean?" he demanded. halpin looked cynical, good-humoured disbelief back into david's eyes, and again let out a dry cackle. "drop that actor business with me, aldrich. i don't know what your game is--but i know there is a game. if you want to find out how much i know, come on. let's go out and have a drink." an hour later david stepped from the rear room of a bowery saloon, and walked dazedly through the spattering slush back to his house. he paused before it, and looked irresolutely at rogers's office window, whose shade was faintly aglow. he began to pace up and down the block, his eyes constantly turning to the window, his mind trying to determine his honourable course. at length he crossed the street, entered the house, and knocked at rogers's door. rogers admitted him with a look of quiet surprise and led the way across his office into the living-room behind, whose one window opened upon the air shaft. in this room were two easy chairs, a couch on which rogers slept, a table with a green-shaded reading-lamp, two or three prints--all utterly without taste. everything was in keeping with the surface commonplaceness of the man except a row of shelves containing a couple of hundred well-selected books. rogers motioned david to a chair and he himself leaned against his table, his hands folded across the copy of "père goriot" he had been reading. "i'm very glad you came in," he said, in his low, even voice. david gazed at rogers in his attitude of waiting ease, and he suddenly felt that to speak to this unsuspecting man was impossible. it did not occur to him that perhaps rogers had caught his strained look, and that perhaps this ease might be the mask of an agitation as great as his own. he dropped his eyes. but it was his duty to speak--and, in a way, his desire. he forced himself to look up. rogers had the same look and attitude of quiet waiting. "mr. rogers," david began, with an effort, "i have just been told something that i think i am bound to tell you. you hired me, befriended me, in the belief that i knew nothing about you. i feel it would not be honourable in me to remain your employe, in a sense your friend, if i concealed from you that i know what may be your secret. and there is another reason why i want you to know that i know: if the story is true, i want to tell you how much i sympathise." "go on," said rogers in his even voice. "it's doubtless all a mistake," said david, hurriedly, feeling that it was not. "i've just had a talk with a man i knew in prison--bill halpin. he's called to see me several times. he happened to see you. something about you struck him at once as familiar, but he could not recognise you. he saw you again, and he thought he placed you. he called here, had a talk with you, and on going away purposely shook hands. there was no grip in your little finger--you could only half bend it. he said he placed you by that." rogers still leaned against the table, his figure quiet as before--but david could see that the quiet was the quiet of a bow drawn to the arrow's head. the tendons of his hands, still holding the book, were like little tent-ridges, and his yellowish face was now like paper. "and who did he say i am?" his low voice asked. "he told me that fifteen years ago you and he were friends, pals--that you were a famous safe-breaker--that you were 'red thorpe.'" instantly rogers was another man--tense, slightly crouching as though about to spring, his eyes blazing, on his face the fierce look of the haunted creature that knows it is cornered and that intends to fight to the last. a swift hand jerked open a drawer of the table, and stretched toward david. in it was a revolver. david sprang to his feet and stepped back. rogers glared at him for a moment, and for that moment david expected anything. then suddenly rogers said, "what a fool!--to be thinking of that!" and tossed the pistol into the open drawer. defiantly erect, he folded his arms, his fierce pallor suggestive of white heat, his eyes open furnace-doors of passion. "well, you've got me!" he said, with strange guttural harshness. "i've been expecting this minute for ten years. what're you going to do? expose me, or blackmail me?" david got back his breath. "i don't understand. halpin told me he didn't think the police were after you." "they're not. i don't owe the state a minute." "then why do you talk of exposure?" "you understand--perfectly!" his words were a blast of furnace-hot ferocity. "you know what would happen if my clients learned i'm an ex-convict. they'd take every house from me--i'd again be an outcast. you know this; you know you've got your teeth in my throat. well--i'll pay blood-money. i have paid it. a police captain found me out, and for five years sucked my blood--every cent i made--till he died. i'll pay again--i can't help myself. how much do you want?--blood-sucker!" these hot words, filled with supremest rage and despair, thrilled david infinitely; he felt the long struggle, the tragedy, behind them. "you mistake me," he cried. "i've told you what i have because i thought to tell was my duty to you. betray you, or accept money for silence--i never could! surely you know i never could!" "for ten years i've touched no man's penny but my own," he said fiercely. "in money matters, i've been as honest as god!" the rage was dying out of his face, and despair was growing--the despair that sees nothing but defeat, failure. he looked unbelief at david. "but what difference does that make to you?" he asked bitterly. "well--how much is it to be?" the piercing brothership that had been surging up in david for this desperate, defiant, suspicious man, swept suddenly to the flood. "don't you see that we're making the same fight?" he cried with passionate earnestness. "i admire you! i honour you! your secret is as safe with me as in your own heart." david stretched out his hand. "i honour you!" he said. for several moments rogers's gaze searched david's soul. "you're speaking the truth--man?" he asked in a slow, harsh whisper. "i am." he continued staring at david's open face, flushed with its fervid kinship. "if you're lying to me--!" he whispered. then he held out his hand, and his thin fingers gripped about david's hand like tight-drawn wires. "during the month i've known you, you've seemed a white man. i think i believe you. but, man! don't play with me!" he burst out with sudden appeal. "if there's any trick in you, out with it now!" "if there was, now would be my time, wouldn't it?" they stood so for a moment, hands gripped, eyes pointed steadily into eyes. "yes, i believe you!" rogers breathed, and sank into a chair and let his head fall into his hand. david also sat down. presently rogers looked up. "i guess i was very harsh," he said weakly. "but you can't guess what i was going through. it was the moment i had feared for ten years. it seemed that the world had fallen from beneath me." "i understand," said david. "but you cannot understand the ten years of fear, of suspense--of fear and suspense that walk with you, eat with you, sleep with you." he sat looking back into the years. after a space, the hunger for sympathy, the instinct to speak his decade of repressed bitterness, prompted him on. "i was one of those thousands and thousands that never had a chance when boys. i had no very clear idea between right and wrong; there was no one to show me the difference. i was full of life and energy, and i had brains. i could easily have been turned into the right way--but there was no one. so i turned into the wrong. about that part of my life halpin told you." "he said you were the cleverest man in your line." rogers seemed not to hear the praise. "a man may begin to think while he is still a boy; if he has spirit and animal energy, he doesn't begin to think till later. i was twenty-seven. i had been two years in sing sing and had three more years to serve. it wasn't the warden's words that started me thinking, nor the chaplain's sermons. chaplains!--bah!--frocked phonographs! it was two old men i happened to see there--mere cinders of men. the thought shot into me, 'there's what you're going to be at sixty-five!' "i couldn't get away from that thought. my mind forced me to study my friends; there was not one old man among them who was living a peaceful, comfortable life. that burnt-out, hunted old age--i revolted from it! i did a lot of thinking. i decided that, when i got out, prison gates should never have reason to close on me again. "finally, i was discharged. i knew it was hard for an ex-convict to get work, but i thought it would be easy for me. i was willing, clever, adaptable. but--oh, god! you know what the fight is, aldrich!" "i do!" said david. rogers was on his feet now, his eyes once more glowing. he began to pace the floor excitedly. "your fight was easy to mine. but i'll skip it--you know what the fight's like. it's enough to say that i found the world would not receive me as my old self. i changed my name; i grew a beard; i began to wear glasses; i dyed my red hair brown; i smothered down my spirit. i became john rogers. "a friend of mine in a chicago real estate office, in which i once worked for a couple of weeks as a clerk, sent me an envelope and a sheet of paper of the firm. on the paper i wrote a letter of recommendation from the firm. i had told my story to the mayor of avenue a--it was because he knew i would sympathise with you that he brought you to me--and he helped me. i got my first job. "think of that, aldrich!" he held a trembling fist in david's face, and laughed harshly. "i had to become a disguise, i had to lie, i had to commit forgery, to get a chance to be honest! oh, isn't this a sweet world we're living in! "and ever since, my life has been one great lie! a lie for honesty! but the lie has done for me what truth could not do. i'm respected in a small way. i'm successful in a small way. but, man, how that smallness chafes me! how i am shackled! i should be respected, be successful, in a large way. i'm cleverer than most of the men in my line. i have brains. i see big business opportunities. but i dare not take them. i must always be pulling back at the reins. if i let myself out, i should become prominent. men would begin to ask, 'who is that fellow rogers?' and pretty soon some one would be sure to find out. and down i'd go! i must keep myself so small that i'll not be noticed--that's my only safety!" he paused. david could say nothing. "and always the lie that saved me is threatening to destroy me," rogers went on, in a lower voice. "god, how i've worked to get to this poor place! how i want to live peacefully, honestly! but some day someone will find out i'm an ex-convict. a breath, and this poor house of cards i've worked so hard to build and protect will go flat! and i cannot begin all over again. i cannot! i haven't the strength. this is going to happen--i feel it! and how i fear it! how i've feared it for ten long years! man, man, how i fear it!" he dropped exhausted into a chair, and almost at once a cough began to shake him by the shoulders. "and this disease"--a hand pressed itself upon his chest--"it's another prison gift!" he gasped, bitterly. there was not a word in david. he reached out and gathered one of rogers's thin hands in both of his; gathered it in the clasp of his soul. the cough ceased its shaking and rogers looked up. he gazed at the tears, at the quivering brothership, in david's face. thus he sat, silent, gripping david's hands; then, slowly, his own tears started. "man, dear," he whispered brokenly, "i think i'm going to be glad you found me out!" chapter vii hope and dejection a week or two later rogers cut out all qualifying words and said from his heart, "i'm glad you know!" he and david quickly became comrades; and many an hour they sat in the room behind the office talking of life, of philosophy, of books. david now learned that rogers had done a large part of his really wide reading while in prison; and he now understood rogers's frequent mispronunciation--rogers had acquired his less common words entirely from reading, and never having heard them spoken, and lacking such fundamentals of education as rules of pronunciation, he had for fifteen years been pronouncing his new words as seemed to him proper. david was surprised to find that rogers, for all his occasional bitter flashes, was an optimist. he often marvelled how rogers had retained this hopefulness for the world's future; he could explain it only by a great natural soundness in the man. rogers believed the world was marching forward, and he often said, his eyes illumined with belief: "the time is coming, aldrich--i shall not see it, and you may not, but it's coming--when there will be no human waste, when the world will have learned the economy of men!" frequently they discussed society's treatment of the criminal, and david learned that rogers burned with an indignation as great as his own. if ever rogers's obsessing fear should be fulfilled, if he should be found out, then his one desire, a desire always with him, was to speak out his bitter accusation in the world's face. one warm, exuberant sunday toward the end of february, they walked northward through riverside park, the broad, glinting hudson at their left. when they reached the height crowned by grant's tomb, rogers, who had been silent for several minutes, now and then slipping meditative glances at david, laid a hand on david's arm and brought him to a pause. "look across yonder," he whispered, pointing to the palisades that lifted their mighty shoulders from the hudson's farther edge. "wonderful, aren't they," said david, letting his eyes travel northward along the giant wall till it dimmed away. "yes--but i didn't mean the view." rogers drew nearer, and went on in a whisper, while the crowd of sunday promenaders sauntered by their backs: "i told you i saw many big business opportunities, and that i had to let them all pass. over there is one i did not let pass. several years ago i saw that some of the people who were being crowded off manhattan island would in the future live over there. the land was cheap then; i saw it would some day be immensely valuable. after a great deal of manoeuvring, in which mr. hoffman helped me, i secured an option for four years on five pieces of ground that lie together. a few months ago i renewed the option for three more years; each time i paid the owners a thousand dollars for the option. under its terms, i guarantee them a big price, and they are bound to sell the land only through me. so you see i am, in effect, the head of a small land syndicate. over there is my big venture--my big hope." "and has the development you expected come?" "it is coming. i have learned that a big company is buying all the land over there it can get hold of. they're going to establish a new suburb. they're buying secretly and through several agents; they want to keep the different holders from guessing what's up, so they can get the land at their own price. well, for my land they'll have to pay me _my_ price!" that evening they called on kate morgan. once, shortly after that first dinner together in the pan-american café, when david had dropped in to see her he had found rogers there, and he had discovered on rogers's controlled face a look he thought might betoken more than a commonplace interest. since then rogers had often called, and that which david had at first seen as a possibility he now saw developing toward a fact. old jimmie was sleeping off the effects of a "loan" in a back room, so they had kate and the little parlour to themselves. kate was in the depth of the blues. david asked her what was the matter. "soap!" she cried fiercely. "my life's nothing but soap. it's 'that kind's nine cents for a box of three cakes, ma'am. three boxes? twenty-seven cents, please.' or it's 'this variety is thirteen cents a box--regular value twenty-five.' that's all. it's just that, and only that, nine hours a day, six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year--soap!--soap!--soap! oh, i'm going soap-mad! i can't stand it! i won't stand it!" she gazed rebelliously at the two men. "you must try something new," said david. "and please, sir, what'll that be?" she demanded, sarcastically. "something that will use your energy and intelligence. how would you like to be a stenographer? a few months in a business school would fit you for a position. you would develop and advance rapidly, and soon have a responsible place." "i'd like that," she said, decidedly. "i've thought of it--i know i could do the work. but how about the months while i study? i did have a little money on hand, but i couldn't live and keep my father on that soap-counter's five dollars, so i've had to use some of it every week. it's all gone. i must live--and i'm broke. no, i've got to stick to the soap!" "can't you and your father take two cheap rooms, sell most of your furniture, and live on the proceeds while you study?" david persisted. "everything here was bought on instalment. it's about half paid for. if sold, it'd bring about enough to pay off the balance. i might as well just give it back to the dealer." rogers, who thus far had been silent, now said quietly: "you leave the settling with the instalment dealer to me. i'll guarantee to get enough out of him to keep you going till you're through school." she laughed. "you'll be the first that ever got anything out of an instalment dealer!" "i'll get it," he assured her. "if i don't get quite enough from him, i'll borrow the rest for you." she looked at him sharply. "that means you'd loan it all. you're mighty kind. but i could never pay it back--to take it would be the same as stealing. i've never stolen from friends, and i'm not going to begin now." but in the end rogers prevailed; and when they left it had been settled that kate was immediately to enter a business school. two days before--after tom had gratefully refused a second better-paying job--david had had a conference with the mayor. "i been doin' my best talkin' to get him to go," the mayor said despairingly, "but he says i was good to him when he needed a job and now he's never goin' to leave me. say, if i don't get rid o' him pretty soon, i got to start my own dish factory. and here's an interestin' point for you, friend: since he's had them better offers he's been hintin' at a raise." when david entered his room, after telling rogers good night, he found tom, who had avoided him the night before and all the day, sitting far down in the rocking-chair, wrapped in dejection. he understood the boy's gloom, for he had suggested a plan to the mayor. tom dropped his eyes when david came in, and answered david's "hello there," with only a mumble. but at length he looked guiltily up. "is dat job you was tellin' me about took yet?" he asked. david tried to wear an innocent face. "why? what's the matter?" "de boss told me yesterday he was losin' money, dat he'd have to cut down his force, an' dat he'd have to let me go." "yes?" "i told him he'd been a friend to me when i was hard up, an' i was goin' to stick by him now't he was up agin it. i said i was goin' to work for him for nuttin'." "oh!" said david. "but he wouldn't let me. so i'm fired. how about dat odder job?" "i'm afraid it's taken, tom." david pulled a chair before the boy and for ten minutes spoke his best persuasion in favour of entering school. "yes, de mayor handed me out de same line o' talk. he told me what a lot you'd done for me. he was right, too. an' he told me how much you wanted me to go to school." he looked steadily, silently, at david. "d'you really want me to go as much as all dat, pard?" "there's nothing i'd rather have you do." "an' you won't miss de t'ree a week i been fetchin' in?" "i don't think we'll miss it much." there was an inward struggle. "dere's nuttin' i'd not sooner do, pard," he said, huskily. "but since you want me to--all right." the next morning he started to school. at the end of the day he informed david that he was in a class "wid kids knee-high to a milk-bottle," that his teacher was "one o' dem t'inks-she-is beauts dat steps along dainty so she won't break de eart'," and "de whole biz gives me de bellyache." he was miserable for weeks--and so was his teacher--and so were his class-mates. but he gradually became adjusted to school life, and when some of the rudiments were fixed in his head, he began to make rapid progress. he had become great friends with helen chambers, whom he often saw at the mission, and his desire to please her was another incentive to succeed in school. one day david had a note from dr. franklin inviting him to call at the mission, and a day or two later helen explained the invitation. dr. franklin had learned that david was living in the neighbourhood; knowing that helen had once been friends with him, he had spoken of david to her; she had told of david's struggle and his purpose--and the invitation was the consequence. helen advised david to accept, and one evening he called. the gray old man received him in such a spirit of unobtrusive forgiveness, referred only vaguely and hastily to the theft, praised him so sincerely for his struggle, and spoke so hopefully of the future, that david could take none of it amiss. he had to like the man, and be glad that such a one was morton's successor. when he left he gazed long at the glowing memorial window, which was now restored. what resentment there continued in his heart was for the moment swept out. he was glad that morton's memory was clear--glad it was his dishonour that kept the memory so. all this time david worked hard upon his story--becoming closer friends with rogers, frequently seeing kate, who was studying with all her energy, occasionally meeting dr. franklin, and now and then walking with helen from the mission to her car, or part of the way to her home. most of the time his belief in the story was strong, and he worked with eagerness and with a sense that what he wrote had life and soul. but at intervals depression threw him into its black pit, and all his confidence, his strength of will, were required to drag himself out. several times helen chambers rescued him. once she took him to visit her uncle henry, whom she had told of david's struggle. the old man's genial courtesy, and genuine interest in the book, were an inspiration for days. and once she forced him to come to her home and read to her a part of what he had written; and her eager praise lifted him again into the sunlight of enthusiasm. so, working hard, the winter softened into spring, the spring warmed into summer, the summer sharpened into early autumn--and the book was done. he immediately sent it, as he had promised, to helen, who was then at one of the family's country places. three days afterward there came a note from her. it told how the story had gripped her, and how it had gripped her uncle henry, who was visiting them--how big it was just as a story--how splendid it was in purpose; it told what a great promise the book was for his future; and finally it told that she had sent the manuscript to her publisher friend. but the flames of enthusiasm enkindled by this note sank and died away; and he was possessed by the soul-chilling reaction, the utter disbelief in what one has done, that so often follows the completion of a sustained imaginative task. his people were wooden, their talk wooden, their action wooden, and the wires that were their vital force were visible to the dullest eye. helen, he told himself, had judged his work with the leniency of a friend for a friend. hers was not a critical estimate. he knew that the publisher's answer, when it came after the lapse of a month or two months, would be the formal return of his manuscript. success meant too much to him to be possible--his promotion to more pleasant work, a rise in the world's opinion, the partial repayment of his debt, a higher place in helen's regard, the beginning of his dreamed-of part in saving the human waste. no, these things were not for him. he had failed too often with his pen for success to come at last. chapter viii rogers makes an offer the october day was sinking to its close as david, who was walking southward through broadway, came to a pause at thirty-fourth street to wait till a passage should break through the vortex of cabs, trucks, and street cars, created here by the crossing of three counter-currents of traffic. as he stood waiting he saw a woman in disarranged dress, about whom there instantly seemed to be a vaguely familiar air, step from the crowd and walk unsteadily into the turbulence of vehicles. a policeman called a sharp warning to her, but she went on, and the next second the shoulder of a horse sent her to the pavement, and only the prompt backward jerking of the driver saved her from the horse's feet. the policeman dragged her out of danger, and david joined the curious group that ringed the pair. "that'll be your finish some day if you don't leave the bottle alone," he heard the policeman say severely. her answer was a reckless, half-fearful laugh. her voice roused again in david the sense of vague familiarity. presently she turned her face. it was the face of lillian drew. he stared at her a moment, then, careful to hide himself from her eyes, he hurried through the passage that had opened, and on down crowded broadway. the sight of her had startled him deeply. his one meeting with her flashed back into his mind, and all the horrible business of his discovery of morton's guilt, his own accusation, his trial, his sentence--and he lived them through again with sickening vividness. presently he began to study if there was any way in which lillian drew might affect the future. morton she could not injure. morton was too long dead; she had sunk to too low a level for her unsupported word to have belief, and the letters which were her only power had been ashes these five years. as for himself, him she could not touch. no, lillian drew was harmless. and yet he could not wholly rid himself of a feeling of uneasiness. when david reached home he found tom waiting at the head of the little stairway that led down into the basement. the boy had grown much in the last nine months, and the pinched look had given place to a healthy fulness. but he was still the same boy: his cow-lick still was like a curling wave; his clothes would not stay in order, nor his hands clean, despite his desire to please david and helen chambers; and the vernacular of the street, notwithstanding his efforts to "talk schoolroom," still mastered his tongue. he stopped david with an air of subdued excitement. "say," he whispered, "de owner o' de house here, he's downstairs waitin' for you. and say!--but ain't he mad!" the owner of the tenement, who had recently moved into another house he owned in the neighbourhood, had before shown an irascible disposition to interfere in the tenement's management, so tom's news was no surprise to david. "what's he want?" "i dunno. but he's swearin' like he'd like to eat you alive." the owner, drawn by their voices, came out of david's room and mounted the steps. he belonged to that class of men whose life is a balance between gratification of appetite and the relentless pursuit of small gain, and his coarse, full-lipped, small-eyed face bore the family likeness. "ain't you this fellow aldrich?" he demanded aggressively, blocking the head of the stairway. "you know i am," said david. "yes--but i wanted to hear you confess it with your own lips. i have been hearin' about you from st. christopher's mission. ain't you the fellow that stole that money from there?" david saw the brink of a new disaster. but the owner's manner made him bristle. "well?" "well, no crook can be janitor in my house! take your things out o' that room, and git!" david wanted to seize the owner by the shoulders and shake his mean little soul out upon the sidewalk. "i take my orders from mr. rogers," he returned, controlling himself. "and rogers takes his orders from me. see? now you git!" "rogers is my employer." he swore fiercely at david. "get too fresh, you dirty thief, and i'll punch your face in!" "please try!" he looked into david's gleaming eyes, at the shoulders that promised too much strength, and his threatening attitude subsided. "well, if you won't go for me, we'll see what you'll say to rogers!" he snorted. "you come with me to his office." "if you want me, you'll find me in my room." david brushed roughly by the owner and went down the stairway. a minute later, the owner and rogers entered the room. "now you fire him," the owner ordered rogers. "i ain't goin' to have no jailbirds around." "but he's given most excellent service for almost a year," rogers protested in his quiet voice. "i ain't to be fooled by that trick," sneered the owner, with a wise look. "i ain't one o' them muckheads that believes because a thief's been straight for nine months he's always goin' to be straight. no sir! he's nine months nearer his next crooked stunt! now fire him." "but--" "cut out your 'buts'!" he roared, savagely. "fire him or"--he looked threateningly at rogers--"there's agents that will!" rogers turned slowly upon david who was standing beside his table with burning eyes and clenched face. "i think you'll have to go, aldrich," he said, after a moment. without a word david picked up his hat and, followed by tom, walked out of the room. as he tramped hotly through the streets--the boy, pale and silent, beside him--his bitterness was at first directed even against rogers. but in a little while he remembered rogers's situation, and that rogers could not have saved him--and the bitterness ran out of him. in its place came the sharp realisation that he was again in the abyss--stronger, better able than a year before to make his way from its smooth-walled depths--but nevertheless in the abyss. what should he do? how should he get out?--these questions were constantly begging answers till, two hours later, wearied from walking, he came again into his room. rogers rose from his table as he entered and looked questioningly at him. "you understand?--i had to do it?" "yes," said david, taking the hand he held out. rogers sent tom out on an errand. after the boy had gone, anger slowly lit its fires in rogers's thin white cheeks. "the hardest part of it all is, i dare not be a man, be myself!" he burst out fiercely. "you don't know how heavy and revolting this mask of discretion, of control, of subserviency, becomes at times! he should have been kicked out, stamped on! ah, to be unafraid!--that's the greatest thing in the world!" he stood leaning on his tightened fists, which rested on the table, his eyes blazing across at david. but after a moment the red and flame began to die from his face and eyes. "come, sit down," he said abruptly. "there's something i want to say to you." they both took chairs. "i've been thinking of a plan for several weeks, and i guess this is the time to tell you," rogers began. "as you know, the land syndicate that's been secretly buying in land up along the palisades has been sending its agents to me. the syndicate is still keeping itself in the dark, but i've learned that it's called the new jersey home company, and that alexander chambers is its president. the active work of making a deal with them has just begun, and the deal ought to come to a head in a month or six weeks." he paused and gazed steadily at david, his thin face drawing with despair. then he said in a low voice: "haven't you noticed--during the last year--i've been losing strength?" david nodded. "yes--these prison lungs!" he breathed, with fierce bitterness. "i saw my doctor last week. he told me in this climate i might last a year--a little more, a little less. if i went to colorado or new mexico i might last several years, might even get well. that's what i want to do--finish up this deal, then drop everything and go west. "he told me i must do no work, and keep away from excitement. i knew that already. yet this deal's going to mean a lot of both. i simply haven't got the strength to see it through. i must have someone to help me--and i want that someone to be you." "me!" cried david. "why, i don't know the first thing about real estate." "you don't need to. the chief thing will be just to stick to the price i set. there'll be a lot of stiff talking--you can do that. and mr. hoffman will help some; he's got a little interest in the deal." "but my record. they'll doubtless learn about it. aren't you afraid that may endanger you?" "i count that they'll say i've taken you in to give you a new chance in life--and perhaps think no more about it. as for the danger, i'd rather have a man i can trust whose record they may find out, than have near me a man who may find out _my_ record--and tell." david nodded. "i see your point." "you'll be with me, won't you?" "can a drowning man refuse a rope thrown him?" they shook hands. "the financial situation is like this," rogers went on. "in my option i guaranteed the owners to sell the land for one hundred and fifteen thousand; i had to guarantee high to keep the land. i am to have half of all i get over that amount, and in addition, an agent's commission of five per cent. of the sale price. i am demanding from the syndicate a very much larger price than it has been paying for similar tracts. and i'll get my price, too--for they must have the land; and besides, the price is fair, much less than the land is worth to the syndicate. i'm asking one hundred and fifty thousand. "that makes my share twenty-five thousand. and i shall have earned it. several times in the last five years the owners--they're a pretty weak lot--have wanted to sell at insignificant prices, but i wouldn't let them. and if i hadn't been holding them together, they would have sold out months ago to the syndicate at the syndicate's price--eighty or ninety thousand. so you see i'm doing a mighty good thing for the owners. "now as to terms between you and me. twenty-five thousand is more than i'll need even if i live longer than the doctor has promised me. now i know what you want to do about that mission money. if the deal comes off as i expect, five thousand will be your share." "five thousand dollars!" gasped david. "for a month's work? i can't take it. i shall not have earned the smallest fraction of it!" "yes, you will take it. without your help, i'll fail--so you'll earn it all right. besides, even if you didn't earn it, with whom should i divide the money i don't need if not with you?" david still objected, and at length rogers cried out: "oh, take it as a loan, then, and pay off the mission! you'd rather owe me than it, wouldn't you? you can pay me back when i need it. the proposition is the same either way, for i'll be dead before i need it, and i'll make you a present of the amount in my will." in the end david consented. rogers went on with the other details of his plan. david should live with him, and tom could sleep on a cot in the office. it would be wise, with this big deal on, to make a more pretentious office show; kate morgan (he spoke of her calmly, but david surmised the quality of the calmness within), who had recently finished her business course and was looking for a better place than her present one, should be their stenographer. for the sake of the help it would be to her, and to try the effect of the work-cure upon him, old jimmie should succeed to david's place as janitor, and of course he and kate should have the basement flat as their home. when rogers had gone david walked up and down his basement room--his last night there!--and looked excitedly into the future. the book--he expected nothing of that. but here only a month away, almost within his hand, was the sum which, as far as money alone could pay for it, would buy his fair name. he felt an impulse to write helen of the great promise the next month held, but the memory that her father was engaged on the other side vaguely prompted him not to do so; and then came the second thought that it would be better to surprise her. yes, he would wait till he had repaid the money to st. christopher's, and then go to her with the receipt in his hand. chapter ix the mayor and the inevitable at the end of a few days jimmie morgan had been settled into david's place, and david was established in rogers's room and thoroughly drilled into his part. finally, toward the last of the week, a rented typewriter was installed in the office and kate morgan installed before it. "as i told you, there'll be little for you to do," rogers said to her the afternoon she began work. "when anybody's about you can make a show of being busy--but the rest of the time do as you please." he went into his room and closed the door. kate turned to david, who sat at a desk beside her looking a very different man in the well-tailored suit rogers had made him buy. "isn't he fine!" she said in a low voice. "he certainly is," david returned warmly. "the way he pretended to get all that money for our furniture! but i'll pay him back some day--you see. i didn't think i could, but i know now that after a little experience i'll be making good money. they told me at the school i was the fastest girl on the machine they'd had for years. some day i hope my chance'll come to do him a good turn." david wondered if she guessed, as he had, the kind of turn rogers, in his dreams, would like best for her to do him. she had guessed, and she guessed too what was running that instant in david's brain, for she shook her head and whispered meaningly: "you know i don't care for him that way." david looked abruptly back at his desk, and her machine began a whizzing tattoo that fully corroborated the statement of her teachers. but kate as he had first known her a year before came into his mind, and his eyes slipped surreptitiously up to view the contrast. she wore a white cotton dress, its folds as smooth as the iron's bottom, in which she looked very fresh and girlish. the hardness and cynicism had gone from her face, and her exaggerated pompadour had subsided into a dressing which allowed the hair to fall loosely about brow and ears, lending an illusion of fulness to her rather thin face. she was a far softer, far more controlled kate morgan than the kate morgan who had been his first post-prison friend. but the control, he knew, had not extinguished her old personality. it was there, ready to flame forth when occasion provoked it. that evening, in response to a request sent down by the mayor of avenue a, david went up to the mayor's flat. the sitting-room was a chaos of chairs, newspapers, clothes and photographs of feminine admirers--the confirmed disorder of an unmarried man of forty-five. the mayor, standing amid his household goods in evening clothes, noted that david was observing the quality of his housekeeping. "you've seen this before, aldrich," he said brusquely, "so don't turn your nose up so much, or you'll spoil the ceilin'." he glanced about the room. "it does look like i was boardin' a pet hurricane, don't it," he admitted. "sometimes i've been on the point o' askin' mrs. hahn (who attended to the three-room flat) to clean up a bit--but, oh say! i can't boss a woman!" early in their friendship the mayor had discovered that david had some acquaintance with the social customs of fifth avenue, and he had gradually adopted david as his social and sartorial mentor--though in the item of vests he grumbled against david's taste as altogether too conservative. so david was not now surprised when the mayor said, "i sent for you to look me over," stepped into the best light, pulled down his vest and coat, and demanded complacently: "well, friend, do i look fit to be two-steppin' with the ladies?" david's gaze travelled upward from the broad, but not broad enough, patent-leather shoes, past his large, white-gloved hands, to the white vest girdled with a heavy gold chain, across the broad and glistening area of his evening shirt, and upward to the culminating glory of his silk hat. "you certainly do!" said david. "i thought you'd think so," said the mayor, nodding. "when i get into my dress suit i ain't such a slouch, am i. but since you made me quit wearin' them handy white bows that hooks in the back o' the neck, my ties always look like i'd tied 'em with my feet. here, fix this blamed thing on me right." when david had complied, the mayor lowered himself into a chair, taking care to pull up his trousers and to see that the bending did not crumple his shirt bosom. "it's the first fall affair--at the liberty assembly hall--very small crowd--very select," he announced to david in a confidential voice that could have been heard in the street. "if only the dear ladies--oh lord!--leave me alone!" he sighed, and shook his head. "i may look like a happy man, friend, but i ain't. i'm gettin' near my finish. yes, sir! the bunch after me is narrowin' down to a few--the rest has sorter dropped out o' the runnin'. and them few is closin' in on me--closin' in on me. they're in earnest, every one of 'em. oh, you can't count the chances i have to set alone with 'em in their parlours, walk home alone with 'em at night, and all them sort o' tricks. and me"--he groaned, and despair made a vain effort to wrinkle his smooth face--"me, i like it. that's the hell of it! "yes, one's goin' to get me sure. i wish i knew which one'd win out. i'd be almost willin' to put my money on carrie becker. i guess she's as good as any of 'em. she's just had a row with mrs. schweitzer. you know mrs. schweitzer sets in one corner o' schweitzer's café every afternoon, and holds a kind o' reception with the people that drop in. carrie becker wants to marry me and do the same thing in my café, which is ten times as good as schweitzer's. she wants to snow mrs. schweitzer under. oh, i'm onto her! that makes two reasons she has for marryin' me. yes--if i was bettin', i'd bet on carrie becker." he heaved a great sigh and rose. "well, i'd better be goin'. you're sure, are you, that i look all right?" "perfect." the joy of living spread over his face. "yes, i guess i do." they walked together to the stoop. david watched the mayor's progress down the street, saw the heads turn to stare at his effulgent amplitude, and he guessed how the mayor's gratification was chirrupping to itself beneath the mayor's waistcoat. david had ceased cooking his own meals since he had moved from his basement room, and had become a boarder at the pan-american café. when he, rogers and tom appeared at breakfast the next morning the mayor, pale and agitated, yet striving to look composed, hurried over to their table. "i want to see you as soon's you're through eatin'," he whispered in david's ear. "all right," said david. the mayor kept an impatient eye on david, and the moment breakfast was done he was at david's side, hat in hand. "we can't talk in here," he said. "i've got a key to the liberty assembly hall. let's go over there." and excusing themselves to rogers, he led david out. the big ball-room, scattered about with the débris of the previous night's pleasure, had in the cold light of morning a look of desolation which even the mural cascades and seas and mountains could not dispel. the room was a fit setting for the despairing face the mayor turned upon david when the hall door was locked behind them. the mayor did not speak for several seconds, held his gaze straight on david; then he shouted, his mask of self-control flung aside: "well, you see me! what d'you think o' me?" "what's up? "it's all up! i've gone and done it!" "done what?" "what?--i've done _it_!--i'm engaged!" there was frantic hopelessness in the mayor's voice and in the mayor's face. "you don't say so!" david ejaculated. "i did say so!" david could hardly restrain a laugh at the mayor's desperate appearance. "engaged! you don't look it!" "a-a-h! quit your kiddin'!" roared the mayor fiercely. "this ain't nothin' to laugh at. it's serious." "to which one?" david queried, with the required gravity. "carrie becker. i knew she'd get me. oh, she's a slick one all right! say, friend, if you want a job kicking me at five dollars an hour, get busy!" he began to pace wildly to and fro across the room, then let himself drop with a groan into a chair beneath an alpine cascade, so that it seemed the water was splashing upon his polished head. "it was last night--in this damned hall--in that damned corner there--that it happened," he burst out to david, who had taken a chair beside him. "the hall was all fixed up fancy. there was a line o' them green, shiny, greasy-lookin' perpetuated palms across each corner. what's anybody want a hall fixed like that for!--ain't the old way good enough, i'd like to know? "them palms made little holes, with settees inside, that the women could rope you into. cosy and invitin'--oh, sure! and about how many unmarried females in the bunch d'you think missed tryin' to lead me in? nary a blamed one! but i was wise to their little game, and i says to myself, 'none o' them palms for mine.' "i balked every time they led me that way--till that last dance with carrie becker. i was prancin' along with her in my arms, comfortable and thinkin' nothin' about danger, when she says her shoe's untied and won't i fasten it. i'll bet my hat she undone it herself, and on purpose! well, in i went behind her, doubled myself up and fastened her shoe. i held out my arm to her, but she said she was out o' breath and didn't i want to rest a minute, and she throwed me up a smile. you know she's got a real smile, even if it has been workin' forty years. right there's where i ought t've run, but i didn't. i set down. "the window was open, and outside was a new moon. well, she leaned over close to me--you know how they do it!--and began to talk about that moon. it looked like a piece o' pie-crust a man leaves on his plate. i knew it was time for me to be movin', and i started up good and quick. but just then her hand happened to fall on mine--accident, oh, sure!--and what d'you think i done? did i run? no. i'm a fool. i set down. and it was good-bye for me. "when a woman gets hold o' my hand she's got hold o' my rudder, and she can steer me just about where she likes. outside was the moon, there behind them palms playin' goo-goo music was the orchestra, and there beside me a little closer'n before was carrie becker. well, i ain't no wooden man, you know; i like the ladies. i began to get dizzy. i think i enjoyed it. yes, while it lasted i enjoyed it. "she said a few things to me, and i said a few things to her--and pretty soon there she was, tellin' me how unpleasant it was livin' with her brother's family. i was plumb gone by that time. 'why don't you get married?' i asked her. oh, yes, i was squeezin' her hand all right. 'nobody'll have me,' she said. 'oh, yes,' i said, and i named half a dozen. 'but i don't care for any o' them--i only care for one man,' she said. i asked who. she give me that smile o' hers again and said, 'you.' "i was dizzy, you know--way up in the air, floatin' on clouds, and--oh, well, i asked her! i ain't goin' to deny that. i asked her! and you can bet she didn't lose no time sayin' yes and fallin' on my shirt-front. as for me--well, friend, i won't go into no details, but i done what was proper to the occasion. and i enjoyed it. yes, while it lasted i enjoyed it. "she didn't give me no chance to back out. not much! as soon as we come from behind them palms she told, and then come the hand-shakin'. the ladies shook my hand, too; but cold--very cold! and soon they all wanted to go home. understand, don't you? and everybody's been shakin' hands this mornin'. they think i'm happy. and i've got to pretend to be. but, oh lord!" he glared despairingly, wrathfully, at the corner wherein had been enacted the tragedy of his wooing, then looked back at david. "there's the whole story. now i want you to help me." "help you?" queried david. "what do?" "what do!" roared the mayor, sarcastically. "d'you think i'm chasin' down a best man!" "if i can help you that way----" "oh, hell! see here--i want you to help me out o' this damned hole i'm in. you ought to know how to get me out." "oh, that's it." david thought for a moment, on his face the required seriousness. "there are only three ways. disappear or commit suicide----" "forget it!" "break it off yourself----" "and get kicked out o' this part o' town!" "or have her break it off." "now you're comin' to the point, friend. she must break it off, o' course. but how'll i get her to?" "isn't there something bad in your past you can tell her--so bad that she'll drop you?" "oh, i've tried that already. as soon as i got outside the hall last night and struck cool air, i come to. i began to tell her what a devil of a fellow i'd been--part truth, most lies. oh, i laid it on thick enough!" "and what did she say?" "say? d'you suppose she'd take her hooks out o' me? not much! say? she said she was goin' to reform me!" they looked steadily at each other for a long time; then david asked: "you really want my advice?--my serious advice?" "what d'you suppose i brought you here for? sure i do." "here it is then: marry her." david expected an outburst from the mayor, but the mayor's head fell hopelessly forward into his hands and he said not a word. david took advantage of the quiet to speak as eloquently as he could of the advantages of marrying in the mayor's case. at length the mayor looked up. hopelessness was still in his face, but it was the hopelessness of resignation, not the hopelessness of revolt. "well, if it had to be one o' them, i'd just as soon it was her," he said, with a deep sigh. chapter x a bad penny turns up david found a keen pleasure in the business on which he was now engaged. for four years he had talked to no one, and for a year he had talked to but four or five. now he was actively thrown among men of the world--jordon, the general agent of the new jersey home company, his assistants, and the attorneys of the company. he instinctively measured himself beside them, and he exulted, for though they were the shrewder in business, he felt himself bigger, broader, than they. the deal progressed hopefully. david discovered the five owners in rogers's syndicate to be five ordinary men, with no particular business courage and no courage of any other kind, and whose interest in their own welfare was their only interest in life. however, they had confidence in rogers's success, and stood solidly behind him--which was all that could be desired of them. from his first meeting with jordon, david, too, was confident of success. jordon held off, talked about preposterous prices--but david felt surrender beneath the grand air with which the general agent brushed rogers's proposition aside. the company had to have the land, so it had to meet rogers's terms. and after each subsequent meeting david felt that much nearer the day of surrender. one morning, two weeks after he had entered upon his new duties, he was looking through some papers in the living-room relating to the land, when kate knocked and entered. "there's a woman out there wants to see you," she said, with a sharp glance. "what's she want?" "she wouldn't tell me. she said you'd see her all right--she was an old friend. if she is, i think some of your friends had better sign the pledge!" david followed kate into the office. a tall woman rose from his chair and smiled at him. it was lillian drew. the life went out of him. he stood with one hand against the door jamb and stared at her. when he had seen her five years ago she had had grace, and lines, and a hardened sort of beauty--and she had worn silks and diamonds. now the face was flushed, and coarsened, and lined with wrinkles--the hands were gemless, the hair carelessly done--and in place of the rich gown there was an ill-fitting jacket and skirt. it was evident that for her the last five years had been a dizzy incline. "what a warm welcome!" she said, with a short laugh. david did not answer her. kate's quick eyes looked from one to the other. "wouldn't you just as soon our talk should be private?" lillian drew asked, with a smile of irony. "you'd better run out for awhile, little girl." kate glanced at her with instinctive hatred. lillian drew, whom the five years had made more ready with vindictiveness, glared back. "come, run along, little girl!" kate turned to david. "you'd better leave us alone for a few minutes," he said with an effort. kate jerked on her hat, jabbed in the pins, marched by lillian drew with "you old cat!" and passed out into the street. "well, now--what do you want?" david demanded. "oh, i've just come to return your call. may i sit down?--i'm tired." and smiling her baiting smile she sank back into david's chair. david crossed to his desk and looked harshly down upon her. "how did you find me?" "surely you thought i'd look you up when i got back to town! i asked at the mission. a girl in the office there wrote your address down on a card for me. and told me a few things." she narrowed her eyes--almost all their once remarkable brilliance was gone. "a few things, mister." "please say at once what you want," he asked, trying to speak with restraint. "just to see an old acquaintance." "come to the point!" he said sharply. "well, then--i'm broke." "i don't see why that brings you to me." "because you're going to give me money--that's why." "i certainly will not!" "oh, yes, you will--when i get through with you. you wouldn't want me to tell all i know of phil morton, now would you?" "tell if you want to." anger at her as the cause of his five hard years was rising rapidly. he pointed savagely to a mirror that kate had put up behind the door. "look at yourself. who'll believe your word?" "but i won't ask 'em to believe my word," she said softly, her eyes gleaming triumph at him. her words and manner startled him. "what do you mean?" "why, i'll show the letters, of course." "letters! what letters?" "morton's letters." "morton's letters!" he stared at her. "you gave them to me." "part of them." she laughed quietly, and ran the tip of her tongue between her lips. "oh, you were easy!" david choked back an impulse to lay vengeful hands upon her. "you're lying!" he said fiercely. "oh, i am, am i?" she slipped a hand into the pocket of her skirt, paused in the action, and her baiting smile turned to a look of threat. "if you try to grab them, if you make a move toward me, i'll scream, people will rush in here, and the whole thing will come out at once! you understand?" the tormenting smile returned, and she slowly drew from her skirt a packet of yellow letters held together by an elastic band. she removed the band, drew one sheet from its envelope, and held it up before david's eyes. "you needn't bother about reading it. you've read one bunch--and they're all alike. but look at the handwriting. i guess you know that, don't you? and look at the signature: 'always with love--phil.' that's one letter--there are fourteen more. and look at this photograph of the two of us together, taken while he was in harvard. and look at this letter written five years ago, saying he'd send me five hundred the next day--and at this letter, written two days before he died, saying he hadn't another cent and couldn't get it. i guess you're satisfied." she coolly snapped the band over the bundle and returned the letters to her pocket. "i guess i'll get some money, won't i?" "i see," david remarked steadily, "that i must again call your attention to the fact that there are such things as laws against blackmailing." she looked at him, amusedly. "that worked once--but it won't work twice. arrest me for blackmail, and there'll be a trial, and at it the truth about morton will come out. you told me five years ago you didn't care if the truth did come out--but i know a lot better now!" she laughed. "please send for a policeman!" he was helpless, and his face showed it. "oh, i've got you! but don't take it so hard. you scared me out of town--but i've got nothing against you. i really like you; i'm sorry it's you i'm troubling. i've got to have money--that's all." there was an instant of faint regret in her face--but only an instant. "yes, i've got you. but i haven't showed you all my cards yet. mebbe you'll tell me you won't pay anything to keep me still about phil morton, who's been dead for five years. all right. but you'll pay me to keep still about yourself." david looked at her blankly. "you don't understand? i'll talk plainer then. i've been doing a little putting one and one together. you didn't take that five thousand dollars from the mission. phil morton didn't have a cent of his own--he told me that when he was half crazy with trying to beg off; he said i was driving him into crime. he took that money, and i got it. well, for some reason, i don't know why, you said you took it, and went to prison." wonderment succeeded to hardness and sarcasm. "you're a queer fellow," she said slowly. "why did you do it?" "go on!" "i don't understand it--you're a queer lot!--but i know you've got your reason for wanting to make the world think it was you that took the money and not phil morton. and i know it's a mighty strong reason, too--strong enough to make you willing to go to prison and to keep still while people are calling you thief. well--and here's my ace of trumps, mister--if you don't hand out the cash i'll tell that _you didn't take the money_!" david sank slowly into kate morgan's chair, and gazed stunned at the woman, whose look grew more and more triumphant as she noted the effect of her card. his mind comprehended her threat only by degrees, but at length the threat's significance was plain to him. if he didn't pay her, she would clear his name, he must pay her money to retain his guilt. "i guess i'll get the money--don't you think?" she asked. he did not answer. temptation closed round him. temptation coming in its present form would have been stronger in his darker days, but even now it was mighty in its strength. why should he bear his disgrace longer? this woman could clear him; would clear him, if he did not pay. and he had no money--almost none. he had merely to say "no"--that was all. in these first dazed moments he really did not know which was the voice of temptation and which the voice of right. one voice said, "to refuse will be to destroy hundreds of people." and the other voice said, "to pay blackmail is wrong." desire took advantage of this moral disagreement to order his reply. "i shall not pay you a cent!" "oh, yes you will," she returned confidently. "i shall not!--not a cent!" he said, with wild exultation. "you know what'll happen if you don't?" "yes. you'll tell. all right--tell!" she studied his flushed face and excited eyes. "you're in earnest?" "don't i look it! i shall not pay you a cent! understand? not a cent!" he had risen, and she too now rose. "oh, you'll pay something," she said with a note of coaxing. "i'm not as high as i once was. fifty dollars would help me a lot." "not a cent!" "twenty-five?" "not a cent, i said." "well, you'll wish you had!" she said vindictively, and turned and walked out of the office. he dropped back into his chair. so he was going to be righted before the world!--at last! vivid, thrilling dreams flashed through his brain--dreams of honour, of success, of love!... then, slowly, his mind began to clear; he began to see the other results of lillian drew's disclosure. his five years would have been uselessly spent--lost. and the people of the mission--quick visions pictured the consequence to them. he sprang up, holding fast to just one idea among all that confused his brain. he must stick to his old plan; the people must keep morton. he must find lillian drew and silence her. but where find her? he had not asked her address, he had not even watched which direction she had gone. perhaps even now she might be telling someone. he seized his hat, and hurried from the room. as he came out upon the sidewalk, a tall woman who had been standing across the street, started over to meet him. at sight of her he stopped, and gave a great sigh of relief. "you're looking for me, aren't you?" she asked, when she had come up. "yes." "i knew you'd be changing your mind, so i waited," she said with a smile of triumph. "i knew you'd pay!" chapter xi a love that persevered lillian drew, as she had said, was not as high as she once was; so david, after making plain to her his poverty, managed to put her off with fifteen dollars--though for this amount she refused to turn over the letters. before giving her the money he asked if she had kept secret her knowledge of morton, and her answer was such as to leave him no fear. "this kind of thing is the same as money in the bank; telling it is simply throwing money away." after he had paid her, and she had gone, he fell meditating upon this new phase of his situation. she would soon come again, he knew that--and his slender savings could not outlast many visits. when his money was gone and she still made demands, what then, if the ending of the deal was not fortunate? and, now that he was quieter, the irony of this new phase of his situation began to thrust itself into him. here he was, forced to pay money that the world might continue to believe him a thief! he laughed harshly, as the point struck home. he and rogers were a pair, weren't they!--the great fear of one that he might be found out to be a thief, the great fear of the other that he might be found out not to be a thief. what would helen chambers think if she knew that not only was he trying to pay a debt he did not owe, but that he was paying to retain that debt? presently rogers came in and they started for lunch, first leaving a note that would send kate morgan on a long errand so as to have the office clear for a conference with the mayor in the afternoon. as they passed through the hall they brushed by jimmie morgan, who hastily slipped a bottle into his pocket. the experiment with kate's father had not been successful. david had advised rogers to discharge him, but rogers, while admitting that to do so seemed a necessity, said that it would be as well to wait two or three weeks, when the end of the land deal would send them all away. david needed no one to tell him that what kept the father in his place was the fear of the daughter's disappointment. an hour later david and rogers, accompanied by the mayor, re-entered the office, and the three plunged into a discussion of matters relating to the deal. after a time the mayor asked: "chambers ain't showed his hand in this thing at all yet, has he?" "no," said rogers. "i s'pose he's savin' himself for the finishin' touches. he's like this chap dumas that wrote them stories i used to like to read. he's got so many things goin' on together, he's only got time to hand out the original order and then take the credit when it's done. but say--did you see the way the reverend what-d'you-call-him jumped on him this mornin' in the papers? no? you didn't. well, it was about that hundred and fifty thousand he's tryin' to give to help found a seminary for makin' missionaries. the preacher ordered his church not to cast even one longin' look at the coin. he said it was devil's money, and said it was diseased with dishonesty, and mentioned several deals that chambers had got people into, and left 'em on the sandy beach with nothin' but the skin god'd give 'em. oh, he gave chambers what was comin' to him! me, i ain't never seen a diseased dollar that when it come to buyin', wasn't about as able to be up and doin' as any other dollar--but, all the same, i say hurrah for the preacher." the dozen or more times david had been with mr. chambers he had met him socially, and he remembered him as a man of broad reading and interest, and of unfailing courtesy. david could not adjust his picture of the man to the characterisations he sometimes saw in the papers and magazines, and to the occasional vituperative outbursts of which that morning's was a fair example. so he now said with considerable heat: "i certainly do not believe in the centralisation of such vast wealth in one man's purse, but, the rules of the game being as they are, i can't say that i have much sympathy with those persons who call a man a thief merely because he has the genius to accumulate it!" "and neither do i, friend," said the mayor soothingly. "if there's any gent i don't press agin my bosom, it's a sorehead. but i know about chambers!--you set that down!" he paused for a moment, then asked meditatively: "i suppose miss chambers don't believe any o' them stories?" "she believes the stories spring either from jealousy, or vindictiveness, or from a totally mistaken impression of her father." "i thought she must look at him about that way." the mayor nodded thoughtfully. "d'you know, i've thought more'n once about her and her father. she's about as fine as they're turned out--that's the way i size her up. conscience to burn. mebbe some o' these days she'll find out just what her old man's really like. well, when she finds out, what's she goin' to do? that's what i've wondered at. somethin' may happen--but i don't know. blood's mighty thick, and when it's thickened with money--well, sir, it certainly does hold people mighty close together!" david quickly shifted the conversation back to business. they were all agreed that success seemed a certainty. rogers turned his large bright eyes from one to the other. "there's only one danger of failure i can see." "and that?" said david. "if they find out i'm red thorpe." "how'll they learn you're red thorpe?" the mayor dismissed the matter with a wave of a great hand. "no danger at all." "i suppose not. but i've been fearing this for ten years, and now that my work is coming to its climax i can't help fearing it more than ever." "two more weeks and you'll be on your way to colorado," the mayor assured him. "by-the-bye, have you had an answer yet from that sanitarium at colorado springs?" "yes. this morning. i want to show it to you; it's in the other room." rogers walked over the strip of carpet through the open door into the living room. the next instant david and the mayor heard his strained voice demand: "what're you doing here?" they both hurried to the door. on rogers's couch lay jimmie morgan. the half-swept floor, the broom leaning against a chair, and the breath of the bottle, combined to tell the story of morgan's presence. "what're you doing here?" rogers demanded, his thin fingers clutching the old man's shoulder. morgan rose blinking to his elbows, then slipped to his feet. "sweepin'," he said with a grin. "why weren't you doing it then?" "i must 'a' had failure o' the heart and just keeled over," explained morgan, still grinning amiably. the mayor sniffed the air. "yes, smells exactly like heart failure." "yes, it was my heart," said old jimmie, more firmly, and he began to sweep with unsteady energy. rogers, rigidly erect, watched him in fearing suspicion for a space, then said, "finish a little later," and led him through the other door of the room into the hall. when the door had closed rogers leaned weakly against it. "what's the matter?" cried david. "d'you think he heard what we said about red thorpe?" "him!" said the mayor. "didn't you bump your nose agin his breath? hear?--nothin'! he was dead to the world!" "he didn't hear me come up," returned rogers with tense quiet. "when i saw him first his eyes were open." "are you sure?" asked david. "wide open. he snapped them shut when he saw me." they looked at each other in apprehension, which the mayor was first to throw off. "he probably didn't hear nothin'. and if he did, i bet he didn't understand. and if he did understand, what's he likely to do? nothin'. you've been a friend to him and his girl, and he ain't goin' to do you no dirt. anyhow, in a week or two it'll all be over and you'll be pointed toward colorado." they heard kate enter the office and they broke off. the mayor, remarking that he had to go, drew david out into the hall. "he dreams o' troubles--i've got 'em," the mayor whispered. "i asked her to fix the weddin' day last night. she'd been leadin' up to it so much i couldn't put off askin' any longer. and o' course i had to ask it to be soon--oh, i've got to play the part, you know! did she put it away off in the comfortable distance? not her! she said she could get ready in a month. now what d'you think o' that? who ever heard of a woman gettin' ready in a month! she said since i seemed so anxious she'd make it four weeks from yesterday. only twenty-seven more days! "and say, you remember all them lies i told her about myself when i was tryin' to scare her off. well, she's already begun to throw my past in my face! rogers there, he dreams o' troubles--but, oh lord, wouldn't i like to trade!" with a dolorous sigh the mayor departed and david went into the office. as he sat down at his desk kate morgan looked sharp questions at him--questions concerning lillian drew. she did not speak her questions that afternoon, but they had planned a walk for the evening and they were hardly in the street when the questions began to come. david was instantly aware that the kate morgan beside him was the kate morgan of a year ago, whose impulses were instantly actions and whose emotions were instantly words. "who was that woman this morning?" she demanded. "her name is lillian drew." he offered her his arm, but she roughly refused it. "who is she?" "i know little of her; i have spoken to her but once before," he answered evasively. but in thinking he could parry her with evasion, he had forgotten her old persistent directness. "i know better--you know a great deal about her! and she has something to do with you. do you suppose i didn't see that in a second this morning?" david looked with dismay down on the tense face the light from shop-windows revealed to him. he saw that she had to be answered with facts or blank refusals, and he studied for a moment how much of the first he could give her. "except for one glimpse of her in the street i haven't seen her for five years--" he was beginning guardedly, when she broke in with, "that was just before you were sent away?" "yes." like a flash came her next question. "and it was for her you stole the money? she got the five thousand dollars?" he was fairly staggered. "i cannot say," he returned. she quickly moved a step ahead, and looked straight up into his face. "a-a-h!" she breathed. "so that's it!" "i tell you that, except for a mere glimpse the other day, i never saw her but once before in my life; and that before that time i had never even heard the name; and that, since then, i had never heard of her or seen her till to-day." her gaze fairly pierced to his inner self. "you wouldn't lie to me--i know that," she said abruptly. "but she's got some hold on you; she means something in your life--don't she?" "i've told you all i can tell you," david answered firmly. she exploded. "i hate her! you hear me?--i hate her!" he did not answer, and they walked on to the eastward in silence, through streets effervescent with playing children. in tompkin's square they sat down on one of the benches which edged both sides of the curving walks and which were filled with husbands, wives, lovers, german and jewish and magyar, who had come out for an hour or two of the soft october air. david tried to draw kate into casual conversation, but she remained silent, and soon they rose and walked on. after several blocks the window of a delicatessen store showed him she was more composed, and he again offered her his arm. she now took it. presently they saw the gleam of water at the end of the street, and continuing they came out upon a dock. it was crowded with trucks, and against its one side creakingly rubbed a scow loaded with ashes and against its other a scow ridged high with empty tin cans. sitting in the tails of some of the trucks were parlourless lovers--their courtship flanked by garbage, presided over by the odour of stables. they did not break their embraces as david and kate brushed by them and passed on to the end of the dock. kate sank upon the heavy end timber and gazed at the surging tide-river that swept along under the moonlight. it came to david, who leaned against a snubbing-post at her side, that this was the very dock on which he had stood on new year's eve; and half his mind was thinking of the hopelessness of that night and of the bitter days preceding it, when a whispered "david" reached up to him. he glanced down. the moon, which dropped full into her face, revealed no hardness--showed appealing eyes and a mouth that rippled at its corners. "what is it?" he asked. "i hate her--yes." her voice flamed slightly up with its old fire, but it immediately subsided into tremulous appeal. "but i had no right to talk to you like i did. i can't brag about what i've been, you know." "there, let's say no more about it," he said gently. "yes, i must. i've been thinking about myself while we were walking along. thinking of your past isn't always pleasant, is it, when there's so much of it that don't suit you. but i've wanted to improve, and i've tried. do you think i've improved, a little--david?" the wistful voice drew his hand upon her shoulder. "i wish i had grown as much!" he breathed. she pressed his hand an instant to her cheek, then rose and peered up into his face. "do you say that!" she said eagerly. "if i've tried to improve--you know why." he looked quickly from her tremulous face, out upon the million-faceted river. he writhed at the pain she must be feeling now, or would some day feel, and was abased that he was its cause. "oh, why did things have to happen so!" he exclaimed in a whisper. "what happen?" "that you should want--to please me." she did not speak at once, but her hand locked tightly upon his arm and he felt her eyes burning into him. at length she whispered, in a voice taut with emotion: "then you still care--for _her_?" he nodded. she was again silent, but the locked grip told him of her tensity. "but she's impossible to you. she lives in another world. you still believe this?" "yes." silence. "and i'm still next?" "yes." "and do you like me any less than you did at first?" he looked back upon her impulsively, and caught her hands. "this is a miserable affair, kate!" he cried. "can't we forget it--wipe it out--and be just friends?" "do you like me any less than you did at first?" she repeated. "more!" her next words tumbled out breathlessly. "i'll keep on improving--you'll like me more and more--and then--!" her impetuous force fairly dazed him. "ah, david!" she whispered almost fiercely, gripping his hands, "you can't guess how i love you!" he could not bear her passionate eyes, they pained him so--and he looked back across the river to where a blast furnace was thrusting its red fangs upward into the night. there was a silence, broken only by the monotonous chatter of the ripples among the piles below. then she went on, still tense, but quieter, and slightly meditative. "nor how differently i love you. sometimes there is a tiger in me, and i could kill anyone that stood between us. and then again i'm not the same person; i want first of all what is the best thing for you. when i feel this way i would do almost anything for you, david. i think"--her voice dwindled to the barest whisper--"i think i could almost give you up." chapter xii mr. chambers takes a hand mr. alexander chambers sat in the center of his airy private office, panelled to the ceiling in flemish oak, looking through the selections from the monday morning's mail his secretary had just laid upon his great glass-topped desk. his lofty forehead, crowned with soft, white hair, made one think of the splendid dome of walter scott. but below the forehead, in the face that was beginning to be netted with fine wrinkles, there was neither poetry nor romanticism: power, that was all--power under perfect mastery. the gray eyes were quiet, steady; the mouth, half hid under a thick, short-cropped, iron-gray moustache, was a firm straight line; the jaw was a great triangle with the squared apex as a chin. facetious persons sometimes referred to that triangular chin as "chambers's cowcatcher;" but many there were who said that those that got in chambers's way were never thrown aside to safety, but went down beneath the wheels. as he skimmed the letters through with a rapidity that in him seemed ease, there was nothing about him to suggest the "human dynamo," which has come to be the popular conception of the man of vast business achievement--no violent outward show of effort, no whirring of wheels, no coruscating flashes of escaping electricity. he ran noiselessly, effortlessly, reposefully. those who knew him intimately could no more have imagined alexander chambers in a strain than providence. he glanced the last letter through--a report from mr. jordon on the negotiations for the land controlled by rogers--pushed the heap aside and touched a button. immediately there entered a young man of twenty-eight or thirty. "please have mr. jordon come over as soon as he can," mr. chambers said in a quiet voice to his secretary. "yes, sir. i was just coming to tell you, when you rang, that mr. allen is waiting to see you." "have him come in." as allen entered mr. chambers raised his strong, erect figure to his feet and held out his hand with a smile. "how are you, allen. you look as fresh as a spring morning." "then i look as i feel. i'm just back from myrtle hill. it was a glorious two days--though we missed you a lot." "come now, some of the party may have missed me--but you, did you think of me once?" those who knew mr. chambers in a business way alone, would have felt surprise at the humorous wrinkles that radiated from the outer corners of his eyes. "the next time i arrange for a weekend party i'll see that the wires to boston are cut. but how did you leave helen?" they sat down. "with nothing to be desired in point of health"--allen hesitated a moment--"and everything to be desired in point of her regard for me." mr. chambers considered allen's strongly masculine face. "you'll win her in the end, as you've won everything else--by fighting right on. there's no one that ranks higher with her than you." "she's told me if an edict were passed compelling her to marry to-morrow, i'd be the man. but--she's not eager for the edict." "you've won her head, at least. that's progress." "not even all her head. she disapproves of my ideas. she made that clear to me again yesterday. i tell you, i do wish her concern in st. christopher's and such things could be--well, at least lessened quite a bit." "that's hardly possible--her concern is too deeply rooted." mr. chambers shook his head reminiscently. "she has it from her mother." "yes, but the strength with which she holds to it--that she has from you. i suppose there is little chance of uprooting her convictions. but--i feel i've gained one concession." "yes?" "she's promised at the end of five weeks to give me her yes or no." mr. chambers leaned forward and grasped allen's hand. "you know which answer i want. and i'm sure it will be that." they looked at each other steadily a moment, then settled back into their chairs. "now about that merger," said allen. "that's what brought me in." and allen, who handled the legal side of many of mr. chambers's affairs, began to discuss certain legal details of a railroad consolidation mr. chambers had under consideration. the instant allen was out of the office, the secretary announced mr. jordon and at mr. chambers's order ushered him in. mr. jordon, a man whom prosperity had flushed and bulked, wished mr. chambers good morning with that little tone of deference which a successful business man uses to a more successful business man, and seated himself in the leather-covered chair allen had just vacated. mr. chambers picked up mr. jordon's letter from the heap on his desk. "i wanted to speak to you about the price this mr. rogers insists on for the land he controls," he said in his even voice. "it is at a far higher rate than we paid for the rest of the land. you've done all that's possible to get him to lower his terms?" "everything!" for emphasis mr. jordon clapped two fat hands down upon two fat knees. "but he's as solid as a rock. if we were dealing with the real owners individually, it would be different. they're anxious to sell and they're all short on nerve. it's him that holds them together and keeps them braced up." "i suppose you've tried to get them to withdraw their land from his control?" "i tried that long ago. but it wouldn't work. he's promised them a big price, and he's made them believe they'll get it." "then you think as you say here"--he laid his hand upon the letter--"that we'd better pay him what he demands and close the deal?" "i certainly do. we've got to have that land, and to get it we've got to pay his price. he knows that and he won't come down a dollar. since we've got to pay the price in the end, i'm for paying it right now and not losing any more time in launching the company before the public." "your reasoning is sound. but you're aware, of course, that the difference between his price and the rate we've been paying is considerably over fifty thousand?" "yes, but we're not going to lose money on it even at that." mr. jordon nodded knowingly. "besides, when we come to counting up the profits on the whole deal, we'll never miss that fifty thousand." "fifty thousand dollars, mr. jordon," mr. chambers said quietly, "is fifty thousand dollars." mr. jordon blushed as though caught in an ill deed. "yes--yes--of course," he stammered. "we don't want to lose it, but how are we going to help it?" mr. chambers did not answer--gave no sign of having noticed the other's embarrassment. "suppose we have a meeting here to-morrow afternoon, and try again to get him to lower his price." "very well--i'll write him to be here. but i warn you that he'll not come down a cent." "then i suppose we'll have to settle on some other basis." there was a moment's pause. "by the way, who is this mr. rogers?" "never heard of him till i ran across him in this deal. nobody seems to know much about him. he's just a little two-for-a-cent agent that was cute enough to see this chance and grab it." mr. chambers said no more, and mr. jordon, seeing that use for himself was over, departed. mr. chambers had an instinct for loss that was like a composer's ear for false notes. in his big financial productions he detected a possible loss instantly; it pained him as a discord, and he at once set about correcting it. the new jersey home company was but one of the many coexisting schemes that had sprung from his creative brain, and the fifty thousand dollars was a beggar's penny compared to the sums that floated through his mind. but the fifty thousand dollars was a loss, a flaw, and he could not pass it by. mr. chambers had the theory, proved by long practice, that many men have something hidden away in their lives which if discovered and properly used, or some vulnerable business spot which if struck, will so disable them that they cannot stand up against your plans. this theory, applied, had turned for him many a hopeless struggle into a quiet, easy victory--so that it had become his practice, when dealing with a man whose past life and whose present business relations he did not know, to acquaint himself with all that could be uncovered. the moment mr. jordon had gone mr. chambers wrote a line, requesting full information about rogers, and enclosed it in an envelope which he addressed to the man who usually served him in such confidential matters. he touched a button and handed the note to his secretary. "see that mr. hawkins gets this at once," he said. * * * * * that afternoon a man, whom david afterward remembered as a diamond ring, a diamond shirt-stud and a heavy gold watch-chain, walked into the office of john rogers. "is this mr. rogers?" he asked of david, who was alone in the room. "no. aldrich is my name. but i represent him. can i do anything for you?" "i'd like to see him if i can. i'm thinking of investing in some real estate in this neighbourhood, and i've been looking at a couple of houses that i was told he was agent for." "i'll call him--wait a minute." david went into the living room, and at once returned. "mr. rogers will be right in," he said. "thanks." the man turned his pinkish face about the room. "cosy little office you've got, for this part of town," he remarked, with an air of speaking pleasantries to kill time. "yes--we think so." "how long's mr. rogers been interested in real estate in this neighbourhood?" "i've been with him for less than a year, so i don't exactly know. but i believe about eight or nine years." "in the same business before then?" but the entrance of rogers at that instant saved david a reply. the caller, who had sat down, rose and held out his hand. "is this mr. rogers? harris is my name--william harris." rogers, as he came up, laid hold of the back of a chair. he did not see mr. harris's hand. "i'm glad to meet you," he returned in his low voice. "won't you sit down?" the three took chairs, and the next hour was filled with talk about the houses mr. harris had examined. mr. harris was very eager for the buildings, and david became excited at the prospect of the agent's commission that would come from the sale. but rogers was quiet and reserved as always--answering all questions fully, save a few casual personal queries which he evaded. when mr. harris went away he said in so many words that the deal was as good as settled, except for a small difference in the price which would bother them little. the instant the office door closed upon mr. harris david turned eagerly to rogers, who was sitting motionless in his chair. "won't that be a windfall though if he takes those houses!" he cried. "your commission will be at least two thousand dollars!" there was no tinge of enthusiasm in rogers's pale cheeks. he did not speak at once, and when he did he ignored david's exclamations. "did you notice, aldrich," he said in a strained voice, "that i avoided taking his hand when he offered it at first and again when we parted?" "no. why?" "i was afraid." "afraid?" repeated david, puzzled. "what of?" "i shook hands with bill halpin--and you know what he found out." david stepped nearer to rogers, and saw in his eyes the look of hunted fear. "i don't understand," he said slowly. "mr. harris may be a _bona-fide_ dealer in real estate--but fifteen years ago he was one of the cleverest detectives on the new york police force. i recognised him the instant i saw him. he helped arrest me once." david sank slowly to a chair. "you don't say so!" he ejaculated. he stared for several moments at rogers's thin face, on which he could now see the exhaustion of the straining interview. "do you think he can possibly be on your trail?--and if so, what for?" "what for, i don't know. but didn't you notice how he was constantly studying me?--how he slipped in a question about what i used to do?--how he tried to learn the names of some of my friends, whom he might quiz about me? he's clever." "but do you think he found out anything?" "i don't think he did. i was watching him closer than he was watching me, for any least sign of recognition. i didn't see any. but you know i can't help fearing, aldrich! i can't help fearing!" david tried to drive the strained, hunted look from rogers's face by saying that there was hardly any possibility of his identity being discovered, and no apparent motive for it being used against him even if found out. david succeeded in bringing back his own confidence, and at length drew from rogers the admission, "well, maybe you're right." chapter xiii the end of the deal the next morning when david glanced at the envelopes the postman had handed him he saw that one letter was from mr. jordon. he was ripping it open eagerly when he noticed the envelope beneath it bore the handwriting of helen chambers. he dropped jordon's letter and excitedly opened the other. its cordiality set him afire. she was just back in town for the winter, she wrote, and the following afternoon she would be at st. christopher's. would he care to come to meet her at about four for an hour's walk? would he! he had not seen her since the early summer--and how he had hungered to see her, speak with her, feel her near presence! he walked across the office, in which he was alone, half a dozen times before he took up the letter of mr. jordon. mr. jordon asked that mr. rogers and his associates be at the office of mr. chambers at three o'clock that afternoon. he hoped that they would be able to reach an agreement on terms and close the matter up. david, the letter in his hand, was rushing into the living room to read the news to rogers, when he saw, through the open hall-door, the ample form of the mayor passing out. he captured the mayor and led him in to the side of the couch on which rogers was lying. "listen to this, will you!" david cried, and excitedly read the letter. "did you take in that sentence at the last?--'i hope that we will at length be able to agree on terms.' now what do you think that means?" "it means," said the mayor, explosively, "that they've woke up and see that you ain't never goin' to come down to them, they've got to come up to you! it means that you've won!" rogers's sunken eyes flamed, and he stood up. "it seems so!" he breathed. they all seized hands. "this don't mean much to me personally, for i've only got a little in it," said the mayor, "but i certainly have the glad feeling on your account, rogers. you can clear right out to a land where the air was made for breathin' purposes. here in new york the air ain't good for much except fillin' in lots. yes sir, rogers, i'm certainly glad!" they talked on excitedly, as men do who are but a step from success. david was glad, too, on rogers's account, for he saw afresh how thinly disease had sculptured his cheeks and nose, and how deeply it had chiselled about the eyeballs, and to what a slender shaft it had carved the neck. also he was ablaze with gladness on his own account. success, but a few hours off, meant the partial clearing of his name. his mind exulted over the details of the scene to-morrow afternoon when he would tell helen chambers he had the means to pay his debt to st. christopher's. in the course of the morning mr. harris dropped in. he asked for rogers, but david said that rogers was out. for half an hour the detective talked about the houses in which he was interested, now and then slipping in a guileless question about rogers. but david was on his guard; he matched his wits against mr. harris's, and when at length the detective went away david was certain he was no wiser than when he came. at half past two the mayor thrust his head into the office and, seeing kate was there, beckoned david into the hall. the mayor had never before been at elbows with a real money king, so for him the meeting was a new experience; and despite his ire toward mr. chambers he was prompted to make his appearance before royalty in fitting court costume. "d'you think i look all right?" he asked, anxiously. david surveyed the mayor's bulky figure. there was a silk hat with not a single hair in disarray, a long light overcoat, a pair of fresh gloves that were staringly tan, and the most gorgeous vest in the mayor's closet. david could have wished that the whole scheme of dress had been pitched in a lower key, but he criticised nothing but the vest. "if that's all you kick about, then i'm o. k.," the mayor said complacently, smoothing a yellow glove over the silken pinks. "you've give me some good points, but when it comes to vests, friend--well, you ain't got no real taste for vests." he walked to the door and looked out. "there comes our carriage," he called. "get rogers and we'll be movin'." "carriage!" cried david. "sure. d'you think we're goin' to let chambers and his bunch think we're a lot o' cheapskates? not much. we're goin' to do this thing proper." "but mr. chambers himself uses the street cars." "well, he can afford to," the mayor returned with equanimity. "we can't." when david walked with rogers to the carriage he would not have been surprised had the mayor handed them for their lapels a bunch of roses knotted with ribbon. they settled back against the cushions and suspense silenced them--and with hardly a word they rumbled over to broadway, down into wall street and up before mr. chambers's office. as they stepped from the carriage, rogers's thin fingers gripped david's hand like taut cords. clasp, face, and the feverish fire in his eyes told david how great was the strain rogers bore. this was the climax of his life. david returned the pressure of his hand. "it'll be all right," he whispered reassuringly. they went up the broad steps into a tiled hallway, and turned to their right to the entrance of the private banking house of alexander chambers & co. an erect, liveried negro, whose stiffly formal manners suggested a spring within him, admitted them into a great light room, in which, behind a partition of glass and bronze grating that half reached the ceiling, sat scores of men working swiftly without appearance of speed. a word and a lifted finger from the black automaton directed them to the far end of the room. here a man with the bearing of a statesman, mr. chambers's doorkeeper, bowed them into three leather-seated chairs, and carried their names into mr. chambers's private secretary. they did not speak; the nearness of the climax awed even the mayor. and to add to the suspense throbbing within him, david began to wonder how he would be greeted by mr. chambers, whom he had not seen since his ante-prison days. almost at once the doorkeeper reappeared, and with the subdued air that characterised the place, led them into a large office. the keen-faced secretary rose from a desk, ushered them through a door and into another office. at the great desk in the center of the room were mr. chambers and mr. jordon. the two men rose, and david's wonder as to how mr. chambers would receive him was at once relieved. an inclination of the head and a quiet, "glad to see you, mr. aldrich"--that was all; nothing in his impassive face and manner to suggest that he remembered the prison-gap in david's life. the mayor had announced during the carriage drive that if "chambers holds out his hand to me to be shook, i won't see nothin' but the ceilin'." but there was no opportunity thus to humiliate mr. chambers, for his response to the introduction was but a brief nod. so the mayor could only declare his independence by opening the front of his overcoat, like a pair of doors, upon his brilliant waistcoat, and by gazing into mr. chambers's face with aggressive hauteur. mr. jordon shook hands all around. "well, i hope we'll settle things up to-day," he said. as to how things were going to be settled, he had not the slightest doubt. he was certain the afternoon would force mr. chambers to his way of thinking. a few minutes before mr. chambers had asked his opinion as to the result of the conference, and he had said, "they'll not give in; we've got to pay what they ask." mr. chambers had said nothing--which had not surprised him, for he knew it was instinctive with mr. chambers, even in such small matters as this, to let the completed act announce his purpose. they all sat down, david, rogers, and the mayor in three leather-bottomed chairs which stood in front and to the right of mr. chambers's desk. to the left, in a row, were half a dozen other chairs. mr. chambers leaned slightly forward and folded his hands on his desk's plate-glass top. "let us go straight to the point of this matter," he began, addressing rogers, who sat between david and the mayor. "mr. jordon tells me you refuse to consider any sum less than one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the land you control. is that correct?" "it is." david's shoulder against rogers told him that rogers's lean frame was as rigid as the chair that held it. "this then is your ultimatum?" "it is." "just as i told you," nodded mr. jordon, who was at mr. chambers's elbow. mr. chambers pressed a button beneath the desk and the door opened before his secretary. "please show in the others," he requested quietly. the secretary bowed and the door closed. "the others?" breathed rogers; and he and david and the mayor looked at each other. "the others!" exclaimed mr. jordon. "what others?" mr. chambers sat silent, with unchanged face. the next instant the door, opening, answered the question. into the room hesitantly filed the five owners of the land rogers controlled. rogers, david, and the mayor, and also mr. jordon, rose in astonishment. the five stopped and stared at rogers's party; plainly the surprise was mutual. mr. chambers, remaining in his seat, motioned the new-comers to the chairs at the left of his desk. "be seated, gentlemen." "what's this mean?" david asked, catching rogers's arm. rogers turned toward him, and for an instant david felt he was gazing into the abyss of fear. then the arm he held tightened and rogers looked toward his five clients and nodded. "good afternoon. i'm glad to see you," he said in an even tone. they sat down again, and rogers's eyes fastened on the finely wrinkled face of mr. chambers--as did every other pair of eyes in the room. they vainly strove to read the purpose behind that inscrutable countenance. the purpose was simple enough. by bringing together the two elements of rogers's crowd, each ignorant that the other was to be present, unprepared with common replies, he had thought he might possibly play them against each other in a way to bring them to his price; and if not, he would at least have them all together, and so be able to make an immediate settlement upon their terms. he had had a faint hope that mr. hawkins might discover something significant, but a note from the detective during the morning had contained no single new fact. mr. chambers did not give the surprised group time to readjust itself. "i have called together all parties interested in this transaction in order that we may more effectively reach an agreement, and in the hope that we may obviate the necessity for future meetings." he fastened his gray eyes upon the five owners, who were looking very much at a loss, and spoke coldly, calmly, as though his decision were unchangeable and his words immutable facts. "first i desire to say that you gentlemen and your agent have a very inflated idea of the value of your property. the price is one we cannot, and will not, pay. if you want to take what we offer, very well. if not, i assure you that we shall run no streets, water-mains, sewers or gas pipes near your tract. we shall leave the neighbourhood of your property entirely unimproved. you will recall that our land lies between yours and the car line; we shall forbid anybody living on your land crossing our land. nobody else is going to buy your land under these conditions. you can sell it only to us." the owners, struck while off guard, were dazed; and david, rogers, and the mayor, who had expected the exact opposite of this talk, were completely taken back. the cold, dominant voice went on. "such being the situation, does it not seem better to accept our price, which is a fair price, than to have your land made unsaleable, to have your investment tied up for years to come?" he centered his personality upon the weakest of the five. "i'm sure you think so, do you not?" the man blinked--then nodded his head. "but--" began rogers. "and you, i'm sure you think so," mr. chambers demanded of another owner. "ye-e-s," said the man. this was child's play to mr. chambers, who had browbeaten and overpowered even the directors of great corporations. he tried to rush his plan through, before the men could recover. "it is plain you are all agreed. you see how your clients stand, mr. rogers. it certainly seems the only course to settle this matter at once upon the basis of our offer, which seems to them fair and just." rogers saw that awe of the great financier and his intimidating statments had fairly stampeded his clients. fighting down the momentary sense of defeat, and not heeding mr. chambers's words to him, he fixed his great burning eyes on the five men. "gentlemen!" he said desperately. they shifted their gaze from mr. chambers to him. "gentlemen, i want to assure you that if we hold out we will get our own price. i happen to know they've just bought a piece of ground beyond ours; without ours it will be worthless to them. they've got to have our land! you understand? simply got to have it!" the mayor lifted an emphatic yellow hand toward the owners. "of course they have! and don't you listen to no bluffin'." rogers continued to talk for several minutes; and gradually confidence and determination came into the manner of the five. at the end rogers turned to mr. chambers. "we shall stand out for our price," he said firmly. mr. chambers had wrecked railroads in order to buy them in at a lower rate, but the similar procedure which he had threatened did not seem worth while here. he had tried his plan, which he had known had only a chance of success, and it had failed. there was but only one thing to do--to yield. he was thoughtful for several moments. "if we should refuse your terms, we of course in the end would buy your land at our own price. but it occurs to me that the bother and extra cost of improving the land and opening it up at a later date, might be as much as the difference between your price and ours. what do you think, mr. jordon?" "there's much in what you say," returned the general manager, guardedly. rogers, david, and the mayor exchanged quick, triumphant glances. they had won. mr. chambers again relapsed into his appearance of thoughtfulness, and they all sat waiting for him to speak. david laid his hand on rogers's and pressed it exultantly. while mr. chambers still sat thus, the office door opened and his secretary apologetically tiptoed across the room with a letter in his hand. "i told mr. hawkins you were engaged, but he insisted that this was important," the secretary said to mr. chambers, and withdrew. mr. chambers read the note, thought a moment, slowly folded the sheet, then raised his eyes. "before going further, there is one point--of no importance, i dare say it will prove to be--that it might be well for us to touch upon." he centered his calm gaze upon the five owners. "since you have intrusted mr. rogers with the management of your property i take it that he has your fullest confidence?" "ye-es," said one hesitatingly, and the others followed with the same word. "your confidence, of course, is founded on thorough acquaintance?" david glanced from the impassive mr. chambers to rogers. the mask of control had fallen from his face. he was leaning forward, his whole being at pause, his face a climax of fear and suspense. a succession of slow "yes-es" came from the owners. "then of course," mr. chambers went on in his composed voice, "you are perfectly aware that mr. rogers is a man with a long criminal career." a shiver ran through rogers; he stiffened, grew yet whiter. there was a moment of blankest silence. then the mayor sprang up, his face purpling. "it's an infernal lie!" he shouted. consternation struggled on the faces of the five; they looked from the rigid, white figure of rogers to the calm face of mr. chambers. "it isn't so," declared one tremulously. "we will leave the question to mr. rogers," said mr. chambers's unexcitable voice, and he pivoted in his chair so that his steady eyes pointed upon rogers. "if mr. rogers is not 'red thorpe,' the one time notorious safe-blower, with scores of burglaries and three terms in the penitentiary against him, let him say so. however, before he denies it, i shall tell him that i have all the police data necessary for his identification. now, mr. rogers." their gaze on rogers's face, all waited for him to speak--jordon, astounded, the five pale with the fear of loss, the mayor glowering, david with a sense that supreme ruin was crushing upon them. at length rogers's lips moved. "it is true," he whispered. "what if it is?" roared the mayor at mr. chambers. "there's nothin' agin him now!" "i'm making no charges against him," returned mr. chambers. "this is merely some information it seemed his clients might be interested in having." all eyes again turned upon rogers. he came slowly to his feet, walked to mr. chambers's desk, leaned his hands upon it and directed his large burning eyes down into mr. chambers's face. "i have done many bad things, yes," he said in a voice, low, flame-hot, "but nothing as bad as you have just done. you have stolen more this minute than i have stolen in my lifetime." he held his eyes, blazing with accusation, upon mr. chambers's imperturbable face for several moments, then looked about on the five owners. there was a chance, a bare chance, they might not turn against him. "yes, i am red thorpe," he said in a vibrant voice that became more and more appealing with every word. "i knew it would be found out--some day. there are some things i always told myself i'd say to the world when this day came. but to you i want to say only this: for ten years i've been honesty itself. i've been honest with you--you know it. if you stand by me, i'll do everything i've promised." he stood rigid, awaiting their verdict. there was a strained silence. the five looked dazedly at rogers, at one another, completely at a loss. "if the gentlemen desire to entrust their affairs to a most dangerous criminal, one who might defraud them of everything, that is their privilege," put in mr. chambers quietly. their bewilderment was gone; mr. chambers's words had roused their property instinct. a murmuring rose among them. david and the mayor sprang up, but rogers raised a hand and they remained beside their chairs. a flame began to burn in his white cheeks, in his deep eyes. "i knew this day was coming," he said in a low voice, that had a wild bitter ring of challenge. "instead of you, you weaklings"--he looked at the five--"and you, you mere soulless acquisition"--his eyes blazed at mr. chambers--"i wish i had the world before me. i'd like to tell it what a vast fool it is in its treatment of such as me--how eyeless and brainless and soulless! oh, what a fool!... but the world's not here." he was silent for a moment. "and why am i at an end?--why?" his answer rang through the room with a passionate resentment, with an agony of loss. "because the world did not care to step in and point the right way to me. to have saved me would have been so easy! i was worth saving! i had brains--there was a man in me. whose fault is it that i am now at the end?--a miserable remnant of a man! the world's. i was robbed of my chance in life--robbed, yes sir, robbed!--and i could have made it a splendid life! ah, how i've wanted to make it a splendid life. and the world--the world that robbed me!--that world calls me criminal. and i must pay the penalty, and the penalty is--what you see! oh, my god!" for ten years rogers had cherished the purpose of accusing the world on the day of his exposure--but now his loss was so overwhelming, speech to these people was so utterly useless, strength was so little, that he could say no more--could only, leaning against the desk, gaze in hatred and despair at mr. chambers and the owners. the faces of the five were pale and blank. there was a trace of sympathy in mr. jordon's face, and a momentary change in mr. chambers's that indicated--who knows what? david sprang to mr. chambers's desk, his soul on fire. "this, sir, is a damned inhuman outrage!" he flung down into the older man's face. "it might also have been of interest to mr. rogers's clients," mr. chambers returned calmly, "to have known the record of mr. rogers's associate." david's wrath had no time to fashion a retort, for the mayor, at his side, hammered the desk with a great yellow-gloved fist. "that's what it is!" he shouted. "it's a low, dirty, murdering trick!" "i merely acquainted his clients with his record--which they have a right to know." a huge sarcastic laugh burst from the mayor, and he pushed his face down into mr. chambers's. "_you_," he roared, "you, when you're in a deal, you always show your clients _your record_, don't you!" rogers, out of whose cheeks the fire had gone, leaving them an ashen gray, tugged at their sleeves. "it's no use!--let's go!" he begged, chokingly. "quick!" david's eyes blazed down upon mr. chambers. "yes, let's leave the infernal thief!" he took one of rogers's arms, the mayor, shaking a huge fist in mr. chambers's face, took the other, and they made for the door. mr. chambers, still seated, watched rogers's thin figure, head pitched forward and sunken between his shoulders, pass out of the office. brushing people out of his way had become the order of his life, and he did it impersonally, without malice, as a machine might have done it. and rogers was one of the most insignificant he had ever brushed aside. "mr. rogers, as of course you are aware, has not the rights of a citizen," mr. chambers said to the five. "consequently his agreement with you is invalid; he can not hold you to it. if you will kindly wait in the next room a moment, mr. jordon will speak with you." after they had filed out he remarked to jordon: "they are stampeded. they will come to your terms. i leave them in your hands." he touched the button on his desk and his secretary appeared. "if senator speed has come," he said, "ask him to step in." * * * * * when david and rogers were home again, and the mayor and his profanity had gone, there was a long silence during which both sat motionless. david searched his mind for some word of hope for rogers, who was a collapsed bundle in a morris chair, gazing through the window into the dusky air-shaft. at length he bent before rogers and took his hand. "we'll go to some new place together, and start all over again," he said. rogers turned his face--the only part of him that the deepening twilight had not blotted out. it seemed a bodyless face--the mask of hopelessness. "it's no use--i'm all in," he whispered. "even if i had the courage to make another fight, there's no strength." he was silent for several moments. then a low moan broke from him. "ten years!" he whispered. "and this is the end!" book iv the soul of woman chapter i helen chambers gets a new view of her father the morning light that sunk down the deep air-shaft and directed its dimmed gaze through the window, saw rogers lying dressed on the couch and david sitting with sunken head at the window, a sleepless night on both their faces. there had been little talk during the crawling hours, save when the mayor had dropped in near midnight and set walls and furniture trembling with his deep chest-notes of profanity. even tom, awed by the overwhelming disaster, moved noiselessly about and spoke only a few whispered monosyllables. the blow was too heavy to be talked of--too heavy for them to think of what should next be done. once, however, david, whose personal loss was almost forgotten in his sympathy for rogers, had spoken of the future. "there is no future," rogers had said. "in a few days the owners of my buildings will hear about me. they will take the agency from me. i have a few hundred dollars. that will soon go. and then--?" the dinginess in the light began to settle like the sediment of a clearing liquid, and the sense that the sun must be breakfast-high worked slowly to the seat of david's will. he rose, quietly set a few things in order, rogers's eyes following him about, then put on his hat with the purpose of going to the pan-american for his breakfast and to bring rogers's. as he started for the door rogers reached forth his hand. "i'm glad you found out about me, aldrich," he said. "i can never tell you how much you've meant to me during the last eight months, and how much you mean to me now." david grasped the hand and looked down into the despairing eyes. "i'm glad," he said, simply. after a moment rogers's weak grip relaxed and he turned away his face with a sigh. david went softly out. while david was at breakfast--his appetite shrunk from it--the mayor sat down at his table, which had the privacy of an empty corner. "by the way," the mayor whispered, "d'you have any idea yet how chambers found out?" "no more than yesterday. we told you of the call of that detective. he must have been from chambers, and he must have made the discovery. but how, we don't know." "poor rogers!" the mayor shook his head sadly, thoughtfully. his face began slowly to redden and his eyes to flash. he thrust out a big fist. "friend, i don't believe in fightin'--but say, i'd give five years to flatten the face that belongs to mr. chambers!" david had to smile at the idea of the mayor and mr. chambers engaged in fisticuffs. "it's sad, but men like mr. chambers are beyond the reach of justice." the mayor dropped his belligerent attitude. "oh, i don't know. mebbe they can't be reached with fists, or law--but there's other ways. and i'd like to jab him any old way. i've been thinkin' about that daughter o' his. wouldn't i like to tell her a few things about her dad!" the mayor swayed away in response to a summons from the kitchen, and a few minutes later david entered his room bearing in a basket rogers's prescribed milk and soft-boiled eggs. rogers drank down the eggs, which david had stirred to a yellow liquid, and after them the milk, and then with a gasp of relief sank back upon the couch. as david was clearing up after the breakfast he heard some one--kate he guessed--enter the office, and presently there was a rap on the door between the two rooms. david opened the door and found, as he had expected, kate morgan. she wore her coat and hat, just as she had come from the street. on her face was a strange, compressed look, and her eyes were red-lidded. "can i come in?" she asked with tremulous abruptness. "please do," said david. she entered and moved to the foot of the couch where she could look down on rogers. "i've come to say something--and to say good-bye," she announced. "say good-bye?" rogers sat up. "good-bye? why? oh, you have a new position?" "no. i've no right to be here. you won't want me when you know. so i'm going." her face tightened with the effort of holding down sobs. the two men looked at her in wonderment, waiting. "you know how broke up i was when you told me about yesterday afternoon," she went on, "and how mad i was at mr. chambers. and then to find out what i have!... here's what i've come to tell you. yesterday afternoon and last night my father was drinking a great deal. i wondered where he got the money. this morning i went through his clothes while he was asleep; there were several dollars. i asked him about it. he lied to me, of course. but i got the truth out of him in the end. "you remember that detective you told me about last night. when he left here yesterday about noon he happened to see my father sweeping off the sidewalk. he began to talk to my father, got my father to drinking, gave him some money. and after a while my father--he'd learned it somehow--he told the detective--he told him you were red thorpe." the two men were silent a moment, looking at the strained face down which tears were now running. "so that's how it happened!" rogers breathed. "yes--my father told!" the tremor in her voice had grown to sharp sobs--of shame, agony, and wrath. "my father brought all this on you. and it's all because of me. if you both hadn't tried to be good to me, my father would not have been here and everything would have turned out right. it's all because of me!--all my fault!--don't you see? i know you'll both hate me now. i know you'll want me to go away. well--i'm going. but i want to tell you how sorry i am--how sorry!... good-bye." david wanted to speak to her, but this was rogers's affair rather than his. she swept them both with her brimming eyes. "good-bye," she said again, and turned to the door. "miss morgan!" called rogers. she paused and looked at him. "don't go yet." he rose and came to her with outstretched hand. "it wasn't your fault." she stared dazedly at him. "you're ruined--you told me so last night, and i did it. yes, i did it." "no. you couldn't help it. you mustn't go at all." she took his hand slowly, in astonishment. "oughtn't i to go?" she quavered. "you must stay and help bear it," he said. she looked steadfastly into his eyes. "you're mighty good to me," she breathed in a dry whisper. and then a sob broke from her, and turning abruptly she went into the office. * * * * * in the afternoon david walked over to st. christopher's to meet helen chambers. besides his bitterness, and his suspense over seeing her, david felt as he entered the door of the mission (what he had felt on his three or four previous visits) a fear of meeting some wrathful, upbraiding body who would recognise him. but he met no one except a group of children coming with books from the library, and unescorted he followed the familiar way to the reception room, where helen had written she would meet him. this, like the rest of the mission's interior he had seen, was practically unchanged; and in this maintenance of old arrangements he read reverence for morton. he wandered about the room, looking at the friendly, brown-framed prints that summoned back the far, ante-prison days. the past, flooding into him, and his sense of the nearness of helen, crowded out for the time all his bitterness over rogers's destruction. when helen appeared at the door, he was for an instant powerless to move, so thrilled was he with his love for her. she came across the room with a happy smile, her hand held out. he strode toward her, and as he caught her hand his blood swept through him in a warm wave. "i'm so glad to see you again!" she cried, and a little laugh told him how sincere her joy was. a sudden desire struggled to tell her, truly, how great was his gladness, and its kind, at seeing her again; and fighting the desire back made him dizzy. "and i to see you!" he said. "it's been--let's see--five months since i've seen you, and--" "five months and four days," the desire within david corrected. "and four days," she accepted, with a laugh. "and there've been so many things during that time i've wanted to talk with you about. but how are you?" she moved near a window. she was full of spirits this day. the out-door life from which she had just come, the wind, the sun, the water, were blowing and shining and rippling within her. david, in analysing his love for her, had told himself he loved her because of her able mind, her nobility of soul, her feeling of responsibility toward life. had he analysed further he would have found that her lighter qualities were equally responsible for his love--her sense of humour, the freshness of her spirits, her joy in the pleasures of life. she had never shown him this lighter side with more freedom than now--not even during the summer seven years before when for two weeks they had been comrades;--and david, yesterday forgotten, yielded to her mood. he frankly looked her over. she wore a tailor-made suit of a rich brown, that had captured some of the warm glow of sun-lit autumn, and a little brown hat to match on which bloomed a single red rose. her face had the clear fresh brown of six months' sun, and the sun's sparkle, stored in her deep eyes, beamed joyously from them. she was a long vacation epitomised, idealised. "may i say," he remarked at length, with the daring of her own free spirit, "that you are looking very well?" for her part, she had been making a like survey of him. his tall figure, which had regained its old erectness, was enveloped in clothes that fit and set it off; and his clean-lined face, whose wanness had been driven away by the life in hers, looked distinguished against the background of the dark-green window hangings. "you may," she returned, "if you will permit me to say the same of you." "of me? oh, no. i'm an old man," he said exultantly. "do you know how old i am?" he touched his head. "see! the gray hairs!" "yes--at least a dozen," she said gravely. "such an old man!" "thirty-one! isn't it awful?" "twenty-eight--that's worse for a woman!" they looked at each other solemnly for a moment. then she broke into a laugh that had the music of summer, and he joined her. her face became more serious, but all the sparkle remained in it. "there are so many things i want to talk over with you. one is a check my father has just given me. every autumn he gives me a sum to spend on philanthropic purposes just as i see fit--he never asks me about it. the check's for twenty thousand dollars. i thought you might have some suggestions as to what to do with it--something in line with what we have often talked about. but we'll speak of that and some other things later. first of all, have you heard anything from your book?" "not a word." "you will--and favourably, i am sure. i want to say again what i've written--i think it's splendid as a piece of literary work and splendid as a work of serious significance. and uncle henry is just as enthusiastic as i am." david reddened with pleasure, and his enthusiasm, dead for over a month now, began to warm with new life. her eyes were looking straight into his own, and the love that had several times urged him beyond the limits of discretion, now pressed him again--and again all his strength was required to hold it silent. "but come!--we were to walk, you know," she said, smiling lightly. "i'll prove that i'm the better walker." during their silent passage through the halls to the mission door, it returned to him that she was the daughter of the man who, by an even-toned word, had destroyed one of his hopes and utterly destroyed all of rogers's. his high spirit, which had been but a weaker reflection of her own, faded from his face, leaving it tired and drawn; and she, looking up at him, saw the striking change. "why, have you been ill?" she exclaimed. a grim little smile raised the corners of his mouth. "no." "then you've been working too hard. what have you been doing since you finished your book?" he briefly told of his discharge and his acceptance of a position with rogers--and while he spoke his refluent bitterness tempted him to go on and tell her father's act of yesterday. "but this was over a month ago," she said when he had ended. "have the expected developments in mr. rogers's business taken place?" "tell her all," temptation ordered. he resisted this command, and then temptation approached him more guilefully. "tell her all, only give no names but yours and rogers, and no clues that would enable her to identify her father." this appealed to david's bitterness, and instantly he began. he told her rogers's true story, which of course he had as yet not done--of rogers's fight, so like his own--of rogers's deception of the world for ten years that he might live honestly--of his loneliness during that time, his fears, his secret kindnesses--of the first stages of the real estate deal--of the vast meaning of success to rogers, and of its meaning to himself--and finally of the happenings of the day before. "so you see," he ended, "this mr. a. has utterly destroyed mr. rogers, in cold blood, merely that he might increase the profits of his company." she had followed him with tensest interest, and indignation's flame in cheek and eye had grown higher and higher. "do you mean to say," she demanded, slowly, "that any man would do such a thing as that?" "yes--and a most respected citizen." "it was heartless!" she burst out hotly. "that man would do anything!" it filled david with grim joy to hear her pass such judgment upon her own father. at that moment he was untroubled by a single thought as to whether he had acted honourably to betray her into pronouncing judgment. "that man should be exposed!" she went on. "honourable business men should ostracise him. won't you tell me his name? perhaps my father can do something." an ironic laugh leaped into david's throat. he checked it. "no, i cannot tell his name." her indignation against the destroyer gave way to sympathy for the destroyed. she saw rogers defeated, despairing, utterly without chance. they came to david's street and her sympathy drew her into it. "i'm so sorry for him!" she burst out. "so sorry! i wish i could do something. i'd like to go in and tell him what i feel--if you think he wouldn't mind that from a stranger." "i'm afraid he would," said david, grimly. they fell silent. as they drew to within a block of the house, david saw the mayor of avenue a, whom he had left with rogers, come down the steps and start toward them, which was also toward the café. the mayor recognised them instantly, and a smile began to shine on his pink face. he had long been wanting to meet helen, and now the chance was his. he came up, his overcoat spread wide at the demand of his vest, and, pausing, took off his hat with his best ball-room flourish. "i've heard a great deal about you through mr. aldrich," helen said, when david had introduced them. "i'm very happy to meet you." "and i'm happy to meet you, miss," he returned, bowing, making a graceful sweep with his hat, and vigorously shaking the hand she had given him. "and me, i've heard about you a lot--and that long before i saw mr. aldrich. "from st. christopher's, i suppose." "yes, there--and elsewhere," said the mayor, smiling gallantly. "on the society pages. i've seen lots o' pieces about you, and seen your picture there among the beauties of society." the mayor expected to see her blush with gratification and ask for more--as women always did. but she quickly shifted to another subject. "mr. aldrich has just been telling me of a business affair you, he and mr. rogers have been engaged in." "oh, has he!" the mayor, in the agreeable experience of meeting helen, had forgotten there was such a person as her father. but he was the gallant no longer. his feet spread apart, his face grew stern, and he looked helen squarely in the eyes. "well," he demanded, "--and what do you think o' your father now?" "my father?" she said blankly. david caught his arm. "keep still, hoffman!" he cried roughly. the mayor looked from one to the other in astonishment. "what," he cried, "d'you mean you hadn't told her it was her father?" the colour of summer faded slowly from helen's face, and a hand reached out and caught a stoop railing. her eyes turned piercingly, appealingly, to david. after a moment she whispered, "my father--was that man?" he nodded. her head sank slowly upon her breast, and for moment after moment she stood motionless, silent. the mayor when he had thought of her as an instrument to strike her father, had not thought the instrument itself might be pained. filled with contrition, he stammered: "please, miss, i'm sorry--i didn't mean to hurt you." she did not answer; she seemed not to have heard. a moment later she lifted a gray, drawn face to david. "mr. aldrich," she said tremulously, "will you please put me in a cab?" * * * * * in the cab she sat with the same stricken look upon her face. she had, as david had once said to the mayor, always regarded her father as a man of highest honour. she had never felt concern in his business affairs, or any business affairs, despite the fact that her interests overreached in so many directions the usual interests of women, and despite the fact that her heart was in various material conditions which business had created and which business could relieve. seen from the intimate view-point of the home, her father was generous and kind. she had heard of the reports that circulated in the distant land of business, and she had glanced at some of the articles that had appeared in years past in magazines and newspapers, and she knew that stories were at this time current. her conception of her father had given the silent lie to all these reports. she believed they sprang from jealousy, or false information, or a distorted view. they had troubled her little, save to make her indignant that her father was so maligned; and even this indignation had been tempered with philosophic mildness, for she had remembered that it had ever been a common fate of men of superior purpose, or superior parts, or superior fortune, to be misunderstood and to be hated. but, all of a sudden, her conception of her father was shattered. this thing he had indubitably done was certainly not without the legal law, and perhaps not wholly without the cold lines of the moral--but it was hard-hearted, brutal. "the man who would do that would do anything," she had said to david; and all the way home in the cab this thought kept ringing through her consciousness, and kept ringing for days afterwards. it led logically and immediately to the dread question: "after all, may not these other stories be true?" helen did not belong to that easy-conscienced class who can eliminate unpleasantness by closing their eyes against it. she had to face her question with open vision--learn what truth was in it. she secured all she could find in print about her father and read it behind the locked door of her room. there was case after case in which her father, by skilful breaking of the law, or skilful compliance with it, or complete disregard of moral rights, had moved relentlessly, irresistibly, to his ends over all who had opposed him. the picture these cases drew was of a man it sickened her daughter-love to look upon--a man who was truly, as the articles frequently called him, an "industrial brigand," and whose vast fortune was the "loot of a master bandit." the articles seemed woven of fact, but she could not accept them unsubstantiated. she must know the truth--beyond a single doubt. at the same time, she, her father's daughter, could not go to the men he had wronged, demanding proof. at length she thought of her uncle henry, whom she loved and trusted, and whom she knew to be intimately acquainted with her father's career. to him she went one night and opened her fears. "are these things true?" she asked. and he said: "they are true." she went away, grief-burdened, feeling that the whole structure of her life was tottering. and two questions that before had been vaguely rising, became big, sharp, insistent: what should be her attitude toward her father, whom she loved? and what should be her attitude toward his fortune, which she shared? chapter ii david sees the face of fortune when david had handed helen into the cab, she had not spoken to him, had not even said, "thank you," and had rolled away without giving him so much as a backward glance. he now felt it had been brutal, dishonourable, to trap her into denouncing her father and then to strike her with her father's guilt. he was certain she was deeply offended, and this conviction grew as day after day passed without a word from her. but there were other things to be thought of during these days. there was his future--upon which, uncertain as it was, he saw that lillian drew was to be a parasite; for she had made another call (while kate was out of the office; he was thankful for that) and had carried away the larger fraction of his small store of money. he was again workless--again at the base of that high, smooth wall which before he had been able to surmount only with, as it were, his last gasping effort. what he should do, he had no idea. but his own future he thrust aside as being a less pressing problem than rogers's future and rogers's present. as rogers had predicted, the fact that he was red thorpe quickly reached the ears of his clients, and they all lost no time in withdrawing their property from his charge. the owner who had forced david's dismissal as janitor demanded with the same delicacy that rogers should vacate the rooms he occupied; but rogers had a lease and, moreover, had paid a month's rent in advance, so they and their belongings were not tumbled into the street. these days were for rogers solid blackness. david had promised to share with him, but he saw that there was doubt of david's having anything to share. even if david did, his bitter mood now looked upon that portion as charity, and little more agreeable to his pride than public charity--which he saw as a near-looming, shame-laden spectre, feared more than death. that he who had had the brains to achieve independence, who had been on the verge of fortune, should have been crushed to his present extremity--this filled him with wild revolt. kate, with a subdued gentleness that begged to serve; tom, with his alert willingness; david, with his constant presence and consideration; the mayor, with his ever-ready vituperation and bluff words of hope that rang hollow;--they all tried to lift the draping blackness from about him--and failed, because they had nothing but blackness to hang in its place. but some definite plan for the future had to be made, and rogers himself made it. since colorado was not for him, he would, as soon as his month here was ended, secure as cheap a room as he could find and try to stretch his small funds to reach that final day when he would have no need of more. kate's father fell with the rest of the rogers regime, and from the basement they moved into a couple of cheap rooms a few blocks away. david had often considered the relation between kate and her father: aside from keeping him alive kate was of no service to him--he was a terrible drag on her; if they could be separated, with his maintenance secured, he would be no worse off and she would be far better. david now talked the matter over with rogers; together they talked it over with kate, who finally yielded; and david enlisted the interest of dr. franklin in behalf of getting old jimmie into an institution for inebriates. there was little for kate to do in rogers's office, but she insisted on remaining and remaining without salary. "it's because of me all this happened--you may need me--i'm going to stay," she said to rogers. "i've still got most of my last month's wages--two or three weeks will be soon enough to get a job." and nothing rogers urged could move her. tom begged to be allowed to go to work, but david prevailed on him to continue in school. "something good will surely turn up," david said to the boy. but days went and nothing arose. david was on the point of yielding to tom, when into the general gloom there shot, for him, a bright shaft of hope. ten days after he had put helen into the cab a letter came to him addressed in her handwriting. he hardly dared open it, for he expected reproof--delicately conveyed, of course, but still reproof. when he drew the letter from its envelope an enclosure fell unheeded to the floor. instead of censure he found this: "it seems your address was not on your manuscript, so mr. osborne has sent the enclosed letter to you in care of me. i can hardly refrain from opening it. i feel certain there is good news in it. i congratulate you in advance! "you know how interested i am, so i know you'll come and tell me all about it just as soon as you learn the book's fate. you'll find me in almost any time." david picked up the envelope--stamped in one corner with "william osborne & co," a name he had once worshipped from afar off--ripped it open and read the following, signed by mr. osborne himself: "we have been greatly interested in your story. if you will call at your convenience i shall be glad to talk with you about it." david stared at the three type-written lines. the letter was not an acceptance--but then neither was it a rejection. a wild hope leaped up within him. could it be here was a ladder up the unseizable wall? could it be the success he had failed of five years before was at last about to be won? he dared not let himself be swept to these dizzy heights; he knew how far it was to the ground. so he told himself it could not be possible. still, was there not a chance? he slipped away without hinting of his hope to rogers--there would be time for telling later, if anything was to tell--and at ten o'clock reached a little five-story brick building off union square that was the home of william osborne & co. at first he had not the courage to enter. he remembered, as he walked on, a manuscript novel he had left here in the long ago--and it came back to him that this was the very manuscript he had been working over on that day, now more than five years gone, when morton's death had summoned him to st. christopher's. when he reached the door again he drove himself in and was swung to the top floor in a little creaking elevator, and before his courage had time to recede he was within a railed-off square in a large room and had given his name to a boy to be carried to mr. osborne. in a moment the boy returned and led him across the room, filled with sub-editors, manuscript readers and stenographers, and ushered him into a small private office. here at a desk sat a white-haired man chatting with two visitors. the white-haired man rose as david entered and smiled a kindly, spectacled smile. "i'm very glad to see you, mr. aldrich. if you'll excuse me for a minute, i'll be right with you." david sat down in the chair mr. osborne indicated and waited with pulsing suspense for the two men to go. there, on one corner of mr. osborne's desk, which was littered with letters, manuscripts and magazine page-proofs, he saw his book. he felt, as he waited, almost as he had felt five years before during the suffocating minutes between the return of the jury with its verdict and the verdict's reading. the verdict on the book was ready. what was it to be? at length the two men went away. mr. osborne turned from the door and came toward david, smiling cordially, his hand outstretched. "let me congratulate you, mr. aldrich!" he said heartily. david rose and put a nerveless hand into mr. osborne's. "you mean--you like it?" "indeed i do! if you and i can come to an agreement, we shall be proud to publish it." david gazed swimmingly at him. there was a whirling, a bubbling, within him--but he managed to say with fair control: "it's hardly necessary to tell an old publisher how happy a new author is to hear that." mr. osborne sat down and david automatically did likewise. "you, mr. aldrich, have particular reason to feel happy. we print a great many well-written, dramatic stories--stories which are just that, and no more. that, of course, is a great deal. but when a book, without impairment to its dramatic and artistic quality, leaves a profound impression regarding some aspect of life--that book has an element of bigness that the other stories lack. mr. aldrich, yours is such a story." david felt he was reeling off his chair. "yes?" he said. mr. osborne went on to praise the book in detail. after a time he proposed terms. david took in hardly a word of the offer; his mind was over-running with his success, his praise. but he accepted the terms instantly. this settled, mr. osborne picked up several yellowed type-written sheets from his disordered desk. "by the way, are you the david aldrich that submitted us a novel five or six years ago called 'the master knot?'" "yes," said david. "i thought you might be interested in the readers' opinions on that story, so i had them brought in." he handed the sheets to david, and when he saw david had glanced them through, he remarked: "you see they all amount to the same. 'the author knows how to write, but he does not know life.'" he gazed steadily at david through the kindly spectacles. "since then, mr. aldrich, you have come to know life." "i think i have." david strained to keep his voice natural. "yes, you have come to know life--to feel it." he paused, and considered within himself. for all his warmth, there had been in his tone and manner, caution, reserve. suddenly these fell away, and he radiated enthusiasm. "i try never to raise false hopes in a young author," he cried, "but i've got to say more than i've said. really, i think i've made what a publisher is always looking for, hoping for--a great find, a real writer! you're going to do big things!" david dared not respond; he knew his voice would not be steady. "yes--big things," mr. osborne repeated. "but here's another point i wanted to speak of. we can use several short stories from you in our magazine. if you have any, or will write some, that are anywhere near as good as the book, i can guarantee acceptance." it was a moment before david could trust himself to speak. "i have none, but i should like to write some." then he suddenly remembered he had not the money to carry him through the period that must elapse before the stories could be written and paid for. "but i fear i'm not in a position to write them just now," he added. mr. osborne had had thirty years' experience with the impecuniosity of authors. "money?" he queried. there was no taking offence at the friendly way he asked this. "yes," david confessed. "i think we can solve that difficulty. i don't know how the book there is going to sell. i was a publisher before you were born, but after all my experience i have to regard the commercial side of publishing as pretty much of a gambling game. critically, your book is certain of great success. financially--i don't know. it may win in a large way; i hope so. but you are sure of at least a moderate sale. suppose, then, i make you a small advance on your royalty. say--let's see--well, three hundred. will that do?" david felt, as he had felt since he had heard his verdict, that to venture beyond a monosyllable would be to explode. he swallowed. "yes," he said. "very well, then. do you prefer check or cash?" "cash." ten minutes later david entered the street, three hundred dollars in his pocket, his heart wild with joy, hope. he wanted to run, to shout, to fly. his glowing face was the visage of triumph. at last the success he had prayed for--striven for--given up--had come! he turned northward, to carry the news to helen. a suggestion of hers flashed into his mind: the book might help pay his debt to the mission. obeying impulse he walked into a bank he was at the instant passing, and when he came out there was in an inner coat pocket a draft for two hundred dollars made out to the reverend joseph franklin. all the way to helen's door there was no pavement beneath his feet. when he had called here the last time--the time he had read her part of the story; he was a shabby creature then--he had borne himself very humbly toward the footman. now he asked for helen with a buoyant ring in his voice and fairly flung his coat and hat upon the astonished servant; and he bowed with a new dignity to helen's aunt, mrs. bosworth, whom he met on the stairway. helen met him at the drawing-room door. "i can read the news in your face!" she cried. "i'm so glad!" he laughed joyously as he caught her hand. "yes, mr. osborne took it!" "i knew he would! and he likes it? tell me--how does he like it?" "you must ask him. but--he likes it!" "immensely--i'm certain! come, you must tell me all!" they sat down and david told her of his half-hour with mr. osborne. since receiving her note that morning he had not once thought of the end of their last meeting. if he had, and had been aware of the pain that meeting had brought her, he would have marvelled at the ease with which she threw her misery aside for the sake of a mere friend, a dishonoured friend. but he did not wonder; he just drank recklessly of this glorious draught, compounded of her praise and her joy in his joy. at the end he told her of the three hundred dollars--never thinking that it was barely more than the price of the simple-looking gown she wore, that it was but a penny to the rich furnishings of the drawing-room, that it was her father's income for perhaps less than a quarter of a business hour. and completely abandoned to the boyish happiness that forced him to share everything, he told her of the draft for two hundred dollars. her face shadowed; this man, who was paying back, had suddenly brought to mind her father, who was not paying back. but quickly a deep glow came into her eyes. "you should be as proud of this as of any of the rest," she said. she gazed at him thoughtfully, her head slightly nodding. "yes--you are going to win all you started out to win," she went on, her low voice vibrating with belief. "you are going to clear your name; you are going to achieve a personal success; you are going to carry out your dream to help save the human waste. yes, you are going to do it all." his success, her words, the glowing sincerity in her brown eyes, swept him to the heights of exaltation. suddenly his love made another of its trials to burst from him. he leaned toward her. "and there's something else to tell you." "yes?" but he did not go on. instantly his love was being fought back. exalted though he was, the old compelling reasons for silence had rushed into him. "yes? what is it?" she asked. he swallowed hard. "some other time," he said. "when the time comes, i shall be glad to hear it." he looked into her steady eyes, and saw she had no guess of what the thing might be. "when the time comes--i shall tell," he said. but in his heart was no belief that time would ever come. chapter iii helen's conscience when david reached home he found the mayor had just brought over rogers's lunch and kate, with the help of tom, was arranging it on the table. he threw his happiness among them in a score of words. the mayor stepped forward, his face ruddied with a smile. "friend, put 'er there!" invited his gruff diaphragm, and david put his hand to bed in the big, mattress-soft palm. "well, sir, i'm certainly happy--that's me! on the level, when i first heard you were tryin' to write a book, said i to myself, private-like, 'he'd better be makin' tidies.' but you're the goods, friend! every man and woman on the avenue has got to buy one o' your books, you bet!" "say, pard, you're certainly it!" cried tom, who had seized him from the other side. "dat puts you on top--way up where you belongs. an' no more worryin' about de coin!" "i'm glad too,--you know that, aldrich!" said rogers, grasping david's hand. rogers's face was drawn; david's success had freshened, emphasised, his own failure. "i wish both of us could have pulled out. but if only one of us could, it's best that that one is you. i'm glad, aldrich!" david felt the pain behind rogers's words, felt their pathos, and he suddenly was ashamed of his success. "it's because i was doing something where the world did not have to trust me," he said apologetically. "it's because you are the exceptional man, doing the exceptional thing. they have a chance. the others have not." kate had not moved since david had announced his good fortune. she stood with her hands on the table and leaning slightly against it, her white, strained face fastened on david. "i'm glad, too," she now said, in a voice that had a trace of tremolo; and, turning abruptly, she went into the office. in there, alone, she sat at her desk with her cheeks in her hands. soon, with a little burst of despair, she cried out: "why did this have to happen!" and she added, with a moan: "oh, david, this puts you such a long ways off!" that afternoon and evening david could settle to nothing; and that night he slept not a minute for sweeping joy, for flashing ideas for stories, for swift, vivid visions of the future. the next morning he had a note from helen asking him to call in the afternoon. "you remember my speaking to you about the check for twenty thousand dollars my father gave me," she said, when he had come. her face was pale and she spoke with an effort. "i've decided what to do with it. i want you to help me." "if i can," he said. "i've been thinking a great deal about mr. rogers." she paused, then went on, her voice more strained. "he should not have lost that money. i have cashed the check. i want to give the money to mr. rogers--not as a gift, but as property that belongs to him." he looked wonderingly into her pained eyes. "you're in earnest?" he said slowly. "i am--i must do it. and i want you to take the money to him, from"--she obeyed a sudden instinct of blood-loyalty--"from my father." his anger against her father suddenly flamed up. "from your father? i know how much your father knows of this plan!" she went on as if she had not heard him, though she had quivered at his words. "i want you to take the money to mr. rogers. you will know what to say." the full significance of what she had said was just dawning upon him. he gazed at her, wondering what must have been passing in her mind these last few days. "mr. rogers is very proud," he said. "he'll not take the money--at least not from me." "you're certain?" "from me--never." "then i must take it to him myself." she rose. "i'll be ready in a few minutes. you must go with me." he rose also. her white face, that met his so squarely, told him how deeply she felt, how strong her determination was. "yes, i'll go with you," he said. when she re-entered the library she was dressed in the suit of autumn brown and the brown hat with its single rose, which she had worn the day they had met at st. christopher's. he knew she felt the matter of her errand too keenly to speak of it, and too absorbingly to speak of anything else; and so, in silence, they went out into the street. half an hour later they entered rogers's office. "just wait a minute, while i tell him you're here," whispered david, and went into the living room where rogers was. presently he brought her in, introduced her to rogers, and withdrew. helen had never seen rogers. her picture of him was purely of the imagination, and imagination had put in its vague portrait the hard lines, the hang-dog look, the surly bearing that might well remain with a reformed criminal. so she was totally unprepared for the slight figure with the wasted, intellectual face that rose from an easy-chair by the air-shaft window, and for the easy gesture and even voice with which he asked her to be seated. she recognised instantly that to make him accept the money would prove a harder task than she had counted. "thank you," she said, and sitting down she studied rogers's face for the moment she was adjusting her faculties to the new difficulty. "did mr. aldrich tell you why i wished to see you?" "no." he would be courteous to her for the sake of the request david had made to him, but his hatred of her father allowed him only a monosyllabic reply. to speak words that would show warm sympathy for him and no disloyalty to her father, this was her problem. "mr. aldrich has told me of your land enterprise and how--it failed," she said with a great effort, feeling that her words were cold and ineffective. "he told me how you lost a large sum that you had practically gained. he told me that it was--my father--who made you lose it." her first effort would carry her no further. he nodded. she clutched the arms of her chair, breathed deeply, and drove herself on. "you should not have lost it. i have come to bring you--to ask you to let me return to you"--a brown-gloved hand drew a roll of bills from the bag in her lap "this money that belongs to you." she held the elastic-bound roll out to him. his interlocked hands did not move from his lap. "i don't just understand," he said slowly. "you mean that this money is the equivalent of what i should have made in the land deal?" "yes." his face tinged faintly with red, his bright eyes (he had discarded glasses, now that a disguise no longer served him) darted quick flames, and he leaned toward her. "do you think i can take as a gift that which i honestly earned?" he demanded in a low, fierce voice. "but it is not offered as a gift. it is restitution." "restitution! so you want to make restitution? can you restore the strength despair has taken from me? my good name was built on deception, but i had worked hard for it and it was dear to me. can you restore my good name? i've lost everything! can you restore everything?" the ringing bitterness of his voice, the wasted face working with the passion of despair, the utter hopelessness of the future which her quick vision showed her--all these stirred a great emotion which swept her father from her mind. before, she had sympathised with rogers abstractly; now her sympathy was for a hopeless soul, bare and agonising beneath her eyes. her words rushed from her, in them the throb of her heart. "no! no! i can't give them back--no one can. oh, what a wrong it was!" he stared at her. the wrath and bitterness on his face slowly gave place to surprise. "oh, but it was a shame!" she cried, her face aflame, her voice aquiver. and then a sense of the irretrievableness of this wreck laid hold upon her and a quick sob broke forth. she felt a sympathetic agony for rogers, and an agony that she, through her blood, was the cause of his wrecked life. "oh, it was terrible, terrible! you are right! restitution cannot be made--only the pitiful restitution of money. but you must let me make that--you must!" he felt that he was speaking to a friend, and it was as to a friend that he said quietly: "i can't." "but you _must_!" she was now thinking of but one thing, how to force him to take the bills. "i'm not doing you a favour. i'm asking a favour from you. i come to you in humility, contrition. the money i bring is not my money--it is your money. my father entered your house and took it; i bring it back to you. you merely accept your own. you see that, don't you? surely you see that!" rogers did not answer at once. he was so dazed by the rush of her words--words that sprang from complete sympathy and understanding, words that might have come from his own heart--that he could not. she had risen and now stood above him. "you understand, don't you?" she went on imploringly. "my father has done wrong; i feel it just as though i had done it. i must repair the wrong as far as i can. you must take this money for my sake, don't you see?" he rose and started to speak, but she cut him off. "i know what is in your heart; your pride wants you to refuse. if you refuse, you do only one thing: you deny me the relief of partially correcting a wrong. that is all. is it right for you to deny me that? will you yourself not be doing a wrong?" he was trembling; she had taken the only road to his consent. but he made no motion toward the money in her outstretched hand. "for my sake--i beg you--i implore you." she spoke tremulously, simply. he held out a thin hand, and she laid the money in it. "for your sake," he breathed. "thank you," she said. helen felt herself growing weak and dizzy. the reaction was setting in. "i must go. i can't ask you to forgive me--but won't you let me, as one that would like to be regarded as a friend, wish that there may be brightness ahead which you don't see." she held out her hand, timidly. he grasped it. he could not speak. "thank you," she whispered, and slowly turned away. at the door she paused, and looked back. "my best wishes are with you," she said, and went out. chapter iv the ordeal of kate morgan that night david and rogers had a long talk. in consequence, correspondence was re-opened with the sanitarium at colorado springs, and david began to spend part of his time in helping equip rogers for the distant struggle against death. during the two weeks since his exposure rogers had not railed; he had borne his defeat in grim, quiet despair. his bitterness did not now depart; he had not forgotten his defeat, and he had not forgiven the world. but his life now had an object, and the hope, which the really brave always save from even the worst wreck, began to stir within him. the next two weeks david worked with his pen as he had never worked before. he was in that rare mood when things flow from one. before the end of the two weeks he turned in to mr. osborne two short stories which mr. osborne, with the despatch a publisher gives a new author he is desirous of holding, immediately examined, accepted and paid for at a very respectable rate. mr. osborne suggested a series of articles for his magazine, spoke of more stories, assured david he would have no difficulty in marketing his writing elsewhere; and when david left the publisher's office it was with the exultant sense that financially his future was secure. mr. osborne assured him his book was going to turn much serious thought to our treatment of the criminal and other wasted people, and that his shorter writings were going to help to the same end. his publisher asked him to speak before a club interested in reform measures, and his talk, straight from the heart and out of his own experience, made a profound impression. the success of this speech suggested to him another means of helping--the spoken word. he felt that at last his life was really beginning to count. but he realised he was still only at the beginning. before him was that giant's task, conquering the respect of the world--with the repayment of st. christopher's as the first step. the task would require all his mind and strength and courage and patience, for years and years and years--with success at the end no more than doubtful. the more david pondered upon the ills he saw about him, the less faith did he have in superficial reforms, the deeper did he find himself going for the real cure. and gradually he reached the conclusion that the idea behind the present organization of society was wrong. that idea, stripped to its fundamentals, was selfishness--and even a mistaken selfishness: for self to gain for self all that could be gained. under this organization they that have the greatest chance are they that are strong and cunning and unscrupulous, and he that is all three in greatest measure can take most for himself. so long as the world and its people are at the mercy of such an organization, so long as self-interest is the dominant ideal--just so long will the great mass of the people be in poverty, just so long will crime and vice remain unchecked. he began to think of a new organization of society, where individual selfishness would be replaced as the fundamental idea by the interest of the whole people--where "all men are born free and equal" would not be merely a handsome bit of rhetoric, but where there would be true equality of chance--where the development of the individual in the truest, highest sense would be possible--where that major portion of vice and crime which spring from poverty and its ills would be wiped out, and there would remain only the vice and crime that spring from the instincts of a gradually improving human nature. and so, without losing interest in immediate changes that might alleviate criminal-making conditions, david set his eyes definitely upon the great goal of a fundamental change. since rogers would soon be gone, david began to look for new quarters. his pride shrunk from a boarding-house, where he knew he would be liable to snubs and insults. as money matters troubled him no longer, he leased a small flat with a bright southern exposure, in an apartment house just outside the poorer quarter. if he and tom prepared most of their own meals they could live here more cheaply than in a boarding-house, and he could save more to quiet lillian drew and to pay off the debt to st. christopher's. one afternoon, while david was at the pan-american talking to the mayor, and kate was at her desk type-writing a manuscript, the office door opened and closed, and a low, satiric voice rasped across the room: "hello, little girl!" kate looked about, then quickly rose. her cheeks sprang aflame. at the door stood lillian drew, smiling mockingly, her face flushed with spirits. "hello, little girl!" she repeated. kate's instinctive hatred of this woman, founded partly on what lillian drew obviously was, but more on the certainty that she had some close and secret connection with david's life, made kate tremble. a year before the wrathful words that besought to pass her lips would have burst forth unchecked. but she controlled herself. "what do you want?" she demanded. to pain a person who stirred her antagonism, this twenty uncurbed years had made one of lillian drew's first instincts. she had observed before that kate disliked her and stung under her "little girl;" consequently to inflict her presence and the phrase on kate was to gratify instinct. she walked with a slight unsteadiness to david's chair, sat down and smiled baitingly up into kate's face. "i've just come around to have a visit with you, little girl. sit down." kate grew rigid. "if you want mr. aldrich, he's not here." "oh, yes, he is. but i don't want him just yet. i want to have a visit with you." she looked kate up and down. "well, now, for such a little girl, you're not so bad." kate's eyes blazed. "i tell you he's not here. there's no use of your waiting." "i'm in no hurry at all. but you're too thin. you've got to put on ten or fifteen pounds if you expect to catch his eye." kate pointed to the door. "get out of here!--with that breath of yours!" the vindictive fire gathered in lillian drew's eyes; the return blow of her victim had roused her pain-giving desire into wrath. "oh, you want to catch him, all right!" she laughed, malignantly. "i saw that in a second the other day from the way you looked at him. but d'you think he'll care for a girl like you? i came the other day and found no one around but that nice father of yours. i had a little talk with him, and--well, i've got you sized up just about right. and you think you're the girl for him!" kate took one step forward and drew back her open hand. but the hand paused in mid-blow. "you drunken she-devil!" she blazed forth, "get out of here!--or i'll have the police put you out!" lillian drew sprang up, as livid as if the hand had indeed cracked upon her cheek, and glared at the flame of hatred and wrath that was kate morgan. rage, abetted by liquor, had taken away every thought, every desire, save to strike this girl down. her hands clenched; but blows make only a passing hurt. all her life she had used words; words, if you have the right sort, are a better weapon--their wound is deep, permanent. "you little skinny alley-cat!" she burst out furiously. "you think you're going to marry him, don't you. you marry him! oh, lord!" kate shivered with her passion. "get out!" lillian drew gave a sharp, crunching, gloating laugh. "that's it!--you think you're going to marry him. you think he's a thief, don't you. you think you're in his class. well--let me tell you something." she drew close to kate and her eyes burned upon kate with wild vindictive triumph. "he's not a thief--he never was one!" "it's a lie!" cried kate. "oh, he says he is, but he's not. he never took that five thousand dollars from st. christopher's. he pretends he did, but he didn't. you hear that, little girl?--he didn't. phil morton took it. i know, because i got it.--d'you understand now?--that he's not a thief?--that he's ten thousand miles above you? and yet you, you skinny little nothing, you've got the nerve to think you're going to catch him! oh, lord!" "you're drunker than i thought!" sneered kate. "if it wasn't true, d'you suppose he'd be paying me to keep still about it?" "pay you to keep still about his not being a thief! and you want me to believe that too?" kate laughed with contempt. then she inquired solicitously: "would you like a bucket of water over you to sober you a bit?" at this moment the hall door opened and david entered the room. he paused in astonishment. "what's the matter?" he asked sharply. the two had turned at his entrance, and, their faces ablaze with anger, were now glaring at him. kate was the first to speak, and her words tingled with her wrath. "nothing. only this charming lady friend of yours--don't come too near her breath!--has been telling me that you didn't take the money from the mission--that mr. morton did--that she got it--that you're paying her not to tell that you're innocent." the colour slowly faded from david's face. he held his eyes a moment on kate's infuriate figure, and then he gazed at lillian drew. she gazed back at him defiantly, but the thought that her betrayal of the secret might cut off her supplies began to cool her anger. david thought only of the one great fact that the truth had at last come out; and finally he exclaimed, almost stupidly, more in astoundment than wrath: "so this's how you've kept it secret!" kate paled. her eyes widened and her lips fell apart. she caught herself against her desk and stared at him. "so--it's the truth!" she whispered with dry lips. but david did not hear her. his attention was all pointed at lillian drew. "this is the way you've kept it, is it!" he said. "she's the only one i've told," she returned uneasily. her effrontery began to flow back upon her. "she's only one more you've got to square things with. come, give me a little coin and i'll get out, and give you a chance to settle with her." "you've had your last cent!" he said harshly. "oh, no, i haven't. i don't leave till you come up with the dough!" she sat down, and looked defiantly at him. kate moved slowly, tensely, across to david, gripped his arms and turned her white, strained face upon his. "so--you never took that mission money!" her voice was an awed, despairing whisper. her tone, her fierce grip, her white face, sent through him a sickening shiver of partial understanding. "i'm sorry--but you know the truth." she gazed wide-eyed at him; then her voice, still hardly more than a whisper, broke out wildly: "yes--yes--you took it, david! say that you took it!" he was silent for a moment. "if i said so--would you believe me?" he asked. her head slowly sank, and her hands fell from his arms. "oh, david!" she gasped--a wild, choked moan of despair. she took her hat and jacket from their hooks, and not stopping to put them on, not hearing the triumphant "good-bye, little girl" of lillian drew, she walked out of the office. she moved through the acid-sharp november air, a white-faced automaton. she felt a vague, numb infinity of pain. she perceived neither the causes of the blow nor its probable results; she merely felt its impact, and that impact had made her whole being inarticulate. but presently her senses began to rouse. she began to see the outlines of her disaster, its consequences; her great vague pain separated into distinct pangs, each agonisingly acute. she felt an impulse to cry out in the street, but her instinctive pride closed her throat. she turned back and hurried to her room, locked herself in, and flung her hat upon the floor and herself upon the bed. but even here she could not cry. all her life she had been strong, aggressive, self-defending; she had cried so rarely that she knew not how. so she lay, dry-eyed, her whole body clenched, retched with sobs that would not come up. lillian drew's words, "he's ten thousand miles above you," sat upon her pillow and cried into her ear. she had seen david's superior quality and his superior training; but she and he had both been thieves--they were both struggling to rise clear of thievery. this commonness of experience and of present effort had made him seem very near to her--very attainable. it was a bond between them, a bond that limited them to one another. and she had steadfastly seen a closer union a little farther ahead. but now he was not a thief. the bond was snapped--he was ten thousand miles above her! her despair magnified him, diminished herself; and when she contrasted the two she shrunk to look upon the figure of her insignificance. he must see her as such a pigmy--how could he ever care for such paltriness? he never could. he was lost to her--utterly lost! all that afternoon she was tortured by her hopelessness. in the evening she became possessed by an undeniable craving to see david, and she went to david's house and asked him to walk with her. for the first minute after they were in the street the silence of constraint was between them. david could but know, in a vague way, of kate's suffering; he was pained, shamed, that he was its cause. in the presence of her suffering, to him, with his feeling of guilt, all else seemed trivial. but there was one matter that had to be spoken of. "you've not told a soul, have you, what you learned this afternoon?" he asked. "no," she returned, in a muffled voice. "i was sure you hadn't. i was afraid this afternoon that rogers had overheard, but he didn't; either you talked in low voices, or he was asleep. no one must ever know the truth--no one--and especially rogers." "why him especially?" she asked mechanically. david hesitated. "well, you see one thing that makes him feel close to me is that he believes we have both been in the same situation. in a way that has made us brothers. if he knew otherwise, it might make a difference to him." "i understand!" said kate's muffled voice. she asked him details of the story lillian drew had revealed, and since she already knew so much, he told her--though he felt her interest was not in what he told her. at length--he had yielded himself to her guidance--they came out upon the dock where they had talked a month before. she had wanted to be with him alone, and she had thought of no better place. despite the wind's being filled with needles, they took their stand at the dock's end. they looked out at the river that writhed and leaped under the wind's pricking--black, save beneath the arc lamps of the williamsburg bridge, where the rearing little wave-crests gleamed, sunk, and gleamed again. for several minutes they were silent. then the choked words burst from her: "i'm not fit to be your friend!" "you mustn't let this afternoon make a difference, kate," he besought. "it doesn't to me. fit to be my friend! you are--a thousand times over! i admire you--i honour you--i'm proud to have you for a friend!" she quickly looked up at him. the light from the bridge lamps, a giant string of glowing beads, lay upon her face. in it there gleamed the sudden embers of hope. "but can you love me--some time?" she whispered. it was agony to him to shake his head. "i knew it!" she breathed dully. when he saw the gray, dead despair in her face, he cried out, in his agony and abasement: "don't take it so, kate! i'm not worthy to be the cause of so much pain." she looked back at the river; the wind had set her shivering, but she did not know she was cold. he saw that she was thinking, so he did not speak. after several minutes she asked in a low voice: "do you still love miss chambers?" he remained silent. "do you?" "yes." "as much as i love you?" "yes." there was a pause. when she next spoke she was looking him tensely in the face. "would she love you if she knew the truth?" "i shall never tell her." "but would she love you?" she repeated, fiercely. she clutched his arms and her eyes blazed. "she'd better not!--i'd kill her!" the face he looked down into was that of a wild animal. he gazed at it with fear and fascination. the vindictive fire began slowly to burn lower, then, at a puff, it was out. "no!--no!" she cried, convulsively, gripping his arms tighter. "i wouldn't! you know i wouldn't!" the face, so rageful a minute before, was now twitching, and the tears, that came so hard, were trembling on her lashes. her eyes embraced his face for several moments. "ah, david!" she cried, and her words were borne upward on the sobs that now shook her, "even if you don't love me, david--i want you to be happy!" chapter v the command of love mr. allen put down his teacup and gazed across the table at helen. since mrs. bosworth had left the drawing-room, ten minutes before, they had been arguing the old, old point, and both held their old positions. "then you will never, never give your ideas up?" he sighed, with mock-seriousness that was wholly serious. "then you will never, never give your ideas up?" she repeated in the same tone. "never, never." "never, never." they looked at each other steadily for a moment, then their make-believe lightness fell from them. "we certainly do disagree to perfection!" he exclaimed. "yes. so perfectly that the more i think of what you've asked for, the more inadvisable does it seem." "but you'll change yet. a score of drawn battles do not discourage me of ultimate victory." "nor me," she returned quietly. their skirmish was interrupted by the entrance of a footman. helen took the card from the tray and glanced at it. "show her into the library and tell her i'll join her soon." she turned back to mr. allen. "perhaps you remember her--she was a maid at your house a little while--a miss morgan." "i remember her, yes," he said indifferently. his face clouded; he made an effort at lightness, but his words were sharp. "where, oh where, are you going to stop, helen! you are at st. christopher's twice a week, not counting frequent extra visits. two days ago, so you've just told me, that mr. aldrich was here. to-day, it's this girl. and the week's not yet over! don't you think there might at least be a little moderation?" "you mean," she returned quietly, "that, if we were married, you would not want these friends of mine to come to your house?" "i should not! and i wish i knew of some way to snap off all that side of your life!" she regarded him meditatively. "since there's so much about me you don't approve of, i've often wondered why you want to marry me. love is not a reason, for you don't love me." the answers ran through his head: he admired her; she had beauty, brains, social standing, social tact, and, last of all but still of importance, she had money--the qualities he most desired in his wife. but to make a pretence of love, whatever the heart may be, is a convention of marriage--like the bride's bouquet, or her train. so he said: "but i do love you." "oh, no you don't--no more than i love you." "then why would you marry me?--if you do." "because i like you; because i admire your qualities; because i believe my life would be richer and fuller and more efficient; and because i should hope to alter certain of your opinions." "well, i don't care what the reasons are--just so they're strong enough," he said lightly. he rose and held out his hand; his face grew serious; his voice lowered. "i must be going. four more days, remember--then your answer." after he had gone she sat for several minutes thinking of life with him, toward which reason and circumstances pressed her, and from which, since the day he had declared himself, she had shrunk. this marriage was so different from the marriage of her dreams--a marriage of love, of common ideals; yet in it, her judgment told her, lay the best use of her life. she dismissed her troubling thoughts with a sigh and walked back to the library. as she entered kate rose from a high-backed chair behind the great square library-table, whose polished top shone with the light from the chandelier. kate's face was white, the mouth was a taut line, the eyes gleamed feverishly amid the purpled rings of wakeful nights. helen came smiling across the noiseless rug, her hand held out. "i'm very happy to see you, miss morgan." kate did not move. she allowed helen to stand a moment, hand still outheld, while her dark eyes blazed into helen's face. then she abruptly laid her hand into the other, and as abruptly withdrew it. "i want to speak to you," she said. "certainly. won't you sit down?" kate jerked a hand toward the wide, curtained doorway through which helen had entered. "close the door." "why?" asked helen, surprised. "close the door," she repeated in the same low, short tone. "nobody must hear." the forced voice, and the repressed agitation of kate's bearing, startled helen. she drew together the easy-running doors, and returned to the table. kate jerked her hand toward the open plate-glass door that led into the conservatory. "and that door." "there's no one in there." but helen closed the heavy pane of glass. "won't you sit down," she said, when this was done, taking one of the richly carved chairs herself. "no." kate's eyes blazed down upon helen's face; her breath came and went rapidly, with a wheezing sound; her hands, on the luminous table-top, were clenched. her whole body was so rigid that it trembled. the colour began to leave helen's face. "i'm waiting--go on." kate's lips suddenly quivered back from her teeth. she had to strike, even if she struck unjustly. "people like you"--her voice was harsh, tremulous with hate--"you always believe the worst of a man. you throw him aside--crush him down--walk on him. you never think perhaps you've made a mistake, perhaps he's all right. oh, no--you never think good of a man if you can think bad." she leaned over the corner of the table. "i hate your kind of people! i hate you!" "is this the thing you wanted no one to hear?" helen asked quietly. kate slowly straightened up. after two days and two nights--a long, fierce, despairing battle between selfish and unselfish love--she had decided she must come here; but now her rehearsed sentences all left her. for a moment she stood choking; then the bald words dropped out: "he's not a thief--never was one." "who?" "david aldrich." helen came slowly to her feet. her face was white, her eyes were wide. for a moment she did not speak--just stared. "what do you mean?" "he did not take the money from the mission." helen moved from the corner of the table, her wide eyes never leaving kate's gleaming ones, and a hand clutched kate's arm and tightened there. "tell me all." "you hurt me." helen removed her hand. kate crept closer and stared up into her face. "does it make any difference to you?" she breathed, tensely. "tell me all!" kate drew back a pace, and leaned upon her clenched hands. "you knew mr. morton," she said, in a quick strained monotone. "when he was young, he lived with a woman. he wrote her a lot of letters--love letters. she turned up again a few months before he died, and threatened to show the letters if he didn't pay her. he had no money; he took money from the mission and paid her. then he died. his guilt was about to be found out. but david aldrich said he took the money and went to prison. he did it because he thought if mr. morton's guilt was found out, the mission would be destroyed and the people would go back to the devil. you know the rest. that's all." helen continued motionless--silent. "it's all so," kate went on. "the woman herself told me. she knew the truth. she'd been making david pay her to keep from telling that he was innocent. she told me before him. he had to admit it." kate leaned further across the corner of the table. "he made me promise never to tell." for a moment of dead quiet she gazed up into helen's fixed face. "and why do you think i've broken my promise?" she asked in a low voice, between barely parted lips. helen rested one hand on the back of a chair and the other on the table. she trembled slightly, but she did not reply. "because"--there was a little quaver in kate's voice--"i thought it might sometime make him happy." there was another dead silence, during which kate gazed piercingly into helen's face. "do you love him?" she asked sharply. helen's arms tightened. after a moment her lips moved. "you love him yourself." "me?--it's a lie. i don't!" kate moved round the corner of the table and laid a fierce hand on helen's arm. "do you love him?" she demanded. silence. "thank you--for telling me." kate laughed a low, harsh laugh, and flung helen's arm from her. "you!--you think you're way above him, don't you! well--you're not! you're not fit for him!" her eyes leaped with flame. "i hate you!" again a moment of silence. a tremor ran through helen. she moved forward, and her hands reached out and fell upon kate's shoulders. "i love you," she whispered. kate shrunk sharply away. her eyes never leaving helen's face, she backed slowly toward the doors. she pushed them apart, and gazed at helen's statued figure. kate's face had become ashen, drawn. after a moment she slipped through the doors and drew them to. as the doors clicked, helen swayed into a chair beside the table, and her head fell forward into her arms. chapter vi another world at half-past eight o'clock that evening david walked up the broad steps of the chambers's house and rang the bell. the footman left him in the great hall, rich with carved oak and old tapestries, and went off with his card. as he waited, he continued to wonder at the telegram he had received half an hour before from helen, which had merely said, "can you not call this evening?" why could she so suddenly desire to see him? he had no faintest guess. in a few minutes the footman returned, led him up the stairway and directed him into the library. a wood fire was burning in the broad fire-place, and on a divan before it she was sitting, all in white. she rose. "will you draw the doors, please," her voice came to him. he did so, and went toward her eagerly. but his steps slowed. two or three paces from her he came to a stop. she stood, one hand on the divan's arm, gazing at him with parted lips, and wide, marvelling eyes. the look put a spell upon him; he returned it silently, with a growing bewilderment. for several moments her whole being was brought to a focus in the awed wonder of her face. then her breast began to rise and fall, her face to twitch, her eyes to flood with tears. the tears glinted down her cheeks and fell upon her swelling breast. she gave them no heed, but continued to hold her quivering face full upon him. "what is it?" he whispered. she stretched out her hands and slowly moved toward him, her eyes never leaving his face. he automatically took her hands. they were warm and tight, and through them he felt her whole body trembling. he thrilled under their pressure and under her look--under her glorious, brimming eyes. as she gazed upon him his last five years ran through her mind--his trial, his prison life, his struggle for a foothold, his dishonoured name. a sob broke from her, and upon it came her low, vibrant voice--quavering, awed: "it was god-like!" he could barely ask, "what?" "what you did." he could not find a word, he was so bewildered, so thrilled by her gaze, by her clinging hands. her tears continued to drop from her eyes to her heart. there was a momentary silence, then the awed, quavering voice, said slowly: "you never took the money!--the mission money!" for a space he was utterly dazed. the room swam; he held to her hands for support. slowly the bewilderment of ignorance passed into the greater bewilderment of knowledge. she knew the truth! the secret of his life that he had hidden from her, thought always to hide from her, she had found out! he realised this, but no more. it did not occur to him even to wonder how she had learned--and her words, "miss morgan told me," lodged an explanation in his mind that would waken after a while, but did not now stir a single thought regarding kate. that she knew, had burst upon him so suddenly as to set everything whirling within him--to overwhelm, outcrowd all else. he sank to the couch, and she sank to a place beside him, their hands and eyes still clasped. "oh, you never took it!" the voice dripped with tears, vibrated with a rising note of triumph. "to think what you've gone through!" she marvelled on, quaveringly. "your struggles--such struggles!--and everybody believing you dishonoured. and all the time, you being this splendid thing that you are!" a great sob surged up. he was still whirling and still saw her face hazily. but his faculties were coming back. "what i did was not active--it was merely passive," he said. "to achieve by suffering, and be repaid by dishonour--what can be higher?" she gazed at him, and gazed at him. "and to think that i believed you--you!--guilty! to think that i never sent you even a single word while you were in prison! how i drew away from you when i found you sick in that poor room! how since then i have tried to help you reform! ah, the irony of that now! and the irony of my proposing to you to pay back the money you never took!" the words, the voice, had reached the ears of his heart; it was going madly. he gazed into her glorious face, quivering, tear-splashed, into her glorious, swimming eyes. even in his daringest fancy he had never pictured his innocence affecting her so! he felt himself suddenly a wild, exultant flame. the insuperables were swept out of the world. he was the lover he had tried seven years to stifle. he had thought the words would never be spoken. but they came out boldly--with a rush. "i love you!" she paled slightly. for a moment she looked wonderingly into his eyes. her head slowly shook. "ah--how can you!" she whispered. "after i've had no faith!--after i've treated you so!" she tried to draw away. but he caught her hands, held them tight. "i love you!" again her head shook. "i'm ... not worthy." "but you're glad--i did not take it?" there was silence. her eyes held steadfastly to his. "it's another world!" she whispered. her glorious self looked at him, leaned toward him, from her divine eyes. his soul reeled; awe descended upon him. one hand loosed itself from hers, and weak, tingling, fearful, crept slowly about her, drew her toward him. she came at his touch. he bent down breathless. he felt her tremble in his arm. her face was white, but it did not waver; her eyes glowed into his. as their lips touched, her free arm slipped about his neck and she shook with sobs. "yes ... another world!" she breathed. * * * * * when he had finished the long story of his acceptance of morton's guilt and of what had followed, she sat gazing at him with her look of awe. "i shall never stop being amazed that a man could do a thing like that," she said. "it was wonderful!" he shook his head. "no," he said slowly, "the real wonder is that you could learn to love a man whom you believed to be a criminal." for a moment he looked silently into her eyes; this great thing that had come to pass still seemed hardly true. "that's the wonder--helen." it was the first time he had used her name, and he spoke it with a fervent hesitancy. he repeated it softly, "helen!" she flushed. "i loved you long before i thought you were guilty," she said. "it seems that i have always loved you." "always!" he repeated, amazed. "always?--just as i've always loved you?" "yes." for a space he was lost in his astonishment. "it doesn't seem possible. what was there in me to make you love me?" "i loved you because of your idealism, because there was an indefinable something in you that was good and great. i loved you--oh, i don't know why i loved you. i just loved you. and how i felt when i thought you had taken the money! oh, david, it was----" "say it again!" he broke in. "what?" "david." she smiled. "david." her face became serious. "it was weeks before i could sleep. i tried to forget you. as the years passed i sometimes thought i had; but when i tried to listen to other men talk of love, i knew i hadn't. i never forgot you. i was on trial with you. i was in prison with you. though i kept away from you, i suffered with you when you were sick in that poor little room. i have searched for work with you. i have struggled with you to regain place in the world. haven't you ever felt me beside you?" "i have always thought of you as far away from me. of you here"--his eyes swept the library--"in this life." the glance about the room was an abrupt transition. for an hour or more he had been oblivious to all things save herself and himself. now the library's material richness recalled to him the circumstances his rapture had for the time annihilated--her wealth, her social position, his poverty, his disgrace. slowly these forced upon him one relentless fact. his face became grave, then pale. "why, what's the matter?" she cried. "after all, we are as inexorably separated as ever," he said. "we can be merely friends." "why?" "i'm poor--without position in life--covered with dishonour." "it's your soul that i love," she said. "it's rich, and full of honour." her look, the ring in her voice, made him catch his breath. "what!--you don't mean you'd marry me--as i am!" "yes." wild joy sprang up within him. but he choked it down. "no--no! you couldn't. you haven't thought. you couldn't give up all the richness of your life, all your friends, for my poverty, my friendlessness. and this isn't all--nor the worst. there's my disgrace." he paused a moment before the great fact that must always be a barrier between them. "do you realise, helen," he went on, "that i can never clear myself. to do that would be to destroy the people of st. christopher's. i can never do that. i never will." she was thoughtful for several moments. "no, you never can," she said slowly. then a glow came into her face, and she added suddenly in a tone that vibrated through him: "but i shall marry you anyhow!" he caught her hands. "god bless you!" he said huskily. he shook his head slowly, with pale resolution. "but no. i love you too much, honour you too much, to drag you from your place--to let you marry a criminal!" chapter vii as love apportions after david had gone helen sat gazing into the rich romance of the glowing logs, reproached by the remembrance of her treatment of david, awed by his long sacrifice, thrilled with love and the knowledge of his innocence. her imagination showed her scenes of david's trial, of his prison life, of his struggles to regain place in the world, and she cried softly as she looked upon him amid these travails. that she had not believed in him despite appearance and his own declaration, she regarded as evidence of her weakness, and she told herself that her five years of suffering were too light a punishment for her lack of faith. she should have learned his innocence--and lost him! presently her mind, rehearsing the evening, came to david's statement that, for st. christopher's sake, he must always remain a guilty man. she paused before the declaration. yes, he was right. as she admitted this a calm fell upon her, and she saw, as she had not seen before, the distance that lay between them. he could not come to her; he was bound where he was. if they came together, she must go to him. could she go? she loved the ease and beauty which surrounded her; and this love now pointed out that going to him meant resigning all the comforts of her father's house, all things that thus far had comprised her life. and not alone resigning them, but substituting for them the cramped, mean surroundings of a poor man. was the love of a poor man sufficient to balance, and balance for the rest of life, the good things that would be given up? she had said to david with ringing joy, "i shall marry you anyhow!"--and now, with the same glow of the soul, she swept her present life out of consideration. yes, she could give it up! but following immediately upon the impulse of renunciation came the realisation that david was not only a poor man--he was, and must be always, to the rest of the world a criminal. was her love strong enough, and was she strong enough, to share a criminal's dishonour and struggles--even though she knew him to be guiltless? while this question was asking itself her father entered, and with him her aunt caroline--in an ermine-lined opera cloak and a rustling cream-lace gown, about her plump throat a collar of pearls and in her gray hair a constellation of diamonds. "why, helen, sitting here all alone, and at one o'clock!" her aunt cried. "well, at any rate it means you're feeling better." helen had had her dinner brought to her sitting-room, and had excused herself from the opera on the plea of indisposition. helen returned the kiss with which her aunt, bending over, lightly touched her cheek. she would have preferred to say nothing of david's visit, but she knew her aunt, who had charge of the servants, would doubtless learn of it on the morrow from the housekeeper. "but i haven't been alone the whole evening," she returned quietly. "mr. aldrich called." mrs. bosworth hopelessly lifted her shoulders, whose fulness her fifty-odd years had not impaired. "what'll your help-the-poor ideas make you do next!" she cried. "think of giving up melba to be bored a whole evening by an east side protégé! and such a lot of your friends came to our box, too. mr. allen was very disappointed." "it seems to me, too, helen," said her father who stood with his back to the fire, "that you're carrying your philanthropy a little too far in having your brands-snatched-from-the-burning so much at the house." helen did not answer. "well, i suppose you must find some satisfaction in it or you wouldn't do it," mrs. bosworth sighed. "good night, dear." they kissed again, perfunctorily. helen liked her aunt in that moderate way in which we all like good-natured, fate-made intimates whose interests touch our own at few points. and mrs. bosworth's complacent good-nature there was no denying--even if her interest did pause, way-worn, after it had journeyed out as far as those remote people who had only twenty-five thousand a year. "don't sit too long," said her father, bending down. during the last four weeks she had tried to wear before her father an unchanged manner. so she now met his lips with her own. "only a few minutes longer; good night," she said. when they had gone her gaze returned to the fire, and her mind gathered about her father. since she had learned he was a great highwayman whose plunderings were so large as to be respectable, her days and nights had been filled with thoughts of him, and of her relation to him and his fortune. she realised that if he were seen by the world as he actually was, and if the world had the same courage to condemn large thefts that it had to condemn small thefts, he would be dishonoured far below david. she realised that his great fortune was founded on theft, that the food she ate, the dresses she wore, the house she lived in, were paid for with money that was rightly others! what should she do?--for almost a month that question had hardly left her: should she beg her father to change his business ways, and to restore his money to whom he had defrauded? she knew the power was not in her, nor any other, to change him. since he was going to continue gathering in other people's money with his own, should she keep silent and remain by him, and see that the money was spent in service of the people? or should she, refusing to live on dishonest income, withdraw from his house and shape her own life? she came out of her thoughts with a start to find herself shivering, the bronze clock on the mantel pointing at two, and the glowing romance in the fire-place cooled to gray ashes. when she reached her sitting-room she remembered a yellow photograph of david that on the day he had confessed his guilt she had tried to burn, and which she had since tried to forget, but which she had often taken from its hiding-place and gazed at in pained wonderment. she took this out of the drawer of her writing desk, went into her bedroom and set it upon the reading-table beside her bed. after preparing herself for sleep she lit the candles on the table, turned out the gas, and lying with her head high up on the pillows she looked with glowing eyes on the open boyish face. after a time she reached a white arm for the picture, pressed a kiss upon its yellowed lips, then snuffed the candle and held the picture against her heart; and, lying so, she presently drifted softly away into sleep. paradise walked home with david that night. he did not think of the barrier that stood between helen and him--that must always keep them apart despite her declaration that she would marry him. he thought only of her love. this fact was so supremely large that it had filled his present. at times he thrilled with awe, as though god had descended and were walking at his side. again he could barely hold down the eruptive cries of his exultation; he clenched his hands, and tensed his arms, and flung his face up at the far, white stars. he strode through the night, too excited to think of anything but helen and himself. he and she--they were the world. but presently, after hours of walking, his thoughts went to people without the walls of his paradise. he thought of rogers--and the misery of rogers was an accusation against his joy. he had gained everything--rogers had lost everything. he was ashamed of himself, and he tried to subdue his happiness by thinking of rogers's failure and hopelessness. and the thought of kate shot through him a great jagged pain. he realised how fierce must have been the struggle that had preceded her call on helen; he realised that he owed his paradise to the apotheosis of her love; and he realised, too, how utterly beyond his power it was to make her any repayment. when, toward three o'clock, he reached his house, he was surprised to see that a light burned in roger's office. the office door was unlocked, and he entered. beside her desk stood kate, suddenly risen, and on the desk's arm lay a few note-books, a dictionary and a pair of sateen sleeve-protectors. "i've come for my things--i've got a new job," she said after a moment, in a dry unnatural voice. david saw instantly through her pitiful craft--knew instantly how long she had been waiting there. he filled tinglingly with a quick rush of pity and pain and tenderness. he wanted to thank her, but he felt the emptiness of words, and dared not. so, confusedly, awkwardly, he stood looking at the white face. her eyes holding to his like a magnetic needle, she moved across the room, paused a pace away, and stared, hardly breathing, up at him. her burning, questioning eyes, ringed with their purple misery, forced from him a low cry of pain. "oh, kate!--kate!" she trembled slightly at his voice. "you've seen her!" she whispered. "yes." he felt tears scalding his eyes. suddenly he caught her hands and broken words leaped from his lips. "what a wonderful soul you are!--i can't speak my thanks, but in my heart--" she jerked her hands away and drew back. "don't!" she gasped. "don't!" he hated himself for the suffering he was causing her--for his helplessness to thank her, to say the thing in his heart. she continued to stare up at him with the same quivering tensity. after a moment she asked in a dry whisper: "and she loves you?" "yes." a sharp moan escaped her. she put an unsteady hand out and caught her desk, and the edge of david's vision saw how the fingers clenched the wood. "i knew it--from the way she acted," she said mechanically. for several moments more she looked up at him, her face as pale as death. then she turned and, thoughtless of her belongings, walked toward the door, a thin, unsteady figure. as she reached for the knob he sprang across the room with a cry and caught her outstretched hand. "oh, kate--forgive me!--i hate myself!--forgive me!" her hand tightened spasmodically on his, her body swayed, her eyes flamed up into his. "oh, david!" burst from her in a low moan of infinite pain and loss. for a moment she was all a-tremble. then she clenched herself in an effort at self-control, answered him with a slow nod, and dropping her head turned and went through the door. chapter viii a partial release when david, after leaving helen at the end of the next afternoon, sat down to his early dinner in the almost empty pan-american, the mayor came swaying toward him. during the last two weeks the mayor had been daily seeking david for sympathy over his marriage, or advice upon his wedding clothes and upon arrangements for the ceremony that was to make his life a joyless waste. he took an opposite chair, sighed heavily and regarded david in steady gloom. "d'you, realise, friend," he burst out, "that it's only one day more? twenty-four hours from to-night at nine o'clock! only one day more o' life! if god had to make me, why didn't he put a little sense into me--that's what i'd like to know!" he shook his head despairingly. but after a few moments his face began to lighten and he leaned across the table. "but anyhow, friend, don't you think my weddin' clothes is just about proper!" david agreed they were, and in the discussion of the marriage garments the mayor forgot the marriage and became quite happy. from garments he passed on to a description of the preparation for the wedding festivities, which were to be held in the liberty assembly hall. he leaned proudly back and glowed on david. "it's goin' to be the swellest ever," he said, with a magnificent wave of his right hand. "it's goin' to have every weddin' that was ever pulled off in this part o' town, simply skinned to death--yes, sir, simply faded to nothin'." he flamed upward into the very incandescence of pride. but on the morrow his pride was ashes. never did another bridegroom have so severe an attack of the bridegroom's disease as did the mayor. all the afternoon he kept david beside him, and once when david tried to leave for a few minutes the mayor frantically caught his arm and would not let him go. the mayor was too agitated to sit still, too nerveless to move about, too panic-stricken to talk or to listen to david; and when, after dinner, it came to putting on his wedding raiment, he was in such a funk that david had to dress him. he had but one coherent idea, and that he often expressed, his glassy, fearful eyes appealingly on david, with a long-drawn moan: "friend, ain't it hell!" when it came time to leave, the mayor collapsed into a chair and glared defiantly at david. "i ain't goin' to go!" he announced in a tremulous roar. but david, by the use of force and dire pictures, finally got him into the dressing-room of the liberty assembly hall where he was to meet miss becker. she was already there, and she came toward him with a blushing smile. he stood motionless, his tongue wet his lips, a hand felt his throat. he gazed at the white gown and at the veil as a condemned man at the noose. he put a limp, fumbling hand into hers. "howdy do, carrie," he said huskily. some men are cowards till the battle starts, then are heroes. when the mayor and his triumphant bride, radiant on his arm, paused a moment outside the hall door for the march to begin, he was still the agitated craven. but when he saw within the hall the scores of gorgeous guests, and realised that he was the chief figure in this pageant, his spirit and _savoir-faire_ flowed back into him; and when professor bachmann's orchestra struck into the wedding-march he stepped magnificently forward, throwing to right and left ruddy, benign smiles. he bore himself grandly through the ceremony; he started the dancing by leading the grand march with mrs. hoffman in his most magnificent manner; and at the wedding supper, which was served in an adjoining room, he beamingly responded to the calls for a speech with phrases and flourishes that even he had never before equalled. at the end of the supper the party resumed dancing, and the mayor had a chance to pause a moment beside david. he swept a huge, white-gloved hand gracefully about the room, and demanded in an exultant whisper: "didn't i tell you, friend, that this was goin' to be the swellest weddin' that ever happened? well, ain't it?" "it certainly is," agreed david. the mayor tapped david's shirt-front with his forefinger. "it certainly is the real thing, friend. nothin' cheap-skate about this, let me tell you. everything is just so. why, did you notice even the waiters wore white gloves? yes, sir--when i get married, it's done right!" he leaned to within a few confidential inches of david's ear. "and say--have you sized up carrie? ain't she simply _it_! huh, she makes every other woman in this bunch look like a has-been!" a little later, during a lull in the dancing, the mayor and his bride, who had quietly withdrawn, suddenly appeared in the doorway of the hall, hatted and wrapped. "good-bye!" boomed the mayor's mighty voice. "same luck to you all!" mrs. hoffman's finger-tips flung a kiss from her blushing lips to the guests, and the mayor's hand gathered a kiss from amid his own glowing face and bestowed it likewise. the guests rushed forward, but the couple went down the stairs in a flurry, into a waiting carriage, and were gone. the dancing continued till early workmen began to clatter through the streets--for in the supper-room was enough cold meats and cake and punch and ices to gorge the guests for a week, and professor bachmann has been paid to keep his musicians going so long as a dancer remained on the floor. but david slipped away soon after the bride and groom. when he got home he found kate morgan sitting by rogers's side. he looked at her in constraint, and she at him--and it was a very uncomfortable moment till rogers announced: "she's going with me." david turned to his friend. there was an excited glow in rogers's dark eyes. "what?" david asked. "she's going with me--to colorado." david stared at him, and then at kate, who nodded. "oh, i see!" he said. kate's features tightened, and she looked at him defiantly. "it isn't what you think. i offered to marry him, but he wouldn't let me." "what, let a woman marry a wreck like me!" exclaimed rogers. "no, she's going as a nurse. i've begged her not to go, but she insists." "why shouldn't i?" kate asked, still with her straight, defiant look full on david. "my father's now in an asylum. mr. rogers needs me: he'll be lonely--he ought to have someone to take care of him. i know something about nursing. why shouldn't i?" david looked at her slight, rigidly erect figure, standing with one hand on the back of rogers's chair, and tried to find words for the feelings that rushed up from his heart. but before he could speak she said abruptly, "good night," and, very pale, marched past david and out of the room. the following afternoon, as david was helping rogers with the last of the packing for the western trip, which was to be begun that night, a messenger brought him a letter. he looked at the "st. john's hospital" printed in one corner of the envelope in some surprise before he opened the letter. it read: "dear sir:-- "there has just been brought here, fatally injured from being run down by an express wagon, a woman whose name seems to be lillian drew, judging from a packet of old letters found on her person. as your address was the only one about her, i am sending you this notice on the possibility that you may be an interested party." the note was signed "james barnes, house surgeon." david's first thought was, morton's letters have been read and the secret has begun to come out! for a space he did not know whether this was a hope or a fear. on the way to the hospital it was of the glory that would follow this disclosure, and not of the disaster, that he thought. he saw his name cleared, himself winning his way unhampered into honour, free to marry helen--he saw a long stretch of happiness in work and in love. on reaching the hospital he was led to a small room adjoining the operating-room. here he found dr. barnes, a young fellow of twenty-five, shirt sleeves rolled above his elbows, aproned in a rubber sheet, head swathed in gauze. he was beginning to wash his hands at an iron sink. "are you a near friend or relative?" dr. barnes asked after david had introduced himself. "an acquaintance," david answered. "then i can break the news point-blank. she died a few minutes ago." david hardly knew what the young surgeon was saying--his mind was all on the letters. "it's the old, old story," added the surgeon, with a shrug. "intoxicated--got in the way of a truck--a cracked skull. i've been trying to do what i could for her"--he nodded toward the open door of the operating-room,--"but she died under the operation." "in your note," david said as steadily as he could, "you mentioned some letters." "oh, yes. i wanted to find the address of friends, so i read a few of them." he smiled at david as he rubbed a cake of yellow soap about in his hands. david leaned heavily against a window-sill. his mind was reeling. "they were from relatives?" he forced from his lips. the surgeon gave a short laugh. "hardly! they were love letters--and warm ones, too! all about twenty years old. queer, wasn't it." he rinsed the soap from his arms and began to rub them with a white powder. "but i got nothing out of them. they were merely signed 'phil.'" david's control returned to him, and he was conscious of a tremendous relief. "i suppose," he said, "there's no objection to my claiming and taking the letters." "we usually turn anything found on a body over to the relatives or friends. but pardon me--i don't know that you're the proper person." "there's no one else to claim them. i'm perfectly willing to give you security for them." "oh, i guess it'll be all right. they're merely a package of old letters." he walked over to where several coats were hanging, and pointed a scoured hand at one. "i've just washed up for another operation, so i can't take them out for you. you'll find them in the inside pocket." david transferred the yellow packet to the inside pocket of his own coat. he had thanked the surgeon and said good-bye, when the fear seized him that perhaps the dead woman might after all not be lillian drew. he turned back and asked if he might see the body. the surgeon led him into the operating-room where two attendants were starting to push out a wheeled operating-table, burdened with a sheeted figure. the surgeon stopped them, and at his order a nurse drew back the sheet from the head. david gave a single glance at the face. his fear left him. with the letters buttoned inside his coat he left the hospital and set out for helen's, on whom he had promised to call that afternoon. at this moment he had not for lillian drew that understanding, sympathy even, which he was later to attain; he did not then consider that she, too, might have had a very different ending had her beginning been more fortunately inspired. for such a sympathy he was too dazed by the narrowness of his escape from vindication and of the mission's from destruction. had the letters been signed by morton's full name, then the house surgeon, in trying to learn who philip morton was, would certainly have started a scandal there would have been no stopping. but now his secret was safe: lillian drew would menace him no more, and the two women who knew his story would keep it forever locked in their hearts. he chanced to reach the chambers's home at the same moment as mr. chambers, who bowed coldly and passed upstairs. as mr. chambers went by the drawing-room door he saw helen and mr. allen at the tea-table. he entered and shook hands cordially with mr. allen. "how are you, allen?" he said. "but i just stopped for a second. i'll try and see you before you go." at this moment a footman handed helen david's card. "don't you think, helen," her father asked quietly, "that you're letting that fellow make himself very much of a bore?" without waiting for an answer he passed out. "will you show mr. aldrich up," helen said to the waiting footman. mr. allen had begun, before her father's entrance, to draw near the question he had come to put. she shrunk from answering it, so david's coming was doubly welcome. "a minute, please," mr. allen called to the servant. "now, helen, is this treating me fair?" he demanded in a whisper. "you know i want to see you. can't you send down word that you're engaged?" "he's in the house--i'm here--i can't deny him," she said rapidly. "besides, for a long while i've been wanting you to meet him. show him up, mitchell." "well, if i must meet him, i suppose i must," allen said with a shrug, sharpness cutting through his even tone. "but i warn you, helen--i'm going to outstay him." a moment later david entered the room. he was crossing eagerly with a hand held out to helen, when he saw allen beside the tea-table. he suddenly paused. allen slowly rose, and for a space the two men stared at each other. "so," allen said, with slow distinctness, "you're mr. david aldrich?" david went pale. he knew, from what helen had told him of allen, that he was in the power of a man whose ideas of justice and duty made him merciless. for a moment david had, as on the night allen had forced him to unmask, a glimpse of the inside of a cell. "i am," he said. helen had looked from one to the other in surprise. "what--you know each other?" david turned to her. "you remember i told you that about a year ago i broke into a man's house. it was his house." "what!" she exclaimed. "yes, your protégé is a thief!" there was a vibration of triumph in allen's voice. an old idea had flashed back upon him. he had often thought that if he could, by some striking example, show helen the futility of her work, show her that the people whom she thought were improving were really deceiving her, then her belief in her efforts would be shattered and she would abandon them--would come nearer to him. this man aldrich here summed up to her the success of her ideas. "i think i shall leave you for a while," allen said. he moved toward the door. david knew where allen was going. helpless to save himself, he stood motionless, erect, and watched allen start from the room. helen, very pale, blocked allen's way. "you intend to have him arrested. it's in your face." "i certainly do." "you must not!" cried helen, desperately. "why, he took nothing--you yourself told me he took nothing." "that doesn't make him any less a thief," returned allen. "he had good reason for not taking anything--he was frightened away." he started to pass around her, but she caught his arm. "you must not! you'll be committing a crime!" he looked at her almost pitingly. "really, helen, he must have hypnotised you. you know he's a thief. i caught him in the act; he's confessed to you. what more can you want?" she gazed steadily up into his face. "won't you let him go if i assure you that in arresting him you'll be making the mistake of your life?" "no. because i know that you, in believing that, are mistaken." she was silent a moment; her brown eyes never left his face. "won't you let him go because i, a friend, ask it as a favour?" "you are making it very hard for me," he said in genuine distress. "you know it's a duty to society to put such men where they can do no harm." "nothing can prevent your arresting him?" she asked slowly. "it's my duty," he said. her face was turning gray with despair, when her eyes began to widen and her lips to part, and she drew in a long, slow breath and one hand crept up to her bosom. she looked about at david. "will you please wait for me in the library," she said; and she added immediately to allen, "i'll give you bond for his return when you want him." david bowed and left the room. helen caught the back of a chair. the hand above her heart pressed tightly. "you have left me but one thing more to say for him," she said in a low voice. "and that?" asked allen. "i love him." he stepped back and his face went as pale as her own. several moments passed before words came from him. "you love mr. aldrich?" asked a strange whisper. "i love him," she said. again several moments passed before he spoke, and when he did speak his words were to himself rather than to her. "and this is my answer?" "forgive me--because it came this way," she begged. there was silence between them. "he is safe," he said. he continued gazing at her several moments, then without speaking again he left the room. chapter ix father and daughter for several minutes after allen had gone, helen sat, her face in her hands, waiting for the refluence of her strength. then she walked back to the library, where she found david pacing restlessly to and fro. he saw that she was very white and that she was trembling, and forbearing to question her he led her to a deep easy-chair before the open wood fire. but she saw his suspense and at once told him that allen would be silent. gently, reverently, david laid his hand upon her hair, and of all the things in his heart he could only say, "you saved me." she drew his hand down and held it against her cheek and gazed up into his eyes. he sat down on the arm of her chair. they had both been through too great a strain to fall into easy converse, and for several minutes each was filled with quivering thoughts. presently david remembered what he had forgotten since entering the house--his experience at st. john's hospital. he told her the story, and when he had ended he drew out the packet containing the yellow letters, the photograph and the two notes of five years before. "well, they'll make no more trouble," he said, and started toward the fire-place. she laid a hand upon his arm. "what are you going to do?" "burn them." she shook her head and held out her hand. "no--you must not. give them to me." he laid them in her hand. "but why do you want them?" "didn't you ever think, david, that there may come a time, years from now, when you may want to clear your name? well, these letters will help. i shall keep them for that time. they're precious to me, because they contain your good name." she slipped the soiled and worn packet into the front of her dress. in the silence that followed, her mind, as it was constantly doing these days, reverted to her father's business practices, and again she was beset by the necessity of telling david her new estimate of her father. she gathered her strength, and, eyes downcast, told him briefly, brokenly, that her father was not an honest man. "so you see," she ended, "i have no right to any of these things about me--i have no right to stay here." david had suffered with her the shame of her confession. he took her hands. "oh, i wish i had the right to ask you to come to me, helen!" she raised her eyes. "i'm coming to you," she said. "but i'd be a brute to let you. you can leave your father, and yet keep almost everything of your present life except its wealth--your friends, your position, your influence, your honour. i can't let you give up all these things--exchange them for my disgrace. i can't let you become the wife of a thief! i love you too much!" "but i'm ready for it!" "i can't do it, helen! i can't!" she gazed at his pain-drawn, determined face--her eyes wide, her lips loosely parted, her face gray. "and you never will?" she whispered. "i can't!" he groaned huskily. his arm dropped from the chair back about her shoulders, and they sat silently gazing into each other's eyes. they were still sitting so when the library doors rolled back and mr. chambers appeared between them. david sprang up, and helen also rose. mr. chambers gave back a pace as to a blow, and his hand gripped the door. for a moment he stared at them, then he quietly closed the door and crossed the room. rigidly erect, he paused in front of helen, his face pale and set and harsh, and looked squarely into her face. he turned a second to david; his gray eyes were like knives of gray steel. then his gaze came back to helen. "what's this mean?" his quiet voice grated out. helen's face was like paper and her eyes, held straight into his, had a fixed, wild stare. she gathered her strength with a supreme effort. "i'm going to marry him," she said. for a moment he merely stared at her. then he reached out a hand that trembled, caught her arm and shook her lightly. "helen?" he cried. "helen?" "i'm going to marry him," she repeated, with a little gasp. "you're--really--in--your--senses?" "i am." he loosed his hold, and studied her strained face. "you are!" he whispered, in low consternation. david's defiant hatred of mr. chambers was beginning to rise. he was willing that mr. chambers should feel pain; but helen's suffering because of himself, this would not let him keep silent. "but, helen, you know you're----" she stopped him with a touch on his shoulder. "this is my moment. i've been expecting it. it is i that must speak." mr. chambers slowly reddened with anger. "marry that thief? you shall not!" he cried. her face was twitching, tears were starting in her eyes. "forgive me for saying it, father," she besought tremulously, "but--can you prevent me?" "your reason, your self-respect, should prevent you. have you thought of the poverty?" she put a hand through david's arm. "i have. i'm ready for it." "and of the disgrace?" "i'm ready for it." he paled again. he saw the utter social ruin of his daughter, and it gave him infinite pain--and he saw the social injury to himself. she would sink from her present world, and her sinking would be the year's scandal; and that scandal he would have to live with, daily meet face to face. "yes," he said slowly, "but your act will also disgrace your family, your friends. you are willing to disgrace me?" for three weeks conscience had demanded one attitude toward him, love another. "please let's not speak of that!" she begged. "you're willing to disgrace me?" he repeated. she did not answer for a moment; then "forgive me--i am," she whispered. "and you're decided--absolutely determined?" she nodded. "my god, helen!" he burst out, "to think that you, with open eyes, would destroy yourself and dishonour your father!" "forgive me!" she begged. he turned to david, his face fierce with rageful contempt. "and aldrich! let me say one thing to you. any man in your situation who would ask a decent woman to marry him is a damned cad!" helen raised a hand to stop the retort that was on david's lips. "it is i that insist on marriage--he refuses me," she said quietly. mr. chambers stared long at her, astounded as he had never before been in his life. "there's something behind all this," he said, abruptly. she was silent. even in this tense moment his readiness did not desert him. sometimes one is stronger than two, sometimes weaker. this time one would be weaker. "mr. aldrich," he said quietly, "would you be so kind as to leave us. there are matters here to be talked over only between helen and me." helen felt the moment before her she had for a month been fearing--felt herself on the verge of the greatest crisis of her life. "yes--please do, david. it's best for us two to be alone." she gave david her hand. he pressed it and silently withdrew. mr. chambers stepped close to helen and gazed searchingly into her face. "there's something back of this. you're telling me all?" "i can't--please don't ask me, father!" "you propose--he refuses," he said meditatively. he studied her face for several moments. "i think i know you, my child.--i would have staked my fortune, my life, that you would never have given yourself to any but a man of the highest character." his face knitted with thought; he began to nod his head ever so slightly. "i recall now that there were some queer circumstances connected with his taking the money. his motives, what he did with it, did not seem particularly plausible to me." his eyes fairly looked her through. his mind, trained to see and consider instantly all the factors of a situation, and instantly to reach a conclusion, sought with all its concentration the most logical explanation of this mystery. after a moment he said softly: "so--he didn't take the money after all?" she gazed at him in choking fascination. "if he had taken it, if he was what he seems to be, you would never have offered to marry him," he went on in the same soft voice. "i've guessed right--have i not?" she did not answer. "have i not?" he repeated, dominantly. it seemed to her that the words were being dragged from her by a resistless power. "yes," she whispered. the next instant she clasped her hands. "oh, why did i tell!" she cried. "i guessed it," he said. they looked silently at each other for a space. when he spoke his tone was quiet again. "since i know the main fact i might as well know the minor ones. why did he pretend to be guilty?" she hesitated. but he knew the essential fact--and, besides, he was her father, and she had the daughter-desire for her father to appreciate what manner of a man this was whom she loved. so she told the story in a few sentences. "it's remarkable," he said in a voice that showed he had been affected deeply. "i can see that it was a deed to touch a woman's heart. all the same--he's not the match i'd prefer for you." he was thoughtful for several moments. he knew the quality of helen's will--knew there was no changing her determination to marry david. the problem, then, was to arrange so that the marriage would bring the minimum disgrace. "no, he's not the match i'd prefer for you. still, if he'll publicly admit and establish his innocence, i'll have not a word to say against him." "but we've agreed that he can't do that," she said. "i've already made plain to you that to clear himself would be to destroy st. christopher's." "nothing can change that decision?" "no." mr. chambers again thought for a minute. "i think you exaggerate the effect of the truth on st. christopher's. however, for the moment, i'll grant you're right. from what you told me i gather mr. aldrich has some rather large philanthropic ideas. well, if he will clear himself, i'll settle upon you any amount you wish--ten million, twenty million. that will enable him to carry out his ideas on any scale he may like. the good he can do will more than balance any injury that may be done to st. christopher's. on the one hand, he will have, and you with him, powerless disgrace. on the other, clear name, love, fortune, unlimited power to do good." she slowly shook her head. "it's all thought over--he can't do it." "and nothing can change your determination to marry him?" she held out a hand to him. "no. forgive me, father," she whispered. he gazed steadily at her--and again his quick mind was searching for a solution to the situation. he pressed her hand. "i want to think. we'll speak of this again." he started out, but she stepped before him. "wait--there's something i must say. but first, you must never tell what you've just found out."' he did not answer. his silence stirred a sudden new fear. she crept close to him and peered up into his face. "father--you're not going to tell, are you?" again he was silent. her face paled with consternation. she drew a long breath, and her voice came out a thin whisper. "you are going to tell, father! i see it." he looked into her wide brown eyes and at her quivering face. "i think, helen, you can leave the proper action to my discretion." she swayed slightly, and then her whole body tightened with effort. "you are going to make his innocence public," she said, with slow accusation. "you can't deny it." "i am," he said shortly. she stepped a pace nearer him. "you must not! you must not!" she cried. his jaw tightened and his brows drew together. "i shall!--you hear me?" "but, father--it isn't your secret. you haven't the right." "i have the right to protect my own daughter and myself!" "but to destroy others?" she implored. "you know it will ruin hundreds. have you the right to do that?" "a man's first duty is to those nearest him." "but don't you see?--you destroy hundreds to save yourself, and me!" "you have my answer," he said. she looked at him despairingly. "then nothing can stop you?" "nothing." his face was firm, his voice hard. "and now, helen, i'm going," he said shortly. "there's nothing more to be said." helen caught his arm. "not yet!" she gazed at him, her face gray and helpless.... then the crisis gave her inspiration. a new view of the situation flashed into her mind. she considered it for several moments. "father," she said. "well?" she spoke slowly, with a frantic control, with the earnestness of desperation. "listen, father. suppose you tell--what will be the use? david will deny your story. i, who shall be with him, i shall deny the story. and there is the decision of the court. all say the same. on your side, you have no proof--not one bit. the world will say you made up the story just to save yourself. the world will honour you less, because it will say you've tried to save yourself by disgracing mr. morton.... don't you see, father?--it will do you no good to tell!--don't you see?" he gazed at her, but did not answer. "the story will create a great scandal--yes," she went on. "for you to accuse mr. morton--you know how that will injure st. christopher's before the public--you know how it will lessen the mission's influence in the neighbourhood. the story will do great ill--so very great an ill! but it will not help you a bit, father--not a bit!" she paused a moment. "please do not tell it father! please do not ... i beg it of you!" he did not reply at once. he realised the truth of what she had said--but to yield was hard for the chambers's will, and it was hard to accept the great dishonour. he swallowed with an effort. "very well," he said. "then you'll say nothing?" she asked eagerly. "no." "oh, thank you!--thank you!" she cried, her voice vibrating with her great relief. they looked into each other's eyes for a long space. "i hope this is all," he said. "there's one more thing," she answered, and tried to gather herself for another effort. her breast rose and fell, and she was all a-tremble. "there is something else--something i must say--something that has been upon my heart for weeks. say that you forgive me before i say it, father!" "go on!" her voice was no more than a whisper. "i have learned that the stories ... about your not being honest ... are true." his face blanched. "so--you insult your own father!" "don't make it any harder!" she besought piteously. "you do not understand business matters," he said, harshly. she did not hear his last words. "this is the other thing--i'm going to leave home," she went on rapidly. "perhaps i would not decide to do what i am going to do, if i thought i could help you--to be different. but i know you, father; i know you will not--be different; you do not need me--you are strong and need no support--you will have aunt caroline. so i am going to go. "i'm going to leave home because it seems to me that i have no right to it--to it and the other things of my life. you understand. so i want to ask you not to send any of these things to me. i want nothing--not a cent." he was silent a moment. the determination in her face again kept him from argument or intercession. he saw that to her this break was a great, tragic, unchangeable fact, and so it also became to him. "but how are you going to live?" he asked. "i have the money mother left me--that's enough." despite the tragedy of the moment a faint smile drew back the corners of his mouth. "that's two thousand a year--that doesn't begin to pay for your clothes." "i shall wear different clothes. it will be enough." "very well." his face became grim. "and i have my reason why i cannot give you anything! do you realise, helen, that you are driving me, in order to protect my reputation, to disown you publicly if you marry mr. aldrich?" she did not reply. "but don't forget," he went on after a moment, "that you are escaping my fortune only temporarily. it will all go to you on my death." "no--no! i don't want it!" "but you can't escape it, if i choose to leave it to you." "if you do," she said slowly, "i shall use it to make restitution, as far as i can, to the people it--it came from." she added, almost breathlessly, "why not do that now, father? it's the thing i've been wanting to ask you, but have not dared." "i have not noticed any lack of daring," he observed grimly. there was a brief silence. "then this is all," she said. suddenly she stretched out her arms to him, and tears sprang into her eyes. "forgive me, father!--forgive me!" standing very erect, his hands folded before him, he gazed fixedly into her imploring face while his mind comprehended their new relations. she dared a step nearer and laid a hand upon his arm. "forgive me--won't you please, father?" she whispered. his face twitched, and he put his hands on her shoulders almost convulsively. "you're taking my heart out!" he said huskily. "forgive me!" she sobbed. "i can't help it! i'm the way god made me." "and god made you very much like your mother," he said, his mind running back to scenes not unlike this. he drew her to him and she flung her arms about his neck and they kissed. "i love my father--i always shall--it's the business man that"--but her voice trailed away into sobs. they drew apart. "we shall never speak of this matter again," she said tremulously. she held out her hand. "good-bye ... father. i shall see you again--yes. but this is the real good-bye." he took her hand. "good-bye," he said. they gazed steadily into each other's eyes. "good-bye," she repeated in a low voice, and, head down, walked slowly from the room. * * * * * he sat long before the fire while upon him his new situation pressed more heavily, more sharply. it was the bitterest hour of his life. upon him bore the pain of impending public disgrace, the pain of the loss of his daughter--and cruellest of all, the pain of being judged by the one person of his heart, disowned by her. and this last bitterness was given a deep-cutting, ironic edge as he realised afresh that, to protect himself, he must disown her--that, cast off by her, he must make it appear to the world that he had cast her off. and how the world would take this! his imagination saw in the papers of some near day, across the first page in great black head-lines, "miss helen chambers marries ex-convict--disowned and disinherited by her father--social world horrified!" the irony of it! but even in this hour, pained as he was by helen's judgment, he felt no regret for those deeds for which he had been judged. for thirty years and more he had had one supreme object--to take from life, for himself, all that life could be made to yield. all his faculties were pointed to, attuned to, acquisition. his instinct, his long habit, his mighty will, his opportunity-making mind, his long succession of successes, the irresistible command of his every cell to go on, and on, and on--all these united in a momentum that allowed him neither to recoil from what he had done nor to regard it with regret. he felt pain, yes--but mixed with his pain was no other feeling, no impulse, that would swerve his life even a single degree from its thirty-years' direction. chapter x the beginning of life in five minutes the long, heavy express was due to pull out of the station and go lunging westward through the night. kate's and rogers's hand luggage was piled in kate's seat, and across the aisle and a little ahead, in rogers's seat, were the two travellers, side by side. facing them sat david and the mayor, the latter just back from his brief honeymoon, and standing in the aisle was tom. "well, got everything you need for the trip?" asked the mayor, in tones that filled the sleeper. "there's enough in our trunks and in those bags"--rogers nodded backward towards kate's seat--"for a trip to the moon. aldrich tried to buy out new york." "there's nothin' like havin' too much," declared the mayor. "oh, say there, captain," he cried to the porter who had just brushed by. "see here." the porter turned back. "yes suh." there was even more than the usual porterly deference in his manner, as he instantly measured the authority in the mayor's florid person and took note of the silk hat and the imposing beflowered vest. "yes suh." "these here two people are friends o' mine. you want to see that they get everything that's comin' to 'em, and a few more besides. understand?" "yes suh." the mayor, with some effort, got into and out of a trouser pocket, and held forth a dollar. "if you ain't bashful, take that. and stick it some place where your willingness'll know you've got it. "there's nobody'll treat you as white as a well-tipped nigger," he remarked as the porter passed on. he leaned forward and laid a hand on rogers's knee, his smiling face redly brilliant under the pintsch light. "just as soon as you get your bellows mended and some meat on your bones, i'm goin' to write you a letter handin' you some straight advice." the edge of his glance slyly took in kate. "no, i ain't goin' to wait. i'll tell you now and be in the price o' the stamp. friend--get married!" kate rose abruptly, walked back to her seat and began to fumble about the baggage. the mayor nodded his head emphatically. "there's nothin' like it!" the cry, "all aboard," sounded through the car, and they rose. the mayor said good-bye, and after him tom. then david took rogers's thin hand. the two men silently gazed at one another for a long moment; each realised he might never again look into the other's face. "good-bye, old man," breathed david, gripping his hand. "i hope it's going to be as you hope. god knows you deserve it!" rogers's large eyes clung to him. "i've never had a friend like you!" he said slowly. "good-bye--and if it's to be the long good-bye, then ... well, good-bye!" he broke off, then added: "you're going to try to help change some things we both know are wrong. never forget one thing: the time to reform a criminal is before he becomes one. save the kids.--god bless you!" the car began slowly to move. they gripped hands again, and david hurried back to kate, whom the mayor had just left and who was kissing tom good-bye. david took her hand, and on gazing into her dark eyes and restrained face, it rushed upon him anew how much joy she had brought him and how much misery he had given her; and suddenly he was without a single word to say farewell. "good-bye," she said with a forced calmness. "forgive me!" he burst out in a whisper. "your heart will tell you what i'd like to tell you. forgive me!" her head sank forward in affirmation. "but you've done nothing." there was no time to reply to that. "god bless you, kate!--good-bye!" he cried in a low voice. he ran out of the rapidly moving car and swung himself to the platform--unconscious that kate's eyes had followed him to the last. he joined the mayor, and together with tom they walked out of the station and into the street, talking of the friends they had just left. but the mayor, who had met the party at the station, and consequently had not had a confidential word with david, was bubbling with his own affairs, and he quickly left kate and rogers to travel their way alone. "friend," he said with joyful solemnity, slipping his arm through david's, "i'm the biggest fool that ever wore pants!" "why?" "for not lettin' carrie marry me before." "then you're happy?" "happy?" a great laugh rose from beneath the mayor's vest, and he gave david a hearty slap upon the back. "yes, sir! happy!--that's me! "yes, sir," he went on, after they had boarded a car, "i've got only one thing agin carrie, and that is that she didn't rope me in before. say, she's all right--she's _it_. no siree, friend, there ain't nothin' like gettin' married!" the mayor continued his praise of his present state till david and tom bade him good night and left the car. as they walked through the cross street a sense of loneliness began to settle upon david; so that when tom slipped a hand through his arm he drew the hand close against his side. "you're not going to leave me, are you?" "me?" tom hugged the arm he held. "not till you turn me out!" they walked in silence for a block. "pard," tom began in a low voice, "i don't know why you've been so good to me. i don't know nuttin', an' i'm a lot o' trouble. mebbe sometimes you t'ink i don't appreciate all what you've done for me. but i do. when i t'ink about when i tried to steal your coat a year ago, an' den when i t'ink about now--i certainly do appreciate. i'm goin' to work hard--an' i'm goin' to study hard--an' i'm goin' to do what you tell me. if i do, d'you t'ink i'll ever make somebody?" david pressed the arm closer. "my boy, you're going to make a splendid man!" tom looked up; tears were in his eyes. "pard--i'd die tryin'--for you!" he said. when they reached the apartment house that held their new home, david sent tom upstairs and set out for st. christopher's mission. his sense of loneliness made his mind dwell upon mr. chambers's offer of millions; for earlier in the evening a messenger had brought a note from helen which gave the substance of her talk with her father. he would not have returned an answer different from hers--yet in this moment he ached for those things which had been refused in his name, and the aching drew him to look upon that for which he had given them up. he paused across the street from st. christopher's and gazed at the brilliant windows of the club-house and at the great window in the chapel that glowed in memory of morton. then he crossed the street and entered the club-house. a few young men and women were coming down the stairway, and a few struggling late-comers were mounting to the floors above. he stood irresolute, then noticing that farther down the hall the door of the assembly room was open, he cautiously joined the little knot of people who stood about it. the room was crowded with men and women, all in their best clothes. david quickly gathered from the talk of the officers on the platform, all women, that this was a meeting of the women's club, held for the double purpose of installing new officers and entertaining the members' husbands. he had been gazing in but a few minutes when the new president, a shapeless little woman, was sworn into office. the audience demanded a speech, and her homely face glowing with happiness and embarrassment, she responded in a few halting, grammarless phrases. "i hope i can do my duty," she ended, "so good that dr. morton, who got us to make this club, won't never be ashamed when he looks down on it." her other sentences had been applauded, but this last was received in that deep silence which is applause at its highest; and it came to david afresh that morton was still the soul of st. christopher's. all the while that other officers were being installed this closing sentence and its significance persisted in his mind, and so engrossed him that he was startled when the folding chairs began to be rattled shut and stacked in one corner of the room. a little later a piano and a violin started up, and part of the fathers and mothers began stumbling about in a two-step, and part crowded against the walls and made merry over the awkwardness and disasters of the dancers. david slipped out of the building. clearer than ever before had come to him a realisation of the responsibility of sacrifice: when one gives, the gift no longer belongs to one--it belongs to those who have builded their lives upon it. across the street, he looked back. only once before had the morton memorial window seemed to him more significant, more warm and powerful in its inspiration--and that was on the day of his discharge from prison when it had first flashed upon his vision. above the glowing window the chapel's short spire, softened by the round-hanging poetry of night, seemed to his imagination to be the uplifted, supplicatory hands of the neighbourhood.... well, their morton was safe. when david reached home he found that tom was in bed and fast asleep. he walked through the scantily furnished rooms. they were still strange to him, for this was his first night in them--and their strangeness, and the fresh loss of two of his best friends, and the sense, which grew heavier and darker, that he and helen must remain apart, sharpened his loneliness to a racking pain. he tried to dissipate it by thinking of the ground he had gained--progress that a year ago, when all men refused him a chance, he would have thought impossible; by thinking of the greater achievements the future held. but he could not beget even an artificial glow of spirits; his success seemed but ashes. so he ceased to struggle, and gave himself over to his dejection. he turned down the gas in his little sitting-room, and raising the shade of a window he sat down and gazed into the street. it was always a quiet street--and now, at half past ten, only an occasional figure moved darkly along its sidewalks. far above the line of opposite housetops, in a moonless sky, gleamed thousands of white stars. leaning back in his easy chair, and gazing up at the remote points of light, he went over anew the problem of his relations with helen, and he asked himself again if he had decided rightly. yes, he had done right to save her.... and yet, how he longed for the thing she was willing to give! how empty his life seemed without it--what a far, far stretch of loneliness! his gloom was pressing heavier and heavier upon him, when suddenly there came a ring of his bell. wondering who could be calling on him at that hour, he crossed the room and opened the door. a tall figure, heavily veiled and wearing a long coat, stepped in. despite the veil and the dusk of the room, he knew her instantly. "helen!" he exclaimed in an awed whisper. she did not speak. he closed the door and turned up the gas, and he saw she carried a small travelling bag in one hand. "helen!" he said. she set the bag on a chair, and drew her veil up over the front of her hat. her face was pale, determined. "i've come to stay," she said slowly. he could only stare at her. "i've come to stay," she repeated. "helen!" he breathed. "i've left home--for good. i belong with you. i shall not go away." "helen!" "we shall be married to-night." he gazed wordless at her white face, and he vaguely realised what her mind had passed through since he had left her five hours before. a wild joy sprang ablaze within him--yet he held fast to his old decision. "but helen----" "i've thought it all over," she broke in. "everything. heretofore you've been the rock. now i'm the rock--i can't be changed.... i understand that you've refused me because you want to save me, and i love you for it. but i have searched my soul--i know what i want, i know what i can bear, i know what is best for us both. i know, david!--i know! since you would not take me, i have come here to force you to take me. you cannot avoid it. i shall not go away." his heart thrilled at her words, at the steadfastness of her erect figure. "but helen!--when i think of the disgrace that will fall upon you--oh, i can't let you!" "the truth is not known about either of us," she returned, steadily. "if the truth were known and if justice were done, my father would be disgraced and i would share his disgrace, and you would be exalted. it would be i who would dishonour you. if i do get a part of your false disgrace, i only get what is due me. "you have borne this disgrace for years," she went on. "don't you think i have the strength to bear, supported by you and love, what you have borne alone?" his heart drew him toward her with all its tremendous strength. "i've come to stay!" she repeated. he wavered. but his old decision had still another word. "there's one more thing, helen. we can speak of it--we are no longer children." "no," she said. her mind fluttered back a month to when they had stood together at the window of the mission, and she smiled tremulously. "i'm twenty-eight." he remembered the day, too, and smiled. "and i'm thirty-one--and see, the gray hairs!" his face sobered. "there's another thing--children. would it be fair to them?--to be born into disgrace?" a faint colour tinged her cheeks. "i have thought of everything--that too," she returned steadily. "in a few years you will have won the respect of all; it will be an honour, not a disgrace, to be your child." suddenly she stretched out her hands to him. "oh, i want to share your sorrows, david! i want to share your sorrows! and there will be glories! i want to help in the good you are going to do. my life will count for most with you ... i've come to stay, david! i belong with you! i'm not going away! take me!" he sprang forward. "oh, helen!" his soul cried out; and he gathered her into his arms. * * * * * a few minutes later, when he returned from telephoning an old clergyman whom she knew well, she met him with a glowing smile. "i've been all through it--i shall love it, _our_ home!" he thought of the home she had just left. he caught her hands and gazed into her deep eyes. "darling--you'll never regret this?" he asked slowly. "i never shall." "god grant it!" "i never shall. this is the day when my life begins." "and mine, too!" he drew her to him, and kissed her. "but we must go. he said he'd be waiting for us. come." she lowered her veil, and they stepped into the hall. in the darkness they reached for each other, their hands touched and clasped; and so, hand in hand, they went down the stairs and forth into the night--and forth into the beginning of life. [illustration: pippin ... breaks out into full-throated song: "knives and scissors to grind, oh! have 'em done to your mind, oh!" [page ]] pippin _a wandering flame_ by laura e. richards author of "florence nightingale," "elizabeth fry," etc. [illustration] frontispiece d. appleton and company new york london copyright, , by d. appleton and company printed in the united states of america to pippin who will never know contents chapter page i. pippin says good-by ii. pippin makes a friend iii. pippin finds a trade, "temp'ry" iv. pippin goes to cyrus v. cyrus poor farm vi. pippin sings for his supper vii. flora may viii. pippin sets bread and lays a plan ix. pippin encounters the red ruffian x. pippin looks for the grace of god xi. the chaplain reads his mail xii. nipper xiii. enter mary-in-the-kitchen xiv. pippin looks for old man blossom's little gal xv. pippin meets an old acquaintance xvi. pippin encounters the gideons xvii. three tete-a-tetes xviii. pippin keeps watch, with results xix. a knot in the thread xx. the perplexities of pippin xxi. mary blossom xxii. the old man xxiii. the chaplain speaks his mind xxiv. primal forces xxv. pippin overcomes xxvi. pippin praises the lord pippin pippin chapter i pippin says good-by the chaplain seemed to be waiting for some one. he was sitting in his office, as usual at this hour of the morning the little bare office in a corner of shoreham state prison, with its worn desk and stool, its chair facing the window (what tales that chair could tell, if it had power of speech!), its piles of reports and pamphlets, its bookshelf within arm's reach of the desk. (bible, concordance, shakespeare, the "life of john howard," pickwick, the "golden treasury"; these, thumbed and shabby, jostled the latest works on prison reform and criminology. an expressive bookshelf, as all bookshelves are.) one would not have picked out lawrence hadley for a prison chaplain; if chaplain at all, he surely belonged in the army. look, bearing, voice--that clear ringing voice we remember so well--all bespoke the soldier; and a soldier he was, not only because of his service in the philippines--he was in the army till his health broke down--but because he was born one. as i said, he seemed to be waiting for some one. his eyes were watching the yard, taking note of each figure that came and went, seeing that old pete was walking lame, that french bill was drooping and poking his head forward, a bad sign with him; that mike was whistling, a good sign always; but while his eyes looked, his ears listened; and now, when it seemed that he had been listening a long time, came the familiar knock. "ah!" the chaplain's chair, which had been tilted back on two legs for meditation, came down on four for action. "come in!" "pippin, sir!" "come in, pippin! i was looking for you." a young man entered and closed the door behind him, making no sound. he moved with an extraordinary grace and swiftness, like some wild creature, yet there was no haste or hurry about him. at first glance, the two men were of something the same build, both tall and square shouldered, holding their chins well up and looking straight forward; but there the resemblance ceased. the chaplain was sandy fair, with blue eyes as kindly as they were piercing; the other was all brown: brown, crisp, curling hair, brown skin, brown flashing eyes. the eyes were not flashing now, though; they were as nearly dim as they could be, for pippin had been saying good-by, and now was come the hardest parting of all. "well, here i be, elder!" he said. "i s'pose it's time i was off." "yes!" said mr. hadley. "yes, i suppose it is. well, pippin, we're going to miss you here. the place won't be the same without you." pippin made as if to speak, but the words did not come. "i just want you to know," the chaplain went on slowly, "what a help you've been to me this past year, especially the past six months. i don't know--i really do not know--how i shall get on without you, pippin!" pippin cleared his throat and spoke huskily. "elder," he said, "say the word and i'll stay! honest i will. i'd be proud, sir, if i could help you, any way, shape, or manner. i would so!" the chaplain laughed rather ruefully, and rose from his chair. "that would never do!" he said. "no, no, pippin, you mustn't think i'm not just as glad to have you go as i am sorry to lose you. you'll be helping outside instead of inside, that's all. we shall not let go of you altogether. how about sandy colt, pippin?" he asked with an abrupt change of voice. "you've been with him a good deal this past month, i've noticed. how about him?" pippin considered a moment. "sandy," he said, "is all right; or i think so, elder. i've been round with him, as you say. i kind o' thought mebbe you got him put on bindin' with me?" the chaplain nodded. "i kind o' thought it squinted that way. well, sir, that boy is about ready to go on the straight; leastways he's sick to death of crooks and their games, and that's the first step. i--kind o'--think--" the words came more and more slowly--"it's about time to leave sandy alone with the money box, elder." "what do you mean?" the chaplain looked up sharply; met a glance full of meaning, and smiled. "so you knew, eh?" he said musingly. "i wondered if you did, pippin." "know!" pippin's eyes were shining now, and he spoke with suppressed energy. "what would you think of it? lemme tell you, elder! i've wanted to tell you ever since. i'd ben tryin'--tryin' hard. i'd found the lord--found him for keeps, and i knowed it; but yet, along that summer, after--that day, you know, sir--i couldn't seem to keep holt of him _stiddy_. now wouldn't that give you a pain, sir? honest, wasn't it awful? but 'twas so!" "not awful in the least, pippin! did you ever see a baby learning to walk? he'll tumble down twice for every new step he takes. you were learning to walk, pippin." "well, i got the tumbles all right!" pippin shook his head. "here was the lord helpin' me, helpin' me good, and you too, elder, and warden, and pete: and yet with all that--gorry to 'liza!--with all that, if the devil didn't get in his licks too, call me pudd'n head! he'd wait till i was dog-tired, mebbe, or some one had spoke ugly to me. 'huh!' he'd say, 'you're no good; what makes you think you are? you're spoilin' a first-rate crook,' he'd say, 'and you'll never make anything else, 'cause that's where your gifts lie,' he'd say. 'nobody'll ever trust you, either!' he'd say. 'sweat all you like, and pray all you're a mind to, and sing your insides out,' he'd say; ''twon't make any difference. a crook you are, and a crook folks'll think you!' he'd say." "but you knew better!" "course i knew better; but there's times when knowin' don't seem to help; and them times he'd get me down, satan would, and kneel on my chist, and lam into me--green grass! he _would_ lam in!" pippin was silent a moment; the chaplain watched him, silent too. "come one day," pippin went on, "he got me bad. i tried singin', but that wouldn't do; i tried prayin', and all i could make out was the lord was real sorry for me, but i'd got to play this hand alone. when you come round i tried to speak up and answer pleasant and cheerful, but i guess i made a poor fist of it. i see you look me over; then you went off kind o' thinkin', whistlin' that tune--what is it, that tune you give us when you're thinkin' somethin' up, elder?" the chaplain laughed outright. "'am i a soldier of the cross?'" he said. "you know too much, pippin." "i know this much!" cried pippin. "i know you sent for me half an hour later, and i come. here were you, and there was i, and on the table was a box full of money, and you were counting it over; might have been a hundred dollars." "just!" said mr. hadley. "my quarter's salary!" "looked to be! well, sir, i don't need to tell you. you began to ask me about my cell, and was i careful about this, that or the other; all of a sudden you pulls up and looks at your watch. 'hello!' you says. 'ten o'clock! i've got to go and speak to the warden about something. just watch this money till i come back, will you, pippin?' and off you go full chisel, and leave me--" pippin's voice broke, and he brushed his hand across his eyes. the chaplain laid a quiet hand on his shoulder; his own eyes were dim for a moment. "and you think sandy is ready for that?" he said quietly. "i do, sir!" pippin straightened his shoulders and threw up his chin again. "i know for myself that was the devil's last kick. i've never had no more trouble with him since that day; and i think sandy's time has come to find there's somebody trusts him and looks to him to be a decent chap from now on. then there's tom kidd--but i'm keepin' you, elder! mebbe you was goin' out, sir? pleasant day like this--" "i'm keeping you!" the kind hand still on his shoulder, pippin was gently propelled toward the door. "time you were starting, pippin, since you are determined to go in this way, without help or company. i'm coming down with you, and you can tell me about tom as we go." down the stone stairs, talking earnestly as he went, pausing now and then for the unlocking of an iron door which clanged "good-by" as it shut behind him; through the narrow corridors whose brick walls shone with the rubbing of generations of shoulders; through the guard room, pausing here to shake the friendly hands of a dozen turnkeys, clerks, attendants, all wishing him good luck, all bidding him not forget them for they would sure miss him; down the final stairs at last went pippin, the chaplain still at his shoulder, through the door behind which he had left hope three years ago, to find her again on the other side--out into the air and sunlight, a free man. now came the last handclasp--long and firm, saying many things; the last clear glance of love and trust between blue eyes and brown; the last word. "and remember, my son, that wherever you look for the grace of god, there you will be pretty sure to find it!" "that's right, elder!" said pippin. "amen! i'll look for it, sure! and i'll never forget all you've done for me. so long, elder!" "good-by, my son! good-by, pippin! the lord be with you!" the chaplain stood on the steps, watching the lithe, alert figure as it strode along the highway; coming to the corner, it turned, waved a salute and vanished. the chaplain sighed; he was glad, heartily glad, that pippin was "out," but he would miss him sadly; everybody would miss him. he had been the sunshine of the place, these six months past. he looked up at the gray walls, the frowning windows, and gave a little shiver; sighed and smiled, squared his shoulders, and went back into the prison. pippin, too, as he waved his farewell at the corner, smiled and sighed and squared his shoulders, then he thrust out his jaw in a way the parson knew well. "now, bo," said pippin, "it's up to you! green grass! i'll miss that man, i sure will. i'll miss him, and the warden, and them little tads of his, and pete, and--gee! i'll miss the whole darned show. now wouldn't that give you a pain? let's look it over a spell!" he looked carefully about, and, finding a large stone, flicked the dust from it with a clean pocket handkerchief (which he then inspected anxiously, shaking every speck of dust from it before repocketing it) and, after laying down the bundle he carried, sat down. "it is up to you, son!" he repeated. "the lord will see to his end, you needn't worry about that any; you'll find your own enough to heft. the elder knows a lot!" he added meditatively. "he doesn't give you no easy talk about blessin's an' golden crowns an' that: no, sir! 'you've got to behave,' he says, 'or you'll be back here again. and the way for you to behave is to hold fast to the grace that god has given you and to get hold of what he has given to others.' yes, sir! straight talk is what elder hadley gives. an' i'm goin' to do them things; just watch me! and to begin with, i'm goin' to do some forgettin', a heap of it. i'm goin' to forget the crib, an' the gang, and the--the _en_tire b'ilin'! yes, sir! i'll say good-by to 'em." he stopped, and taking off his cap, turned it slowly round and round in his hands. "say good-by to 'em!" he repeated under his breath. he stared before him, as one seeing visions at once strange and familiar. a cellar, dark and noisome, under a city street: an old woman in a long blue cloak and a white cap, crouching over a spark of fire: a half-naked child playing on the naked floor: in a corner a man sprawling half-drunk, smoking a clay pipe. the child stumbles over the man's feet, is clutched and held fast in one hand while the other shakes the burning dottle from the pipe on the little bare back. "to larn ye manners!" growls the man. the woman rises painfully, totters across the cellar and brings down her staff with astonishing force on the man's head--"she must have been a hundred!" pippin thinks--bidding him get out for the drunken brute he is. whack! whack! the second blow brings the man staggering to his feet and out of the door, protesting thickly, "i was only larnin' him manners! he'll remember that, see if he don't." the child shrieked when the fire touched him; he is now whimpering piteously. the old woman finds a rag and rubs something cooling on his back, muttering some words--what were they? pippin racks corners of his memory. "white--white--patter, was it?" and then, "st. peter's brother," and--no, it is gone. but he knows the other! he sees her now take the child's two hands in hers, hears her croon the unforgettable words to the unforgettable tune: there was an old man, and he was mad, and he ran up the steeple. he took off his great big hat, and waved it over the people! "i won't forget that!" said pippin. "no, nor i won't forget the whole of granny faa: some parts i'll keep. she was good to me many a time, and give me snuff out of her box. but i'll forget dod bashford all right. just watch me--" he paused, for the vision came again. a dark night, a dark house, shrubbery gleaming wet about it. a match flickers, carefully sheltered by brawny hands, and shows a small window, as of a pantry, standing partly open. somebody is bidden with an oath to "boost the kid up!" a boy of ten is seized by other hands and raised to the window. "get in!" says a rough whisper. "round to your left and open the first door. if you make a noise, i'll cut your heart out!" for some reason--it is not clear what--the boy is unwilling, hangs back, struggling in air, pushing away from the window-sill toward which he is thrust. "will you?" growls the rough voice, and the lighted match is held to his leg. still the child struggles dumbly for a little; at last, with a smothered shriek, he gives up and climbs in at the window. "green grass!" mutters pippin. "i'll forget _that_: watch me!" he blinked twice or thrice, then straightened himself. "there!" said pippin. "there ain't no such folks in the world. i don't know as there ever was--except old granny! i'll keep her in it, 'long of them things she done for me. and anyhow granny was out of it before we begun to do auto sneakin', country houses, and like that. she was dead by that time. now, son, you think of all the _good_ folks you know. count 'em over, what say? take the other taste out of your mouth, see? there's elder hadley first and foremost: keep your eyes on him right straight along: he's like--like a window that's open, and no bars to it, and you see the lord through it, some way. then there's the warden, and mis' warden--gee! remember that dinner she sent me in one day i pulled her little tad out the water? there was--" pippin's eyes kindled--"roast beef, mashed potatoes--" he was checking the items off on his fingers--"fried parsnips, pickles, apple pie--green grass! that was a dinner! and she sent it to me by name, and her thanks, elder hadley said, all because i see that kid fall into the cistern and hauled him out. well! and the kid--some kid that!--and he follerin' me round after that, every chanst he got; and the others, too, and nothin' doin' but i must sing to 'em. and then old pete! gee! pete'll miss me, and me him. you make brooms 'longside of a guy for a year and you know what each other thinks; and pete is _all right_!" he paused once more, seeing things. no distant vision this time, but the familiar scene on which he had just turned his back--forever, he and the elder hoped. a long vaulted room, bare and bright; forty or fifty men at work making brooms; the clean, sweet smell of the broom corn almost driving out the prison smell--almost!--near the door, under the watchful eye of an official, two men working together, binding and clipping, himself and pete. pete was talking, as he had talked that last day they worked together. he knew pippin was going out, and he, pete, was in for life. seemed an awful waste, pippin thought. just because his mad got away with him once--hear pete telling his story in a husky rumble, cheerfully, as a matter of course, this fourteen years now. "i was cuttin' and rollin' my tobarker on the palm of my hand, and the old woman come along and give me a slap in the face. i shoved her off with my elbow and went on rollin' my tobarker. she come up again and hit me over the head with a stove lifter. i forgot i had my knife in my hand, and i just hit out and jabbed it into her. i hadn't oughter done it, but yet it oughter _been_ done, 'pears like." "old pete! and him, you might say, the warden's right hand now, after ten years in solitary under the old management. warden merrow had him out of that in good shape, now i tell you! takes care of the cows and pigs, sleeps with 'em, or so handy by he could hear if a shoat had the teethache, or like that. warden sends him off to buy cows, order in his pocket, proud as a peacock; back in three days and he _is_ back, on the dot. i tell ye! that's the way!" pippin lifts his chin, squares his shoulders once more. "look at here!" he says. "if i'm goin' to set here all day belly-achin' over the folks back there, i mought as well _go_ back there and stay back! it's bein' on my own, you see, after bein' a bunch of corn in a broom, as you might say. green grass! i wish't i had some folks of my own!" a silence followed. pippin studied the road before him, drawing patterns in the dust with his stick. mike hooligan give him that stick: it come from ireland, and was the pride of mike's heart; he wouldn't take gold for it. now wouldn't that--he examined the stick carefully. it was an excellent blackthorn with an anchor carved on the head. mike had been a sailor, and was "in" for making too free with a marlinspike on a shipmate's head. finally, holding it up before him, he addressed it as if it were a living creature. "well! i ain't got no folks, see? but supposin' i had--what i would say--i'd have 'em dandy, that's what! and--what's to prevent my kind o' keepin' in the back of my head that if i _had_ folks, and they _was_ dandy--and they would be, for the reason i wouldn't have the other kind--why, i would act accordin' _to_. see? well, you would! now lemme tell you about the folks i'd have. kind o' get 'em set up, see, and then i can carry 'em along, some kind of way, in the back of my head, and they'll do me good and keep out--other things." whistling softly, he took off his cap and turned it slowly round and round, considering. "i'll have me a ma first!" he said. "she'll have a blue dress and a white apron, and--sort o' pink cheeks, and when she speaks, she'll sort o' smile all over her face. 'sonny,' she'll say, 'sonny, come here and i'll give you a piece of pie!' no! i'm goin' too fast. 'sonny,' she'll say, 'have you washed your hands? go wash them good, and _then_ come here and i'll give you a piece of pie.' that's the talk. golly!--think of her carin' whether my hands was clean or not. she would, though; you bet she would! i've seen fellers as had that kind of ma. we'd have real good times together, ma and me! i'll have me a pa, too. lemme see what kind i'll have!" again he paused, considering, his head on one side, his face grave and earnest. "tall, i guess, and big; big enough to lick me if he wanted to, but he wouldn't want to, and i wouldn't make him want to, neither. smoke a pipe, and talk kind o' slow. fought in the civil war, i expect pa would have, and no end of stories to tell. when he came in from--from--i expect he'd be a farmer: that's it! that's it! nice white farmhouse with green blinds and a garding and white ducks and all the rest of it--green grass! i wish't i was feedin' the ducks this minute!--well, when pa came in, he'd set down and smoke his pipe and then's my time. 'tell me about shiloh!' i'll say, or gettysburg, or some place else. and pa'll take me between his knees--i see the warden take his boy so, and it stays by me yet--and smoke, and talk, and gee! i'll hear the bullets zip and see the flag--old pa! he'd be a good one, surely! then--i wouldn't have no grandmother, because there's granny faa; no kin to me, but she give me snuff--but--there's brothers and sisters. how about them?" pippin whistled "there was an old man" carefully through three times, weighing, sifting, comparing. at last, "my brother ought to be a baby!" he announced. "that's the best way. see? that way i can watch him grow, and see him cut his teeth, and learn him manners--" he frowned, and drew his breath in sharply; then he shook himself and squared his shoulders. "didn't i tell you i'd forgot that?" he said. "but my sister'd be in between. call her about four; pretty little gal--pretty little gal--" once more the vision! an alley, or narrow court, where clothes are drying. a mite of a girl trying to take the clothes down. she cannot reach high enough; she stamps her little foot and cries. a boy comes and takes them down for her. "thank you, boy!" she says prettily. "say pippin!" says the boy. "pip-_pin_!" cries the child in a clear, high little voice. pippin runs his fingers through his close-curling hair with a puzzled look. "now--now--" he said; "when was that? 'twas after the first things i've forgot, and before the second. pretty little gal! what was her name now? polly? no! dolly? no! well, anyhow, i guess i'll have my sister like that little gal. say her name was dolly--and _that_ ain't right somehow, but 'twill do. now! you understand? them's the folks i'd have--if i had 'em! see?" he nodded to the stick, rose from his stone, and stretched his arms with a cheerful gesture; then he took up his bundle, a large bandanna neatly tied (it held a change of linen; the chaplain had offered him a small trunk and a second suit of clothes, but he liked to travel light, and could wash as he went along, he said) and swinging it over his shoulder on the end of his stick, pippin took the road. chapter ii pippin makes a friend elder hadley had tried hard to persuade pippin to commit himself to some definite plan when his time was up. he wanted to give him letters to this friend or that, who would help him to this or that position. "give you a leg up!" said the good man. "why not? i'll guarantee your conduct, pippin, and they'll be glad to help you, and give you a good start. it may make all the difference in the world to you." "no offense, elder," replied pippin, "but i'd ruther not. i'd ruther walk on my own feet than other folkses', even yours. long as i've ben here, i've took all you gave, and thankful; but now it's up to me and the lord, and we'll go on our own. no offense in the world, and thanking you kindly, sir!" "but what are you going to do?" asked mr. hadley. "haven't the first _i_dea!" replied pippin cheerfully. "but i'll find the right thing, just watch me! you see, elder, this is the way i look at it. i was fetched up to a trade, and it was the devil's, wasn't it? well! so i got a wrong start, you see. now i've got to find the lord's trade, the one he meant for me to find, and you can't find unless you look. that's the way i see it. i'm going to take the road and find my own trade that i was meant for: i'll know it when i see it, don't you have no fear!" pippin fared merrily onward, walking briskly. as he went, he talked aloud, now addressing the stick, which he called his pal, now an imaginary comrade, now the beloved figure of the chaplain. this habit of talking aloud had been formed in his prison days. a wholly social creature, he loved the kindly sound of the human voice, and when there was no other to hear he must listen to his own. he even called up the family that his fancy had fashioned, and pictured them walking the road with him, "ma" in her blue dress, with her pink cheeks and bright eyes, "pa" brown and stalwart as himself ("only he'd wear a beard, kind of ancient-like and respectable"), the little girl, even the baby. a fanciful pippin; but "i like to have things inter_est_in'," he would say, "and they can't be real interestin' unless you have somebody to chin with. see?" he was deep in an imaginary argument with the chaplain concerning the merits and demerits of chiney pottle, who had occupied the next cell to his. "i don't say he's lively company, elder, nor i don't say he's han'some. take a guy like that, color of last week's lemon, and he's got somethin' wrong with his liver, most likely, and chiney sure has. he has pains something fierce; i hear him groanin' nights. i see a yarn in a book about a bird interferin' with some guy's liver: well, chiney sounded like that. but what i would say, you start anybody else groanin' or belly-achin', any way, shape, or manner, and chiney's _all there_! shuts up on his own, and is orful sorry you--" "hi!" said a voice close beside him. pippin started violently. he had been so absorbed in talk that he had not heard the sound of wheels in the soft dust of the road. the driver of the wagon pulled up his horse and surveyed him curiously. "who were you talkin' to?" he asked. pippin blushed, but met his questioner's look cheerfully. a thickset, grizzled man with an honest face, now screwed up in a puzzled expression, bent forward over the dasher. "who were you talkin' to?" he repeated. "i was just talkin'!" said pippin. "i admire to talk, don't you?" the man looked about, to see if any one else were near: then again at pippin. "you don't look like a drinkin' man!" he said. "that's because i ain't!" pippin smiled. "nor yet you don't look loony! yet there you was, footin' it along, and talkin' nineteen to the dozen. looks queer, to me!" "does it? now i maintain that it's more natural for a man to talk than to keep still." the man studied pippin with shrewd, observant eyes. at last, "like a lift?" he said. "thank'ee!" said pippin, and in another minute they were jogging along the road. "nice day!" said the stranger. "dandy! havin' elegant weather right along. don't know as ever i see better. as i was sayin'," pippin turned toward his companion, "talkin' is the way of natur', or so i view it. when a man keeps still--well, it may mean one thing and it may mean another. he may be gettin' religion: i never spoke for three days when the lord was havin' it out with me: but then again it may mean that he's plannin' to get out, or that he's goin' home. why, i've known men that never stopped talkin', mornin' till night, fear they'd lose their minds if they did; in solitary, they was." the man looked at him sharply. "what are you talkin' about?" he asked in a different tone. pippin's eyes met his squarely. "when a thing is so," he said, "it's so. i found the grace of god, and there's no lyin' in mine from now on. i've ben doin' time, sir! i'm just out of state prison." "is that so?" the man was silent, his kindly face grave. "what were you in for?" the question came at last. "breakin' and enterin'!" "whew!" the gray-haired man drew in his breath with a long, slow whistle. again he studied pippin's face intently. "you foolin'?" he asked at length. pippin shook his head. "poor kind o' foolin' i'd call that, wouldn't you? i'm tellin' you the truth." "whoa up!" the man checked his horse, and looked about him. a lonely road, no house in sight, no sound in the air save the distant barking of an invisible dog. after scanning the landscape, he took a careful survey of his horse, leaning forward to scrutinize every buckle of the harness; at last his eyes came back to pippin with a very grave look. "i guess we'd better go into this a mite!" he said. "i ain't accustomed to--no, you needn't get down! i don't mean that. i want to understand where i am, that's all. out on parole, are you, or--" pippin stared at him; then broke into a laugh. "or run away? that what you was thinkin', sir? why, if i'd run away, would i be tellin'? i guess nix! no parole, neither. i'm out for good; served my turn--and had my lesson!" he added in a different tone. "breakin' and enterin', too!" the gray-haired man repeated. "how come you to be breakin' and enterin'? weren't you sayin' something about religion just now? that don't go along with burglary, young chap!" "brought up to it!" pippin replied briefly. "my trade, from a baby as you may say. i've give it up now, and lookin' for another." "how long were you there? in prison, i mean!" "three years. it'll sound queer to you, sir, but i count them three years the best i've had yet in my life." glancing at pippin, and seeing the bright eagerness of his face, the stern look of the elder man softened. "how's that?" he said, not unkindly. "git up, nelson!" he clucked to the horse, which started obediently on a jog trot. pippin drew a long breath, and threw his head back with a little upward glance. one would have thought he was giving thanks for something. then he looked at his companion, timidly yet eagerly. "i don't know as you'd care to hear about it, sir," he said, "but perhaps if you had a boy of your own--" "i had! i'd like to hear, son!" pippin breathed deeply again, and squared his shoulders, settling himself in his seat. "i thank you, sir. i'll make it as short as i can. well! i hadn't no parents, to know them, and i growed up anyhow, as you might say, kickin' round the streets. come about ten years old, a man bought my time of the old woman who had a kind of an eye to me--she was no kin, but she was good to me sometimes--and i went with him, and learned sneakin'." "sneaking?" "sneak-thievin'! hallways, overcoats, umbrellas, like that! i hated it, but i learned it good. shopliftin', too, and pocket-pickin'! i could pick your pocket, sir, and you'd never know i'd moved my hands. your pocket-book is in your inside breast pocket--" the man recoiled involuntarily--"and i'd advise you to change it, for you see, sir, in a crowd, any one in that line that knew his business would slit your coat and pinch it just as easy--well! so i learned that, and at the same time i was taken on breakin's. i was small up to about twelve, and i did the openin' and gettin' in part. i always hated that. you may not believe me, but i didn't really like any of it much, but it was my trade, and i wanted to do my best; and anyhow--anyhow i had to or i'd been killed." "what do you mean?" "just that! he was that kind of man, the boss who bought my time. i saw him kill a boy--i guess i won't go into that! well, sir, i grew up big, as you see, and i cut loose from bashford's gang. i'd learned all he had to teach--all that was worth learnin'--and i was counted a master hand for a young un. pippin the kid--i had other names, too, but no need to go into that. i was as proud of 'em as i am ashamed now, and i guess that's enough. he tried to keep me, but i was fed up with him and his kind, so i licked him in good shape and went over to blankton, 'crost the river. along about then i got in with some fellers of my own age, who thought breakin' was the only trade in the world. they were keen on it, and they meant to be gentleman burglars, and get rich, and own the earth, or as much of it as they could cover. they'd been readin' a book about a feller named snaffles; i called him a mean skunk, but they thought he was all creation; well, they were good fellers, and we chummed up together, and pretty soon i got my pride up and wanted to show 'em that i knew all they did ten times over. _i did_! they had growed up in homes, nice clean homes, with mothers--green grass! mothers that took care of 'em, taught 'em to say prayers, kept their clothes mended; wouldn't that give you a pain? if i saw them boys now, wouldn't i put the grace of god into them with a jimmy--not that i carry a jimmy now!" he added hastily. "i wouldn't, not if it was handier than it is, and it's dreadful handy! now a file's different!" "why is it different?" asked his companion, half smiling at his earnest look. pippin's hair curled thick and close all over his head, like an elastic cushion. he ran his fingers through it and produced a small file. "anybody needs a file, you see!" he explained. "there's your nails, for one thing; a crook has to keep his nails and hands just so, or he'd lose his touch--and yet an honest man takes care of 'em too, or ought so to do! this file is a good friend to me!" he replaced it carefully, the other following his motions with wondering eyes. "but a jimmy, you see, sir," turning an animated face toward his companion, "is a crook's tool, and no one else's. well! where was i? oh, yes, i had joined them fellers. well, we made up a gang, and we got us a name; the honey boys we were. crooks are real childish, or apt to be; i expect most folks are, one way or another, but there's lots of crooks that ain't all there, or maybe they wouldn't be crooks. elder hadley would say--but i haven't come to him yet. so we was the honey boys, and we was goin' to steal di'monds and jool'ry, and the kings of the earth wouldn't be in it with us." "my! my!" said the stranger. "an' you lookin' like an honest feller! i'm real sorry--" "i _am_ an honest feller!" cried pippin. he leaned forward and laid his hand on the other's knee. "just look me in the eye! i couldn't pinch the kimberley di'mond, not if it was stickin' out in your shirt front this minute. there's no pinch in me! just you wait! now was the time when the lord began to take a hand. that is, of course he was playin' the game right along, but you couldn't see the cards; now they was on the table, so to say. he'd give me just so much rope, and that was all i was goin' to have. the first big job we undertook i got pinched and run in. green grass! how mad i was! you see, it wasn't my fault. one of our gang had a hunch against me--i'd licked him one day when he robbed a kid. brought home a little gal's bracelet he'd took off her at the movies; wouldn't that make your nose bleed? well, i made his, i tell you, and he laid it up; kind of dago he was, with an ugly streak in him. there was four of us on the job--country house job, and him and me was the two to go in while the others kep' watch. so we went through the rooms, did it in good shape too, got quite a lot of swag and didn't wake a soul till just as we was gettin' out the window. he got out first and i give him the bag; just then a door opened into the pantry where we was. he caught me on the sill, give me a shove with all his strength and knocked me back into the room, then he slammed the window and run off. i was too mad to move for a minute, and then before i could get the window open, there was a woman standin' by me--a tall woman she was, in a white gown. she just looked at me and says she, 'why, it's a boy! oh, your poor mother!' that took me kind of sudden, because i hadn't no mother, so to say--and i guess she see the way i felt. i believe she would have let me off, but just then her husband came in, and--well, it wasn't to be expected he would look at it any such way. so i was run in, and i got three years." "in shoreham?" "in shoreham! p'raps you know the place, sir?" pippin's eyes lightened inquiringly. the stranger shook his head. "i never was in it, but i've seen some that have been--and more that ought to be. pretty hard place, i'm told!" "it used to be!" said pippin. "they tell tales--and there's things still that don't seem to belong, someway, to the lord's world. left-over barber--barberries--no! barbarisms, elder hadley calls 'em. that's it, barbarisms! him and the old man--that's the warden, sir--are doin' of 'em away as fast as they can, but you can't clean a ward with one pail of water. and there's old crooks that wouldn't understand; they--i dono--" pippin shook his curly head, and was silent, seeing visions. his companion jogged him with his elbow. the story was proving interesting. "you say you found the lord there; or the lord found you! how was that?" "i found him!" pippin laughed joyously. "he didn't find me, and reason good: he never lost me. he knowed where i was all the time. i'll cut it as short as i can. the first year i was no good. i was mad, and i stayed mad: there was nobody i inclined to chum up with. there was some kind o' made up to me, but i didn't take to 'em someway. they was dirty, too. one thing i'll always lay kind to the honey boys, they was clean. brought up clean, you see; learned to wash, and brush their hair, and that; mothers learned 'em. green grass! and think o' their--well, anyhow, i took to that like a cat to cream; i've never been dirty since, nor i can't abide dirty folks. i just grouched off by myself, and planned what i'd do when my time was up; nobody thought i was any good, and i wasn't. all i thought of was how to get out, and then get back at chunky--he was the dago guy i was tellin' about. i'd study over it all day long. i wouldn't kill him, i thought, just smash his face (good-lookin' guy, great on the girls, an' they on him), or break his back so he'd never walk again, or--_i'm tellin' you this because i am ashamed to tell it_, and because i want you should know what the lord raised me up out of. i tell you i'd sit there after workin' hours, hunched up in my cheer, never speakin' to a soul, just feelin' him under my hands, feelin' his flesh go soft and his bones crunch--" pippin stopped abruptly, flushing scarlet. "lord, forgive me!" he said simply. "amen!--well?" the gray-haired man was looking expectantly at him. "go on, young feller! you can't stop there." pippin gave a gulp and went on. "the chaplain used to come and see me once or twice a week, and he give me papers to read--nice papers they was, too; i liked 'em--and said i was in a bad way and didn't i repent, and i said no, i didn't, and he'd shake his head and say, 'hardened! hardened!' kind of sad, and go away. he'd ben there a long time, and it had soaked into him, as you may say. he'd lost his spring, if ever he had any. well! come one day--i'll never forget that day! bright, sunshiny day it was, just like this--i went to chapel as usual. i liked to go to chapel, 'count of the singin'. i'd rather sing than eat, any day. i never noticed the words, you understand, but i liked the tunes, and i sang out good whenever i got a chance. so i went in with the rest, like a sheep, and sat down, never lookin' up. i'd got a piece of string, and a feller had showed me a new knot, and i sat tyin' it, waitin' for the singin'. i never took no notice of anything else. then a voice spoke, and i jumped, and looked up. it was a strange voice, and a strange man. tall and well set up, he was, kind o' sandy hair and beard, and eyes that looked right through you and counted the buttons on the back of your shirt. yes, and his voice went through you, too; it wasn't loud nor yet sharp, but you couldn't help but listen. '_the lord is here!_' he said. he let that sink in a minute; then, 'right here,' he said, 'in this chapel. and what's more, you left him behind you in your cell. and what's more, you'll find him there when you go back. _you can't get away from him!_' i can't tell you all he said, but every word come straight as a rifle bullet. i wasn't the only one that sat up, i tell ye! 'twas different talk from what we was used to. he spoke about ten minutes, and it didn't seem three; then he stops short and says, 'that's enough. now let's sing! hymn !' well, there was some sung, like me, because they liked it, and there was a few here and there was professors, but half of 'em didn't pay no attention special, just sat there. after the first verse he held up his hand. 'i said _sing_!' says he. 'and when i say sing i mean _sing_! never mind whether you know how or not; _make a noise_! i ain't goin' to sing alone!' "gorry! i can see him now, standin' there with his head up, clappin' two hymn books together to beat the time and singin' away for all he was worth. in two minutes every man in the place was singin', or crowin', or gruntin', or makin' what kind of noise was give him to make. yes, sir! that was elder hadley all over. i let out my voice to the last hole; i expect i bellered like a bull, for he looked at me kind o' quick; then in another minute he looked again, and that time he saw all there was to see. i felt it crinkle down to my toes, so to say. bimeby, as we were goin' out, after service, he come down and shook hands with us all, every man jack, and said somethin' pleasant. come to me, he looks me right through again, and says he, 'well, boy, what are _you_ doin' here?' i choked up, and couldn't say a word. it wasn't so much what he said, mind you, as the way he said it. why, you was a real person, and he _cared_; you bet he cared! well, sir, 'twould take the day to tell what that man did for me. he told me that 'twas true, the lord _was_ there. and that--that _he_ cared too. it took a long time to get that into my head. i'd been kicked about from one gutter to another; nobody ever had cared--except old granny faa; she give me snuff sometimes, when she was sober, and she kep' bashford off me as much as she could--but still-- "well! i'll bile it down. come one day, somethin' started me wrong; i don't know what it was. my head ached, and the mush was burnt, and i didn't give a tinker's damn for anything or anybody. i did what i had to, and then i sat down and just grouched, the way i told you. crooks is childish, as i said; maybe other folks is too, i dono. well! so elder hadley come along, and he says, 'hello, pippin! what's the matter? you look like you'd been frostbit!' he says. i tried to fetch a grin, but it wouldn't come. 'nothin' doin', elder!' i says. "'what's the matter?' he says again, his kind way. "'hell's the matter!' i says. i used language, them days; never have since, but i did then. "he sits down and looks me over careful. 'what's "hell"?' he says. "'everything's hell!' i says: and then i biled over, and i guess that mush was burnt all right. he listened quiet, his head kind o' bent down. at last he says, 'how about takin' the lord into this, and askin' him to help?' "'nothin' doin'!' i says. 'there's no lord in mine!' "'_stop that!_' says he. i looked up; and his eyes was like on fire, but yet they was lovin' too, and--i dono--somethin' in his look made me straighten up and hold up my head. 'none of that talk!' he said. 'that's no talk for god's boy. now, hark to me! you like me, don't you, pippin?' "'you bet i like you, elder!' i says. 'there's nothin' doin' in your line here, but you bet i like you. you've treated me white, and you're a gentleman besides.' "'now,' he says, slow and careful, 'what you like in me is just the little bit of god that's in me. the little bit that's in you finds the little bit that's in me, do you see? and _likes_ it, because they belong together. there's another bit in the warden, and another in tom clapp there, though i'll own he doesn't look it (and he didn't); and there's a bit in everybody here and elsewhere. and that's not all! go you out into that field yonder and sit there for an hour, and you'll find other little bits, see if you don't! and see if they don't fit together.' "he pointed out of the window to a field a little ways off: i could see the buttercups shinin' in it from where i sat. i stared at him. 'go along!' says he. 'what do you mean?' i says. 'i mean _go_!' he says. 'i've the warden's leave for you whenever i see fit, and i see fit now.' i looked at him, and i see 'twas true. i got up kind o' staggerin', like, and he tucked his arm into mine, and he opened the door and we went out. out! i'd been in there a year, sir. i don't believe you could guess what 'twas like. he marched me over to that field--we clum over the fence, and _that_ done me a sight of good--and told me to set down. then he give me his watch--gold watch and chain, handsome as they make 'em--and said, 'come back in an hour. good-by, boy!' and he went off and left me there. green grass! do you understand? he never turned round even. he left _me_--a crook, a guttersnipe, a jailbird--out there alone in the sunshine, with the buttercups all round me." pippin's voice broke. mr. bailey produced a voluminous bandanna handkerchief and blew his nose loudly. there was silence for a few moments. pippin went on. "then, after a while, i found the lord, like the elder said. he come all round me, like the air; i couldn't get away from him. a little bird come and tilted on a bush by where i was sittin', and he sang, and there was a bit of the lord in him, and he said so, over and over, plain, and i heard him. and the sun shined on the buttercups, and they had a bit too, and appeared like they knowed it, and kind o' nodded and was pleased; and the leaves on the trees rustled, and they appeared pleased, too. and like a voice said inside me, 'it all belongs, and you belong too!' and all at once i was down on my knees. 'it's the lord!' i says. 'i've found him, and he's the whole show!'" chapter iii pippin finds a trade, "temp'ry" there was a silence when pippin finished his story. he had no more to say. he sat erect, looking straight before him, with parted lips and shining eyes. jacob bailey glanced at him once or twice, and cleared his throat as if to speak, but no words came. again he looked his horse over, slowly and critically, as if he rather expected to see something out of place. "that strap's worked a mite loose!" he muttered. "he crabs along so, you can't keep the straps in place." finally he blew his nose with much deliberation, and turned toward his companion. "young man," he said, "i'd like to shake hands with you!" he held out a brown, knotty hand, and pippin grasped it eagerly. "i believe every word you say, and i thank the lord for you. i--i'd ought to have trusted you from the beginning, same as your face told me to, but--" pippin shook his head emphatically. "i couldn't ask no more than what you've done. i thank you, sir! i thank you much!" he cried. "you've listened real kind and patient, and it sure has done me good, gettin' this off my chest, like; a heap of good! it has so! and how could you tell? i've seen crooks looked like--well, real holy and pious, different from me as a dove from a crow, and they wasn't, but the reverse. behooved you be careful, is what i say." "especially being guardian of the poor!" said jacob bailey. "yes, son, i run the poor farm, up to cyrus. it's as pretty a piece of farm land as there is in the state, and a pleasant place whatever way you take it. now--you say you are lookin' for a trade? how about farmin'? ever think of that?" pippin pondered. "i never had any experience farmin'," he said, "but i love to see things grow, and i love the smell of the earth, and like that. i should think 'twould be a dandy trade all right." "well!" jacob bailey's eyes began to shine too. "now, young feller, i tell you what! i--i take to you, some way of it. i don't take to everybody right away like this; i'm some slow as a rule; but--what i would say is this: i'm kinder short-handed just now at the farm, and unless you find something you like better, why, you might come and have a try at that." "you're awful good!" cried pippin. "say, you are, mr. bailey, no mistake. i feel to thank you, sir. as if you hadn't done me good enough, lettin' me blow off steam, without this!" "nuff said about that!" bailey spoke with the gruffness of a shy man. "you done me good too, so call it square. well, you think it over, that's all. no hurry! i'm there right along, and so's the farm; and farmin' is as good, clean, pleasant a trade as a man can find--or so i hold, and i've farmed thirty years." "i'll bet it is!" pippin climbed down from the wagon, and the two men shook hands again, looking each other in the face with friendly eyes. "i'll bet it is, and i wouldn't wonder a mite but i might take you up some day, mr. bailey. i only want to make sure what it's meant i should do, and if it is farmin' i'd be real pleased, i wouldn't wonder. and anyway, i'll look you up some day, sir. i will, sure." "so do! so do, son! good luck to you, pippin, if that's your name. git up, nelson!" pippin returned the greetings with enthusiasm, and jacob bailey drove off with many a backward wave and glance. "real nice man!" said pippin. "ain't it great meetin' up with folks like that? now behooves me hasten just a mite, if i'm goin' to get to kingdom before sundown! he said 'twas about a mile further. hello! what's goin' on here?" pippin was not to get to kingdom before sundown. he stopped short. a man was lying beside the road, motionless, his feet in the ditch, his head on a tuft of grass: asleep, it seemed. an elderly man, gray and wizened, his face seamed with wrinkles of greed and cunning. near him on the dusty grass lay a scissor-grinder's wheel. pippin bent over him, looked, looked again, then knelt down in the dust. "it's nipper crewe!" he said. "he's--no, he isn't! hi, there! crewe! hold up! what's the matter?" "some kind of fit!" said pippin. "there's no liquor in him. here, crewe, wake up!" he shook the man gently: the lids quivered, opened; the bleared eyes wandered, then fixed, and recognition crept into them. "pippin!" he said faintly. "that's right! it's pippin, all right. how you feelin', nipper?" "what's the matter?" "search me!" said pippin cheerfully. "you appear to have had a fit, or something. you'll come out all right." "where is it?" "where's what? your wheel? right handy by; i expect it dropped when you did, but it looks to be all o.k. took up grindin', eh? good trade, is it?" a cunning look crept into the dim eyes. "good enough. gets you into the house, and then--" his breath failed; he lay back, gasping, in pippin's arms. "now wouldn't that give you a pain?" muttered pippin. "nipper," he said aloud, "you're feelin' bad, ain't you? now here we be on a good road leadin' to a town only a mile off. there's three things to do: i can carry you a little ways at a time till we get to a house; or we can set right here and wait till somebody comes along; or i can lay you so you'll rest easy--as easy as you can--and go and fetch somebody. now--" "don't go!" it was only a whisper, but the groping fingers caught pippin's sleeve and held it convulsively. "go! not likely, if you feel that way!" pippin sat down cheerfully. "it's nice to sit down, anyway. say we put your head on my knee--so! that's easier? good enough! why, we've been--not to say pals, nipper, but we sat side by each for a matter of a year. it's not likely i'd leave you, is it?" the man shook his head feebly. "i ain't comin' out!" he whispered. "i'm goin'! i'm used up, pip!" "sho! what a way to talk!" pippin glanced round him uneasily. "somebody'll be comin' along in a minute, and we'll get you into the city, into a nice hospital--" the man shook his head feebly, but vehemently. "no you don't!" he said. "no more hospital in mine! they had me in one, and i shammed well till they let me out. no more of that for me! i'll die on the road." no one came; it was a lonely road at best, and at this twilight hour the kingdom folk were at their suppers. impossible to leave the man, who was evidently dying! pippin rolled up his coat and put it under the sufferer's head. still looking about him with keen anxious glance, he spied a tiny runnel near by, wet in it one of the two new handkerchiefs the warden's wife had given him, and bathed the gray face which seemed to sharpen as he watched it. he bent lower. "crewe! nipper! have you got any folks? can i take any message?" "no! all gone!" "nipper!" pippin's voice grew eager, his face glowed. "you have got some one! you've got the lord, and he's got you. you're goin' to him. ain't that great? listen!" the sick man raised himself suddenly. "the wheel!" he said. "take the wheel, pippin! you was always white--i bought it; i leave it to you--" he was gone. pippin laid him down gently, and covered his face with the hankerchief. "poor old nipper!" he said. "but there! he's better so. he hadn't hit it off, as you may say, nipper hadn't. i never knew much about him, but i knew that much. give him a new start, some place where there's no rum, and he might do great things. now what comes next? i expect we've just got to wait here till somebody comes along. i couldn't leave him this way, what say?" pippin sat down by the roadside. he made no pretense of regret for the departure of nipper; seeing that he hadn't hit it off here, what object in his remaining, bein' he was let to go? "nipper's ma, now, may have thought he was a nice kid, and no doubt done her best by him, but if she'd had any idea how he was goin' to look an' act when he growed up, why that lady would have been discouraged, she sure would. hark! there's somebody comin' at last!" the disposal of poor nipper's earthly part was a tedious business, but it was accomplished finally. pippin followed the coffin to its resting place as in duty bound. the authorities questioned him pretty sharply, but finally let him go with an admonition not to go sittin' round the ro'ds, but get to work at something. there had been one doubtful moment by the roadside, when the man who picked them up (he chanced to be a selectman of kingdom) asked who owned the wheel. pippin looked at him with puzzled eyes, and fingered his file. why not? he was saying to himself. he knew scissor-grinding, knew it from a to z. why not take hold, now, since it had dropped right into his hand, so to say? yes, but how did he know--he, pippin, was on the straight now, forever-and-ever-give-glory-amen, and nipper was a crook from 'way back. how did he know--but then again, _did_ he know? 'twas all right to stand straight, but no need to straighten so far you fall over backwards! see? mebbe this was what the lord had in view, he wouldn't wonder! "i expect it's mine!" he said. the man looked him over sharply. "you expect it's yours?" he repeated. "what do you mean by that?" "it's mine, then!" said pippin, decidedly, and laid his hand on the wheel. it was a leading, he decided. the man stood irresolute a moment, but pippin smiled at him, and nodded assurance. "it's all right, boss!" he said. "it's mine right enough, see? and i'll see to it. what we've got to do now is to get this poor old guy buried, what?" finally, here was pippin with a trade ready to his hand. "temp'ry!" he assured himself. "i don't feel that the lord picked out scissor-grindin' for me, but while i'm lookin' about, 'twill keep the pot a-b'ilin', and while i'm grindin', i'll grind good, just watch me!" pippin had spent for supper and lodging one of the dollars elder hadley had given him, but he had no idea of spending the other. sharp-set for breakfast, he carried his wheel through the main street of kingdom, his quick eyes glancing from side to side, and stopped before a door bearing the legend, "bakery and lunch." the window beside the door was polished to the last point of brilliance; the loaves, rolls, pies and cakes displayed within were tempting enough. "this for mine!" said pippin, and stepped in. "mornin'!" he said to the crisp, fresh, rosy-cheeked woman behind the counter. "nice mornin', ain't it?" "it sure is!" was the reply. "what can i serve you?" "well! i was wonderin' if we could do a little business, you an' me. say i sharpen your knives and you give me a mite of breakfast; how would that suit?" the woman looked him over carefully. "you a knife-grinder?" she asked. "_and_ scissors! wheel right outside here. i'll grind while you get the coffee. that's straight, isn't it?" "'pears to be! what do you ask for a bread knife?" "you tell me what you're in the habit of payin', and i'll ask that. i'm new to the trade, and i aim to please. here, sonny!" as a black-eyed urchin bobbed in from the bakery, his arms full of loaves. "gimme your jackknife and i'll sharpen it just for luck, so your ma'll see i mean business! sing you a song, too! hand it over. my! that's a handsome knife! "'there was an old man--'" the stroke succeeded. the jackknife brought to murderous sharpness, the mistress of the bakery declared that the others could wait. soon pippin was enjoying to the full what he declared a breakfast that a king would cry for: eggs and bacon, coffee and rolls, all excellent of their kind. "i wonder why they _call_ it coffee over there!" he confided to his stick. "'cause if this is, that ain't, you see! but 'twas good as i deserved! that's the way they look at it, i take it; and i expect they're right. no, ma'am, not another morsel. i'm full as much obliged to you. that sure was a good meal! now i'm ready to sharpen all the knives and scissors in the county. i'll stand my wheel close to the door where it won't be in folks' way, and then just watch me!" the baker's wife brought an apronful of knives and scissors, and pippin set to work, blessing the old man, who had put him in the tool shop for six months and made him keep the tools in order while old grindstone was laid up with rheumatism. old grindstone! pippin wondered what his real name was. "they called him grindstone, account of a song he used to sing when he was grindin'. he said 'grinstone' where i say 'grindstone,' and i always maintained i had reason, because it grinds; but he thought otherwise, and he'd grind away--wonderful hand he was at it; in for twenty years, and ground all the time except when laid up as he was now and again; arson, though he says he never knew there was any one in the house, and anyway they was got out alive, though some damaged--well--so he'd grind away, the old man would, and all the time he'd sing in a kind of dry, wheezy voice: "grin, grinstone, grin! grin, grinstone, grin! when you're out you roam about, but it's otherwise when you're in--grin! it's otherwise when you're in! grin! it's otherwise when you're in!" pippin's voice rang out round and full; his wheel turned merrily, the blades flashed in the sun. a little crowd gathered round him, watching the whirling wheel. looking up, he saw some children among them. was this quite the song for them? he checked himself and broke out with "there was an old man and he was mad--" the children clustered nearer. "sing another!" said a little flaxen-haired girl in a pink pinafore. pippin looked at her approvingly, and reflected that she was the very moral of the "little gal," that little sister he had--or as good as had, almost! he ran over his repertory: most of the prison songs were not what her ma would choose--certainly not! but--there was one the cook's boy used to sing--how did that go? "dum de rido! dum de rido! i had a little dog, and his name was fido--" "what's that?" something seemed to speak in his heart. "why not sing one of the lord's songs? well, i _am_ a duffer! and tryin' to think of some that would do!" he threw back his head, and let out his voice in a shout that made the listeners start: "oh, mother dear, jerusalem, when shall i come to thee? when shall my sorrows have an end, thy joys when shall i see?" the baker's wife came to the door and stood, wiping her eyes with her apron. the baker, flushed and floury, left his ovens and came to peer over her shoulder, open-mouthed; people appeared in the neighboring windows and doorways, and the crowd on the sidewalk thickened silently. pippin neither saw nor heard them; his voice poured out in waves of song, longing, rejoicing, triumphant. "thy gardens and thy goodly walks continually are green, where grow such sweet and pleasant flowers as nowhere else are seen." "you bet they do!" "right through the streets with silver sound the living waters flow, and on the banks on either side the trees of life do grow." "there, ma'am, there's your knives and scissors as good as i can do 'em, and i hope it's pretty good, to pay for that good breakfast. i surely do." "good land, young man!" cried the baker's wife. "who learned you to sing like that? why, you'd sing the heart out of a stone statue!" pippin laughed joyously, eyes and teeth flashing together. "i expect the lord did, ma'am!" he said. "anyhow it's his song, and you have to sing it as good as you can, ain't that so? don't know of a job goin' beggin', do you, ma'am?" "what kind of job?" "'most any kind! i'm lookin' for a trade to work in with my grindin' for a spell. i'm handy, var'ous ways: make brooms, set glass, carpenter or solder, i've done 'em all." "ever been in a bakery?" "not yet, but i'd admire to, if there was a chance." pippin's face kindled, and he looked eagerly from the baker's wife to the baker himself who was considering him gravely. he was a stout, kindly-looking man; his right hand was bandaged, and he wore his arm in a sling. "i'm in need of an extry hand myself," he said slowly, with a glance at the bandage. "i don't know--" he looked at his wife, who nodded emphatically. "step inside a minute, young man! move on, boys, if you'll be so good! you're cluttering up the whole sidewalk." the crowd slowly dispersed, one or two neighbors lingering to question the good woman of the shop about the young stranger who sang so wonderfully. who was he? where'd he come from? good-lookin', wasn't he? their own knives would be none the worse for goin' over-- inside the neat, fragrant shop, with its tempting display of coffee cakes, brown and varnished, of shapely loaves and rolls, cookies and doughnuts, the baker questioned pippin. at first the questioning promised to be brief, for when, in response to "where do you come from?" he heard, "state prison!" the good man shook his head resolutely. "i guess that isn't good enough!" he said, not unkindly. "i'm sorry, young feller, for i like your looks, and you sing like a bird; but--my shop has a good name, and--" "hold on!" pippin laid a hand on his arm. "i know how you feel, sir! i'd feel the same in your place; but it would be because i didn't know. i won't hurt your shop, nor you! i'm _straight_! lemme tell you!" he told his story briefly, the baker listening with anxious, doubtful looks. "so you see," he ended, "i couldn't go on the crook again, not if i wanted to, and i don't!" still the comfortable-looking baker shook his head. "i've heard pious talk before," he said; "it don't always hold good. i'm afraid--" he rose, as if to close the interview; pippin rose too. his eyes roved round the pleasant shop, and came back, meeting the baker's squarely. "this is a dandy place!" he said slowly; "and you have the look of a dandy person, if you'll excuse the freedom. i'd like to work for you, and--i'd hate--to think--that you wouldn't help a guy that wanted help and wanted to work for it. i think you make a mistake; but it's your store, and what you say goes." with a little bow and another regretful look around him, pippin turned toward the door. a moment, and he would be gone. his hand was on the latch. "hold on!" said the baker. "i didn't say positive. i'm not a hard man by nature, only--" "i bet you ain't!" said pippin. "that's why i say i think you make a mistake--" he turned back with his smile that seemed to warm and brighten the whole shop. "try me, mister! try me a week, and see for yourself. no satisfaction, no pay, as it says on the medicine bottles. and i couldn't pinch anything off'n you now if i wanted to. i've put you wise, and you'll be on the watch, see?" the baker laughed in spite of himself. "we'll make it a week, then!" he said. "but not a word to my wife of where you come from. she's timoreous, and she wouldn't sleep a wink all night." "now!" said pippin, "i wouldn't break that good lady's rest, not for all the elegant things in this bakeshop." chapter iv pippin goes to cyrus pippin always looked back on the weeks he spent in kingdom as one of his good times. folks were so everlastingly good to him; they couldn't hardly have been better, he thought, not unless they had been your own. mrs. baxter, the baker's wife, was like--well, call it an aunt. yes, she sure was like a good aunt, and equally so was her uncle; as for buster, the boy--well, that was pippin's moral of a boy. buster would grow up a fine man, you see if he didn't. he'd _better_! as to looking for the grace of god like he promised elder hadley, why, he didn't have to. it stuck right out of 'em, like--like electric lights! pippin lodged with the baxters and paid his board in work, lighting the fires in the morning, heating the ovens, sweeping out the shop, and doing a "hand's turn" in many directions. mrs. baxter declared providence sent him just at that time, when father had caught his hand in the oven door and lamed him so; she did not know what upon earth they would have done without pippin. indeed he showed himself so handy that after the first week mr. baxter offered him a permanent job, declared he would make him the smartest baker in the county. pippin promised to think it over. he loved the smell of new bread; he loved to handle the dough, and rake out the glowing coals; yes, it was a pleasant trade, it sure was; but yet--but yet-- other offers came to him. among the crowd who had gathered to hear him sing that first day were father o'brien of st. bridget's and elder stebbins, the methodist minister. both were music-lovers. both made it in their way to drop in at the bakery in the course of the next few days, and invite the young scissor-grinder to sing in their choir while he sojourned in their midst. was he a catholic? father o'brien asked. no? more was the pity, but let him come and sing in the church, and 'twould be good for him and the rest besides. pippin assented joyfully. he would be real pleased to come, and sing the best he knew how. then came elder stebbins, ostensibly to buy a coffee cake for supper. was his young friend a christian? "you bet!" replied pippin, wrapping up the cake with deft fingers. "i'd have to be, wouldn't i? unless that the lord had seen fit to have me a chinee, or like that, and i'm just as glad he didn't!" mr. stebbins hoped his young friend was also a methodist; but pippin shook his head; he guessed not. they were all good, he guessed; he presumed he belonged to every church there was, in a general way, you know. mr. stebbins looked grave, and said that was not a very safe doctrine. he hoped his young friend would join their service of song on sunday evening; it might be helpful to him, and would assuredly minister to the enjoyment of others. pippin assented joyfully, after ascertaining that service would be over in time for him to set his sponge to rise. so on sunday, and other happy sundays, he went to st. bridget's in the morning, and sang stately old latin hymns and chants; inhaled incense (which he thought real tasty, but yet nothing to what the lord could do with a field of white clover), kneeled reverently with the rest, listened respectfully to father o'brien's excellent little sermon, and liked it all. and the evening found him behind the green moreen half-curtains in the methodist meetinghouse, pouring out his soul in gospel hymns and assuring his hearers that they would meet beside the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river, in such tones and with such feeling that every woman in meeting wept, and there was a mighty blowing up of nasal trumpets among the men. elder stebbins' discourse was rather long-winded and rambling, but when pippin lost the thread, he would take refuge in a psalm, or recall one of elder hadley's brief, pistol-shot addresses, or think how the buttercups shone in the field that day he found the lord. and here, too, he loved it all, every bit, and came home in a glow of happiness and fervor that was enough to make the dough rise at the sight of him. the baker was puzzled at first by his new assistant; as the good man himself expressed it, he didn't get on to pippin's curves. there were things that jarred--for a time--on his sensibilities; as thus. they were together in the shop one evening, and a customer came in for his evening loaf; the shoemaker it was, jere cargo, a man of dry, critical humor. he commented on the loaf; it was a shade deeper brown than usual. "one minute more, young man, and that loaf would have been burnt, that's what!" pippin scanned the loaf carefully. "is that so?" he said. "now! why, i was pleased with this batch, i thought the lord give me an elegant bake on it: that's what i _thought_! but if folks likes 'em pale, why, pale it is!" the shoemaker stared; mr. baxter coughed apologetically as he accompanied him to the door, and--on a summoning jerk of the head--followed him outside. "what have you got there?" asked the shoemaker. "a preacher? where'd you get him?" "no, he isn't a preacher, though i dare say he might have been, if he'd had education. he's just pious, that's all. it's his way of talking." his tone was conciliatory, but the shoemaker sniffed. "'just pious!'" he repeated. "look out for 'em, i say, when they're just pious. they'll bear watching. where'd you say he come from?" "he's traveling!" mr. baxter knew his customer, and had no idea of telling him whence pippin came. "he's a scissor-grinder by trade, and a master hand at it. i hurt my hand last week, and he come along just in the nick of time and has been helping me since. real good help he is, too." "humph!" said jere cargo, shrugging his dry shoulders. "you look out for him, that's all i say. sharp-looking chap, i call that; he'll bear watching." returning to the shop, mr. baxter coughed again, this time with his eye on pippin, who was arranging a tray of creamcakes with a lover's ardor. "ain't them handsome?" he cried. "i ask you, boss, ain't them handsome? and dandy to eat--green grass! mis' baxter give me one. _they_ drop fatness all right, no two ways about that!" here pippin broke into song, proclaiming joyously that he was a pilgrim, he was a stranger, he could tarry, he could tarry but a night. "do not detain me, for i am going--" "ahem!" said mr. baxter, "i was thinking, pippin--" pippin came to attention instantly. "yes, sir! you was thinkin'--" "i was wondering--" the baker spoke slowly, in a tone half admonitory, half conciliatory, and wholly embarrassed--"whether maybe you--just in a manner, you understand, just in a manner--was in the habit of making a mite too free with--with your maker, so to speak." pippin's eye grew very round. "meanin'--with the lord?" he said. "yes! with--with--as you say, with the lord!" mr. baxter was a godly man, but his deity lived in the meetinghouse and was rarely to be mentioned except within its four walls. "for example," he went on, "i was wondering whether it was exactly a good plan to bring the--the almighty--into the bakeshop." "gorry!" said pippin. "i'd hate to leave him out of it!" his eyes, still round and astonished, traveled slowly about the pleasant place. three sides of it were filled with glass counters displaying a wealth of pies, pumpkin, apple, mince and custard, with cakes of every variety, from the wedding cake which was mr. baxter's special pride, to his wife's creamcakes, eagerly sought by the neighborhood for ten miles round. behind the counter, on neat shelves, were stacked the loaves of bread, white and brown, the crisp rolls and melting muffins. the shop looked as good as it smelled; "ther nys namoore to seye!" "i'd hate to leave him out of it!" repeated pippin. "dandy place like this! don't know as i get you this time, boss!" he turned bewildered brown eyes on mr. baxter, who coughed again and reddened slightly. "what i meant--" the baker ran his eye along a pile of loaves, and straightened one that had slipped out of place--"isn't it making rather free with--ahem! what say?" "oh!" pippin's face lightened. "i get you! now i get you, sir! lemme tell you! lemme tell you just the way it is." fairly stammering in his eagerness, pippin leaned across the counter, his eyes shining. "you see, sir, i was raised a crook!" "hush!" mr. baxter looked over his shoulder. "no need to speak out loud, pippin. just as well to keep that between ourselves, you know." "i was raised," pippin repeated in a lower tone, "a crook, and i heard--and used--crooks' language. nor it isn't only crooks!" he cried, smiting the counter. "where i was raised, 'most everybody had the name of god on their tongues every hour in the day, but not in the way of praisin' him; no, sir! there's plenty folks--good folks, too--they can't name hardly anything, whatever be it, without 'god damn' before it. you know that, mr. baxter. you know what street talk is, sir." the baker nodded gravely. "well, then! that's what i was raised to, and it run off my tongue like water, till--till i come to know elder hadley. i'm tol'able noticin', sir; i expect crooks is, when they're all there; you have to be, to get on. i noticed right off the way he spoke, clean and short and pleasant, no damnin' nor cussin'; and i liked it, same as i liked clean folks and despised dirty ones. that was all there was to it at first. but yet i couldn't stop all of a sudden; it took time, same as anything does, to learn it. then--come to find the lord, like i told you, sir, why--i dunno how to put it. i'd ben askin' him all my life to damn everything, this, that, and the other, folks, and--everything, i say; i didn't mean it, 'twas just a fool way of speakin', but what i thought was, supposin' i was to ask him to help right along, 'stead of damn, and _make_ it mean something! what say? you get my idea, mr. baxter, sir?" mr. baxter nodded again. "i get it, pippin. i won't say anything more." "but yet--but yet--" pippin was stammering again, and halfway across the counter in his passion of eagerness. "i get you, too, boss! i do, sure thing. you mean it brings some folks up short, like that gen'leman that stepped in just now? he's no use for me, i see that right off; i wondered why, and now 'tis clear as print. i'd oughter sized him up better. take that kind of man, and he may be good as they make 'em, prob'ly is; but yet--well--you say the lord's name _excep'_ in the way of cussin'--i don't mean that he's that kind himself--but--_it's like he stubbed his toe on the lord's ladder, see?_" "you've got it! you've got it!" the baker was nodding eagerly in his turn. he laughed and rubbed his hands. "stubbed his toe on--on the lord's ladder! i--i expect i stub mine a mite, too, pippin, but i won't say another word." "'cause we're awful glad the ladder's there, ain't we, sir?" pippin's voice was wistful enough now. "ahem! yes! yes!" the baker took out a clean red handkerchief and rubbed an imaginary spot on the shining glass. "that's all right, pippin. do what comes natural to you; only--what _are_ you doing now?" there was a little stove in the shop, behind the middle counter, used for "hotting up" coffee or the like when people were in a hurry. pippin, after a glance at the clock, had taken some pennies out of the till, and was laying them carefully on the top of the stove, which glowed red hot. "what are you doing?" repeated the baker. pippin grinned. "tryin' an experiment!" he said. "there was a quarter missin' yesterday, boss, you rec'lect, and ten cents the day before, and so along back." "yes!" mr. baxter looked serious. "i'm afraid, pippin--" "don't be afraid, sir! just watch me!" pippin tested the pennies carefully and taking them up one by one on the blade of his jackknife, deposited them on the counter. "i've noticed along about this time every night--there they come! don't say a word, only watch!" he retired behind the counter as the door opened and two children came in, a boy and a girl. they were poorly dressed, and there was something furtive and slinking about their looks and manner, but they came forward readily, and the girl asked for a five-cent loaf of white bread, putting at the same moment five pennies on the counter, close beside those which already lay there. as pippin was tying up the bread, the girl began to ask questions. how much was them cookies? were they molasses or sugar? what was the price of the custard pie, and when was it baked? "baked this mornin'!" pippin replied cheerfully. "cost you a quarter, and worth a dollar. what--" a piercing howl interrupted him. the tinkle of metal was heard, and the boy sprang back from the counter and danced about the shop, crying and spluttering, his fingers in his mouth. pippin vaulted the counter in an instant. "what's the matter, bo?" he asked kindly. "hurt your finger? lemme see!" the boy clenched his fist, but pippin forced the fingers open, not ungently. "why, you've burnt 'em!" he announced. "my! my! that _must_ hurt! how in the name--why, you must have made a mistake and took up some of mr. baxter's pennies. yes, sir, that's what you done. didn't you know that bakeshop pennies was hot? they be, sure thing! there goes sissy!" as the girl, seizing her loaf, slipped noiselessly out of the door. "now you foller her, bo, and go home and tell your ma what i say. _bakeshop pennies is hot!_ think you'll remember that? here's something to help your mem'ry!" leading the boy to the door, he gave him a carefully modulated kick, and with a friendly, "so long, bo!" returned to the shop. "i've had my eye on them kids for two three days!" he explained. "smart kids! if i met 'em in the city, i should say they was in trainin'. i'll set father o'brien on 'em; they go to his gospel shop. i see 'em there." "i never should have thought it!" said the baker, and he shook his head sadly. "those little kids! why, the boy doesn't look to be more than eight years old, and the girl only a year or so older." "that's the time to start 'em!" pippin spoke with emphasis. "if you're aimin' to make a first-rate crook, you've got to start in early with him. but father o'brien'll see to 'em; he's smart as a jimmy, father o'brien is." "we won't tell the wife!" said mr. baxter. "she is nervous, and 'twould ha'nt her, and keep her awake nights. one comfort, they're not kingdom born, those kids. they belong to them french folks over by the dump, down devildom way." weekday mornings pippin spent mostly in the bakery, working, singing, whistling, all with a hearty will. after dinner he would take his wheel and go his way through the pretty shady streets of the country town, or out along the green roads that led from it in various directions. when he came to a promising looking corner with houses set within comfortable reach of one another, he would stop, and leaning on his wheel, would put up his shingle, as he called it: in other words, sing his grinding song. he had made it up, bit by bit, as the wheel turned, humming, under his hands. here it is: but you should hear pippin sing it! knives and scissors to grind, oh! have 'em done to your mind, oh! large and small, damaged and all, don't leave any behind, oh! knives and scissors to grind, oh! every specie and kind, oh! bring 'em to me, _and_ you will see satisfaction you'll find, oh! "yes, sir, made it my own self!" he replied to elder stebbins' questions on the song. "i don't know how i done it. i expect it was a kind of miracle. i sang the first line through two three times, and lo ye! the next one turned right up matchin' of it. now that isn't nature, you know, but yet it's _right_, and it fits straight in. when a thing comes like that, i call it a miracle. what say?" "very interesting, my young friend! do you--a--might it perhaps be better to substitute 'species' for 'specie'? the latter means, as you doubtless are aware, current coin; and--" "great!" said pippin. "current coin is what i'm after every time, so i get it honest. specie'll do for me, elder!" before he had sung the song through once, doors and windows would be opening, housewives peering out, children running to gather round the magic wheel, listening open-mouthed to the singer. it was all play to pippin; wonderful, beautiful play. "i tell you," he would say, "i tell you, seems though just to breathe was enough to keep gay on. over there to shoreham--i dunno--i expect the air got discouraged, some way of it. they'd open the windows, but the outside air was shy of comin' in--like the rest of us! but out here in the open--and things lookin' like this--green grass! i'm happy, and don't you forget it!" sometimes he got a lift on his way. solitary drivers, plodding along the road, and seeing the trim, alert figure ahead stepping out briskly with its wheel, were apt to overhaul it, and after a glance at pippin's face would most likely ask, "goin' along a piece? like a lift?" and pippin, with joyous thanks, would climb eagerly in, all ready to begin a new chapter of human intercourse. once, so clambering, he found himself beside a tall man, brown-eyed and brown-haired, who drove a brown horse. pippin's eyes were brown, too, but they danced and sparkled like running water; the stranger's eyes were like a quiet pool under shady trees, yet there was light in them, too. "goin' far?" he asked. his voice was grave, and he spoke slowly. "four corners was what i'd aimed at," said pippin, "but if you ain't goin' that way--?" "goin' right past it, on my reg'lar route! i do business there to the store. i see you carry your trade with you, same as i do!" he jerked his head backward toward a neat arrangement of drawers and tiny cupboards which half filled his roomy wagon. "nice trade, i expect?" pippin laughed his joyous laugh. "real nice, only it isn't mine, not for keeps, i would say. 'twas a--well, you might call it a legacy, and you wouldn't be far wrong. it come right to my hand when i was lookin' for a job, and i took it up then and there. yes, sir, 'tis a good trade, and a man might do well at it, i don't doubt, but yet i don't feel it to be my own trade that i was meant for. so i go about seekin' for that one, and workin' at this one, and helpin' in the bakery--baxter's to kingdom; i'm boardin' there--helpin' there mornin's an' evenin's." the brown eyes studied him carefully. "about twenty-one years old, son? twenty-two? i thought about there! well, what have you been doin' up to now?" pippin told him, much as he had told jacob bailey. the brown man listened attentively, murmuring, "sho!" or "ain't that a sight!" occasionally to himself. "so you see," pippin concluded, "i want to be right down sure i've got the real thing before i settle down." "sure!" the other assented. "that's right!" "and i keep feelin' at the back of my head that what i want is work with my hands; not this way, but farmin', or like that. the smell of the earth, and to see things growin', and--don't you know?" the stranger assented absently. "elegant!" he said. "farmin's elegant, when you've got the gift, but--ever thought of goin' to sea?" he asked; an eager look came into his face. pippin shook his head. "not any!" he said. "i see the sea once, an' honest, it give me the creeps. cold water mumblin' over the stones, like it wanted to eat 'em; and brown--kind o' like hair it was, floatin' about; and every now and then a big wave would come _sssss!_ up on the shore--well, honest, i run! i was a little shaver, but i've never wanted any more sea in mine!" the brown man laughed. "you'd feel different, come to get out in blue water!" he said. "smell the salt, and get the wind in your face, and--gorry! i'm a sea-farin' man," he said simply. "i spent good part of my life at sea. i'm runnin' a candy route at present--have a pep'mint! do! 'twon't cost you a cent, and it's real good for the stummick--but where i belong is at sea. well! you can't do better than farmin', surely. would you like a temp'ry job pickin' apples? i dunno but sam--" "there's more to it than that!" pippin was speaking absently now; there was a wistful look in his eyes. "there's all that, the smell of the ground, and--and buttercups and--things; but there's more to it. there! you seem so friendly, i'll say it right out. i want to help!" "that's right!" murmured the brown man. "help! that's the stuff!" "i want to help them that needs help. i want there shouldn't be so many kids in cellars, nor so many boys go wrong. green grass! tell you what!" pippin's eyes were shining now, and his hands clenched. "i've been sayin' along, this month past, i'd forget all that time when i was a kid; i'd forget everything up to where i found the lord. i kind o' think there was where i was wrong, mister--?" "call it parks!" said the brown man. "calvin parks is what i was christened, and i'd like to know your name, son." "pippin!" "meanin'--?" "just pippin!" "christian name or surname?" "all the name there is!" "but pippin ain't no given name; it's an apple!" "that's right! but it's all the name i've got. fur back as i remember, granny faa called me it, and dod bashford called me 'pup' or 'snipe.' that's all i have to go by, so you see how 'tis!" how should you remember anything more, pippin? you were a baby when granny faa, then still able to travel, living in and out of the tilt cart which was home to her, found you by the roadside with your dying mother. the woman was almost past speech. "don't roof me!" she muttered, flinging her arms out as the old gypsy lifted her. "don't roof me!" and so died. granny faa felt no responsibility for the corpse. she rifled the body methodically, but found nothing of value. the shoes were better than her own, so she put them on. as for the baby, she took it partly because it smiled in her face and made something stir in that withered region where her heart was still alive, but more because her son wished it. gypsy gil (short for gilbert), bent over the child delightedly; he snapped his fingers, and the baby crowed and jumped in the withered arms that held it. "hell! ain't he a pippin?" said gil. "say, kid, ain't you a pippin?" "goo!" said the baby. that was all. it was very simple. during the week gil had still to live, he was "wrop up," as his mother said, in the child, and declared twenty times a day, with a new oath each time, that it was a pippin sure enough. then, a knife thrust in a drunken scuffle sent gil wherever he was to go; but he had named the baby. the old woman, mourning like a she-wolf, tended the child grimly because gil had liked it; called it, for the same reason, by the name-that-was-no-name which he had given it. it was all simple enough, you see, had pippin but known. "that's mighty queer!" the brown man ruminated. "i don't know as ever i heard of any one without two names to him, and yet it sounds all right, too. pippin! well--well, son, i will say you look it. and now, here we are at the poor farm, and i'm goin' in here in my reg'lar way." "poor farm! is this a poor farm?" ever since it came in sight, pippin had been looking with a lover's eye at the broad low house of mellow brick, standing back from the road under its giant elms, its neat garden skirts gathered round it, its prim, trim gravel path leading to its white steps and green fan-lighted door. "this a poor farm!" he repeated. "sure! jacob bailey's idea of one, and i wish there was more like it." "jacob bailey!" cried pippin. "why, green grass! why--why, ain't this great? he's a gentleman i'm acquainted with; he asked me to come and see him, and i promised i would. well, if this ain't a leadin', i never see one. mr. parks, i'm pleased enough at meetin' up with you, just your own self; but add on your bringin' me here--why, i don't know how to thank you, sir!" "nothin' at all! nothin' at all!" said calvin parks. "i'm just as pleased myself. think of your knowin' jacob! well! well! he's pure fruit and cane sugar, jacob is, not a mite of glucose in his make-up. here he comes this minute!" such a welcome as they had! good mr. bailey, coming out to welcome his old friend, was quite overcome with pleasure and amazement at finding his new one, too. he had been telling the woman about him ever since that day, he assured pippin. only this morning he had said he wished that young feller would turn up, and she had said she wished to goodness he would for there was nothing in the house that would cut except aunt mandy's tongue. "one of the inmates!" he explained. "poor old lady! m' wife was a mite worked up, and she _is_ cuterin', times when her rheumatism ketches her. come in! come in, the two of ye! make ye welcome, pippin, to cyrus poor farm!" he led them through the neat vestibule, through--with a glance of pride--the chilly splendor of the parlor, with its embossed plush rockers and lace curtains, into the kitchen. "we'll find the woman here!" he said. "kitchen's home, i always say." it was a large, brick-paved room, with four broad windows facing south and east. most of one side was taken up by a black cavern of a fireplace, which sheltered grimly the shining trimness of a modern cookstove. there was plenty of room for the settles on either side, and warm though the day was, two or three old people were sitting there, rubbing their chilly knees and warming their poor old hands. they looked up, and their faces sharpened into lively curiosity at sight of the visitors; but the girl who sat at the window never glanced at them, only crooned to the cat in her lap. the blind man in the corner, weaving willow baskets, listened, and his face lightened at the sound of the brown man's voice. "howdy, folks!" he said. "well, i am a stranger, as you were saying. say we have a pep'mint all round, what? or a marshmallow? uncle ammi, i've got a treat for you, come all the way from cyrus!" while he gossiped cheerily with the old people, a sweet-faced woman came from an inner room and was introduced by jacob bailey as "m' wife." "this is the young man i was tellin' you about, lucy!" he said. "cur'us he should happen along to-day, what say?" "that's right! only i should call it providential myself, jacob. be seated, won't you, mr.--now jacob told me your name!--pippin--to be sure! be seated, mr. pippin. we'll be having supper soon, and you'll set right down with us, i hope." "thank you, ma'am! if there was some knives i could be sharpenin', to earn my supper, sort of, i should be tickled to death to stay. or if there's anything else you'd rather--what i aim at is to please, you see. them scissors the young lady has in her lap don't appear to be what i'd call real sharp, now." mrs. bailey laid her hand gently on the girl's fair head. "flora may can't have sharp scissors!" she said. "she's good as gold, but she's a little wantin', and she might cut off her lovely hair, mightn't you, flora?" the girl raised a sweet, vacant face. "i might cut off my lovely hair!" she repeated in a musical singsong. "my lovely, lovely hair! my--" the quiet hand touched her again, and she was silent. "after supper we'll have some singin'!" she said. "flora may admires to sing." "does she?" pippin looked earnestly at the young face, pure and perfect in form and tint. "it's like a lamp when you've blown it out!" he thought. now mrs. bailey brought an apronful of knives and scissors. pippin retreated to the yard where he had left his wheel, and was soon grinding and singing away, oblivious of all else save flying wheel and shining steel. glancing up after a while, he saw all the inhabitants of the poor farm gathered in the doorway, listening; he paid little heed; folks always listened. that was the way the lord had given him, to pay folks for bein' so pleasant to him as they always was. he was real thankful. "look at the aidge on this knife, will you? hardly you can't tell which is it, and which is air; see?" he broke out into a wild, sweet air: "oh! carry me 'long! dar's no more trouble for me. i's gwine away to a better land, where all de niggers am free. long, long hab i worked, i'b handled many a hoe; i'll turn my eye before i die, and see de sugar cane grow." something moved near him. he glanced down and saw the girl flora may. she had crept nearer and nearer, till now she was almost at his feet. she sat, or rather crouched, on the ground, graceful as a creature of the woods, her blue print gown taking the lovely lines of her figure, her masses of fair hair, neatly braided, wound round and round her head. such a pretty head! just a little too small, poor flora may! not for grace, but for other things. looking at her, pippin saw, and wondered to see, the face which he had likened to a dead lamp, now full of light, the pale cheeks glowing, the red lips parted, the blue eyes shining. yet somehow--what was the matter? they did not shine as other eyes shone; those brown ones, for instance, of the brown man towering in the doorway, or the twinkling gray eyes of jacob bailey. "the lamp's burnin'," said pippin, "but yet it's went wrong, some ways, but even so--green grass! she's a pictur!" coming to the end of his song, he smiled and nodded at the upturned face. "sing more for flora may!" cried the girl. "sing more!" "sure!" said pippin. "wait till i get a start on this aidge, miss flora may--now! here's what'll please you, i expect: "joseph was an old man, an old man was he; he married sweet mary, the queen of galilee. "as they went a-walking in the garden so gay, maid mary spied cherries hanging over yon tree. "mary said to cherry tree, 'bow down to my knee, that i may pluck cherries by one, two, and three.'" a long way back to the cellar, and granny faa crooning over her black pot--in her best mood, be sure, or she would not be singing the cherry tree carol. a far longer way back to an english lane in early summer, the gypsy tilt halted under a laden cherry tree, the gypsy mother singing to her little maid as she dangled the cherries over her head. a long, long road to go, and yet as yesterday, as a watch in the night. "o eat your cherries, mary, o eat your cherries now, o eat your cherries, mary, that grow upon the bough."-- "now, mr. pippin," called mrs. bailey from the doorway, "it's plain to be seen there'll be no supper in this house till you give over singin'. i'm full loath to ask you to stop, but my cakes have to be eat hot, or they're no good." chapter v cyrus poor farm another lifelong possession for pippin was that first supper at cyrus poor farm. "i never forget a good meal!" he was wont to say. "it's one of the gifts, or so i count it; we've no call to forget 'em, just because we've eat 'em up. i think about 'em oftentimes, travelin', and enjoy 'em over again." the long table was set in the wide doorway of the shed, "for coolth," mrs. bailey said. all around were piles of fragrant wood, birch and oak, with here and there a precious little store of apple wood, fruit of jacob's thrifty pruning and thinning. the table itself, in the full light of the westering sun, glowed with many colors: rosy pink of boiled ham, dull brown of baked potatoes, rich russet of doughnuts, all set off by the vivid red of the turkey cotton tablecloth. pippin drew a long breath as he surveyed his plate, heaped with the solids of this repast, the lighter eatables ranged round it in nappies shaped like a bird's bath. "lord, _make_ me thankful!" he ejaculated. "if i wasn't thankful, mr. bailey, sir, i'd ask you to take me by the scruff and heave me out, i would so!" "well, son, well!" responded jacob comfortably. "we aim to set a good table, m' wife an' i; glad it suits you. you see," he added, "we have advantages over many other institutions. some of our inmates is payin' boarders, sir, payin' boarders, and behooves us set palatable food before 'em. why, some of us pays as high as two dollars a week, don't we?" he smiled round the table. pippin flung a quick glance, saw two sharp noses proudly lifted, two pairs of eyes gleaming with satisfaction, while the serene dignity of the blind man's countenance proclaimed him third of the paying boarders. "i've allers paid where i boarded!" said miss lucilla pudgkins. "i would scorn to do otherwise!" said aunt mandy whetstone. "and others that doesn't pay in money pays in help!" jacob bailey went on calmly; "so you see we're all comfortable! a little more of the ham, pippin? pass your plate!" "i don't know," said pippin, complying, "i don't really know as i ever eat a ham to compare to this, mr. bailey. it's--it's _rich_, that's what it is!" a new voice spoke from the bottom of the table, that of a fat old man with a game leg. "i claim," he said huskily, as if there were crumbs in his throat, "that it's the second best ham i've ever ate here." "the _third_ best!" said the blind man calmly. "the fire got low on me one night, and the smoke was checked. we had a ham last year and one five years ago that was some better than this." "green grass!" ejaculated pippin in amazement. "do you mean to tell me--" "we're right proud of mr. brand here to the farm!" said mrs. bailey gently. "wantin' his sight has give him wonderful powers of smell and taste--and touch, too. he has smoked our hams and bacon for twenty years, haven't you, mr. brand?" "i have, ma'am!" said the blind man proudly. "we make good profit out'n 'em," said jacob. "far and near, folks wants our hog p'dooce. mr. brand is money in the bank for the farm and for himself, too." as they left the table, a little cold hand was slipped into pippin's. "sing!" said the girl. "please sing for flora may!" "why, sure!" pippin was beginning; but jacob bailey broke in kindly but firmly: "not the minute he's finished his supper, he can't sing, flora may!" he said. "beside, i promised old mr. blossom to fetch pippin in to see him." "old mr. _who_?" cried pippin. "he said you'd know the name," chuckled jacob. "this way, pippin! he's pretty feeble, the old man is. keeps his bed mostly, now." for one moment pippin hung back. another! first nipper, and now--old man blossom, too! old boozer, old snipe! was he goin' to meet up with these folks right along, think? wouldn't he ever get rid of 'em? "shut up! if the lord can stand 'em, i expect you can!" and pippin followed mr. bailey into a clean bare little room, where, propped on pillows, lay a clean old man. he looked eagerly up as jacob entered. "you got him with you?" he asked querulously. "you got pippin? i heard his voice--" "you did, daddy blossom!" pippin advanced and took the hand that was plucking nervously at the coverlet. "you heard pippin, and now you see him! well! well! and who ever thought of meetin' up with you here, daddy? and sick, too! but if i had to _be_ sick, i wouldn't ask no pleasanter place--" he turned to smile at jacob bailey, but jacob had disappeared, and the door was closing softly. "pardoned out!" whispered the old man in his weak fretful voice. "pardoned out, 'count of age and sickness. i ain't a well man, pippin; my vitals is all perished; but that ain't what i want to say. i want you to help me! say you'll help me, pippin! i was always friends with you over there--" he nodded vaguely--"and now i'm old and sick, you'll help me, won't you?" "sure!" pippin drew a stool beside the bed and sat down. "put a name to it, old man! what can i do for you?" "find my little gal, pippin, my mary: you rec'lect her? sure you do! she used to bring me candy, and poke it in betwixt the bars with her little hand--flowers too, she'd bring: sure you rec'lect little mary, pippin?" pippin did not, but there was no need of saying so. "what about her, old man?" "i want her! i ain't a well man, nor yet i ain't goin' to be well, and i want my little gal; i want you to find her, pippin, and bring her to me." "sure!" said pippin comfortably. "where would i be likely--" "i don't know!" cried the old man wildly. "that--" he gave a brief and vivid sketch of his wife's character--a wholly inaccurate sketch--"never would tell me where she sent her. she died herself, and a good job, too, and she sent word to me that mary was well and doin' well, but now she'd got shet of me she was goin' to keep her shet. now what a way that was to talk to a father! if little mary knowed where i was, she'd come like a shot, but she don't know, nor i don't know--you find her, pippin! you rec'let the little gal: you'll find her, won't you?" "sure!" said pippin. for some moments he sat absently, running his fingers through his brown curls. taking out the little file, he considered it unseeingly, tried to whistle a tune on it, and failing, returned it to its hiding place. then, waking from his reverie, he put the old man through a sharp examination. the answers were feeble and uncertain, but he learned something. eighteen year old, or mighty nigh it. yes, red hair, or--naw! it might be darker by now, like her ma's was; color of--there! 'member old mis' jennings that lived just over the way from there? well, sir, she had a heifer, kind o' red brown, like a hoss chestnut when you break it open; and her skin the white of one, too, kind o' soft and creamy; and her eyes like her'n too (the heifer's, old man blossom meant), big and soft and blue with a kind of brown in 'em too--there! he'd know her, pippin would, by the dimple right corner of her little mouth. cur'us thing that was. when she wasn't more than a baby, 'bout two year old, he gave her a little sunshade--she see her ma's and hollered for it, and he said she should have one of her own; pink it was, and she carried it like the lady of the land, sir. but bimeby she tumbles down, and the p'int of it went right through her cheek. that's right; instead of a scar, it made a dimple, paint him sky blue striped if it didn't. prettiest little gal--hair would curl round your finger like 'twas a stick-- the whisper broke into crying, and pippin had to soothe him and sing "the factor's lady, or the turkish garland," all through to restore tranquillity. but when pippin rose to go, the old man clutched him with trembling fingers. "whisper!" he said. "whisper, pippin! the way you go to work--the way i'd go to work if i wasn't perished in my vitals"--he consigned his vitals to a warm region--"is, take brand along!" "brand?" repeated pippin. "the blind man! he has eyes in his fingers. he can--he can tell the way the wind blew yesterday by feelin' of it to-day. if i'd had brand i'd never been nabbed, and i'd be rollin' in gold to-day, and goin' in my automobile to find my little gal. but you get brand along, pippin! talk him round first, he's never been in the sportin' line, but--" "hold on! hold on!" pippin loosed the clutching hands gently, and laid the poor old sinner, still gasping and whispering back on the pillow. "old man, you're makin' one big mistake. i'm not in the line any more; i guess not!" he threw back his head and laughed joyously. "you didn't know i found the lord, did you? well, i have, and there's no more sport in mine. but--i'll tell you! i'm runnin' a wheel at present, knife-grindin', you know. why--i've got nipper's wheel! nipper was a pal of yours, wasn't he?" "nipper's wheel? where's nipper? is he here?" "he's dead, and before he went he gave me his wheel. it's a real handy--what now?" he paused, for the old man, after staring at him a moment, broke into a fit of cackling, wheezing laughter. "nipper's wheel!" he gasped. "he's got nipper's wheel, and he's found the lord, and he isn't in the line no more! gorry to hemlock, this is rich! you took me in complete, pippin, you did so! go on! you're all right!" he grew purple in the face, and his eyes rolled. pippin stepped to the door. "mr. or mrs. bailey!" he called quietly. "mr. blossom is having a fit!" mrs. bailey, hastening in, surveyed the situation with practised eyes; lifted the patient, thumped his back gently, administered remedies, enjoined silence. "you've ben talkin' too much, mr. blossom; it always brings on a spasm, and you hadn't ought to. now lay down and take a nap, that's a good soul." obeying a glance of her kind gray eyes, pippin slipped out, leaving the old man still gasping and gurgling. many more of them kind, pippin reflected, would carry the old geezer off, sure thing. he was on the blink, no two ways to that. "loony too! hear him laffin' fit to bust when i told him nipper was dead! now what do you know about that? that's loony, you see, that is! behooves me find that little gal pooty quick if i'm goin' to find her. and how--in--moses' meal-chist--am i goin' to find her?" pondering deeply, he went back into the kitchen. the table had been cleared and covered with its decent between-meals cloth of red and white check; beside it, facing the door, sat miss amanda whetstone and miss lucilla pudgkins, diligently mending stockings. these ladies, as has been seen, were paying boarders, and "demeaned themselves accordin'," as they would have said. they helped mrs. bailey in housework, mending, etc., but always with a touch of condescension and the understanding that it was "to accommodate." in person they were well contrasted. miss whetstone was a thin active little woman, with eyes like black glass and thin lips puckered in a sub-acid smile. she was always neat as wax, in dresses of black and white striped print, the lines so near together that they seemed to waver constantly. ("throw her away!" flora may often besought her "uncle bailey." "please throw her away! she dazzles!") but every one knew aunt mandy had a black silk in her trunk, and a tatting collar that the minister's wife might have been glad to possess. miss lucilla pudgkins was billowy in figure and was addicted to purple print, with a string tied round the middle to show that she knew where the waist line ought to be. her face might have been made by a clever boy out of a large red apple; and if aunt mandy's eyes were like glass, miss lucilla's were like china, two blue china buttons plumped into the red, on either side of the queerest button of a nose that ever was seen, pippin thought. she wore a rather pathetic "front," which was seldom quite straight; in fact, she was a pathetic figure altogether, poor miss lucilla, but she did not know it, so all was well. she never forgot that at sixteen she had been queen of the may at a sunday school festival, and her trunk still held, under the scanty stock of petticoats and aprons, the white muslin frock of her great day. miss lucilla was a little greedy, and somewhat foolish, though not so foolish as aunt mandy thought her; the attitude of the two towards each other was usually an armed truce, except on occasions of general conflict, when they never failed to combine against the common enemy--usually mr. wisk, the fat man, who was greedy too. the two ladies looked up eagerly as pippin entered. how was mr. blossom? miss whetstone asked. he sounded something awful. was it the death spasm, did mr. pippin think? they had been expecting it any day, and wishing his folks would come. wasn't it awful? "he's all right!" pippin reassured her. "choked up a bit, but mis' bailey knows how to handle him. he'll rest easy now, poor old skeezicks. how long has he ben this way, ladies?" "sit down, do, mr. pippin!" miss whetstone hastened to make room for him beside her. "that cheer is comfortable; set right down, now do so! he has been having those spasms ever since he come, a month and more ago, but none so bad as this. be you kin to him?" "me? not much!" pippin shook his head vigorously. "i only asked because one likes to know, you know, about the folks one has to associate with. of course you can keep yourself to yourself, and oftentimes so do, but any one ought to be sociable when they can, i claim." "sure thing!" murmured pippin absently, his eyes glancing over the speaker's head to where flora may sat rocking in her corner, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes fixed on him with a curious intentness. she seemed to be calling him, he thought, though she made no sound. he nodded, with a friendly glance which said "presently!" impossible to go at this moment, for miss whetstone evidently had more to say. she was bridling, and making little clucking noises in her throat, expressive (to herself, at least), of delicacy of feeling. now speech came, preluded by a genteel titter, and accompanied by a glance round the room, which took in the blind man quietly whittling splints in his own special corner, and flora may, rocking by the window, the latter with a compassionate depreciatory shrug of miss whetstone's shoulders. "we aim to be as select here as circumstances allow," said the lady. "of course it is a town institution, i am well aware of that; but cyrus is a select neighborhood, and there's no one feels any call to take boarders _except_ mr. bailey. you can see for yourself how it is, mr. pippin. the house is large and his own family small. he is well connected, jacob is; his mother was own cousin to mine, and so--we thought, me and miss pudgkins, we'd like you to understand just how we come to be here. not but what we could of went anywhere we pleased, if we _had_ pleased!" pippin was aware of a certain wistfulness in the two pairs of eyes fixed on him. now wouldn't that give you a pain? poor old ladies! "i bet you could, ma'am!" he responded heartily. "i expect you could pass all your time visitin' round, and find your welcome runnin' ahead of you like a houn' dog. but if you searched the country over, i bet you wouldn't find as pleasant a place as this. you show your taste, is what i would say." the wistful eyes brightened as they exchanged glances. there was a point to make with this young man; it had to be made with every newcomer. people _must_ know that they were here for convenience' sake, and that alone! "i knew he would understand!" cried miss pudgkins. "he has that way. i see it first thing. and bein' as it is, mr. pippin, we try to keep up the _tone_, you see. now mr. blossom--you say he's no kin to you? well, to speak my mind--and miss whetstone holds with me--mr. blossom is _not_ just the kind cyrus folks is accustomed to. has he--has he led a good life, are you aware?" pippin smiled at her. "well, no, lady, he ain't; not exactly to call it _good_, you know; not what _you_ would call good, though there never was as much harm in the old man as in lots of others. but anyway," he added, "he's on the blink now, you see, liable to croak 'most any day, i should judge, so it don't so much matter, does it?" "liable to--i beg your pardon?" "i beg yours. no expression to use to ladies. pass away is what i would say. i expect his trick is about up, what say? dandy place to pass away in, too, when your time's come. excuse me, ladies, i see mr. bailey--" pippin saw also his opportunity of escape, and with a little bow of apology, and appreciation, slipped out of the door, thinking to join his host who had just walked past it. but jacob bailey had already disappeared in the shed, and it was flora may's turn. she had followed pippin, and now stood before him, looking up at him with clear, lovely, empty eyes: empty, yet with that curious shining intentness he had noticed before. "sing now for flora may!" said the girl. "i will!" pippin assured her. "just the moment mrs. bailey gets through with mr. blossom, we'll have us a reg'lar singsong, we will so. real fond of singin', ain't you, miss flora may? say, that's a dandy necklace you have on! them beads are carved elegant, they sure are." flora may lifted the beads and glanced carelessly at them. they were of some hard nut wood, each one adorned with flowers and fruit in delicate carving: a pretty ornament enough. "uncle brand made them for me," she said. "take them!" she had slipped the necklace off and was pressing it into pippin's hand. he took it and examined it admiringly, then put it gently back over the girl's head. "i thank you a thousand times!" he said. "i couldn't wear 'em myself, not travelin' like i am, you see, and i like to see 'em round your neck, they look so pretty. it's young ladies ought to wear joolry, you know." he smiled at her, but her eyes met his anxiously. "you are not goin' away?" said the girl. "you are goin' to stay? i'll give you my eagle feathers if you will stay. i'm tired of the folks here." "now what a way that is to talk! you're just jokin' though, i see. it _would_ be a joke if you was tired of mr. and mrs. bailey, wouldn't it now?" "i'll give you the white duck, if you'll stay!" she went on in her sweet monotonous voice, which yet was strangely eager. "uncle bailey gave it to me, it's mine. i'll give you everything i've got if you'll stay." at this moment, to pippin's infinite relief, mr. bailey emerged from the shed. he laid his hand on the girl's shoulder; instantly her whole form relaxed and she drooped into her customary attitude of listless indifference. "anything wrong, little gal?" asked jacob bailey, kindly. flora may shook her head and turned away with a pettish movement of her shoulders. "she was wantin' me to sing for her," said pippin. "i will, too, mr. bailey, sir, soon as ever you and mis' bailey are ready. i don't mean to brag of my singin', don't you think that, but it's what has ben give me, and about all i have to give when folks is so dandy to me as what you folks have been here. so if agreeable, sir, say the word and i'll tune up!" chapter vi pippin sings for his supper so pippin sang for his supper, a grateful tommy tucker; and the imbecile girl sat at his feet and listened, rocking to and fro, her lovely face so full of joy that it was almost--almost-- he sang about the young lady who went a-hunting with her dog and her gun, and about poor bonny sweet bessie, the flower of dundee, and "silver threads among the gold," which made mrs. bailey cry and jacob blow his nose loudly. he was about to give them "nancy lee," but checked suddenly. was he forgetting the lord, after that elegant supper? now wouldn't that give you a pain? "_that's right!_" pippin spoke so suddenly that everybody started. "excuse _me_!" he said hastily. "i was thinkin'--leastways i wa'n't thinkin'--well, it don't signify whichever way of it, but if agreeable, i will praise the lord a spell!" a murmur of approval greeted him. mrs. bailey's kind face lighted up. "that will surely be a treat!" she cried. "and--oh, mr. pippin, wait one moment! if you don't mind standing in the doorway of old mr. blossom's room, so he can hear you? he's real quiet now, and i'm sure 'twill do him good--" so pippin stood in the doorway, and threw back his head and sang with all his heart and soul: "when i can read my title clear to mansions in the skies, i'll bid farewell to every fear, and wipe my weeping eyes." this hymn is left out of many hymn books nowadays; it is old-fashioned, and some of its lines are patently absurd: but i wish the hymnologists could hear pippin sing it. his voice goes soaring up, a golden trump of victory and triumph: "there shall i bathe my weary soul in seas of heavenly rest; and not a wave of trouble roll across my peaceful breast." as he finished, he swung round, his eyes blazing, every inch of him a-thrill. "old man," he cried, and the passion in his voice made them all start. "don't you feel it? don't you feel somethin' crinklin' all through you, like sap in a sugar maple? that's the grace of god, old man; let her run! oh, lord, let her run!" there was a moment's silence; then mr. blossom snickered. it is not a pretty word, but then it was not a pretty sound. pippin was at his side in an instant, his eyes ablaze again, but with a very different light. "you old skunk!" he cried, gripping the bony shoulders hunched below the leering face. "you darned old son of a broken whisky jug, you dare to snicker before the lord? for half a quarter of a cent i'd wring your rooster's neck for you, you--" he stopped, as if somebody had touched him. his head drooped, his arms dropped by his side, and he flushed scarlet from throat to forehead. he stood so for several minutes, no one stirring; then he turned humbly to jacob bailey. "i ask your pardon, sir, and the company's. i lost holt of myself. there! i am fairly ashamed." he leaned over the poor old sinner, who was still gasping from the sudden onslaught. "hurt you, did i, old man? i ask your pardon, too, i do so. lemme h'ist you a mite!" with anxious care he raised the shrunken figure and settled the pillows under the palsied head. "there! that comfy, old geezer? now you go to sleep! i was a mutt to shake you up that way. goo' night, old man!" * * * * * sitting on his neat bed an hour later, pippin dealt with himself, as judge with criminal. his vivid fancy saw himself as two distinct beings, one arraigning, the other replying. he desired to know whether he, pippin, thought he was all creation? because if so, he took leave to tell him he wasn't, nor anything approachin' it. reassured on this point, he further observed that perhaps on the whole it might be best for him to go back to shoreham. most likely he wasn't prepared yet to live among christian folks; say he was to go back for another year till he'd learned to hold his tongue and keep his temper! how would he like that? "well, then, you behave! if you're a christian, show up, that's what i say. what was it you promised elder hadley? to look for the grace of god in every one you see, wasn't it? well, then! _did_ you look for it in old man blossom?" "why, sure! didn't i sing, and pray, and all? i couldn't find no grace, not a mite, so help me!" silence; the outward man sitting with bent head and knotted brows, the inner--both of him--wrestling with a problem. at last the brows cleared, the head lifted. "bonehead!" said pippin. "you didn't look in the right place. prayin' an' singin' wasn't his kind, no more than they were a dumb critter's. didn't he want his little gal, want her real bad? wasn't that mebbe the way grace took him? i expect the lord has as many ways as there is folks." finally pippin concluded that he would do well to say his prayers and go to bed and let the lord run things a spell, as he was full able to do. and start off next morning, sure thing, or the boss would think he had cut. gee! he hated to leave this place! * * * * * "i don't see how you do it!" said pippin. "gorry to 'liza, mr. brand, i don't see _how_ you do it!" brand was making a broom; pippin, smoking his after-breakfast and before-departure pipe in the barn doorway, watched him with growing wonder and admiration. his fingers seemed almost to twinkle, they moved so fast, knotting, laying together, binding in the fragrant strands of broom corn. "i've made many a broom!" pippin went on. "i was counted a crackerjack at bindin'; but you work twice as fast blind as what i would seein'; that's what gets me!" the blind man raised his head with a smile, his hands never ceasing their swift motion. "i sometimes think seeing folks don't have half a chance at broom-making and like that," he said. "there's so many things to take their minds off. now, take this minute of time. there's a cloud passing over the sun, isn't there?" "why, yes!" pippin looked up involuntarily, shifting his position a little to do so. "yes, sir, there is. now how--" "and you had to look up to see it!" the blind man went on, calmly. "that takes time and attention. now i _feel_ the cloud, and that's all there is to it. there are some advantages in being blind; born blind, that is." pippin gave him a helpless look. his eyes wandered over the scene before him: the wide, sunny barnyard, the neat buildings, the trim garden spaces, the green, whispering trees; beyond them the white ribbon of the road, and wave upon wave of fair rolling country, sinking gradually to where the river flowed between its darkly wooded banks; overhead a sky of dazzling blue flecked with cloudlets of no less dazzling white. there was a hawk hovering over the chicken yard. pippin picked up a stone and threw it at the bird, which vanished with a shrill scream. his eyes came back to the figure in the doorway, with bent head and flying fingers. "advantages?" he repeated, and his tone was as helpless as his look had been. "well, you get me, mr. brand, every time. you--you was born blind, sir, do i understand?" brand nodded. "sixty years ago this month. when i say advantages, i don't mean i would have chose--" he made a slight, eloquent gesture toward the clear, sightless eyes. "but since so it is, one looks at it from that end, you see, and one finds--advantages. for one thing, changes don't trouble a born-blind man as they do seeing folks. i hear talk about this person looking poorly, and that one having gone gray, and lost his teeth, and like that; that don't trouble me, you see, not a mite. folks look to me just as they sound. now take our folks here--lucy--i would say mrs. bailey--and jacob: well, their voices tell me what they are like, see? they called lucy handsome when she was a girl; she's just as handsome to me as she was then." there was a wistful note in his voice, and pippin responded instantly. "she's a fine-appearin' lady, now!" he said heartily. "she sure is." "i presume likely!" said brand. "she'd have to be, being what she is. when lucy first grew up, i made a--a picture (so to say! i never saw a picture) of her in my mind, and i see it as clear to-day as i did then." he was silent for a time, then went on, in an altered tone: "then there's other things, things that seeing folks don't have. take hearing. i hear twice what most folks do, and i hear things no seeing person _can_ hear; undertones, our music teacher called them, and overtones, too. now, you hear a woman's dress rustle, and that's all, isn't it?" "ye-yes!" pippin replied. "that is--i can tell a silk rustle from a calico, and a woolen from either." "well, that is more than many men can do. women, of course; but not many men without training." the blind man leaned forward, and felt carefully of pippin's ear. "a good ear!" he nodded approvingly. "an excellent good ear! there's many hold that the outer ear has nothing to do with hearing, but i don't know! i don't know! the doctor told me of a king who wanted to know everything that was said in his house--palace, like!--and he built it in the shape of an ear. long ago, doctor said it was, and he didn't say he believed it, but i've often wondered. but you've had training, too; you've learned how to listen, which is more than some folks learn all their lives long." "you bet i had training!" not a vision this time, though a dim, brutal figure lurks in the background; not a vision, but a sound! "listen! listen, you cursed pup, or i'll cut your heart out. my ears are thick to-night. is that a cop's whistle, or a pal's? if you get it wrong, i'll make you sweat blood--" "yes, i had training!" said pippin. "then--" brand's face was fairly glowing as he turned it on his young visitor. it was not often that he could speak of his blindness, but there was something about this boy that seemed to draw speech from him like a magnet. "then--there's the other senses; smell--why, what wonderful pleasure i have in a delicate smell! whether it's a flower, or my bacon when it's smoked just to the fine point, or--why, take smoke alone, all the various kinds of it! wood smoke, and good tobacco, and leaves burning in the fall of the year, and brush fires in spring! and there's herbs, southernwood, mint, lemon balm--wonderful pleasure in odors, yes, sir! and when you come to touch, why there's where a blind man has it over a seeing, almost every time. the pleasure of touching a leaf of mullein, say, or soft hair like the little gal's--flora may's, i would say--or a fruit, or a baby's cheek--wonderful pleasure! i wonder are your fingers as good as your ears? let me see!" he held out his hand, and pippin laid his own in it. how proud you were of your hands, pippin! how you used to boast that your fingers needed no sandpaper to sharpen their exquisite touch! is that why you hang your head, and the blood creeps up to the roots of your hair? "if he's let to live," a husky voice murmurs, "he'll make a ---- ---- good un; but i ain't certain but i'll wring his neck yet. there's things about him ain't right!" perfectly consistent, mr. bashford, and wholly correct from your point of view! "a fine hand!" says david brand. "strong and yet delicate. you can do a great deal with that hand, young man. why, with that, and your fine ears, you--why--" he laughs his cheery laugh--"i won't go so far as say you'd ought to have been born blind, but you surely would make a first-rate blind man!" pippin puffed at his pipe meditatively for a few minutes, considering the serene face and the flying fingers. what a face it was! the calm, thoughtful brow, the well-cut features, the clear eyes, the patient look--well, there! if an angel could be old--that is to say, gettin' on in years--and blind, this would sure be him! now--come to see a face like this, you know the lord has ben there: _is_ there, right along, same as the devil was with dod and nosey and them. do a person good, now, to hear what he has to tell, how the lord has dealt with him, what say? he couldn't more than say no, if-- "mr. brand!" pippin spoke timidly, yet eagerly. "you'll excuse me--but when i like folks, i like to know about 'em; what they've no objection to tellin' is what i would say. you must have a lot that's real interestin'--i hope no offense!" he ended lamely. "none in the world!" brand laughed cheerily. "quite the other way, young man. old folks don't always find young ones that care to hear their old stories. i should be pleased--find a seat, won't you? i haven't much to tell, but you're welcome to what there is!" pippin curled his long legs up on the floor, his back against the door jamb. "this is great!" he murmured. "this certainly is great. i'd ought to be gettin' on, but i don't care. now if you're ready, mr. brand!" brand reached for a pile of straws, measured, clipped, laid them in orderly piles ready for binding in. "i was born in cyrus," he said; "born and raised. i was the only child, and my parents did everything they could for me. i was a happy youngster and had reason to be. everybody was good to me; cyrus is a good, kind neighborly place. yes, sir, i was a happy boy. always singing and laughing; i recollect hearing folks say, 'poor child!' or like that when they came to see mother. i used to wonder what poor child they meant. i asked lucy one day--lucy allen, that's mrs. bailey now; we lived next door, and played together always, her and jacob and me. i says, 'lucy, who are they always saying "poor child!" about? is it you?' and lucy says, 'i wouldn't wonder, dave! my front teeth has come out, and i am a sight.' little girl seven years old: she was that thoughtful always, lucy was. she was doing me good turns every day and all day when we was little: once, i remember, i had a chance to do her one. we was playing together in uncle ivory cheeseman's candy kitchen--he give us the run of it, lucy and jacob and me, because he could trust us, he said; he was a kind old man, though crusty where crust was needed. well, we was playing there, and lucy went too near the stove and her dress caught fire. i smelled it before it begun to blaze, and caught it in my two hands and squeezed it out. 'twas a calico skirt; another minute and 'twould have been in a blaze." brand paused, and pippin looked up inquiringly. "i've always been thankful for that!" said brand. "there was a girl at the institution who lost her sight by burning, just that way, her skirt catching at the stove." "now wouldn't that give you a pain?" murmured pippin. "i know what burnin' feels like, just a mite of it. not meanin' to interrupt, mr. brand; i'm just as interested!" "when i was ten years old, mother died, and father sent me to the blind institution. i was there many years, and there i learned all i know--except what i learned before or since!" brand added with a whimsical smile. "that puts me in mind of the first--no, the second--day i was there. i was to see the doctor, the head of the institution--he was away the day i came--and i was left alone in his office to wait for him. i was always keen to see what kind of place i was in, so i was moving about the room, finding out in my own way, when the door opened and two men came in. one of them was tall--what say?" "now! now!" cried pippin. "how in the airthly did you know he was tall?" "his voice was high up! that's an easy one, pippin. why, _you_ would know that, with those good ears. he was speaking, and the first sound of that voice stays by me yet. a _master_ voice! i've never forgot the words either. 'the first lesson--the hard lesson--you have first to learn is--_to be blind_--to live in the world without light--to look upon your life as still a blessing and a trust, and to resolve to spend it well and cheerfully, in the service of your maker and for the happiness of those about you.'"[ ] [ ] dr. s.g. howe to one of his blind pupils. he paused. pippin sat spellbound, gazing at the face that was indeed now as the face of an angel. "the service of your maker, and the happiness--" he murmured. "say, that's great! it--it sounds like a song, don't it, mr. brand? or--like psalms, some way of it! i'd like to learn them words off by heart, sir, if no objection." "he was a great man!" said brand reverently. "a great and good man. as he spoke, so he lived, for his maker and his fellow men. the man he spoke to gave a kind of groan, i remember; he had just lost his sight--a gun that wasn't loaded, the old story! then the doctor said a little more, comforting him like, and then he saw me. i had felt all round the room, and now i had my fingers on a raised map that hung on the wall. i had heard of such things and was pleased to death to get hold of one. i suppose it showed in my face, for the doctor said, 'here's a little fellow who already knows how to be blind! come here, my son!' i went straight to him--his voice led me, you understand: i could always follow a voice, from the time i learned to walk. he laid his hand on my head and turned my face up, studying me. i knew that; i felt his eyes, is the only way i can put it. 'born blind, weren't you, my boy?' he said. 'twasn't often the doctor had to be told anything about blind folks--or seeing either, for that matter. well, sir, that was the beginning of life for me, in a way. i got my education there. 'twas a happy place, and a happy life. i could tell about it from now till sundown, and not fairly make a beginning. the doctor was my friend; everybody was my friend. i was quick, and i wanted to learn; and, too, there was a good deal i didn't have to learn, being born blind, you see. there's a passage in the bible about remembering that 'he was born thus'; i used to think--" a silence fell, while brand counted strands, pippin watching him eagerly. a black hen who had been watching, too, her head cocked, her bright yellow eye fixed on the blind man with the false air of intelligence affected by hens, came up with a quick, rocking step, and uttered a long, reflective "crawk!" scratching meanwhile on the barn floor. "hicketty picketty wants some corn!" said brand. "here, picketty!" he took a handful of corn from a bag and scattered it. the black hen pecked vigorously, trying to get every grain swallowed before any one else should come; but the motion of brand's hand brought other hens fluttering, squawking, jostling, to get their share, and there was quite a scrimmage before he could resume his work. "i spoil that hen!" he said apologetically. "jacob says i oughtn't, and it's true; but she has such a way with her! there's no other hen i'm so partial to, though i love them all. "well! want to hear any more, or are you tired of listening? 'tisn't much of a story; i warned you in the beginning." "tired? well, i guess nix! why, i'm--why, it's _great_, mr. brand! i'm learnin' something 'most every word you say. do go on, sir--if i'm not troublin' you!" "i don't know as there is so very much more to tell, after all. a man's life goes on steady; there don't things keep happening right along, as they do in stories. i've had a quiet life, but a real pleasant one. i stayed on at the institution quite a spell after i grew up, teaching in the shop. basketry is what i taught; i liked it best, and was good at it. then, along when i was thirty years old, father needed me, and i came home. he was getting on in years, and he needed some one, and i was the one. his housekeeper got married, and i was handy about the house. yes, we made out to do well, father and i, as long as he lived. spare time and evenings, i'd make brooms and baskets, and the neighbors took all i could make. sometimes i'd make a trip round other places, same as you do with your wheel, pippin. i liked that real well. lucy and jacob had married by that time--i always knew they would! i--yes, i always knew they would, and right and fitting it was. jacob's folks had passed on, and he and lucy lived there next door to us, and was like brother and sister to me, as they always had been. cyrus is a pleasant place; yes, sir, we've all been happy, only when lucy lost her little david--named for me, yes, and like my own to me. that was a grief, but grief is part of our lot. lucy mourned so, jacob was desirous of making a change for her, and about that time they was changing here, too, and the selectmen beseeched jacob and lucy to take the place, and they did. they wanted me to come with them then, but i wouldn't leave father. bimeby, though, father passed on, and then--i didn't make up my mind right away to the change. i didn't want to be a care to lucy, and i thought i could get on by myself, and i _could_; but--well--no need to go into that. along about ten years back i come to make my home here with my good friends, and i've never regretted, nor i hope they haven't." "no need to go into that!" quite right, brand. impossible for you, being what you are, to tell of the various persons, male and female, who saw your comfortable cottage and few but fertile acres, and "felt a call to do for you." lucy bailey sometimes spoke of it to her husband with amused indignation. "fairly driven out of his home, david was! the idea! lucky we had one to offer him, or he'd have been saddled with the whole passel of them, like cap'n parks was a while back, and no mercy lovely to trim 'em out for him." a doleful squeak was heard, and a wheelbarrow trundled slowly by with mr. wisk as the motive power. "you'd think 'twould go faster by itself!" pippin thought; then reproached himself, the man being afflicted. brand's fine brows contracted as he listened to the squeak. "wisk has been promising to oil that exe for a month!" he said. "it gives me the toothache to hear it." "moves kinder moderate, don't he?" said pippin. "i s'pose his leg henders him." brand laughed. "i don't--know! aunt mandy whetstone says the lame leg makes the better time of the two. she's small and spry, you know, and wisk gets in her way sometimes. he means all right, but he never feels any call to hurry, that i know of." here mr. wisk, having given up the wheelbarrow as a bad job, came hobbling up, and with a wheeze by way of greeting, planted his shoulders against the door-jamb. "nice mornin'!" he said. "great!" replied pippin. "it surely is great! i'd oughter ben on the road an hour ago, but mr. brand makes it hard to get away, now i tell ye. i must go in and say good-by to the folks, and then i'm off. mr. brand, i thank you a thousand times for all you've told me, and you may be sure i shan't forget it, no, sir! you'll see me again pretty soon. i shan't be able to keep away from this place more'n just about so long, i see that plain. good-by, sir!" they shook hands warmly, the blind man urging him to come sooner and stay longer every time he could. "good-by to you, too, mister." pippin turned to the lame man. "i'm goin' into the house!" said the latter. "i'll step along with you. i want a drink o' water!" he stumped along beside pippin. out of earshot of the barn, he looked back over his shoulder. "or a drink of something!" he added. "got a drop about you, young feller?" "no, i ain't!" said pippin shortly. he was not drawn toward mr. wisk. "i thought you might have. i'm orful dry, and the water here don't agree with me. say! brand ain't the only one is afflicted, young man. i want you should understand that. my limb pains me something fierce; very close veins is what i have. you wouldn't find me in no such place as this if i didn't. brand's a stand-offish kind of cuss, but he don't measure up so much higher than other folks as what he thinks, mebbe. they make of him because he's blind, but i'll bet a dollar he don't suffer nights the way i do. got a mite of tobacker to spare? ain't? when i was in trade--i was a tin-knocker while i had my health--i allers made out to have a drop and a chew for a gen'leman when he asked for it; it helped trade. i was allers called a good feller. well, so long! call again!" pippin took an affectionate leave of the inmates of cyrus poor farm. they would see him again, he assured them heartily; no fears but they would. all he had to do was say good-by to the kingdom folks--for a spell. _they'd_ see him again, too. elegant folks!--and go find that little gal, or young woman, or whatever she was, and then just watch him make a bee line for cyrus! yes, sir! he would bring back that gal, sure thing! and he would bring mr. brand some of that new basket stuff he'd heard tell of. "yes, ma'am!" as he shook hands with miss lucilla pudgkins. "you shall have some perfoomery, the best i can lay hands on. and you shall have them buttons, miss whetstone, if they are to be had. and miss flora may shall--" he looked about the room, but the girl was not there. "she's out some place," said mrs. bailey. "feeding the hens, i presume likely. i'll tell her good-by for you, pippin!" he shook hands with old man blossom, who was only too eager to be friends. "i'm all friends, pippin!" he cried in eager, quavering tones. "honest i am! you find my little gal, and you can pray yourself black in the face and i won't say a word. it just took me that way, you know; you prayin' as slick as a gospel shark, and nipper's wheel out in the shed all the time--tee hee! you're smart, pippin! ain't any pious goin' to get round you, hey? 'tother way round, hey? gorry! that is rich!" he grew purple, and the bed shook under him. "hold on there!" said pippin. "don't you go and have another on me. i'm goin'." and he bolted. "i'm comin' out to the gate with you!" said jacob. "take a look at the stock as you go?" pippin nodded gravely. the two went out together to the great barn, fragrant with hay; patted the sleek farm horses, rubbed the noses of the calves. jacob pointed out briefly the merits of each animal; pippin responded with suitable encomiums. both men were absent and constrained. it was not till they reached the gate that jacob bailey spoke out. leaning against a post, he drew out his jack knife, looked about for a stick, and finding one, began to whittle. "well!" he said at length. "so you found your way here. how do you like?" "first-rate!" said pippin. "i never saw a place i liked so well." jacob whistled "yankee doodle" (his one tune) carefully through; then-- "how about comin' back?" he said. and as pippin was about to speak, "i mean comin' to stay! there now, i've out with it," he added. "here it is! me and m' wife have took a liking to you, and so has all the inmates. i never saw 'em take so to any one, unless 'twas cap'n parks, and he's an old friend. what i would say is, pippin, we're gettin' on in years, and we need young help. we've no boys of our own; i've got a nevy, but--never mind about that now! we'd like first-rate to think that you'd come back bimeby to stay." "do you hear that?" pippin asked himself silently. "he would trust me; knowin' all there is to know, he'd take me right in! now wouldn't that--" he turned to mr. bailey with shining eyes. "you're real good, sir!" he said simply. "you're--you're _darned_ good! i don't know how to say what i feel, but i feel it all the same. now--want me to say what i've ben thinkin'?" "sure!" assented jacob with a grave nod. pippin looked about him vaguely. "woodpile yonder!" jacob nodded over his shoulder. pippin went to the pile and selected a stick with great care, squinting along it to observe the straightness of the grain. returning with his prize, he produced his own knife, and silence reigned for a moment while he removed the bark, jacob critically regarding him the while. "i've ben thinkin'--the _chance_ of it! here you've got these folks, and they're nice folks--most of 'em, that is--and you're doin' everything in the world for 'em, and it's _great_. yes, sir, it's great! and the farm, and the garding--why, it's mother dear, jerusalem, right here in cyrus township, or so it appears to me. but what i'm thinkin' of is the boys!" a look of pain crossed the kindly face. "the boys!" he repeated. "mr. bailey, i'd love to take care of them old folks, and blind, and like that; but all the time i'm thinkin' of the boys. boys in the slums, and boys in jug, where i left 'em the other day. it appears to be laid upon me that i am to help the boys; though not to forget the others either, when i git a chance at 'em. now see! i can't go but a little ways at a time, can i? it's like i was learnin' to walk--if you see what i mean. i don't know just what the lord has for me to do, 'cept the first thing, to find this old rip's gal. that's plain, ain't it? when i can _see_ a thing, right face to, i can do it--sometimes! but after that--all about it, i can't tell, but i expect the lord has it all laid out for me, and he'll let me know, 'cordin' to." there was a pause. pippin looked up expectantly, and saw his companion looking out over the fields with eyes full of trouble. his face had suddenly fallen into lines of age. "what's wrong, sir?" asked pippin impulsively. "have i said anything i shouldn't? i'll ask you to excuse me if i have." a shake of the head reassured him. jacob bailey turned the troubled eyes on him, seemed to hesitate; finally, clearing his throat, spoke in a slow, husky voice. "there's one boy--" he stopped. "them oats looks good, don't they?" he nodded toward an adjoining field. "fine!" pippin threw a hasty glance toward the oats. "they are dandy, sure. you was speakin' of a boy, mr. bailey! what about him?" still the gray-haired man hesitated, looking about him with those troubled eyes. at last he seemed to make up his mind, and looked straight at pippin. "there's one boy--" he said; "pippin, there's one boy needs help the worst way. i expect he's right there in kingdom, where you're stoppin'." "i want to know!" pippin was aglow with interest. "where'll i find him? what's his name? has he been run in?" "speak low!" the farmer glanced about him. "there's no one round, and yet you never can tell; the folks don't know. it's m' wife's nevy i'm speakin' of, myron allen, her sister's son. he's been stayin' with us since his mother died--father dead, too--and he got to be like our own to us. he went to school, and he helped me with the chores and helped m' wife with hers, and was handy boy all round. mebbe we worked him too hard; he's only sixteen. we never thought it, but mebbe we did. yet he seemed happy--whistlin' all over the place, jokin' and like that; and his cheeks was round and red as a baldwin apple. yes, sir, he enjoyed good health, and everybody made of him, and he was good as gold. yes, sir, no one couldn't ask nor wish for a better boy than what myron was till last summer. then--well, 'twas bad company begun it." "you bet it was!" murmured pippin. "go on, sir!" "'twas hayin' last year done the mischief. myron hired out to a man over tinkham way--that was after he'd got through with the hayin' here--and there he met up with some that was no better than they should be by all accounts. pippin, that boy left us an innocent boy, that never had a bad word in his mouth that ever _i_ heard, nor no one round here. he come back--" the gruff voice faltered--"he come back different, sir. he'd slap through his work and then off he'd go and set down behind the shed and read. he'd got a lot of books from some one he'd met up with; them sleuth stories, you know, and like that, little paper books. you've seen 'em?" "i've seen 'em!" pippin nodded. "he'd set there by the hour, readin' and readin', and oftentimes the cows bellerin' their hearts out to be milked. i'd come back from the field and find him with his nose in the book, and his eyes startin' out of his head. there warn't no cows nor no farm nor nothin' for him those times. i'd get real worked up, now and then, and give him a good callin' down, and he'd do better for a spell; but that was only the beginning." he glanced round again, and his voice dropped to a whisper. "there's more to it. things begun to be missed round here! it's been goin' on all winter; nothin' great, just a little here and a little there. folks begun to talk, and some claimed 'twas tramps, and some begun to wonder--he's only a boy, you understand, pippin! oftentimes the thinkin' part grows up slower than what the bodily part does, ain't that so?" pippin met the anxious eyes cheerfully. "that's so! why, likely he wasn't more than ten years old, come to look inside of him. where you'll find one boy that knows just where hookin' ends and stealin' begins, you'll find a dozen that don't. and there's more to it than that; but go on, sir! i'm just as inter_est_ed as i can be!" "this spring, a feller come along, and myron knew him; he was one of them he had met over tinkham way, and he was trampin'. lookin' for work, he said, but if i ever saw a countenance that said lookin' for mischief, 'twas his. young man, too! well, myron brought him in and we treated him well, because myron seemed so taken with him. we give him a bed, and next day i set him to work hoein'--said he _wanted_ work, you understand--and he appeared pleased as pie. myron was hoein', too; we can't keep the witch grass out of that field, try our best. i was busy in the barn that day, choppin' hay, but yet i'd come out now and then jest to let 'em know i was round, and every time i'd find 'em with their heads together, tongues doin' the work and hoes takin' a noon spell: quick as they saw me they'd shut up and go to work. well! i'd ought to have known then that they was plottin' mischief, but you don't look for your own folks--" he broke off, and was silent a moment. pippin assured himself that it was all right; it hurt, and thank the lord it did! how'd he feel if it didn't? "that night one of the neighbors was broke into, and money taken from his pants pocket. he woke up jest in time to see a man with a mask on gettin' out of the window. he up and run, but they was too quick for him--he see from the window there was two of 'em--and though he hollered and fired his gun, they got off, and he couldn't find hide nor hair of 'em. next mornin' the tramp was gone, and myron with him, and i found--i found in myron's room some pieces of black cloth, and one of 'em with eyeholes cut in it." there was a long silence. the two sticks were beautifully smooth by this time; pippin began polishing his thoughtfully on his coat sleeve. finally he shut his knife with a snap, and straightened his broad shoulders. the older man, looking up, met his eyes brimful of light and joy. "mr. bailey," said pippin, "the lord is awful good to me! what did i tell you just now? that i couldn't see but just one step ahead, wasn't that it? well, now i see two, and the second one is ahead of the other." "i don't--quite--" began jacob doubtfully. "don't you? why do you s'pose the lord put in your mind to tell me about this? why, green grass! i got to find the boy as well's the gal! that's plain to see. look! where would them two go? they'd strike the nearest town, wouldn't they, so's they could lay up a bit, and spend their swag? well, what's the nearest town? kingdom, where i'm stayin' at present; kingdom, where i'll have to be a spell yet, till i find some one to take my place--green grass! i believe--" silent again, but in great excitement, pippin pocketed his knife and stick, pulled out his file, and ran it through and through his hair wildly. "mr. bailey, sir," he cried at last, "the lord is showin' me his hand, and it's a dandy one. don't say a word; don't ask me anything; but if you can trust me--if you _can_ trust me--why, i'm to be trusted, because the lord has hired me for the job!" chapter vii flora may soon after this, pippin took the road, sober at first, walking slowly with bent head, thinking hard; but as the morning got into his blood it began to tingle, his eyes began to shine, and up went his head. "green grass!" he said. "that sure was a nice place, and nice folks. most of 'em, i would say; old man blossom is a mite yaller sure, but some of the others are white enough to make up for him. mr. and mis' bailey, now, i declare! they are as like as--as peas--to pa and ma, that i thought up to myself along back. how do, pa? how be you, ma? don't you go back on me! gee! and think of that young feller goin' back on them two! if i was him--green grass! wouldn't it have been great if i was! i tell you i'd make things hum to that nice place. i'd make them two forget i wasn't their own son, and twins at that. and them old ladies! why, all they need is a little humorin'. real friendly they was to me! and mr. brand! he is a peach, sure thing! i expect he could do more for me, blind, than i could for him, seein'. but i'd be--call it a nevy--to him, if i had the chance. and that poor sweet pretty creatur, if i wouldn't be a brother to her, send me back over there and put me in solitary! try and learn her little things, try and make her eyes look a mite different. not but they've tried, them good folks, but bein' nearer her age, and she taken with my singin' and like that--why, an angel wouldn't be no handsomer than what she would be if she had her mind. take and learn her--" pippin stopped dead. something was rustling in the bushes. the dream light faded from his face; he stiffened to attention like a pointer, his eyes fixed on the fringe of woods on his left. something in there! a critter, or--? the rustling grew nearer, louder; the bushes crackled, parted; a figure came out, timidly, eagerly, ran forward, fell down before him, seized his hand and looked up with dumb, imploring eyes. flora may! there are two men in every one of us. i used to think there were ten in pippin, but for one instant all ten were paralyzed, looking helplessly into the blue eyes that burned into his; then one of them woke, the one who would have been a physician if pippin had been reared in a home instead of a cellar. he took the girl's wrists, and, holding them firmly, raised her to her feet. "why, miss flora may!" he said cheerfully. "don't ever tell me this is you! did you come all this way just to say good-by? now, if that wasn't pretty of you! i'm just as much obliged as i can be, young lady; and i'll walk back a piece with you, i will so. this wood lot is a mite lonely, 'pears to me." the girl tried to fling herself down again, but he held her tight. "i wouldn't do that!" his voice was kind, but he spoke with authority. "get your nice clean dress all dirty! what would mis' bailey say? why, she'll be lookin' for you, i expect. she thought you was 'tendin' to the hens, and all the time--what say?" "take me with you!" cried the girl. "i want you! i won't go back. take me with you!" "now what a way that is to talk! you wouldn't leave mr. and mis' bailey, good and kind as they be--" "i want you!" wailed the girl, and again she would have flung herself down, had not those firm hands held her fast. "take me with you! sing to me! love me! i belong to you!" pippin's face had been full of perplexity, but now it lightened. "sing to you! why, sure i will! there's a song you'll just admire to hear, miss flora may. we'll walk along and i'll sing as we go. no, i won't let go both your hands; i'll hold this one so--so we can keep step together. now let's step out lively!" the girl drew back, her eyes narrowing. "this isn't the way you were going!" she said sullenly. "i won't go back. i'm a big girl, and they treat me like i was a kid. i won't go back! if you won't take me, i'll drown myself!" "we'll go along! 'along' isn't 'back,' is it now? along, you know: matches up with song, don't you see? green grass! see those pretty yaller flowers! they're along, too, just a piece! let's we gather some, see if they're sweet as they are pretty!" still holding her wrist in that firm grasp, rambling on about the flowers, he stooped to pluck them, and managed to turn back in the direction of cyrus. "now we'll come along!" he proclaimed. "here's a good clear stretch of road, and i'll sing--you just listen!" never before, it seemed to pippin, had he let his voice out to its full power. he felt it fly like a bird before him; it must reach all the way, it _must_! "when i can read my title clear to mansions in the skies, ("he'll hear that sure! he'll sense it in a minute, and know it's all right!") "i'll bid farewell to every fear, and wipe my weeping eyes! "so we will, miss flora may, won't we? you sing, too, that's a dandy girl! let her go, gallagher!" two hundred yards away, a man was driving through the woods at top speed of his lumbering horse. brows bent, lips compressed, deadly fear at his heart, he sat unseeing, silent, save when he urged the clumsy beast to still further effort. fear at his heart, and anger, and bewilderment; but struggling with all these something that said dazedly over and over, "i don't believe it! he wasn't that kind! i don't believe it!" suddenly he checked the horse and threw up his head, listening. through the trees, down the wood road, a voice came flying like a bird, ringing like a trumpet, crying like a great wind in his ears: "i'll bid farewell to every fear, and wipe my weeping eyes!" "lord, forgive me!" cried jacob bailey. "lord, have mercy on me, and never let him know!" a glint of blue among the trees, the jingle of a little bell that hung beside the wheel; next moment they came in sight, pippin first, chin in air, mouth open, singing as a bird sings, with every fibre of his being; the girl hanging back a little, held close by that strong hand, but singing, too, in a sweet, broken voice. "let cares like a wild deluge come, and storms of sorrow fall, may i but safely reach my home, my god, my heaven, my all!" "why, if here isn't our mr. bailey, this minute of time!" cried pippin. "why--why, miss flora may, he's cryin'! mr. bailey, you sick, sir? miss flora may, you climb right in the wagon, and comfort him up pretty!" * * * * * "that was a close call!" pippin stood rubbing his head with his file, gazing after the retreating wagon. his cheek had blanched under the tan, and his breath came quick and short. pippin had been frightened, a thing that had hardly happened since the days when fear was his yokefellow, day and night. "that," he repeated, "was a close call, as close as i want in mine. s'pose i'd got further off, so's he couldn't catch me up. what would he ha' thought? poor innocent gal! gee! the lord stood by me good that time! but--gorry! s'pose i'd ben--gives me the cold shivers to think of it. now--now--i wonder--" pippin stood fingering his file absently, deep in thought. how to help a person like that? he had wanted to help her, sure thing, and now--'peared like all he had done was to hender. he expected 'twas his being a new person, breakin' in, like that, when she was used to havin' things quiet and all of a piece, so to say. he sighed, and replaced the file. best leave it, after all, to them dandy folks; they was used to handlin' her and they knowed how. best he keep away, till he had found the little gal, what say? yes--but--now a doctor might know things that even mr. and mrs. bailey wouldn't. then he laughed, in spite of his trouble. now! how come he to think of that just now, of all times? along back--way along back--they'd say white patter over a person that was like that, not to say crazy, but a little wantin'. old white patter! they would, sure! kind of an old charm; couldn't call it a prayer, but mebbe as nigh one as granny faa could manage to come. pippin had tried to say it late times, but he couldn't seem to fetch it: now--now-- he lifted his head; it was coming back, the age-long jargon. word by word, dropping into his mind from some limbo of things forgotten; word by word, he said it over aloud, standing in the wood road, the trees arching over his head, the moss curling round his feet. white paternoster, st. peter's brother, what hast 'ou i' the left hand? white-book leaves! what hast 'ou i' the right hand? heaven-gate keys! open heaven-gate and steek hell-gate! white paternoster, amen! back in the cellar! darkness, foul air, fumes of liquor. some one singing in drunken tones snatches of song vile as the liquor. the child, on his huddle of rags in the corner, shrinks and shudders, he knows not why. the old woman rises; there is a cuff, a curse, a maudlin whimper; she makes her way to the corner and bends over the child. "when he gets singin'," she whispers, "don't 'ee listen, pippin! stop your ears and say white patter! hark now, till i larn it 'ee!" bending lower, she recites the charm over and over, till the child with faltering lips can say it after her. "that'll keep 'ee safe!" says granny faa, and hobbles back to the spark of fire that keeps her old bones alive. "'twas all the prayer she knew!" said pippin. "green grass! but yet i expect the lord understood. there's amen to it, you see." joy of the road on a june morning! who could taste it as pippin did? it stood to reason that no one who had not been behind the bars could really know what it meant. blue sky overhead--not a little square patch, but all you wanted, all there was--clear, deep, stainless, from rim to rim of the horizon. that would be enough just itself, wouldn't it, after three years of gray-white walls? but there was all the rest beside; trees still in their young, exquisite green, birds not in cages but flitting from branch to branch, singing, singing-- flowers along the road: buttercups, pippin's own flower that the lord gave him that day; daisies, too; beautiful, wicked orange hawkweed, and good honest dandelions, each one a broad gold piece of summer's coinage. grass, too--gorry! 'twas in there ("there" was shoreham) he got the habit of saying "green grass!" it did him good just to think of it, and it filled the mouth full as good as swearin', for all he could see. he used to think about it; used to wonder, on breathless days when the gray-white walls radiated heat--and other things than heat--how it would feel to lie down and roll in grass, cool, moist, fragrant. ah! and now here it was under his feet, an elastic, emerald carpet. all he wanted of that, too! were ever such uncountable riches as pippin's this june morning? he was to have yet more, croesus that he was. on the left of the road a glint of rosy purple showed against the black tree trunks. he stepped aside and parted the branches. a little ferny hollow, with a tiny stream babbling through: beside the stream masses of purple blossoms, delicate, glowing, exquisite. "green grass!" said pippin. he stood for some time gazing; asking no questions of rhodora, being no critic, but taking his fill of delight in simple thankfulness. "gee!" he murmured, as he let the branches droop again over the enchanted place. "and that's right here, by the side of the road, a reg'lar flower show, and no charge for admission. now what do you think of that for a world to live in? i tell you, paradise has got to toe the mark to get ahead of that. what say?" the trees grew thinner, fell away to a fringe; the road grew broader and more even. presently a house or two came in sight. yes, this was the kingdom road; he remembered that white house. he would be back in time for dinner; then he'd put in two three days--or a week, mebbe--finding that boy, and finding--yes, he sure would--the grace of god in him. take a boy like that, and he could be no more than egged over with sin, like you do coffee cake: it hadn't had time to grime into him. and--come to get him all clean and nice and steppin' the lord's way again, what was to hender his steppin' right into his, pippin's, shoes and bein' handy man to mr. baxter? green grass! pippin had planned lays before now, but he never planned a prettier one than what this would be if it worked out good--and it would! and then it was the city, and to find that little gal. he had never meant to go back to the city, chaplain had told him not to; but if he knew how things was, he would say go, he sure would, elder hadley would. yes, sir! and when he found her--well! after all, the old man was her father, and he wouldn't be lasting long anyhow, and if she was a good gal she wouldn't grudge him a portion of time. mebbe even she'd be fond of him: you never could tell what a woman wouldn't be fond of. why, sheeny's wife was fond of him. used to come over there once a month reg'lar and cry over him 'cause he was in for a long jolt; now you'd thought, knowin' sheeny, she'd cry if he wasn't. and, gee! there was the meetin'-house, and if pippin wasn't holler for his dinner, believe _him_! chapter viii pippin sets bread and lays a plan the baxters received pippin with open arms. 'peared like he had been away a week, they said, instead of just over night. they certainly had missed him. no, they hadn't set the dough yet: they were just thinking of it, but they thought likely--well, hadn't he better have his supper first? no such great hurry, though of course 'twas _about_ time-- "gimme five minutes," said pippin, "and then just watch me!" in five minutes, washed and brushed, spotless in white cap and apron, his arms bare to the shoulder, he appeared shouting for his task. everything was white in the bakery; shining white of tiles and vessels, soft white of scoured pine, softer white of snowy flour. the great caldron stood ready, under the chute that led from the upper floor. pippin pressed a knob, and down came the flour, in a steady stream. pretty, pippin thought, to watch it piling up in a soft cone, falling away in tiny avalanches, piling up again. another touch; the stream is checked. now for the salt and sugar. now yeast, milk and water, half and half: more whiteness, brimming in a white pail. in it goes, with wonderful effects of bubbling and creaming, while snowy clouds float up and settle on pippin's brown face and sinewy arms. he touches another knob; down comes the iron dasher--this, too, shining in white enamel--and round and round it goes, tossing, dropping, gathering, tossing again, steadily, patiently; that is the way they mix bread at baxter's bakery. pippin watches it, fascinated; he never tires of the wonder of it. but presently mrs. baxter calls. "supper, pippin, come now! buster'll mind elbert for you." elbert is the dasher, named for the brother baker who persuaded father baxter to give up hand mixing and take to machinery. pippin gives the machine a friendly pat. "good old elbert!" he says. "keep it up, old figger-head! i'll be back, time you're ready to lay off. she's all right, buster," as the boy enters, munching his final doughnut. "in great shape, elbert is! you want to scrape her down a mite--" give it twenty masculine names, and a machine must still be feminine--"when she gets balled up, that's all. she's just as sensible--why, she can all but talk, this machine can." "mourns good and plenty," chuckles buster, "when she's dry." "lots of folks mourn when they're dry! i shall be mournin' myself if i wait any longer for that cup o' coffee your ma's got for me. so long, old sport!" "you said you'd tell me that story about mike cooney and the turkey!" "sure thing! but i didn't say i'd tell you when your ma was keepin' supper for me. quit now!" seeing he was so late, mrs. baxter thought he might as well set right down here at the kitchen table; here was his ham and eggs and coffee, and the pie and doughnuts handy by. she'd been flustrated up all day. had pippin heard that there was thieves about? no, pippin hadn't; he wanted to know if there was! well, 'twas so. mis' wilkins had two pies stole last night right off the butt'ry shelf, and a jug of cider, and matches all over the floor; and night before that they broke into al tibbetts's store, broke open the till and made away with two dollars and seventy-five cents. there! she was so nervous she thought she should fly. did pippin think the lock was real safe on the bakery door? pippin, after reassuring her on this point, grew thoughtful over his supper, so thoughtful that he was reproached for not eating a thing. he roused himself. "not eatin'! just you watch me, mis' baxter! know what ailed the man that wouldn't eat a supper like this? well, he was dead, that was what troubled him!" the table cleared, pippin washed his hands and arms at the sink, and joined mr. and mrs. baxter on the back porch. soon two pipes were puffing, and three rocking chairs (buster had unwillingly gone bedward) creaked and whined comfortably. it was a soft, dark night, just cool enough for comfort, pippin thought, and yet warm enough--well, warm enough for comfort, too. the back porch looked out on a little gully, the bed of a stream that flowed through kingdom to join the river near at hand. white birches grew on the steep banks--you could see them glimmering through the dark--and the place was full of fireflies; the stream murmured drowsily over its pebbles. "green grass!" murmured pippin. "now wouldn't it give you a pain to think of leavin' this?" they were three tired people--mrs. baxter had done a big ironing, and the baker had missed pippin sorely--and for some time were content to sit silent, rocking softly, breathing tranquilly, "just letting go," as mrs. baxter put it. but after a half-hour of this pleasant peace, pippin sighed, knocked the ashes from his pipe, and sat up straight in his chair. "now, folks," he said, "i've got to talk." mrs. baxter woke out of a comfortable doze; mr. baxter straightened himself and knocked out his own ashes. "that's right!" he said. "we'll be pleased to hear you, pippin. i heard you tellin' buster, and it sounded real interestin'. fire away!" "well!" said pippin ruefully. "i'm in hopes you won't be any _too_ well pleased, father baxter. the heft of what i have to say is in four words: i got to leave!" the rocking chairs creaked with startled emphasis. "you ain't, pippin!" "you don't mean it, pippin!" "you're jokin'! he's jokin', mother, can't you see?" "i wish't i was!" sighed pippin. "i tell you, mr. and mrs., i don't want to leave, no way, shape, or manner; but yet i got to. lemme tell you, and you'll see for yourselves. first place, i got to tell mis' baxter about before i come here. yes, boss, i just plain _got_ to! i meant all along to tell her before i left, but i've kind of put it off--the further i get from that feller i used to be, the worse i hate him! well!" slowly and carefully pippin rehearsed the familiar story, hiding nothing, glossing nothing over, giving what glory there was to the lord and elder hadley. when he finished this part, the baker was holding one of his hands, his wife the other, both uttering exclamations of pity, sympathy, encouragement. _that_ wouldn't make no difference, the good people assured him, not the least mite. "why, he told me the very first day, mother! i didn't want to make you nervous, so i kep' it to myself. it don't cut no ice with us, pippin, not a--" pippin checked them gently; that was only the first chapter. he went on to tell of his visit to cyrus poor farm (omitting only the episode of flora may), and of his promises to old man blossom and to jacob bailey. "now you see, you nice folks--you nicest kind of folks--here i be! i _love_ bakin'--if i was to work within four walls there's nothin' else i'd choose so soon--but it isn't so intended; i make sure of that. here i be, promised to the old man to find his little gal if she's to be found (and that means if she's alive), and promised to mr. bailey to get hold of that boy and give him a boost. you see how 'tis, don't you? well, of course! i knew you would! well, now i was studyin' this out all the way home, and the lord took hold and showed me his idea, and i think 'twill work out real good, if we have luck. i say 'we,' because you folks have got to help." "for pity's sake, pippin!" "yes, mis' baxter, for pity's sake! that's the stuff. and that boy's sake. suppose it was buster! this is a good boy, mind you, only weak. suppose it was buster! look at here! this is the way i've worked it out. mr. bailey is a dandy man, and mis' bailey ekally so woman, but they made a big mistake. what did that boy need? he needed other boys, and there wasn't none round, so happened. there was old folks, and blind folks, and wantin' folks, some good as gold and others--well, the reverse! he didn't want none of 'em; he wanted a pal! well! he got one, and he got a crook. that was his streak of bad luck, see? and he's in it still. way i look at it, we got to haul him out, ain't it?" "i'll do my part, pippin!" said mrs. baxter promptly. "count me in!" said the baker. "i don't know what i can do, 'less it's knead the youngster up in a batch of dough and bake him to keep him out of mischief, but count me in!" "well!" said pippin. he leaned forward, a hand on the knee of either. his voice dropped to a whisper. "now--" he paused abruptly. something was moving in the gully beneath them. with a swift gesture of caution, he stole noiselessly to the railing of the porch and looked down. all was soft darkness, save where the birches glimmered dusky white, where the fireflies danced and shone. the stream droned on; the night clung closer. look! was that a blacker shadow there, just where the old willow overhung the stream? was it a shadow that moved, followed by a second stealthy shade? a twig snapped; a branch rustled. hark! was that a whisper, a footstep? the fireflies rose in a wild whirl, scattered, came together, resumed their rhythmic dance, filling the little glen with golden sparks. silence fell like a mantle. chapter ix pippin encounters the red ruffian the days that followed pippin's disclosure of his plan were troublous ones for mrs. baxter. she looked under the bed a dozen times a day; she avoided the broom closet for fear of what might lurk there; if a door resisted her opening, she made sure it was held on the other side. for the first time, terror entered her life. it had been a comfortable life: she had been a good and cheerful baby, child, maiden; she was a good and cheerful woman. she had known that this was a wicked world, and--in a general way--that there were bad people even in kingdom. they never entered the bakery, but tales of them were whispered over the counter during the tying up of buns and coffee cakes. and we were all miserable sinners, of course, especially on sunday. but now she was living _in_ a tale! their own pippin, pippin of the bright eyes, the winning smile, the pleasant, helpful ways--pippin had been one of the wicked. and now there were more of them about, walking kingdom streets, perhaps--she shuddered--looking in the window the moment while her back was turned; and she was to be called upon to help save one of them. "but i've had no experience!" she would say piteously. "i don't know how to talk to them kind of persons, pippin. i've had no experience!" "well, you're goin' to have!" pippin told her cheerily. "woman dear, crooks is just folks, same as other folks; they ain't painted black, outside or in. you know how to talk to me well enough, don't you?" "oh, pippin!" "well, then! just bear in mind that what this boy is, i was, only about a thousand times wuss. why, he's nothin' _but_ a boy! say to yourself, 's'pose it was buster!' say it over and over till it comes easy as breathin'!" "yes, pippin!" said susan baxter. as for pippin himself, the days were not long enough for him. he was making the most of his last week of baking. hitherto he had kept strictly to bread, rolls and doughnuts; but now he essayed loftier flights, wrestled with coffee cake, overcame; made his first batch of pies and glowed with pride to hear them pronounced a no. . between work hours he ranged the town with his wheel, and at every corner people gathered round him, ostensibly to have their knives sharpened, though by this time there was hardly a dull knife in kingdom--really to watch pippin at work and hear him sing. he scanned every group with eager eyes, but saw no strange faces, only the kindly kingdom comers, as he called them, who were all his friends. after dark, leaving his wheel at home, he might drop in on father o'brien or elder stebbins for an hour's chat, and hear what was going on in the two parishes, to both of which he considered himself to belong. "say, that was a dandy anthem, wasn't it?" he would say to the good father. "suited me down to the ground! good sermon you preached, too, father. common sense! i liked that sermon. only, wasn't you just a mite hard on the heathen? i've known dandy heathen, sir, simply dandy. i wish't you knew old sing lee. he used to tell about a guy they call confusion, and i never could see why they called him that, for he was plain as print, 'peared to me, and his ideas was dandy, they sure was. well, so long, father! yes, sir, i'd like a blessin' real well; thank you kindly!" taking his leave, he would leave the house very quietly, shutting the door after him without a sound. before going home he would wander, apparently aimlessly, about the town, diving into alleys, coming suddenly round corners, exploring the quarter of the town known familiarly as devildom. during this week the pilferings hung fire. anxious housewives counted their garments on the line, storekeepers looked well to tills, locks and bolts, and slept with their pocketbooks under their pillows; but nothing happened, and it began to be whispered about that "the mean folks" had left town and gone elsewhere. toward the end of the week pippin made an excursion to a neighboring village on urgent representation from one of its inhabitants, "sharpened 'em up good," as he expressed it, all round, gave them a gospel concert, spent a happy day visiting round among the scattered farms, and started for home with a light heart and a pocketful of dimes. he had covered a good deal of ground, and became aware that he was distinctly "leg weary"; but green grass! he thought, what a dandy time he had had, and how good supper would taste! it was growing dusk as he drew near kingdom. there was the patch of woods that was full of violets a month ago. he wondered if there would be any still in bloom. mrs. baxter was ter'ble fond of violets (and yet they wa'n't her pattern, you'd think; pineys was more her kind), but if there _was_ any violets-- entering the cool shade of the wood path, he was pacing slowly along, glancing left and right for the "proud virgins of the year," when he heard a rustling among the bushes by the roadside. thought flashed back to that day--only a week ago, was it? it seemed a month--when those other bushes had rustled. for an instant he dreaded to see the pale, lovely, imploring face of the imbecile girl; then common sense returned. "she couldn't have got so far," was his first thought; "nor yet she wouldn't be wearin' pants!" his second. there was no time for a third. out from the shadow stepped two masked figures, one of them with a leveled pistol. "throw up your hands!" "that's what!" said pippin. the holder of the pistol--a slight, youthful-looking fellow, gave a triumphant laugh, and glanced over his shoulder at his companion. he laughed too soon. in the act of lifting his hands, pippin made two catlike steps forward, tripped, fell heavily against him, and the two came to the ground together. there was a brief struggle, the two rolling over and over, silent and breathless. when it ended pippin was sitting on his assailant's head, and it was he who held the pistol. thus seated, he put two fingers to his mouth and gave a shrill and piercing whistle in three notes: up, down, up. at sound of this, the second, who had been hovering in the background, took to his heels and fled as if for his life. "green grass!" said pippin. "that worked pretty, didn't it?" the person under him struggled and groaned. "like me to move a little ways?" said pippin, and moved down to his chest. "there! breathe easier that way, can't ye? well, what about it?" "lemme up!" cried the sufferer. "---- ---- you, lemme up!" pippin drew out his red handkerchief, and calmly stuffed it into the fellow's mouth. "just till you can speak pretty!" he said. "you're free to hold me up, if you know enough, which you don't, but i've no call to hear your language when i don't like it. that's square, ain't it?" presently he removed the handkerchief and tied the fellow's wrists with it in a workmanlike fashion. "there now, we can chin a spell; what say?" quitting his uneasy seat, he helped the other to his feet, and as he did so, twitched the mask from his face. then he whistled. it was a boy's face that scowled at him, angry and frightened. a boy of sixteen or seventeen, not bad-looking either-- "green grass!" said pippin under his breath. "i'll bet--" but he did not say what he would bet. instead, he bade the other, kindly, to see what a fool he had went and made of himself. it was easy to see he was new to the trade. the other guy was the old hand, eh, what? he judged so from the way he lifted his feet. lifted--his--feet--where had pippin seen feet lift like them, pounding that way? memory seemed to hover for an instant, but was gone before he could catch it. "and think of your tryin' it on one of your own trade!" said pippin comfortably. "me, that was old to the fancy when you was nussin' your bottle. that was hard luck, wasn't it? and yet--who knows? mebbe 'twas good luck, too!" "what--what you mean?" stammered the boy. "do you mean that you--" "well, i guess! brought up to it from a baby. ever hear of the honey boys of blankton? well, i'd like to know who was boss of the honey boys, if 'twasn't me. yes, sir! i could tell you stories--say we sit down a spell!" they sat. pippin told a few stories with apparent gusto. "now," he said, "let's hear what you have to tell, bo!" the boy, nothing loth, poured out a wild, foolish tale enough. how he was bred to farming, and despised it; how he meant to make his fortune and come back a rich man, and show them--yes, siree! he'd show them whether he was a lunkhead or not! how he met up with that feller over yonder hayin', and heard how things was done, and they went to kingdom. there wasn't much doin' there, so to-night reilly said he'd show him about road work, and let him try his hand. "but, honest, i don't believe he'd ha' done any better than i did!" cried the boy, his weak, handsome face aglow with admiration. "he wouldn't ha' stood up against you. say, you done that slick, mr.----i don't know what your name is!" "try moonlighter," said pippin--"moonlighter or jack-o'-lantern; i've answered to both names. as to your friend, you're well rid of him. if you ask me, he's a sneak and a skunk. he won't come back; i doubt if he stops this side of the city. what makes me think so? why, you heard me whistle?" "yes; what did it mean?" "cop's whistle: look out, there's crooks about. he didn't know i wasn't callin' my mate, did he? no, nor yet you don't know! but i like your looks, bo! you ain't a sneak, are you? you wouldn't give a pal away, if he was to show you a firstrate plant--what say?" the boy stammered protestations and assurances. "that's right! oh, you can tell from a guy's looks, when you're used to sizin' folks up. now if you really mean business--" pippin paused, drew out his file, whistled on it softly, winked and replaced it--"if you really mean business, bo--" he said. * * * * * when pippin entered kingdom town again, it was by a back way little frequented. he trod softly and warily, and at his heels trod his late assailant, now his slave and devotee. pippin would show red ruffi'n (thus he had named the lad) a place where he could rest safe and easy till next night. things wouldn't be ready till next night; he had a heap to do. red ruffi'n would see; this was a dandy place, where he'd be as safe as he would to home. just let him show him! go easy now! kingdom, neat, prosperous little town though it was, had its slum; a huddle of ramshackle cottages tumbling up and down a ragged hill. the cottages were in sad need of paint and shingles, their windows held more old hats than glass, the linen that flapped about them on sagging clotheslines did not look particularly clean. close by was the village dump, exhaling unsavory odors. by day this spot was haunted by frowsy children and slatternly women, grubbing about the edges of the dump for an orange that might be partly good, a box that would split up for kindling; but now all was quiet in devildom. the place was the scandal of kingdom housewives. pippin had usually avoided it, but now he led the way thither eagerly. skirting the edge of the dump, he came to a spot where a ledge cropped out, partly overhanging a tiny hollow. he had seen some children playing here once, and had noted the spot as a good hiding hole, thanking the lord that he never would need to hide, never no more, glory be! "there!" he said, and turned to his companion. "here you'll be safe as you would in your own bed. folks is scared of this place, think it's ha'nted; won't nobody come nigh, you see if there does." "is--is it?" asked the red ruffian, in a tone that might have sounded timorous had his character been less desperate. "is it what? ha'nted? i dunno. i never see anything here but once, and then i wasn't quite positive. somethin' white an' misty went past, sort o' groanin' to itself; i couldn't pass no judgment what it was. anyway, they say if you speak up to 'em, same as you would, they can't do a person no hurt. but say, ain't this a dandy hole? now you rest easy here, and i'll come to-morrow night and fetch you. here's some crackers: what say?" "it--it smells bad, don't it?" the boy was sniffing with evident disrelish. "yes!" pippin glowed enthusiastic. "don't it? real bad. that's another thing will keep folks away. oh, you'll be as snug as--what say? damp? no, it ain't! it's dry as a lime-burner's wig. gorry! i wish't i'd had a place like this, when i was--well, goodnight, red ruffi'n! pleasant dreams to ye! you've got the countersign?" "ye-es! 'blood is red!' are you--are you going, moonlighter?" "that's what! just wait till to-morrow night and you'll see stars! green grass! we'll--have us--a time!" his voice died away: the red ruffian tried to call him back, but failing, cowered down in his hiding hole and shivered. the next day it rained; a gentle, steady downpour that evidently meant business. mrs. baxter, with looks of dismay, called pippin's attention to the fact. pippin chuckled and said it was great. "but my land! that boy'll be all wet!" "you bet he will! wet through to his bones, i tell you!" pippin chuckled again. "might i trouble you for a morsel of the pork, mrs. baxter?" mrs. baxter passed the pork absently, stirred her coffee absently. presently: "what's he got for breakfast?" she asked. "crackers!" said pippin gleefully. "nice dry sody crackers; or mebbe they ain't quite so dry by now; _and_ a cigar!" "pippin!" mrs. baxter looked reproach. "yes, ma'am! nice long black cigar, the strongest i could find in the store. green grass! mr. baxter, where'd you s'pose ed nevins got them cigars? why, they'd knock a bullock stiff!" "my land! it'll make him _sick_!" cried mrs. baxter. "well, i guess! if there's a sicker boy in kingdom than what he'll be, i'm sorry for him!" pippin threw back his head and laughed gleefully, mr. baxter joining in with a deep rumble over his pork and beans. mrs. baxter's dark eyes flashed. "i'd like to know what _you_ find to laugh at, timothy baxter! i must say i think you're real unfeelin', both of you." she brushed the crumbs from her apron with hands that trembled. "that boy--and you _said_ he was motherless, pippin, i heard you--out in the rain all day, half starved, and then to make him sick--there! i think menfolks is just _mean_!" she rose from the table. as she turned away, pippin caught at the corner of her apron. "don't be mad with me, mis' baxter!" he pleaded. "well, i _am_!" mrs. baxter turned squarely upon him. "i am mad with both of you, and what's more, i'm disgusted. there!" "hold on, ma!" father baxter pushed his chair back and came to lay a calm hand on her shoulder. "now, ma, you behave! we agreed to let pippin run this show, didn't we? well, then, what i say is, _let_ him run it!" "but i never--" mrs. baxter began indignantly. "hold on, ma! pippin knows this kind of boy, and you don't, nor i don't, over 'n' above. he ain't calculatin' to give him a birthday party, with a frosted cake and seventeen candles and one to grow on; are you, pippin?" "you bet i ain't!" pippin was glowing with earnestness. "i'm goin' to give him--why, look at here, mis' baxter! when buster ate them green apples last week, what was't you give him? a portion of physic, wasn't it? i thought so! well, you physicked his stummick, 'cause he'd got things in it that didn't belong there; woman dear, i'm goin' to physic this boy's soul, and don't you forget it!" at the ring in his voice, the kindling light in his eyes, the good woman melted. the tears came into her eyes and her lips quivered. "that's right!" pippin was stroking her head now and talking as if to a little child. "you'll see, 'twill all come out nice as pie. and you got your part to do, you know, mis' baxter. you're goin' to have the best hot supper, and the warmest bed, and the dryest clothes that ever was, ready by the time we get through to-night. yes, ma'am! and mr. baxter, he's goin' to do his part--" "i am!" said the baker solemnly. "i don't know yet just what it'll be, but i'm goin' to do it all the same." "green grass!" cried pippin. "you _are_ dandy folks, no use talkin' 'bout it!" chapter x pippin looks for the grace of god all day long the rain fell, softly, steadily, without haste and without rest; all day long the red ruffian cowered in his hiding hole, cold, wet, hungry and miserable. the water trickled in streams down the rock behind him and gathered in pools about his feet. the dump near by steamed, and sent off noisome fumes. rats ran in and out of it; the ruffian was afraid of rats. what did the boy think of as he sat huddled under the partial shelter of the ledge, munching his sodden crackers? did he picture to himself the glories of successful crime, the riches won by skill and daring, the revels with other chosen spirits? no! he thought of cyrus poor farm. he saw the bright, cozy kitchen, the wide fireplace, the cheerful glowing of the stove. he saw the table spread with its homely, hearty fare: baked beans, done to a turn, with that dusky-gold crisp on the pork that none save aunt bailey could give; the potatoes roasted in their jackets; the brown bread--at thought of the brown bread the ruffian groaned aloud and passed the back of his hand across his eyes. the long day wore on. the slow hours chimed from the church beyond the hill. his one comfort was the thought of the cigar inside his shirt, dry and safe in its oiled paper. the matches were safe, too, in a tin box. he would wait till along towards dark, and then smoke. it would chirk him up good, and when moonlighter came to fetch him, he'd find him as gay--as gay--a strong shiver seized him, and his teeth chattered. wasn't it about time? it was growing dusk. at last, with wet, trembling fingers, he drew out his prize. sheltering it with his body from the pitiless rain, he struck a match and applied it to the cigar. the tiny flame spurted, clung, shrank to a spark, spurted again--the cigar was alight. * * * * * it was near midnight. the rain had ceased, and a dense white mist was rising from the drenched earth. a breeze came sighing through the branches of the trees, rustling the grasses round the hiding hole; it was answered by a low moan from the sodden figure that lay stretched in the hollow under the rock. it was his last moan, myron thought. death was coming; this white mist was his shroud. they would find him here--or maybe they would not. maybe his bones would whiten in this dismal spot, and years after, the traveler--hark! what was that? a sound, that was not wind or trees or grasses: a long, low, wailing cry. the wretched boy struggled up on one elbow and peered through the thick white curtain, then, with a smothered shriek, he scrambled to his hands and knees. something was there! something whiter than the mist; something that moved-- "help!" cried the red ruffian. "murder! help!" "hush!" said pippin. "hold your darned noise! _steel is sharp!_" "oh! oh, dear! oh--_blood is red_! is it you, moonlighter? why are you--why are you all in white?" "make folks think i was the ha'nt, bonehead! what'd you s'pose? cute trick, i thought!" pippin stepped down into the hollow and threw off the sheet that covered him. "well, how are you, young feller?" he asked cheerfully. "i'm dyin'!" said the boy feebly. "tell the folks i--" "oh, shucks! here, set up--so! it's stopped rainin'. my! you are wet, ain't you? feelin' sick? i expect that cigar _was_ a mite--_here!_ lean up against the ledge here, and take a drink!" reader, have you ever tasted spice-draught? its basic principle is peppermint. to this is added cinnamon, cloves, cassia, and a liberal dash of cayenne pepper. "temp'rance toddy," i have heard it called, but there is nothing temperate about it. "s'archin'" is the adjective pippin used. "take a good swig!" he urged, putting the bottle to the boy's lips. "it's hot stuff, i tell ye!" the boy drank; next moment he was on his feet, coughing, dancing round, and holding his throat. a howl of anguish broke from him, but pippin checked it with a hand over his mouth. "easy, boy, easy! 'twill het you up good; nothin' like it, mis'--that is, they claim. don't you feel it livenin' of you up? that's hearty! now you'll find your legs. lean against me if you're wobbly still. time we was on our job! foller, red ruffi'n!" as they went along, pippin explained the nature of the job. a soft snap, just the thing for a green hand. nice, quiet folks, sound sleepers, old-fashioned lock--pick it with one hand while you eat your dinner with the other. honest, if he didn't feel that red ruffi'n _needed_ a soft snap, he wouldn't hardly have had the heart to ease them, they _was_ such nice folks. been real good to him, too, and would be to any one come nigh 'em, but red ruffi'n was his pal, and pals were bound to see each other through. "s'pose--s'pose we was pinched!" said red ruffi'n, stumbling along over the plashy ground. "what would--" "shoreham!" pippin gave a lively sketch of the place; the red ruffian shuddered and coughed. "moonlighter," he said, after a pause; "i hadn't ought to get you into this. i--i ain't feelin' well, either; s'pose we--what say?" pippin took his arm with a grip as firm as it was quiet. "testin' me, are ye?" he laughed. "tryin' to see if i'd crawl--what? there's no crawl in me, not an inch! just wait till we get in where it's warm and dry, and you'll see things different: not but i know you was only foolin'. crawl _now_, when everything's all ready? gee! i would be a softy, wouldn't i? here's the gully! now you go first and i'll foller and keep watch behind; stop when you hear me peep like a chicken!" with faltering steps the unhappy ruffian crept along the gully, keeping well in the shadow, starting at every stray cat, every scrap of wind-whisked paper. pippin, stepping lightly and softly a few yards behind, whistled noiselessly, and pursued an imaginary conversation with mrs. baxter. "just you trust me, mis' baxter, and you'll see. why, you don't think i'd take all this trouble, and _give_ all this trouble, if i weren't certain sure that i was right? 'he leadeth me,' you know, ma'am, and the lord is sure leadin' me this time. there's no harm will come of it, but only good, if i'm not a bonehead from bonetown. now see--" he peeped low, like a day-old chicken; the slinking figure in advance stopped. it was, as pippin had said, an easy lock to pick. a stout hairpin of mrs. baxter's did the trick; a nice tool, pippin pronounced it gravely. the door swung open, revealing blackness. the red ruffian, shrinking back, found himself gently but firmly propelled forward; he stumbled over the threshold and the door closed noiselessly behind him. "this way!" pippin guided him through a passage, over another threshold. "here we be!" closing another door, pippin produced a match, lighted a bit of candle. "the bakery!" he whispered. "the money is in here! hush! take your shoes off; one of 'em squeaks." the flickering light shone on the white tiles, the glittering enamel, the black doors of the ovens; the further corners of the room were in deep shadow. "did it squeak loud? do you think--do you think any one heard? hark! what was that?" "nothin'! mouse, mebbe! now look! the cash is in that box, see? under the table there; make it out? now, red ruffi'n, this is your job, and you are goin' to have the credit of it. i'll hold the light; you reach down and get the box--" mr. baxter had felt all along that when the time came, he would know what to do. a calm man, he had followed pippin's instructions implicitly, had now stood patiently for an hour in his dark corner, leaning on his "peel," the long broad-bladed, paddle-like implement which bore the loaves to and from the oven. mrs. baxter, in the shop, might palpitate and wring her hands and moan, only restrained by thoughts of buster slumbering above; mr. baxter awaited his moment, and it came. by the flickering candlelight, he saw a cringing, trembling figure creep forward, and bend over, displaying to his view a broad expanse of trouser. to the father of buster, that expanse suggested but one thing in the world. raising the peel, he brought it down with a resounding thwack which sent the boy flat on his face under the table and brought mrs. baxter shrieking from the shop. "elegant!" said pippin. "mr. baxter, sir, that was simply elegant!" * * * * * an hour later the red ruffian, full, dry, and warm, a plaster over his injured nose, lay in pippin's bed; and pippin ("as per contract with the elder," he told himself, "lettin' alone its bein' right and fittin' so to do") sat on the edge of the bed and looked for the grace of god. he began by explaining his plot in full: how he had been at the poor farm, heard mr. bailey's story, and promised to find the boy if he could; how the lord had come into it and played right into his hand; how the excellent baker and his wife had agreed to help; how everything had went smooth as greased lightnin'--he never see anything work out neater and prettier. "here! take another drink of the lemonade! 'tis some different from spice-draught. gee, wasn't that something fierce! i expect it kep' you from pneumony, though!" pippin held the lemonade to the boy's lips, and patted the pillows tenderly, as a woman might. meeting his eyes, dark with shame, misery, and reproach, he beamed on him benevolently. "there!" he said. "i know how you feel. look at it one way, 'twas a mean trick i played you, a mean, low-down trick. i ask your pardon for that! but look at here! i had to stop you, hadn't i? i'd passed my word, and, too, the lord bid me. no gettin' away from that. well, now, if i'd sat down there in the wood road that day, talked to you real fatherly and pious, told you thus and so, and asked wouldn't you be a good boy and go back to the farm and hoe potatoes--" the boy made a restless motion. pippin laid a quiet hand on his arm. "rest easy! i'll come to that presently! if i'd have done that, would you have listened to me? not you! you'd ha' laughed at me for a gospel shark, and you'd have up and gone after that mean skunk (you notice he never turned round to look what become of you?) fast as you could pick up your heels. then what? say you'd caught up with him and gone on to the next town, and started in breakin' and enterin'! well, what say? why, then you'd ben pinched and run in. yes siree bob! you never was built for a crook, my lad; you're too slow, and you're too--call it clumpsy. you've no quicksilver in your toes, nor yet in your fingers. you'd ben run in, and then you'd gone to shoreham. first offense, they might let you off with six months--more likely a year, but _say_ six months! for six months, then, you'd worked as you never worked before in your little life, alongside of men--well--the lord made 'em, amen!--only they ain't the kind you're used to. what i would say, there's no _ro_mance about shoreham, not a mite, and don't you forget it! (say, ain't this a dandy bed? i betcher! and all ready for the man that comes after me. we'll come to that bumby, too.) and if you try to hook it, or misbehave anyways, you get put in solitary. know what that means? it means four walls with nothin' on 'em except the bricks, walls four feet apart one way and seven the other, and a grated door between you and anything else. it means twenty-four hours every day and each of 'em half of the whole, seems though! no! you can't understand, 'cause you haven't ben there. it means no word spoke or heard excep' when your victuals is passed in, and mighty few then, and what there is is no special pleasure to hear. now, bo, that is what i've ben through, and that is what i've saved you from. now what about it? did i do right, or did i do wrong?" "right!" faltered the boy. "oh, moonlighter--" "hold on! forget that! my name's pippin, and that's what you call me from now on. i had to _show_ you what i used to be, or you'd never have listened to me; _now_, i'm an honest man, and there's nobody i can't look in the face. pippin's my name, and straight is my natur'. praise the lord! amen! well, sir, that is what i done. now the question is, what next? and here comes in mr. and mrs. baxter. well, those folks are as good as they make 'em; they're as good as your uncle and aunt bailey, and more is not to be said. they know all about me, and all about you. i'm leavin' 'em in a day or two, for good; and gorry, what do you think them two bakin' angels is ready to do? they stand ready to take you and make a baker of you. now--rest easy! i got to get it all off my chest! bakin' is as nice a trade, as _pretty_ an all-round trade, as a man can ask for in this world. if i hadn't other things i'd undertaken to do--well, never mind that! here you can stay, if you're a mind to, and if you feel like you've had your bellyful of breakin' and enterin', and like that; work in daylight and sunlight and free air, and eat choice food, and hear kind, decent, pleasant language and never anything else. that's what you've ben used to all your life, you'll say; yes, but there's more to it. here you are in a town, and folks all round you, boys of your own age, nice clean fellers like you--you needn't winch! the dirt ain't grimed into you yet; 'twill wash off, you see!--boys to chin with, and play baseball with, and football; girls too, nice, pretty, refined young ladies, comin' in to buy creamcakes, and--green grass! i certingly shall miss those young ladies!--and--go to singin' school evenin's, and church meetin', and like that, and--well, that, sir, is what we offer, against the life of a crook. you balance them two in your mind, and think it over a bit!" he made a motion with his hand, and turning his face away, was about to take counsel with himself, when the boy spoke hastily. "mr. pippin," he said, "i--no need to think it over! i thank you a thousand times. i'm a fool, but i didn't know it before. now i see it clear, and i thank you--i--i can't say what i feel, but i do sure feel it. i'd stay here glad and thankful, and i'd do my best, sir, honestly i would, and try to make good; but--but--" "well?" pippin's eyes were very bright, he bent forward eagerly. "well, youngster? what stands in the way?" "aunt and uncle!" broke forth the boy. "i've been mean--mean as dirt, and they so good to me. if they'll let me, and if mr. baxter can wait, say a week, i'll come back more thankful than i've words to say; but first i must go home--and--" a thwack upon his shoulders, almost as loud as that of the peel an hour before, sent him half out of bed. looking up in terror, he saw pippin standing over him with shining eyes and outstretched hand. "shake!" he said simply. "i've found what i was lookin' for. let us praise the lord!" chapter xi the chaplain reads his mail the chaplain was sorting his morning mail. he did it deftly and quickly, opening (with a thin-bladed paper knife; no ripping or tearing with hasty fingers), glancing over, destroying, filing, or laying in the "answer immediately" pile. all this with his swift, careful fingers and half of his careful mind; the other half was busy over problems. problems of tom, of dick, of harry; problems mental, moral, physical. if he could only keep them apart, how much simpler it would be! but the three _would_ run together, act and react one upon the other. one of his trusties was "wobbling," the guard told him; growing surly, careless, shirking his work here and there, getting up steam, wilson the guard opined; liable to turn ugly any minute. what had happened? well, he thought his egg had been smaller than the rest, last egg day; he'd been chewing the rag ever since. the chaplain sighed. what children they were! he ran his eyes over a letter. it was from a prisoner's wife, begging to know how nate was. she had been sick; would chaplain please tell nate that was why she couldn't come last tuesday? (tuesday was visitors' day.) the children was smart. joe and susy was at school, but benny had no shoes till she got her pay from the factory; she was working extra time to try and have something left over from the rent. they would get along all right till he, nate, was out, and he could get a place right off in the mill, she guessed. the chaplain sighed again, and laid the note on the growing pile of "answer immediately." poor susan! she worked so hard, and was so hopeful! she always thought the last spree would remain the last; better so! he shook his head, seeing nate's weak, comely face, sodden with drink. poor susan! poor women! god help them all! he opened another letter, and learned that "yrs. respect'ly, wm. billiam," hadn't got no work yet; no wun appeared to want him though he show them the note, sir and sum sed when they was a plaice he shood have it and a nother man sed there wos not work enuf for strate men and he gessed crooks wood haf to wate till the pigs begin to fly "but i ramember wot you sed chapple in and i will keep strate sir you betcher life excusin bad writin'." this letter, written all downhill with no sign of punctuation, smudged and smeared by a not too clean shirtsleeve, might have brought a smile to some faces, but the chaplain's face was grave enough. the endless problem, the riddle without an answer. not work enough for the honest men; yet if the discharged criminal cannot get work, how to prevent him from relapsing into crime? who can blame him? he goes out with his little newborn resolve, a feeble, tottering thing, and tries for honest work. he has learned a trade behind the bars, perhaps; he can make brooms and mats, weave rough baskets, cobble shoes. he finds a dozen applicants before him. questions are asked: where has he worked? what references can he give? if he tells the truth, seven employers out of ten shake their heads. if he lies, he is found out after a time and the result is the same; he is "bounced." who can blame the boss? who can blame the man if--round and round, over and over! no royal road anywhere. nothing to do but keep on trying. the chaplain raised his head, and the fighting look came into his eyes. keep on! never say die! the scroll--his eyes fell on the letter with its forlorn smudges; that one looked as if a tear had fallen and been wiped off with a grimy hand--the scroll was growing clearer; slowly, yes, but steadily. you had only to look back twenty years, ten years, five! line upon line, precept upon precept; here a little and there a little-- "aha!" the word was spoken aloud, in a tone of pleased surprise. "pippin, i verily believe!" said the chaplain. he studied the superscription a moment. how he had labored over those upstrokes! it was a good hand now, though the scamp would never be a professor of calligraphy. then he opened the envelope and read as follows: dear friend elder hadley respected sir, this is to state that i am first rate and hoping the same in regard to yourself and all friends there. well elder i am having a bully time right straight along. i am still to kingdom in the bakery and grindin same as i last wrote but dont think i shall stop much longer, though i like first-rate and if i felt the lord intended bakin for mine there's no dandier place, no sir nor one where i'd feel more at home. if they was my own folks they couldn't be kinder to me than what mr. and mrs. baxter is. but i have fixed them all right with a nice boy will step right along and make an a baker if he has his health which appears rugged up to the present and he likes real well and so do they. well elder you said to tell you when i found a leadin; well sir i have, and it seems to squint like the lord was showin me his hand. i found a dandy place sir, the dandyest you ever see and folks ekally so, and plenty of room; and savin this boy like, or the lord savin him through me is what i would say, made me feel elder i wanted to do _sompin for the boys_. yes sir when i see that dandy place and only a few old folks that pooty soon their time would be up i thought fill that nice big house up with boys and learn em farmin and gardenin and like that, why twould be _great_ elder. take kids like i was with no folks of their own or bum ones which is worse; what i mean take em away from the city and give em hens to take care of and feed the pigs and learn ploughin and sowin and like that and live out doors with a good house to come in nights and good food and some person that knows boys and _feels for_ em and knows what some of em has ben through, i think it would be great sir dont you. i tell you elder there's guys in there, and lifers some of 'em, if they'd ben handled different when they was kids they'd _stayed_ different yes sir they would and you said the same often. now what i mean is when i've got this present job done and found that kid im going to follow this lead, because i feel elder the lord is leadin me yes sir he sure is. i opened the lids of the testament you give me and looked and first thing i see was "this should ye have done and not to leave the other undone." now wouldn't that give you a pain and so it did me and i said lo here was i like samuel and i am elder so help me. mr. bailey would like it firstrate but he thinks twould take time i tell him i want to start right in soon as i have this job done. i am leavin tomorrow so no more from yours in the lord and thanking you kindly elder i am sure for all you done. yours resp'y. pippin. the chaplain read this effusion through twice, a thoughtful frown knitting his brow, a smile curling the corners of his mouth. he tilted his chair back against the wall, and looked out of the window. pippin had been much in his mind since their parting two months before. this was the second letter he had received from him. the first had been written within a week of pippin's leaving shoreham, and told of his finding nipper crewe dying by the roadside, and of the wheel that he considered rightly his. that was a singular meeting, the chaplain thought. the old sinner, full of evil deeds and memories, suspected of many crimes large and small, yet so crafty withal and so passionately bent on keeping out of prison that for the most part he had succeeded. the chaplain shook his head, recalling one inmate and another, who, shaking an impotent fist, choking with rage, had told how after the "deal" for which he was "pinched," nipper, the instigator of it, had slipped quietly off under the very noses of the police. while his mate and dupe was there, raging and choking, nipper would be roaming the country at large with his wheel, grinding more or less, observing a great deal, planning the next neat little job. yes, nipper was a bad one! and strange to think of pippin's being chosen to comfort the old sinner in his last hour and inherit the wheel that had been an innocent _particeps criminis_ in so many "deals"! well, pippin could comfort him if anyone could, thought the chaplain. still looking out of the window, he let his thoughts run back to the day--could it be two years ago? it seemed hardly more than as many months--when he first saw pippin. his first sunday as prison chaplain! he had accepted the call because it seemed right; a new hand seemed needed--his thoughts ran off the track, as other visions came crowding in; he brought them back with an effort. he felt anew, with almost the same shock of strangeness, the first impression of seeing his new flock in chapel that day. the rows on rows of faces, sharp or lowering, weak or silly or vacant, degenerate or sodden, a few that were actually vicious--they were seldom _really_ vicious, his poor boys. suddenly a head lifted, and he saw the face as of a strayed seraph; then presently heard the voice, as of the same seraph at home, singing. the chaplain broke into a little laugh. let the bright seraphim in burning row-- that line came insistently to his mind whenever he heard pippin sing; yet he knew perfectly well that milton's seraphim were not singing, but blowing their loud uplifted angel trumpets. perhaps--perhaps voices and trumpets were more alike there?--anyhow, pippin's voice had a trumpet note in certain hymns that he specially loved. the process of pippin's conversion--to call it that; the chaplain sought for a better word, rejecting in turn a dozen or more--had been the happiest episode of the two years. plenty of good and cheerful and hopeful things, but that--what _had_ it been like? chipping off the baked ashes--in herculaneum, say--and coming upon the lucid marble of some perfect statue? no! a statue was after all a statue, and could give back no warmth. mining, then, in dark and cold and foul air--poor boys! there was so much good in the worst of them, though!--and finding a vein of virgin gold--no! gold was nothing but gold, after all. what--ah! here it was! fumbling with the keys of an organ in the dark, feeling about, waking here a mutter, there a discord, there again a shriek--till suddenly one struck the true chord and the music broke out like sunlight--or wasn't it after all just that, just sunlight, breaking from a cloud-- "come in!" the chair was brought hastily to its normal position. a guard touched his cap in the doorway. "beg pardon, sir, but french bill has broke loose. keeper said you was to be told--" the chaplain was on his feet in an instant. "what has happened? tell me as we go along!" "fell foul of tom packard with his bucket, and mauled him consid'able. i've been lookin' for it these two days. tom was waitin' at his table, and bill thought he give him a small egg o' purpose." "dear me, sirs! who is with him now?" the guard chuckled. "there's no one _with_ him! anybody wouldn't be very comf'table there just now. jones is handy by, lookin' after him. you can hear him now!" they could. a muffled roar, rising now and then into a bellow. as they drew nearer, the roar became articulate, and resolved itself into a sustained and passionate request for the blood, liver, and other vital adjuncts of thomas packard. "lemmegetaholdofhim--lemmegetaholdofhim!" coming down b corridor the clamor was deafening, echoed back from side to side of the narrow passage; accompanied moreover by banging of fists, kicking of feet against iron bars. the chaplain sighed and longed for pippin. nobody could manage bill like pippin. he usually knocked him down and sat on his chest singing "onward, christian soldiers!" till the fit was over. there wasn't a mite of harm in bill, pippin always maintained, only he was nervous, and come to get worked up, he b'iled right over. the other inmates of b corridor were listening to the uproar, some laughing, others sympathizing with bill or tom, as the case might be. opposite the grated door of the cell a turnkey leaned against the wall, a stolid, unmoved figure. "here comes chaplain!" the murmur ran from cell to cell; and every face was pressed eagerly against the grating. "here's chaplain! chaplain'll sort him!" bill himself seemed wholly unconscious of mr. hadley's approach. he was a french canadian, a slender, active fellow. in repose, his face was gentle and rather pensive; now it was the face of a mad wildcat. shaking the bars with all his strength, he continued to pour out in a monotonous roar his request for the vital organs, amply detailed and characterized, of "tompack_ard_!" the chaplain surveyed him quietly for a few minutes in silence; then drew a small square phial from his pocket, and unscrewing the metal top, held it between the bars to the man's nose. with a howl of twenty-wildcat power the fellow let go the bars and staggered backward. instantly hadley unlocked the door and stepped inside, closing it quickly after him. "now then, bill," he said quietly, "what's all this row?" shaking and glaring, the man cowered in the farthest corner, rubbing his nose, clutching his throat. "w'at you kill me for?" he muttered hoarsely. "w'at you kill me for, _mon père_? i do you no harm!" "i haven't killed you. sit down, bill. you've been making a horrid row, do you know it? and you've kicked the toe right out of your boot. now look at that! those boots were new last month. you'll have to put a new toe cap over that, or the warden will have you up for untidiness." he bent to examine the toe. "that's too bad! those new boots!" "i mend heem!" bill bent eagerly beside him. "i mend heem good, _mon père_! warden nevaire see; i mak heem better as new." "well, see you do! and while you're about it, i wish you would look over my shoes, the pair you resoled for me, and see if you can't take the squeak out of them. it doesn't do for the chaplain to go round with squeaking boots, you know; he might disturb quiet fellows like you. by the way, what was your row about, bill? i heard you had been pitching into tom packard." they had sat down on the bed, the better to examine the injured toe cap. bill looked up with a shrug, half ashamed, half sulky, wholly gallic. "he been treatin' me mean, long time, two t'ree days. he geeve me de smalles' egg he can find for my breakfast; leetle, leetle, like pigeon's egg." "well, i got a bad egg the other day; halfway to a chicken it was; but i didn't break the cook's head, as i understand you broke poor tom's." "yes! yes! i break hees head; i kill heem if i could. yes, sir!" "and now you're ashamed, eh? you know you are, bill, you may as well own up." after some argument, bill owned that he was ashamed and promised amendment. "then that's all right!" the chaplain rose with an air of relief. "i'll speak a word to father o'neill, and he'll give you a nice little penance, and you'll make it up with tom. i'm going to see him now, and i shall tell him you are sorry--yes, i shall, because you are, you know, sorry and ashamed. but remember!" he drew out the square green phial and held it up. "the next time you'll get it stronger!" the man recoiled in terror, clasping his hands over his nose. "_non! non, mon père!_ not kill me again! w'at ees eet? w'at you call eet?" "aromatic spirits of ammonia." the chaplain eyed the bottle gravely, shook his head, and put it back into his pocket. "no joke, is it, bill! well, good-by, old sport. remember!" chapter xii nipper a wealthy young squire of plymouth, we hear, he courted a nobleman's daughter so dear, and for to be married it was their intent, all friends and relations had given their consent. so sang pippin, on a july morning when all the world was singing too. bobolinks hovering, trilling, lighting, half mad with glee; catbirds giving grand opera in the willows; thrushes quiring psalms in the birches. pippin stopped short as a dignified robin with the waistcoat of an alderman perched on a blackberry vine at his elbow and poured out a flood of liquid melody. "like out of a jug!" said pippin. "how d'you s'pose he does it? gorry to 'liza, how _do_ you s'pose he does it! "a day was appointed to be the wedding day, a young farmer was chosen to give her away; but soon as the lady this farmer did spy, she cried in her heart, "oh, my heart!" she did cry. "rest easy a spell, nipper, and i'll rest too, and listen how he does that." nipper was the wheel. setting it on the ground, pippin sat down under a wide-branching oak and listened while the robin, like a certain wise thrush we know of, sang his song twice over, carefully and thoroughly. pippin, his head cocked much as the singer's was, noted each cadence, and when the music ceased, repeated it in a clear, mellow whistle. robin, much intrigued, sang a third time, and a fourth, cocked his head still further and listened critically. pippin replied more correctly than before; so it might have gone on indefinitely, but for an inquisitive crow who came bustling down to see what it was all about. robin flew away scornfully, repudiating intercourse with crows; pippin flirted his handkerchief and told the intruder to be off with himself for an old black juggins. leaning against the oak bole, at peace with all mankind, pippin listened and looked, looked and listened. presently he became aware of an undertone of sound which made so perfect an accompaniment to the bird concert that he had not at first distinguished it. in the fringe of weeds beside the road a brook was murmuring over pebbles, gently, persistently, wooingly. the july sun was hot; he had been walking since sunrise. "i'll have me a wash!" quoth pippin. "i'll have me a drink, and i'll have me a wash, and then i'll be clean as a whistle, by--" he stopped abruptly: he had promised mrs. baxter not to say "gosh"; it wasn't an expression she cared to hear him use, not real nice someways. "and nipper shall have a bath too!" he said gleefully. "nip, all the bath you've had these two days is squatterin' in the dust like a hen. i'll show you; just you wait!" carrying the wheel, he plunged into the green covert; the trees closed behind him. "green grass!" said pippin. there was grass, certainly, long rank grass, such as leans over in graceful curves and dips into brooks. there were sweet rushes too, and jewel weed, and cardinal flowers, which pippin viewed with respectful admiration, asking, now honestly did you ever? flowing between these lovely things, taking them quite as a matter of course, was the brook, clear and brown--something like pippin's eyes, i declare!--babbling over mossy stones, with here a fairy cataract all cream and silver, there a round pool where pippin might have found a trout, if he had known enough. but he did not know enough, knew in fact nothing whatever about trout; they are not found in cellars, nor in any part of a slum. kneeling on a flat stone, he drank long draughts of delight, now from his cupped palms, now in sheer boyish glee, putting his mouth to the bubbling silver, letting it splash and tinkle over his face. no thought of germs disturbed his joy; he knew no more of germs than of trout. next he pulled off his shirt, pulled out his file and bestowed it safely in a pocket, and producing a bit of soap, fell to splashing about at a tremendous rate, sending trout, lucky bugs, germs and all helter-skelter off in a fright. a sculptor, watching pippin at his ablutions, would have wondered how the child of the slums should have developed such muscles as rippled under his brown satin skin. pippin could have told him. dod bashford kept his boys lithe and active as young eels; if they didn't move quick, the rawhide curled about their backs and legs in good shape, pippin could tell the sculptor. sometimes the vision would come back even now: boys fighting in a cellar or in the reeking court outside, rolling over and over on the ground, pommelling, kicking, scratching, biting--there were no sporting rules in bashford's gang. the big brute would stand watching the little ones with an occasional "go it, pup!" till he was tired or bored, when "hook it!" followed by the hiss and sting of the rawhide, sent them apart, bleeding, cursing, often weeping with sheer rage and unsated lust of battle. gee! remember that fight he had with nosey, last winter he was with bashford? slim, long-legged, snaky kind of guy, nosey was. some like a fox; some like a rat, too, a sandy rat: sharp p'inted nose on him. gee! pippin gave him a good one on that p'inted nose. gee! he didn't guess it had p'inted so straight since! far enough from bashford's, here in the green thicket, pippin splashed to his heart's content: at last, dripping and joyous, he rose and shook himself like a water-dog, spattering the leaves and rushes with crystal drops. "green grass!" he sighed, "that was great!" next he washed his red handkerchief and his "other" pair of socks, and hung them on a bush to dry; filed a callous on the sole of his foot that had made him walk "pumple-footed" the last day or two; ran his fingers through and through his hair till it curled like that of the borghese hermes. "now it's nipper's turn; come on, nip!" he had grown fond of the wheel. it was a faithful creature, following obediently whither he would, whizzing cheerfully, singing, pippin made no doubt, the only song was give it to sing. this last day or two, though, it had developed a squeak and rattle that was new to him; behooved him look her over and see what was loose. having wiped the dust off and oiled the whole apparatus, he proceeded to examine it carefully, inch by inch. he had done this many times before; had in fact kept the little machine in apple-pie order, partly for its own sake and his, partly as in duty bound to the departed nipper. old nipper! he had been a rip, pippin reflected, same as old man blossom; but yet he sure had done him a good turn leaving him the wheel. now--here was a thing had oftentimes puzzled him of late--what did old man blossom know about nipper? they might have been pals, he presumed likely; birds of a feather, you know! well, yes, that; but old man seemed to have some hunch about the wheel; laffed fitterbust, and said them things, you rec'lect. pippin had studied 'em over and studied 'em over, but he didn't get no-- a clock strikes when it is ready, not before. pippin's clock struck now. something he had never yet touched, or never in the right way, moved under his hand. a click, and the metal plate bearing the maker's name slid aside, revealing a long narrow cavity. who could have guessed such a possibility in the compact little contrivance? with a smothered "gee!" pippin peered eagerly into the hole or box, thrust in his hand, and brought out a small object. he turned it over and over in his hand, still muttering suppressed "gee's!" opened it, and sat staring, motionless. a leather case containing a set of small tools. nothing strange about that, pippin, is there? very ingenious to pack in this little space the tools needed for his trade! clever nipper! why do you stare so, pippin, and why does your face flush under its wholesome tan? his eyes riveted to the tools, pippin sank down on the grass. he handled them, one by one, and a bright spark came into his eye. "green grass!" he muttered. "now wouldn't that--" if you or i had looked over his shoulder, we should have seen at once that some of these were unfamiliar tools. a screw driver--yes! a pair of nippers--yes! a file--yes! but what were these three little shining objects which pippin was fitting together with eager, trembling fingers? now they are joined and make a slender bar of solid steel, one end flattened to a sharp edge. that is a jimmy, and pippin is looking with shining eyes at a miniature but perfect set of burglar's tools. "now wouldn't that--" said pippin. sitting back on his heels, he took the tools out one by one and examined them carefully, handling them like a lover, whistling meantime, slowly and thoughtfully, the air devoted to the aged steeple-climber. he ran his eye along their edges; he rang them on a stone to test their perfection. "_com_-plete!" he muttered. "these certingly are a complete outfit. now i ask you honest, would--not--that--give you a pain in your--" pippin confused the human interior with the gallinaceous. how should he know that we have no gizzard? "old nipper!" he continued. "only to think of the slickness of him! went round with his wheel, innocent appearin' as you please, and when he saw a likely crib, he'd up and crack it with these little daisies, just as easy--" he stopped abruptly, as a light broke in upon him. _this_ was what old man blossom meant. this was why he laffed and 'most had a pupplectic fit; and no wonder! here was he, pippin, singing and praying, and all the time taking a cracksman's kit along with him wherever he went! no wonder the old rip laughed! now question was, what to do with 'em? what say? no one was near; he was alone in the green murmuring place; yet some one did certainly seem to be speaking. pippin cocked his ear to listen. a shame to destroy good tools, pretty set like this, prettiest he ever saw or like to see? might come in handy for any kind of work--even the jimmy? any one might want to use a bar--farmin' like, or-- the strong brown fingers seemed to close of themselves, without will of his, round the tools, fondling them. something like quicksilver ran crinkling through him-- "now honest!" said pippin. "just watch me, will you?" a flash in the sunlight where it broke through the leafy screen; a silver splash--the lucky bugs scattered in terror, and a solemn bullfrog tumbled headfirst off the stone from which he had been watching. another flash and splash, and now a whole shower of them. sang pippin: "there was an old man, and he was mad, and he ran up the steeple. he took off his great big hat, and waved it over the people!" later, he sat under the wayside oak and communed with himself. how did he account for that? he asked. honest, now, wouldn't it gave you a pain? here he was, the lord's boy, a professin' christian, belongin' to every church they was, he expected, startin' out all so gay to do the lord's work, and him knowledgeable to it, and helpin' along; and then all in a minute some part of him--something he couldn't get a holt of--give a jump, and _wanted_ them things, wanted 'em like--gorry to 'liza! you couldn't have no idea _how_ he wanted 'em! and yet 'twasn't him, neither: all the time he was lookin' on, you might say, struck all of a heap. now how would you make that out? honest, how would you? after some thought, pippin expected that it was the devil. he was always round, you know, like a roarin' line, seekin' whom he could devour 'em up. behooved him keep a sharp lookout! _but_, said another part of his brain, ekally the lord was round, and more so, let him bear in mind. the lord was mindful of his own; elder hadley had wrote that in the testament and psalms he give him, and 'twas _so_; and the lord was stronger than the devil, never let pippin have no doubts about that. "you bet he is!" up went pippin's head; he smote his knee with a resounding smack. "you bet he is! satan, you beat it while your shoes are new! i've got no more use for you, and don't you forget it!" chapter xiii enter mary-in-the-kitchen in a certain pleasant suburb--yes, the city has pleasant suburbs, though when you are in the slums you do not believe it--stands a white house with green blinds. it stands in the middle of a square yard (by which i mean an inclosure, not a measure of space); its front looks on a pleasant street, with a sidewalk, and sentinel maples set at regular intervals; the back gives, as the french say, on a road that is not yet paved, with neither sidewalk nor maples, only a straggling procession of elms, with grass or dust, as may happen, under foot. yet it is more sympathetic, some people think, than the proper street, and mary-in-the-kitchen, whose windows both above and below stairs look out upon it, privately thinks she has the best part of the house. so thinks the visitor in the back corner room, too; but we have not come to him yet. mary-in-the-kitchen is not in it just now. she is in the yard, hanging out the clothes, for all the world like the maid in the nursery song. she is standing on a raised platform; her face is toward the house, her back toward the road. so standing, with her arms raised, pinning linen along a line, mary is such a picture that you really must stop and look at her. she is neither tall nor short, but just the right height, and her blue cotton gown takes the lines and curves of as pretty a figure as ever sculptor sighed for. her forehead is broad and smooth, and her hair ripples round it as if for pure pleasure. her brows are black and straight, her lashes black and curled, and her eyes violet blue with brown shadows; you may see the color in clear water when the wind ruffles it. a short straight nose, a chin like mary donnelly's, "very neat and pert, and smooth as a china cup," a mouth with kisses tucked in at the corners: all these things mary has, and her hair beside. hair too dark for gold, too bright for brown; rather like october oak leaves when the sun shines through them at a certain angle--but you must know the right kind of oak. well, then, like a red heifer, a yearling, when her coat is new and glossy in the spring. there is so much of it that mary hardly knows what to do with it; being a very tidy girl, she has it well braided and pinned in shining coils at the back of her head, but little tendrils will escape and curl round her face just because they cannot keep away; and on the nape of her neck are two little curls that know themselves for the prettiest in the world. if you asked mary what she was, she would reply promptly, "a scientific general." by this she would not mean that she was prepared to conduct warfare on approved modern principles; not at all. she means that she has taken courses in general housework at a certain institute; and that she is able to do (and does) the work of two "domestics" of yesterday's class, with ease and precision. it stands to reason--mary's favorite phrase--that she would. knowing not only how but why a thing should be done, you know what came next, and there you were, all ready. so mary was the joy and comfort of her employers ("the nicest folks in the world!") and the distraction of all the youthful tradesmen of the suburbs. and here i am still keeping her standing on that platform with her arms uplifted, pinning the tablecloth on the line. scientific generals do not wash clothes nowadays, nor any other generals for that matter, but this was the employeress's best tablecloth, and mary knew the stuff the laundry put in, and see beautiful linen destroyed was a thing she could not; it stood to reason. the intelligent reader knows why i am keeping her there; i do not even attempt to deceive him. yes, pippin is coming round the corner this moment. here he is, wheel and all; high time, too, says the intelligent reader. he is walking slowly, not looking round him, as is his wont, with quick, darting glances, but with intent look fixed on the ground a little way ahead, as if he were searching for something; as indeed he is. pippin is very busy this morning. he has just established ten or twenty boys (he is not sure which) in cyrus poor farm, and he is now looking for the right kind of guy to teach them the use of their hands. he has never heard of manual training--bashford taught it in a way, but it was called by other names--but there were several guys in there (remember that this meant shoreham) that would have made first-rate mechanics, give 'em the chance. now take 'em young, and--why--why-- at this point fate tapped pippin smartly on the shoulder. he looked up, and saw mary on the platform, with her back to him, pinning out the tablecloth. cyrus poor farm vanished, boys and all! "green grass!" said pippin. he stopped short, and silently bade himself see if there wasn't some pictur to look at. he joyfully absorbed mary, from head to trim feet and back again, his eyes resting finally on the nape of her neck where the two little curls were displaying themselves, and on the heavy coils of shining hair. now _there_ was a color! 'twas the color of a hoss chestnut--no! lighter than that. a bay hoss, then--bright bay, kind o' squintin' toward sorrel; no! lighter than that. green grass! 'twas like a heifer, a yearlin' heifer. now--pippin smote his thigh lightly--that was the very color old man blossom named in regards to his little gal. now would you call that a reminder, p'inter like, fear he should forget? or was it showin' him that gals as had a chance might grow up beauts like this young lady? no, he hadn't see her face, that was a fact, but--here mary turned round. probably neither thought anything in that minute they stood at gaze, save that here was the goodliest person ever seen of their respective eyes; as to how the fates busied themselves at the time, i am not in a position to say, but the next moment, when pippin pulled off his cap and smiled, and mary smiled back, possibly--i cannot say--exceptionally keen ears might have heard the whir of clotho's distaff. to both the smile seemed somehow familiar; it was as if--this was not thought, only a sunlit gleam of something too far and bright to recognize--as if each had known how the other would smile; thus, and not otherwise the gracious lines would curve and melt and deepen. how is this? is there no flash of vision, pippin? think! pippin is too bewildered to think. "mornin'!" said pippin. "nice day!" "real nice!" mary assented. "havin' nice weather right along; seasonable, you might say. any knives or scissors to grind, lady?" "why, i don't know!" mary came daintily down the steps of the platform (demonstrating the while a seeming impossibility, that her foot was as pretty as the rest of her), and advanced, looking from pippin to the wheel and back again. "are you a p'fessional?" she asked. "that's what! i expect i can give satisfaction, knives, scissors, or tools; anything except razors; them i don't undertake. like to have a look at the wheel, lady? she's a beaut, too--what i would say, nipper is her name, not a female name, but all she's got--same as me." "nipper!" the girl paused a fraction of a second. it was as if some faint air stirred, not enough to ruffle ever so delicately the clear pool of memory; it passed and was gone. "'tis a pretty wheel!" said mary. "take it from me, lady, she's o.k., the nipper is. runs slick as greased lightning; i'd show you if you had a knife handy." "i'll fetch the carving knife!" said mary. "it's dull as anything." she vanished, to the perceptible darkening of the daylight, but soon reappeared, bringing not only the sun but a handful of knives, big and little. looking at them, and still more closely at the strong shapely hand that proffered the first of them, an idea came to pippin, which he withheld for the moment. he took the carving knife, pronounced it a dandy but been used some. "now watch me, lady!" he said. a pretty trade! temp'ry, as pippin never failed to assure himself, but pretty. see now how lovingly he lays the blade to the wheel. his foot presses the pedal, and the wheel turns; slowly at first, then faster and ever faster till all mary sees is a blur of gray and blue with now and then a darting spark. pippin, holding the blade tenderly yet firmly against the flying stone, bends over it intent; then as the edge begins to fine and taper, he whistles, then hums under his breath, finally breaks out into full-throated song: "knives and scissors to grind, oh! have 'em done to your mind, oh! large and small, damaged and all, don't leave any behind, oh! "knives and scissors to grind, oh! every specie and kind, oh! bring 'em to me, _and_ you will see satisfaction, you'll find, oh!" mary looks and listens; looks first at the wheel, then at the man. on him her eyes linger, studying his trim khaki-clad figure (his new road suit, a parting gift from mrs. baxter, a good wish set in every stitch), his close-curling hair, the sharp, bold chiseling of cheek and chin. my! thinks mary, if he's as good as he is lookin'! a distant whistle sounds; a clock in the kitchen strikes twelve, with an insistence almost personal. mary jumps up from the step where she has been sitting with her feet tucked under her and her hands clasping her knees. there! she's no idea 'twas so late. she must go in and get dinner. she thanks him ever so; that is an elegant edge. how much, please? pippin, resisting the impulse to say, "nothing at all to _you_!" names his lowest price. mary runs into the house for the change, and again the sun goes and comes with her. "how about the other knives?" she asks, a little breathless with her run. will he finish them now, and bring them in, or-- pippin will come again, if 'tis all the same to her. he does not think it necessary to say that this was the idea that had come to him, winning his instant approval. if he times his coming so as to do one knife a day--why--there's quite a plenty of knives and mebbe she'd scare up some scissors too--pippin sees a long vista of mary-brightened days stretching before him. he bids her good day--since it must be so--almost cheerfully. then, if agreeable, he'll see her again soon. "so long, lady!" mary stands looking after him--it is strange (or not, 'cordin' to, as mrs. baxter would say) how often people stand looking after pippin when he goes away--till conscience nips her sharply; and she flies into the kitchen and all in a moment becomes severely scientific and unbelievably general, executing amazing manoeuvres with saucepans and double-boilers. so scientific is she that when an amorous greengrocer looks in with suggestions of spinach and strawberries, he is hustled off in short order with a curt, "nothing to-day, thank you!" he hesitating in the doorway with the information that it is a fine day, mary, with some asperity, presumes likely, but has not time to look. now, mary! as if you had not been a good half-hour out on that clothes platform! she is even a little--a very little short with her employeress, who saw the departing grocer from her window and thinks they might have liked a box of strawberries. her brother is fond of-- "he's fonder of shortcake!" mary says briefly, "and it's all ready in the 'frigerator." relenting, she explains with her own particular smile that there was enough strawberries left from supper last night, and she remembered that the elder liked her shortcake last time he was here. "besides," she adds irrelevantly, "'twas that fellow with the crooked nose, and i do despise him. he's always making excuses to hang round when i'm extra busy." this was not really meant as a hint, but still the employeress vanished promptly; to see to something, she said. mary's smile was even more in evidence at dinner, when the employer complimented her on the carving knife. "mary, what have you been doing to this knife? it was dull as a hoe yesterday, and now it's a toledo blade. i didn't get you the steel you asked for, either!" mary, standing at attention with an extra plate, an entrancing vision in blue and white, just enough flushed from her manoeuvres over the stove, dimples and smiles and says it _is_ a lovely edge, she does think. a knife-grinder came along, this morning, and he did appear to be a master hand. he did it just as easy! "knows his business!" the employer, who is "in" wholesale cutlery, runs the eye of a connoisseur along the blade. "i'd like to turn him on to my pruning shears. keep a lookout for him, will you, mary? he may come by again!" mary demurely promises to do so. the visitor, who is the employeress's brother, a quiet man in clerical dress, yet with a certain military air and carriage, and blue eyes as keen as they are kind, notices that the girl's color deepens a little, and that a new and distracting dimple appears at the corner of her mouth, as if a smile were trying to escape. "if i were in the habit of betting," he says when mary has left the room, "i would lay a considerable sum that the knife-grinder will come again, and moreover, that he is young and possibly not ill looking!" "i certainly would if i were he!" says the employer heartily. "i'd go round a block just to look at mary!" the employeress here develops dimples of her own, and says there is a pair of them, and they'd better let her mary alone, or there will be trouble. "there are enough people going round blocks to look at mary as it is!" she says. "she's not that kind, either. she huffed babbitt's man right out of the kitchen to-day, before i had time to get downstairs." the visitor says nothing. he did not see the knife-grinder, being too busy with his writing--he was preparing a paper for a conference--to look out of the window; but he has a strong impression that he, the knife-grinder, had not been huffed out of the yard an hour or so ago. and here was mary with the shortcake! chapter xiv pippin looks for old man blossom's little gal back to the city, pippin! leafy suburbs, irradiated by clothes-hanging goddesses, are all very well, but they are not your affair; or if they are, you do not know it. all you know is that you have to find a girl, a girl whose rightful name is may blossom, but likely changed o' purpose to keep the old man from finding the kid, and small blame to her ma for that. pippin goes over in his mind such scant information as he possesses. may blossom was put in some kind of a home joint, being then, the old man would judge, six year old, or a year off or on it. pretty little gal--pretty little gal--pippin's mind comes to a dead stop. he brushes his hand across his eyes. the vision is upon him, but only to confuse and bewilder. an alley, or narrow court, where clothes are drying. a mite of a girl trying to take the clothes down. she cannot reach them, stamps her feet, cries; a boy comes and takes them down for her. "thank you, boy!" she says. "say 'pippin!'" "pip-_pin_!" "green grass!" pippin murmurs. "now--now--could that have been her? he always said he'd knowed me from a baby; said he lived neighbor to granny faa--i never believed him special; but he sure was a pal of bashford's. now wouldn't it give you a pain if that little gal was his little gal; wouldn't it?" what he had to do now was find what homes there was, and ask what become of a little gal name of may blossom--or anyways looking thus and so. pippin smote his thigh, and threw back his head. "one thing at a time, you'll earn a dime: six things in a pickle you'll lose a nickel! like mr. baxter says. now watch me find that joint!" we cannot watch pippin through this search, which took several days. true, there were only two children's homes in the city; but the approaches to them were devious, and pippin's methods were his own. first he must find a bakery in the neighborhood of the home, the one most nearly approaching the perfection of baxter's. here he must linger for an hour or more, talking bakery gossip, discussing yeast, milk powder, rotary ovens, and dough dividers; sharpening the knives, too, mostly for brotherly love, for was not he a (temp'ry) baker as well as knife-grinder? here he would ask casually about the joint whose red brick or gray stone walls towered near by. home for kids, was it? well, that was a dandy _i_dea, sure! did the baker supply--did? had their own baker, but took his buns and coffee-cake reg'lar? he wanted to know! well, talkin' of coffee-cake--here yarns might be swapped for a matter of half an hour. then the baker would be asked what kind of a man the boss was? or was she a woman? was? well--well, even if so! thursday was visitors' day, was it? well, he wouldn't wonder a mite but what he'd look in there some thursday. pretty to see a lot of kids together, what? his first visit to the stone home with the mullioned windows was a short one. the black-robed superintendent was courteous, but cool; she was not interested in either grinding or bakeries. there had been several red-haired girls at the home in her time, but none named mary blossom, none corresponding with pippin's description. was he a relative? no? she was much occupied--"good morning!" "she don't want no boes in hers!" said pippin thoughtfully, as he bore nipper out of the paved courtyard. "i don't blame her, not a mite!" at the red-brick home with the green fanlight over the door his reception was more cordial. the kindly, rosy face of the matron beamed responsive to his smile. the morning was bright, and she had just heard of a thousand-dollar legacy coming to the home, so her own particular shears needed sharpening, and she superintended the process (she had a grass plot to stand on, too, instead of a pavement) and they had a good dish of talk, as she told the assistant later. hearing pippin's brief account of his quest, she meditated, her mind running swiftly back over the years of her superintendence. "a child of six or eight!" she repeated thoughtfully. "with hair like a yearling heifer's! why, we have had many children with red hair; the sandy kind, and the bricky, and the carrotty--_and_ the auburn; but none of them sound just like the child you describe. then, the parents! you never saw the mother, you say? what was the father like?" "like a crook!" said pippin promptly. "dear me! that is a pity. can you describe him? not that i ever saw him, but the child might have resembled him--" "not her!" pippin averred confidently. "the old man never looked like anything but--well, call it mud and plaster, and you won't be far off. now the little gal was a pictur. hair like i said, and eyes--well, first they'd be blue and then they'd be brown, like in runnin' water; know what i mean? and the prettiest way of speakin' you ever--" "_why, you've seen her!_ you didn't say you had seen her." pippin looked helplessly into the clear gray eyes that had suddenly grown sharp and piercing. "i--don't--know!" he said. "don't know what?" "whether i see her, or whether i just--" he stopped to sigh and run his fingers through his hair, almost knocking his file out. "i expect i'll have to explain!" he said. "i think you will!" the tone was not harsh, but it was firm and decided. the matron had seen many people, and was not to be beguiled by the brightest eyes or the most winning smile. moreover, the "pictur" pippin had conjured up had brought a corresponding image on her mental kinetoscope; she, too, saw the child with eyes like running water and the prettiest way of speaking; saw and recognized. pippin sighed again. "when i say i don't know," he said slowly, "it's because i don't! just plain that! when i said the way that gal looked, it--well, it's like it wasn't me that said it, but somebody else inside me. why, i spoke it right off like it was a piece: 'twas as if _somebody_ knew all along what that little gal looked like. now--" the matron took him up sharply. "as if somebody knew? what do you mean by 'somebody'?" light came to pippin. why, of course! "i expect it's a boy!" he said. "what boy?" "i expect it's the boy i used to be. i forget him most of the time, but nows and thens he speaks up and gives me to understand he's there all right. you see, lady, when i was a boy, there was a little gal--somewheres near where i lived, i expect; and she had--yes, she sure had hair that color, and eyes that same kind. and when you spoke just now, it all come back, and seemed like 'twas the boy tellin', not me in a present way of speakin'. i don't know as you see what i'm drivin' at, but i don't know as i can put it any plainer." "what kind of boy were you?" "guttersnipe!" "where did you live?" pippin described the cellar as well as he could. it was no longer in existence, he had ascertained that. where it had yawned and stunk, a model tenement now stood prim and cheerful. the matron looked grave. her clear gaze pierced through and through the man, as if--his own homely simile--she would count the buttons on the back of his shirt. "what references have you?" she asked presently. "references?" pippin looked vague. "yes! i don't know anything about you--except that you are certainly a good scissor-grinder!" she smiled, half relenting. "you want to know about one of our girls--about some one who might have been one of our girls--" she corrected herself hastily--"and you say you were a guttersnipe and her father was a crook. young man, our girls have nothing to do with crooks or guttersnipes, you must understand that. unless you can refer me to some one--" her pause was eloquent. "i wish't elder hadley was here!" said pippin. "he'd speak for me, lady!" "elder hadley? where does he live?" pippin sighed, fingered his file, sighed again. easy to tell his story to jacob bailey and calvin parks, the good plain men who had known good and evil and chosen good all their lives long; less easy, but still not too hard, to tell it to the kind baxters who knew and loved him: but here, in the city, to a woman who knew crooks and guttersnipes and probably feared or despised them--not easy! still-- "you see, lady," said pippin, "'tis this way." * * * * * the matron heard his story, listening attentively, now and then putting a shrewd question. when it was over, she excused herself, not unkindly but with a grave formality unlike her first cheerful aspect. she must attend to something in the house. if he could wait ten or fifteen minutes-- "sure!" said pippin. "and i might be sharpening the meat knife or like that? i'll throw it in for luck." while he was sharpening the meat knife (which, he said to himself, had been used something awful; you'd think they'd gone over it with a crosscut saw!), he heard a cheerful hubbub in the street outside; distant at first, then louder, as turning a corner; louder still, as close at hand; till with a deafening outburst of treble and alto the gate of the courtyard was flung open, and-- "green grass!" cried pippin. "here's the kids!" here they were indeed, just out of school, rosy, tousled, jubilant: boys and girls, the former small, the latter all sizes from kindergarten toddlers to the big sixteen-year-old maiden to whose skirts they clung. at sight of a strange man they checked, and the hubbub fell into sudden silence; only for a moment, though, for pippin smiled, and in another minute they were all around him, hustling and elbowing to get the closest sight of the wheel. "easy!" said pippin. "easy does it! don't come too nigh her; she bites!" there was an instant recoil, with symptoms of possible flight. "what i would say," he went on, "she'll bite if you touch her; no other ways. look with your eyes and not your hands! _and not your hands!_" a swift shove of his elbow saved the fingers of a small boy who thought he knew better, and sent him back upon his more prudent neighbors. shouts resounded. "jimmy got his!" "yeh! jim-_may_! you got yours!" the culprit faced round with crimson cheeks and doubled fists. he had only been at the home a few weeks, and fighting was still his one form of argument; a snub-nosed, freckled bull pup of a boy. pippin observed him, and liked his looks. "say!" said pippin. "look at here! want to hear her sing?" "hear who sing, mister?" "the wheel! stow your noise a sec., while i ask her." he bent over the wheel and seemed to speak and listen. the children waited open-mouthed, goggle-eyed. "says she's got a cold," he announced cheerfully, "and feels bashful beside! say, i'll have to sing for her. what say?" "yep, mister! do, mister! sing, mister!" came in chorus. "o.k. you'll have to keep still, though. i'm bashful myself, you see. now then--where's the smallest kid? here, kiddy! come to pippin! don't be skeered, he won't bite nuther. gimme your hands--that's a daisy! now then-- "there was an old man, and he was mad--" when the matron appeared again, accompanied by an older woman of severe aspect, pippin was sitting on the cellar door, half-buried in children. one little imp was sitting astride his neck, hammering time on his chest with sturdy heels; a six-year-old girl clung to either shoulder, two or three more were on his knees, the rest sat or knelt or squatted as close as they could get; and pippin, his head thrown back, his eyes fixed on the maple leaves overhead, was shouting at the top of his lungs: "darling, i am growing o-hold! silver threads among the gold shine upon my brow to-day-hay, life is fading fast away!" as the song ended, before the matron could make her presence known, the bull pup known as jimmy fell silently upon his nearest neighbor, a boy somewhat bigger than himself, and pommeled him ferociously. the victim shrieking aloud, pippin seized the pup by the scruff of his neck, dragged him off, and held him at arm's length, wriggling and clawing the air, his eyes darting fire. "what ails you?" demanded pippin. "what d'he do?" "didn't do nothin'!" wailed the bigger boy. "he picked on me!" raged the smaller. "didn't neither!" "did teither! and pinched m' leg beside! lemme go!" "yeth, mithter!" piped a five-year-old. "he did pinch him! i thee him do it!" "hold still, pup! hold still! i'm bigger'n you be. now then, you, leave him be, you hear me? i expect you did pinch him all right, all right; you look like a pincher. now look at here! can you wrestle, you two?" "betcher life!" "nope!" came in a fiery yap and anguished yelp from the two. "green grass! what are you made of? putty, or dough-scrapin's?" this to the yelper, while still holding the yapper well in hand. "now if we could make a ring, and leave you fight it out sensible, and--" the matron stepped quickly forward. pippin, aware of her, scrambled to his feet, shaking off (very gently, be sure) all but the urchin on his neck, who only clung the tighter; and still holding the bull pup--by the collar now--he beamed on the matron. "i was sayin', lady," he said, "that if you'd leave me make a ring, and these two pups fight it out, we'd see which would lick, and they'd be friends from now on. what say?" the matron said, "no!" decidedly, and at a word from her the children scuttled into the house by their side door, albeit with many a backward glance. pippin looked longingly after the freckled pup. "there's a kid i like!" he said. "i could do something with that kid if i had him. 'tother one's a low-down skeezicks by the look of him. here's the knife, lady; i hope it's satisfactory." it was; but the two ladies desired a word with pippin indoors, if he could leave his wheel. pippin expected he could; he'd never knowed the nipper to bolt, nor even shy. "after you, ladies!" now who taught pippin to hold the door open and bow with the grace of a young birch in the wind? the matron wondered, but said nothing. the three passed into a cool inexpressive parlor which had no opinion about anything, and sat down on three mission chairs to match. "this is mrs. faulkner," said the matron; "the assistant matron. i am mrs. appleby. your name is--?" "pippin, ma'am!" "pippin--what?" "pippin nix--what i would say, it's all the name i've got. not bein' acquainted with my parents--you see--" "i see! it seems a curious name--the point is this. mrs. faulkner and i think we know--" "think we may possibly know!" struck in mrs. faulkner, speaking for the first time, and then shutting her mouth with a snap as if she feared a word too much might escape. "--may possibly know," mrs. appleby corrected herself, "the girl you are looking for." "_green grass!_ is that so?" pippin smote his thigh, was confounded, and asked pardon, all in a breath. mrs. faulkner bent severe brows on him, and pippin reflected what a blessing it was mrs. baxter didn't ever look like that. "we keep in touch with our girls," mrs. appleby continued, "till they marry or reach the age of twenty-five. the young woman we have now in mind is eighteen years old, and a very fine girl." "gee! ain't that great? where'll i find her, lady?" "remain seated, if you please! we will come to that presently. we know her under a name slightly different from the one you have heard. mrs. faulkner remembers that her mother told her she had altered the name in order that the father should not trace the child." "now wouldn't that--" murmured pippin. "say, she was a daisy, wasn't she?" "she was perfectly right!" mrs. faulkner's aspect was rigid to the point of awfulness. "she was a decent woman, and wished her child decently brought up. her husband was a reprobate!" "meanin' long for 'rip'?" pippin leaned forward eagerly, with pleading eyes and voice. "he sure was, lady! yep, old man blossom was a rip from riptown, and so remains; but yet there never was any _harm_ in him. what i would say--he's a crook, and a bo, and not the guy for family life anyways you look at it; but he never was a _mean_ guy. he never hit from behind; there was no sandbaggin' in his; just he'd give you one on the jaw if he couldn't cop the swag without, you see. now that's square, you see, _for_ a crook! but--" mrs. faulkner's eyes glared wholly unresponsive. he glanced at mrs. appleby, and seeing, or thinking he saw, a faint glimmer that might mean an inward twinkle, addressed himself to her. "you see how 'tis, lady! and now he's on the blink--that is, near his end, you see, and he wants his little gal; wants her bad. and--bein' a bo myself, it ain't for me to p'int out things to ladies like youse, but if she's the kind of gal like you say, mightn't she think, say, 'well, after all, he's my dad, and i'm his kid, and 'twon't do me a mite of harm to give him a look in.' what say?" "you say he is dying?" said the elder woman. "has he suffered any change of heart? does he repent of his evil ways?" "not yet he ain't!" pippin flushed and his hands clenched; he seemed to hear the snicker once more. "but the way i look at it is this, lady!" he bent forward again, all shyness gone now, his brown face aglow. "'look out for the grace of god!' says elder hadley to me. 'wherever you look for it, you'll find it!' he says. 'if you don't,' he says, 'it's your own fault, for it's sure there somewhere!' he says. well, i tried, honest i did, to find grace in old man blossom, and all i could find was he wanted his little gal. so--well! what i would say, god moves in a myster'ous way, his wonders to _per_form; (sung to 'albayno,' common metre, fine hymn, though a mite sober!) and how do i know but wantin' his little gal was the way was took by--by them as has the handlin' of things--" a reverent jerk of the head toward the sky--"and--well--that's the way it struck me!" pippin concluded lamely. the tears stood in mrs. appleby's kind eyes, and even mrs. faulkner's severity was perceptibly abated. "we only want to be sure--" faltered the former. "we _must_ be sure!" said the latter. "yes--of course we must. pippin, i believe all you say--" she glanced a trifle defiantly at her assistant--"because i cannot help it. i am sure you have told us the truth; but we cannot take action--we cannot tell you where mary fl--where the young woman is, until we have _proof_ of your respectability and the steadiness of your purpose. you will understand that, i am sure. well--now! bring us a note from mr. hadley, and we will tell you where she is, and will recommend her employ--that is, the people with whom she is staying--to allow her to visit her father. this is all we can do!" she rose as she spoke, and held out her hand; pippin grasped it heartily. "you're a perfect lady, ma'am!" he said. "i see that the minute i laid eyes on you. i'll get that note if it takes a leg! 'twon't take above a week to get to shoreham--say a day there, and another week back--walkin', you understand--say two weeks, and i'll be back if i'm alive. i'm a thousand times obliged to you, lady--and you too, ma'am!" his smile loosened the strictures about mrs. faulkner's heart--a good heart, but over-institutionalized by years of routine--and sent a warm glow through her. "i'll wish you good day--say!" he stopped suddenly. "about that pup--i would say kid: him with the freckles and the bull-dog grip. i like that kid. he's got sand, a whole bag of it. if you was lookin' for a home for him when he leaves this joint--but i guess we better leave that till i bring that note, what say? good day, ladies! come up, nipper!" and with a comprehensive wave and smile that took in every eager face glued to the playroom window, pippin went his way. chapter xv pippin meets an old acquaintance pippin went his way, planning his expedition as he went. he would start that evening, in the cool. pay up at his joint, and he might leave nipper there, mebbe. decent folks, and he could travel quicker--no! he would take nipper along, and give 'em a good sharpenin' up all round over there. the warden's boys--they'd be glad to see him, he expected. a boy's knife always needed 'tendin' to; and the warden! he was real good, he might have some tools, and he could go into the shop--green grass! he really believed he'd be glad to see the old place again! now wouldn't that give you a pain? was that because he warn't obleeged to go, think, or because he found the lord there, and there was a manner of blessin' on the place for him?--"easy there!" the last remark was not addressed to himself. he was crossing the street with perhaps a dozen other persons, between two halted phalanxes of motor cars, drays, wagons; midway a monumental policeman held a fraction of the world in the hollow of his hand. just in front of pippin was a stout gentleman, puffing nervously, his gold-framed gaze fixed intently on the sidewalk haven before him. suddenly a boy--he was no more--stumbled over pippin's feet, lurched forward, and fell heavily against the stout gentleman with a cry of alarm. the gentleman turned quickly. as he did so, pippin's left arm shot out; he caught the boy and held him, struggling and kicking. "nix on the swipe, my darlin'," he said quietly. "lemme go!" spluttered the boy. "---- you, lemme go!" "is he hurt?" asked the stout gentleman. "is the poor lad hurt?" "not yet he ain't," said pippin grimly, "but he's liable to be." "step lively!" thundered the policeman, his eye on the pawing motor cars. pippin nodded toward the further sidewalk, and made his way thither, dragging his prisoner by the collar. the stout gentleman followed, bewildered. "i don't understand--" he began. "you wouldn't," said pippin gently. "his hand was in your pocket, that's all, sir. easy, bo! nix on the fade-away, neither; i've got your shirt, too, see? why not take it easy?" the boy, who had been trying to wriggle out of his jacket, gave it up and stood sullen and silent, with clenched hands. the stout gentleman looked distressed. "you mean--" he said "--you fear the lad is a pickpocket?" "that's what! open your fins, jimmy! drop the swagglekins! what? need a little help, do you?" pippin was standing discreetly in the gutter that he might not obstruct traffic. now with his free hand he drew out his file and gave a smart rap on the boy's knuckles. the boy uttered a yelp of pain, the hand opened involuntarily. pippin deftly caught its contents as they dropped, and handed them to the gentleman with a little bow. "pocketbook an' wipe--i would say handkerchief! o.k., governor?" "god bless me! yes, they are mine! thank you!" cried the stout gentleman. "is it possible? this young lad! i am distressed. young man, i am deeply indebted to you. shall you--a--deliver him over to the authorities?" "run him in?" pippin eyed the boy thoughtfully. "i ain't quite sure yet. me an' jimmy'll have a little talk first, i expect. mebbe--" a bell clanged. there was a rush and a swirl in the crowd. as the fire-engine came thundering by, the boy suddenly dropped and hung limp and nerveless in pippin's grasp; then, as the grasp shifted a little to gain a better hold, he gave a violent jerk, a shove, a spring, and was off, under the very wheels of the advancing hose-carriage. pippin looked after him regretfully. "slick kid!" he said. "he's ben well trained, that kid has. i couldn't have done that better myself. but there wasn't no chance to look for no grace in that one," he added. "now i leave it to any one! but--what was i tellin' you? that's the second one to-day. you leave me get hold of them boys, this one and that pup to the home joint, and i could do somepin with 'em. i could so!" * * * * * the trip to shoreham, so carefully planned, was not to come off; the ladies of distaff and shears had ordained otherwise. it occurred to pippin that in common politeness he could not leave town for a fortnight without "sharpenin' up" that young lady, bein' he had said he would call again. that afternoon, accordingly, he and nipper took their way to the green lane in the pleasant suburb, and turned in at the white gate. there was no clothes-hanging nymph in the yard this time--it was monday afternoon, and the clothes were lying in neat snowy rolls in a basket within, ready for the morrow's ironing--so pippin knocked at the door, and mary-in-the-kitchen opened it. a rather stern looking mary, until she saw who it was; then she dimpled and smiled in a delightful way, and wanted to know if that was he. "i was sort of looking for you to-day!" she added. "you was!" pippin glowed responsive. "now that sounds good to me. something in my line to-day?" "there was a woman come to clean saturday, and what must she do but take my best potato knife to pry off the top of a jar! 'twas a screw-top, too, so she had her trouble for her pains, and broke the knife besides--just the tip; i thought perhaps you could grind it off?" "well, i guess! just watch me! if there's one job i like better than another, it's grind a new tip." mary brought the knife, which he pronounced a dandy from dandyville. he didn't suppose she would care to see him do it? some thought 'twas pretty to watch. mary, with a glance at the clock, thought she had time. soon, bright head and dark were bending over nipper, the wheel was flying, the rough edge of blue steel was fining, thinning, brightening, shaping--yes, it certainly was pretty to watch. pippin had a strong notion that something else would have been pretty to watch, too, could he have looked two ways at once; it was rather wonderful to feel a soft breath on your cheek, to be conscious that within six or eight inches of your own brown head was that bright efflorescence of light and color and softness, but pippin did not say this. when the knife was done, he looked up, and met his reward in a soft glow of admiration and wonder that almost took his breath. "you surely are a master hand!" cried mary. "why, it's better than when it came from the shop." "i'm real pleased if it's satisfactory!" said pippin modestly. "'twould be better still if i had a bit of shammy skin; i did have a piece, but i can't seem to--" "why, step right in! i've got shammy skin and to spare. step in and set down, do! i'd be pleased to have you!" but not so pleased as pippin was to step! he wiped his shoes as elaborately as if he had not indulged in "the best shine in town, five cents!" before coming; he brushed imaginary dust off his neat brown clothes; finally he made his little bow of a young birch in the wind, and followed mary into the kitchen. very different, pippin, from the kitchen at cyrus poor farm: for space, compactness; for mellow warmth of brick and timbers, brilliant white of paint and tile and enamel, set off by the blurred or shining silver of aluminum or nickel; for mrs. bailey, kindly and wrinkled, in her purple print, this vision of blue and white and gold. "green grass!" said pippin. "this is some, ain't it?" he was to sit right down at this little table, mary said. there! here was the "shammy," and if he would excuse her, she would make up her rolls. that way they'd both be busy, wouldn't they? and no time wasted! mary's laugh seemed to tinkle all round the room, striking little bell-like notes here and there, just as her smile--or so it seemed to pippin--woke new lights on the shining kettles and saucepans. then, standing at the large table next to his small one, she lifted the cover from a yellow bowl full of creamy, bubbling dough, and went to work. have you ever watched a pretty girl making rolls? there are few more attractive sights. first she tumbles the soft mass out on the board; then she kneads it, with much play of dimpled elbow and slender wrist. the bubbles heave and swell, but she catches them, breaks them down, works them in, till the whole is like smooth creamy velvet, delightful to see, more delightful to handle. now she cuts off a piece, cups it in her hands, pats, moulds, shapes, tucks in a bit of butter; behold the perfect roll! into the pan it goes, with its fellows, and so into the oven, to emerge in due time with the perfection of a "pale bake," tenderest fawn color deepening at the top, say to the hue of a winter beech leaf. pippin certainly was a long time over that knife tip. he rubbed it hard for a minute or two, till it shone like mary's own particular coffeepot; then he paused, lost in contemplation of mary's wrists and elbows, her clear-cut profile, and waving hair. whenever she turned toward him, he rubbed the knife tip vigorously, only to relapse again when she turned away. so absorbed was he, he did not notice how rapidly the mass of dough was diminishing; and when mary, having plumped the last roll into place, turned suddenly full upon him with a "there! _that's_ done!" he started with a guilty flush, and almost cut himself with the knife, now more like a razor than a kitchen implement. mary, meeting the full gaze of his dark bright eyes, flushed, too, and then laughed a little. "i think my work's pretty, too!" she said. "i guess you like to watch it same as i do yours." "i sure do! and if you'll excuse me sayin' so, i never see rolls handled so elegant in my life. i'm part baker myself," he added apologetically, "and i've seen a many rolls handled." mary kindled with interest. she wanted to know if he was a baker. then why-- "why ain't i bakin'?" pippin laughed. "i'll have to tell you about that some day--lemme put 'em in for you! dandy oven you've got; dandy outfit all round! that's if i might take the liberty of callin' again, miss--" "mary flower is my name!" said the girl. "i should be pleased to know yours!" "pippin is what they call me!" pippin, for the first time in his life, felt the need of two names. now why? "mr. pippin, i should be pleased to have you call again." she spoke a little formally; these were proper conventions, since there was no third party by to introduce them. "well, now, miss flower, i shall be glad to come, and more than glad, sure thing, the very day i come back. what i came special to-day was to say--" but pippin never said it. at that moment the screen door swung open, and a man entered. a man about pippin's age, in linen duster and straw hat, carrying a basket of vegetables. a grocer's assistant, evidently; his wagon stood at the gate. the first thing that struck pippin was the eager glance the man threw about the room, and the sharp flash of--was it suspicion or jealousy?--as his eyes fell upon him, pippin. this was the first impression; the second was that mary did not like him; the third that the man's nose was crooked. having received these three impressions, pippin bent over his potato knife, and polished it assiduously. where _had_ he seen that nose? where _had_ he seen that nose? it couldn't be--was it?--green grass! now wouldn't that-- he glanced warily up, and seeing the man's attention engrossed by mary, took a good look at him. a thin, sharp face, eyes too near together, a straight slit of a mouth; but the nose was what interested pippin. it was certainly _very_ crooked! a long sharp nose; that must have been a powerful blow which had turned it from the straight course. pippin's right fist clenched involuntarily, with a reminiscent thrill; the corners of his mouth twitched, and his eyes twinkled. "green grass!" he murmured again. "no, i guess we shan't want anything to-morrow!" said mary, in cool, flute-like tones. "no, you needn't call, thank you. we'll telephone when we need anything." "got company, i see!" the man directed an ugly scowl at pippin. pippin looked up cheerfully. "hello, nosey!" he said. "that you? quite a stranger, ain't you?" again the man's eyes flashed, and this time there was recognition in them; the next moment his face was a wooden mask. "guess you've got me!" he said. "stranger to me, far as i know. that your wheel out there?" he spoke with a curious mixture of eagerness and sullenness. "sure thing! forgot me, have you, nosey? say 'pippin,' and see if you don't fetch it?" "we don't carry apples at this season," stolidly. "berries is what we carry now, and early peaches." "that so? well, you're a peach, all right, all right. well, miss flower, i expect i--" he was about to rise and make his adieux, when a look from mary tingled through him to his toes; it said, "stay!" he settled back in his seat. "i expect i'm ready for those other things you spoke of," he said slowly. "scissors, was they, or knives?" "scissors!" said mary. "i'll get them!" she vanished. as the door closed behind her, the man made a step toward pippin, and spoke low and savagely. "you quit, do you hear? quit and stay quit! if i catch you here again, i'll--" he indicated measures which would seriously incommode pippin's internal economy. "that so?" said pippin in an easy drawl. he tilted his chair back on two legs, and smiled amiably at his interlocutor. "why, nosey, i'm sorry you feel that way. i never meant to spile it permanent, but it does seem to have got a kind of a twist, don't it? i wouldn't bear malice, though, if i was you!" "---- ---- you!" hissed the man. "i'll have your--" the door opened; he dropped back against the table, and his face became once more a wooden mask. mary, her hands full of scissors, looked from one to the other; her breath came a little quickly, as if she had hurried. "you two gentlemen know each other?" she asked doubtfully. "why," said pippin slowly, "i thought he was a boy i used to know, but he seems to think different. what is your handsome name, mister, since nosey bashford won't do you?" "my name's brown!" said the man hoarsely. "well, they both begin with b," said pippin. "i don't know as it matters any." "was there anything else you wanted to say, mr. brown?" asked mary civilly. at this palpable hint, the man could but take up his basket and start for the door. he gave pippin one venomous look; pippin replied with a slight but friendly nod. "so long, bo!" he said cheerfully. at the door the man paused, as if struck by a sudden thought. he had some extra fine tomato plants in the cart, he said. they was an order for goodwins, next door, but the boss thought likely mr. aymer (mary's employer) would like some. wouldn't mary step out and look at them? 'twouldn't take but a minute, if she wasn't afraid to leave--a significant glance toward pippin finished the sentence and decided mary's answer. she had meant to say, "no!" with some asperity. as it was, she said, "yes!" and followed him out to the gate, leaving pippin alone. now, the latter asked himself, wouldn't that give you a pain? honest, now, wouldn't it? what did he suppose that skeezicks was sayin' to her. if he came the give-away, he, pippin, expected he could give him as good. even if dod was dead, and it wasn't likely he was-- if pippin had been a cultivated person, he would have said, "the gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us!" being a plain person, he said, no two ways about it, that was what come of startin' mean. yes; but, he reminded himself, the start was not of his own making. let him be straight and keep straight, and things would come round 'cordin' to! "that's right!" said pippin aloud. "i'm only makin' a beginnin', so to say. _my_ start is right now, see? let dod and nosey get what they can out of theirs. last week's dough-scrapin's needn't trouble me!" mary came back with her head high, a flush on her cheek and a sparkle in her eye. "gorry to 'liza!" said pippin, but not aloud. "she looks some-er when she's mad than when she's pleased!" "known nosey long?" asked pippin, rising as she entered. "no, nor want to! he's not my style, nor i his. did you really know him, mr. pippin?" "did i? do i know a skunk by the sm--yes, i knew him when we was boys. 'twas i give him his crooked nose. i'll tell you about it some day, if you'll let me. i must be goin' now." was it quite by accident, i wonder, that mrs. aymer came into the kitchen to get a cup of hot water? she greeted pippin pleasantly, admired the rehabilitated potato knife, thought his must be a pleasant trade in summer weather. she thought it very possible that mr. aymer might like his pocketknife sharpened. could pippin wait a moment? "that's what i'm here for!" pippin smilingly assured her. mr. aymer being summoned, shortly appeared: tall, thin, kindly-faced, looking more like a college professor than a hardware dealer. he, too, after looking pippin well over, praised his skill and discussed various aspects of cutlery with him. they agreed heartily on the fundamental fact that when you wanted a knife, you wanted it good. followed commendation of certain makes, disparagement of others. bugler's goods, pippin opined, wasn't worth the price of the handles; he'd make as good a knife out of lead pipe. now take porter's, and _there_ you had a knife. both men began to glow with responsive ardor, and it required a discreet cough and glance from mrs. aymer to convey to both the fact that supper time was drawing near and that mary had her work to do. pippin withdrew with many apologies, but not before both householders had cordially asked him to call again. mary, in her corner, remained demurely mute, but to be sure she had already invited him; and her farewell glance and smile sent him away trailing clouds of glory. later, on the comfortable little screened porch, the householders told their guest about the handsome lad who was so clever with tools, and who had evidently "taken such a shine" to their pretty mary. "i called john out on purpose!" said the lady. "of course we feel responsible about mary; and you liked him, didn't you, john?" "i certainly did: mighty decent looking fellow. intelligent, too! knows good steel when he sees it." "you ought to have seen him, lawrence! you are so interested in young men. if he comes again, you must be sure to want your knife sharpened--if this old conference is going to give you _any_ time for us!" she added with a smiling pout. "of course if there should be anything serious between him and mary, we should want to be _very_ careful!" "aren't you a little ahead of the game, lucy?" her husband laughed. "the boy has been here once, i understand--twice? oh, well! i don't know that lawrence can count on the wedding fee, even so. but you would like him, larry, that's a fact. i took to him at once, and you know lucy thinks me hard to please, especially about young fellows." "i wish i had seen him!" said the guest heartily. "i've seen nothing but gray heads all day long, and a boy would be refreshing." but if he had seen pippin, the course of my story would have been different. meanwhile, as they talked, mary-in-the-kitchen sat on her back steps in the moonlight, and thought her own thoughts. happy thoughts! mary was always happy. if some of them were of dark eyes and a kindling smile, of quaintly chosen words--he had as sweet a voice, mary must say, as ever she heard; she wished mrs. aymer had heard him sing; when he came again--oh, yes, he would come. the queer thing was, he didn't seem a bit of a stranger. appeared like she had known him always. what would you say, mary, if you knew that the dark eyes were watching you now, in the shadow of that big elm across the road? you would be surprised, but possibly not displeased, mary? ah! but what if another pair of eyes were watching, too, sharply, eagerly, greedily; little red eyes, set too near together across a crooked nose? what then, mary-in-the-kitchen? chapter xvi pippin encounters the gideons pippin spent the evening sitting on the edge of his bed, whistling on his file, as was his custom when perturbed in spirit, and taking counsel with himself. he had had a shock. two hours ago, after leaving the white house, he felt the need of a pipe; a smoke of tribute, call it, to whatever gods might be interested in youth and beauty, in dimples and waving hair. nearly opposite the house, across the lane, was a huge elm whose branches drooped low over the roadside. its roots formed a comfortable seat neatly cushioned with moss. pippin had already observed this natural retreat; now he sought it, and lighting his pipe, was at peace with the world. silently he communed with himself about the "young lady." he did not venture to think of her by any other title, though it must be confessed that he said "mary" to himself now and then, just to be sure that it sounded like the prettiest name in the world, though of course he always knew it was. and he always knew--now, how did he know it was her name?--that she could have no other. if pippin had put his thoughts into words--but he could not! his heart beat quick and hard in his ears, and there was something the matter with his breathing; and anyway, who was he to set up thinking of her at all? but if he had found words, they might have shaped themselves thus. honest, now! had he ever, in all his life, seen a young lady that was a patch on her? believe him, nix! it wasn't only her looks, though they was out of sight, clear; it was the way she moved, and spoke--notice how the corners of her mouth curled up round the words as if she loved 'em--and the sound of her voice, and the goodness that shined right out of her--my! my! _that_ lamp is burnin' all right, all right! he paused, for beside the bright face that shone so clear before him, he seemed to see another, a face no less fair, more perfect indeed in line and tint and carving, but, as he had once said, like a lamp unlighted. "poor flora may!" he murmured. "poor gal! now wouldn't that young lady be a sister to her if she had the chance? you bet she would!" thus musing, he chanced to look up, and was aware of a man coming slowly along the road; very slowly, with a singular gait, half limp, half lurch. he was dressed like a day laborer, and carried a dinner pail; a pickaxe was slung over his shoulder. it was the gait that caught pippin's eye; he stopped building air-castles, and looked narrowly at the advancing figure. the man shambled slowly along, and paused near the gate of the white house. drawing out a clay pipe, he proceeded to light it; a clumsy business he made of it, fumbling long for his matches, then making several vain attempts to strike a light, his eyes meantime roaming over house and grounds with sharp, searching glances. pippin, always so ready to help, might easily have given him a light--but a moment before pippin had extinguished his own pipe with a swift, silent motion. he sat perfectly still under his tree, not to be distinguished from it in the dusk, under the drooping branches, his eyes riveted to the slouching figure. so absorbed was he that he saw nothing of the quiet approach of another figure, until it stood close beside the first; a lighter, slimmer figure, that of a young man. pippin could see no more till the newcomer, turning his profile to the rising moon, displayed a crooked nose. if the two exchanged words, it was in a whisper so low that pippin could not catch it. the younger man also pulled out a pipe, and seemed to ask for a light; there was more fumbling and scratching, then the elder nodded slightly and went limping and lurching along the road. why did the younger man linger? why did he, too, slip under a drooping tree--not fifty feet away from pippin's own, i declare--and stand there, silent and hidden as pippin himself? why, pippin, a man may have feelings, even if his nose is crooked. if a pretty girl comes out to sit on her steps and look at the rising moon and think sweet, girl-moonlight thoughts, why--be reasonable, pippin! why should not nosey bashford like to watch her as well as you? nosey's nose is shockingly crooked, and his eyes are crooked, too, little and red and too near together; he is crooked inside and out, but he has his feelings, and it is well for you, pippin, seeing that you are entirely unarmed, whereas nosey is never without a sandbag or a brass knuckle or some such pretty trifle, that he does not know of your being only fifty feet away from him. "that's right!" said pippin, sitting on his bed, as above mentioned, whistling on his file; "that may be all so, and likely 'tis: but that don't explain dod happenin' along just that minute, nor yet them two with their heads together. dod has aged some--well, he would! must be sixty year old, or nigh it--but he don't look no handsomer nor no--well, say piouser--than he did. what i say is, i believe them two has a game on. i hate to keep the old man waitin', but i rather guess i'll have to hang round here a spell, and see what they're up to. what say?" when in need of sympathy, pippin was apt to call up his dream family and demand it of them, never failing of a response. he did so now, and ma, blue-eyed and pink-cheeked, and pa, brown and stalwart, appeared promptly. pippin, absurd fellow that he was, saw them sitting beside him, and appealed to pa to confirm his last remark. pa said he was right, things did appear to squint that way a mite. he expected pippin had better keep his eye on them two. "but i stuck him out!" pippin slapped his thigh joyously. "i stuck him out, folks! and i would have if he'd have set there all night. another thing!" his voice was grave again. "notice what happened just before he left? why, the boss--mr. aymer, that is--come home. didn't you hear some one step kind of quick along the sidewalk front of the house, whistlin' a little, but not so as to disturb folks, and then the latchkey rattle a mite as he put in? i tell you, 'twasn't all feelin's in nosey's. he wanted to know what time the boss was liable to come home, and he found out. oh, they're smart, bashfords; you got to keep your eye peeled when you watch them!" pippin stopped suddenly. some one seemed to be talking; ma this time, her blue eyes bright and serious. had he looked for grace in them two? "green grass!" pippin laughed aloud. "grace, in bashford's gang! if there's as much grace in e'er a one of 'em as would raise a biscuit, one solitary, little weeny biscuit, i'll--i'll--" he stopped again, for again the voice seemed to speak. "i didn't know as the elder made any exception. fellow creatures, he said--" pippin dropped his head. if he had been differently brought up, he might have beaten his breast and cried, "_mea culpa!_" as it was, he said, "green grass!" again, several times. the last exclamation was in a different tone. he raised his head, and his eyes shone. "i'll try!" he said. "honest, i will! now behooves me get a mite o' sleep. but first--" the room was a small and plain one, in a meek by-street which had to work hard to prove that it was not a slum, but did prove it. there were curtains in most of the windows, faded, patched, darned, but whole and clean (mrs. morrissey's were nottingham lace, the street would have you know, but then mr. morrissey was on the force), and not a house but had a geranium or a straggle of nasturtiums in window-box or tin can or broken pitcher. besides all this, not a lodging room in the street but had a bible; the gideons had seen to that. pippin took the fat black book from the little light-stand beside the bed. he had his own little testament that elder hadley had given him, but this was handy by, and besides, he admired to read about them old testament guys. elijah was "some," he thought; as for elisha, he had no opinion of him. gettin' them kids all stove up just because they was a mite cheeky! likely he _was_ bald-headed! the volume opening at the title page revealed a printed slip pasted inside the cover, on which pippin read as follows: this holy book, whose leaves display the life, the light, the truth, the way, is placed in this room by the gideons, the christian commercial travelers' association of america, aided by the christian forces of this city with the hope also that by means of this book many may be brought to know the love of christ which passeth knowledge. the ancient gideon's test and triumph--judges and . the modern gideon's motto--judges : . the greatest sermon ever preached--matthew , , and . blessed truth--accept it--luke : ; john : . the supreme sacrifice for all--isaiah . the universal invitation to all--isaiah . if lonesome or blue and friends untrue, read psalms and , luke . if trade is poor, read psalm , john . if discouraged or in trouble, read psalm ; john . if you are all out of sorts, read hebrews . if you are losing confidence in men, read i cor. . if skeptical, read john : , : ; phil. : - . if you can't have your own way, read james . if tired of sin, read luke : - , - , john . if very prosperous, read i cor. : , . the wonderful result--isaiah --psalm --romans . we earnestly solicit free-will offerings for the aid of our bible work. christian traveling men, join us, help us. for particulars, inquire of any man wearing the button, or the gideons, west quincy street, chicago, ill. "green grass!" said pippin. "now wouldn't that--" he read it again, slowly and carefully. "now wouldn't that--well, the reverse of give you a pain! lemme see! what fits me special in this outfit?" his finger following the table of contents, pippin knit his brows and set his teeth, murmuring as he went, "'if trade is poor,'--that ain't me! i made three dollars to-day, and two yesterday. fifteen a week wouldn't be far from it, and five of that in the bank reg'lar every week. i tell you! "'if discouraged or in trouble;' nope! "'if you are all out of sorts;' not a mite! "'if you are losing confidence in man'--there! isn't that a leadin'? bet your life!" said pippin. he turned to the appointed passage and read: "'though i speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, i am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. "'and though i have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though i have all faith, so that i could remove mountains, and have not charity, i am nothing. "'and though i bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though i give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.' "i expect that is so," said pippin gravely. "i certainly expect that that is so, and i will act as near that as is give me, 'cordin' to. say i learn it off, so i'll have it handy by and not forget it, what say? 'though i speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, i am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling--'" at this point there was a rap on the wall, and an angry voice asked whether there was a prayer meeting going on, or what? couldn't a man get a wink of sleep without condemned galoots hollering their prayers through a megaphone? "i'm real sorry, brother!" said pippin pacifically. "i didn't know i'd riz my voice." "riz your voice! you go hire yourself out as foghorn to a sound boat, and you'll make your fortune!" "you've got a powerful organ of your own," replied pippin. "if you'd like to have a prayer meetin', i'd be pleased to have you join in. are you a gideon?" "are you a goat that wants its hide took off?" roared the other. "if you don't shut your head--" "i've shut and padlocked it! i'm just whisperin' through a knothole. go to by-by, bo! pleasant dreams!" * * * * * pippin's chance came the very next day. as he was carrying nipper past the white house--he was not going in, but somehow his way seemed to lie mostly through the lane--the grocery wagon stood at the gate, and even as he looked, the door opened and shut, rather hastily, and the crooked-nosed man--his given name was william, by the way--came out with his empty basket. he greeted pippin with a scowl that blackened his never too attractive face. pippin gave him a friendly nod. "mornin', nosey!" he said. nosey's only reply was a snarl that might have meant anything--except friendliness. "say, nosey, quit the grouch, what? i'm sorry i sp'iled your beak, bo. there! i'd mend it if i knew how, honest i would!" nosey's reply was intelligible this time, but unprintable. it was to the general effect that if pippin didn't light out pretty condemned quick, he would "get his," whatever that might mean. "that so?" said pippin. "all right, bo! i just wanted to say that i hadn't no grouch against you. i'm on the straight now, bill, see? mebbe you are, too?" "yes, you are!" with an ugly sneer. "you and your wheel! you look out, that's all i say to you! gidap!" the last remark was addressed to the horse, and was accompanied by a savage blow of the whip; the startled animal sprang forward and the wagon rattled out of sight. "well, i tried!" said pippin. "honest, i did!" * * * * * a day or two after, mrs. appleby received a letter that puzzled her somewhat. it was signed, "yours in the lord, pippin," and was to the effect that she was please not to be sore because the writer had to hold up that job a mite. he would pull it off quick as he could, but they was some guys trying to make a deal out of some folks he knew that was dandy folks, he could tell her, and he felt a call to hang round a spell so as he would be ready in case an extra hand was needed, for them guys was mean as they grow, and if that young lady or her boss come to any harm, he'd never get over it, sure thing. but quick as he got this off his chest, he'd make tracks for shoreham and get that letter, if it took a leg. mrs. appleby smiled over this effusion, which was carefully written on heavily ruled paper. the handwriting was stiff and official--had not pippin learned to write in the office of the warden, under the eye of that kindly potentate?--the spelling occasionally quaint, but she seemed well pleased as she laid it away methodically. "i am sure that boy is genuine!" she said with a little nod. "i would trust him--what is it, jane?" a pupil-teacher was standing before her, red-cheeked, round-eyed, and out of breath. "jimmy 'as run away again, mam!" "jimmy! dear! dear! played hookey from school, you mean?" "yes, mam! i 'ad 'im be the 'and"--jane was but one remove from london--"and we was steppin' along quite-like, wen 'e 'eard a horgan, and 'e was horf!" "dear! dear!" said mrs. appleby again. "that is the third time; i will notify the police at once." stepping to the telephone, she gave notice of the truant, "ten years old, small and wiry, red hair and freckles; khaki pants, gray flannel shirt; will probably answer to any name except his own, which is james mather. do have him found, mr. inspector! he isn't a bad boy, and he is sure to have the nightmare to-night." turning back, she spoke to mrs. faulkner who was just entering the room. "jimmy mather has run away _again_, mrs. faulkner! i really don't know what to do with the boy." "i should send him to the farm school!" said mrs. faulkner promptly. "he is a very bad influence here. last evening, when the cook was going to church, he pinned a dishcloth to her cloak, and she never found it out till she got back. she has given notice. i was just coming to tell you. i think she will stay if the boy is sent away." "little jim!" cried mrs. appleby. "oh, mrs. faulkner! he is too young for the farm school, even if--" "mary is a very valuable woman!" said mrs. faulkner severely. "it is matter of knowledge to me that she has been offered fifteen dollars a week, and we get her for ten because of her little niece being here. james mather is worth nothing at all that i can see, and is a nuisance besides." "oh, mrs. faulkner!" said mrs. appleby again. as she stood perplexed, what was this vision that flashed suddenly before her eyes? two brown, bright eyes in a face that seemed to smile all over, brow to chin; a musical voice saying, "there's a kid i like! i could do something with that kid if i had him!" "dear! dear!" said mrs. appleby aloud. "i do wish he would!" and happening to glance out of the window, she saw pippin entering the courtyard with jimmy mather beside him. yes, things happen that way sometimes. mrs. appleby did not try to analyze her feeling of relief when mrs. faulkner was called out of the room just as pippin entered it. "run straight into me!" said pippin, when the culprit had been welcomed, rebuked, provisionally pardoned and sent to bed. "follerin' a dago with an organ and a monkey. gee! run just the way i used to run after a monkey. i knew the pup in a minute, and i had him by his slack and scruff before he knew what had got him. green grass! he was surprised, that kid was! then he bawled, and wanted to go with me, but nix on that, so i said i'd fetch him home, and he come along like pie. but say, lady, you rec'lect what i told you that day?" "i was just thinking of it when you came in! your coming seemed providential." "can you show me anything that ain't, in a manner of speakin'? well, i say it again. this is a dandy place for some kids, but it's no place for that one. you want to let me take him--" "where? where would you take him, pippin?" "to cyrus poor farm!" "a poorhouse?" the matron's face fell. "it's that, but it's more than that, and it's goin' to be more than what it is now. leave me have that boy and a dozen more like him, and gee! i tell you we'll make things hum there to cyrus! that's the kind i want; smart little kids, the kind that makes the smartest crook. catch 'em little, and make 'em grow straight instead of crooked--what do you know about that? wouldn't that be mince pie atop of roast turkey and cranberry sauce? i tell you!" thus pippin, glowing with ardor, sure that everyone must see his project as he saw it; but now the gay fire died out of his face. "i forgot!" he said. "i can't take him just yet, lady. i--you got a letter from me? did? well, there's where it is, you see! i ain't free to go just yet. this job to mr. aymer's--" "mr. _who_?" mrs. appleby started. "mr. aymer: john e. lives corner of smith and brown street. maybe you might know him, mis' appleby? they sure are dandy folks!" "i know mr. aymer," drily. "how came you to know him, pippin?" "there's a young lady works for him!" pippin was blushing hotly, but he met the inquiring look bravely. "miss flower, her name is. i happened along by--in the way of business, you understand--and she had a carver needed sharpenin', and so we made acquaintance. she's--well, there! mebbe you might know her, too? do?" as mrs. appleby nodded. "now isn't that great! well, honest now, isn't she--did you ever see a dandier young lady than that?" "she is a nice girl!" mrs. appleby's mouth was under strict control, but her eyes twinkled. "have you been at the house more than once? you say you have met mr. aymer--and mrs. aymer?" "i have, ma'am! they were more than kind to me, i must say. yes, i've been there four or five times. i--i didn't do all the knives the first day i was there, nor yet the second. their knives was in poor shape--" he paused and looked helplessly into the kind, shrewd gray eyes. "i--i don't know as i was in any too great hurry about them knives!" he faltered. "i--fact is, i give consid'able time to 'em; took a couple one day and another couple another. pleasant place, and nice folks, you understand--and--i told you about them two mean guys--" mrs. appleby said she did understand. and what did pippin propose to do next? she asked. why, that was just what he was studyin' over; he was just puttin' that up to himself when he ran across the kiddo just now. whether to wait round a bit and watch till he was a mite surer than what he was--and yet he _was_ sure, knowin' them two and their ways--or up and tell the boss thus and so, and let him do as he der--as he thought fit. "i've got a hunch," said pippin, "that i'd better tell him right away. what say?" "i say you are right!" mrs. appleby spoke with decision. "i'll do it! i'll do it before i sleep to-night. maybe he'll think of some way to hasten matters up a mite. if they're goin' to do him up, i wish't they'd get at it, so's we can round 'em up and me get off on my business. not but it _is_ my business to stop such doin's every time i see a chance. i wish you good mornin' lady, and i'm a thousand times obliged to you." he departed, and mrs. appleby sat down and wrote a note to miss mary flower, care of john e. aymer, esq., cor. smith and brown streets, city. chapter xvii three tete-a-tetes "it's a rum start!" said mr. john aymer. "it certainly is queer!" said mrs. john aymer. "i don't like it one bit, john. i do wish lawrence was back." "sent for him over there, did they? one of his pet lambs in trouble? well, he'll be back on the night train, for to-morrow is the final cakewalk of his old conference. but as far as immediate plans are concerned, i'm afraid, my dear, you will have to put up with yours truly. now, this--what's his name? lippitt? pippit?" "something like that! i didn't quite make it out." "say pippit! certainly _seems_ to be a decent chap. tells a straight story, too. knows this fellow brown for a crook. we didn't ask him _how_ he knew--" "it wasn't necessary, john. i have _never_ liked the man's looks. i spoke to babbitt about him, and he said he had taken him on trial for three months, and he seemed a smart fellow, and that was all he knew. of course i couldn't ask babbitt to discharge him because i didn't like his looks, now could i?" "--but we can find out about that later!" mr. aymer went on calmly. "has seen brown chinning with a pal--" "john! i do wish you were not so slangy!" "has seen brown holding sweet converse with a comrade tried and true, of specially obnoxious character. look here, lucy!" mr. aymer blew a smoke ring and looked inquiringly at his wife, knitting briskly in her corner by the rose-shaded lamp. "how _does_ your friend nippitt know all this? i want to go a little bit slow here." "oh, john! you _are_ so tiresome! i am sure, and so is mary, that pippit is perfectly truthful. why, you have only to look at him! when he smiles--john, you needn't laugh! i would believe anything that boy said. and here he offers of his own free will to watch the house at night for a week, or as long as is necessary, if we will just give him a shakedown in the shed. i am sure the least we can do is to accept such an offer as that. the old night watchman would never offer to do such a thing." "the night watchman is not paid to sleep in people's sheds, my dear!" "well, he might as well. he never comes through this street at all, that i know of. _well_, john, did you tell lippitt--pippit--he was to come? i shall feel _so_ safe if he is there!" "yes!" said mr. aymer slowly. "i told him he might come, and now the question is whether i am only a plain fool, or a--" "and now we need not lose our sleep!" mrs. aymer laid down her knitting, and came forward to rumple her john's hair affectionately, and deposit a kiss on his forehead. "you ought not to lose one wink of sleep just now, john, with stock-taking just coming on, and if i lie awake i am such a _fright_ next day, and you don't like me to be a fright, do you, dear?" "neither to be nor to have!" said john. "sooner shall pippit occupy the shed for life." "the loft could be made into a perfectly good bedroom if ever--" mrs. aymer cast a guilty glance at her husband, and went to fetch the cribbage board. while this conversation was going on in the parlor with its rose chintz hangings, another dialogue was being held in the kitchen. mary admired the parlor, dusted reverentially its _bibelots_, plumped its cushions to perfection; but for coziness, she must say, give her her kitchen! it certainly was cozy this evening, with the red half-curtains drawn, and the lamplight shining on white enamel and blue crockery; shining on mary, too, sitting in her low rocking-chair, knitting as swiftly and steadily as was the lady in the parlor. they were fast friends, mistress and maid, and it was a race between them which should produce the more socks and mufflers in this year when all the world was knitting. pippin, sitting as near as he thought manners would allow, watched the flying fingers and glittering needles, and wished that he might be a sock, just for a minute, to feel how soft her hands would be. now mary's hands were not soft; she would have been ashamed if they had been: firm, strong little hands, used to work ever since she could remember. the two had just been preparing pippin's shakedown in the shed, she deprecating, fearing he would sleep but poorly on a straw mattress, he glowing with praise of as dandy an outfit as anyone would want to see. "straw mattress!" he repeated. "straw'll do for me, miss flower. why, come to think of it, i don't know as i hardly ever slep' on anything _but_ straw except while i was to mis' baxter's, over to kingdom. she had wool tops to her beds, and they were surely elegant. i have heard of folks havin' curled hair, horses' hair, in their beds; did ever you hear of that?" yes, mary had heard of that. she forbore to say that her own neat white bed upstairs boasted a hair mattress. as mrs. aymer said, it was real economy, but still--and in her heart she was wondering how and where this young man had grown up. of course they had wool top mattresses at the home--and mother had had nothing but straw--poor mother! mary shivered a little. she too saw visions sometimes; one came upon her now, of the straw mattress being taken away, with its scanty coverings, and sold by him for drink. 'twas summer, he said; no need of beds and bedclothes in summer. "sleep floor, nice 'n' cool!" it was after that that mother left him, and took her to the home. poor mother! mary became aware that a silence had fallen. looking up, she met pippin's bright eyes fixed on her with a look half eager, half appealing. "what is it?" she asked involuntarily. "did you ask me something, mr. pippin? i--i was just thinking--" "i didn't!" pippin spoke slowly, and his voice had not its usual joyous ring. "but i'd like to ask you something, miss flower; or perhaps tell you would be more what i mean. but maybe i'm keepin' you up?" he made as if to rise. mary glanced at the clock. "no indeed!" she said. "it's only nine, mr. pippin. i don't hardly ever go up before half past. i'd be glad to hear anything you have to tell me." "i don't know as you will!" pippin spoke rather ruefully. "be glad, i mean. i--i haven't been quite square with your boss, miss flower. i haven't, that's a fact. no!" as mary looked up, startled. "i don't mean i've told him anything that wasn't so. i believe it's all as i think and more so; but what i would say is, there's a heap i haven't told him. you see i--i dunno just how to put it--i felt to help him through this deal that i knew them fellers was puttin' up; and--and--what i would say--if i'd told him the whole of what there was to tell, mebbe he wouldn't have let me help. i'm doin' the right thing, young lady, no fears of that; the lord showed me; but i'm scared, fear mebbe i ain't doin' it the right way. so i thought if i might tell you the way i was fixed--what say?" "certainly, mr. pippin! i'll be pleased to hear, as i said." mary laid down her work, and looked straight at pippin with her honest blue eyes. that made pippin blush and feel as if a blue knife had gone through him. to cover his confusion, he felt for his file, drew it out and whistled softly on it; then, seeing mary's look change to one of open amazement, he fell into still deeper confusion. "it's a file!" he explained. "i always carry it. it's handy--" he broke off short, and made a desperate plunge. "i wondered if--if _you_ wondered--how i come to be so cocksure of that guy's bein' a crook. did you?" "well!" mary hesitated a moment. "yes! i didn't doubt but you did know, but--yes, i did wonder some." "that's what i've got to tell you. i've knowed that guy ever since we was little shavers. we was--you may say--raised together, for a spell; that is, we was learned together, anyway." "you mean--you went to school together?" pippin leaned forward, his eyes very bright. "bashford's school!" he said. "bashford's gang. sneak-thievin', pocket-pickin', breakin' and enterin'. instruction warranted _com_plete. that's the school we went to, young lady. i know nosey bashford because i was a crook like him--only i will say i could do a better job--" pippin's chin lifted a little--"till the lord took holt of me. now you know where i stand! and gorry to 'liza!'" he added silently; "do you s'pose i've got to git off this song and dance every time i meet any person that i value their good opinion? i want you to understand the lord ain't lettin' me off any too easy, now i tell you!" "but think," he assured himself, "how much easier you breathe when it's off your chest! i expect the lord knows full well just who ought to be told things, and plans accordin'." but pippin had never heard of the _ancient mariner_. mary flower had gone very pale, and her sweet face was grave; but her eyes still met pippin's frankly. "go on!" she said. "you've said too much, or you've said too little; either way you'll have to finish now. but be careful, for i shall believe everything you say." "now wouldn't that--" murmured pippin; then he was silent for a little, fingering his file absently. mary thought he must hear the beating of her heart, but he did not, for his own was sounding trip hammers in his ears. she would believe everything--she would _believe_! lord make him worthy--at least not leave him be more un-so than--pippin drew a long, sobbing breath. at last he lifted his head. "i left that gang when i was eighteen years old. i'd broke nosey's beak for him long before that, fightin' when we was kids. he was a mean kid. i see he has it in for me still, and though i'm sorry, in the way of a christian, that i broke it, still i'm kind o' glad too." "so am i!" mary spoke impulsively. pippin looked up in surprise, and a smile broke over his anxious face. "is that so?" he said. "well, nosey never was real attractive, any time that i remember. anyhow, come to grow to my stren'th, i quit. i didn't like them nor their ways; low-down is what i call bashford's. but yet i didn't quit the trade: no, ma'am! not then. the lord didn't judge me ready by then. i stayed in it, and i done well in it--" "excuse me!" mary's voice faltered a little. "what trade? i don't quite understand--" pippin stared at her. "like i said. sneakin', breakin' and enterin'--burglary, to say the real word. there! i wasn't ashamed to do it then, nor i won't be afraid to say it now. i told you i was a crook, and i was--till goin' on four year ago. then--" a curious softness always came into pippin's voice when he reached this part of his story--"i found the lord! yes, young lady, i found the lord, for keeps. i--" he glanced at the clock. "'twould take too long to tell you all about it to-night; some day i will, if you'll take time to listen. i was in prison, and he visited me. all along of a good man who _cared_, and took holt of me and raised me up where i could see and hear, and know it _was_ the lord. if ever you hear of a man named elder hadley--" "_what!_" said mary flower. had pippin seen her face at that moment, he might have stopped; but he stooped to pick up the ball she dropped. mary opened her lips, hesitated, seemed to reflect, finally thanked him for the ball and went on with her work. "that's his name!" pippin was looking at the table now, his chin propped in his hands. "best man the lord ever made, bar none. i was in darkness, and he brought me out. he brought me out. amen!" there was another pause, while the clock ticked and the kettle purred gently on the stove. presently pippin pushed his chair back and rose to his feet, his shoulders very square, his chin well up. "i'll ask you to believe that i've kep' straight since then!" he said gravely. "i do believe it!" said mary flower. again brown eyes and blue met in a long earnest look; again pippin drew a long breath. "that sounds good to me!" he said simply. "i thank the lord for that, miss flower. i don't know what i'd have done if you--had felt otherways. now--" he glanced at the clock--"i mustn't stay another moment, keepin' you up like this. it's nigh on ten o'clock. there's more to it, a heap more. i'd like you to know why i come here to the city, and what i'm tryin' to do, and all about it. you--you'll try to--i'd like to regard you as a friend, if i might take the liberty. i've never had a lady friend, except mis' baxter, and though she is a wonder, and more than kind, yet she's--" married and stout, and middle-aged, and altogether aunt-like; speak out, pippin. but pippin did not speak out; he stood and looked with bright, asking eyes, at once brave and timid. mary held out her hand frankly. "sure, we will be friends!" she said. "i haven't ever--that is--i'll be glad of your friendship, i am sure, mr. pippin. and now i will say good night, and hoping you will sleep well and no disturbance for anyone." * * * * * having witnessed two _tête-à-têtes_, we may as well glance at a third, which was held about the same time, though in a place wholly unlike either rose-shaded parlor or shining kitchen. a back room in a slum grog shop: dingy, dirty, reeking with stale tobacco, steeped in fumes of vilest liquor. some of the liquor is on the table now, in two glasses; some of the tobacco is in the pipes, which two men are smoking as they sit, one sprawling, the other hunched, in their respective chairs. an elderly man, low-browed, heavy-jawed, the brutal-criminal type that every prison knows; the other young, slight, narrow-chested, with a crooked nose and small eyes set too near together. "all ready for to-night?" the elder was saying, in a hoarse, whispering voice, that matched his face. "what's your hurry, bill? i'm takin' things easy these days. i'm gettin' on in years, and when i take on a night job, i want to be sure it's all slick as grease. what's your hurry?" the other clenched his fist and brought it down on the table with an oath. "i want pippin!" he said. "that's what i'm after. you can have the swag, dad; it's all straight, i tell you--silver locked up nights in the sideboard, locks that a kid could pick. no money kep' in the house, but good silver; you can have the whole bag, but let--me--get--my hands on pippin!" the elder ruffian looked at him curiously. the little eyes were aflame with something more than greed and cunning. "go slow, bill!" said the affectionate father. "go slow and easy! you don't want to get twenty years for a job like this." "i'd take hell," said the other, "to smash his face for him!" "that's it, is it?" the older man whistled, and a grim smile broke over his countenance. "he did maul you bad, bill, no mistake. not that you ever were a beauty!" he added musingly. "your mother's folks is all homely. well, if that's all you want, to get even with pippin, why not happen on him in that lane some night and--hey? then we could take our time about gettin' the swag, and he be out of the way, see?" "that ain't all!" the young man's face flamed with passion as he bent forward. "i want to get him _there_, dad! i want to show her--to show them folks--that he's a crook from way back. didn't i tell you he'd got old nipper crewe's wheel? goin' about smilin' and singin'--damn him!--workin' his way in smooth as oil, and all the time fitted out with the best set of tools in the city. he's ben watchin' the house all the week, an' i've a hunch he's there to-night. i want to show him up! i want they should see his face when i do it--see it before i smash--" he choked with passion; his upper lip curled back, and his breath hissed through the bared teeth. the older bashford laughed outright. "boys is boys!" he said. "you're really mad, ain't you, bill? well, i shan't stand in your way. i owe pippin one myself, ---- ---- him! but--hell! he is a slick one, no two ways about that. joshin' on the pious, is he? and nipper's kit handy by? that's good, that is! we'll get in ahead of him, bill, sure thing we will. now le's go home and get a mou'ful of sleep before we start in." and all this time, while these three couples were spinning their unconscious threads for the shuttle, under the quiet starlit sky the night train was drawing nearer and nearer, bringing among its hundred-odd passengers a quiet, bright-eyed man in clerical dress. chapter xviii pippin keeps watch, with results mary was a long time going to bed that night. in the first place she could not find her blue ribbon bow, and being as economical as she was methodical, this distressed her. it was a new ribbon, bought at a special sale, and marked down almost unbelievably low, because there was a flaw in the weaving which would never be seen when made up. it was a good bow too; it is not everyone who can make a pretty bow; and mary was perfectly sure that she had pinned it on her neat collar this evening. she searched the room thoroughly--such a pretty, tidy room, all white and blue like her kitchen--even peeping under bed and bureau, but no blue bow was to be found. then there was her chapter to be read; hard reading to-night, though it was ruth, which she loved; hard to keep her mind on the text, her eyes on the page. everything was all a-flutter, somehow. mary sighed, and put her bookmark in soberly. she was not a very good girl, she thought, to be thinking of--other things--when she was reading her bible. then--blue kimono substituted for blue one-piece dress--out came mary's hairpins and down came mary's hair. it took a good while to do mary's hair. it was not only the quantity of it--it flowed down and about her like a cloak--it was the quality. it _would_ curl up round the brush, and break into ripples in the very teeth of the comb. it was a storage battery of electricity, and if a thunderstorm were to come on now, while it was down, you would see long golden strands separate themselves from the mass and fly straight up from her head. there being no thunderstorms this night, mary, with firm, long strokes of the brush, with searching arguments of the comb, brought all the unruly gold into subjection, made it lie as nearly smooth as it could over her shoulders, finally braided it tight in two massive braids to be tossed back over her shoulders with a little sigh. "_that's_ done!" said mary. but even then, and even when her prayers were said and herself composed in her narrow white bed, as saint ursula in her wide one in the parmegianino picture (looking rather like her, i declare!), mary was not ready for sleep. but through her brain of weal and woe so many thoughts went to and fro, that vain it were her eyes to close. most of her thoughts hovered, it must be confessed, about pippin on his straw mattress in the shed. why did she think about him so much? mary asked herself, and found no answer, unless the blood tingling in her cheeks were an answer. mary's had been a cool, detached, impersonal little life, in the years of her girlhood. life at the home, pleasant, regular, unconnected with emotions in any way, had changed the trembling, palpitating child who started at every sudden sound into a calm, self-possessed, rather matter-of-fact young woman. she did not often think of the old days. why should she? they were gone, and where was the sense in stirring herself all up when it did no good to any one? it stood to reason! but pippin's story to-night brought the old time back whether she would or no. she lay still, staring out into the starlit night. his story--how strange that he should have had such a childhood! was that why she seemed to have known him all her life? the old times! perhaps it was the straw mattress that brought it back so clear. she could smell that musty straw now, so unlike the clean, fresh smell of that nice new one out in the shed. she saw her mother, the little gray shawl drawn tightly over her shoulders, the fair hair strained back from the face with its too early lines of pain and grief; saw her eyes as they followed the poor bed dragged almost from under their feet by the shambling figure. oh! how she had hated that sodden, stumbling figure! and the child, clinging passionately to those poor skirts--thin, worn to shreds, but always clean; poor mother was always clean!--clinging, crying, shaken with a passion of anger, grief, tenderness, which swept away all power of speech--could that child be herself? yet he was kind, when he was sober; yes, father was kind--indeed, he had never been hard to her. often and often he would call her to him, caress her, call her his little gal--while her flesh shrank from him, loathing the smell of liquor--he always smelled of liquor, even when sober--of rank tobacco--pah! mary supposed she was hard-hearted: how could she love a man like that? she adored her mother; the tears came smarting into her eyes at the thought of her. but for him, mother might be alive to-day; poverty, hunger, hard work, had aged her, killed her, long before her time, poor mother! look at her there; see her eyes following the mattress. mary turned in her bed, and a sigh that was almost a sob broke from her. she hated wicked people--yes, she hated them; and weak people, too, people who made others suffer just because they were too feeble to deny themselves the drink that was poison-- "i _hate_ them!" said mary aloud. then she thought of pippin, and blushed again. pippin did not hate wicked or weak people. he seemed to love them. how was it? mary, cool, kind, a little aloof, did not understand it. they had talked together a good deal during these past two weeks, and she had wondered at the glow in his eyes, the thrill in his voice, when he spoke of his religion. mary was a good congregationalist; she went to church, and said her prayers, and read her bible. she supposed--why, of course she loved the lord; she would be a wicked girl if she didn't; but--well, she was different, that was all. of course, with all he had gone through--how bright his eyes were! how strong his faith must be! she supposed she was cold-hearted; yet when pippin sang a hymn, she felt as if heaven was close by. it surely was a privilege to know a person like that. and to think that he had once been--how to believe it? how not to believe anything he said, with those bright eyes looking straight into her? perhaps the lord would soften her heart-- pippin was right down there in the shed--think of it! she hoped he wouldn't lie cold; it felt so safe, having him there! she put an extra comforter--she did hope he would sleep well-- at this point mary went to sleep herself. * * * * * she slept peacefully for some hours, lying still and straight as saint ursula herself; then she began to dream. pippin was not sleeping well, out there in the shed; likely it had come up cold in the night. he had got up and come into the house, for warmth, of course. she heard him stumbling about among the chairs and tables; if she had only shown him the switch! hark! he was whistling, calling out--_hark!_ mary sprang up, broad awake. something was going on downstairs. voices, low and angry, hasty steps--the house on fire? she was up in an instant, slipped on the blue kimono and over it a heavy cloak, ran down the back stairs just as john aymer ran down the front. opening opposite doors quietly, they came upon a strange sight. in the middle of the kitchen was pippin, at grips with another man of slighter build than himself; at one side stood a third man, older and heavier than either, watching the two. they struggled silently for a moment; then pippin's greater strength prevailing, he forced the other back toward the wall. suddenly the latter wrenched his right hand free; wrenched himself round; there was a flash of bright metal--pippin ducked, and the brass knuckles crashed into the smooth plaster, cracking and starring it. pippin had been struggling cheerfully and composedly up to now, but when his eye caught the brazen flash, he went dead white under his tan. with a sharp blow he beat down the murderous hand, caught the ruffian by the throat, ran him back across the room and dashed him against the opposite wall with a violence that shook the house. the man dropped like lead, and pippin, towering over him like michael over the dragon, turned to face the other. at this moment, before any one could move, the outer door was opened and a giant form appeared in the doorway, lantern in one hand, truncheon in the other. "what's going on here?" asked dennis cassidy, the night watchman. the elder man stepped quickly between him and the others. "officer, i give this man in charge!" his voice was quiet, but venomous. "assault and battery, mebbe manslaughter, too. he's half killed my son, a respectable tradesman." the policeman looked from one to the other; then, as bashford stretched his hand toward pippin's collar, he motioned him back. "hold still!" he commanded. "everybody stand where they be!" turning for a moment in the doorway, he drew forth his whistle and sounded a long, piercing note. "now then, you!" he nodded to bashford. "what are you and your respectable tradesman son doing here this time o' night? hallo, young chap!" as he recognized pippin. "_you_ in this game?" mr. aymer stepped forward. "good evening, cassidy. this is the young man i told you about, who was going to watch the house for me. these are the men he found--i suppose--breaking and entering. i think--i am _sure_ of his honesty!" the last phrase was uttered somewhat explosively. mrs. aymer had crept downstairs after him, and pinched his arm violently. "that's as may be, sir! don't you say anything yet, my bo!" to pippin. "i asked _you_," he spoke to bashford, "what you and your son were doing here this time o' night." "watchin' him!" the reply came coolly. "i give him in charge, officer, and it's your dooty to arrest him. if you don't know him, ask the third district force! ask 'em what they know about pippin the kid, alias moonlighter, alias jack-o'-lantern--he's well known to every cop in that district. me and my son have seen him wormin' his way in here, deceivin' this good gentleman and his family; me and my son have knowed him from a--" mr. bashford paused a moment--"knowed him for a crook from way back." "i don't believe a word of it!" said john aymer. pippin looked up, white to the lips, but his chin held high. "it's true!" he said. there was a moment of dead silence, broken only by a tiny squeak from the stairs where mrs. aymer crouched invisible. all eyes were fixed on pippin, and he held them all, glancing from one to the other. "up to three years ago," he said slowly, "i was all that. i'm straight now. i'm an honest man. mr. aymer, sir, i'd ought to have told you before; i ask your pardon! but i'm an honest man, and i come here to-night to protect your property." "you _ought_ to have told me, lippitt!" mr. aymer spoke in a troubled voice. "i ought to have known if there was anything like this behind you." a little blue figure came forward, a little warm hand was slipped into pippin's. "i knew!" said mary-in-the-kitchen. "he told me!" "god bless you!" pippin grasped the little hand and squeezed it till mary had to bite her lips to keep back a scream. but now the younger bashford, regaining the senses which had been knocked out of him, struggled up on his elbow and pointed a shaking finger at pippin. "yes, he's straight!" he cried in a voice broken with passion. "yes, he's an honest man all right, all right! get his wheel, his innercent little scissor-grinder's wheel! bring it in from the shed where he's kep' it handy. nipper crewe's wheel, well known to every burglar in the state, with the finest kit of breakin' tools made by man hid away in it! fetch the wheel, somebody! the ---- skunk has broke my leg or i'd go." what is this? from dead white pippin has gone vivid scarlet from brow to neck. he steps forward hastily. "i'll bring the wheel!" he says. "no you don't!" the giant policeman fills the doorway, seeming to expand till it is a close fit on either side. "no, nor you either!" as the elder bashford made a motion. "you three stay where you be! yes, sir, if you'll be so kind!" this to john aymer, who has silently indicated his readiness to go. no one speaks while the householder slips out. pippin, still holding the little hand, has dropped his brave crest and stands with hanging head and downcast looks. what can it mean? mary casts little anxious glances at him. mrs. aymer weeps audibly on the stairs; the bashfords, father and son, seem to swell with anticipatory triumph; dennis cassidy, thoroughly puzzled, glowers at the three from under his shaggy eyebrows. as the light rattle of the wheel was heard, pippin started, and darted a strange look at mary. "i ask your pardon, miss mary!" he muttered. "i hadn't ought--" mr. aymer entered with the wheel, and nosey bashford struggled to his knees, still pointing his shaking finger. "fetch it here!" he shrieked. "i know the trick of it. here!" in his eagerness he scrambled up and hopped on one foot (his leg was not broken, by the way, only twisted in falling) to where john aymer stood. his fingers hovered over the wheel, clutching and clawing with eagerness; his breath whistled through his teeth. john aymer looked at him and turned away with a shudder of disgust. "here! here it is! see, copper? see, governor? you shove back this plate--look! look, now, and see how straight he is! he, he! what--damn!--what's this?" he broke short off, and stood glaring. all the others pressed eagerly forward, save pippin, who stood like a statue, looking at the floor. dennis cassidy, with a massive shove, sent nosey staggering back, then thrust his finger into the narrow cavity and drew out, and held up--a little bow of blue ribbon. it was at this instant, before any one had time to speak, that a firm, quick foot crunched on the gravel outside. some one came up the step, and looking over the policeman's shoulder, stood in silent amazement. pippin looked up, uttered a great cry, and sprang forward. "elder!" he cried. "elder hadley, sir! i'm straight! as god is above us in heaven, sir! i'm straight." the air turned black about him, and for a moment he saw nothing but whirling sparks of fire. when his vision cleared, he found himself leaning on lawrence hadley's shoulder. a sob broke from him. "i'm straight, elder!" he repeated. "of course you are straight, pippin! easy, old chap. take it easy! look out, officer!" mr. dod bashford, after one glance at the contents of the secret compartment, had been edging unostentatiously toward the door. as cassidy stepped aside to let the chaplain enter, he made a sudden dash, amazingly swift for so heavy a man, and diving between the colossal legs, got halfway out of the door; but calculating his chance a little too closely, he upset the equilibrium of mr. cassidy, who sat down suddenly and heavily, blocking the doorway more completely than before. "hold on, dod!" he said, seizing mr. bashford's legs in a grip of iron. "hold on! i ain't sure about young pippin, or whatever his name is, but i've no doubts about you, my man. you're wanted on several counts, and i don't doubt but your respectable son is too. _hold still!_ you don't want i should have to knock you out before the ladies, do you? i'm ashamed of you!" bashford struggled savagely, desperately, muttering curses under his breath. his son moved quietly to the window and investigated the firmness of the fly screen. but now more footsteps were heard. two men came running along the lane, into the yard, up the steps; stars shone, truncheons waved, handcuffs clinked. in two minutes all was over, and the bashfords, relapsing instantly into the hunch, skulk, cringe of the habitual criminal, stood in apparent humility before the force. one of the newcomers, surveying the group, broke into a jovial laugh. "well done, dennis cassidy!" he cried. "bully for you! let's hear anyone say again that you go to sleep on your beat!" chapter xix a knot in the thread it was afternoon of the next day. mary's kitchen was in its customary trim perfection, so far as mary could make it so. she had scrubbed and polished all the morning, determined to remove every trace of the hateful doings of the night before. such actions going on in her kitchen! real _bad folks_ there, and policemen, and all! of course the room needed cleaning; it stood to reason. one trace, however, could not be scrubbed or polished away. it would need more than brush and mop to mend that plaster, cracked and starred where the savage blow had struck it. mary, gazing at it over her broom, found herself suddenly sobbing, the tears running down her cheek. "he would have been killed!" she murmured. "but for being so quick, he would have been killed. _my soul!_ oh, i thank the lord for saving him. i do thank him!" but that was morning. now, as i said, it was afternoon, and mary, in her afternoon apron with its saucy pockets and bewildering blue ribbons, was putting away the newly washed luncheon dishes. pippin had helped her wash them; he would not take no for an answer. coming a little early for his promised talk with the elder, he had found mary still at work, in blue pinafore, and had taken a hand as a matter of course. they were very silent at first over the dishes. both were shaken by the events of the night. pippin still felt the theft of the blue ribbon heavy on his soul. mary, stealing glances at him under her eyelashes, saw again the flash of the brass knuckles; saw--in thought only, thank god! oh, all her life she would be thanking god--the bright face all crushed and shattered-- she gave a little scream under her breath, lifting her head quickly. pippin stooped at the same moment to set down a dish, and their heads came together smartly. this brought laughter, and thereafter things went much better. they talked--of trivial things, to be sure, the weather, and crockery, and hardware. both instinctively avoided the depths, but somehow each found an astonishing quality in the mere sound of the other's voice, something soothing, cheering, uplifting, all at once. so the dishwashing was a singularly pleasant little ceremony, only too short, pippin thought. seemed a pity folks didn't eat more. he would not hear of mary's leaving the kitchen when mr. hadley came. the idea! he had nothing to say but he'd say it better for her bein' there; nor would he accept mrs. aymer's kindly proffer of the parlor. full as much obliged to her, but--he looked appealingly at the chaplain, who laughed outright. "we shall both be more comfortable in the kitchen, lucy!" he said. "come on, pippin!" so there they were, pippin and his best friend, sitting by the table with its bright afternoon cloth of turkey red, talking, listening, talking again; the elder man sitting with his head on his hand, his elbow on the table, in the attitude we all remember, the younger bending eagerly forward, hands on knees, face alight with happiness. "no!" pippin was saying. "you don't tell me pete is pardoned out. well, that does sound good to me. old pete! green grass! well, he's airned it, pete has. and what's he goin' to do, elder? pete's no chicken by now!" "going back to lobstering. some friends have bought back his boat for him"--some friends indeed! lawrence hadley, where is that new suit you were going to buy without fail this summer? you still have on the old one, white at the seams, threadbare at the cuffs!--"and he and tom are going into partnership." "tom out too? great! that surely is great, elder." "yes, tom is out, on parole; but we shall never see him back, i am sure. i took your advice, pippin, gave him the money test, and he rose to it at once. you were right. he needed some one to trust him, and to show that he trusted him." "you bet he did!" pippin sprang up, and began pacing the room with light, eager steps. "you bet he did, and you done it! green grass! i would say glory to god! and he found the lord? did tom find the lord, elder? he couldn't help but, with you showin' him!" "why--" the chaplain paused, and a twinkle crept into his blue eyes, "i think he did, pippin, but not just in the way you mean. the lord has many ways, and everybody cannot be an evangelist, and go singing and praying about the country as i understand you do." pippin's eyes were very large and round. "sure i do! what else would i? the lord give me the voice, didn't he? behooves me praise him with it; that's right, ain't it, elder? or ain't it? have i took too much upon me? say the word, and--" "perfectly right! perfectly right, pippin! sing all you possibly can. but tom cannot sing, and, if you ask me, i think he would make a very poor hand at praying; but he's a good fellow for all that. it's good honest work he's going to do, too; pleasant work. i'd like to go lobstering myself for a change!" "you wouldn't! not with all that mess of cold water heavin' up round you all the time--honest, elder! i never was in a boat in my life, and i never hope to be." the chaplain sighed and smiled. the sea had been his life dream. it came before him now, blue, alluring, mysterious--he brushed it away, and bade pippin sit down. "you've had your innings," he said, "and i've told you all i'm going to; now it's your turn to tell me, young man. how comes it that you are back in the city, pippin? didn't i warn you against it? didn't i tell you you were sure to get into trouble if you came back?" pippin sat down and drew out his file. "you sure did, elder! and i never meant to set foot in the darned hole, honest i never! but look the way things come round! i had to, hadn't i? i just fair had to! i wrote you about that, didn't i?" "no! you wrote me that you had found the dandyest place that ever was, and that you wanted to fill it plumb up with boys and bring them up clean and straight, and that you were going to do it soon as ever you had finished the job you had on hand, but you didn't say what the job was, and you didn't say that it would be bringing you back to the last place in the world where you ought to be." "is that so?" pippin ran the file through his hair anxiously. "now what a lunkhead i be! i sure thought i told you, elder. why--well, anyways, i'll tell you now. why, 'twas at that place, cyrus poor farm--it _is_ a dandy place, now i want you should understand that; and the dandyest folks in it ever _i_ see--almost!" his eye caught the flutter of blue ribbons as mary entered after hanging out her dish towels. "and--why, 'twas there i found the old man, and made him the promise. he's on the blink, you see; in poor shape the old man is, and no mistake; and he wants to see his little gal before he goes--well, wherever he _is_ goin'. his little gal, you understand, elder; his kid, the only kid he ever had, i presume. mother took her away from him--i'm sure no one can blame her for that--but--well, she's woman grown now, and he's never set eyes on her since she was a kid. now wouldn't that give you a pain, elder? he's a rip from riptown, and he's never done a cent's worth of good that i know of; but there 'tis! and he plead with me, plead real pitiful, i'd find his little gal for him. what would you done, elder? i looked for grace in him, honest i did, and i couldn't find one smitch, no sir! not one single, solitary smitch, till--what i mean--till--till i see how bad he wanted his little gal; and i thought mebbe that was the way it took him--you get me, elder?" "i get you, pippin! go on!" "and--and mebbe if i could find the kid--i can't help but call her a kid, though she's a woman now, if she's alive--if i could take that kid to him, he might--get me?--might find the lord through the lot he set by her. i ain't puttin' it the right way, but--" pippin paused, and his eyes finished the sentence. "perfectly clear, pippin, perfectly clear; i haven't a word to say. you did right. but who is this old man? you speak as if it were some one i knew, yet you wrote me that nipper crewe died. what old man is this?" pippin stared. "ain't i tellin' you? old man blossom! it's him, and it's his little may--" _crash!_ both men sprang to their feet. mary-in-the-kitchen had dropped a plate, the first thing she had broken since she entered the aymers' service. she stooped hastily to gather up the fragments. pippin ran to help her, but she motioned him away, hastily, almost rudely. no, she thanked him--she was just as much obliged--she thought she could fit the pieces together. she didn't know what made her so careless--here she suddenly dropped the pieces again on the floor and ran out of the room and up the stairs. "green grass!" said pippin. "now wouldn't that give you a pain? just one plate, and hurt her feelin's like that! they're so delicate in their feelin's, ladies is. gee! 'member when i fell downstairs with the whole of a corridor's dishes, elder? now _that_ was some smash, it sure was!" in her own room, standing at the window with wide eyes that staring out yet saw nothing, mary blossom wrestled through her dark hour alone. this, then, was what it all meant. this was what had brought him to blankboro, the bright-eyed singer with his wheel. he was looking for her. that--that man--had sent him to hunt her down, to drag her from her safe, happy, respectable home, to drag her back to him where he lay, in a poorhouse, suffering a little--oh, a very, _very_ little--of what her mother had suffered through him. after all these years, when she had all but--not forgotten mother; never! never! she broke into wild sobbing and crying--but forgotten him, and the shame, and misery, the cold, hunger, nakedness that he stood for. after all these years he had reached out that palsied, shaking hand and laid it on her. or tried to! mary stood still, and let the tide of feeling surge through and through her. grief, resentment, resistance. back and forth it flowed, till from its surge a thought was cast up. _no one knew._ he, pippin, did not know; never would know, unless she told him. why--should--she--tell him? no one--except mrs. appleby, of course; she knew, but she would keep it close. they never told a girl's past at the home, unless there was reason; unless she was adopted, or--or married, or the like of that. even mrs. aymer knew no more than that she came well recommended. (but here mary was mistaken: lucy aymer knew all about it.) she had had a note from mrs. appleby, asking her to come to the home on her first afternoon out, and she would. she would tell that kind, motherly friend about--about-- the wild tides stopped racing. her eyes dropped. what should she tell mrs. appleby about pippin? straightway his figure rose before her. his eyes, dark, bright, glowing, looked into hers; she forgot mrs. appleby. what was it he was saying? "he plead with me; plead real pitiful, i'd find his little gal for him. what would you done, elder?" she knew what he had done himself. he had left everything, he, a stranger--that is, one that had been a sinner--and come back where he knew there was danger for him, to look for the child of an old rascal who was nothing to him. that was what pippin had done; and she, the old man's child-- new waves this time, mary! hot waves of shame and contrition, sweeping resistless through you, driving grief and anger and resistance away into the nothingness of past emotion. long she stood there motionless, still staring with unseeing eyes. at last she heaved a long, sobbing sigh. she would be good. god make her a good girl. she would try. what was it he had said the other night, when he told her that strange thing about the bible in his room, about the rules of some queer society or other? she heard his laugh ring out clear and joyous, saw his head thrown back. "honest, miss mary, i'll never forget the gideons. why, since that night, if ever anything gets me riled up, i take and read th corinthians. then i'll say to myself, 'have you give all your goods to feed the poor?' i'll say, 'have you give your body to be burned? well, then, dry up!'" mary laughed, a little broken laugh with tears in it. "i certainly haven't given my body to be burned!" she said. half an hour later, a composed and cheerful mary came quietly down the back stairs to the kitchen. the traces of tears were nearly gone; cold water can do much in that way. a mary-in-the-parlor might have blotted them out with powder, but mary-in-the-kitchen had never used powder in her clean, wholesome, scientific-general life. her eyes merely looked rather larger than usual, and the long lashes were still curling from the water. she was not smiling yet, but she was ready to smile when she met the eyes of her friend. how they would flash when she told him, when he learned that his search was over, that she was mary blossom, that she would go back with him, to do what duty and kindness could do! how he would spring up-- so coming lightly down to the door, she paused a moment, not to listen, just to make sure she was not interrupting anything private. pippin was still leaning forward, light, alert, as if even sitting he felt the wings on his ankles; he was looking at his friend, with a glance half timid, half whimsical. "you see, elder," he said, "i _ain't_ exactly alone, like you think. you're right about it's bein' poor dope for a guy to live all by himself, but lemme tell you! i've got--what i would say is--well, i've got a family of my own a'ready--kind of! not what you'd call a _reg'lar_ family, but yet they're dandy, sir, they are so! lemme tell you! i never told a soul about 'em, but--" i have described the mary who came down the stairs; it was a different mary who confronted pippin as, turning his head, he saw her and sprang to his feet. marble white, with a blind dazed look, as if she had been struck in the face, the girl stood motionless. "_my soul!_" cried pippin. "what's the matter, miss mary?" "what has happened, mary?" mr. hadley had risen, too; both men stood looking at her in concern. had she struck her head against something? the chaplain asked anxiously. mary was very well, she thanked mr. hadley; she had a little headache, that was all. she kept her eyes fixed on the chaplain, not even glancing at pippin. "i came," she said, "to tell you--mr. hadley, i heard what--what the young man was saying, and i came to tell you. i am mary blossom. it's me he is looking for." "_you!_" pippin sprang forward, with a shout that rang through the house. "you, miss flower!" "my mother gave me the name of flower when i went to the home!" mary spoke quickly and steadily, her eyes still fixed on those kind blue ones that always seemed to know what you were going to say before you said it. "she didn't want my father to find me; i didn't either. he was--he--never mind!" she hurried on. "but i am mary blossom, and i will go to see my--father, and try to do my duty by him." she paused. "that's all!" she said, and turned, still with that blind, stricken look, as if to leave the room. "stay, mary!" mr. hadley took her hand gently. "no wonder you are bewildered, my child. sit down, won't you? let us talk it over. this is wonderful news, indeed!" "i guess it is!" pippin had found words at last. "miss mary--i--i am clean dumbfoundered, i guess. you! you, little may blossom that i used to play with, back there in the lane? well, if ever there was a dunderhead in this world it's me, it sure is. green grass--i would say, glory to god! why, little may! why, of course it is! why, look at the color of her hair, will you? just like he said it was, color of a yearlin' heifer! and--did ever you see a bonehead, elder? 'cause you see one now. may blossom!" he moved nearer, and held out both hands with an appealing gesture. "look at me, won't you? look at pippin! don't you rec'lect how we'd play together? you couldn't say my name plain at first. 'pittin!' you'd say. 'pippin!' i'd say. 'say pippin, kiddy!' and you says--i can hear you now--'pip-_pin!_' you says; and then--what--what's the matter, miss--miss mary? you ain't mad with me, are you?" he faltered into silence. mary's eyes still clung to the chaplain's desperately. "you must excuse me!" she said. her voice trembled; she shook as if with cold. "i--my head aches; i must go back--" "yes, my dear!--go up and lie down!" said the kindly chaplain. "take a good rest! i'll tell mrs. aymer you are not well." he led her to the stairs, saw her totter up, feeling her way, watched till the door closed behind her, then turned to comfort as best he might a distracted pippin who stood motionless, gazing with a stricken look at the door through which mary had disappeared. as the chaplain advanced with outstretched hand, he turned bewildered eyes on him. "what--what's the matter?" he faltered. "what did i do? she wouldn't speak to me, elder! she wouldn't look at me! she--gorry to 'liza, she's mad with me!" "no, no, pippin!" the chaplain, puzzled himself, laid a kindly hand on the broad shoulder that was shaking like a frightened child's. "she has a headache, and she very likely didn't sleep last night. i don't believe you slept either; go home, now, like a good chap, and go to bed. but stay! first tell me about this family; what on earth do you mean--hey?" but pippin shook his head. "not now! i couldn't tell you about 'em now! to-morrow i will, elder. i--i guess i'll go now, sir! i thank you--" he broke off suddenly, with something like a sob, wrung his friend's hand hard, then went out drooping, like a broken thing. "dear me, sirs!" said lawrence hadley. * * * * * pippin did not go to bed. he had had little sleep for several nights; this last night he had had none. excitement and emotion had run riot through him for twenty-four hours, and for the first time in his life he had turned from his food. these things, added to the lightning stroke of mary's revelation and the strangeness of her manner in making it, brought about a condition which pippin failed to recognize or to understand. his head seemed to whirl; his knees felt "like they was water in 'em"; black specks danced before his eyes. he was dead tired, and did not know it. puzzled and bewildered, his simple mind fallen apart, as it were, into incongruous fragments; asking over and over again how and why, and again why and how. deaf for once to the kindly voices of the creatures of his own brain, which had cheered and companioned him through these past months, he ranged the fields like a hunted animal; finally, long after nightfall, he sought his poor room and dropped exhausted on his bed. here, as he sat with drooping head and hanging arms, sleep fell upon him like a mantle of lead, yet he struggled against it. he was all wrong inside, he now confided to "ma" whom he seemed to feel once more beside him. "i'm all wrong!" he repeated. "it's like sin, or somethin', was gnawin' at me. i will--" pippin struggled to his feet and made his little birch-tree bow, but very wearily, as if the tree had been beaten by tempests, "i will praise the lord a spell before now i lay me down to sleep." why, even his voice was going back on him. at the strange, husky sound, his heart grew cold within him. "my god!" he muttered. "what's this? has satan got a-holt of me?" clearing his throat violently, he summoned all his strength, and the great voice broke out like a silver trumpet: "throw out the life line across the dark wave, there is a brother whom someone should save; somebody's brother! oh, who, then, will dare to throw out the life line, his peril to share?" thump! thump came the unmistakable sound of an angry boot on the wall. "shut up!" cried an exasperated voice. "shut up, you darned gospel shark!" pippin stopped dead; his eyes blazed; molten flames coursed through his veins. he darted out of his own door and grasped the handle of the next one. it was locked, but that meant nothing to pippin the kid. one dexterous turn of mrs. baxter's hairpin (a dandy tool for light work, sure!) and the door flew open. mr. joseph johnson was a stonemason, and worked hard all day. he needed his sleep, and was not of mystic or dramatic temperament; it was, therefore, perhaps hardly strange that he was annoyed by vehement-tuneful demands for a life line at nine o'clock o' night. at all events, he was just bending forward to deliver another thump on the wall when, as has been said, the door flew open, and to him entered a lightly clad bronze statue, its arm outstretched, its eyes darting flames. "say!" cried the statue; "who are you that can't hear the lord praised a spell? who are you to stop a man in the middle of his song? darn your hide! if you can't sing yourself, be thankful other folks can; you hear me? have you said your prayers to-night? you never! down you go!" mr. johnson found himself suddenly on his knees, the statue, kneeling also, holding him tightly by the shirt collar. a short, sharp injunction was issued to deity. "o lord, you make this man behave; he don't know how, no way, shape, or manner. amen! "_now!_" pippin rose, towering seven feet high, mr. johnson told the scandalized landlady next day. "let me hear another word out of you!" mr. johnson remaining discreetly silent, pippin, after glaring at him a minute, dropped his fiery crest. "good-night, brother!" he said meekly. "i'm sorry if i spoke harsh. pleasant dreams to you!" chapter xx the perplexities of pippin "i don't know _what_ to do with mary!" said mrs. aymer. "i am really distracted about her, larry. i don't think she's _fit_ to go with you to-morrow, yet i don't believe anything can stop her." "she certainly looks ill." the chaplain glanced thoughtfully toward the pantry door, as if he expected to see through it. "have you had any talk with her, lucy?" "i've tried, but i had to do all the talking. she just pulls this little wooden smile--it's just that, lawrence! it's as if she pulled a string and twitched the corners of her mouth up; there is no smile in her eyes. it's _tragic_! and all she will say is, 'it is my duty to go to my father; i must go, because it is my duty!' over and over; in fact--" with a petulant outburst--"i seem to have lost my mary, and got a very beautiful talking doll in exchange--only dolls _do_ look cheerful," she added, "and they don't cry their eyes out all night." "have you heard her crying?" asked john aymer. "heard her? no! but i see her in the morning, don't i? _i_ am not an _owl_, my dear john!" "no, my love, certainly not!" the two men gazed meditatively at each other over their pipes. ("since my husband must either smoke or fidget," mrs. aymer was wont to say, "i prefer to have him smoke; and there shall be no room in my house that he is obliged to fidget in.") but the pipes did not make for peace as usual; the atmosphere of the rose-shaded room was anxious and troubled, reflecting the mood of its little ruler. however things might be with mary-in-the-kitchen, lucy-in-the-parlor was not herself this evening. she would knit diligently for a few minutes, then spring up to turn down the lamp, to poke the fire, to straighten an already straight window blind, then plunge at her knitting again, and make the needles fly at a bewildering rate. "it certainly is an extremely rum start!" said john aymer thoughtfully. "makes one feel as if one were living behind the scenes at the ----," he named a popular theatre. "john aymer!" the knitting was dropped, and two indignant sapphires burned on the guilty husband. "i don't _like_ to think you are heartless, john," said lucy; "but sometimes there seems nothing else _to_ think. to _make game_ of a poor girl's misery! men are--" "not at all, my love, not at all! i am as sorry as sorry can be, and you know it. but none the less i cannot help feeling as if i were in a movie. here are all the materials, black-hearted ruffian, lovely maiden, gallant youth--if that wasn't a movie scene the other night, i never saw one, that's all!-- by the way, larry, what of the gallant youth? how has pet-lamb pippin been to-day? or haven't you seen him?" "oh, yes, i have seen him. i don't believe he cried last night, but he doesn't look as if he'd slept much for several nights. the boy is as thoroughly upset as the girl." the chaplain stooped to pick up a coal from the hearth; then went on slowly. "on the one hand he is all joy at having found mary; on the other he is all despair because he thinks he has offended her in some way. how about that, lucy? they have been good friends up to yesterday, have they?" he looked inquiringly at his sister. "_good friends!_" mrs. aymer sprang up again and moved restlessly to the fire. "_hold on!_" her husband grasped her skirt and drew her resolutely back. "my child, if you put the cape cod fire-lighter _hot_ into the kerosene, there will be an explosion, and we shall all be burned very painfully. this is the fourth time i have caught you on the point of doing it; the next time, i shall take the thing away and give it to your cousin selina, who has never moved quickly in her life. now, my dear girl, sit down, and _stay_ down for ten minutes." mrs. aymer subsided in temporary eclipse of meekness, and john aymer turned to his brother-in-law, who also had sprung forward when he saw the glowing sponge approaching the brass pot. "all right, lar! she _will_ do it, but i am generally on the lookout. you ask if mary and pippin have been good friends. lawrence, i have been conscious for the last two weeks that while lucy's body has had many occupations, her mind has done little except marry these two young people, establish them in a shed-apartment-elect (to be furnished, i gather, with all our belongings except those actually in use), and assist in bringing up their family. i feel quite the godfather already, i assure you!" "dear me, sirs!" the chaplain blew smoke rings and watched them with a critical eye. "i had no idea it had gone as far as that!" "it hasn't, except in lucy's fertile brain. possibly neither of them has thought of it, though i admit the possibility to be highly improbable, at least on the boy's side. if i were in his place--" here mrs. aymer was discovered to be weeping quietly and drying her eyes with her knitting, to their imminent peril. both men sprang to caress and comfort her. her husband vowed that he would, if necessary, hale both the potentially contracting parties to the altar and make larry marry them then and there. anything, he declared, rather than have his wife blinded by knitting needles or destroyed by fire. incidentally, he himself was a brute, and if his little girl cried any more, he would touch himself off with the cape cod fire-lighter and have done with it. her brother said nothing, but took hold of her little finger and shook it in a particular way which had meant consolation ever since he was six and big, and lucy was three and little. finally, between them, they coaxed a smile from her, and a declaration that they were dear boys and she was a goose. then it occurred to her that mary might sleep better with a hot water bottle; this cleared up matters wonderfully, and she bustled off quite cheerfully, promising john that she would have one herself, and giving larry a good-night hug as the best of brothers. the brothers-in-law exchanged an affectionate nod as the door closed behind the little woman they both adored; a nod which said many things, all kind and patient and loving. they smoked in silence for ten minutes, then one asked the other where he got his boots; the other replied, and they talked boots with absent-minded ardor for ten minutes more, then fell silent again. "_but_," john aymer exploded suddenly, "it _is_, as i said, an extremely rum start. i suppose you feel perfectly sure of your pet lamb, lar?" "perfectly--humanly speaking!" "then that's all right. the fellow is so infernally attractive--you understand! if i thought he would make mary unhappy, or--or anything--i'd wring his neck for him, see?" the chaplain nodded gravely. "i see! you won't have to wring his neck, jack." "then that's all right," repeated john aymer. "glad of it! he certainly is as taking a scamp as ever i saw. is he--has he any family? nice comfortable mother or sister who would be good to mary, eh?" lawrence hadley shook his head; a slow, humorous smile curled the corners of his mouth. he heard pippin's voice, eager, imploring. "you won't tell any one, will you, elder? about pa and ma, i mean. honest, sir, they've ben more help to me than lots of real folks i've seen. what i mean--well, i've seen folks act real ugly, you know, to their own flesh and blood; speak up real hateful, the way you wouldn't speak, no, nor i wouldn't, to a houn' dog! but these folks of mine, so good and--and so--well, kind of holy is what i mean, and yet ready to joke and laugh any time--gorry to 'liza! elder, i do wish you could _see_ ma and pa, i do so!" "no, john," said the chaplain, "i'm afraid--i have always understood that pippin was an orphan." the friendly silence fell again, and the chaplain's thoughts reverted to his conversation with pippin that morning. what a child the boy was! how almost incredible--if the things of god could ever be incredible, mused the chaplain--that after such a bringing-up (say, rather, dragging, kicking, cuffing up) he should be what he was. hadley's mind, always with a whimsical thread running through its earnestness, recalled a visit to an aquarium, and certain creatures of living crystal through which such organs as they had were visible as through glass. pippin was like that, he thought. an israelite without guile; the child of the slums, the young desperado; pippin the kid, alias moonlighter, alias jack-o'-lantern. strange and true, and blessed! out of the mouths of babes--gutter babes as well as those of christian homes! but how absurd, how utterly unreasonable, this very crystalline quality made the boy! he had thought that once he found the girl, all would be plain sailing. he had actually expected mary to start with him, hand in hand like two children, that very morning for cyrus poor farm, thirty miles away. there was folks he knowed all along the road, dandy folks, would be tickled to death to take them in; what say? the chaplain vetoing this proposal decidedly, the eager light had died out of pippin's eyes, the anxious cloud settled again on his brow. "she's mad with me!" he lamented. "green grass! she's mad with me, and i don't know no more than the dead what i done. why, don't you rec'lect, elder, she was puttyin' round there [pippin meant "puttering"] while we was talkin', smilin' and--and lookin' pleasant, the way she does--why, you'd said i was welcome, wouldn't you? sure you would! why, sir, we was _friends_! there's things i've told that young lady--and she 'peared to understand, too, and to--what i mean--not be opposed to hearin' 'em--and then all of a sudden--i tell you, elder, i don't know what i'll do if she stays mad with me, honest i don't." pippin's voice broke, and he brushed his hand across his eyes. "have you any _i_dea why she's mad with me, elder?" he asked simply. the chaplain patted his shoulder as he would a child's. "no, pippin, i have no idea. i don't even know that she is 'mad with you.' she has had a shock, and a great deal of excitement and--and emotion, and i don't think she is quite herself now. you must be patient, pippin. a young woman's feelings are very sensitive, as you said yourself yesterday. mary is very much upset, and she probably feels--she is a very sensible girl, and a very intelligent one"--"you bet she's all that!" pippin murmured--"probably feels that as you are connected with all this excitement and emotion, it is better for her not to see you just now. start along with your wheel, and mary and i will follow by rail. mr. bailey can meet us at cyrus centre--it's a four-mile drive, you say? we'll be there as soon as you, pippin, or before. be off with you! and cheer up!" he added with his friendly hand on the broad shoulder that drooped as it had never drooped before since that hour among the buttercups. "cheer up, pippin! 'praise the lord with gladness,' you know, my son!" "amen, elder! 'and come before his presence with a song.' i will, sir! gimme a little start, and i will. so long, sir!" it was not pippin's own flashing smile that greeted the chaplain from the gate, as with nipper on his back, the boy turned into the lane; but still it was a smile, and his chin was up, and his shoulders square once more. yes, pippin was all right again. but--the chaplain sank deep and deeper into reverie--what was to become of pippin eventually? he could not go pirouetting across the stage of life as if it were--hadley glanced at his brother-in-law, and saw him also deep in thought--a moving picture show. if he had only taken his, the chaplain's, advice in the beginning, and let him find an opening for him in some safe, steady business! as if in answer to his thoughts, john aymer looked up suddenly. "how would pet-lamb fit into the hardware line?" he asked. "about as well as a salmon in a lobster pot, eh? well, we must fit him in somewhere, lar. i want mary to stand by lucy this winter, you understand!" "of course. and anyhow, jack, the boy cannot expect to support a wife by scissor-grinding." "all right!" john aymer rose with an air of relief. "i was afraid that you might have some idea in your visionary old noddle. come on! let's have an apple and go to bed!" when pippin went his way that morning, with many a wistful backward glance at the friendly house and yard where now no blue shape of grace and youth smiled on him, he did not start at once for cyrus poor farm. there was a visit to make first. he plodded along the streets, looking neither to right nor to left, his bell tinkling in vain (two or three housewives waved their aprons and called to him, but he did not hear them) until he came to the now familiar brick wall and the wrought-iron gate opening on the cheerful courtyard. he was a frequent visitor now at the home; he knew every child intimately, and had won every adult heart, even that of mrs. faulkner, who declared that there was certainly no resisting him and that she had given up trying. mrs. appleby's heart had been his from the start, as we have seen, and it was she he had come to see, for the children, he knew, would be at school. still, as a matter of habit he glanced at the upper windows, and was rewarded by the sight of a forlorn little freckled face which lighted into ecstasy at sight of him. "gee!" said pippin. "now wouldn't that--" he waved his cap to the little prisoner, and a lively sign dialogue ensued. had jim, pippin asked with expressive action of his hands, run away again and got behind the bars? vehement denial, the red head shaken till it seemed in danger of coming off. been cutting up, then, and got spanked good and hard and sent to quod? this also was rendered with dramatic effect, was also denied, with some show of indignation. then what the didoes was the matter? pippin spread his arms abroad with uplifted brows. for reply the window was pushed up behind the nursery bars, and a hoarse little voice croaked "tonsilitis! been abed--" here the speaker was withdrawn swiftly from behind, and the window closed again. mrs. appleby looked down and nodded to pippin, intimating that she would be down directly; then turned to the child, with admonition in every line of her firm, substantial figure. soon she came, with friendly hand extended; soon pippin was sitting opposite her in the mission-furnished parlor, pouring out his artless tale of woe and bewilderment. mrs. appleby had been expecting mary for several days, had rather wondered at her non-appearance. she listened round-eyed to pippin's account of the attempted burglary--his own part in the drama lightly dismissed with, "i knowed the guys, and i just put a spoke in their wheel. see?" "good gracious!" she ejaculated. "why, they might have been murdered in their beds. why, pippin, your being there was simply providential." mrs. appleby, like many another excellent person, had distinctly biassed views as to the part played by providence in human affairs; not so pippin, otherwise enlightened by his elder. "i view things generally in that light!" he said gravely. "all is, there's times when i can't understand 'em. lemme tell you!" he told her, with kindling eyes, of his discovery of the astonishing fact that mary flower was may blossom. yes, she knew that, mrs. appleby said demurely. she did? _she did?_ then why--pippin stared at her a moment in blank bewilderment; then he smote his hand on his knee. that was right! he saw, he understood. that was why she wanted the letter from elder hadley; that was right! she couldn't have done no other way, she sure couldn't. and now, here was the elder right in town here, and she could see him and make all the inquiries she-- but now the mobile face darkened, and the wail broke out. "mrs. appleby, she's mad with me! yes, ma'am, she is so! she won't look at me, nor yet hardly speak to me, excep' kind of cool and polite, like you'd speak to a stranger. why--" he sprang up and paced the room, light-foot, absorbed, lifting his chin a little, unconsciously, as he reached either wall of the room, like a woodland creature in a cage. "why, mrs. appleby, i respect that young lady more than anybody in the world. we was friends, i want you to understand, till this come up, real good friends!" cried pippin, clutching at his file and stabbing the air with it as he paced. "nor i don't know no more than the dead what it _was_ come up! i never said anything anyways low to that young lady--my tongue would ha' withered in my mouth first. it makes me wild--" here he stopped, and, collecting himself with a great effort, sat down and begged mrs. appleby's pardon. he would ask the lord to help him, he said gravely. 'twasn't likely any one else could, and he'd no business to be bawlin' like he was a kid. he asked mrs. appleby's pardon again, and hoped she would overlook it. she, good lady, as much puzzled as he, tried to comfort him, as the chaplain had done, with hopes that all would come out right eventually. mary was upset, and no wonder. this might make a great change in her life; pippin must have patience. "st. james!" pippin's brow cleared, and he rose with his little bow which mrs. appleby privately considered the most graceful motion she had ever seen in her life. talk of russian dancers! "st. james! 'let patience have her perfect work.' that's right! james, he's real good and searchin'; that takes holt of me. well, ma'am, i'll wish you good day, and thank you kindly. you have helped me, too, you sure have." at this moment a knock was heard, and the round-eyed pupil-teacher entered. please, ma'am, jimmy mather wanted to know could the--the gentleman [janey did not think "my grindy man" would be polite or proper to repeat] come up to see him. he was flouncing about horfil, and she could not keep him quiet. mrs. appleby hesitated. it was not usual, she said, but--the other children were at school, and jimmy had been very poorly; if pippin cared to go up for a few minutes-- "sure i do! tickled to death! thank you, ma'am." mrs. appleby led the way through cool, clean, stone-flagged halls and corridors to the pleasant infirmary with its yellow walls and snowy beds. ten beds, and only one occupied, by a freckled, tousled quintessence of fractiousness in a blue wrapper. "i _won't_ behave! i _will_ kick them off!" he did. "i want my grindy man, and i won't _ever_ behave unless he comes. i won't, i won't, i _won't_!" "dry up!" pippin stood in the doorway, erect, with eyes of authority. "what kind of way is this to act, i want to know? you lay down--" the boy obeyed instantly--"and you stay layin' down till i give you leave to set up. now!" he nodded assurance to mrs. appleby, who withdrew, drawing a reluctant janey after her. janey admired pippin as much as anybody did, and had her own thoughts about the foolishness of letting that kid have his own way like that. but mrs. appleby did not go far, only into the sewing-room close by, where she sat down and motioned janey to a seat beside her. the door was open--it would have been close with it shut--and she had left the infirmary door on the jar. sitting at their sewing, the two women listened. no sound at first except pippin's voice in a low admonitory murmur. then louder, in clear, crisp tones: "what say, kid? goin' to try? shake!" two voices now, in brisk and cheerful dialogue; then gurgles and crows of childish delight. (what could pippin be doing? as a matter of fact, he was giving an exhibition of the wig wags, his fingers impersonating these mystic creatures, and performing unheard-of acrobatic feats in connection with the bedposts.) then--and this was what mrs. appleby had been waiting and hoping for, came the injunction: "now sing, grindy man!" pippin sang; and the mite of fractious quicksilver lay back on the pillow with a happy sigh. the matron dropped her sewing, and took out her handkerchief; she was easily moved to tears, good mrs. appleby. downstairs from the housekeeper's room, upstairs from kitchen, dining-room, pantry, eager footsteps came stealing. soon the whole household was sitting on the stairs, listening, and mrs. appleby was resolutely unaware of them, reflecting that some things were more important than others, and that nobody would die if dinner _was_ a little late. sing, pippin! pour your heart out, and lift up the hearts of all that hear you, sad hearts and merry, dull hearts and quick, for with them you shall lift up your own also, till your eyes shine with their own glad light, and you go your way, once more joyful in the lord: "fling out the life line with hand quick and strong: why do you tarry, why linger so long? see! he is sinking; oh, hasten today-- and out with the life-boat! away, then, away!" chapter xxi mary blossom to pippin the last month had passed like a watch in the night; say rather in the day, a watch on a hillside under a clear sky, with the sound of flutes in the air. but at cyrus poor farm it had been a long month, and things had gone rather heavily. brand, weaving baskets in his corner, thought it one of the longest months he had ever known. there had been many wet, cold days when the barn had been too chilly to work in, and though he loved the big kitchen, he preferred solitude for his work hours,--solitude, that is, enlivened by snatches of cheery talk as jacob bailey came and went about his own work, by whiffs of fragrant clover and hay, by the sunlight that lay warm upon him as he sat in the wide doorway, by the friendly whinnying of molly, the pretty black mare, in her loose box close by. then flora may would come drifting in, and would sit down beside him, and rub her smooth cheek against his, and coo and murmur like a white pigeon. they were intimate, the blind man and the simple girl. he was uncle brand, she was his little gal. they spoke little as they sat together, but now and then he would pat her fair head and say, "we knowed it, little gal!" and she would nestle closer and repeat, "we knowed it!" that was all the speech they needed. but now flora may seldom came to the barn; she seemed almost to avoid him, brand thought. maybe it was just the bad weather; she was apt to be moody in bad weather. but even in the house she was changed, somehow. she used always to give him a pat or a coo when she passed him; now--but he must not be demanding. blind folks were apt to be demanding, he had once been told, and had resolved no one should have cause to say it of him. there were other trials, too, that month. some tramps came, asking shelter for the winter, pleading illness, promising work. jacob bailey had taken them in, not too willingly, but feeling it his duty to do so; and had thereby roused the indignation of all his other "boarders," except brand. for three days the usually cheerful house had seethed like a witches' cauldron; then the tramps departed by night, carrying with them such small personal property as they could lay hands on, and peace reigned again. meantime old man blossom was growing weaker day by day. the poor old body, sodden with drink and worse than drink, was nearly worn out. the machine worked feebly; at any moment it might run down and stop. one thing only, mrs. bailey thought as she watched beside the bed, kept him alive: the longing for his child. she spent every moment she could spare, good soul, sitting beside him, knitting in hand, ready to answer the inevitable question when it came. he would lie for hours motionless, apparently sleeping. then the lids would flutter open, the hands begin to wander and pluck at the bedclothes; the dim eyes, after rolling vacantly, would fix themselves on her, and recognition creep into them. "ain't he come yet?" "not yet, mr. blossom. he'll be here soon." "you don't think--" "yes, mr. blossom?" "you don't think he's slipped one over on me?" "i think he will come as soon as he can; that is, as soon as he finds your daughter, you know. you don't want him to come without her, do you?" "if he does--" the voice dies into a whisper, faint yet vehement. bending to catch his words, lucy bailey listens a moment, then straightens herself with compressed lips. mr. blossom is consistent, and expresses himself in his usual manner. presently he finds his voice again, a whimper in it this time. "but ain't it hard luck, lady? i ask you, lady, if it ain't hard luck that i have to get a crook to fetch me my little gal. i ain't a con, lady! booze was all my trouble--that an' not havin' the stren'th to work. i never got no longer jolt than a year. now pippin's a crook, born and bred. if he slips one over on me--" the voice sinks again into a hoarse mutter, and so lapses into silence. the face, puckered into sharp wrinkles of anxiety, seems to flatten and smooth itself till it lies like an old wax mask, ugly but peaceful. he will be quiet now for some time; mrs. bailey settles the bedclothes tidily and steals away. her faithful attendance on the dying vagrant has not been fortunate for the other inmates; her firm gentle hand is missed everywhere in the house. her husband confides to her, in the quiet hour before bedtime, that things have been kind of cuterin'. aunt mandy was some fractious to-day; she made miss pudgkins cry at dinner, callin' her a greedy old haddick; no way to talk to miss pudgkins, lucy knew. miss pudgkins ought not to mind aunt mandy, mrs. bailey said; she knew full well what aunt mandy was. pepper grass had to grow the way it grew; you couldn't expect it to be sweet gale, nor yet garden blooms. yes, mr. bailey expected she knew that, but still, 'twas provoking, and in the face and eyes of the whole table. 'twas true miss pudgkins had taken brand's dish of prune sauce and put her empty one in its place. "the mean old thing!" mrs. bailey spoke sharply, and a spark came into her kind eyes. she could not bear to see the blind man "put upon." "now i am glad aunt mandy spoke out. i hope you took the dish right straight away from her, jacob!" jacob looked troubled. "i couldn't do that, lucy; women-folks, you know!" "no, you couldn't. i wish i'd been there." "but i give brand another dish, and filled it plumb up, so he got more than she did after all." he looked up, and received a cheerful nod of approval. "that's good. brand likes prune sauce, and he has so few pleasures. not that he's anyways greedy or lick-lappin'; far from it; but he tastes more than others do. did he finish the two-bushel basket? he aimed to finish it to-day." jacob's brow clouded again. "he would have, but he couldn't lay his hand on his splints, and i was out of the way, so he had to wait a considerable time." "where was flora may? didn't she help him? i told her be sure to!" "that was the trouble!" jacob spoke reluctantly. "flora may had an odd spell, and she--fact is, she took and carried the splints up chamber, and run out and hid in the haymow till dinner." "she did! now, jacob! why didn't you call me? you can't cope with flora may in her odd spells, nor it isn't right you should. why didn't you call me?" "i set out to, lucy. i came to the door to speak to you, but i heard the old man mournin' and i--it didn't appear as if i could go in just then." "no, you couldn't!" said his wife again. then she sighed. "i don't hardly know what to do with flora may," she said. "she's havin' those odd spells right along, sometimes two or three a week. she's been havin' 'em ever since--jacob--" she looked around and lowered her voice. "i don't hardly know about his comin' back here--to stay any time, that's to say." jacob bailey also glanced around apprehensively and spoke almost in a whisper. "you mean--pippin?" "hush! yes! she hasn't been the same girl since he was here. i'm scared for her, jacob." "lucy, pippin is as good as gold. there couldn't no father nor brother have handled her better than what he did that day." "hush! what was that?" she went quietly to the door that led to the back stairs, and opened it with a quick, noiseless motion. in the dusk of the stairway a board creaked, something white glimmered. "who's there?" no answer. "flora may, is that you? answer when i speak to you!" the voice was gentle, but compelling; the answer came, half sullen, half frightened. "i want a drink of water, aunt lucy." "you go right back to bed, flora may! i'll bring you a drink when i come up. let me hear your door shut now!" she waited till a door closed upstairs; then latching the one she held in her hand, beckoned her husband, and stole to the other side of the room. "like as not she'll be down again!" she whispered. "i've caught her listenin' here and there any time this past week. she thinks she'll hear when he's comin', or hear about him anyway. jacob--whisper! i know pippin's good; it isn't him i'm afraid of. it's her. it isn't a father that poor thing wants, nor yet a brother!" "flora may's a good girl!" jacob spoke as if in defense of the girl who so short a time ago had been his little pet, his pretty kitten-like child plaything. "she's always been a good innocent girl, lucy." "oh, good!" lucy bailey, sixty years old, new england born and bred, made an almost impatient gesture. "who's to say good or bad, when folks haven't their reason? i tell you there's things workin' inside that poor child that knows nothing about good or bad, things that's stronger than her. i hate to say it, but she ought not to be here any longer, jacob." "now, lucy!" "there ought to be places for such as her--there is, i b'lieve, if we but knew--places where they can be kep' and cared for and learned all they can learn. yes, i know we've done our best--" in answer to a murmur of protest--"but our best ain't good enough, that's all. there! we must go to bed, father; 'tis late, and i promised that child a drink of water. poor lamb! she was so happy till this come up! let rover in, will you? he's scratchin' all that nice new paint off the door. i'll put kitty down cellar. here, kitty, kitty! the stove is all right, father; you lock up and come right up to bed, won't you? you've had a tirin' day with all them potatoes to dig." she was tired too, good lucy bailey! every part of her strong body seemed to ache; yet she lay awake long after jacob's deep breathing gave her comfortable assurance of his sleeping. it did seem strange, how their quiet life was all jolted up, she thought, as she lay staring at the elm shadows that tossed in the moonlight. so long it had run on a level, as you might say, day by day, month by month, year by year. for her the years had been marked chiefly by the growth of the two young creatures, her nephew and the "simple" girl who had been a town charge from early childhood. such a contrast! myron so bright and quick; how his eyes would light up when he laughed! and poor flora may; well! the lord knew best! and now myron was doing so well over at kingdom, and so happy! those nice baxters! she must certainly ask them over to spend the day! if only they didn't spoil her boy, making of him so! but he was gone from cyrus poor farm whose light he had been; and now came this old man whom mrs. bailey could not like, try as she might, sorry as she was for him; and then came pippin, like a wandering flame, setting fire--so to say--where before was just straw or like that. sleep came at last, deep and sweet; from the quiet chamber it seemed to pass through the old house, laying a quiet hand on every living thing. the dog slept beside the stove, the cat in her cushioned basket in the cellar, the bird on his swinging perch; only in the attic chamber flora may lay broad awake, staring through the dark, tossing to and fro on her narrow bed. * * * * * mary blossom started on her journey with a heavy heart. duty might lead her by the hand, but could not lighten her burden. she had slept ill for the past few nights, had eaten little; her head ached, and even mr. hadley's cheerful talk could hardly bring a smile to her lips. once in the train, however, the swift motion, the rushing panorama before her eyes, roused and interested her in spite of herself. the chaplain noted with delight her brightening eyes, and the faint color that crept into her pale cheek. thank god, she was young, and joy was always tagging after youth, trying to keep hold of her hand, even when things pushed in between. it was the first time she had ever gone far from the city. the yearly excursion of the home children had been to a grove not ten miles off; since she grew up and went to work there had been no time to think about going "any place else," as mary would have expressed it. she watched with delight as the swift miles sped by, and responded eagerly when the chaplain pointed out this or that object of interest. that was tankard mountain, was it? my! wasn't it high? mary had never seen a real mountain before. (she called it "mounting," but then so did pippin; some people will, strive as you may to teach them otherwise.) and that was blue lake? mary wanted to know! well, it surely _was_ blue, wasn't it? did mr. hadley know what _made_ water blue like that? 'twas the sky reflected in it? he didn't say so! well, creation was curious, wasn't it? lawrence hadley enjoyed the journey, too; the familiar landscape took on fresh beauty for him, and he began to recall bits of half-forgotten legend and tale to adorn it. "you see that steep rock, mary, overhanging the lake? there, where the big pine is? they say an indian maiden threw herself from that rock, long ago, into the lake, and was drowned. her lover was false to her, i believe, poor thing!" "poor thing!" the shadow darkened again over the girl's face, and she looked earnestly at the dark cliff. "but i wouldn't have given him that satisfaction. i'd never have let on that i cared--that much!" she spoke low, but with suppressed energy. hadley glanced at her; seemed about to speak, but checked himself, and presently called her attention to another object. they were still skirting blue lake, a ten-mile stretch of dimpling, crinkling sapphire. "that little pile of rocks is lone man island. it got its name from a hermit who lived there twenty-five years and never spoke to a soul in all that time but just once." "my! he was a caution! what did he say, sir, the time he did speak? it ought to be worth hearing." the chaplain laughed. "the story is, mary, that his wife talked so much he couldn't stand it, and ran away. his house--it's gone now--stood on the shore, just opposite the island. he took the boat so she couldn't come out after him, but every day, they say, for a long time, she would stand on the shore and scream to him, till her voice was gone, telling him to come back. he would sit on a stone by the water's edge, rocking back and forth, rubbing his knees and never saying a word. when this had gone on for a year, more or less, the minister in the village over yonder--" he pointed to where a white spire twinkled among the trees--"thought it was his duty to interfere; so he came with his boat, and took the woman over to the island." he paused and his eyes twinkled. "well, sir?" mary's face was bright with eager interest. "it was then that he spoke? he freed his mind, i suppose?" "she spoke first, and then the minister spoke. they both had a good deal to say, i have been told. and while they were talking, jotham wildgoose--yes, that was his actual name--sat on his stone, rocking back and forth, rubbing his hands on his knees, saying never a word. at last, when both of them were out of breath and out of patience, the old man spoke. 'get out!' he said; and never said another word as long as he lived." "the _i_dea! why, i never heard of such a thing, mr. hadley. why, how did he live? how did he do his marketing?" the practical mind of the scientific general pounced at once on the main issue. man need not talk, but he must eat. "he lived mostly on fish; he had his boat, you see, and he was a good fisherman. when he wanted other supplies, he took a string of fish to the nearest village and got what he wanted in exchange. he was very clever in making signs; he could write, too. yes, i believe jotham wildgoose lived to a good old age, and counted himself a fortunate man." "and what became of his wife?" "poor thing! they say she scolded herself to death. she was a sad shrew, from all accounts. of course, i am not excusing jotham," he added hastily; "i am only explaining." mary pondered. "'tis a queer story!" she said at last. "'twas strange he wouldn't listen to the minister, though. you'd thought he would!" the chaplain's eyes twinkled. "they are taken that way sometimes!" he said. "i'll bet he'd have minded if _you_ had told him to go home!" mary spoke with conviction, but the chaplain shook his head. "don't be too sure, mary! did you ever hear about mr. bourne and his wife? no, how should you! it was an old song when my father was a boy. listen, now! "mr. bourne and his wife one evening had a strife. he wanted bread and butter with his tea, but she swore she'd rule the roast and she'd have a piece of toast, so to loggerheads with him went she, she, she, so to loggerheads with him went she. "now there was a mr. moore lived on the second floor, a man very strong in the wrist. he overheard the splutter about toast and bread and butter and he knocked down mr. bourne with his fist, fist, fist, and he knocked down mr. bourne with his fist. "quoth moore, 'by my life, you shall not beat your wife. it is both a sin and disgrace.' 'you fool,' said mrs. bourne, ''tis no business of yourn!' and she dashed a cup of tea in his face, face, face, and she dashed a cup of tea in his face. "quoth poor mr. moore, as he sneaked to the door, 'i'm clearly an ass without brains. for, when married folks are flouting, if a stranger pokes his snout in. he is sure to get it tweaked for his pains, pains, pains, he is sure to get it tweaked for his pains.'" "and that is a pretty accurate statement of the case, i believe!" said the chaplain. "but here we are at cyrus, my dear, and there, from pippin's description, is jacob bailey himself waiting for us." mary shrank, and drew in her breath with a sob. the journey, the cheery talk, had dulled for the time the pain at her heart, the suffocating dread of what was before her; now both awoke and clutched at her. she clung to the chaplain's arm, trembling and sobbing, dry-eyed. "i'm afraid!" she said. "i'm afraid!" "yes!" said lawrence hadley. "yes, you are afraid, mary, but that does not signify. what signifies is that you are bringing light into a dark place. light, and warmth, and joy. be thankful, my child; be thankful!" he led her forward, and jacob bailey did the rest. his hearty, "well! well! here's the folks i'm downright glad to see," restored mary's balance in an instant. "elder hadley, i presume?" he went on. "and this is miss blossom? well, i _am_ pleased to meet you! step right this way, the team's waitin'." * * * * * it was dusk when they drove up to the door of cyrus poor farm. mary was stiff after the four-mile drive--she was not used to driving--and even a little chilly; at least, she was trembling, though the evening was mild. the cheerful rays that streamed from the opening door struck warm to her heart which was still throbbing painfully. she could not speak, could only return the warm pressure of mr. hadley's hand as he helped her to alight. jacob bailey held the other little cold hand and led her forward. "this way!" he said heartily. "here she is, lucy. make you 'quainted with m' wife, miss blossom. reverend mr. hadley, make you 'quainted with mis' bailey. walk in! walk in! i expect they're famished with hunger, lucy; supper ready, hey?" ever since word had come that morning of the impending arrival, curiosity had run rampant through the house. miss mandy whetstone's nose had been pressed against the window glass so often that mr. wisk (he was the fat old gentleman with the hoarse voice; his friends called him whiskey, for reasons best known to themselves) asked her if she wasn't afraid of wearin' a hole in the glass. miss mandy, resenting this, replied that at least she hadn't been out the gate seventeen times--mr. wisk needn't say a word, she had counted!--to look down the road to see if they was any one coming. _she_ had uses for her time, let it be with others as it might. miss lucilla pudgkins, anxiously forecasting, presumed likely they would bring good appetites with them, traveling all the ways from the city. she took occasion, when the table was set for supper, to count the doughnuts on the plate, and with prudent forethought, mrs. bailey's back being turned, slipped two plump ones into a drawer of the table conveniently near her seat. now they were actually here, and the inmates took their fill of staring, open-eyed and unashamed; all except brand in his corner, polishing a basket handle, and flora may, rocking in her chair, crooning listlessly to the cat in her lap. pale and weary though she was, mary's beauty shone in the doorway like a lamp, as pippin would have said--poor pippin, who was not there to see. mr. wisk rose to his feet and struck an attitude of respectful admiration; the two elderly women who had been plain all their lives uttered little whimpering moans of surprise. "what right has the daughter of that horrid old tramp to look like this?" they seemed to ask. "i expect she's stuck-up!" whispered aunt mandy to miss pudgkins. "look at that hat!" it was the simplest possible hat, but it had an air, as all mary's hats had. she trimmed them herself, and i believe the ribbons curved into pretty shapes for pure pleasure when she patted them. mrs. bailey took no note of the hat; she looked straight into mary's eyes, as clear and honest as her own, and answered hastily the unspoken question in them. "yes, he's livin', my dear, though feeble. i'm _real_ glad you've come!" "thank you! oh, thank you! so am i!" the words came from her lips unbidden, and the girl marveled even as she spoke them. she _was_ glad! what did it mean? "she'd better have her supper before she goes in, lucy," said hospitable jacob, "seein' it's all ready, and she come so far!" but his wife, still holding mary's hand, shook her head, again in response to a mute appeal. "no, jacob! she's goin' right in. i'll take her in a cup o' tea and a mite of something, and she can eat while she's sittin' there. this way, dearie!" the door closed, and the inmates drew a long breath; it was as if the drop curtain had descended between the acts of a drama. it was cruel to shut them off from what was going on in that other room. miss whetstone even discovered that she had left her pocket handkerchief up chamber, and had her hand on the door when mrs. bailey, returning, intervened with the offer of a spandy clean one just ironed, and a bland but firm gesture toward the table. "we'll set right down, if you please!" said the mistress of cyrus poor farm. "reverend mr. hadley, will you ask a blessin'?" chapter xxii the old man the chaplain was getting uneasy. his time was up, he ought to get back to shoreham that night, and there was no sign of pippin. of course he could go back without seeing him, but--but he _wanted_ to see the boy. lawrence hadley was at heart as romantic as his sister, and had built his own modest air castle for pippin and mary. there was a misunderstanding between them; he might be able to clear it up if he could have a good talk with them both. well, there was an afternoon train; he would get back late, but still-- so the good man spent the morning at cyrus poor farm, and enjoyed himself extremely. he had an interview with mr. blossom, a brief one. the old man was consistent; spiritual matters did not interest him in the least. all he cared for was the sight of mary in her blue dress and white apron; he brushed the chaplain away with a feeble but definite, "sky pilot? nix! lemme 'lone!" hadley, wise and kind, said a few cheery words, nodded to mary, and went away. but for the other inmates that morning was marked with a white stone. he talked with each one; better still, he listened to each one, not plucking out the heart of his mystery but recognizing it with a friendly and appreciative nod and leaving it where it was. he sympathized with every individual ache in miss pudgkins' j'ints, prescribed hot water and red pepper for her dyspepsy, and promised a bottle of his favorite liniment. he heard all about the whetstones and the flints (aunt mandy's mother was a flint, and _her_ mother was a cattermole; he probably knew what the cattermoles were), he heard the number of rooms in the whetstone homestead, and the cost of the brussels carpet laid down at the time of aunt mandy's aunt petunia's wedding. she married a traveling man, and had _everything_. all this with much bridling, and drawing down of an upper lip already sufficiently long. hadley reflected that this poor soul could never have been anything but a fright, and his manner grew even kindlier. he received the husky confidences of mr. wisk, who assured him, as between man and man, that this was no place for a gen'leman to stay any len'th of time. good people in their way, good people, they meant well; but not, you understand, what a gen'leman was accustomed to. he, mr. wisk, was just waiting till his folks sent for him out west, that was all. mr. hadley didn't happen to have a drop of anything about him? a gen'leman was used to a drop after breakfast, and it came hard--all right! all right! no offense! all this the chaplain took with cheerful friendliness; it was all in the day's work, all interesting; everything was interesting. but the talk he really enjoyed was one with jacob bailey and brand, the blind man. they sat in the barn doorway, wide and sunny; brand on his stool, finishing his two-bushel basket; hadley on an upturned bucket beside him; bailey leaning against the door jamb. they talked of stock and crops, of seeds and basketry and butter. then some one said, "pippin," and the other things ceased to exist. first, jacob bailey must tell his story, of how he had seen that young feller steppin' out along the road, who but he! steppin' out, sir, and talkin' nineteen to the dozen, all alone by himself; of their making acquaintance, and all it had led to. "brand is like one of the fam'ly! i've but few secrets from brand. pippin saved my boy, sir; my wife's nevy, that's been a son to us both, and was goin' astray. pippin saved him! lemme tell you!" he told; the chaplain listened with kindling eyes, and then in his turn told of pippin's life in the prison, of his influence over this man and that, of the help he had been as a trusty this past year, of how he had been missed. "why, actually, the place seems darker without him!" the blind man, who had been listening intently, spoke for the first time. "yes!" he said slowly. "he is like light!" the others turned to him. "how's that, brand?" asked bailey, kindly. "i have never seen light," said the man who was born blind, "but when this young man comes in, he brings something that seems to me like what light must be. 'tis warm, but more than that; 'tis--" he shook his head. "i cannot put it into words!" he said. "i have never seen light!" "you are right, sir!" the chaplain spoke with conviction. "you have described it exactly. pippin is one of the light-bringers. they are a class by themselves, and--to judge by my own experience--pippin is in a sub-class by himself. but, mr. bailey, this light must be focused; to do all it can do, all it is meant to do, it must burn steadily; must be a trimmed lamp, not a wandering flame. do you take me?" bailey leaned forward, almost stammering in his eagerness. "that's right! that's right!" he cried. "that's what i've been wantin' to say! that's what i want to go over with you, before he comes, mr. hadley. i've been itchin' to, ever since you come. here's the way it looks to me!" the other two men bent toward him; the talk went on in low, earnest tones. the sun poured in at the wide barn door; the hens and chickens clucked and scratched in the golden straw; from her loose box polly, the black mare, whinnied a request for sugar. past the farmyard gate went the road, a white, dusty ribbon stretching far into the distance; but look and listen as they might, the three men caught no glimpse of a gay figure swinging along, a wheel at its back, a song on its lips. mary was doing her duty, thoroughly and faithfully, as she did all things. the old man had been well taken care of before she came; the little room had been neat as wax, the old rag and tatter of humanity had been kept clean and wholesome as might be; but mrs. bailey had no time for the little touches, the scientific generalities, so to speak, that appeared wherever mary went. the little trays, by whose daintiness gruel was made to appear a feast for sybarites; the tidy screen, fashioned from a clotheshorse and a piece of cheesecloth; the glass of flowers on the light-stand by the bed: all these said, "mary-in-the-kitchen," as plain as things can speak; and mary, sad and steadfast, found satisfaction in them. but old man blossom cared for none of these things; dirt was good enough for him, he said, he was made of it, anyways; let mary stop wieldin' that duster and set down by him, she'd been bustlin' the entire mornin'; he wanted to look at her. mary sat down patiently, and took out her tatting--but the nerveless hand groped and groped till it touched hers, and clutched and held it. then he lay quiet, gazing his fill, asking nothing more of earth or heaven; and mary sat patiently, seeing her duty plain, doing it thoroughly. loving it? no! she would not lie to herself. her flesh would cringe and shrink at the touch of that other flesh, flaccid, lifeless, yet clinging so close it seemed to be sucking her clean young strength as a leech sucks blood. the visions would come, try as she might to banish them; visions of the old, dreadful days, of this face, now so peaceful on the pillow, purple and sodden, with glazed eyes and hanging mouth; of her mother, with the watchful terror in her eyes; mingled with these visions, inseparable from them, the smell of liquor and musty straw. then, as she fought with herself, striving to drive away the sight and the smell, lo! all would change. she would see a dark face glowing with a warmth of tenderness and compassion which--she told herself--her cold heart could never know. "poor old mutt!" said the voice that was like a golden bell. "he's on the blink, you see, and he wants his kid. wouldn't that give you a pain? honest, now!" then mary would bend over the bed in an agony of self-reproach. "father, are you easier? father, would you like a drink? let me lift your head--so!" and through it all, something at the back of her brain knew that along the white ribbon of road a figure was striding, lithe, alert, a wheel at its back and a song on its lips. yes, a song! all would come right, it couldn't help but. the lord was pippin's shepherd, e'en as he was mary's. he would make her see, make her understand. glory be! "dinner's ready, mary! can you come?" mrs. bailey, opening the door softly, spoke under her breath, with a glance at the still figure in the bed, at the hand clutching mary's with feeble, clinging grasp. mary nodded and her lips shaped the words, "presently! he's dropping off asleep." five minutes passed; ten minutes. at last the fingers loosed their hold, the eyes closed, the lines faded, and the ugly old wax mask lay still on the pillow. quietly mary rose, her soft dress making no sound. quietly she stole to the door, quietly opened it, so quietly that no one saw or heard her, for at that moment another door was flung wide open from outside, and a gay "hello! hello! hello!" brought every one to their feet. pippin stood in the doorway, laughing, glowing, his wheel at his back; in his arms--a child--a little, dark, bright-eyed child, who clung to him and gazed wide-eyed at the strange faces, for all were clustering about him now with greetings and questions. "where have you been, pippin? we've been looking for you all day. how are you? what you been doing? whose child is that?" "easy, folks, easy!" laughed pippin. "you're scaring the kiddy out of his boots--if he had any!" with a glance at the brown toes that were curling frantically round him. "mis' bailey, you come--" "whose child is it?" asked lucy bailey again, as she came forward. "well!" pippin laughed again, as he tried to unwind the clinging brown arms from his neck. his face was alight, there was a ring of triumph in his voice. "he calls me daddy. what do you know about that? i expect he's mine, ain't he?" mary! mary! stop! wait and listen! this child is six years old, and pippin two and twenty. use the reason on which you pride yourself! but mary is gone, closing the door softly. gone to fling herself on her knees beside the dying reprobate, to tell him--silently, be sure! his sleep must not be broken--tell him over and over that he is all she has in the world, that she is a wicked, wicked girl; that she will try to love him; she will, she will! "mother! mother! i will try!" no one sees; no one hears. pippin, after a wistful glance round the room, sat down at the table and tucked the child comfortably away under his left arm. "set down, please, everybody!" he said. "i'm right sorry i disturbed you all. seemed so good to get here! no, mis' bailey, full as much obliged, seein' he holds so to me, i'll keep him right here. if you'd pass me some bread and milk; he can eat by himself," proudly; "can't you, old sport? there now! fall afoul of that, what say? elder, i am proper glad to see you, i sure am. i was scared to death you'd got out of patience and gone. mary--miss blossom--well? the old man--she got here in time?" reassured on this point, he drew a long sigh of relief. "that's good! that's good! i kep' on thinkin' and thinkin', what if she come too late? she comin' in soon?" "pretty soon, pippin; he can't bear to have her out of his sight, so she's waiting till he drops asleep. if you don't tell us about that child, mrs. bailey won't give you a morsel to eat, will you, mrs. bailey? and it's the best corned beef hash you ever tasted." pippin threw back his head and laughed again, the gay, triumphant laugh that rang through the kitchen. "got you all guessin', ain't i? now i'll tell you all about it. yesterday i was slammin' along the ro'd--it's been a long trip, twice as long as gettin' there, 'cause i didn't stop any place excep' i had to--slammin' along to beat the band, when i heard a kid hollerin', hollerin' like he was hurt. come round the corner, and there--green grass! there was a big dago guy with an organ, and he was layin' into this kid. layin' into him, you understand, with a stick--little kid like this! wouldn't that give--well! i guess i went sort of dotty. i--well, you'll excuse me, ladies! i done what appeared the right dope--in that case, you understand. i give him his, in good shape! and then i dumped his organ atop of him, and took the kid and _e_-loped. that's all there is to it, really." he swept the table with a smile as confident as it was appealing. "guess you'd all done the same, wouldn't you? the gents, i would say." there was a doubtful murmur, which might mean assent or dissent; the chaplain alone spoke out. "i don't know, pippin! of course you were right to stop the man's beating the child; but if he was his father--" "father nothin'! he was one of them pat rooneys." "pat rooneys? what do you mean?" "that's what they call 'em!" with an assured nod. "never knew why they give 'em an irish name, for they're i-talian dagoes, every man jack of 'em. _buy_ kids, they do, or as good as buy 'em, and learn 'em--" a light broke on the chaplain. "oh! _padrone_, you mean!" "that's what i say. pat roney or rooney: rooney's a more common name. there's rooneys every place, i guess, but they're mostly irish. well! now you see, elder, this kiddo--lemme tell you! say, kiddo! where's puppa?" "papagondaiddo!" replied the child, burrowing his head into pippin's shoulder. "where's mamma?" "mammagondaiddo!" "want to go back to pat rooney?" the boy screamed, and clung frantically round pippin's neck, half choking him. "there! you see, elder, and folks! and you see this!" he added gravely, pulling the ragged shirt from the little shoulders. the women cried out in pity and horror; the men grew red and muttered. pippin pulled the shirt up again, gently as a woman. "i know the way that feels!" he said simply. "i've been there!" there was a moment's silence, while he stroked the curly head absently. then lucy bailey, the tears running down her cheeks, held out her arms. "come to me, little lamb!" she said. "come and have a nice warm bath and some clean dry clothes! then we'll go out and see the chickabiddies and the ducks! come to auntie!" the child resisted at first, but after a long look at her, put his hand in hers and trotted off obediently. pippin drew a breath of relief, and turned eagerly to the chaplain. "glory!" he cried. "glory to god! wa'n't that a leadin', elder? honest, now, did ever you see a leadin' made clearer? i set out to find that little gal, allowin' soon as i'd found her, to do thus and so--you know, to get some boys and give 'em the glad hand, help 'em up. and the very day after i find that gal--" again that wistful glance round the room; she was long in coming--"the _very day_, sir, the lord sends this kid right in my road. and--" pippin's eyes brightened; he brought his hand down with a resounding smack on the table--"green grass! _before_ that, elder!--there's another kid, all ready to come and start right in, waitin' up there to the orphan joint till i tip him the signal, and then just watch him make tracks for cyrus! i--i guess i'll have to sing, elder; i feel like i was bustin'. shall we praise the lord a spell in song?" he was springing to his feet, but the chaplain, exchanging a glance with jacob bailey, laid a quiet hand on his shoulder. "not just yet, pippin!" he said. "you are going too fast; we must talk this over. come out with me--why, you foolish fellow, you haven't eaten any dinner!" "that's right! i haven't. and i'm holler as a pail, too. trouble you for a mite of that hash, mr. bailey? gee! it _is_ good, no two ways about that!" absurd that they should all sit and watch pippin eating his dinner, but they did. he drew them like a magnet. some of them lingered because it put off a little longer the return to work; this was the case of mr. wisk, who did not like to dig potatoes. others, like brand and miss whetstone, pricked eager ears for the scraps of gay talk that alternated with pippin's mouthfuls; while miss pudgkins watched the mouthfuls themselves with mournful interest, and while admiring the skill with which pippin handled his knife (his formative years had not known forks), saw with dismay the dwindling pile of savory hash. she had counted on a portion for her supper; she must say he was a master hand at eating. the chaplain for his part watched the meal with mingled amusement and impatience. it was pleasant to see a perfectly healthy creature enjoying his food, but, with a third mountain of hash just begun upon, and kindling glances thrown toward the custard pie and doughnuts, what was to become of the "heart-to-hearter" which he must have with his "wandering flame"? the moments were passing, the afternoon train looming larger and larger. but the chaplain was not to take the train that afternoon. just as pippin had flung himself joyously on the pie, the inner door opened, and mary, pale and grave, appeared. "mr. hadley," she said, "will you come? father isn't so well!" chapter xxiii the chaplain speaks his mind when it was over; when the spirit--gladly, one must think, with never a backward glance--left the broken shell on the pillow and went its way, there came to old man blossom his hour of dignity and importance. this shell, after all, was what had borne his name, spoken with his voice, thought such thoughts as were his. washed and combed, dressed in clean white clothes that smelt of lavender, covered with spotless drapery that hung in as comely laps and folds as for any bishop at st. praxed's, the old man lay in state, and cyrus poor farm, individually and collectively, came to do him honor, and to pronounce him a "beautiful remains." by and by this was over, too, and mary sat alone in the little room, her capable hands folded in her lap, with a strange, numb feeling that was part thankfulness, part relief, and all desolation. to her, thus sitting, appeared pippin in the doorway, the little italian boy clinging to his hand. the child (his name was peppino, a diminutive of giuseppe, but pippin thought it was pippino and another finger post in the path of his "leading") would hardly leave his adopted daddy for an instant. through the funeral service he had clung to his knees; and when pippin sang "abide with me" (sang it like a surrup, miss whetstone said; she like to bawled right out), the child's eyes glowed with the delight of a latin, and he murmured an unconscious alto. "miss mary--" pippin spoke timidly; "i thought maybe--won't you come outdoors a spell? it's a nice day!" mary looked up with cold sweet eyes. "no, thank you!" she said. "i am tired." "is that so? well, of course you are, all you've ben through. would you like me to bring pippino in to set with you? he'd admire to, wouldn't you, pippino?" mary's white brow contracted. "you must excuse me!" she said. "my head aches. i don't feel like seeing company." and her arms were aching for the child! she wanted to hold him close, close, to fret him with sallies of her kisses, to twine his curls round her finger. from the tail of her eye she absorbed his beauty, the roundness of his cheek, the deliciousness of his chin, the dark stars that were his eyes. but she set her lips, and turned away toward the window, and pippin, with a murmured, "come, kiddo! best we go along!" went his sad way out into the sunshine. instinctively he turned his steps toward the barn, and there the chaplain found him soon after. he was sitting on the upturned bucket, leaning listlessly against the door jamb. peppino was playing beside him with a box of red and white beans, very wonderful. now and then he held up a handful of the pretty things with a gleeful shout; and pippin would nod and smile and say, "some beans, kiddo! they sure are!" his whole air and attitude were so wholly unlike himself that mr. hadley said involuntarily, "what's the matter, pippin?" pippin rose and bowed, with the ghost of his own smile. "that you, elder? well, now! that was a nice funeral, wasn't it? he couldn't ask for no nicer, not if he was the president!" he spoke with obvious effort; his eyes, meeting the chaplain's keen glance, dropped. "what's the matter?" repeated hadley. pippin sat down again, the other beside him. there was a pause; then-- "i've lost my grip!" he said heavily. hadley waited. the father in him, the son in pippin, must meet in silence, if they were to meet at all. presently the words came in a rush. "i've lost my grip; things has got away from me. i don't know what i done--" his eyes, dark with pain and trouble, roved hither and thither, as if seeking enlightenment--"but i done something i hadn't ought to. she has no use for me any more!" still hadley waited. the voice rose into a cry. "i thought," pippin mourned, "i thought when she come to see her pa, and--and knew how he sent me, and i looked for her--looked for her--i thought she'd feel different, but she doesn't, sir; no, she doesn't. she never give me one look to-day, just passed me by same as if i was a chair, or like that. and--just now--i see her sittin' all alone there, and i thought--i tried--but 'twas no good. i don't cut no ice with her, that's all there is to it. i don't know what i'll do, elder; i don't--know--what i'll do! nor that ain't all! i've lost my folks!" "what do you mean, pippin?" "my folks: my movie folks, that i made up like i told you: pa and ma, and the rest. they've gone back on me, elder." "tell me!" the kind hand on his shoulder, pippin poured out his tale; how since he first saw mary things had begun to change, little by little, so gradually that it was a long time before he realized it. then it came over him, suddenly, that all was not right, that the beloved figures were less clear, less sharply defined than they had been. "they'll come when i speak to 'em, yes, and they'll answer, but it's like i had to make up what i want 'em to say, 'stead of them wantin' to say it themselves. i know--elder, i expect you'll think i'm wantin' in my mind, but--i _know_ they wa'n't real folks, but yet they was real to me. they acted so live, and so good and lovin' and all--why, ma--why--what'll i do without ma?" he broke off and stared into vacancy. "i see her now, but she's different: more like a shadow, and when i look at her, she changes into--you know what she changes into, elder?" "yes, pippin, i think i do!" "she changes into mary!" pippin sprang up, and paced the barn with eager steps, throwing up his chin at every turn. "and pa similar. and the little gal--but i never see her so plain, some ways, i never--what i mean--she always appeared like she was some person else, and now i know it was little may, little may blossom!" he choked. the child, dropping his beans, came and pulled at him with eager hands. "daddi pippin, what a matter, daddi?" pippin looked down, and patted the brown head tenderly. "say, kiddo, you run in and ask mis' bailey for a cooky and a mug of milk; what say? it's time you had a bite!" the child hesitated. "and bring-a daddi piece?" he inquired. "daddy'll come in directly and get his piece. you cut along now and wait for me in the kitchen. you can play with the kitty till i come." the child obeyed, only half willingly. "say, isn't he a dandy kid?" pippin turned to the chaplain with a wistful look. "i've got him!" he said. "i've got the kiddo, and i've got my work to do. maybe the lord didn't intend for me to be happy; everybody can't be, it stands to reason." mary's own phrase! the chaplain looked at his watch, and stood a moment as if irresolute. then--"pippin, wait here for ten minutes, will you?" he said. "i have to see about something. just wait, will you?" "sure!" said pippin, wondering. hadley nodded, and walked back to the house with a quick decided step, his watch still in his hand. glancing toward the pasture gate, he saw jacob bailey approaching it, leading the pilot colt which was, he knew, to take him to the station. he quickened his pace still more, and, entering the house, made his way to the room where mary blossom was still sitting, her capable hands idle in her lap, her eyes turned toward the window, seeing nothing. "mary!" at the sharp, decided tone, the girl looked up with a start. the chaplain shut the door, and stood with his back against it, watch in hand. "mary, you are behaving badly! yes!"--as the color rushed over the girl's astonished face. "i mean it! listen to me, for i have only a few minutes. pippin has done you an incalculable service, incalculable! he has shown you your duty and has made it possible for you to do it. no!" as mary made a movement. "you must hear me; i haven't time to hear you. this boy, brought up in a slum cellar, trained for crime and steeped in it, has shown himself your master and mine, in practical christianity. knowing the danger, knowing that he might meet the ruffians who so nearly killed him, as you know--" mary winced--"he went back to the city, because an old dying vagrant asked him to find his child. he found that child, you know at what cost; through him, your father died happy, the desire of his heart fulfilled. in return, you treat him like a dog! instead of gratitude, you give him the cold shoulder. shame on you, mary blossom! your conduct is heartless and wicked. you know pippin loves you. you know there is no one in the world but you--" he paused involuntarily, for mary had risen and faced him, white as marble. "no one but me?" she cried in a voice that shook with the cold passion of a sword. "i don't know what you mean, mr. hadley. hasn't he got his family?" "his family?" repeated the chaplain. "his family, that i heard him tell you about; the family that wasn't just exactly regular, but yet was as dandy as any--i haven't forgot!" cried mary with a sob. "where do i come in, i should like to know? why doesn't he go to his dandy family?" the chaplain's face, that had been set as steel, broke into lines of exquisite kindness. "my soul!" he said. "and i've only five minutes. listen, my dear child! i'm sorry i scolded you!" briefly he told her of the family, of ma and pa, little gal and the baby; how the lonely boy had fashioned them out of his great longing heart, had warmed himself at the shadow fire of their affection. "till you came!" cried the chaplain. "till love came! then--he has just been telling me, poor boy!--his shadows grew cold and dim. he has lost them; he gets nothing in return. mary!" "but--" mary pressed her hands to her head, bewildered--"the child! i saw the child; he calls him--daddy. i heard him say so; i heard him say, 'he is mine!'" "my soul!" cried hadley again. "where were you when he told us? the child? a waif like himself, a lost baby whom he found on the road being cruelly beaten by a brute of an italian _padrone_. pippin thrashed the brute and took the child. what else would he do, being pippin? mary!" he opened the door and spoke over his shoulder. "he is out in the barn now. i told him to wait ten minutes. good-by! remember, _opportunity comes once_!" but even as he left the room, there was a swift movement behind him; he heard a sob; his hand was caught and a swift, shy kiss dropped on it. * * * * * "ain't got any too much time to spare!" said anxious jacob, gathering up the reins. "thank the lord! i mean--we'll fetch it!" said the chaplain. the first words broke unconsciously from him, for he had seen from the gate a light figure emerge from the house and hasten toward the barn. "well," said bailey, "what d'he say when you put it to him? saw reason, didn't he? he would! he's real reasonable, pippin is." the chaplain hung his head. "i--i forgot!" he said. "i'll come over again next week!" * * * * * panting, sobbing, so blinded with tears that she could hardly see her way, mary fled out of the house, across the wide barnyard. the turkey cock, her terror and abomination, ruffled his feathers, spread his tail, and advanced upon her with swelling gobbles of wrath, but she neither saw nor heard him. there never was such a barnyard; there seemed no end to it, and she kept stumbling, now over the puppy, gamboling to meet her, now over the muscovy duck that _would_ waddle directly in front of her. at last she reached the barn, but only to pause, for she heard voices. no! one voice, pippin's, loud and angry, as she had never heard it before! "i tell you, _beat it while your shoes are new_! i've got no use for you, and don't you forget it. i know all you're tellin' me, and i tell _you_ i don't care!" wondering much, mary peeped round the corner of the barn, and saw pippin standing in the middle of the doorway. no one else was in sight, but his eyes, shining with angry light, were bent forward on something that he saw plain enough. mary, this is a matter too hard for you. were the chaplain here, he would know all about it. he might even smile, and murmur to himself, "dominic!" or "francis!" as the notion took him; for he knows that the mystic did not pass with the middle ages, but is to be found in the twentieth century as in the twelfth. mary, of temperament wholly non-mystical, could only look and listen in terror as the voice rang out again. "i know all you've got to say. i know i've lost 'em, pa and ma and all. i know i'll never get 'em back. and i know i'll never get my girl; never! never!" his voice broke, but next moment it rang clear again: "and i say to you what i said before, what i'll say while i have a tongue to speak. you, satan, _beat it!_ you hear me!" now, mary! oh, now, run forward! clasp his hand, your own true lover; cry to him: "you can have your girl! she is yours, yours, yours, every inch of her, now and always!" her feet were starting forward; her lips were opening to speak, when she heard something beside her, a breath drawn sharply in with a hissing sound. she turned, and met the eyes of the imbecile girl, gazing at her with strange and deadly looks. chapter xxiv primal forces "comin' in to supper, brand? the horn has blew!" mr. wisk paused, one foot uplifted for the next step. to realize what a tribute to the blind man's personality lay in this pause, one must have known mr. wisk. as his internal clock pointed the approach of supper time he had been standing, poised for flight, an elderly and ramshackle mercury on a half-dug potato hill. at sound of the horn he started, head bent forward, nose pointing as straight for the kitchen as ever porker's for the trough. he would not have stopped to put away his spade, because the corner behind the right-hand door jamb of the barn had been long since appropriated by him for this purpose; he could reach it without breaking step or slackening his pace. probably nothing on earth would have checked him except the very sight that now met his eyes: the blind man standing just inside the door, feeling over various things on a shelf so high that he (a very tall man) could but just reach it. mr. wisk hesitated; it was his happy boast never to have been late to a meal since he came to manhood. "want--want i should help you?" he quavered. "no, thank you, wisk! i'll be in presently, tell mrs. bailey. i have to look for something just a minute, tell her." he smiled at the sigh of conscious heroism which drifted back from the departing wisk; but the smile faded quickly, and his face was anxious enough as his fingers closed round one object and another on the shelf; a bottle, a jar, a row of paper bags neatly tied with twine. to the casual eye these bags were all alike; one must read the label, see the skull and crossbones, to distinguish them; the blind man needed no labels. "lime, paris green, bordeaux mixture, arsenate of lead--one, two, three, four--there should be five. lime, paris green, bordeaux mixture--_where is the hellebore_?" he paused, his hand resting in an empty space between two bags. the hellebore should be there; it was always there. he had used it himself yesterday. he had counted these objects every night for the past ten years, and never before had one been missing. no one but he could reach the shelf; even jacob bailey had to stand on the bucket to get at it, and the rule was strict that none but one of these two was ever to touch any object on it. brand stood pondering, with bent head, his hand still on the shelf. who had been in the barn this afternoon? he himself, jacob, pippin, and the child. no one else--except the little girl; brand always called flora may the little girl. she had been there, not half an hour ago; he had heard her step, had spoken to her, but she did not answer. in one of her odd spells, probably, poor child! but she could not reach the shelf, even if-- the supper table was less gay than usual that evening; silence prevailed instead of the usual cheerful chatter. a stranger, glancing round the table, would have seen for the most part faces absent or absorbed. jacob was thinking about pippin, regretting that the chaplain had failed to have that talk with him, wondering how he should himself make the matter clear to the boy. his wife was disturbed about flora may who was evidently on the verge of one of her odd spells, for she had acted strangely all day, and she looked wrong to-night. when she crumbled her bread and didn't seem to know the way to her mouth, look out for trouble! in the minds of miss pudgkins and mr. wisk the same thought reigned supreme. the pie looked to be smaller than common; would she cut it in six and fetch in another, or would she make it go round? miss whetstone was inwardly lamenting that she had not told mr. hadley of jonas cattermole's having been two years in the legislature. he'd see plain enough then that folks was folks, even if they found it convenient to board a spell with relations that happened to hold a town office. miss whetstone raised her nose loftily, and told mr. wisk with a grand air that she would trouble him for just a mite of them pickles if he could spare any. and mary? mary had changed her seat, with a murmured excuse about a draft on her back. she had usually sat between jacob bailey and flora may, sat there with an inward protest. she shrank from contact with the imbecile girl: the instinctive shrinking of the healthy from the sick, the unconscious cruelty of the normal toward the abnormal. hitherto she had given no sign of this, ashamed of an instinct that was yet too strong for her; conscious, too, under the skin of her mind, of the warmth of compassion, the tenderness of courtesy, with which pippin always treated the poor girl. if she had been the first lady of the land, he could have shown her no more attention, mary thought. but to-night there was something more; mary was afraid. the look she had met, out there by the barn, the dreadful look which seemed to strike like a sword at her springing hope and lay it cold and dead--she shuddered now at thought of it; she would not meet it again. if she had turned her eyes toward flora may, she would have seen the beautiful face sombre but quiet, the eyes cast down, the girl's whole air listless and brooding; only--if she had looked longer--she might have seen now and then the heavy white lids tremble, lift a little way, and a glance dart from under the long lashes toward pippin where he sat opposite her. mary dared not look at pippin either, for she felt his eyes upon her. not yet, not before all these people, could she give him back look for look, tell him silently all that was crying out within her; but soon, soon, pippin! meantime she had drawn the child peppino into the seat next her, and was lavishing on him all the innocent wiles of the child-hungry woman; and the child nestled close to her, and looked up at her with adoring eyes. pippin would see, would understand. all would be well. pippin saw, but did not understand. he had wrestled and overcome, but the stress of conflict was still upon him, the air was still full of the clash of arms, the sound of great wings. his shadow world was gone, swept away into nothingness; and of the actual flesh-and-blood realities he saw nothing except mary blossom. there she sat opposite him, in all her loveliness; surely he might look at her now, might for once take his fill of gazing on the lovely head with its clustering hair ("the color of a yearlin' heifer--poor old mutt! what a way to speak of it! wouldn't that give you a pain?"), on the long dark lashes against the exquisite curve of the rose-white cheek, on the perfect mouth-- pippin's eyes grew misty; the world fell away from him--say, rather, it narrowed to a point, and life and death and every other creature were merged in that fair head of the love he thought he had lost. "flora may!" mrs. bailey spoke abruptly, almost sharply; every one started. "wake up, flora, and set up straight; you're all slid down in your chair. here! take this cup o' tea to miss blossom, dear!" the brooding face lightened, sharpened, in a strange way; the girl rose with a swift, sudden movement, and went obediently to the end of the table to take the cup. if mrs. bailey had looked up then--but she was busy over her tea things. "you put the sugar in, dearie--she likes two lumps--and cream! mr. brand, you ready for another cup?" pippin had started with the rest, when mrs. bailey spoke. now his eyes followed flora may for a moment; she had turned her back to the table, and was--what was she doing? an old-fashioned mirror hung against the wall, dim with age, yet not so dim but that pippin saw in it the graceful figure of the girl reflected. she paused, the cup in her left hand, drew from her bosom a folded paper, shook into the cup what looked like a white powder, replaced the paper carefully. now what was that poor thing doing? putting salt in mary's tea for a joke like? lacking reason, they were like monkeys, some way-- then the girl lifted her head, and pippin saw her eyes. in a flash he was beside her, and had taken the cup from her hand; now he lifted it, smiling, as if to drink. "i guess that's my cup, ain't it, miss flora may? i guess mis' bailey made a mistake for once!" it all happened in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. before the cup touched his lips, the girl struck it out of his hand. it fell with a sharp crash on the floor. she threw up her arms with a cry which rang through the house, and darted out into the night. "she's got a spell on her!" said jacob bailey, rising quickly. "it's been coming on this week past, m' wife says. come, pippin; come, wisk! we'll have to find the poor child and bring her home." he spoke sadly, but without surprise, as of a thing well known. "you come too, brand! oftentimes she'll answer your voice when she won't another. the barn first!" "she was there this afternoon," said the blind man, following. "likely she's gone to put back something she--borrowed!" not in the barn; not in the corncrib, where she used to sit by the hour, crooning her wordless songs; not in the kennel with old rover, where they had found her more than once, poor thing, her arms around the dumb creature who perhaps--who knows?--was nearer her dumb mind than the human beings around her. "this way!" said brand. "here's a thread of her dress on the gatepost. she's gone to the wood lot." not in the wood lot; no answer to the calls of friendly, tender voices. "flora! flora may! where be you, little gal? speak up, won't you?" further on, through the meadows, guided by the blind man's unerring fingers which found here a broken twig, there a shred of cotton, here again a knot of ribbon caught in a bramble wreath; searching, calling, searching, through weary hours. so at last to the distant pasture where the lily pond gleamed under the moon. there they found her, poor flora may. lying among the lily pads, her lovely hair twined about the brown stems, her fair face turned upwards, the clear shallow water dimpling and wavering above her, so that she seemed to smile at them in faint, disdainful mockery; so they found her, lying quietly in the place of her rest. * * * * * "don't cry, mother! don't ye! the lord has took his poor lamb home. don't take on so, lucy!" thus jacob, patting his wife's shoulder with clumsy, tender hand. he had never seen her so overcome; the calm, self-contained woman was crying and sobbing like a child. but now she collected herself with an effort, and dried her eyes. "i know, jacob! i know i hadn't ought; i know she's better off; but--'tis so pitiful! oh, 'tis so pitiful! she couldn't help it, my poor girl; she couldn't help it. 'twas stronger than her. and, oh, jacob, i can't but think--if her father had been--different--" "there, lucy! there! such things is beyond us." "they hadn't ought to be!" cried lucy bailey, and her tears broke out afresh. "they hadn't ought to be beyond us. the lord intended we should live clean and decent, and made us accordin'; and them as don't, it's their children must pay, like the bible says. but what keeps comin' back and back on my mind is--she was so innocent and so pretty! full as pretty as what mary is, to my thinkin'. seein' her lyin' there, so pretty--oh, so pretty! i couldn't but think--i couldn't but think--if she had had a fair chance--" if she had had a fair chance! so pippin thought, as he stood by the little white bed in the narrow room. he had carried her home in his young strong arms, had laid her here--reverently, as he would have laid a royal princess--on the bed where she had tossed and moaned her heart out for him; now she had no thought for him, she was all for sleep. he had left her to the women, and gone to join the older men, a sorrowful little group about the kitchen fire; but now, when all the house was still, there could be no harm in his entering the quiet room once more, humbly, with bowed head, to say a word of farewell to the poor sweet pretty creatur'; to say a little prayer, too, and maybe--whisperin' like, not to wake a soul--to sing a little hymn, seeing she used to set by his singing. he looked round the room, neat and bare, yet a girl's room, with pretty touches here and there: a bird's nest on a mossy twig, a bunch of feathery grasses in a graceful jug, bright christmas cards framing the little mirror, drooping over them a necklace of wooden beads carved by brand for his little girl. beside these things, on a stand by the bedside, some pond lilies in a glass bowl, drooping with folded petals. pippin shivered, and his eyes turned to the still figure, the white lovely face. kneeling humbly by the humble bed, he said his prayer; then raised his head, and softly, softly, a golden thread of sound--sure no one could hear!--his voice stole out in the hymn she had loved best: "there is rest for the weary, there is rest for the weary, there is rest for the weary, there is rest for you! "on the other side of jordan, in the green fields of eden, where the tree of life is blooming, there is rest for your soul!" pippin rose and stood for some moments looking down on the quiet face; then he made his reverence--bowing lower than usual, with a gesture of his hands as if taking leave of something high and noble--and turned away. closing the door softly, he paused, looking into the darkness of the passage with wistful eyes. he was very, very lonely; his heart was sad as death. could he--might he not, once more, call up to comfort him the shadow faces he had loved so well? now? just this once! he bent forward, his eyes fixed intently. "ma!" he said softly. "you there?" a moment's pause; then a sob broke from him and he turned to go. but then--oh, then!--came a rustle of something soft, came a flash of something white. two arms were flung round his neck, pressing him close, close; a radiant head lay on his shoulder. "will i do?" cried mary blossom. "oh, pippin, pippin! will i do instead?" chapter xxv pippin overcomes "well, how about it?" said john aymer. a council was being held in the pleasant parlor with the rose-colored shades. john aymer, lucy his wife, and lawrence hadley, his wife's brother, were sitting together, talking of things with which we have some concern. "how about it?" repeated the hardware merchant. he planted both elbows on his knees, rested his chin on his hands, and, as he would have said, squared away for action. the others looked up inquiringly. "pippin is your hunt, larry, and from your point of view--and his--he is on the right track, and it's all highcockolorum erin go bragh. but mary is our hunt, lucy's and mine, and we don't feel so sure about all this." "i do part of the time, john!" mrs. aymer spoke with a certain timidity, unlike her usual gay decisiveness. "when i talk with larry, or see pippin--even just look at him--it seems all as right as right; but then--" "but then you look at mary, and it doesn't. see here, lar!" john aymer laid down his pipe, a token of strong interest with him. "pippin is what you call a mystic and i call a glorified crank. all he wants in the world--beside mary--is a chance to help, as he says; and it's great. i know it is, and i'm proud to know the chap, and all that. but that _isn't_ all mary wants!" the chaplain looked up with a grave nod of comprehension. "mary blossom," john aymer went on, "is a fine girl, and she's an ambitious girl. she has done well herself, got a first-rate education of its kind, made herself a first-rate all-round young woman, capable of doing--within limits--anything she sets her hand to. now--she's as dead stuck on pippin as he is on her--" "john! what language! she adores him, if that is what you mean." "well, she adores him, then--doesn't sound half as real--but she doesn't adore the line of life he is laying out for himself and her. i don't believe she takes any more stock in it than--than i should. she would like to see her husband a church member in regular standing: a vestryman; doing no end of pious work, you know--he has to do _that_ or bust; even i can see that--but doing it in a regular respectable kind of way: chairman of boards--what? frock coat, handsome rooms, subcommittees, secretaries, that kind of thing. she wants to see him a leader, and she believes he can be. this picking up a boy here and a tramp there, singing and praying, hurrah boys and god bless you, doesn't cut much ice with mary. poor little soul, she cried an hour on lucy's shoulder the other night. lucy cried, too, of course; water works all over the house, almost drowned me out." "john!" "well, sir, that kind of thing--the chairman, frock coat, committee-room thing, is what mary wants for her husband; and who can say but she's right? i don't say she is, mind! i'm not a spiritual kind of man, and i know it; but i do say that pippin ought to realize how she feels and the kind of life she would choose. then he can face it, squarely, and make his own decision, knowing what it means to her. you say--" he turned to his wife, who was listening intently--"he's had no education. granted--in a way! but you can't keep pippin from education any more than you can keep a dog from water when he's thirsty. (nip's bowl is empty, by the way, lucy; might cry into that next time, what?) i don't say it will be book education; much good my books have done me, and as you say, lucy, my english resembles a tinker's--well, thought it, if you didn't say it--well--what do you say, reverend?" lawrence hadley threw his head back with a little reversed nod that was all his own. "give me a minute, jack! i'm assimilating! give me a minute!" he took a minute, whistling "am i a soldier of the cross?" through slowly and carefully. then he took three more in silence, walking slowly up and down the room, the others watching him anxiously. all true--so far as it went. pippin ought to see, ought to realize, what mary wanted. ought to realize, too, what power he would have in that way, the frock coat, roast-turkey, mahogany-and-brass-rail way. popularity? he might become the idol of a day--of many days. men's hearts would open to him like flowers to the sun. mass meetings; hospitals; his voice floating through the wards; "the bright seraphim in burning row!" yes! mary beside him, glorified in him, shining with his light and her own--yes!--on the other hand--what? a dying tramp comforted; a weak boy saved from ruin; a poor old sinner made happy. not much, perhaps? and yet--had the master founded hospitals there in judea? had he healed all the lepers? he healed one, and the world changed. the hospitals have been building ever since. at last he spoke. "every word you say is true, jack! hold on!" as the other reached for his pipe with an air of relief. "don't light up yet; you won't be so pleased in a minute. every word is true, i say, but it's only half the truth, and the less important half!" hadley's eyes kindled, and he began to beat time with his fist on the arm of his chair. he was getting up steam. "what do you mean?" said aymer, rather shortly. "you are right about pippin's realizing mary's point of view. he ought, and he shall; you shall put it to him yourself, as strongly as you like; but--here comes in my half--she must also realize his, and that is what she doesn't do." "that is true, john!" mrs. aymer started forward, clasping her pretty hands in an adorable little way she had when strongly moved. "she _doesn't_ realize, any more than you do; any more than i do, except just the least little bit. but, oh, i know lawrence is right! i feel it in every bone i have. john dear, do as lar says; put your side--_our_ side, for, oh, i _am_ such a worldly little animal!--before pippin plainly, and then let lar show mary the other!" "agreed!" said john aymer. "no!" said lawrence hadley. "pippin shall show her the other himself." at this moment came a knock at the door. "come in!" said john aymer impatiently. the door flew open, and mary entered, a mary at sight of whom mrs. aymer sprang forward with inarticulate murmurs, while the two men rose to their feet in confusion. a wholly unfamiliar mary; one would have said an impossible one. crying, laughing, clasping and unclasping her hands wildly, she ran to the other woman, and melted into her arms as if there were no such things as class distinctions in the world. "oh! mrs. aymer!" she sobbed. "oh, mr. aymer and mr. hadley! if you please! i have been a wicked, wicked girl!" sorely puzzled, the three friendly conspirators looked past the bright head, now resting on mrs. aymer's agitated shoulder, to the doorway, where stood pippin, silent, motionless, but radiating light and joy and pride, "like a torch!" "like a blooming lighthouse!" said the two men, each to himself, in his own speech. "i wouldn't cry, mary!" pippin spoke quietly, as he would to a child. "you would!" mary flashed round upon him. "you'd cry your eyes out, and wish you had more to cry out! i've been a wicked, wicked girl! oh, mrs. aymer! oh, dear! oh, dear! no, my kind lady, don't stop me, for it has to come out. he took me--my pippin took me--down--down to those dreadful places where he used to live. i went into a cellar, dark and cold--oh! and there was a little child, all thin and cold and dirty, not clothes enough to cover him; and bruises on his little flesh! oh, my heart! and pippin said--pippin said--'that might be me, mary!' oh, mrs. aymer! oh, mr. hadley! _it might have been me, too!_ it all came back. i remember--i remember--" the sobs choked her, but she fought them back fiercely, and went on, struggling for utterance, still clasping and unclasping those eager hands. "he showed me more, but that was enough. i says to myself, 'who am i, to turn him from his own work? who am i, to come between him and the lord? no! no!" she turned, and held out her hands with a passionate gesture. pippin stepped forward and clasped the hands in his. "we're going to work together!" said mary blossom. she spoke quietly now, though the sobs still tried to break out. "i'm going to follow him, help him, serve with him, every minute of my life from now on. he will do all the real work, everything that counts; but i can cook, and mend, and--oh, mrs. aymer, i can wa-wa-wash for them!" she caught pippin's hand to her lips, then flung it away and ran out. a silken flutter, and lucy aymer was after her like a flash. there was a tempestuous rustle of petticoats, and the sound of sobs and cooing; then silence. the three men looked at one another. presently john aymer drew a long breath. "so _that's_ all right!" he said. "one to you, parson!" the chaplain laughed, a contented little laugh. "very handsome of you, jack!" he said. "what do you say, pippin? is it all right?" "it is, sir!" pippin raised his head, which had been bent for a moment. "yes, elder, and boss--i would say mr. aymer, sir; it is all right. i knew it would be; i never had no fears. i knew as soon as mary sensed it she'd realize how 'twas. yes, sir, i took her down--" he named a certain quarter of the city--"and showed her. i didn't need to say a word, hardly. she saw; mary saw! and now, elder--" he turned to lawrence hadley, and his eyes kindled. "lemme tell you! it's like you said. i've got to get edication. i'm not fit to take holt of kids yet--not yet--but i will be! i'd like to start right away, if agreeable to you. you say where to go, and i'll go, if i have to wheel myself in a barrer!" chapter xxvi pippin praises the lord two years have passed, as yesterday, as a watch in the night. once more the chaplain sits in his office, the bare, unlovely little room where we first saw him. once more he is opening, sorting, reading his morning mail, his brow saddening, lightening, saddening again. finally, once more the cloud rolls away entirely, and he settles himself in his chair with a comfortable sigh. "pippin!" he says, and composes himself to read. let us look over his shoulder and read with him! honored and respected sir, i take up my pen with pleasure, to express the hope that the present seasonable weather may find you in good health and the enjoyment of every blessing. well, elder, i haven't written this good while past, because i wanted to wait and see would i be able to tell you what i _wanted_ to tell you. well, elder, i want you should know it's _all right_, i have got that degree! i had a talk with the old man last winter, and he surely is great. he said i was all right on chemistry and crops and soils and like that, and similar on social economics, and mathematics, but where i fell down was on rhetoric and english literature. i said did he think that cut any great amount of ice when all i wanted was know how to run a farm and bring up boys straight and white. he said he didn't know as it did, but yet i didn't want those boys to grow up speaking ignorant. you bet i don't says i, but what's to hinder me learning 'em? i says, and learning myself at the same time? have the books, and study right along with 'em i says, and there would be others could teach me, i says. then i told him how it was about me and mary, and how it didn't seem as if i _could wait any longer_. he laughed real pleasant, and said he guessed i wouldn't be called upon to wait very long, and i should have the degree all right first minute he could give it to me. then he explained just how it was, and of course i saw in a minute; he couldn't give a degree to a guy for knowing a thing when he didn't know it. he knew how 'twas with me, and that i was doing chores and odd jobs to pay my way. and grinding! elder, i was thankful to nipper for that wheel. i sure was. i kept the whole show sharpened up good, now i tell you. well, elder, now i want to tell you. when you first said, and mr. bailey upheld you, that it behooved me wait two years, and go to state agricultural, and do thus and so, before i'd be fit to handle boys and be trusted by them as had 'em in charge--i tell you, sir, it seemed as if i _couldn't_, no way in the world. it appeared like i couldn't do it. it was like as if i was in heaven, and you took me by my scruff and pants and hove me out. "it's more than reason," i says to myself. "it's more than flesh and blood can stand; it's like i was white-hot metal, and they took and threw cold water over me!" well, elder! you see where that was leading me? i bet you do! but i didn't, not at first. i went out to the barn, you rec'lect, and just set there by myself, humped up on the meal bucket, sayin' over and over, "i was all white hot to do the lord's work, and they've took and threw cold water over me!" and then, all of a sudden, it come to me, and i laughed right out. you must have heard me over to the house, i expect. mary did, and she come running--bless her! "you lunkhead!" i says. "you lunkhead from way back everlasting, how do they temper metal _but_ with cold water? nice kind of steel you'd get without it, what say? like to shave with soft iron, what say? and when you put it in the water it hisses," i says, "and so does the old gander hiss, and i know which you are most like!" i says. i was laughing, you rec'lect, when i come back to tell you 'twas all right; i expect you knew pretty well how twas. you were whistling "soldier of the cross," and that showed me. well, elder, i have had a _great time_ over to state agricultural, i sure have. the folks have been dandy, sir, simply dandy. folks couldn't _be_ no dandier than what they have to me. i used to think college folks and like that was _wanting_ somehow, but i found the boot was on the other leg, it was me that was a nut to think so. i've made friends--why, they are _all_ friends, i do believe. i'll tell you all about it first chance i get, but what i want to say _now_ is, elder, _my time is up_! i've got my degree, and mr. bailey is satisfied, and the cottage is ready (i've put in all my vacations on it, you know, and mr. bailey and the selectmen have been more than kind, the neighbors too), and mary is ready; bless her heart! and mrs. aymer can spare her all right, or at least she says she _can't_, but she _will_, the kiddo learning to walk and like that; and she's got mary the dandiest outfit ever you saw, elder! if she was the president's wife, it couldn't be no dandier. and i've been to see all those gentlemen you said, the boards and like that, and they was all dandy too, and said "go ahead," and _i'm going_! so name the day you can come over, elder, and _mary and i will be there_. the lord is so good to me--i don't know why he is so good, except that he _is_ good. and all my life long, sir, i'll try my best to make other folks happy, i sure will. so no more but thanking you elder, because under the lord you really done it all sir. with a grateful heart though faltering pen i beg to convey to you, reverend and highly respected sir, the assurance of my being your most obedient humble servant pippin. p.s. i could have written and spelled it better if i had have taken time and followed this book, the "polite letter writer"; a guy loaned it to me over to state agricultural. i began this letter with it, but it balled me up so i couldn't keep on and i'm in hopes you will excuse bad writing and spelling. but i aim at a correct and elegant style, dear sir, in epistolary communication--green grass! maybe when i have _more time_, elder, i can do it, but it's no use, i cannot now. the chaplain read this letter through twice. then, after docketing and filing it carefully, he rose, and tucking his coat tails under his arm, proceeded to dance gravely up and down the little bare room, singing the song that was his high water mark of joy and triumph: "green is for ireland, ireland, ireland, green is for ireland, fiddle dal day!" the day was named; the day was here. boards, councils and committees sent each a kindly delegate to the opening of the new boys' cottage at cyrus poor farm. the opening was to take place in the afternoon; eight of the ten boys were to be brought over from the city by the president of a certain institution; there were to be addresses and formalities. but a few delegates had been asked to come early, to attend the wedding of the young couple who were to take charge of the new cottage. these delegates came smiling, full of cheerful expectation. this, they told one another, was lawrence hadley's venture. good fellow, hadley, excellent fellow! yes, he vouched for this young chap, absolutely. seemed to be an extraordinary chap; state agricultural college gone wild over him. kind of athletic evangelist, it appeared; led 'em all by the nose, they say. this cottage was his idea; yes. and there it was; pretty cottage! a pretty cottage indeed; red brick, like the mother building which smiles friendly upon it across the green yard; its creepers already started, its flower beds already in bloom; its brass knocker defying the sun. inside, all fresh and bright, homelike and--full! full to overflowing, so that the kindly delegates pause astonished, and wonder whence all these people have found their way to so remote a district as north cyrus. who are all these people? come and see! first, in the shining kitchen, which has walked bodily over, it would appear, from mr. aymer's home in the city suburb, who are these two busy, rosy, white-capped and aproned people, man and woman? why, these are mr. and mrs. baxter, who are preparing the wedding breakfast. who else should prepare it, they would like to know? weren't they the first to welcome pippin when he came to kingdom? wasn't he like their own, a son to them, a brother to buster? buster is in the shed now, "spelling" myron at the ice cream freezer, both so eager that they are making five-minute shifts at the handle. glancing through the open shed door, you may see jacob bailey in his sunday suit, deep in talk with father o'brien and elder stebbins--pleasant talk, to judge from their faces. from the barn comes brand, he too in his decent best, threadbare but spotless, carrying in careful hands the wonderful nest of baskets on which his spare hours for the past year have been spent: his wedding present for pippin and mary. look at him! he has never seen light, but we see it in his face. who is in the dining-room of the cottage? mrs. bailey, of course, with aunt mandy whetstone and miss pudgkins. miss whetstone opines that if there was need of city folks to do their table settin' for them, it was time they give up! with trembling hands she is laying out on the table the four silver teaspoons and the gravy ladle which commonly repose with her burial money at the bottom of her trunk. the trunk is kept locked, strapped and corded, the key hangs round miss whetstone's neck on a string; you never know, and in case of fire, there you are! miss pudgkins has no teaspoons, but she has "loaned" for the occasion the chief ornament of her bedroom, a magnificent wreath of "preserved" funeral flowers in a glass case. the cloud on her brow at this moment comes from mrs. bailey's kindly but firm refusal to use the wreath for a centrepiece. "fresh flowers is rill common!" miss pudgkins thinks. one cannot say that mr. wisk is in any special room, because he is in them all, following his unerring nose from dining-room to kitchen, from kitchen to pantry, wherever the smell of food leads him; pointing industriously, and whispering in any willing ear that that ham, sir, is the "pick and peer of swine p'dooce the country over, let the others be who they will." mr. wisk has unearthed from some mouldering portmanteau an enormous red velvet waistcoat with glass buttons, reaching halfway to his knees. he is proud of every inch of it, and struts gloriously when glances are cast toward it. who is in the parlor? why, who but mrs. appleby and mrs. faulkner, both in holiday guise; both beaming with the same effulgence of joy that lights every face in this astonishing cottage? here in the parlor also is the chaplain, holding in either hand peppino and jimmy mather, who are straining like puppies on a leash. "keep still, youngsters!" commands the chaplain. "you nearly had me over that time. i'll tell you as soon as i see--ah! there they are!" the mellow note of a gabriel horn is heard; an automobile comes dashing down the road. it is john aymer's new car, the "son and heir," and john aymer is driving it. beside him sits mrs. aymer, all smiles and roses and pink muslin, as becomes a matron of honor, in her arms the son and heir himself, _almost_ big enough, she thinks, for a page, (but not quite, since every third step still brings his nose to the earth). and in the tonneau--are these two glorified spirits from another world, radiating light and joy and triumph? no! these are pippin and mary; she in white, with white roses in her pretty hat, he--but no one could ever tell what pippin had on. at sight of him the chaplain looses his hold of the two boys. they make one bolt for the door, fall out of it together, wriggle up again, and rush like a double whirlwind to the gate, rolling under the wheels of the car, which has fortunately come to a standstill. pippin and mary spring down. seeing them, the cottage becomes all eyes, guests, helpers, delegates, crowding to the windows. most of the women begin to cry. foolish creatures! what is the matter with them? and why, on the other hand, do most of the men suddenly develop head colds, and flourish handkerchiefs violently? is it just because it is the common way at weddings? or is it because these two young people have been patient, valiant, and steadfast, and now, after the long days of their waiting, there is something in their faces that brings the tear as well as the smile to all that see? here they are, hand in hand. everybody is shouting, "pippin! pippin!" and crowding round him and mary. the delegates rather think everybody has gone suddenly mad, but they don't feel quite sane themselves somehow. something in the air, something in pippin's face and voice, goes to their heads too, and they find themselves shaking hands with everybody, and echoing the chaplain's shout, "glorious! glorious! great guns, this is glorious!" the time has come. the workers hurry in, breathless but demure, the guests smooth their dresses and settle with a solemn gesture. "dearly beloved--" then, the seven minutes over that have made pippin and mary man and wife, what a rush of kisses, slaps on the back, handshakings, good wishes, congratulations! amid all which mrs. baxter and mrs. bailey nod to each other and steal out, beckoning to their aids. "dish up!" the word passes round, low and emphatic. the baxters fly, the baileys flutter, mr. wisk and his pointing nose get in everybody's way and narrowly escape upsetting mr. baxter as he comes proudly into the dining-room, carrying his life's masterpiece, the wedding cake. such a cake! frosting as many inches deep as frosting can be; citron and angelica, plums and comfits--even solomon in all his glory had no cake like this. mr. baxter, in his rapture hinting at this, is promptly rebuked by mrs. baxter, and told not to be profane, father; before the boy, too! "breakfast is served!" says mr. baxter, as if he were reading the declaration of independence. in they all come, pippin and mary leading off, the guests following in a joyous mob, the delegates bringing up the rear, smiling twice as hard as when they came. most extraordinary occasion! must remember all this to tell the wife. most extraordinary people! they have all got round the table, no one knows how. pippin and mary are standing, still hand in hand, all heaven in their faces. pippin looks round, and his eyes fill with tears like all the rest. he bows his head for a moment, his lips moving silently; then he looks up, and his smile lightens the room. once more his eyes make the circuit of the table, every face kindling from his glance. he lifts his hand, and makes his reverence like a young birch tree in the wind. "mary and folks," says pippin; "seein' the lord has dealt with us not accordin' to--i would say _my_ sins, mary not havin' any, nor i wouldn't presume likely any of you dandy folks--what i would say--shall we praise him in song?" he lifts his head; his voice breaks out, solemn, jubilant, triumphant. "praise god, from whom all blessings flow!" * * * * * transcriber's note: punctuation has been corrected when it was deemed to be printer's error. 'oe' ligatures have been rewritten as non-ligatured 'oe'. produced from scanned images of public domain material from the google print project.) the ancient law by the same author the wheel of life the deliverance the battle-ground the freeman, and other poems the voice of the people phases of an inferior planet the descendant the ancient law by ellen glasgow new york doubleday, page & company copyright, , by doubleday, page & company published, january, all rights reserved including that of translation into foreign languages including the scandinavian to my good friend effendi contents book first--the new life chapter page i. the road ii. the night iii. the return to tappahannock iv. the dream of daniel smith v. at tappahannock vi. the pretty daughter of the mayor vii. shows the graces of adversity viii. "ten commandment smith" ix. the old and the new x. his neighbour's garden xi. bullfinch's hollow xii. a string of coral book second--the day of reckoning i. in which a stranger appears ii. ordway compromises with the past iii. a change of lodging iv. shows that a laugh does not heal a heartache v. treats of a great passion in a simple soul vi. in which baxter plots vii. shows that politeness, like charity, is an elastic mantle viii. the turn of the wheel ix. at the cross-roads x. between man and man xi. between man and woman book third--the larger prison i. the return to life ii. his own place iii. the outward pattern iv. the letter and the spirit v. the will of alice vi. the iron bars vii. the vision and the fact viii. the weakness in strength book fourth--liberation i. the inward light ii. at tappahannock again iii. alice's marriage iv. the power of the blood v. the house of dreams vi. the ultimate choice vii. flight viii. the end of the road ix. the light beyond book first the new life chapter i the road though it was six days since daniel ordway had come out of prison, he was aware, when he reached the brow of the hill, and stopped to look back over the sunny virginia road, that he drank in the wind as if it were his first breath of freedom. at his feet the road dropped between two low hills beyond which swept a high, rolling sea of broomsedge; and farther still--where the distance melted gradually into the blue sky--he could see not less plainly the new york streets through which he had gone from his trial and the walls of the prison where he had served five years. between this memory and the deserted look of the red clay road there was the abrupt division which separates actual experience from the objects in a dream. he felt that he was awake, yet it seemed that the country through which he walked must vanish presently at a touch. even the rough march wind blowing among the broomsedge heightened rather than diminished the effect of the visionary meeting of earth and sky. as he stood there in his ill-fitting clothes, with his head bared in the sun and the red clay ground to fine dust on his coarse boots, it would have been difficult at a casual glance to have grouped him appropriately in any division of class. he might have been either a gentleman who had turned tramp or a tramp who had been born to look a gentleman. though he was barely above medium height, his figure produced even in repose an impression of great muscular strength, and this impression was repeated in his large, regular, and singularly expressive features. his face was square with a powerful and rather prominent mouth and chin; the brows were heavily marked and the eyes were of so bright a blue that they lent an effect which was almost one of gaiety to his smile. in his dark and slightly coarsened face the colour of his eyes was intensified until they appeared to flash at times like blue lights under his thick black brows. his age was, perhaps, forty years, though at fifty there would probably be but little change recorded in his appearance. at thirty one might have found, doubtless, the same lines of suffering upon his forehead and about his mouth. as he went on over some rotting planks which spanned a stream that had gone dry, the road he followed was visible as a faded scar in a stretch of impoverished, neutral-toned country--the least distinctive and most isolated part of what is known in virginia as "the southside." a bleached monotony was the one noticeable characteristic of the landscape--the pale clay road, the dried broomsedge, and even the brownish, circular-shaped cloud of smoke, which hung over the little town in the distance, each contributing a depressing feature to a face which presented at best an unrelieved flatness of colour. the single high note in the dull perspective was struck by a clump of sassafras, which, mistaking the mild weather for a genial april, had flowered tremulously in gorgeous yellow. the sound of a wagon jolting over the rough road, reached him presently from the top of the hill, and as he glanced back, he heard a drawling curse thrown to the panting horses. a moment later he was overtaken by an open spring wagon filled with dried tobacco plants of the last season's crop. in the centre of the load, which gave out a stale, pungent odour, sat a small middle-aged countryman, who swore mild oaths in a pleasant, jesting tone. from time to time, as the stalks beneath him were jostled out of place, he would shift his seat and spread out his short legs clad in overalls of blue jean. behind him in the road the wind tossed scattered and damaged leaves of tobacco. when the wagon reached ordway, he glanced over his shoulder at the driver, while he turned into the small grass-grown path amid the clumps of sassafras. "is that bernardsville over there?" he asked, pointing in the direction of the cloud of smoke. the wagon drew up quickly and the driver--who showed at nearer view to be a dirty, red-bearded farmer of the poorer class--stared at him with an expression which settled into suspicion before it had time to denote surprise. "bernardsville! why, you've come a good forty miles out of your road. that thar's tappahannock." "tappahannock? i hadn't heard of it." "mebbe you ain't, but it never knowed it." "anything going on there? work, i mean?" "the biggest shippin' of tobaccy this side o' danville is goin' on thar. ever heard o' danville?" "i know the name, but the tobacco market is about closed now, isn't it? the season's over." the man's laugh startled the waiting horses, and lifting their heads from a budding bush by the roadside, they moved patiently toward tappahannock. "closed? bless you, it never closes--whoa! thar, won't you, darn you? to be sure sales ain't so brisk to-day as they war a month back, but i'm jest carryin' in my leetle crop to baxter's warehouse." "it isn't manufactured, then--only bought and sold?" "oh, it's sold quick enough and bought, too. baxter auctions the leaf off in lots and it's shipped to the factories in richmond an' in danville. you ain't a native of these parts, i reckon?" "a native--no? i'm looking for work." "what sort of work? thar's work an' work. i saw a man once settin' out in an old field doin' a picture of a pine tree, an' he called it work. wall, wall, if you're goin' all the way to tappahannock, i reckon i kin give you a lift along. mebbe you kin pick up an odd job in baxter's warehouse--thar's a sayin' that he feeds all the crows in tappahannock." he drove on with a chuckle, for ordway had declined the proffered "lift," and the little cloud of dust raised by the wagon drifted slowly in the direction of the town. a mile farther on ordway found that as the road approached tappahannock, the country lost gradually its aspect of loneliness, and the colourless fields were dotted here and there with small negro cabins, built for the most part of unbarked pine logs laid roughly cross-wise to form square enclosures. before one of these primitive dwellings a large black woman, with a strip of checked blue and white gingham bound about her head, was emptying a pail of buttermilk into a wooden trough. when she saw ordway she nodded to him from the end of the little path, bordered by rocks, which led from the roadside to the single stone step before her cabin door. as he watched the buttermilk splash into the trough, ordway remembered, with a spasm of faintness, that he had eaten nothing since the day before, and turning out of the road, he asked the woman for a share of the supper that she gave the pigs. "go 'way, honey, dis yer ain' fit'n fur you," she replied, resting the pail under her arm against her rolling hip, "i'se des' thowin' hit ter de hawgs." but when he had repeated his request, she motioned to a wooden bench beside a scrubby lilac bush on which a coloured shirt hung drying, and going into the single room inside, brought him a glass of buttermilk and a piece of corn bread on a tin plate. while he ate hungrily of the coarse food a half-naked negro baby, covered with wood ashes, rolled across the threshold and lay sprawling in the path at his feet. after a little rambling talk the woman went back into the cabin, where she whipped up cornmeal dough in an earthenware bowl, turning at intervals to toss a scrap or two to a red and white cock that hovered, expectant, about the doorway. in the road a covered wagon crawled by, and the shadow it threw stretched along the path to the lilac bush where the coloured shirt hung drying. the pigs drank the buttermilk from the trough with loud grunts; the red and white cock ventured, alert and wary, across the threshold; and the negro baby, after sprawling on its stomach in the warm earth, rolled over and lay staring in silence at the blue sky overhead. there was little beauty in the scene except the beauty which belongs to all things under the open sky. road and landscape and cabin were bare even of any chance effect of light and shadow. yet there was life--the raw, primal life of nature--and after his forty years of wasted experience, ordway was filled with a passionate desire for life. in his careless pursuit of happiness he had often found weariness instead, but sitting now homeless and penniless, before the negro's cabin, he discovered that each object at which he looked--the long road that led somewhere, the smoke hanging above the distant town, the deep-bosomed negro mother and the half-naked negro baby--that each of these possessed an interest to which he awakened almost with a start of wonder. and yielding to the influence of his thought, his features appeared to lose gradually their surface coarseness of line. it was as if his mouth grew vague, enveloped in shadow, while the eyes dominated the entire face and softened its expression to one of sweetness, gaiety and youth. the child that is in every man big enough to contain it looked out suddenly from his altered face. he was thinking now of a day in his boyhood--of an early autumn morning when the frost was white on the grass and the chestnuts dropped heavily from the spreading boughs and the cider smelt strong and sweet as it oozed from the crushed winesaps. on that morning, after dressing by candlelight, he had gone into town with his maiden aunt, a lady whom he remembered chiefly by her false gray curls which she wore as if they had been a halo. at the wayside station, while they had waited for the train to the little city of botetourt, he had seen a convict brought in, handcuffed, on his way to the penitentiary, and in response to the boy's persistent questioning, his aunt had told him that the man was wicked, though he appeared to the child's eyes to be only miserable--a thin, dirty, poorly clad labourer with a red cotton handkerchief bound tightly about his jaw. a severe toothache had evidently attacked him, for while he had stared sullenly at the bare planks of the floor, he had made from time to time a suffering, irritable movement with his head. at each gesture the guard had called out sharply: "keep still there, won't you?" to which the convict had responded by a savage lowering of his heavy brows. for the first time it had occurred to the child that day that there must be a strange contradiction--a fundamental injustice in the universal scheme of nature. he had always been what his father had called impatiently "a boy with ideas," and it had seemed to him then that this last "idea" of his was far the most wonderful of them all--more wonderful than any he had found in books or in his own head at night. at the moment he had felt it swell so large in his heart that a glow of happiness had spread through his body to his trembling hands. slipping from his aunt's hold he had crossed the room to where the convict sat sullenly beside his guard. "i'll give you all my money," he had cried out joyously, "because i am so much happier than you." the convict had started and looked up with an angry flash in his eyes; the guard had burst into a loud laugh while he spat tobacco juice through the window; the silver had scattered and rolled under the benches on the plank floor; and the child's aunt, rustling over in her stiff brocade, had seized his arm and dragged him, weeping loudly, into the train. so his first mission had failed, yet at this day he could remember the joy with which he had stretched out his little hand and the humiliation in which he had drawn it back. that was thirty years ago, but he wondered now if the child's way had been god's way, after all? for there had come an hour in his life when the convict of his boyhood had stood in closer relationship to his misery than the people whom he had touched in the street. his childish memories scattered like mist, and the three great milestones of his past showed bare and white, as his success, his temptation and his fall. he remembered the careless ambition of his early youth, the brilliant promise of his college years, and the day on which he had entered as a younger member the great banking house of amos, bonner, and amos. between this day and the slow minutes when he had stood in his wife's sitting-room awaiting his arrest, he could find in his thoughts no gradation of years to mark the terrible swiftness of his descent. in that time which he could not divide wall street had reached out and sucked him in; the fever of speculation had consumed like disease the hereditary instincts, the sentiments of honour, which had barred its way. one minute he had stood a rich man on the floor of the stock exchange--and was it an instant or a century afterwards that he had gone out into the street and had known himself to be a beggar and a criminal? other men had made millions with the use of money which they held in trust; but the star of the gambler had deserted him at the critical hour; and where other men had won and triumphed, he had gone down, he told himself, dishonoured by a stroke of luck. in his office that day a mirror over the mantel had showed him his face as he entered, and he had stopped to look at it almost with curiosity--as if it were the face of a stranger which repelled him because it bore some sinister likeness to his own. after this there had come days, weeks, months, when at each sudden word, at each opening of the door, he had started, half sickened, by fear of the discovery which he knew must come. his nerves had quivered and given way under the pressure; he had grown morose, irritable, silent; and in some half-insane frenzy, he had imagined that his friends, his family, his wife, even his young children, had begun to regard him with terror and suspicion. but at last the hour had come, and in the strength with which he had risen to meet it, he had won back almost his old self--for courage, not patience, was the particular virtue of his temperament. he had stood his trial bravely, had heard his sentence without a tremor, and had borne his punishment without complaint. the world and he were quits now, and he felt that it owed him at least the room for a fair fight. the prison, he had said once, had squared him with his destiny, yet to-day each act of his past appeared to rivet, not itself, but its result upon his life. though he told himself that he was free, he knew that, in the reality of things, he was still a prisoner. from the lowest depths that he had touched he was reached even now by the agony of his most terrible moment when, at the end of his first hopeless month, he had found awaiting him one day a letter from his wife. it was her final good-bye, she had written; on the morrow she would leave with her two children for his father's home in virginia; and the single condition upon which the old man had consented to provide for them was that she should separate herself entirely from her husband. "the condition is hard," she had added, "made harder, too, by the fact that you are his son and my only real claim upon him is through you--yet when you consider the failure of our life together, and that the children's education even is unprovided for, you will, i feel sure, admit that my decision has been a wise one." the words had dissolved and vanished before his eyes, and turning away he had flung himself on his prison bed, while the hard, dry sobs had quivered like blows in his chest. yet she was right! his judgment had acquitted her in the first agony of his reproach, and the unerring justice in her decision had convicted him with each smooth, calm sentence in her letter. as he lay there he had lost consciousness of the bare walls and the hot sunshine that fell through the grating, for the ultimate desolation had closed over him like black waters. a little later he had gone from his cell and taken up his life again; but all that he remembered of it now was a voice that had called to him in the prison yard. "you look so darn sunk in the mouth i'll let you have my last smoke--damn you!" turning sullenly he had accepted the stranger's tobacco, unaware at the moment that he was partaking of the nature of a sacrament--for while he had smoked there in his dogged misery, he had felt revive in his heart a stir of sympathy for the convict he had seen at the wayside station in virginia. as if revealed by an inner illumination the impressions of that morning had started, clear as light, into his brain. the frost on the grass, the dropping chestnuts, the strong sweet smell of the crushed winesaps--these things surrounded in his memory the wretched figure of the man with the red cotton handkerchief bound tightly about his swollen jaw. but the figure had ceased now to stand for itself and for its own degradation alone--haunting, tragic, colossal, it had become in his thoughts the image of all those who suffer and are oppressed. so through his sin and his remorse, ordway had travelled slowly toward the vision of service. with a word of thanks to the woman, he rose from the bench and went down the little path and out into the road. the wind had changed suddenly, and as he emerged from the shelter of a thicket, it struck against his face with a biting edge. where the sun had declined in the western sky, heavy clouds were driving close above the broken line of the horizon. the night promised to be cold, and he pushed on rapidly, urged by a feeling that the little town before him held rest and comfort and the new life beneath its smoking chimneys. walking was less difficult now, for the road showed signs of travel as it approached the scattered houses, which appeared thrust into community by the surrounding isolation of the fields. at last, as he ascended a slight elevation, he found that the village, screened by a small grove of pines, lay immediately beneath the spot upon which he stood. chapter ii the night the scattered houses closed together in groups, the road descended gradually into a hollow, and emerging on the opposite side, became a street, and the street slouched lazily downhill to where a railroad track ran straight as a seam across the bare country. quickening his steps, ordway came presently to the station--a small wooden building newly painted a brilliant yellow--and pushed his way with difficulty through a crowd of negroes that had gathered closely beside the waiting train. "thar's a good three hundred of the critters going to a factory in the north," remarked a man behind him, "an' yit they don't leave more'n a speck of white in the county. between the crows an' the darkies i'll be blamed if you can see the colour of the soil." the air was heavy with hot, close smells--a mingling of smoke, tobacco, dust and humanity. a wailing sound issued from the windows of the cars where the dark faces were packed tightly together, and a tall negro, black as ebony, in a red shirt open at the throat, began strumming excitedly upon a banjo. near him a mulatto woman lifted a shrill soprano voice, while she stood beating the air distractedly with her open palms. on the other side of the station a dog howled, and the engine uttered an angry whistle as if impatient of the delay. after five years of prison discipline, the ugly little town appeared to ordway to contain an alluring promise of freedom. at the instant the animation in the scene spoke to his blood as if it had been beauty, and movement seemed to him to possess some peculiar æsthetic quality apart from form or colour. the brightly dyed calicos on the negro women; the shining black faces of the men, smooth as ebony; the tragic primitive voices, like voices imprisoned in the soil; the strumming of the rude banjo; the whistling engine and the howling dog; the odours of smoke and dust and fertilisers--all these things blended in his senses to form an intoxicating impression of life. nothing that could move or utter sounds or lend a spot of colour appeared common or insignificant to his awakened brain. it was all life, and for five years he had been starved in every sense and instinct. the main street--warehouse street, as he found later that it was called--appeared in the distance as a broad river of dust which ran from the little station to where the warehouses and small shops gave place to the larger dwellings which presided pleasantly over the neighbouring fields. as ordway followed the board sidewalk, he began idly reading the signs over the shops he passed, until "kelly's saloon," and "baker's general store" brought him suddenly upon a dark oblong building which ran back, under a faded brick archway. before the entrance several men were seated in cane chairs, which they had tilted conveniently against the wall, and at ordway's approach they edged slightly away and sat regarding him over their pipes with an expression of curiosity which differed so little in the different faces that it appeared to result from some internal automatic spring. "i beg your pardon," he began after a moment's hesitation, "but i was told that i might find work in baxter's warehouse." "well, it's a first-rate habit not to believe everything you're told," responded an enormous man, in half-soiled clothes, who sat smoking in the middle of the archway. "i can't find work myself in baxter's warehouse at this season. ain't that so, boys?" he enquired with a good-natured chuckle of his neighbours. "are you mr. baxter?" asked ordway shortly. "i'm not sure about the mister, but i'm baxter all right." he had shifted his pipe to the extreme corner of his mouth as he spoke, and now removing it with what seemed an effort, he sat prodding the ashes with his stubby thumb. his face, as he glanced down, was overspread by a flabbiness which appeared to belong to expression rather than to feature. "then there's no chance for me?" enquired ordway. "you might try the cotton mills--they's just down the next street. if there's a job to be had in town you'll most likely run up against it there." "it's no better than a wild goose chase you're sending him on, baxter," remarked a smaller member of the group, whose head protruded unexpectedly above baxter's enormous shoulder; "i was talking to jasper trend this morning and he told me he was turning away men every day. whew! but this wind is getting too bitter for me, boys." "oh, there's no harm can come of trying," insisted the cheerful giant, pushing back his chair as the others retreated out of the wind, "if hope doesn't fill the stomach it keeps the heart up, and that's something." his great laugh rolled out, following ordway along the street as he went in pursuit of the fugitive opportunity which disported itself now in the cotton factory at the foot of the hill. when he reached the doors the work of the day was already over, and a crowd of operatives surged through the entrance and overflowed into the two roads which led by opposite ways into the town. drawing to one side of the swinging doors, he stood watching the throng a moment before he could summon courage to enter the building and inquire for the office of the manager. when he did so at last it was with an almost boyish feeling of hesitation. the manager--a small, wiry man with a wart on the end of his long nose--was hurriedly piling papers into his desk before closing the factory and going home to supper. his hands moved impatiently, almost angrily, for he remembered that he had already worked overtime and that the muffins his wife had promised him for supper would be cold. at any other hour of the day he would have received ordway with politeness--for he was at heart a well-disposed and even a charitable person--but it happened that his dinner had been unsatisfactory (his mutton had been served half raw by a new maid of all-work) and he had particularly set his hopes upon the delicious light muffins in which his wife excelled. so when he saw ordway standing between him and his release, his face grew black and the movements of his hands passed to jerks of frantic irritation. "what do you want? say it quick--i've no time to talk," he began, as he pushed the last heap of papers inside, and let the lid of his desk fall with a bang. "i'm looking for work," said ordway, "and i was told at baxter's warehouse----" "darn baxter. what kind of work do you want?" "i'll take anything--i can do bookkeeping or----" "well, i don't want a bookkeeper." he locked his desk, and turning to take down his hat, was incensed further by discovering that it was not on the hook where he had placed it when he came in. finding it at last on a heap of reports in the corner, he put it on his head and stared at ordway, with his angry eyes. "you must have come a long way--haven't you? mostly on foot?" "a good distance." "why did you select tappahannock? was there any reason?" "i wanted to try the town, that was all." "well, i tell you what, my man," concluded the manager, while his rage boiled over in the added instants of his delay; "there have been a blamed sight too many of your kind trying tappahannock of late--and the best thing you can do is to move on to a less particular place. when we want bookkeepers here we don't pick 'em up out of the road." ordway swallowed hard, and his hands clinched in a return of one of his boyish spasms of temper. his vision of the new life was for an instant defaced and clouded; then as he met the angry little eyes of the man before him, he felt that his rage went out of him as suddenly as it had come. turning without a word, he passed through the entrance and out into the road, which led back, by groups of negro hovels, into the main street of the town. his anger gave place to helplessness; and it seemed to him, when he reached presently the larger dwellings upon the hill, and walked slowly past the squares of light that shone through the unshuttered windows, that he was more absolutely alone than if he had stood miles away from any human habitation. the outward nearness had become in his thoughts the measure of the inner distance. he felt himself to be detached from humanity, yet he knew that in his heart there existed a stronger bond than he had ever admitted in the years of his prosperity. the generous impulses of his youth were still there, but had not sorrow winnowed them from all that was base or merely selfish? was the lesson that he had learned in prison to be wholly lost? did the knowledge he had found there count for nothing in his life--the bitterness of shame, the agony of remorse, the companionship with misery? he remembered a sunday in the prison when he had listened to a sermon from a misshapen little preacher, whose face was drawn sideways by a burn which he had suffered during an epileptic seizure in his childhood. in spite of his grotesque features the man had drawn ordway by some invisible power which he had felt even then to be the power of faith. crippled, distorted, poorly clad, the little preacher, he felt, had found the great possession which he was still seeking--this man believed with a belief that was larger than the external things which he had lost. when he shut his eyes now he could still see the rows of convicts in the chapel, the pale, greenish light in which each face resembled the face of a corpse, the open bible in its black leather binding, and beside it the grotesque figure of the little preacher who had come, like his master, to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance. the sun had dropped like a ball below the gray horizon, and the raw march wind, when it struck him now, brought no longer the exhilaration of the afternoon. a man passed him, comfortable, well-fed, wheezing slightly, with his fat neck wrapped in a woollen muffler, and as he stopped before a whitewashed gate, which opened into the garden surrounding a large, freshly painted house, ordway touched his arm and spoke to him in a voice that had fallen almost to a whisper. at his words, which were ordinary enough, the man turned on him a face which had paled slightly from surprise or fear. in the twilight ordway could see his jaw drop while he fumbled awkwardly with his gloved hands at the latch of the gate. "i don't know what you mean--i don't know" he repeated in a wheezing voice, "i'm sorry, but i really don't know," he insisted again as if in a helpless effort to be understood. once inside the garden, he closed the gate with a bang behind him, and went rapidly up the gravelled walk to the long piazza where the light of a lamp under a red shade streamed through the open door. turning away ordway followed the street to the end of the town, where it passed without distinct change of character into the country road. on this side the colour of the soil had paled until it looked almost blanched under the rising moon. though the twilight was already in possession of the fields a thin red line was still visible low in the west, and beneath this the scattered lights in negro cabins shone like obscure, greenish glow-worms, hidden among clumps of sassafras or in stretches of dried broomsedge. as ordway looked at these humble dwellings, it seemed to him that they might afford a hospitality denied him by the more imposing houses of the town. he had already eaten of the negro's charity, and it was possible that before dawn he might be compelled to eat of it again. beneath his feet the long road called to him as it wound a curving white line drawn through the vague darkness of the landscape. somewhere in a distant pasture a bull bellowed, and the sound came to him like the plaintive voice of the abandoned fields. while he listened the response of his tired feet to the road appeared to him as madness, and stopping short, he turned quickly and looked back in the direction of tappahannock. but from the spot on which he stood the lights of the town offered little promise of hospitality, so after an uncertain glance, he moved on again to a bare, open place where two roads met and crossed at the foot of a blasted pine. a few steps farther he discovered that a ruined gate stood immediately on his right, and beyond the crumbling brick pillars, he made out dimly the outlines of several fallen bodies, which proved upon nearer view to be the prostrate forms of giant cedars. an avenue had once led, he gathered, from the gate to a house situated somewhere at the end of the long curve, for the great trees lying across the road must have stood once as the guardians of an estate of no little value. whether the cedars had succumbed at last to age or to the axe of the destroyer, it was too dark at the moment for him to ascertain; but the earth had claimed them now, magnificent even in their ruin, while under the dim tent of sky beyond, he could still discern their living companions of a hundred years. so impressive was the past splendour of this approach that the house seemed, when he reached it, almost an affront to the mansion which his imagination had reared. broad, low, built of brick, with two long irregular wings embedded in english ivy, and a rotting shingled roof that sloped over dormered windows, its most striking characteristic as he first perceived it under the moonlight was the sentiment which is inevitably associated with age and decay. never imposing, the dwelling was now barely habitable, for the roof was sagging in places over the long wings, a chimney had fallen upon one of the moss-covered eaves, the stone steps of the porch were hollowed into dangerous channels, and the ground before the door was strewn with scattered chips from a neighbouring wood pile. the air of desolation was so complete that at first ordway supposed the place to be uninhabited, but discovering a light presently in one of the upper windows, he ascended the steps and beat with the rusted knocker on the panel of the door. for several minutes there was no answer to his knock. then the sound of shuffling footsteps reached him from the distance, drawing gradually nearer until they stopped immediately beyond the threshold. "i ain' gwine open dis yer do' ef'n hits oner dem ole hants," said a voice within, while a sharp point of light pierced through the keyhole. an instant later, in response to ordway's assurance of his bodily reality, the bolt creaked back with an effort and the door opened far enough to admit the slovenly head and shoulders of an aged negress. "miss meely she's laid up en she cyar'n see ner comp'ny, marster," she announced with the evident intention of retreating as soon as her message was delivered. her purpose, however, was defeated, for, slipping his heavy boot into the crack of the door, ordway faced her under the lamp which she held high above her head. in the shadows beyond he could see dimly the bare old hall and the great winding staircase which led to the painted railing of the gallery above. "can you give me shelter for the night?" he asked, "i am a stranger in the county, and i've walked thirty miles to-day." "miss meely don' wan'ner comp'ny," replied the negress, while her head, in its faded cotton handkerchief, appeared to swing like a pendulum before his exhausted eyes. "who is miss meely?" he demanded, laying his hand upon her apron as she made a sudden terrified motion of flight. "miss meely brooke--marse edward's daughter. he's daid." "well, go and ask her. i'll wait here on the porch until you return." her eyelids flickered in the lamplight, and he saw the whites of her eyes leap suddenly into prominence. then the door closed again, the bolt shot back into place, and the shuffling sound grew fainter as it passed over the bare floor. a cold nose touched ordway's hand, and looking down he saw that an old fox-hound had crept into the porch and was fawning with pleasure at his feet. he was conscious of a thrill of gratitude for the first demonstrative welcome he had received at tappahannock; and while he stood there with the hound leaping upon his chest, he felt that, in spite of "miss meely," hidden somewhere behind the closed door, the old house had not lost utterly the spirit of hospitality. his hand was still on the dog's head when the bolt creaked again and the negress reappeared upon the threshold. "miss meely she sez she's moughty sorry, suh, but she cyarn' hev ner strange gent'mun spendin' de night in de house. she reckons you mought sleep in de barn ef'n you wanter." as the door opened wider, her whole person, clad in a faded woollen dress, patched brightly in many colours, emerged timidly and followed him to the topmost step. "you des go roun' ter de back en den thoo' de hole whar de gate used ter be, en dar's de barn. nuttin' ain' gwine hu't you lessen hits dat ar ole ram 'lejab." "well, he shall not find me unprepared," responded ordway, with a kind of desperate gaiety, and while the old hound still leaped at his side, he found his way into a little path which led around the corner of the house, and through the tangled garden to the barn just beyond the fallen gateposts. here the dog deserted him, running back to the porch, where a woman's voice called; and stumbling over a broken ploughshare or two, he finally reached the poor shelter which miss meely's hospitality afforded. it was very dark inside, but after closing the door to shut out the wind, he groped his way through the blackness to a pile of straw in one corner. the place smelt of cattle, and opposite to the spot on which he lay, he distinguished presently a soft, regular sound which he concluded to be caused by the breathing of a cow. evidently the barn was used as a cattleshed also, though his observation of the mansion did not lead him to suppose that "miss meely" possessed anything approaching a herd. he remembered the old negress's warning allusion to the ram, but so far at least the darkness had revealed nothing that could prove hostile to his company. his head ached and his will seemed suddenly benumbed, so stretching himself at full length in the straw he fell, after a few troubled moments, into the deep and dreamless sleep of complete physical exhaustion. an instant afterwards, it seemed to him, he was aroused by a light which flashed into his face from the opening door. a cold wind blew over him, and as he struggled almost blindly back into consciousness, he saw that a girl in a red cape stood holding a lantern above her head in the centre of the barn. at his first look the red cape warmed him as if it had been flame; then he became aware that a voice was speaking to him in a peculiar tone of cheerful authority. and it seemed to him that the red cape and the rich voice expressed the same dominant quality of personality. "i thought you must be hungry," said the voice with energy, "so i've brought your supper." even while he instinctively grasped the tray she held out, he observed with quickened attention that the hands which offered him the food had toiled out of doors in good and bad weather--though small and shapely they were chapped from cold and roughened by marks of labour. "you'd better drink your coffee while it's hot," said the voice again. the practical nature of her advice put him immediately at his ease. "it's the first hot thing i've had for a week," he responded. "then it will be all the better for you," replied the girl, while she reached up to hang the lantern from a rusted nail in the wall. as the light fell over her, the red cape slipped a little from her shoulder and she put up her hand to catch it together on her bosom. the movement, slight as it was, gave ordway a chance to observe that she possessed a kind of vigorous grace, which showed in the roundness of her limbs and in the rebellious freedom of her thick brown hair. the airy little curls on her temples stood out, he noticed, as if she had been walking bareheaded in the wind. at his first look it did not occur to him that she was beautiful; what impressed him most was the quality of radiant energy which revealed itself in every line of her face and figure--now sparkling in her eyes, now dimpling in her cheek, now quickening her brisk steps across the floor, and now touching her eyes and mouth like an edge of light. it may have been merely the effect of the red cape on a cold night, but as she moved back and forth into the dark corners of the barn, she appeared to him to gather both warmth and animation out of the gloom. as she did not speak again during her work, he found himself forced to observe the same friendly silence. the ravenous hunger of the afternoon had returned to him with the odour of the food, and he ate rapidly, sitting up on his straw bed, while she took up a bucket and a piece of wood sharpened at one end and prepared a bran mash for the cow quartered in a stall in one corner. when a little later she gathered up an armful of straw to replenish the animal's bed, ordway pushed the tray aside and made a movement as if to assist her; but stopping an instant in her task, she waved him aside with the easy dignity of perfect capability. "i can do it myself, thank you," she said, smiling; and then, glancing at his emptied plate, she added carelessly, "i'll send back presently for the tray and lantern--good-night!" her tone had changed perceptibly on the last word, for its businesslike authority had given place to the musical southern drawl so familiar to his ears in childhood. in that simple phrase, accompanied by the gracious bend of her whole person, she had put unconsciously generations of social courtesy--of racial breeding. "thank you--good-night," he answered, rising, and drawing back with his hand on the heavy latch. then before she could reach the door and pass through, a second lantern flashed there out of the blackness beyond, and the terrified face of a negro urchin was thrust into the full glare of light. "fo' de good lawd, miss em'ly, dat ar ole ram done butt sis mehitable clean inter de smoke 'us." perfectly unruffled by the news the girl looked at ordway, and then held out her small, strong hand for the lantern. "very well, i'll come and shut him up," she responded quietly, and holding the red cape together on her bosom, she stepped over the threshold and followed the negro urchin out into the night. chapter iii the return to tappahannock at sunrise he came out of the barn, and washed his face and hands at the well, where he found a coarse towel on the moss-covered trough. the day was breaking clear, but in the fine golden light the house and lawn appeared even more desolate than they had done under the full moon. before the war the place had been probably a comfortable, unpretentious country mansion. some simple dignity still attached to its bowers of ivy and its ancient cedars, but it was easy to imagine that for thirty years no shingle had been added to its crumbling roof, and hardly a ship gathered from the littered walk before the door. at the end of the avenue six great trees had fallen a sacrifice, he saw now, to the mere lust for timber--for freshly cut and still odorous with sap, the huge trunks lay directly across the approach over which they had presided through the tragic history of the house. judged by what it must have been in a fairly prosperous past, the scene was sad enough even to the eyes of a stranger; and as ordway walked slowly down the dim, fragrant curve of the avenue, he found it difficult to place against so sombre a background, a figure as full of life and animation as that of the girl he had seen in the barn on the evening before. she appeared to his imagination as the embodiment of youth amid surroundings whose only remaining beauties were those of age. though he had resolved yesterday not to return to tappahannock, he found himself presently retracing, almost without an effort of will, the road which he had travelled so heavily in the night. something between sunrise and sunset had renewed his courage and altered his determination. was it only the wasted strength which had returned to him in his sleep? or was it--he hesitated at the thought--the flush of shame which had burned his face when the girl's lantern had flashed over him out of the darkness? in that pitiless illumination it was as if not only his roughened surface, but his secret sin was laid bare; and he had felt again all the hideous publicity that had touched him and put him as one apart in the court-room. though he had outgrown the sin, he knew now that he must carry the scar of it until his death; and he knew, also, that the reality of his punishment had been in the spirit and not in the law. for a while he walked rapidly in the direction of tappahannock; then sitting down in the sunshine upon the roadside, he ate the piece of cornbread he had saved last night from his supper. it would be several hours at least before he might hope to find the warehouses open for the day, so he sat patiently eating his bread under the bared boughs of a young peach-tree, while he watched the surface of the long white road which appeared to hold for him as much despondency as freedom. a farmer driving a spotted cow to market spoke to him presently in a friendly voice; and rising to his feet, he overtook the man and fell into the jogging pace which was rendered necessary by the reluctance of the animal to proceed. "i declar' the sense in them thar critters do beat all," remarked the farmer, after an ineffectual tug at the rope he held. "she won't be drove no more 'n a woman will--her head is what she wants no matter whar it leads her." "can you tell me," inquired ordway, when they had started again upon the advance, "the name of the old house i passed a mile or so along the road?" "oh, you mean cedar hill, i reckon!--thar now, betsey, that thar toad ain't a turnip!" "cedar hill, is it? well, they appear to be doing their level best to get rid of the cedars." "mr. beverly did that--not miss em'ly. miss em'ly dotes on them trees jest the same as if they were made of flesh and blood." "but the place belongs to mr. beverly, i presume?" "if thar's a shingle of it that ain't mortgaged, i reckon it does--though for that matter miss em'ly is overseer and manager, besides teachin' every day in the public school of tappahannock. mr. beverly's got a soft heart in his body--all the brookes had that they say--but the lord who made him knows that he ain't overblessed with brains. he used to speculate with most of the family money, but as luck would have it he always speculated wrong. then he took to farmin', but he's got such a slow gentlemanly way about him that nothin' he puts in the ground ever has spirit enough to come up agin. his wife's just like him--she was miss amelia meadows, his second cousin from the up-country, and when the children kept on comin' so thick and fast, as is the lord's way with po' folks, people said thar warn't nothin' ahead of 'em but starvation. but miss em'ly she come back from teachin' somewhar down south an' undertook to run the whole place single-handed. things are pickin' up a little now, they say--she's got a will of her own, has miss em'ly, but thar ain't anybody in these parts that wouldn't work for her till they dropped. she sent for me last monday to help her mend her henhouse, and though i was puttin' a new roof over my wife's head, i dropped everything i had and went. that was the day mr. beverly cut down the cedars." "so miss emily didn't know of it?" "she was in school, suh--you see she teaches in tappahannock from nine till three, so mr. beverly chose that time to sell the avenue to young tom myers. he's a sly man, is mr. beverly, for all his soft, slow ways, and if young tom had been on time he'd have had half the avenue belted before miss em'ly got back from school. but he got in some mess or other at the store, and he was jest hewin' like thunder at his sixth cedar, when up come miss em'ly on that old white horse she rides. good lord! i hope i'll never see anybody turn so white agin as she did when her eyes lighted on them fallen trees. 'beverly,' she called out in a loud, high voice, 'have you dared to sell the cedars?' mr. beverly looked a little sick as if his stomach had gone aginst him of a sudden, but he stood right up on the trunk of a tree, and mumbled something about presarvin' useless timber when the children had no shoes an' stockings to thar feet. then miss em'ly gave him a look that scorched like fire, and she rode straight up to myers on her old horse and said as quiet as death: 'put up your axe, tom, i'll give you back your money. how much have you paid him down?' when young tom looked kind of sheepish and said: 'a hundred dollars,' i saw her eyelids flicker, but she didn't hesitate an instant. 'you shall have it within an hour on my word of honour,' she answered, 'can you wait?' 'i reckon i can wait all day, miss,' said young tom--and then she jumped down from her horse, and givin' me the bridle, caught up her skirt and ran indoors. in a minute she came flying out agin and before we had time to catch our breath she was ridin' for dear life back to town. 'you'd better go on with yo' work,' said mr. beverly in his soft way, but young tom picked up his axe, and sat down on the big stump behind him. 'i reckon i can take her word better 'n yours, mr. beverly,' he answered, 'an' 'i reckon you can, too, young tom,' said i----." "but how did she raise the money?" inquired ordway. "that's what nobody knows, suh, except her and one other. some say she sold a piece of her mother's old jewelry--a locket or something she had put by--and some believe still that she borrowed it from robert baxter or jasper trend. whichever way it was, she came ridin' up within the hour on her old white horse with the notes twisted tight in her handkerchief. she was mighty quiet, then, but when it was over, great lord, what a temper she was in. i declar' she would have struck mr. beverly with the sour gum twig she used for a whip if i hadn't slipped in between 'em an' caught her arm. then she lashed him with her tongue till he seemed to wither and shrink all over." "and served him right, god bless her!" said ordway. "that's so, suh, but mr. beverly ain't a bad man--he's jest soft." "yet your miss emily still sticks to him, it seems?" "if she didn't the farm wouldn't hold together a week. what she makes from teachin' is about all they have to live on in my opinion. last summer, too, she started raisin' garden things an' poultry, an' she'd have got quite a thrivin' business if she had had any kind of help. then in july she tried her hand at puttin' up preserves and jellies to send to them big stores in the north." ordway remembered the cheerful authority in her voice, the little cold red hands that had offered him his supper; and his heart contracted as it did at the memory of his daughter alice. yet it was not pity alone that moved him, for mingled with the appeal to his sympathy there was something which awoke in him the bitter agony of remorse. so the girl in the red cape could endure poverty such as this with honour! at the thought his past sin and his present disgrace appeared to him not only as crime but as cowardliness. he recalled the angry manager of the cotton mills, but there was no longer resentment in his mind either against the individual or against society. instead it seemed to him that all smaller emotions dissolved in a tenderness which placed this girl and alice apart with the other good and inspiring memories of his life. as he walked on in silence a little incident of ten years before returned to his thoughts, and he remembered the day he had found his child weeping beside a crippled beggar on his front steps. when, a little later, they reached tappahannock, the farmer turned with his reluctant cow into one of the smaller paths which led across the common on the edge of the town. as it was still too early to apply for work, ordway sat down on a flat stone before an iron gate and watched the windows along the street for any signs of movement or life within. at length several frowsy negro maids leaned out while the wooden shutters swung slowly back against the walls; then a milk wagon driven by a small boy clattered noisily round the corner, and in response to the shrill whistle of the driver, the doors opened hurriedly and the negro maids rushed, with outstretched pitchers, down the gravelled walks to the iron gates. presently an appetising odour of bacon reached ordway's nostrils; and in the house across the street a woman with her hair done up on pins, came to the window and began grinding coffee in a wooden mill. not until eight o'clock did the town open its gates and settle itself to the day's work. when the doors of the warehouses were fastened back, ordway turned into the main street again, and walked slowly downhill until he came to the faded brick archway where the group of men had sat smoking the evening before. now there was an air of movement in the long building which had appeared as mere dim vacancy at the hour of sunset. men were passing in and out of the brick entrance, from which a thin coat of whitewash was peeling in splotches; covered wagons half filled with tobacco were standing, unhitched, along the walls; huge bags of fresh fertilisers were thrown carelessly in corners; and in the centre of the great floor, an old negro, with a birch broom tied together with coloured string, was sweeping into piles the dried stems left after yesterday's sales. as he swept, a little cloud of pungent dust rose before the strokes of his broom and floated through the brick archway out into the street. this morning there was even less attention paid to ordway's presence than there had been at the closing hour. planters hurried back and forth preparing lots for the opening sale; a wagon drove into the building, and the driver got down over the muddy wheel and lifted out several willow crates through which ordway could catch a glimpse of the yellow sun-cured leaf. the old negro swept briskly, piling the trash into heaps which would finally be ground into snuff or used as a cheap grade of fertiliser. lean hounds wandered to and fro, following the covered wagons and sniffing suspiciously at the loose plants arranged in separate lots in the centre of the floor. "is baxter here this morning?" ordway asked presently of a countryman who lounged on a pile of bags near the archway. "i reckon you'll find him in his office," replied the man, as he spat lazily out into the street; "that thar's his door," he added, pointing to a little room on the right of the entrance--"i seed him go in an' i ain't seed him come out." nodding his thanks for the information, ordway crossed the building and rapped lightly on the door. in response to a loud "come in," he turned the knob and stood next instant face to face with the genial giant of the evening before. "good-morning, mr. baxter, i've come back again," he said. "good-morning!" responded baxter, "i see you have." in the full daylight baxter appeared to have increased in effect if not in quantity, and as ordway looked at him now, he felt himself to be in the presence less of a male creature than of an embodied benevolent impulse. his very flabbiness of feature added in a measure to the expansive generosity of mouth and chin; and slovenly, unwashed, half-shaven as he was, baxter's spirit dominated not only his fellow men, but the repelling effect of his own unkempt exterior. to meet his glance was to become suddenly intimate; to hear him speak was to feel that he had shaken you by the hand. "i hoped you might have come to see things differently this morning," said ordway. baxter looked him over with his soft yet penetrating eyes, his gaze travelling slowly from the coarse boots covered with red clay to the boyish smile on the dark, weather-beaten face. "you did not tell me what kind of work you were looking for," he observed at last. "do you want to sweep out the warehouse or to keep the books?" ordway laughed. "i prefer to keep the books, but i can sweep out the warehouse," he replied. "you can--can you?" said baxter. his pipe, which was never out of his hand except when it was in his mouth, began to turn gray, and putting it between his teeth, he sucked hard at the stem for a minute. "you're an educated man, then?" "i've been to college--do you mean that?" "you're fit for a clerk's position?" "i am sure of it." "where did you work last?" ordway's hesitation was barely perceptible. "i've been in business," he answered. "on your own hook?" inquired baxter. "yes, on my own hook." "but you couldn't make a living at it?" "no; i gave it up for several reasons." "well, i don't know your reasons, my man," observed baxter, drily, "but i like your face." "thank you," said ordway, and he laughed again with the sparkling gaiety which leaped first to his blue eyes. "and so you expect me to take you without knowing a darn thing about you?" demanded baxter. ordway nodded gravely. "yes, i hope that is what you will do," he answered. "i may ask your name, i reckon, mayn't i?--if you have no particular objection." "i don't mind telling you it's smith," said ordway, with his gaze on a huge pamphlet entitled "smith's almanac" lying on baxter's desk. "daniel smith." "smith," repeated baxter. "well, it ain't hard to remember. if i warn't a blamed fool, i'd let you go," he added thoughtfully, "but there ain't much doubt, i reckon, about my being a blamed fool." he rose from his chair with difficulty, and steadying his huge body, moved to the door, which he flung open with a jerk. "if you've made up your mind dead sure to butt in, you might as well begin with the next sale," he said. chapter iv the dream of daniel smith he had been recommended for lodging to a certain mrs. twine, and at five o'clock, when the day's work at baxter's was over, he started up the street in a bewildered search for her house, which he had been told was situated immediately beyond the first turn on the brow of the hill. when he reached the corner there was no one in sight except a small boy who sat, crying loudly, astride a little whitewashed wooden gate. beyond the boy there was a narrow yard filled with partly dried garments hung on clothes lines, which stretched from a young locust tree near the sidewalk to the front porch, where a man with a red nose was reading the local newspaper. as the man with the red nose paid no attention to the loud lamentations of the child, ordway stopped by the gate and inquired sympathetically if he could be of help. "oh, he ain't hurt," remarked the man, throwing a side glance over his paper, "he al'ays yells like that when his ma's done scrubbed him." "she's washed me so clean that i feel naked," howled the boy. "well, you'll get over that in a year's time," observed ordway cheerfully, "so suppose you leave off a minute now and show me the way to mrs. twine's." at his request the boy stopped crying instantly, and stared up at him while the dirty tearmarks dried slowly on his cheeks. "thar ain't no way," he replied solemnly, "'cause she's my ma." "then jump down quickly and run indoors and tell her i'd like to see her." "'t ain't no use. she won't come." "well, go and ask her. i was told to come here to look for board and lodging." he glanced inquiringly at the man on the porch, who, engrossed in the local paper, was apparently oblivious of the conversation at the gate. "she won't come 'cause she's washin' the rest of us," returned the boy, as he swung himself to the ground, "thar're six of us an' she ain't done but two. that's lemmy she's got hold of now. can't you hear him holler?" he planted his feet squarely on the board walk, looked back at ordway over his shoulder, and departed reluctantly with the message for his mother. at the end of a quarter of an hour, when ordway had entered the gate and sat down in the cold wind on the front steps, the door behind him opened with a jar, and a large, crimson, untidy woman, splashed with soapsuds, appeared like an embodied tempest upon the threshold. "canty says you've come to look at the dead gentleman's room, suh," she began in a high voice, approaching her point with a directness which lost none of its force because of the panting vehemence with which she spoke. "baxter told me i might find board with you," explained ordway in her first breathless pause. "to be sure he may have the dead gentleman's room, mag," put in the man on the porch, folding his newspaper, with a shiver, as he rose to his feet. "i warn't thinkin' about lettin' that room agin'," said mrs. twine, crushing her husband's budding interference by the completeness with which she ignored his presence. "but it's jest as well, i reckon, for a defenceless married woman to have a stranger in the house. though for the matter of that," she concluded in a burst of domestic confidence, "the woman that ain't a match for her own husband without outside help ain't deservin' of the pleasure an' the blessin' of one." then as the man with the red nose slunk shamefacedly into the passage, she added in an undertone to ordway, "and now if you'll jest step inside, i'll show you the spare room that i've got to let." she led the way indoors, scolding shrilly as she passed through the hall, and up the little staircase, where several half-dressed children were riding, with shrieks of delight, down the balustrade. "you needn't think you've missed a scrubbing because company's come," she remarked angrily, as she stooped to box the ears of a small girl lying flat on her stomach upon the landing. "such is my taste for cleanness," she explained to ordway, "that when my hands once tech the soap it's as much as i can do to keep 'em back from rubbin' the skin off. thar 're times even when the taste is so ragin' in my breast that i can hardly wait for saturday night to come around. yet i ain't no friend to license whether it be in whiskey or in soap an' water. temperance is my passion and that's why, i suppose, i came to marry a drunkard." with this tragic confession, uttered in a matter of fact manner, she produced a key from the pocket of her blue gingham apron, and ushered ordway into a small, poorly furnished room, which overlooked the front street and the two bared locust trees in the yard. "i kin let you have this at three dollars a week," she said, "provided you're content to do yo' own reachin' at the table. thar ain't any servant now except a twelve year old darkey." "yes, i'll take it," returned ordway, almost cheerfully; and when he had agreed definitely as to the amount of service he was to receive, he closed the creaking door behind her, and looked about the crudely furnished apartment with a sense of ownership such as he had not felt since the afternoon upon which he had stood in his wife's sitting-room awaiting his arrest. he thought of the florentine gilding, the rich curtains, the long mirrors, the famous bronze mercury and the corot landscape with the sunlight upon it--and then of the terrible oppression in which these familiar objects had seemed closing in upon him and smothering him into unconsciousness. the weight was lifted now, and he breathed freely while his gaze rested on the common pine bedstead, the scarred washstand, with the broken pitcher, the whitewashed walls, the cane chairs, the rusted scuttle, filled with cheap coal, and the unpainted table holding a glass lamp with a smoked chimney. from the hall below he could hear the scolding voice of mrs. twine, but neither the shrill sound nor the poor room produced in him the smothered anguish he felt even to-day at the memory of the corot landscape bathed in sunlight. an hour later, when he came upstairs again as an escape from the disorder of mrs. twine's supper table, he started a feeble blaze in the grate, which was half full of ashes, and after lighting the glass lamp, sat watching the shadows flicker to and fro on the whitewashed wall. his single possession, a photograph of his wife taken with her two children, rested against the brick chimney piece, and as he looked at it now it seemed to stand in no closer relationship to his life than did one of the brilliant chromos he had observed ornamenting the walls of mrs. twine's dining-room. his old life, indeed, appeared remote, artificial, conjured from unrealities--it was as if he had moved lightly upon the painted surface of things, until at last a false step had broken through the thin covering and he had plunged in a single instant against the concrete actuality. the shock had stunned him, yet he realised now that he could never return to his old sheltered outlook--to his pleasant fiction--for he had come too close to experience ever to be satisfied again with falsehood. the photograph upon the mantel was the single remaining link which held him to-day to his past life--to his forfeited identity. in the exquisite, still virgin face of his wife, draped for effect in a scarf of italian lace--he saw embodied the one sacred memory to which as daniel smith he might still cling with honour. the face was perfect, the expression of motherhood which bent, flamelike, over the small boy and girl, was perfect also; and the pure soul of the woman seemed to him to have formed both face and expression after its own divine image. in the photograph, as in his memory, her beauty was touched always by some rare quality of remoteness, as if no merely human conditions could ever entirely compass so ethereal a spirit. the passion which had rocked his soul had left her serenity unshaken, and even sorrow had been powerless to leave its impress or disfigurement upon her features. as the shadows flickered out on the walls, the room grew suddenly colder. rising, he replenished the fire, and then going over to the bed, he flung himself, still dressed, under the patchwork quilt from which the wool was protruding in places. he was thinking of the morning eighteen years ago when he had first seen her as she came, with several girl companions, out of the old church in the little town of botetourt. it was a christmas during his last year at harvard, when moved by a sudden interest in his southern associations, he had gone down for two days to his childhood's home in virginia. though the place was falling gradually to ruin, his maiden great-aunt still lived there in a kind of luxurious poverty; and at the sight of her false halo of gray curls, he had remembered, almost with a start of surprise, the morning when he had seen the convict at the little wayside station. the station, the country, the muddy roads, and even the town of botetourt were unchanged, but he himself belonged now to another and what he felt to be a larger world. everything had appeared provincial and amusing to his eyes--until as he passed on christmas morning by the quaint old churchyard, he had seen lydia preston standing in the sunshine amid the crumbling tombstones of several hundred years. under the long black feather in her hat, her charming eyes had dwelt on him kindly for a minute, and in that minute it had seemed to him that the racial ideal slumbering in his brain had responded quickly to his startled blood. afterward they had told him that she was only nineteen, a southern beauty of great promise, and the daughter of old adam preston, who had made and lost a fortune in the last ten years. but these details seemed to him to have no relation to the face he had seen under the black feather against the ivy-covered walls of the old church. the next evening they had danced together at a ball; he had carried her fan, a trivial affair of lace and satin, away in his pocket, and ten days later he had returned, flushed with passion, to finish his course at harvard. love had put wings to his ambition; the following year he had stood at the head of his class, and before the summer was over he had married her and started brilliantly in his career. there had been only success in the beginning. when had the tide turned so suddenly? he wondered, and when had he begun to drift into the great waters where men are washed down and lost? lying on the bed now in the firelight, he shivered and drew the quilt closer about his knees. she had loved beauty, riches, dignity, religion--she had loved her children when they came; but had she ever really loved him--the daniel ordway whom she had married? were all pure women as passionless--as utterly detached--as she had shown herself to him from the beginning? and was her coldness, as he had always believed, but the outward body of that spiritual grace for which he had loved her? he had lavished abundantly out of his stormy nature; he had spent his immortal soul upon her in desperate determination to possess her utterly at her own price; and yet had she ever belonged to him, he questioned now, even in the supreme hours of their deepest union? had her very innocence shut him out from her soul forever? in the end the little world had closed over them both; he had felt himself slipping further--further--had made frantic efforts to regain his footing; and had gone down hopelessly at last. those terrible years before his arrest crowded like minutes into his brain, and he knew now that there had been relief--comfort--almost tranquillity in his life in prison. the strain was lifted at last, and the days when he had moved in dull hope or acute despair through the crowd in wall street were over forever. to hold a place in the little world one needed great wealth; and it had seemed to him in the time of temptation that this wealth was not a fugitive possession, but an inherent necessity--a thing which belonged to the inner structure of lydia's nature. a shudder ran over him, while he drew a convulsive breath like one in physical pain. the slow minutes in which he had waited for a rise in the market were still ticking in agony somewhere in his brain. time moved on, yet those minutes never passed--his memory had become like the face of a clock where the hands pointed, motionless, day or night, to the same hour. then hours, days, weeks, months, years, when he lived with ruin in his thoughts and the sound of merriment, which was like the pipe of hollow flutes, in his ears. at the end it came almost suddenly--the blow for which he had waited, the blow which brought something akin to relief because it ended the quivering torture of his suspense, and compelled, for the hour at least, decisive action. he had known that before evening he would be under arrest, and yet he had walked slowly along fifth avenue from his office to his home; he recalled now that he had even joked with a club wit, who had stopped him at the corner to divulge the latest bit of gossip. at the very instant when he felt himself to be approaching ruin in his house, he remembered that he had complained a little irritably of the breaking wrapper of his cigar. yet he was thinking then that he must reach his home in time to prevent his wife from keeping a luncheon engagement, of which she had spoken to him at breakfast; and ten minutes later it was with a sensation of relief that he met the blank face of his butler in the hall. on the staircase his daughter ran after him, her short white, beruffled skirts standing out stiffly like the skirts of a ballet dancer. she was taking her music lesson, she cried out, and she called to him to come into the music room and hear how wonderfully she could run her scales! her blue eyes, which were his eyes in a child's face, looked joyously up at him from under the thatch of dark curls which she had inherited from him, not from her blond mother. "not now, alice," he answered, almost impatiently, "not now--i will come a little later." then she darted back, and the stumbling music preceded him up the staircase to the door of his wife's dressing-room. when he entered lydia was standing before her mirror, fastening a spotted veil with a diamond butterfly at the back of her blond head; and as she turned smilingly toward him, he put out his hand with a gesture of irritation. "take that veil off, lydia, i can't see you for the spots," he said. complaisant always, she unfastened the diamond butterfly without a word, and taking off the veil, flung it carelessly across the golden-topped bottles upon her dressing-table. "you look ill," she said with her charming smile; "shall i ring for marie to bring you whiskey?" at her words he turned from her, driven by a torment of pity which caused his voice to sound harsh and constrained in his own ears. "no--no--don't put that on again," he protested, for while she waited she had taken up the spotted veil and the diamond pin. something in his tone startled her into attention, and moving a step forward, she stood before him on a white bearskin rug. her face had hardly changed, yet in some way she seemed to have put him at a distance, and he felt all at once that he had never known her. from the room downstairs he heard alice's music lesson go on at broken intervals, the uncertain scales she ran now stopping, now beginning violently again. the sound wrought suddenly on his nerves like anger, and he felt that his voice was querulous in spite of the torment of pity at his heart. "there's no use putting on your veil," he said, "a warrant is out for my arrest and i must wait here till it comes." * * * * * his memory stopped now, as if it had snapped suddenly beneath the strain. after this there was a mere blank of existence upon which people and objects moved without visible impression. from that minute to this one appeared so short a time that he started up half expecting to hear alice's scales filling mrs. twine's empty lodgings. then his eyes fell on the whitewashed walls, the smoking lamp, the bare table, and the little square window with the branches of the locust tree frosted against the pane. rising from the bed, he fell on his knees and pressed his quivering face to the patchwork quilt. "give me a new life, o god--give me a new life!" chapter v at tappahannock after a sleepless night, he rose as soon as the dawn had broken, and sitting down before the pine table wrote a letter to lydia, on a sheet of paper which had evidently been left in the drawer by the former lodger. "it isn't likely that you'll ever want me," he added at the end, "but if you should happen to, remember that i am yours, as i have always been, for whatever i am worth." when he had sealed the envelope and written her name above that of the town of botetourt, he put it into his pocket and went down to the dining-room, where he found mrs. twine pouring steaming coffee into a row of broken cups. a little mulatto girl, with her hair plaited in a dozen fine braids, was placing a dish of fried bacon at one end of the walnut-coloured oil-cloth on the table, around which the six children, already clothed and hungry, were beating an impatient tattoo with pewter spoons. bill twine, the father of the family, was evidently sleeping off a drunken headache--a weakness which appeared to afford his wife endless material for admonition and philosophy. "thar now, canty," she was remarking to her son, "yo' po' daddy may not be anything to be proud of as a man, but i reckon he's as big an example as you'll ever see. he's had sermons p'inted at him from the pulpit; they've took him up twice to the police court, an' if you'll believe me, suh," she added with a kind of outraged pride to ordway, "thar's been a time when they've had out the whole fire department to protect me." the coffee though poor was hot, and while ordway drank it, he listened with an attention not unmixed with sympathy to mrs. twine's continuous flow of speech. she was coarse and shrewish and unshapely, but his judgment was softened by the marks of anxious thought on her forehead and the disfigurements of honest labour on her hands. any toil appeared to him now to be invested with peculiar dignity; and he felt, sitting there at her slovenly breakfast table, that he was closer to the enduring heart of humanity than he had been among the shallow refinements of his past life. mrs. twine was unpleasant, but at her worst he felt her to be the real thing. "not that i'm blamin' bill, suh, as much as some folks," she proceeded charitably, while she helped her youngest child to gravy, "for it made me downright sick myself to hear them carryin' on over his beatin' his own wife jest as much as if he'd been beatin' somebody else's. an' i ain't one, when it comes to that, to put up with a white-livered, knock-kneed, pulin' sort of a critter, as i told the jedge a-settin' upon his bench. when a woman is obleeged to take a strappin' thar's some real satisfaction in her feelin' that she takes it from a man--an' the kind that would lay on softly with never a broken head to show for it--well, he ain't the kind, suh, that i could have helt in any respect an' honour. and as to that, as i said to 'em right then an' thar, take the manly health an' spirit out o' bill, an' he's jest about as decent an' law abidin' as the rest. why, when he was laid up with malaria, he never so much as rized his hand agin me, an' it'll be my belief untwel my dyin' day that chills an' fever will keep a man moral when all the sermons sence moses will leave him unteched. feed him low an' work him hard, an' you kin make a saint out of most any male critter, that's my way of thinkin'." while she talked she was busily selecting the choicest bit of bacon for bill's plate, and as ordway left the house a little later, he saw her toiling up the staircase with her husband's breakfast on a tin tray in her hands. "if you think i'm goin' to set an' wait all day for you to get out o' bed, you've jest about clean lost yo' wits, bill twine," she remarked in furious tones, as she flung open a door on the landing above. out of doors ordway found that the wind had died down, though a sharp edge of frost was still in the air. the movement of the day had already begun; and as he passed the big house on the brow of the hill he saw a pretty girl, with her hair tied back with a velvet ribbon, run along the gravelled walk to meet the postman at the gate. a little farther, when he had reached the corner, he turned back to hand his letter to the postman, and found to his surprise that the pretty girl was still gazing after him. no possible interest could attach to her in his thoughts; and with a careless acknowledgment of her beauty, she faded from his consciousness as rapidly as if she had been a ray of sunshine which he had admired as he passed along. then as he turned into the main street at the corner, he saw that emily brooke was riding slowly up the hill on her old white horse. she still wore her red cape, which fell over the saddle on one side, and completely hid the short riding-skirt beneath. on her head there was a small knitted tam-o'-shanter cap, and this, with the easy freedom of her seat in the saddle, gave her an air which was gallant rather than graceful. the more feminine adjective hardly seemed to apply to her at the moment; she looked brave, strong, buoyant, a creature that had not as yet become aware of its sex. yet she was older, he discovered now, than he had at first imagined her to be. in the barn he had supposed her age to be not more than twenty years; seen in the morning light it was impossible to decide whether she was a year younger or ten years older than he had believed. the radiant energy in her look belonged, after all, less to the accident of youth than to some enduring quality of spirit. as she neared him, she looked up from her horse's neck, rested her eyes upon him for an instant, and smiled brightly, much as a charming boy might have done. then, just as she was about to pass on, the girth of her saddle slipped under her, and she was thrown lightly to the ground, while the old horse stopped and stood perfectly motionless above her. "my skirt has caught in the stirrup," she said to ordway, and while he bent to release her, he noticed that she clung, not to his arm, but to the neck of the horse for support. to his surprise there was neither embarrassment nor amusement in her voice. she spoke with the cool authority which had impressed him during the incident of the ram's attack upon "sis mehitable." "i don't think it is quite safe yet," he said, after he had drawn the rotten girth as tight as he dared. "it looks as if it wouldn't last, you see." "well, i dare say, it may be excused after forty years of service," she returned, smiling. "what? this saddle? it does look a little quaint when one examines it." "oh, it's been repaired, but even then one must forgive an old servant for growing decrepit." "then you'll ride it again?" he asked, seeing that she was about to mount. "of course--this isn't my first tumble--but major expects them now and he knows how to behave. so do i," she added, laughing, "you see it doesn't take me by surprise." "yes, i see it doesn't," he answered gaily. "then if you chance to be about the next time it happens, i hope it won't disturb you either," she remarked, as she rode up the hill. the meeting lingered in ordway's mind with a freshness which was associated less with the incident itself than with some vivid quality in the appearance of the girl. her face, her voice, her carriage--even the little brown curls blowing on her temples, all united in his thoughts to form a memory in which alice appeared to hold a place. why should this country girl, he wondered, bring back to him so clearly the figure of his daughter? but there was no room for a memory in his life just now, and by the time he reached baxter's warehouse, he had forgotten the interest aroused in him a moment before. baxter had not yet appeared in his office, but two men, belonging evidently to the labouring class, were talking together under the brick archway. when ordway joined them they did not interrupt their conversation, which he found, after a minute, to concern the domestic and financial troubles of the one whom he judged to be the poorer of the two. he was a meanly clad, wretched looking workman, with a shock of uncombed sandy hair, a cowed manner, and the expression of one who has been beaten into apathy rather than into submission. a sordid pathos in his voice and figure brought ordway a step closer to his side, and after a moment's careless attention, he found his mind adjusting itself to the small financial problems in which the man had become entangled. the workman had been forced to borrow upon his pathetic personal securities; and in meeting from year to year the exorbitant rate of interest, he had paid back several times the sum of the original debt. now his wife was ill, with an incurable cancer; he had no hope, as he advanced beyond middle age, of any increase in his earning capacity, and the debt under which he had struggled so long had become at the end an intolerable burden. his wife had begged him to consult a lawyer--but who, he questioned doggedly, would take an interest in him since he had no money for a fee? he was afraid of lawyers anyway, for he could give you a hundred cases where they had stood banded together against the poor. as ordway listened to the story, he felt for an instant a return of his youthful enthusiasm, and standing there amid the tobacco stems in baxter's warehouse, he remembered a great flour trust from which he had withdrawn because it seemed to him to bear unjustly upon the small, isolated farmers. beyond this he went back still further to his college days, when during his vacation, he had read virginia law in the office of his uncle, richard ordway, in the town of botetourt. he could see the shining rows of legal volumes in the walnut bookcases, the engraving of latane's burial, framed in black wood above the mantel, and against this background the silent, gray haired, self-righteous old man so like his father. through the window, he could see still the sparrows that built in the ivied walls of the old church. with a start he came back to the workman, who was unfolding his troubles in an abandon of misery under the archway. "if you'll talk things over with me to-night when we get through work, i think i may be able to straighten them out for you," he said. the man stared at him out of his dogged eyes with a helpless incredulity. "but i ain't got any money," he responded sullenly, as if driven to the defensive. "well, we'll see," said ordway, "i don't want your money." "you want something, though--my money or my vote, and i ain't got either." ordway laughed shortly. "i?--oh, i just want the fun," he answered. the beginning was trivial enough, the case sordid, and the client only a dull-witted labourer; but to ordway it came as the commencement of the new life for which he had prayed--the life which would find its centre not in possession, but in surrender, which would seek as its achievement not personal happiness, but the joy of service. chapter vi the pretty daughter of the mayor the pretty girl whom ordway had seen on the gravelled walk was milly trend, the only child of the mayor of tappahannock. people said of jasper trend that his daughter was the one soft spot in a heart that was otherwise as small and hard as a silver dollar, and of milly trend the same people said--well, that she was pretty. her prettiness was invariably the first and the last thing to be mentioned about her. whatever sterner qualities she may have possessed were utterly obscured by an exterior which made one think of peach blossoms and spring sunshine. she had a bunch of curls the colour of ripe corn, which she wore tied back from her neck with a velvet ribbon; her eyes were the eyes of a baby; and her mouth had an adorable little trick of closing over her small, though slightly prominent teeth. the one flaw in her face was this projection of her teeth, and when she looked at herself in the glass it was her habit to bite her lips closely together until the irregular ivory line was lost. it was this fault, perhaps, which kept her prettiness, though it was superlative in its own degree, from ever rising to the height of beauty. in milly's opinion it had meant the difference between the glory of a world-wide reputation and the lesser honour of reigning as the acknowledged belle of tappahannock. she remembered that the magnificent manager of a theatrical company, a gentleman who wore a fur-lined coat and a top hat all day long, had almost lost his train while he stopped to look back at her on the crowded platform of the station. her heart had beat quickly at the tribute, yet even in that dazzling minute she had felt a desperate certainty that her single imperfection would decide her future. but for her teeth, she was convinced to-day, that he might have returned. if a woman cannot be a heroine in reality, perhaps the next best thing is to look as if she might have been one in the age of romance; and this was what milly trend's appearance suggested to perfection. her manner of dressing, the black velvet ribbon on her flaxen curls, her wide white collars open at her soft throat, her floating sky-blue sashes and the delicate peach bloom of her cheeks and lips--all these combined to produce a poetic atmosphere about an exceedingly poetic little figure. being plain she would probably have made currant jelly for her pastor, and have taught sedately in the infant class in sunday school: being pretty she read extravagant romances and dreamed strange adventures of fascinating highwaymen on lonely roads. but many a woman who has dreamed of a highwayman at eighteen has compromised with a bank clerk at twenty-two. even at tappahannock--the veriest prose piece of a town--romance might sometimes bud and blossom, though it usually brought nothing more dangerous than respectability to fruit. milly had read longfellow and _lucille_, and her heroic ideal had been taken bodily from one of bulwer's novels. she had played the graceful part of heroine in a hundred imaginary dramas; yet in actual life she had been engaged for two years to a sandy-haired, freckled face young fellow, who chewed tobacco, and bought the dry leaf in lots for a factory in richmond. from romance to reality is a hard distance, and the most passionate dreamer is often the patient drudge of domestic service. and yet even to-day milly was not without secret misgivings as to the wisdom of her choice. she knew he was not her hero, but in her short visits to larger cities she had met no one who had come nearer her ideal lover. to be sure she had seen this ideal, in highly coloured glimpses, upon the stage--though these gallant gentlemen in trunks had never so much as condescended to glance across the foot-lights to the little girl in the dark third row of the balcony. then, too, all the ladies upon the stage were beautiful enough for any hero, and just here she was apt to remember dismally the fatal projection of her teeth. so, perhaps, after all, harry banks was as near olympus as she could hope to approach; and there was a mild consolation in the thought that there was probably more sentiment in the inner than in the outward man. whatever came of it, she had learned that in a prose age it is safer to think only in prose. on the morning upon which ordway had first passed her gate, she had left the breakfast table at the postman's call, and had run down the gravelled walk to receive a letter from mr. banks, who was off on a short business trip for his firm. with the letter in her hand she had turned to find ordway's blue eyes fixed in careless admiration upon her figure; and for one breathless instant she had felt her insatiable dream rise again and clutch at her heart. some subtle distinction in his appearance--an unlikeness to the masculine portion of tappahannock--had caught her eye in spite of his common and ill-fitting clothes. though she had known few men of his class, the sensitive perceptions of the girl had made her instantly aware of the difference between him and harry banks. for a moment her extravagant fancy dwelt on his figure--on this distinction which she had noticed, on his square dark face and the singular effect of his bright blue eyes. then turning back in the yard, she went slowly up the gravelled walk, while she read with a vague feeling of disappointment the love letter written laboriously by mr. banks. it was, doubtless, but the average love letter of the average plain young man, but to milly in her rosy world of fiction, it appeared suddenly as if there had protruded upon her attention one of the great, ugly, wholesome facts of life. what was the use, she wondered, in being beautiful if her love letters were to be filled with enthusiastic accounts of her lover's prowess in the tobacco market? at the breakfast table jasper trend was pouring maple syrup on the buckwheat cakes he had piled on his plate, and at the girl's entrance he spoke without removing his gaze from the plated silver pitcher in his hand. "any letters, daughter?" he inquired, carefully running his knife along the mouth of the pitcher to catch the last drop of syrup. "one," said milly, as she sat down beside the coffee pot and looked at her father with a ripple of annoyance in her babyish eyes. "i reckon i can guess about that all right," remarked jasper with his cackling chuckle, which was as little related to a sense of humour as was the beating of a tin plate. he was a long, scraggy man, with drab hair that grew in scallops on his narrow forehead and a large nose where the prominent red veins turned purple when he became excited. "there's a stranger in town, father," said milly as she gave him his second cup of coffee. "i think he is boarding at mrs. twine's." "a drummer, i reckon--thar're a plenty of 'em about this season." "no, i don't believe he is a drummer--he isn't--isn't quite so sparky looking. but i wish you wouldn't say 'thar,' father. you promised me you wouldn't do it." "well, it ain't stood in the way of my getting on," returned jasper without resentment. had milly told him to shave his head, he might have protested freely, but in the end he would have gone out obediently to his barber. yet people outside said that he ground the wages of his workers in the cotton mills down to starvation point, and that he had been elected mayor not through popularity, but through terror. it was rumoured even that he stood with his wealth behind the syndicate of saloons which was giving an ugly local character to the town. but whatever his public vices may have been, his private life was securely hedged about by the paternal virtues. "i can't place him, but i'm sure he isn't a 'buyer,'" repeated milly, after a moment's devotion to the sugar bowl. "well, i'll let you know when i see him," responded jasper as he left the table and got into his overcoat, while milly jumped up to wrap his neck in a blue spotted muffler. when he had gone from the house, she took out her lover's letter again, but it proved, on a second trial, even more unsatisfactory than she had found it to be at her first reading. as a schoolgirl milly had known every attribute of her divinity from the chivalry of his soul to the shining gloss upon his boots--but to-day there remained to her only the despairing conviction that he was unlike banks. banks appeared to her suddenly in the hard prosaic light in which he, on his own account, probably viewed his tobacco. even her trousseau and the lace of her wedding gown ceased to afford her the shadow of consolation, since she remembered that neither of these accessories would occupy in marriage quite so prominent a place as banks. the next day ordway passed at the same hour, still on the opposite side of the street. after this she began to watch regularly for his figure, looking for it when it appeared on mrs. twine's little porch, and following it wistfully until it was lost beyond the new brick church at the corner. she was not aware of cultivating a facile sentiment about the stranger, but place a riotous imagination in an empty house and it requires little effort to weave a romance from the opposite side of the street. distance, that subtle magnifier of attachments, had come to her aid now as it had failed her in the person of harry banks. even from across the street it was impossible to invest mr. banks with any quality which might have suggested an historic background or a mysterious past. he was flagrantly, almost outrageously himself; in no fictitious circumstances could he have appeared as anything except the unvarnished fact that he was. no legendary light could have glorified his features or improved the set of his trousers--which had taken their shape and substance from the legs within. with these features and in these trousers, she felt that he must usurp the sacred precincts where her dream had dwelt. "it would all be so easy if one could only be born where one belongs," she cried out hopelessly, in the unconscious utterance of a philosophy larger than her own. and so as the week went by, she allowed her rosy fancies to surround the figure that passed three times daily along the sidewalk across the way. in the morning he walked by with a swinging stride; at midday he passed rapidly, absorbed in thought; in the evening he came back slowly, sometimes stopping to watch the sunset from the brow of the hill. not since the first morning had he turned his blue eyes toward milly's gate. at the end of the month mr. banks returned to tappahannock from a business trip through the tobacco districts. he was an ugly, freckled face, sandy-haired young fellow--an excellent judge of tobacco--with a simple soul that attired itself in large checks, usually of a black and white variety. on the day of his first visit to milly he wore a crimson necktie pierced by a scarf-pin bearing a turtle-dove in diamonds. "who's that fellow over there?" he inquired as ordway came up the hill to his dinner. "i wonder if he's the chap hudge was telling me about at breakfast?" "oh, i don't know," answered milly, in a voice that sounded flat in her own ears. "nobody knows anything about him, father says. but what was hudge telling you?" she asked, impelled by a devouring yet timid curiosity. "well, if he's the man i mean, he seems to be a kind of revivalist out of a job--or something or other queer. hudge says he broke up a fight last saturday evening in kelly's saloon--that's the place you've never heard the name of, i reckon," he added hesitatingly, "it's where all the factory hands gather after work on saturday to drink up their week's wages." for once milly's interest was stronger than her modesty. "and did he fight?" she demanded in a suspense that was almost breathless. "he wasn't there, you know--only passing along the street outside, at least that's what they say--when the rumpus broke out. then he went in through the window and----" "and?" repeated milly, with an entrancing vision of heroic blows, for beneath her soft exterior the blood of the primitive woman flowed. "and preached!" finished banks, with a prodigious burst of merriment. "preached?" gasped milly, "do you mean a sermon?" "not a regular sermon, but he spoke just like a preacher for a solid hour. before he'd finished the men who were drunk were crying like babies and the men who weren't were breaking their necks to sign the pledge--at any rate that's something like the tale they tell. there was never such speaking (hudge says he was there) heard before in tappahannock, and kelly is as mad as a hornet because he swears the town is going dry." "and he didn't strike a single blow?" asked milly, with a feeling of disappointment. "why, he had those drunken fools all blubbering like kids," said banks, "and then when it was over he got hold of kit berry (he started the row, you know) and carried him all the way home to the little cottage in the hollow across the town where kit lives with his mother. next sunday if it's fine there's going to be an open air meeting in baxter's field." there was a sore little spot in milly's heart, a vague sentiment of disenchantment. her house of dreams, which she had reared so patiently, stood cold and tenantless once more. "did you ever find out his name?" she asked, with a last courageous hope. "smith," replied banks, with luminous simplicity. "the boys have nick-named him 'ten commandment smith.'" "ten commandment smith?" echoed milly in a lifeless voice. her house of dreams had tottered at the blow and fallen from its foundation stone. chapter vii shows the graces of adversity on the morning after the episode in the barroom which banks had described to milly, ordway found baxter awaiting him in a condition which in a smaller person would have appeared to be a flutter of excitement. "so you got mixed up in a barroom row last night, i hear, smith?" "well, hardly that," returned ordway, smiling as he saw the other's embarrassment break out in drops of perspiration upon his forehead. "i was in it, i admit, but i can't exactly say that i was 'mixed up.'" "you got kit berry out, eh?--and took him home." "nothing short of a sober man could have done it. he lives on the other side of the town in bullfinch's hollow." "oh, i've been there," said baxter, "i've taken him home myself." the boyish sparkle had leaped to ordway's eyes which appeared in the animation of the moment to lend an expression of gaiety to his face. as baxter looked at him he felt something of the charm which had touched the drunken crowd in the saloon. "his mother was at my house before breakfast," he said, in a tone that softened as he went on until it sounded as if his whole perspiring person had melted into it. "she was in a great state, poor creature, for it seemed that when kit woke up this morning he promised her never to touch another drop." "well, i hope he'll keep his word, but i doubt it," responded ordway. he thought of the bare little room he had seen last night, of the patched garments drying before the fire, of the scant supper spread upon the table, and of the gray-haired, weeping woman who had received his burden from him. "he may--for a week," commented baxter, and he added with a big, shaking laugh, "they tell me you gave 'em a sermon that was as good as a preacher's." "nonsense. i got angry and spoke a few words, that's all." "well, if they were few, they seem to have been pretty pointed. i hear kelly closed his place two hours before midnight. even william cotton went home without falling once, he said." "there was a good reason for that. i happened to have some information cotton wanted." "i know," said baxter, drawing out the words with a lingering emphasis while his eyes searched ordway's face with a curiosity before which the younger man felt himself redden painfully. "cotton told me you got him out of a scrape as well as a lawyer could have done." "i remembered the law and wrote it down for him, that's all." "have you ever practised law in virginia?" "i've never practised anywhere, but i intended to when--" he was going to add "when i finished college," but with a sudden caution, he stopped short and then selected his words more carefully, "when i was a boy. i read a good deal then and some of it still sticks in my memory." "i see," commented baxter. his heart swelled until he became positively uncomfortable, and he coughed loudly in the effort to appear perfectly indifferent. what was it about the chap, he questioned, that had pulled at him from the start? was it only the peculiar mingling of pathos and gaiety in his look? "well, i wouldn't set about reforming things too much if i were you," he said at last, "it ain't worth it, for even when people accept the reforms they are pretty likely to reject the reformer. a man's got to have a mighty tough stomach to be able to do good immoderately. but all the same," he concluded heartily, "you're the right stuff and i like you. i respect pluck no matter whether it comes out in preaching or in blows. i reckon, by the way, if you'd care to turn bookkeeper, you'd be worth as good as a hundred a month to me." there was a round coffee stain, freshly spilled at breakfast, on his cravat, and ordway's eyes were fixed upon it with a kind of fascination during the whole of his speech. the very slovenliness of the man--the unshaven cheeks, the wilted collar, the spotted necktie, the loosely fitting alpaca coat he wore, all seemed in some inexplicable way, to emphasise the large benignity of his aspect. strangely enough his failures as a gentleman appeared to add to his impressiveness as a man. one felt that his faults were merely virtues swelled to abnormal proportions--as the carelessness in his dress was but a degraded form of the lavish generosity of his heart. "to tell the truth, i'd hoped for that all along," said ordway, withdrawing his gaze with an effort from the soiled cravat. "do you want me to start in at the books to-day?" for an instant baxter hesitated; then he coughed and went on as if he found difficulty in selecting the words that would convey his meaning. "well, if you don't mind there's a delicate little matter i'd like you to attend to first. being a stranger i thought it would be easier for you than for me--have you ever heard anybody speak of beverly brooke?" the interest quickened in ordway's face. "why, yes. i came along the road one day with a farmer who gave me his whole story--adam whaley, i heard afterward, was his name." baxter whistled. "oh, i reckon, he hardly told you the whole story--for i don't believe there's anybody living except myself who knows what a darn fool mr. beverly is. that man has never done an honest piece of work in his life; he's spent every red cent of his wife's money, and his sister's too, in some wild goose kind of speculation--and yet, bless my soul, he has the face to strut in here any day and lord it over me just as if he were his grandfather's ghost or george washington. it's queer about those old families, now ain't it? when they begin to peter out it ain't just an ordinary petering, but a sort of mortal rottenness that takes 'em root and branch." "and so i am to interview this interesting example of degeneration?" asked ordway, smiling. "you've got to make him understand that he can't ship me any more of his worthless tobacco," exclaimed baxter in an outburst of indignation. "do you know what he does, sir?--well, he raises a lazy, shiftless, worm-eaten crop of tobacco in an old field--plants it too late, tops it too late, cuts it too late, cures it too late, and then lets it lie around in some leaky smokehouse until it isn't fit for a hog to chew. after he has left it there to rot all winter, he gathers the stuff up on the first pleasant day in spring and gets an old nigger to cart it to me in an open wagon. the next day he lounges in here with his palavering ways, and demands the highest price in the market--and i give it to him! that's the damned outrage of it, i give it to him!" concluded baxter with an excitement in which his huge person heaved like a shaken mountain. "i've bought his trash for twenty years and ground it into snuff because i was afraid to refuse a brooke--but brooke or no brooke there's an end to it now," he turned and waved his hand furiously to a pile of tobacco lying on the warehouse floor, "there's his trash and it ain't fit even for snuff!" he led ordway back into the building, picked up several leaves from the pile, smelt them, and threw them down with a contemptuous oath. "worm-eaten, frost-bitten, mildewed. i want you to go out to cedar hill and tell the man that his stuff ain't fit for anything but fertiliser," he went on. "if he wants it he'd better come for it and haul it away." "and if he refuses?" "he most likely will--then tell him i'll throw it into the ditch." "oh, i'll tell him," responded ordway, and he was aware of a peculiar excitement in the prospect of an encounter with the redoubtable mr. beverly. "i'll do my best," he added, going through the archway, while baxter followed him with a few last words of instruction and advice. the big man's courage had evidently begun to ebb, for as ordway passed into the street, he hurried after him to suggest that he should approach the subject with as much delicacy as he possessed. "i wouldn't butt at mr. beverly, if i were you," he cautioned, "just edge around and work in slowly when you get the chance." but the advice was wasted upon ordway, for he had started out in an impatience not unmixed with anger. who was this fool of a brooke? he wondered, and what power did he possess that kept tappahannock in a state of slavery? he was glad that baxter had sent him on the errand, and the next minute he laughed aloud because the big man had been too timid to come in person. he had reached the top of the hill, and was about to turn into the road he had taken his first night in tappahannock, when a woman, wrapped in a shawl, hurried across the street from one of the smaller houses fronting upon the green. "i beg your pardon, sir, but are you the man that helped william cotton?" clearly william cotton was bringing him into notice. at the thought ordway looked down upon his questioner with a sensation that was almost one of pleasure. "he needed business advice and i gave it, that was all," he answered. "but you wrote down the whole case for him so that he could understand it and speak for himself," she said, catching her breath in a sob, as she pulled her thin shawl together. "you got him out of his troubles and asked nothing, so i hoped you might be willing to do as much by me. i am a widow with five little children, and though i've paid every penny i could scrape together for the mortgage, the farm is to be sold over our heads and we have nowhere to go." again the glow that was like the glow of pleasure illuminated ordway's mind. "there's not one chance in a hundred that i can help you," he said; "in the case of william cotton it was a mere accident. still if you will tell me where you live, i will come to you this evening and talk matters over. if i can help you, i promise you i will with pleasure." "and for nothing? i am very poor." he shook his head with a laugh. "oh, i get more fun out of it than you could understand!" after writing down the woman's name in his notebook, he passed into the country road and bent his thoughts again upon the approaching visit to mr. beverly. when he reached cedar hill, which lay a sombre shadow against the young green of the landscape, he saw that the dead cedars still lay where they had fallen across the avenue. evidently the family temper had assumed an opposite, though equally stubborn form, in the person of the girl in the red cape, and she had, he surmised, refused to allow beverly to profit by his desecration even to the extent of selling the trees he had already cut down. was it from a sentiment, or as a warning, he wondered, that she left the great cedars barring the single approach to the house? in either case the magnificent insolence of her revenge moved him to an acknowledgment of her spirit and her justice. in the avenue a brood of young turkeys were scratching in the fragrant dust shed by the trees; and at his approach they scattered and fled before him. it was long evidently since a stranger had penetrated into the melancholy twilight of the cedars; for the flutter of the turkeys, he discovered presently, was repeated in an excited movement he felt rather than saw as he ascended the stone steps and knocked at the door. the old hound he had seen the first night rose from under a bench on the porch, and came up to lick his hand; a window somewhere in the right wing shut with a loud noise; and through the bare old hall, which he could see from the half open door, a breeze blew dispersing an odour of hot soapsuds. the hall was dim and empty except for a dilapidated sofa in one corner, on which a brown and white setter lay asleep, and a rusty sword which clanked against the wall with a regular, swinging motion. in response to his repeated knocks there was a sound of slow steps on the staircase, and a handsome, shabbily dressed man, holding a box of dominoes, came to the door and held out his hand with an apologetic murmur. "i beg your pardon, but the wind makes such a noise i did not hear your knock. will you come inside or do you prefer to sit on the porch where we can get the view?" as he spoke he edged his way courteously across the threshold and with a hospitable wave of his hand, sat down upon one of the pine benches against the decaying railing. in spite of the shabbiness of his clothes he presented a singularly attractive, even picturesque appearance, from the abundant white hair above his forehead to his small, shapely feet encased now in an ancient pair of carpet slippers. his figure was graceful and well built, his brown eyes soft and melancholy, and the dark moustache drooping over his mouth had been trained evidently into an immaculate precision. his moustache, however, was the one immaculate feature of his person, for even his carpet slippers were dirty and worn threadbare in places. yet his beauty, which was obscured in the first view by what in a famous portrait might have been called "the tone of time," produced, after a closer and more sympathetic study, an effect which, upon ordway at least, fell little short of the romantic. in his youth beverly had been, probably, one of the handsomest men of his time, and this distinction, it was easy to conjecture, must have been the occasion, if not the cause, of his ruin. even now, pompous and slovenly as he appeared, it was difficult to resist a certain mysterious fascination which he still possessed. when he left tappahannock ordway had felt only a humorous contempt for the owner of cedar hill, but sitting now beside him on the hard pine bench, he found himself yielding against his will to an impulse of admiration. was there not a certain spiritual kinship in the fact that they were both failures in life? "you are visiting tappahannock, then?" asked beverly with his engaging smile; "i go in seldom or i should perhaps have seen you. when a man gets as old and as much of an invalid as i am, he usually prefers to spend his days by the fireside in the bosom of his family." the bloom of health was in his cheeks, yet as he spoke he pressed his hand to his chest with the habitual gesture of an invalid. "a chronic trouble which has prevented my taking an active part in the world's affairs," he explained, with a sad, yet cheerful dignity as of one who could enliven tragedy with a comic sparkle. "i had my ambitions once, sir," he added, "but we will not speak of them for they are over, and at this time of my life i can do little more than try to amuse myself with a box of dominoes." as he spoke he placed the box on the bench between them and began patiently matching the little ivory blocks. ordway expressed a casual sympathy, and then, forgetting baxter's warning, he attempted to bring the conversation to a practical level. "i am employed now at baxter's warehouse," he began, "and the object of my call is to speak with you about your last load of tobacco." "ah!" said beverly, with warming interest, "it is a sufficient recommendation to have come from robert baxter--for that man has been the best, almost the only, friend i have had in life. it is impossible to overestimate either his character or my admiration. he has come to my assistance, sir, when i hardly knew where to turn for help. if you are employed by him, you are indeed to be envied." "i am entirely of your opinion," observed ordway, "but the point this morning----" "well, we'll let that rest a while now," interrupted beverly, pushing the dominoes away, and turning his beautiful, serious face upon his companion. "when there is an opportunity for me to speak of baxter's generosity, i feel that i cannot let it escape me. something tells me that you will understand and pardon my enthusiasm. there is no boy like an old boy, sir." his voice broke, and drawing a ragged handkerchief from the pocket of his corduroy coat, he blew his nose and wiped away two large teardrops from his eyes. after such an outburst of sentiment it seemed a positive indecency to inform him that baxter had threatened to throw his tobacco into a ditch. "he regrets very much that your crop was a failure this year," said ordway, after what he felt to be a respectable pause. "and yet," returned beverly, with his irrepressible optimism, "if things had been worse it might even have rotted in the ground. as it was, i never saw more beautiful seedlings--they were perfect specimens. had not the tobacco worms and the frost and the leak in the smokehouse all combined against me, i should have raised the most splendid crop in virginia, sir." the spectacle of this imaginary crop suffused his face with a glow of ardour. "my health permits me to pay little attention to the farm," he continued in his eloquent voice, "i see it falling to rains about me, and i am fortunate in being able to enjoy the beauty of its decay. yes, my crop was a failure, i admit," he added, with a touching cheerfulness, "it lay several months too long in the barn before i could get it sent to the warehouse--but this was my misfortune, not my fault, as i am sure robert baxter will understand." "he will find it easier to understand the case than to sell the tobacco, i fancy." "however that may be, he is aware that i place the utmost confidence in his judgment. what he does will be the right thing, sir." this confession of artless trust was so overpowering that for a moment ordway hung back, feeling that any ground would be dangerous ground upon which to proceed. the very absorption in which beverly arranged the dominoes upon the bench added to the childlike simplicity of his appearance. then a sudden irritation against the man possessed him, for he remembered the girl in the red cape and the fallen cedars. from where he sat now they were hidden by the curve of the avenue, but the wonderful trees, which shed their rich gloom almost upon the roof of the house, made him realise afresh the full extent of beverly's folly. in the fine spring sunshine whatever beauties were left in the ruined place showed in an intenser and more vernal aspect. every spear of grass on the lawn was tipped with light, and the young green leaves on the lilacs stood out as if illuminated on a golden background. in one of the ivy-covered eaves a wren was building, and he could see the flutter of a bluebird in an ancient cedar. "it is a beautiful day," remarked beverly, pensively, "but the lawn needs trimming." his gaze wandered gently over the tangled sheep mint, orchard grass and ailantus shoots which swept from the front steps to the fallen fence which had once surrounded the place, and he added with an outburst of animation, "i must tell micah to turn in the cattle." remembering the solitary cow he had seen in a sheltered corner of the barn, ordway bit back a smile as he rose and held out his hand. "after all, i haven't delivered my message," he said, "which was to the effect that the tobacco is practically unfit for use. baxter told me to request you to send for it at your convenience." beverly gathered up his dominoes, and rising with no appearance of haste, turned upon him an expression of suffering dignity. "such an act upon my part," he said, "would be a reflection upon baxter's ability as a merchant, and after thirty years of friendship i refuse to put an affront upon him. i would rather, sir, lose every penny my tobacco might bring me." his sincerity was so admirable, that for a moment it obscured even in ordway's mind the illusion upon which it rested. when a man is honestly ready to sacrifice his fortune in the cause of friendship, it becomes the part of mere vulgarity to suggest to him that his affairs are in a state of penury. "then it must be used for fertilisers or thrown away," said ordway, shortly. "i trust myself entirely in baxter's hands," replied beverly, in sad but noble tones, "whatever he does will be the best that could be done under the circumstances. you may assure him of this with my compliments." "well, i fear, there's nothing further to be said," remarked ordway; and he was about to make his final good-bye, when a faded lady, wrapped in a paisley shawl, appeared in the doorway and came out upon the porch. "amelia," said beverly, "allow me to present mr. smith. mr. smith, mrs. brooke." mrs. brooke smiled at him wanly with a pretty, thin-lipped mouth and a pair of large rather prominent eyes, which had once been gray but were now washed into a cloudy drab. she was still pretty in a hopeless, depressed, ineffectual fashion; and though her skirt was frayed about the edges and her shoes run down at the heel, her pale, fawn-coloured hair was arranged in elaborate spirals and the hand she held out to ordway was still delicately fine and white. she was like a philosopher, who, having sunk into a universal pessimism of thought, preserves, in spite of himself, a small belief or so in the minor pleasures of existence. out of the general wreck of her appearance she had clung desperately to the beauties of her hair and hands. "i had hoped you would stay to dinner," she remarked in her listless manner to ordway. fate had whipped her into submission, but there was that in her aspect which never permitted one for an instant to forget the whipping. if her husband had dominated by his utter incapacity, she had found a smaller consolation in feeling that though she had been obliged to drudge she had never learned to do it well. to do it badly, indeed, had become at last the solitary proof that by right of birth she was entitled not to do it at all. at ordway's embarrassed excuse she made no effort to insist, but stood, smiling like a ghost of her own past prettiness, in the doorway. behind her the bare hall and the dim staircase appeared more empty, more gloomy, more forlornly naked than they had done before. again ordway reached for his hat, and prepared to pick his way carefully down the sunken steps; but this time he was arrested by the sound of smothered laughter at the side of the house, which ran back to the vegetable garden. a moment later the girl in the red cape appeared running at full speed across the lawn, pursued by several shrieking children that followed closely at her skirts. her clear, ringing laugh--the laugh of youth and buoyant health--held ordway motionless for an instant upon the porch; then as she came nearer he saw that she held an old, earth-covered spade in her hands and that her boots and short woollen skirt were soiled with stains from the garden beds. but the smell of the warm earth that clung about her seemed only to increase the vitality and freshness in her look. her vivid animation, her sparkling glance, struck him even more forcibly than they had done in the street of tappahannock. at sight of ordway her laugh was held back breathlessly for an instant; then breaking out again, it began afresh with redoubled merriment, and sinking with exhaustion on the lowest step, she let the spade fall to the ground while she buried her wind-blown head in her hands. "i beg your pardon," she stammered presently, lifting her radiant brown eyes, "but i've run so fast that i'm quite out of breath." stopping with an effort she sought in vain to extinguish her laughter in the curls of the smallest child. "emily," said beverly with dignity, "allow me to present mr. smith." the girl looked up from the step; and then, rising, smiled brightly upon ordway over the spade which she had picked up from the ground. "i can't shake hands," she explained, "because i've been spading the garden." if she recognised him for the tramp who had slept in her barn there was no hint of it in her voice or manner. "do you mean, emily," asked beverly, in his plaintive voice, "that you have been actually digging in the ground?" "actually," repeated emily, in a manner which made ordway suspect that the traditional feminine softness was not included among her virtues, "i actually stepped on dirt and saw--worms." "but where is micah?" "micah has an attack of old age. he was eighty-two yesterday." "is it possible?" remarked beverly, and the discovery appeared to afford him ground for cheerful meditation. "no, it isn't possible, but it's true," returned the girl, with good-humoured merriment. "as there are only two able-bodied persons on the place, the mare and i, it seemed to me that one of us had better take a hand at the spade. but i had to leave off after the first round," she added to ordway, showing him her right hand, from the palm of which the skin had been rubbed away. she was so much like a gallant boy that ordway felt an impulse to take the hand in his own and examine it more carefully. "well, i'm very much surprised to hear that micah is so old," commented beverly, dwelling upon the single fact which had riveted his attention. "i must be making him a little present upon his birthday." the girl's eyes flashed under her dark lashes, but remembering ordway's presence, she turned to him with a casual remark about the promise of the spring. he saw at once that she had achieved an indignant detachment from her thriftless family, and the ardent, almost impatient energy with which she fell to labour was, in itself, a rebuke to the pleasant indolence which had hastened, if it had not brought about, the ruin of the house. was it some temperamental disgust for the hereditary idleness which had spurred her on to take issue with the worn-out traditions of her ancestors and to place herself among the labouring rather than the leisure class? as she stood there in her freshness and charm, with the short brown curls blown from her forehead, the edge of light shining in her eyes and on her lips, and the rich blood kindling in her vivid face, it seemed to ordway, looking back at her from the end of his forty years, that he was brought face to face with the spirit of the future rising amid the decaying sentiment of the past. chapter viii "ten commandment smith" when ordway had disappeared beyond the curve in the avenue, emily went slowly up the steps, her spade clanking against the stone as she ascended. "did he come about the tobacco, beverly?" she asked. beverly rose languidly from the bench, and stood rubbing his hand across his forehead with an exhausted air. "my head was very painful and he talked so rapidly i could hardly follow him," he replied; "but is it possible, emily, that you have been digging in the garden?" "there is nobody else to do it," replied emily, with an impatient flash in her eyes; "only half the garden has been spaded. if you disapprove so heartily, i wish you'd produce someone to do the work." mrs. brooke, who had produced nothing in her life except nine children, six of whom had died in infancy, offered at this a feeble and resigned rebuke. "i am sure you could get salem," she replied. "we owe him already three months' wages," returned the girl, "i am still paying him for last autumn." "all i ask of you, emily, is peace," remarked beverly, in a gentle voice, as he prepared to enter the house. "nothing--no amount of brilliant argument can take the place of peace in a family circle. my poor head is almost distracted when you raise your voice." the three children flocked out of the dining-room and came, with a rush, to fling themselves upon him. they adored him--and there was a live terrapin which they had brought in a box for him to see! in an instant his depression vanished, and he went off, his beautiful face beaming with animation, while the children clung rapturously to his corduroy coat. "amelia," said emily, lowering her voice, "don't you think it would improve beverly's health if he were to try working for an hour every day in the garden?" mrs. brooke appeared troubled by the suggestion. "if he could only make up his mind to it, i've no doubt it would," she answered, "he has had no exercise since he was obliged to give up his horse. walking he has always felt to be ungentlemanly." she spoke in a softly tolerant voice, though she herself drudged day and night in her anxious, tearful, and perfectly ineffectual manner. for twenty years she had toiled patiently without, so far as one could perceive, achieving a single definite result--for by some unfortunate accident of temperament, she was doomed to do badly whatever she undertook to do at all. yet her intention was so admirable that she appeared forever apologising in her heart for the incompetence of her hands. emily placed the spade in the corner of the porch, and desisting from her purpose, went upstairs to wash her hands before going in to dinner. as she ascended the wide, dimly lighted staircase, upon which the sun shone with a greenish light from the gallery above, she stopped twice to wonder why beverly's visitor had slept in the barn like a tramp only six weeks ago. before her mirror, a minute later, she put the same question to herself while she braided her hair. the room was large, cool, high-ceiled, with a great brick fireplace, and windows which looked out on the garden, where purple and white lilacs were blooming beside the gate. on the southern side the ivy had grown through the slats of the old green shutters, until they were held back, crumbling, against the house, and in the space between one of the cedars brushed always, with a whispering sound, against the discoloured panes. in emily's absence a curious melancholy descended on the old mahogany furniture, the greenish windows and the fireless hearth; but with the opening of the door and the entrance of her vivid youth, there appeared also a light and gracious atmosphere in her surroundings. she remembered the day upon which she had returned after ten years' absence, and how as she opened the closed shutters, the gloom of the place had resisted the passage of the sunshine, retreating stubbornly from the ceiling to the black old furniture and then across the uncarpeted floor to the hall where it still held control. for months after her return it had seemed to her that the fight was between her spirit and the spirit of the past--between hope and melancholy, between growth and decay. the burden of debt, of poverty, of hopeless impotence had fallen upon her shoulders, and she had struggled under it with impetuous gusts of anger, but with an energy that never faltered. to keep the children fed and clothed, to work the poor farm as far as she was able, to stay clear of any further debts, and to pay off the yearly mortgage with her small income, these were the things which had filled her thoughts and absorbed the gallant fervour of her youth. her salary at the public school had seemed to beverly, though he disapproved of her position, to represent the possibility of luxury; and in some loose, vague way he was never able to understand why the same amount could not be made to serve in several opposite directions at the same time. "that fifty dollars will come in very well, indeed, my dear," he would remark, with cheerfulness, gloating over the unfamiliar sight of the bank notes, "it's exactly the amount of wilson's bill which he's been sending in for the last year, and he refuses to furnish any groceries until the account is settled. then there's the roof which must be repaired--it will help us there--then we must all have a supply of shoes, and the wages of the hands are due to-morrow, i overlooked that item." "but if you pay it all to wilson," emily would ask, as a kind of elementary lesson in arithmetic, "how is the money going to buy all the other things?" "ah, to be sure," beverly would respond, as if struck by the lucidity of the idea, "that is the question." and it was likely to remain the question until the end of beverly--for he had grown so accustomed to the weight of poverty upon his shoulders that he would probably have felt a sense of loss if it had been suddenly removed. but it was impossible to live in the house with him, to receive his confidences and meet his charming smile and not to entertain a sentiment of affection for him in one's heart. his unfailing courtesy was his defence, though even this at times worked in emily an unreasonable resentment. he had ruined his family, and she felt that she could have forgiven him more easily if he had ruined it with a less irreproachable demeanour. after her question he had said nothing further about the tobacco, but a chance meeting with adam whaley, as she rode into tappahannock on the sunday after ordway's visit, made clear to her exactly what the purpose of that visit had been. "it's a pity mr. beverly let his tobacco spoil, particular' arter his wheat turned out to be no account," remarked adam. "i hope you don't mind my sayin', miss em'ly, that mr. beverly is about as po' a farmer as he is a first rate gentleman." "oh, no, i don't mind in the least, adam," said emily. "do you know," she asked presently, "any hands that i can get to work the garden this week?" whaley shook his head. "they get better paid at the factories," he answered; "an' them that ain't got thar little patch to labour in, usually manage to git a job in town." emily was on her old horse--an animal discarded by mr. beverly on account of age--and she looked down at his hanging neck with a feeling that was almost one of hopelessness. beverly, who had never paid his bills, had seldom paid his servants; and of the old slave generation that would work for its master for a song, there were only micah and poor half-demented aunt mehitable now left. "the trouble with mr. beverly," continued adam, laying his hand on the neck of the old horse, "is that he was born loose-fingered jest as some folks are born loose-moraled. he's never held on to anything sense he came into the world an' i doubt if he ever will. why, bless yo' life, even as a leetle boy he never could git a good grip on his fishin' line. it was always a-slidin' an' slippin' into the water." they had reached tappahannock in the midst of adam's philosophic reflection; and as they were about to pass an open field on the edge of the town, emily pointed to a little crowd which had gathered in the centre of the grass-grown space. "is it a sunday frolic, do you suppose?" she inquired. "that? oh no--it's 'ten commandment smith,' as they call him now. he gives a leetle talk out thar every fine sunday arternoon." "a talk? about what?" "wall, i ain't much of a listener, miss, when it comes to that. my soul is willin' an' peart enough, but it's my hands an' feet that make the trouble. i declar' i've only got to set down in a pew for 'em to twitch untwel you'd think i had the saint vitus dance. it don't look well to be twitchin' the whole time you are in church, so that's the reason i'm obleeged to stay away. as for 'ten commandment smith,' though, he's got a voice that's better than the doxology, an' his words jest boom along like cannon." "and do the people like it?" "some, of 'em do, i reckon, bein' as even sermons have thar followers, but thar're t'others that go jest out of the sperit to be obleegin', an' it seems to them that a man's got a pretty fair licence to preach who gives away about two-thirds of what he gits a month. good lord, he could drum up a respectable sized congregation jest from those whose back mortgages he's helped pay up." while he spoke emily had turned her horse's head into the field, and riding slowly toward the group, she stopped again upon discovering that it was composed entirely of men. then going a little nearer, she drew rein just beyond the outside circle, and paused for a moment with her eyes fixed intently upon the speaker's face. in the distance a forest, still young in leaf, lent a radiant, springlike background to the field, which rose in soft green swells that changed to golden as they melted gradually into the landscape. ordway's head was bare, and she saw now that the thick locks upon his forehead were powdered heavily with gray. she could not catch his words, but his voice reached her beyond the crowd; and she found herself presently straining her ears lest she miss the sound which seemed to pass with a peculiar richness into the atmosphere about the speaker. the religious significance of the scene moved her but little--for she came of a race that scorned emotional conversions or any faith, for that matter, which did not confine itself within four well-built walls. yet, in spite of her convictions, something in the voice whose words she could not distinguish, held her there, as if she were rooted on her old horse to the spot of ground. the unconventional preacher, in his cheap clothes, aroused in her an interest which seemed in some vague way to have its beginning in a mystery that she could not solve. the man was neither a professional revivalist nor a member of the salvation army, yet he appeared to hold the attention of his listeners as if either their money or their faith was in his words. and it was no uncultured oratory--"ten commandment smith," for all his rough clothes, his muddy boots and his hardened hands, was beneath all a gentleman, no matter what his work--no matter even what his class. though she had lived far out of the world in which he had had his place, she felt instinctively that the voice she heard had been trained to reach another audience than the one before him in the old field. his words might be simple and straight from the heart--doubtless they were--but the voice of the preacher--the vibrant, musical, exquisitely modulated voice--was not merely a personal gift, but the result of generations of culture. the atmosphere of a larger world was around him as he stood there, bare-headed in the sunshine, speaking to a breathless crowd of factory workers as if his heart went out to them in the words he uttered. perfectly motionless on the grass at his feet his congregation sat in circles with their pathetic dumb eyes fixed on his face. "what is it about, adam? can't you find out?" asked emily, stirred by an impulsive desire to be one of the attentive group of listeners--to come under the spell of personality which drew its magic circle in the centre of the green field. adam crossed the space slowly, and returned after what was to emily an impatient interval. "it's one of his talks on the ten commandments--that's why they gave him his nickname. i didn't stay to find out whether 'twas the top or the bottom of 'em, miss, as i thought you might be in a hurry." "but they can get that in church. what makes them come out here?" "oh, he tells 'em things," said adam, "about people and places, and how to get on in life. then he's al'ays so ready to listen to anybody's troubles arterward; and he's taken over martha frayley's mortgage--you know she's the widow of mike frayley who was a fireman and lost his life last january in the fire at bingham's wall--i reckon, a man's got a right to talk big when he lives big, too." "yes, i suppose he has," said emily. "well, i must be going now, so i'll ride on ahead of you." touching the neck of the horse with her bare hand, she passed at a gentle amble into one of the smaller streets of tappahannock. her purpose was to call upon one of her pupils who had been absent from school for several days, but upon reaching the house she found that the child, after a slight illness, had recovered sufficiently to be out of doors. this was a relief rather than a disappointment, and mounting again, she started slowly back in the direction of cedar hill. a crowd of men, walking in groups along the roadside, made her aware that the gathering in the field had dispersed, and as she rode by she glanced curiously among them in the hope of discovering the face of the speaker. he was walking slightly behind the crowd, listening with an expression of interest, to a man in faded blue overalls, who kept a timid yet determined hold upon his arm. his face, which had appeared grave to emily when she saw it at cedar hill, wore now a look which seemed a mixture of spiritual passion and boyish amusement. he impressed her as both sad and gay, both bitter and sympathetic, and she was struck again by the contrast between his hard mouth and his gentle eyes. as she met his glance, he bowed without a smile, while he stepped back into the little wayside path among the dusty thistles. unconsciously, she had searched his face as milly trend had done before her, and like her, she had found there only an impersonal kindliness. chapter ix the old and the new when she reached home she found beverly, seated before a light blaze in the dining-room, plunged in the condition of pious indolence which constituted his single observance of the sabbath. to do nothing had always seemed to him in its way as religious as to attend church, and so he sat now perfectly motionless, with the box of dominoes reposing beside his tobacco pouch on the mantel above his head. the room was in great confusion, and the threadbare carpet, ripped up in places, was littered with the broken bindings of old books and children's toys made of birchwood or corncob, upon which beverly delighted to work during the six secular days of the week. at his left hand the table was already laid for supper, which consisted of a dish of batter-bread, a half bared ham bone and a pot of coffee, from which floated a thin and cheap aroma. a wire shovel for popping corn stood at one side of the big brick fireplace, and on the hearth there was a small pile of half shelled red and yellow ears. between the two long windows a tall mahogany clock, one of the few pieces left by the collector of old furniture, ticked with a loud, monotonous sound, which seemed to increase in volume with each passage of the hands. "did you hear any news, my dear?" inquired beverly, as emily entered, for in spite of the fact that he rarely left his fireside, he was an insatiable consumer of small bits of gossip. "i didn't see anybody," answered emily in her cheerful voice. "shall i pour the coffee?" she went to the head of the table, while her brother, after shelling an ear of corn into the wire shovel, began shaking it slowly over the hickory log. "i thought you might have heard if milly trend had really made up her mind to marry that young tobacco merchant," he observed. before emily could reply the door opened and the three children rushed in, pursued by aunt mehitable, who announced that "miss meely" had gone to bed with one of her sick headaches and would not come down to supper. the information afforded beverly some concern, and he rose to leave the room with the intention of going upstairs to his wife's chamber; but observing, as he did so, that the corn was popping finely, he sat down again and devoted his attention to the shovel, which he began to shake more rapidly. "the terrapin's sick, papa," piped one of the children, a little girl called lila, as she pulled back her chair with a grating noise and slipped into her seat. "do you s'pose it would like a little molasses for its supper?" "terrapins don't eat molasses," said the boy, whose name was blair. "they eat flies--i've seen 'em." "my terrapin shan't eat flies," protested bella, the second little girl. "it ain't your terrapin!" "it is." "it ain't her terrapin, is it, papa?" beverly, having finished his task, unfastened the lid of the shovel with the poker, and suggested that the terrapin might try a little popcorn for a change. as he stood there with his white hair and his flushed face in the red firelight, he made a picture of beautiful and serene domesticity. "i shouldn't wonder if he'd get quite a taste for popcorn if you could once persuade him to try it," he remarked, his mind having wandered whimsically from his wife to the terrapin. emily had given the children batter-bread and buttermilk, and she sat now regarding her brother's profile as it was limned boldly in shadow against the quivering flames. it was impossible; she discovered, to survey beverly's character with softness or his profile with severity. "don't you think," she ventured presently, after a wholesome effort to achieve diplomacy, "that you might try to-morrow to spade the seed rows in the garden. adam can't find anybody, and if the corn isn't dropped this week we'll probably get none until late in the summer." "'i cannot dig, to beg i am ashamed,'" quoted beverly, as he drank his coffee. "it would lay me up for a week, emily, i am surprised that you ask it." she was surprised herself, the moment after she had put the question, so hopeless appeared any attempt to bend beverly to utilitarian purposes. "well, the tomatoes which i had counted on for the market will come too late," she said with a barely suppressed impatience in her voice. "i shouldn't worry about it if i were you," returned beverly, "there's nothing that puts wrinkles in a pretty face so soon as little worries. i remember uncle bolingbroke (he used to be my ideal as a little boy) told me once that he had lived to be upward of ninety on the worries from which he had been saved. as a small child i was taken to see him once when he had just come to absolute ruin and had been obliged to sell his horses and his house and even his wife's jewellery for debt. a red flag was flying at the gate, but inside sat uncle bolingbroke, drinking port wine and cracking nuts with two of his old cronies. 'yes, i've lost everything, my boy,' he cried, 'but it doesn't worry me a bit!' at that instant i remember noticing that his forehead was the smoothest i had ever seen." "but his wife had to take in dressmaking," commented emily, "and his children grew up without a particle of education." "ah, so they did," admitted beverly, with sadness, "the details had escaped me." as they had escaped him with equal success all his life, the fact seemed to emily hardly deserving of comment, and leaving him to his supper, she went upstairs to find mrs. brooke prostrate, in a cold room, with her head swathed in camphor bandages. in answer to emily's inquiries, she moaned plaintively that the pantry shelves needed scouring and that she must get up at daybreak and begin the work. "i've just remembered lying here that i planned to clean them last week," she said excitedly, "and will you remind me, emily, as soon as i get up that beverly's old brown velveteen coat needs a patch at the elbow?" "don't think of such things now, amelia, there's plenty of time. you are shivering all over--i'll start the fire in a moment. it has turned quite cool again." "but i wanted to save the pine knots until beverly came up," sighed mrs. brooke, "he is so fond of them." without replying to her nervous protest, emily knelt on the hearth and kindled a blaze which leaped rosily over the knots of resinous pine. of the two family failings with which she was obliged to contend, she had long ago decided that beverly's selfishness was less harmful in its results than amelia's self-sacrifice. inordinate at all times, it waxed positively violent during her severe attacks of headache, and between two spasms of pain her feverish imagination conjured up dozens of small self-denials which served to increase her discomfort while they conferred no possible benefit upon either her husband or her children. her temperament had fitted her for immolation; but the character of the age in which she lived had compelled her to embrace a domestic rather than a religious martyrdom. the rack would have been to her morally a bed of roses, and some exalted grace belonging to the high destiny that she had missed was visible at times in her faded gray eyes and impassive features. "mehitable brought me an egg," she groaned presently, growing more comfortable in spite of her resolve, as the rosy fire-light penetrated into the chill gloom where she lay, "but i sent it down to blair--i heard him coughing." "he didn't want it. there was plenty of batter-bread." "yes, but the poor boy is fond of eggs and he so seldom has one. it is very sad. emily, have you noticed how inert and lifeless mr. brooke has grown?" "it's nothing new, amelia, he has always been that way. can't you sleep now?" "oh, but if you could have seen him when we became engaged, emily--such life! such spirits! i remember the first time i dined at your father's--that was before beverly's mother died, so, of course, your mother wasn't even thought of in the family. i suppose second marriages are quite proper, since the lord permits them, but they always seem to me like trying to sing the same hymn over again with equal fervour. well, i was going to say that when your father asked me what part of the fowl i preferred and i answered 'dark meat, sir,' he fairly rapped the table in his delight: 'oh, amelia, what a capital wife you'll make for beverly,' he cried, 'if you will only continue to prefer dark meat!'" she stopped breathlessly, lay silent for a moment, and then began to moan softly with pain. emily swept the hearth, and after putting on a fresh log, went out, closing the door after her. there was no light in her room, but she reflected with a kind of desperation that there was no beverly and no amelia. the weight of the family had left her bruised and helpless, yet she knew that she must go downstairs again, remove the supper things, and send the three resisting children off to bed. she was quite equal to the task she had undertaken, yet there were moments when, because of her youth and her vitality, she found it harder to control her temper than to accomplish her work. at ten o'clock, when she had coaxed the children to sleep, and persuaded amelia to drink a cup of gruel, she came to her room again and began to undress slowly by the full moonlight which streamed through the window. outside, beyond the lilac bushes, she could see the tangled garden, with the dried stubble of last year's corn protruding from the unspaded rows. this was the last sight upon which her eyes turned before she climbed into the high tester bed and fell into the prompt and untroubled sleep of youth. awaking at six o'clock she went again to the window, and at the first glance it seemed to her that she must have slipped back into some orderly and quiet dream--for the corn rows which had presented a blighted aspect under the moonlight were now spaded and harrowed into furrows ready for planting. the suggestion that beverly had prepared a surprise for her occurred first to her mind, but she dismissed this the next instant and thought of adam, micah, even of the demented aunt mehitable. the memory of the fairy godmother in the story book brought a laugh to her lips, and as she dressed herself and ran downstairs to the garden gate, she half expected to see the pumpkin chariot disappearing down the weed-grown path and over the fallen fence. the lilac blossoms shed a delicious perfume into her face, and leaning against the rotting posts of the gate, she looked with mingled delight and wonder upon the freshly turned earth, which flushed faintly pink in the sunshine. a heavy dew lay over the landscape and as the sun rose slowly higher the mist was drawn back from the green fields like a sheet of gauze that is gathered up. "beverly? micah? mehitable?" each name was a question she put to herself, and after each she answered decisively, "no, it is impossible." micah, who appeared at the moment, doting, half blind and wholly rheumatic, shook his aged head helplessly in response to her eager inquiries. there was clearly no help to be had from him except the bewildered assistance he rendered in the afternoon by following on her footsteps with a split basket while she dropped the grains of corn into the opened furrows. his help in this case even was hardly more than a hindrance, for twice in his slow progress he stumbled and fell over a trailing brier in the path, and emily was obliged to stop her work and gather up the grain which he had scattered. "dese yer ole briers is des a-layin' out fur you," he muttered as he sat on the ground rubbing the variegated patch on his rheumatic knee. when the planting was over he went grumbling back to his cabin, while emily walked slowly up and down the garden path and dreamed of the vegetables which would ripen for the market. in the midst of her business calculations she remembered the little congregation in the green field on sunday afternoon and the look of generous enthusiasm in the face of the man who passed her in the road. why had she thought of him? she wondered idly, and why should that group of listeners gathered out of doors in the faint sunshine awake in her a sentiment which was associated with some religious emotion of which she had been half unconscious? the next night she awoke from a profound sleep with the same memory in her mind, and turning on her pillow, lay wide awake in the moonlight, which brought with it a faint spring chill from the dew outside. on the ivy the light shone almost like dawn, and as she could not fall asleep again, she rose presently, and slipping into her flannel dressing-gown, crossed to the window and looked out upon the shining fields, the garden and the blossoming lilacs at the gate. the shadow of the lilacs lay thick and black along the garden walk, and her eyes were resting upon them, when it seemed to her that a portion of the darkness detached itself and melted out into the moonlight. at first she perceived only the moving shadow; then gradually a figure was outlined on the bare rows of the garden, and as her eyes grew accustomed to the light, she saw that the figure had assumed a human shape, though it was still followed so closely by its semblance upon the ground that it was impossible at a distance to distinguish the living worker from his airy double. yet she realised instantly that her mysterious gardener was at work before her eyes, and hastening into her clothes, she caught up her cape from a chair, and started toward the door with an impulsive determination to discover his identity. with her hand on the knob, she hesitated and stopped, full of perplexity, upon the threshold. since he had wished to remain undiscovered was it fair, she questioned, to thrust recognition upon his kindness? on the other hand was it not more than unfair--was it not positively ungrateful--to allow his work to pass without any sign of acceptance or appreciation? in the chill white moonlight outside she could see the pointed tops of the cedars rising like silver spires. as the boughs moved the wind entered, bringing mingled odours of cedar berries, lilacs and freshly turned soil. for an instant longer her hesitation lasted; then throwing aside her cape, she undressed quickly, without glancing again down into the garden. when she fell asleep now it was to dream of the shadowy gardener spading in the moonlight among the lilacs. chapter x his neighbour's garden in his nightly work in the brookes' garden, ordway was prompted at first by a mere boyish impulse to repay people whose bread he had eaten and in whose straw he had slept. but at the end of the first hour's labour the beauty of the moonlight wrought its spell upon him, and he felt that the fragrance of the lilacs went like strong wine to his head. so the next night he borrowed mrs. twine's spade again and went back for the pure pleasure of the exercise; and the end of the week found him still digging among the last year's plants in the loamy beds. by spading less than two hours a night, he had turned the soil of half the garden before sunday put a stop to his work. on his last visit, he paused at the full of the moon, and stood looking almost with sadness at the blossoming lilacs and the overgrown path powdered with wild flowers which had strayed in through the broken fence. for the hours he had spent there the place had given him back his freedom and his strength and even a reminiscent sentiment of his youth. while he worked lydia had been only a little farther off in the beauty of the moonlight, and he had felt her presence with a spiritual sense which was keener than the sense of touch. as he drew his spade for the last time from the earth, he straightened himself, and standing erect, faced the cool wind which tossed the hair back from his heated forehead. at the moment he was content with the moonlight and the lilacs and the wind that blew over the spring fields, and it seemed easy enough to let the future rest with the past in the hands of god. swinging the spade at his side, he lowered his eyes and moved a step toward the open gate. then he stopped short, for he saw that emily brooke was standing there between the old posts under the purple and white lilacs. "it seemed too ungrateful to accept such a service and not even to say 'thank you,'" she remarked gravely. there was a drowsy sound in her voice; her lids hung heavily like a child's over her brown eyes, and her hair was flattened into little curls on one side by the pressure of the pillow. "it has been a pleasure to me," he answered, "so i deserve no thanks for doing the thing that i enjoyed." drawing nearer he stood before her with the spade on his shoulder and his head uncovered. the smell of the earth hung about him, and even in the moonlight she could see that his blue eyes looked almost gay. she felt all at once that he was younger, larger, more masculine than she had at first believed. "and yet it is work," she said in her voice of cheerful authority, "and sorely needed work at that. i can thank you even though i cannot understand why you have done it." "let's put it down to my passion to improve things," he responded with a whimsical gravity, "don't you think the garden as i first saw it justified that explanation of my behaviour?" "the explanation, yes--but not you," she answered, smiling. "then let my work justify itself. i've made a neat job of it, haven't i?" "it's more than neat, it's positively ornamental," she replied, "but even your success doesn't explain your motive." "well, the truth is--if you will have it--i needed exercise." "you might have walked." "that doesn't reach the shoulders--there's the trouble." she laughed with an easy friendliness which struck him as belonging to her gallant manner. "oh, i assure you i shan't insist upon a reason, i'm too much obliged to you," she returned, coming inside the gate. "indeed, i'm too good a farmer, i believe, to insist upon a reason anyway. providence disposes and i accept with thanks. i may wish, though, that the coloured population shared your leaning toward the spade. by the way, i see it isn't mine. it looks too shiny." "i borrowed it from mrs. twine, and it is my suspicion that she scrubs it every night." "in that case i wonder that she lets it go out to other people's gardens." "she doesn't usually," he laughed as he spoke, "but you see i am a very useful person to mrs. twine. she talks at her husband by way of me." "oh, i see," said emily. "well, i'm much obliged to her." "you needn't be. she hadn't the remotest idea where it went." her merriment, joining with his, brought them suddenly together in a feeling of good fellowship. "so you don't like divided thanks," she commented gaily. "not when they are undeserved," he answered, "as they are in this case." for a moment she was silent; then going slowly back to the gate, she turned there and looked at him wonderingly, he thought. "after all, it must have been a good wind that blew you to tappahannock," she observed. her friendliness--which impressed him as that of a creature who had met no rebuffs or disappointments from human nature, made an impetuous, almost childlike, appeal to his confidence. "do you remember the night i slept in your barn?" he asked suddenly. she bent down to pick up a broken spray of lilac. "yes, i remember." "well, i was at the parting of the ways that night--i was beaten down, desperate, hopeless. something in your kindness and--yes, and in your courage, too, put new life into me, and the next morning i turned back to tappahannock. but for you i should still have followed the road." "it is more likely to have been the cup of coffee," she said in her frank, almost boyish way. "there's something in that, of course," he answered quietly. "i _was_ hungry, god knows, but i was more than hungry, i was hurt. it was all my fault, you understand--i had made an awful mess of things, and i had to begin again low down--at the very bottom." it was in his mind to tell her the truth then, from the moment of his fall to the day that he had returned to tappahannock; but he was schooling himself hard to resist the sudden impulses which had wrecked his life, so checking his words with an effort, he lowered the spade from his shoulder, and leaning upon the handle, stood waiting for her to speak. "then you began again at baxter's warehouse the morning afterward?" she asked. "i had gone wrong from the very base of things, you see," he answered. "and you are making a new foundation now?" "i am trying to. they're decent enough folk in tappahannock, aren't they?" he added cheerfully. "perhaps they are," she responded, a little wistfully, "but i should like to have a glimpse of the world outside. i should like most, i think, to see new york." "new york?" he repeated blankly, "you've never been there?" "i? oh, no, i've never been out of virginia, except when i taught school once in georgia." the simple dignity with which she spoke caused him to look at her suddenly as if he had taken her in for the first time. perfectly unabashed by her disclosure, she stood before him as calmly as she would have stood, he felt, had he possessed a thousand amazed pairs of eyes. her confidence belonged less to personal experience, he understood now, than to some inherited ideal of manner--of social values; and it seemed to him at the moment that there was a breadth, a richness in her aspect which was like the atmosphere of rare old libraries. "you have, i dare say, read a great many books," he remarked. "a great many--oh, yes, we kept our books almost to the last. we still have the entire south wall in the library--the english classics are there." "i imagined so," he answered, and as he looked at her he realised that the world she lived in was not the narrow, provincial world of tappahannock, with its dusty warehouses, its tobacco scented streets, its red clay roads. she had turned from the gate, but before moving away she looked back and bowed to him with her gracious southern courtesy, as she had done that first night in the barn. "good-night. i cannot thank you enough," she said. "good-night. i am only paying my debt," he answered. as he spoke she entered the house, and with the spade on his shoulder he passed down the avenue and struck out vigorously upon the road to tappahannock. when he came down to breakfast some hours later, mrs. twine informed him that a small boy had come at daybreak with a message to him from bullfinch's hollow. "of course it ain't any of my business, suh," she continued impressively, "but if i were you i wouldn't pay any attention to kit berry or his messages. viciousness is jest as ketchin' as disease, that's what i say, an' you can't go steppin' aroun' careless whar it is in the air an' expect to git away with a whole morality. 'tain't as if you were a female, either, for if i do say it who should not, they don't seem to be so thin-skinned whar temptation is concerned. 'twas only two weeks ago last saturday when i went to drag bill away from that thar low lived saloon (the very same you broke into through the window, suh) that timmas kelly had the imperence to say to me, 'this is no place for respectable women, mrs. twine.' 'an, indeed, i'd like to know, mr. kelly,' said i to him, 'if it's too great a strain for the women, how the virtue of the men have stood it? for what a woman can't resist, i reckon, it's jest as well for a man not to be tempted with.' he shet up then tight as a keg--i'd wish you'd have seen him." "in his place i should probably have done the same," admitted ordway, as he took his coffee from her hands. he was upon excellent terms with mrs. twine, with the children, and even with the disreputable bill. "wall, i've done a lot o' promisin', like other folks," pursued mrs. twine, turning from the table to pick up a pair of canty's little breeches into which she was busily inserting a patch, "an' like them, i reckon, i was mostly lyin' when i did it. thar's a good deal said at the weddin' about 'love' and 'honour' and 'obey', but for all the slick talk of the parson, experience has taught me that sich things are feelin's an' not whalebones. now if thar's a woman on this earth that could manage to love, honour and obey bill twine, i'd jest like for her to step right up an' show her face, for she's a bigger fool than i'd have thought even a female could boast of bein'. as for me, suh, a man's a man same as a horse is a horse, an' if i'm goin' to set about honourin' any animal on o'count of its size i reckon i'd as soon turn roun' an' honour a whale." "but you mustn't judge us all by our friend bill," remarked ordway, picking up the youngest child with a laugh, "remember his weakness, and be charitable to the rest of us." mrs. twine spread the pair of little breeches upon her knee and slapped them into shape as energetically as if they had contained the person of their infant wearer. "as for that, suh," she rejoined, "so far as i can see one man differs from another only in the set of his breeches--for the best an' the worst of 'em are made of the same stuff, an' underneath thar skin they're all pure natur. i've had three of 'em for better or for worse, an' i reckon that's as many specimens as you generally jedge things by in a museum. a weak woman would have kept a widow after my marriage with bob cotton, the brother of william, suh--but i ain't weak, that's one thing can be said for me--so when i saw my opportunity in the person of mike frazier, i up an' said: 'wall, thar's this much to be said for marriage--whether you do or whether you don't you'll be sure to regret it, an' the regret for things you have done ain't quite so forlorn an' impty headed a feelin' as the regret for things you haven't.' then i married him, an' when he died an' bill came along i married him, too. sech is my determination when i've once made up my mind, that if bill died i'd most likely begin to look out for another. but if i do, suh, i tell you now that i'd try to start the next with a little pure despisin'--for thar's got to come a change in marriage one way or another, that's natur, an' i reckon it's as well to have it change for the better instead of the worst." a knock at the door interrupted her, and when she had answered it, she looked back over her shoulder to tell ordway that mr. banks had stopped by to walk downtown with him. with a whispered promise to return with a pocket-full of lemon drops, ordway slipped the child from his knee, and hurriedly picking up his hat, went out to join banks upon the front steps. since the day upon which the two men had met at a tobacco auction banks had attached himself to ordway with a devotion not unlike that of a faithful dog. at his first meeting he had confided to the older man the story of his youthful struggles, and the following day he had unburdened himself with rapture of his passion for milly. "i've just had breakfast with the trends," he said, "so i thought i might as well join you on your way down. mighty little doing in tobacco now, isn't there?" "well, i'm pretty busy with the accounts," responded ordway. "by the way, banks, i've had a message from bullfinch's hollow. kit berry wants me to come over." "i like his brass. why can't he come to you?" "he's sick it seems, so i thought i'd go down there some time in the afternoon." they had reached trend's gate as he spoke, to find milly herself standing there in her highest colour and her brightest ribbon. as banks came up with her, he introduced ordway, who would have passed on had not milly held out her hand. "father was just saying how much he should like to meet you, mr. smith," she remarked, hoping while she uttered the words that she would remember to instruct jasper trend to live up to them when the opportunity afforded. "perhaps you will come in to supper with us to-night? mr. banks will be here." "thank you," said ordway with the boyish smile which had softened the heart of mrs. twine, "but i was just telling banks i had to go over to bullfinch's hollow late in the afternoon." "somebody's sick there, you know," explained banks in reply to milly's look of bewilderment. "he's the greatest fellow alive for missionarying to sick people." "oh, you see it's easier to hit a man when he's down," commented ordway, drily. he was looking earnestly at milly trend, who grew prettier and pinker beneath his gaze, yet at the moment he was only wondering if alice's bright blue eyes could be as lovely as the softer ones of the girl before him. as they went down the hill a moment afterward banks asked his companion, a little reproachfully, why he had refused the invitation to supper. "after all i've told you about milly," he concluded, "i hoped you'd want to meet her when you got the chance." ordway glanced down at his clothes. "my dear banks, i'm a working man, and to tell the truth i couldn't manufacture an appearance--that's the best excuse i have." "all the same i wish you'd go. milly wouldn't care." "milly mightn't, but you would have blushed for me. i couldn't have supported a comparison with your turtle-dove." banks reddened hotly, while he put his hand to his cravat with a conscious laugh. "oh, you don't need turtle-doves and things," he answered, "there's something about you--i don't know what it is--that takes the place of them." "the place of diamond turtle-doves and violet stockings?" laughed ordway with good-humoured raillery. "you wouldn't be a bit better looking if you wore them--milly says so." "i'm much obliged to milly and on the whole i'm inclined to think she's right. do you know," he added, "i'm not quite sure that you are improved by them yourself, except for the innocent enjoyment they afford you." "but i'm such a common looking chap," said banks, "i need an air." "my dear fellow," returned ordway, while his look went like sunshine to the other's heart, "if you want to know what you are--well, you're a downright trump!" he stopped before the brick archway of baxter's warehouse, and an instant later, banks, looking after him as he turned away, vowed in the luminous simplicity of his soul that if the chance ever came to him he "would go to hell and back again for the sake of smith." chapter xi bullfinch's hollow at five o'clock ordway followed the uneven board walk to the end of the main street, and then turning into a little footpath which skirted the railroad track, he came presently to the abandoned field known in tappahannock as bullfinch's hollow. beyond a disorderly row of negro hovels, he found a small frame cottage, which he recognised as the house to which he had brought kit berry on the night when he had dragged him bodily from kelly's saloon. in response to his knock the door was opened by the same weeping woman--a small withered person, with snapping black eyes and sparse gray hair brushed fiercely against her scalp, where it clung so closely that it outlined the bones beneath. at sight of ordway a smile curved her sunken mouth; and she led the way through the kitchen to the door of a dimly lighted room at the back, where a boy of eighteen years tossed deliriously on a pallet in one corner. it was poverty in its direst, its most abject, results, ordway saw at once as his eyes travelled around the smoke stained, unplastered walls and rested upon the few sticks of furniture and the scant remains of a meal on the kitchen table. then he looked into mrs. berry's face and saw that she must have lived once amid surroundings far less wretched than these. "kit was taken bad with fever three days ago," she said, "an' the doctor told me this mornin' that the po' boy's in for a long spell of typhoid. he's clean out of his head most of the time, but whenever he comes to himself he begs and prays me to send for you. something's on his mind, but i can't make out what it is." "may i see him now?" asked ordway. "i think he's wanderin', but i'll find out in a minute." she went to the pallet and bending over the young man, whispered a few words in his ear, while her knotted hand stroked back the hair from his forehead. as ordway's eyes rested on her thin shoulders under the ragged, half soiled calico dress she wore, he forgot the son in the presence of the older and more poignant tragedy of the mother's life. yet all that he knew of her history was that she had married a drunkard and had brought a second drunkard into the world. "he wants to speak to you, sir--he's come to," she said, returning to the doorway, and fixing her small black eyes upon ordway's face. "you are the gentleman, ain't you, who got him to sign the pledge?" ordway nodded. "did he keep it?" her sharp eyes filled with tears. "he hasn't touched a drop for going on six weeks, sir, but he hadn't the strength to hold up without it, so the fever came on and wore him down." swallowing a sob with a gulp, she wiped her eyes fiercely on the back of her hand. "he ain't much to look at now," she finished, divided between her present grief and her reminiscent pride, "but, oh, mr. smith, if you could have seen him as a baby! when he was a week old he was far and away the prettiest thing you ever laid your eyes on--not red, sir, like other children, but white as milk, with dimples at his knees and elbows. i've still got some of his little things--a dress he wore and a pair of knitted shoes--and it's them that make me cry, sir. i ain't grievin' for the po' boy in there that's drunk himself to death, but for that baby that used to be." still crying softly, she slunk out into the kitchen, while ordway, crossing to the bed, stood looking down upon the dissipated features of the boy who lay there, with his matted hair tossed over his flushed forehead. "i'm sorry to see you down, kit. can i do anything to help you?" he asked. kit opened his eyes with a start of recognition, and reaching out, gripped ordway's wrist with his burning hand, while he threw off the ragged patchwork quilt upon the bed. "i've something on my mind, and i want to get it off," he answered. "when it's once off i'll be better and get back my wits." "then get it off. i'm waiting." "do you remember the night in the bar-room?" demanded the boy in a whisper, "the time you came in through the window and took me home?" "go on," said ordway. "well, i'd walked up the street behind you that afternoon when you left baxter's, and i got drunk that night on a dollar i stole from you." "but i didn't speak to you. i didn't even see you." "of course you didn't. if you had i couldn't have stolen it, but baxter had just paid you and when you put your hand into your pocket to get out something, a dollar bill dropped on the walk." "go on." "i picked it up and got drunk on it, there's nothing else. it was a pretty hard drunk, but before i got through you came in and dragged me home. twenty cents were left in my pockets. mother found the money and bought a fish for breakfast. "well, i did that much good at least," observed ordway with a smile, "have you finished, kit?" "it's been on my mind," repeated kit deliriously, "and i wanted to get it off." "it's off now, my boy," said ordway, picking up the ragged quilt from the floor and laying it across the other's feet, "and on the whole i'm glad you told me. you've done the straight thing, kit, and i am proud of you." "proud of me?" repeated kit, and fell to crying like a baby. in a minute he grew delirious again, and ordway, after bathing the boy's face and hands from a basin of water on a chair at the bedside, went into the kitchen in search of mrs. berry, whom he found weeping over a pair of baby's knitted shoes. the pathos of her grief bordered so closely upon the ridiculous that while he watched her he forced back the laugh upon his lips. "kit is worse again," he said. "do you give him any medicine?" mrs. berry struggled with difficulty to her feet, while her sobs changed into a low whimpering sound. "did you sit up with him last night?" asked ordway, following her to the door. "i've been up for three nights, sir. he has to have his face and hands bathed every hour." "what about medicine and food?" "the doctor gives him his medicine free, every drop of it, an' they let me have a can of milk every day from cedar hill. i used to live there as a girl, you know, my father was overseer in old mr. brooke's time--before he married miss emily's mother----" ordway cut short her reminiscences. "well, you must sleep to-night," he said authoritatively, "i'll come back in an hour and sit up with kit. where is your room?" she pointed to a rickety flight of stairs which led to the attic above. "kit slept up there until he was taken ill," she answered. "he's been a hard son to me, sir, as his father was a hard husband because of drink, but to save the life of me i can't forgit how good he used to be when he warn't more'n a week old. never fretted or got into tempers like other babies----" again ordway broke in drily upon her wandering recollections. "now i'll go for an hour," he said abruptly, "and by the way, have you had supper or shall i bring you some groceries when i come?" "there was a little milk left in the pitcher and i had a piece of cornbread, but--oh, mr. smith," her small black eyes snapped fiercely into his, "there are times when my mouth waters for a cup of coffee jest as po' kit's does for whiskey." "then put the kettle on," returned ordway, smiling, as he left the room. it was past sunset when he returned, and he found kit sleeping quietly under the effect of the medicine the doctor had just given him. mrs. berry had recovered sufficient spirit, not only to put the kettle on the stove, but to draw the kitchen table into the square of faint light which entered over the doorstep. the preparations for her supper had been made, he saw, with evident eagerness, and as he placed his packages upon the table, she fell upon them with an excited, childish curiosity. a few moments later the aroma of boiling coffee floated past him where he sat on the doorstep smoking his last pipe before going into the sick-room for the night. turning presently he watched the old woman in amazement while she sat smacking her thin lips and jerking her shrivelled little hands over her fried bacon; and as he looked into her ecstatic face, he realised something of the intensity which enters into the scant enjoyments of the poor. the memory of his night in the brookes' barn returned to him with the aroma of the coffee, and he understood for the first time that it is possible to associate a rapture with meat and drink. then, in spite of his resolve to keep his face turned toward his future, he found himself contrasting the squalid shanty at his back with the luxurious surroundings amid which he had last watched all night by a sick-bed. he could see the rich amber-coloured curtains, the bowls of violets on the inlaid table between the open windows, the exquisite embroidered coverlet upon the bed, and the long pale braid of lydia's hair lying across the lace ruffles upon her nightgown. before his eyes was the sunken field filled with negro hovels and refuse heaps in which lean dogs prowled snarling in search of bones; but his inward vision dwelt, in a luminous mist, on the bright room, scented with violets, where lydia had slept with her baby cradled within her arm. he could see her arm still under the falling lace, round and lovely, with delicate blue veins showing beneath the inside curve. in the midst of his radiant memory the acrid voice of mrs. berry broke with a shock, and turning quickly he found that his dream took instant flight before the aggressive actuality which she presented. "i declare i believe i'd clean forgot how good things tasted," she remarked in the cheerful tones of one who is full again after having been empty. picking up a chip from the ground, ordway began scraping carelessly at the red clay on his boots. "it smells rather nice anyway," he rejoined good-humouredly, and rising from the doorstep, he crossed the kitchen and sat down in the sagging split-bottomed chair beside the pallet. at sunrise he left kit, sleeping peacefully after a delirious night, and going out of doors for a breath of fresh air, stood looking wearily on the dismal prospect of bullfinch's hollow. the disorderly road, the dried herbage of the field, the negro hovels, with pig pens for backyards, and the refuse heaps piled with tin cans, old rags and vegetable rinds, appeared to him now to possess a sordid horror which had escaped him under the merciful obscurity of the twilight. even the sun, he thought, looked lean and shrunken, as it rose over the slovenly landscape. with the first long breath he drew there was only dejection in his mental outlook; then he remembered the enraptured face of mrs. berry as she poured out her coffee, and he told himself that there were pleasures hardy enough to thrive and expand even in the atmosphere of bullfinch's hollow. as there was no wood in the kitchen, he shouldered an old axe which he found leaning in one corner, and going to a wood-pile beyond the doorstep, split up the single rotting log lying upon a heap of mould. returning with his armful of wood, he knelt on the hearth and attempted to kindle a blaze before the old woman should make her appearance from the attic. the sticks had just caught fire, when a shadow falling over him from the open door caused him to start suddenly to his feet. "i beg your pardon," said a voice, "but i've brought some milk for mrs. berry." at the words his face reddened as if from shame, and drawing himself to his full height, he stood, embarrassed and silent, in the centre of the room, while emily brooke crossed the floor and placed the can of milk she had brought upon the table. "i didn't mean to interrupt you," she added cheerfully, "but there was no one else to come, so i had to ride over before breakfast. is kit better?" "yes," said ordway, and to his annoyance he felt himself flush painfully at the sound of his own voice. "you spent last night with him?" she inquired in her energetic tones. "yes." as he stood there in his cheap clothes, with his dishevelled hair and his unwashed hands, she was struck by some distinction of personality, before which these surface roughnesses appeared as mere incidental things. was it in his spare, weather-beaten face? or was it in the peculiar contrast between his gray hair and his young blue eyes? then her gaze fell on his badly made working clothes, worn threadbare in places, on his clean striped shirt, frayed slightly at the collar and cuffs, on his broken fingernails, and on the red clay still adhering to his country boots. "i wonder why you do these things?" she asked so softly that the words hardly reached him. "i wonder why?" though she had expected no response to her question, to her surprise he answered almost impulsively as he stooped to pick up a bit of charred wood from the floor. "well, one must fill one's life, you know," he said. "i tried the other thing once but it didn't count--it was hardly better than this, when all is said." "what 'other thing' do you mean?" "when i spoke i was thinking of what people have got to call 'pleasure,'" he responded, "getting what one wants in life, or trying to get it and failing in the end." "and did you fail?" she asked, with a simplicity which saved the blunt directness of the question. he laughed. "do you think if i had succeeded, i'd be splitting wood in bullfinch's hollow?" "and you care nothing for kit berry?" "oh, i like him--he's an under dog." "then you are for the under dog, right or wrong, as i am?" she responded with a radiant look. "well, i don't know about that," he answered, "but i have at least a fellow feeling for him. i'm an under dog myself, you see." "but you won't stay one long?" "that's the danger. when i come out on top i'll doubtless stop splitting wood and do something worse." "i don't believe it," she rejoined decisively. "you have never had a chance at the real thing before." "you're right there," he admitted, "i had never seen the real thing in my life until i came to tappahannock." "do you mind telling me," she asked, after an instant's hesitation, "why you came to tappahannock? i can't understand why anyone should ever come here." "i don't know about the others, but i came because my road led here. i followed my road." "not knowing where it would end?" he laughed again. "not _caring_ where it would end." her charming boyish smile rippled across her lips. "it isn't necessary that i should understand to be glad that you kept straight on," she said. "but the end isn't yet," he replied, with a gaiety beneath which she saw the seriousness in his face. "it may lead me off again." "to a better place i hope." "well, i suppose that would be easy to find," he admitted, as he glanced beyond the doorway, "but i like tappahannock. it has taken me in, you know, and there's human nature even in bullfinch's hollow." "oh, i suppose it's hideous," she remarked, following his look in the direction of the town, "but i can't judge. i've seen so little else, you know--and yet my city beautiful is laid out in my mind." "then you carry it with you, and that is best." as she was about to answer the door creaked above them and mrs. berry came down the short flight of steps, hastily fastening her calico dress as she descended. "well, i declare, who'd have thought to see you at this hour, miss emily," she exclaimed effusively. "i thought you might need the milk early," replied the girl, "and as micah had an attack of rheumatism i brought it over on horseback." while the old woman emptied the contents of the can into a cracked china pitcher, emily held out her hand to ordway with an impulsive gesture. "we shall have a flourishing kitchen garden," she said, "thanks to you." then taking the empty can from mrs. berry, she crossed the threshold, and remounted from the doorstep. chapter xii a string of coral as emily rode slowly up from bullfinch's hollow, it seemed to her that the abandoned fields had borrowed an aspect which was almost one of sentiment. in the golden light of the sunrise even the negro hovels, the refuse heaps and the dead thistles by the roadside, were transfigured until they appeared to lose their ordinary daytime ugliness; and the same golden light was shining inwardly on the swift impressions which crowded her thoughts. this strange inner illumination surrounded, she discovered now, each common fact which presented itself to her mind, and though the outward form of life was not changed, her mental vision had become suddenly enraptured. she did not stop to ask herself why the familiar events of every day appear so full of vivid interests--why the external objects at which she looked swam before her gaze in an atmosphere that was like a rainbow mist? it was sufficient to be alive to the finger tips, and to realise that everything in the great universe was alive around one--the air, the sky, the thistles along the roadside and the dust blowing before the wind, all moved, she felt, in harmony with the elemental pulse of life. on that morning she entered for the first time into the secret of immortality. and yet--was it only the early morning hour? she asked herself, as she rode back between the stretches of dried broomsedge. or was it, she questioned a moment later, the natural gratification she had felt in a charity so generous, so unassuming as that of the man she had seen at mrs. berry's? "it's a pity he isn't a gentleman and that his clothes are so rough," she thought, and blushed the next instant with shame because she was "only a wretched snob." "whatever his class he _is_ a gentleman," she began again, "and he would be quite--even very--good-looking if his face were not so drawn and thin. what strange eyes he has--they are as blue as blair's and as young. no, he isn't exactly good-looking--not in beverly's way, at least--but i should know his face again if i didn't see it for twenty years. it's odd that there are people one hardly knows whom one never forgets." her bare hands were on major's neck, and as she looked at them a displeased frown gathered her brows. she wondered why she had never noticed before that they were ugly and unwomanly, and it occurred to her that aunt mehitable had once told her that "ole miss" washed her hands in buttermilk to keep them soft and white. "they're almost as rough as mr. smith's," she thought, "perhaps he noticed them." the idea worried her for a minute, for she hated, she told herself, that people should not think her "nice"--but the golden light was still flooding her thoughts and these trivial disturbances scattered almost before they had managed to take shape. nothing worried her long to-day, and as she dismounted at the steps, and ran hurriedly into the dining-room, she remembered beverly and amelia with an affection which she had not felt for years. it was as if the mere external friction of personalities had dissolved before the fundamental relation of soul to soul; even poor half-demented aunt mehitable wore in her eyes, at the minute, an immortal aspect. a little later when she rode in to the public school at tappahannock, she discovered that the golden light irradiated even the questions in geography and arithmetic upon the blackboard; and coming out again, she found that it lay like sunshine on the newly turned vegetable rows in the garden. that afternoon for the first time she planted in a discarded pair of buck-skin gloves, and as soon as her work was over, she went upstairs to her bedroom, and regarded herself wistfully by the light from a branched candlestick which she held against the old greenish mirror. her forehead was too high, she admitted regretfully, her mouth was too wide, her skin certainly was too brown. the blue cotton dress she wore appeared to her suddenly common and old-fashioned, and she began looking eagerly through her limited wardrobe in the hopeless quest for a gown that was softened by so much as a fall of lace about the throat. then remembering the few precious trinkets saved from the bartered heirlooms of her dead mother, she got out the old black leather jewel case and went patiently over the family possessions. among the mourning brooches and hair bracelets that the box contained there was a necklace of rare pink coral, which she had meant to give bella upon her birthday--but as her gaze was arrested now by the cheerful colour, she sat for a moment wondering if she might not honestly keep the beads for her own. still undecided she went to the bureau again and fastened the string of coral around her firm brown throat. "i may wear it for a week or two at least," she thought. "why not?" it seemed to her foolish, almost unfeminine that she had never cared or thought about her clothes until to-day. "i've gone just like a boy--i ought to be ashamed to show my hands," she said; and at the same instant she was conscious of the vivid interest, of the excitement even, which attached to this new discovery of the importance of one's appearance. before going downstairs she brushed the tangles out of her thick brown hair, and spent a half hour arranging it in a becoming fashion upon her neck. the next day micah was well enough to carry the milk to mrs. berry's, but three mornings afterward, when she came from the dairy with the can, the old negro was not waiting for her on the porch, and she found, upon going to his cabin, that the attack of rheumatism had returned with violence. there was nothing for her to do but carry the milk herself, so after leading major from his stall, she mounted and rode, almost with a feeling of shyness, in the direction of bullfinch's hollow. the door was closed this morning, and in answer to her knock, mrs. berry appeared, rubbing her eyes, beyond the threshold. "i declare, miss emily, you don't look like yourself at all," she exclaimed at the girl's entrance, "it must be them coral beads you've got on, i reckon. they always was becomin' things--i had a string once myself that i used to wear when my po' dead husband was courtin' me. lord! lord!" she added, bursting into sobs, "who'd have thought when i wore those beads that i'd ever have come to this? my po' ma gave 'em to me herself--they were her weddin' present from her first husband, and when she made up her mind to marry again, she kind of thought it warn't modest to go aroun' wearin' what she'd got from her first marriage. she was always powerful sensitive to decency, was po' ma. i've seen her scent vulgarity in the most harmless soundin' speech you ever heard--such as when my husband asked her one day if she was afflicted with the budges in her knee, and she told me afterward that he had made a sneakin' allusion to her leg. ten years from that time, when all my trouble came upon me, she held that over me as a kind of warnin'. 'if you'd listened to me, sarindy,' she used to say, 'you'd never have got into this scrape of marryin' a man who talked free befo' women. for a man who is indecent in his language can't be decent in his life,' she said." as she talked she was pouring the milk into the cracked pitcher, and emily breaking in at the first pause, sought to hasten the washing of the can, by bringing the old woman's rambling attention back to kit. "has he had a quiet night?" she asked. "well, yes, miss, in a way, but then he always was what you might call a quiet sleeper from the very hour that he was born. i remember old aunt jemima, his monthly nurse, tellin' me that she had never in all her experience brought a more reliable sleeper into the world. he never used to stir, except to whimper now and then for his sugar rag when it slipped out of his mouth." hurriedly seizing the half-washed can, emily caught up her skirt and moved toward the door. "did you sit up with him last night?" she asked, turning upon the step. "that was mr. smith's night, miss--he's taken such a fancy to kit that he comes every other night to watch by him--but he gets up and leaves now a little before daybreak. i heard him choppin' wood before the sun was up." "he has been very kind about it, hasn't he?" "lord, miss, he's been a son and a brother as far as work goes, but i declare i can't help wishin' he wasn't quite so shut mouthed. every blessed sound he utters i have to drag out of him like a fox out of a burrow. he's a little cranky, too, i reckon, for he is so absent-minded that sometimes when you call his name he never even turns aroun'. but the lord will overlook his unsociable ways, i s'pose, for he reads his bible half the night when he sets up, jest as hard as if he was paid to do it. that's as good a recommendation, i reckon, as i need to have." "i should think his charity would be a better one," rejoined emily, with severity. "well, that's as it may be, miss," returned mrs. berry, "i'm not ungrateful, i hope, and i'm much obliged for what he gives me--particularly for the coffee, which ain't as thin as it might be seein' it's a present. but when all's said i ain't so apt to jedge by things like that because charity is jest a kind of saint vitus dance with some folks--it's all in the muscles. thank you, miss, yes, kit is doin' very well." mounting from the step, emily turned back into the tappahannock road, aware as she passed through the deserted fields that her exaltation of the morning had given way before a despondency which seemed to change the face of nature. the day was oppressive, the road ugly, mrs. berry more tiresome than usual--each of these things suggested itself as a possible reason for the dissatisfaction which she could not explain. not once during her troubled mood did the name or the face of ordway appear as the visible cause of her disturbance. so far, indeed, was his individual aspect from her reflections, that some hours later, when she rode back to school, it was with a shock of surprise that she saw him turn the corner by the new brick church, and come rapidly toward her from the brow of the long hill. that he had not at first seen her was evident, for he walked in an abstracted reverie with his eyes on the ground, and when he looked up at last, she had drawn almost within speaking distance. at sight of his face her heart beat so quickly that she dropped the reins on major's neck, and raised her free hand to her bosom, while she felt the blood mount joyously to her cheeks; but, to her amazement, in the first instant of recognition, he turned abruptly away and entered the shop of a harness maker which happened to be immediately on his right. the action was so sudden that even as she quickened her horse's pace, there flashed into her mind the humiliating conviction that he had sought purposely to avoid her. the throbs of her heart grew faster and then seemed to die utterly away, yet even as the warm blood turned cold in her cheeks, she told herself with spirit that it was all because she "could not bear to be disliked." "why should he dislike me?" she questioned presently; "it is very foolish of him, and what have i done?" she searched her memory for some past rudeness of which she had been guilty, but there was nothing she could recall which would justify, however slightly, his open avoidance of a chance meeting. "perhaps he doesn't like the colour of my hair. i've heard men were like that," she thought, "or the freckles on my face? or the roughness of my hands?" but the instant afterward she saw how ridiculous were her surmises, and she felt angry with herself for having permitted them to appear in her mind. she remembered his blue eyes with the moonlight upon them, and she wondered why he had seemed to her more masculine than any man that she had ever known. with the memory of his eyes and his smile she smelt again the odour of the warm earth that had clung about him, and she was conscious that this and everything about him was strange and new as if she had never looked into a pair of blue eyes or smelt the odour of the soil before. after this meeting she did not see ordway again for several weeks, and then it was only to pass him in the road one sunday afternoon when he had finished his sermon in the old field. as he drew back among the thistles, he spoke to her gravely, with a deference, she noticed, which had the effect of placing him apart from her as a member of the working class. since kit berry's recovery she had not gone again to bullfinch's hollow; and she could not fail to observe that even when an opportunity appeared, ordway made no further effort to bridge the mere casual acquaintance which divided rather than united them. if it were possible to avoid conversation with her he did so by retiring into the background; if the event forced him into notice, he addressed her with a reserve which seemed at each meeting to widen the distance between them. though she hardly confessed it to herself, her heart was wounded for a month or two by his frank indifference to her presence. then one bright afternoon in may, when she had observed him turn out of his path as she rode up the hill, she saved the situation in her mind by the final triumph of her buoyant humour. "everybody is privileged to be a little fool," she said with a laugh, "but when there's the danger of becoming a great big one, it's time to stop short and turn round. now, emily, my dear, you're to stop short from this minute. i hope you understand me." that the emily she addressed understood her very clearly was proved a little later in the afternoon, when going upstairs to her bedroom, she unfastened the coral beads and laid them away again among the mourning brooches and the hair bracelets in the leather case. book second the day of reckoning chapter i in which a stranger appears on a bright june morning, when ordway had been more than two years at tappahannock, he came out upon mrs. twine's little porch as soon as breakfast was over, and looked down the board walk for harry banks, who had fallen into the habit of accompanying him to the warehouse. from where he stood, under the hanging blossoms of the locust trees, he could see the painted tin roofs and the huddled chimneys of the town, flanked by the brazen sweep of the cornfields along the country roads. as his eyes rested on the familiar scene, they softened unconsciously with an affection which was almost paternal--for in the last two years tappahannock had become a different place from the tappahannock he had entered as a tramp on that windy afternoon in march. the town as it stood to-day was the town which he had helped to make, and behind each roll of progress there had been the informing purpose of his mind, as well as the strength of his shoulder at the wheel. behind the law which had closed the disreputable barrooms; behind the sentiment for decency which had purified the filthy hollows; behind the spirit of charity which had organised and opened, not only a reading room for the factory workers, but an industrial home for the poorer classes--behind each of these separate movements there had been a single energy to plan and act. in two years he had watched the little town cover the stretch of ten years' improvement; in two years he had aroused and vitalised the community into which he had come a stranger. tappahannock was the child of his brain--the life that was in her to-day he had given her out of himself, and the love he felt for her was the love that one bestows upon one's own. standing there his eyes followed the street to the ugly brick church at the corner, and then as his mental vision travelled down the long, hot hill which led to the railroad, he could tell himself, with a kind of exultation, that there was hardly a dwelling along the way which had not some great or little reason to bless his name. even kelly, whose saloon he had closed, had been put upon his feet again and started, with a fair chance, in the tobacco market. yes, a new life had been given him, and he had made good his promise to himself. the clothes he wore to-day were as rough as those in which he had chopped wood in bullfinch's hollow; the room he lived in was the same small, bare lodging of mrs. twine's; for though his position at baxter's now assured him a comfortable income, he had kept to his cramped manner of life in order that he might contribute the more generously to the lives of others. out of his little he had given abundantly, and he had gained in return the happiness which he had ceased to make the object of his search. in looking back over his whole life, he could honestly tell himself that his happiest years since childhood were the ones that he had spent in tappahannock. the gate closed with a slam, and banks came up the short brick walk inside, mopping his heated face with a pink bordered handkerchief. "i'm a minute late," he said, "but it doesn't matter, does it? the trends asked me to breakfast." "it doesn't matter in the least if you spent that minute with milly," replied ordway, with a laugh, as he knocked the ashes out of his pipe and descended the steps. "the hot weather has come early, hasn't it?" "oh, we're going in for a scorcher," responded banks, indifferently. there was a heavy gloom in his manner which was hardly to be accounted for by the temperature in which he moved, and as they closed the gate behind them and passed under the shade of the locust trees on the board walk, he turned to ordway in an outburst which was little short of desperation. "i don't know how it is--or whether it's just a woman's way," he said, "but i never can be sure of milly for ten minutes at a time. a month ago i was positive that she meant to marry me in the autumn, but now i'm in a kind of blue funk about her doing it at all. she's never been the same since she went north in april." "my dear chap, these things will vary, i suppose--though, mind you, i make no claim to exact knowledge of the sex." "it isn't the sex," said banks, "it's milly." "well, i certainly can't claim any particular knowledge of milly. it would be rather presumptuous if i did, considering i've only seen her about a dozen times--mostly at a distance." "i wish you knew her better, perhaps you could help me," returned banks in a voice of melancholy. "to save the life of me i don't see how it is--i've done my best--i swear i've done my best--yet nothing somehow seems to suit her. she wants to make me over from the skin and even that doesn't satisfy her. when my hair is short she wants it long, and when it's long she says she wants it short. she can't stand me in coloured cravats and when i put on a black tie she calls me an undertaker. i had to leave off my turtle-dove scarf-pin and this morning," he rolled his innocent blue eyes, like pale marbles, in the direction of ordway, "she actually got into a temper about my stockings." "it seems to be a case for sympathy," commented ordway seriously, "but hardly, i should say, for marriage. imagine, my dear banks, what a hell you'd make out of your domesticity. suppose you give her up and bear it like a man?" "give her up? to what?" "well, to her own amiability, we'll say." "i can't," said banks, waving his pink bordered handkerchief before his face in an effort either to disperse the swarming blue flies or to conceal the working of his emotion. "i'd die--i'd kill myself--that's the awful part of it. the more she bangs me over the head, the more i feel that i can't live without her. is that natural, do you s'pose?" he inquired uneasily, "or have i gone clean crazy?" checking his smile severely, ordway turned and slipped his left arm affectionately through his companion's. "i've heard of similar cases," he remarked, "though i confess, they sounded a little strained." "do you think i'd better see a doctor? i will if you say so." "by no means. go off on a trip." "and leave milly here? i'd jump out of the train--and, i reckon, she'd bang my head off for doing it." "but if it's as bad as that, you couldn't be much more miserable without her." "i know it," replied banks obstinately, "but it would be a different sort of miserableness, and that happens to be the sort that i can't stand." "then i give it up," said ordway, cheerfully, "there's no hope but marriage." with his words they turned under the archway of baxter's warehouse, and banks's passionate confidences were extinguished in the odour of tobacco. a group of men stood talking loudly in the centre of the building, and as ordway approached, baxter broke away, with his great rolling laugh, and came to join him at the door of his private office. "catesby and frazier have got into a squabble about that lot of tobacco they brought in last february," he said, "and they have both agreed to accept your decision in the matter." ordway nodded, without replying, as he followed the other through the doorway. such judicial appeals to him were not uncommon, and his power of pacification, as his employer had once remarked, was one of his principal qualifications for the tobacco market. "shall i hear them now? or would it be as well to give them time to cool off?" he asked presently, while baxter settled his great person in a desk chair that seemed a size too small to contain it. "if they can cool off on a day like this they're lucky dogs," returned baxter, with a groan, "however, i reckon you might as well get it over and let 'em go home and stew in peace. by the way, smith, i forgot to tell you that major leary--he's the president of the southside bank, you know, was asking me yesterday if i could tell him anything about you before you came to work for me." "of the southside bank," repeated ordway, while his hand closed tightly over a paper weight, representing a gambolling kitten, which lay on baxter's desk. with the words he was conscious only of the muffled drumming of his pulses, and above the discord in his ears, the cheerful tones of baxter sounded like an echo rather than a real voice. at the instant he was back again in his room in the great banking house of amos, bonner & amos, in the midst of the pale brown walls, the black oak furniture and the shining leather covered volumes behind the glass doors of the bookcases. with peculiar vividness he remembered the eccentric little bird on the bronze clock on the mantel, which had hopped from its swinging perch to strike the hour with its beak; and through the open windows he could hear still the din of traffic in the street below and the ceaseless, irregular tread of footsteps upon the pavement. "oh, i didn't mean to raise your hopes too high," remarked baxter, rising from his chair to slap him affectionately upon the shoulder, "he isn't going to make you president of the bank, but of the citizen's improvement league, whose object is to oust jasper trend, you know, in the autumn. the major told me before he left that you'd done as much for tappahannock in two years as any other man had done in a lifetime. i said i thought he'd hit the nail pretty squarely, which is something he doesn't generally manage to do." "so i'm to fight jasper trend, am i?" asked ordway, with sudden interest. the sound of his throbbing arteries was no longer in his ears, and as he spoke, he felt that his past life with his old identity had departed from him. in the swift renewal of his confidence he had become again "ten commandment smith" of tappahannock. "well, you see, jasper has been a precious bad influence around here," pursued baxter, engrossed in the political scheme he was unfolding. "the only thing on earth he's got to recommend him is his pretty daughter. now, i've a soft enough heart, as everybody knows, when the ladies come about--particularly if they're pretty--but i'm ready to stand up and say that jasper trend can't be allowed to run this town on the platform of pure chivalry. there's such a thing as fairness, suh, even where women are concerned, and i'll back my word with my oath that it ain't fair!" "and i'll back your word with another that it isn't," rejoined ordway. "there's no doubt, i reckon," continued baxter, "that jasper has connived with those disorderly saloons that you've been trying to shut up, and for all his money and the men he employs in the cotton mills there's come a considerable reaction against him in public sentiment. now, i ain't afraid to say, smith," he concluded with an ample flourish of his dirty hand, "that the fact that there's any public sentiment at all in tappahannock is due to you. until you came here there weren't six decent men you could count mixed up in the affairs of this town. jasper had everything his own way, that's why he hates you." "but i wasn't even aware that he did me so much honour." "you mean he hasn't told you his feelings to your face. well, he hasn't gone so far as to confide them to me either--but even if i ain't a woman, i can hear some things that ain't spoke out in words. he's made a dirty town and you're sweepin' it clean--do you think it likely that it makes him love you?" "he's welcome to feel about me anyway he pleases, but do you know, baxter," he added with his whimsical gravity, "i've a pretty strong conviction that i'd make a jolly good street sweeper." "i reckon you're right!" roared baxter, "and when you're done, we'll shoot off some sky-rockets over the job--so there you are, ain't you?" "all right--but there's jasper trend also," retorted ordway. "oh, he can afford to send off his own sky-rockets. we needn't bother about him. he won't be out of a job like kelly, you know. great scott!" he added, chuckling, "i can see your face now when you marched in here the day after you closed kelly's saloon, and told me you had to start a man in tobacco because you'd taken him out of whiskey." his laugh shook through his figure until ordway saw his fat chest heave violently beneath his alpaca coat. custom had made the younger man almost indifferent to the external details which had once annoyed him in his employer, and he hardly noticed now that baxter's coat was turning from black to green and that the old ashes from his pipe had lodged in the crumpled bosom of his shirt. baxter was--well, baxter, and tolerance was a virtue which one acquired sooner or later in tappahannock. "i suppose i might as well get at catesby and frazier now," remarked ordway, watching the other disinter a tattered palm leaf fan from beneath a dusty pile of old almanacs and catalogues. "wait a minute first," said baxter, "there's something i want to say as soon as i get settled. i ain't made for heat, that's certain," he pursued, as he pulled off his coat, and hung it from a nail in the wall, "it sweats all my morals out of me." detaching the collar from his shirt, he placed it above his coat on the nail, and then rolling up his shirt sleeves, sank, with a panting breath, back into his chair. "if i were you i'd get out of this at night anyway, smith," he urged. "why don't you try boarding for the next few months over at cedar hill. it would be a godsend to the family, now that miss emily's school has stopped." "but i don't suppose they'd take me in," replied ordway, staring out into the street, where the dust rose like steam in the air, and the rough-coated country horses toiled patiently up the long hill. across the way he saw the six stale currant buns and the three bottles of pale beer behind the fly-specked window panes of a cheap eating house. in front of them, a negro woman, barefooted, with her ragged calico dress tucked up about her waist, was sousing the steaming board walk with a pailful of dirty water. from his memory of two years ago there floated the mingled odours of wild flowers and freshly turned earth in the garden of cedar hill, and emily appeared in his thoughts only as an appropriate figure against the pleasant natural background of the lilacs and the meadows. in the past year he had seen her hardly more than a dozen times--mere casual glimpses for the most part--and he had almost forgotten his earlier avoidance of her, which had resulted from an instinctive delicacy rather than from any premeditated purpose. his judgment had told him that he had no right to permit a woman to become his friend in ignorance of his past; and at the same time he was aware of a terrible shrinking from intruding his old self, however remotely, into the new life at tappahannock. when the choice came between confessing his sin and sacrificing the chance acquaintance, he had found it easier simply to keep away from her actual presence. yet his interest in her had been so closely associated with his larger feeling for humanity, that he could tell himself with sincerity that it was mere folly which put her forward as an objection to his boarding for the summer at cedar hill. "the truth is," admitted baxter, after a pause, "that mrs. brooke spoke to me about having to take a boarder or two, when i went out there to pay mr. beverly for that tobacco i couldn't sell." "so you bought it in the end," laughed ordway, "as you did last year after sending me out there on a mission?" "yes, i bought it," replied baxter, blushing like a boy under the beads of perspiration upon his face. "i may as well confess it, though i tried to keep it secret. but i ask you as man to man," he demanded warmly, "was there another blessed thing on god's earth for me to do?" "let mr. beverly go about his business--that's what i'd have done." "oh, no, you wouldn't," protested baxter softly, "not when he'd ruin himself for you to-morrow if you were to walk out and ask him." "but he couldn't," insisted ordway with the brutality of the naked fact, "he did that little job on his own account too long ago." "but that ain't the point, smith," replied baxter in an awed and solemn accent. "the point ain't that he couldn't, but that he _would_. as i make it out that's the point which has cost me money on him for the last thirty years." "oh, well, i suppose it's a charity like any other, only the old fool is so pompous about his poverty that it wears me out." "it does at tappahannock, but it won't when you get out to cedar hill, that's the difference between mr. beverly in the air and mr. beverly in the flesh. the one wears you out, the other rests you for all his darnation foolishness. now, you can board out there for twenty-five dollars a month and put a little ready money where it ought to be in mrs. brooke's pocket." "of course i'd like it tremendously," said ordway, after a moment in which the perfume of the lilacs filled his memory. "it would be like stepping into heaven after that stifling little room under the tin roof at mrs. twine's. do you know i slept out in the fields every hot night last summer?" "you see you ain't a native of these parts," remarked baxter with a large resigned movement of his palm leaf fan, "and your skin ain't thick enough to keep out the heat. i'll speak to 'em at cedar hill this very day, and if you like, i reckon, you can move out at the beginning of the week. i hope if you do, smith, that you'll bear with mr. beverly. there's nothing in the universe that he wouldn't do for me if he had the chance. it ain't his fault, you see, that he's never had it." "oh, i promise you i'll bear with him," laughed ordway, as he left the office and went out into the warehouse. the knot of men was still in the centre of the building, and as ordway walked down the long floor in search of catesby and frazier, he saw that a stranger had drifted in during his half hour in baxter's office. with his first casual glance all that he observed of the man was a sleek fair head, slightly bald in the centre, and a pair of abnormally flat shoulders in a light gray coat, which had evidently left a clothing shop only a day or two before. then as frazier--a big, loud voiced planter--turned toward him with the exclamation, "here's smith, himself, now!"--he saw the stranger wheel round abruptly and give vent the next instant to a sharp whistle of surprise. "well, i'll be damned!" he said. for a minute the tobacco dust filled ordway's throat and nostrils, and he felt that he was stifling for a breath of air. the dim length of the warehouse and the familiar shadowy figures of the planters receded before his eyes, and he saw again the bare walls of the prison chapel, with the rows of convicts seated in the pale, greenish light. with his recognition of the man before him, it seemed to him suddenly that the last year in tappahannock was all a lie. the prison walls, the grated windows, and the hard benches of the shoe shop were closer realities than were the open door of the warehouse and the free, hot streets of the little town. "i am very happy to meet you, mr. smith," said the stranger, as he held out his hand with a good-humoured smile. "i beg your pardon," returned ordway quietly, "but i did not catch your name." at the handshake a chill mounted from his finger tips to his shoulder, but drawing slightly away he stood his ground without so much as the perceptible flicker of an eyelash. "my name is brown--horatio brown, very much at your service," answered the other, with a manner like that of a successful, yet obsequious commercial traveller. it was on ordway's tongue to retort: "you lie--it's gus wherry!"--but checking the impulse with a frown, he turned on his heel and asked the two men for whom he was looking to come with him to settle their disagreement in baxter's office. as he moved down the building an instant later, it was with an effort that he kept his gaze fixed straight ahead through the archway, for he was aware that every muscle in his body pricked him to turn back and follow wherry to the end. that the man would be forced, in self-defence, to keep his secret for a time at least, he had caught in the smiling insolence of his glance; but that it was possible to enter into a permanent association or even a treaty with gus wherry, he knew to be a supposition that was utterly beyond the question. the crime for which the man had been sentenced he could not remember; but he had a vague recollection that something morbidly romantic in his history had combined with his handsome face to give him an ephemeral notoriety as the adonis of imaginative shop-girls. even in prison wherry had attained a certain prominence because of his beauty, which at the time when ordway first saw him had been conspicuous in spite of his convict's clothes. in the years since then his athletic figure had grown a trifle too heavy, and his fair hair had worn a little thin on the crown of his head; yet these slight changes of time had left him, ordway admitted reluctantly, still handsome in the brawny, full-blooded style, which had generally made fools of women. his lips were still as red, his features as severely classic, and his manner was not less vulgar, and quite as debonnair as in the days when the newspapers had clamoured for his pictures. even the soft, girlish cleft in his smooth-shaven chin, ordway remembered now, with a return of the instinctive aversion with which it had first inspired him. yet he was obliged to confess, as he walked ahead of catesby and frazier down the dusty floor of the warehouse, that if wherry had been less of an uncompromising rascal, he would probably have made a particularly amiable acquaintance. chapter ii ordway compromises with the past when ordway came out of baxter's office, he found that gus wherry had left the warehouse, but the effect upon him of the man's appearance in tappahannock was not to be overcome by the temporary withdrawal of his visible presence. not only the town, but existence itself seemed altered, and in a way polluted, by the obtrusion of wherry's personality upon the scene. though he was not in the building, ordway felt an angry conviction that he was in the air. it was impossible to breathe freely lest he might by accident draw in some insidious poison which would bring him under the influence of his past life and of gus wherry. as he went along the street at one o'clock to his dinner at mrs. twine's, he was grateful for the intensity of the sun, which rendered him, while he walked in it, almost incapable of thought. there was positive relief in the fact that he must count the uneven lengths of board walk which it was necessary for him to traverse, and the buzzing of the blue flies before his face forced his attention, at the minute, from the inward to the outward disturbance. when he reached the house, mrs. twine met him at the door and led him, with an inquiry as to his susceptibility to sunstroke, into the awful gloom of her tightly shuttered parlour. "i declar' you do look well nigh in yo' last gasp," she remarked cheerfully, bustling into the dining-room for a palm leaf fan. "thar, now, come right in an' set down an' eat yo' dinner. hot or cold, glad or sorry, i never saw the man yit that could stand goin' without his dinner at the regular hour. sech is the habit in some folks that i remember when old mat fawling's second wife died he actually hurried up her funeral an hour earlier so as to git back in time for dinner. 'it ain't that i'm meanin' any disrespect to sary, mrs. twine,' he said to me right whar i was layin' her out, 'but the truth is that i can't even mourn on an empty stomach. the undertaker put it at twelve,' he said, 'but i reckon we might manage to git out to the cemetery by eleven.'" "all the same if you'll give me a slice of bread and a glass of milk, i'll take it standing," remarked ordway. "i'm sorry to leave you, mrs. twine, even for a few months," he added, "but i think i'll try to get board outside the town until the summer is over." "well, i'll hate to lose you, suh, to be sure," responded mrs. twine, dealing out the fried batter with a lavish hand despite his protest, "for i respect you as a fellow mortal, though i despise you as a sex." her hard eyes softened as she looked at him; but his gaze was on the walnut coloured oilcloth, where the flies dispersed lazily before the waving elm branch in the hands of the small negro, and so he did not observe the motherly tenderness which almost beautified her shrewish face. "you've been very kind to me," he said, as he put his glass and plate down, and turned toward the door. "whatever happens i shall always remember you and the children with pleasure." she choked violently, and looking back at the gasping sound, he saw that her eyes had filled suddenly with tears. lifting a corner of her blue gingham apron, she mopped her face in a furious effort to conceal the cause of her unaccustomed emotion. "i declar' i'm all het up;" she remarked in an indignant voice, "but if you should ever need a friend in sickness, mr. smith," she added, after a moment in which she choked and coughed under the shelter of her apron, "you jest send for me an' i'll drop every thing i've got an' go. i'll leave husband an' children without a thought, suh, an' thar's nothin' i won't do for you with pleasure, from makin' a mustard plaster to layin' out yo' corpse. when i'm a friend, i'm a friend, if i do say it, an' you've had a way with me from the very first minute that i clapped eyes upon you. 'he may not have sech calves as you've got,' was what i said to bill, 'but he's got a manner of his own, an' i reckon it's the manner an' not the calves that is the man.' not that i'm meaning any slur on yo' shape, suh," she hastened to explain. "well, i'll come to see you now and then," said ordway, smiling, "and i shan't forget to take the children for a picnic as i promised." but with the words he remembered gus wherry, as he had seen him standing in the centre of baxter's warehouse, and it seemed to him that even his promise to the children was rendered vain and worthless. the next day was sunday, and immediately after dinner he walked over to baxter's house, where he learned that mrs. brooke had expressed her willingness to receive him upon the following afternoon. "we had to talk mr. beverly over," said baxter, chuckling. "at first he didn't like the idea because of some notion he'd got out of his great-grandfather's head about the sacredness of the family circle. however, he's all right now, though if you take my advice, smith, you'll play a game of dominoes with him occasionally just to keep him kind of soft. the chief thing he has against you is your preachin' in the fields, for he told me he could never bring himself to countenance religion out of doors. he seems to think that it ought to be kept shut up tight." "well, i'm glad he doesn't have to listen to me," responded ordway. "by the way, you know i'm speaking in catlett's grove of pines now. it's pleasanter away from the glare of the sun." then as baxter pressed him to come back to supper, he declined the oppressive hospitality and went back to mrs. twine's. that afternoon at five o'clock he went out to the grove of pines on the southern edge of the town, to find his congregation gathered ahead of him on the rude plank benches which had been placed among the trees. the sunshine fell in drops through the tent of boughs overhead, and from the southwest a pleasant breeze had sprung up, blowing the pine needles in eddies about his feet. at sight of the friendly faces gathered so closely around him, he felt his foreboding depart as if it had been blown from him by the pure breeze; and beginning his simple discourse, he found himself absorbed presently in the religious significance of his subject, which chanced to be an interpretation of the parable of the prodigal son. not until he was midway of his last sentence did he discover that gus wherry was standing just beyond the little wildrose thicket on the edge of the grove. in the instant of recognition the words upon his lips sounded strangely hollow and meaningless in his ears, and he felt again that the appearance of the man had given the lie, not only to his identity, but to his life. he knew himself at the instant to have changed from daniel smith to daniel ordway, and the name that he had worn honestly in tappahannock showed to him suddenly as a falsehood and a cheat. even his inward motive was contemptible in his eyes, and he felt himself dragged back in a single minute to the level upon which wherry stood. as he appeared to wherry, so he saw himself now by some distorted power of vision, and even his religion seemed but a convenient mask which he had picked up and used. when he went on a moment later with his closing words, he felt that the mockery of his speech must be evident to the ears of the congregation that knew and loved him. the gathering broke up slowly, but after speaking to several men who stood near him, ordway turned away and went out into the road which led from tappahannock in the direction of cedar hill. only after he had walked rapidly for a mile, did the sound of footsteps, following close behind him, cause him to wheel round abruptly with an impatient exclamation. as he did so, he saw that wherry had stopped short in the road before him. "i wanted to tell you how much obliged i am for your talk, mr. smith," he said, with a smile which appeared to flash at the same instant from his eyes and his teeth. "i declare you came pretty near converting me--by jove, you did. it wouldn't be convenient to listen to you too often." whatever might be said of the effusive manner of his compliments, his good humour was so evident in his voice, in his laugh, and even in his conspicuously flashing teeth, that ordway, who had been prepared for a quarrel, was rendered almost helpless by so peaceable an encounter. turning out of the road, he stepped back among the tall weeds growing in the corner of the old "worm" fence, and rested his tightly clinched hand on the topmost rail. "if you have anything to say to me, you will do me a favour by getting it over as soon as possible," he rejoined shortly. wherry had taken off his hat and the red disc of the setting sun made an appropriate frame for his handsome head, upon which his fair hair grew, ordway noticed, in the peculiar waving circle which is found on the heads of ancient statues. "well, i can't say that i've anything to remark except that i congratulate you on your eloquence," he replied, with a kind of infernal amiability. "if this is your little game, you are doing it with a success which i envy from my boots up." "since this is your business with me, there is no need for us to discuss it further," returned ordway, at white heat. "oh, but i say, don't hurry--what's the use? you're afraid i'm going to squeeze you, now, isn't that it?" "you'll get nothing out of me if you try." "that's as much as i want, i guess. have i asked you for as much as a darned cent? haven't i played the gentleman from the first minute that i spotted you?" ordway nodded. "yes, i suppose you've been as fair as you knew how," he answered, "i'll do you the justice to admit that." "well, i tell you now," said wherry, growing confidential as he approached, "my object isn't blackmail, it's human intercourse. i want a decent word or two, that's all, on my honour." "but i won't talk to you. i've nothing further to say, that's to be understood." "you're a confounded bully, that's what you are," observed wherry, in the playful tones which he might have used to a child or an animal. "now, i don't want a blooming cent out of you, that's flat--all i ask for is a pleasant word or two just as from man to man." "then why did you follow me? and what are you after in tappahannock?" wherry laughed hilariously, while his remarkably fine teeth became the most prominent feature in his face. "the reply to your question, smith," he answered pleasantly, "is that i followed you to say that you're an all-fired, first rate sort of a preacher--there's not harm in that much, is there? if you don't want me to chaff you about it, i'll swear to be as dead serious on the subject as if it were my wife's funeral. what i want is your hand down, i say--no matter what is trumps!" "my hand down for what?" demanded ordway. "just for plain decency, nothing more, i swear. you've started on your road, and i've started on mine, and the square thing is to live and let live, that's as i see it. leave room for honest repentance to go to work, but don't begin to pull back before it's had a chance to begin. ain't we all prodigals, when it comes to that, and the only difference is that some of us don't get a bite at the fatted calf." for a moment ordway stared in silence to where the other stood with his face turned toward the red light of the sunset. "we're all prodigals," repeated wherry, as if impressed by the ethical problem he had uttered unawares, "you and me and the president and every man. we've all fallen from grace, ain't we?--and it's neither here nor there that you and i have got the swine husks while the president has stuffed and eaten the fatted calf." "if you've honestly meant to begin again, i have certainly no wish to interfere," remarked ordway, ignoring the other's excursion into the field of philosophy. as he spoke, however, it occurred to him that wherry's reformation might have had better chance of success if it had been associated with fewer physical advantages. "well, i'm much obliged to you," said wherry, "and i'll say the same by you, here's my hand on it. rise or fall, we'll play fair." "you haven't told me yet why you came to tappahannock," rejoined ordway, shortly. "oh, a little matter of business. are you settled here now?" "at the moment you can answer that question better than i." "you mean when i come, you quit?" ordway nodded. "that's something like it." "well, i shan't drive you out if i can help it--i hate to play the sneak. the truth is if you'd only get to believe it, there's not a more peaceable fellow alive if i don't get backed up into a place where there's no way out. when it comes to that i like the clean, straight road best, and i always have. from first to last, though, it's the women that have been dead against me, and i may say that a woman--one or more of 'em--has been back of every single scrape i ever got into in my life. if i'd had ten thousand a year and a fine looking wife, i'd have been a pillar in the church and the father of a family. my tastes all lean that way," he added sentimentally. "i've always had a weakness for babies, and i've got it to this day." as he could think of nothing to reply to this touching confession, ordway picked up a bit of wood from the ground, and taking out his knife, began whittling carelessly while he waited. "i suppose you think i want to work you for that fat old codger in the warehouse," observed wherry suddenly, passing lightly from the pathetic to the facetious point of view, "but i'll give you my word i haven't thought of it a minute." "i'm glad you haven't," returned ordway, quietly, "for you would be disappointed." "you mean you wouldn't trust me?" "i mean there's no place there. whether i trust you or not is another question--and i don't." "do you think i'd turn sneak?" "i think if you stay in tappahannock that i'll clear out." "well, you're a darn disagreeable chap," said wherry, indignantly, "particularly after all you've had to say about the prodigal. but, all the same," he added, as his natural amiability got the better of his temper, "it isn't likely that i'll pitch my tent here, so you needn't begin to pack for a day or two at least." "do you expect to go shortly?" "how about to-morrow? would that suit you?" "yes," said ordway, gravely, "better than the day afterward." he threw the bit of wood away and looked steadily into the other's face. "if i can help you live honestly, i am ready to do it," he added. "ready? how?" "however i can." "well, you can't--not now," returned wherry, laughing, "because i've worked that little scheme already without your backing. honesty is going to be my policy from yesterday on. did you, by the way," he added abruptly, "ever happen to run up against jasper trend?" "jasper trend?" exclaimed ordway, "why, yes, he owns the cotton mills." "he makes a handsome little pile out of 'em too, i guess?" "i believe he does. are you looking for a job with him?" at this wherry burst again into his hilarious humour. "if i am," he asked jokingly, "will you promise to stand off and not spoil the game?" "i have nothing to do with trend," replied ordway, "but the day you come here is my last in tappahannock." "well, i'm sorry for that," remarked wherry, pleasantly, "for it appears to be a dull enough place even with the addition of your presence." he put on his hat and held out his hand with a friendly gesture. "are you ready to walk back now?" he inquired. "when i am," answered ordway, "i shall walk back alone." even this rebuff wherry accepted with his invincible good temper. "every man to his company, of course," he responded, "but as to my coming to tappahannock, if it is any comfort to you to know it, you needn't begin to pack." chapter iii a change of lodging when ordway awoke the next morning, it seemed to him that wherry had taken his place among the other nightmares, which, combined with the reflected heat from the tin roof, had rendered his sleep broken and distracted. with the sunrise his evil dreams and his recollections of wherry had scattered together, and when, after the early closing at baxter's warehouse, he drove out to cedar hill, with the leather bag containing his few possessions at his feet, he felt that there had been something morbid, almost inhuman, in the loathing aroused in him by the handsome face of his fellow prisoner. in any case, for good or for evil, he determined to banish the man utterly from his thoughts. the vehicle in which he sat was an ancient gig driven by a decrepit negro, and as it drew up before the steps at cedar hill, he was conscious almost of a sensation of shame because he had not approached the ruined mansion on foot. then descending over the dusty wheel, he lifted out his bag, and rapped twice upon the open door with the greenish knocker which he supposed had once been shining brass. through the hall a sleepy breeze blew from the honeysuckle arbour over the back porch, and at his right hand the swinging sword still clanked against the discoloured plaster. so quiet was the house that it seemed as if the movement of life within had been suspended, and when at last the figure of mrs. brooke floated down the great staircase under the pallid light from the window above, she appeared to him as the disembodied spirit of one of the historic belles who had tripped up and down in trailing brocades and satin shoes. instead of coming toward him, she completed her ghostly impression by vanishing suddenly into the gloom beyond the staircase, and a moment afterward his knock was answered by a small, embarrassed darky in purple calico. entering the dining-room by her invitation, he stumbled upon beverly stretched fast asleep, and snoring slightly, upon a horsehair sofa, with the brown and white setter dozing on a mat at his feet. at the approach of footsteps, the dog, without lifting its head, began rapping the floor heavily with its tail, and aroused by the sound, beverly opened one eye and struggled confusedly into an upright position. "i was entirely overcome by the heat," he remarked apologetically, as he rose from the sofa and held out his hand, "but it is a pleasure to see you, mr. smith. i hope you did not find the sun oppressive on your drive out. amelia, my dear," he remarked courteously, as mrs. brooke entered in a freshly starched print gown, "i feel a return of that strange dizziness i spoke of, so if it will not inconvenience you, may i beg for another of your refreshing lemonades?" mrs. brooke, who had just completed the hasty ironing of her dress, which she had put on while it was still warm, met his request with an amiable but exhausted smile. "don't you think six lemonades in one day too many?" she asked anxiously, when she had shaken hands with ordway. "but this strange dizziness, my dear? an iced drink, i find far more effective than a bandage." "very well, i'll make it of course, if it gives you any relief," replied his wife, wondering if she would be able to bake the bread by the time beverly demanded supper. "if you'll come up stairs now, mr. smith," she added, "malviny will show you to the blue room." malviny, who proved upon further acquaintance to be the eldest great-grandchild of aunt mehitable, descended like a hawk upon his waiting property, while mrs. brooke led the procession up the staircase to an apartment upon the second floor. the blue room, as he discovered presently, contained a few rather fine pieces of old mahogany, a grandfather's chair, with a freshly laundered chintz cover, and a rag carpet made after the "log cabin" pattern. of the colour from which it had taken its name, there was visible only a faded sampler worked elaborately in peacock blue worsteds, by one "margaret, aged nine." beyond this the walls were bare of decoration, though an oblong streak upon the plaster suggested to ordway that a family portrait had probably been removed in the hurried preparations for his arrival. after remarking that she hoped he would "make himself quite at home," mrs. brooke was glancing inquiringly about the room with her large, pale, rather prominent eyes, when a flash of purple in the doorway preceded the announcement that "marse beverly done turn right green wid de dizziness, en wus axin' kinder faintlike fur his lemonade." "my poor husband," explained the exhausted wife, "contracted a chronic heart trouble in the war, and he suffers so patiently that at times we are in danger of forgetting it." pressing her aching head, she hurried downstairs to prepare beverly's drink, while ordway, after closing the broken latch of the door, walked slowly up and down the large, cool, barely furnished room. after his cramped chamber at mrs. twine's his eyes rested with contentment upon the high white ceiling overhead, and then descended leisurely to the stately bedstead, with its old french canopy above, and to the broad, red brick hearth freshly filled with odorous boughs of cedar. the cleanly quiet of the place restored to him at once the peace which he had missed in the last few days in tappahannock, and his nerves, which had revolted from mrs. twine's scolding voice and slovenly table, became composed again in the ample space of these high white walls. even "margaret, aged nine," delivered a soothing message to him in the faded blues of her crewel work. when he had unpacked his bag, he drew the chintz-covered chair to the window, and leaning his elbow on the sill, looked out gratefully upon the overgrown lawn filled with sheepmint and clover. though it was already twilight under the cedars, the lawn was still bright with sunshine, and beyond the dwindling clump of cabbage roses in the centre, he saw that the solitary cow had not yet finished her evening meal. as he watched her, his ears caught the sound of light footsteps on the porch below, and a moment afterward, he saw emily pass from the avenue to the edge of the lawn, where she called the cow by name in a caressing voice. lifting her head, the animal started at a slow walk through the tangled weeds, stopping from time to time to bite a particularly tempting head of purple clover. as the setting sun was in emily's eyes, she raised her bared arm while she waited, to shield her forehead, and ordway was struck afresh by the vigorous grace which showed itself in her slightest movement. the blue cotton dress she wore, which had shrunk from repeated washings until it had grown scant in the waist and skirt, revealed the firm rounded curve of her bosom and her slender hips. standing there in the faint sunshine against the blue-black cedars, he felt her charm in some mysterious way to be akin to the beauty of the hour and the scene. the sight of her blue gown was associated in his mind with a peculiar freshness of feeling--an intensified enjoyment of life. when the cow reached her side, the girl turned back toward the barnyard, and the two passed out of sight together beyond the avenue. as he followed them with his gaze, ordway had no longer any thought of gus wherry, or of his possible presence in tappahannock upon the morrow. the evil association was withdrawn now from his consciousness, and in its place he found the tranquil pleasure which he had felt while he watched the sunshine upon the sheepmint and clover--a pleasure not unlike that he had experienced when emily's blue cotton dress was visible against the cedars. the faces of the men who had listened to him yesterday returned to his memory; and as he saw them again seated on the rude benches among the pines, his heart expanded in an emotion which was like the melting of his will into the divine will which contained and enveloped all. a knock at the door startled him back to his surroundings, and when he went to answer it, he found the small frightened servant standing outside, with an old serving tray clutched desperately to her bosom. from her excited stutter he gathered that supper awaited him upon the table, and descending hastily, he found the family already assembled in the dining-room. beverly received him graciously, emily quietly, and the children assured him enthusiastically that they were glad he had come to stay because now they might eat ham every night. when they had been properly suppressed by emily, her brother took up the conversation which he carried on in a polite, rambling strain that produced upon ordway the effect of a monologue delivered in sleep. "i hope the birds won't annoy you at daybreak, mr. smith," he remarked, "the ivy at your windows harbours any number of wrens and sparrows." "oh, i like them," replied ordway, "i've been sleeping under a tin roof in tappahannock which no intelligent bird or human being would approach." "i remember," said mr. beverly pensively, "that there was a tin roof on the hotel at richmond i stayed at during the war when i first met my wife. do you recall how very unpleasant that tin roof was, amelia? or were you too young at the time to notice it? you couldn't have been more than fifteen, i suppose? yes, you must have been sixteen, because i remember when i marched past the door with my regiment, i noticed you standing on the balcony, in a long white dress, and you couldn't have worn long dresses before you were sixteen." mrs. brooke glanced up calmly from the coffee-pot. "the roof was slate," she remarked with the rigid adherence to a single idea, which characterised her devoted temperament. "ah, to be sure, it was slate," admitted beverly, turning his genial face upon ordway, "and i remember now it wasn't the roof that was unpleasant, but the food--the food was very unpleasant indeed, was it not, amelia?" "i don't think we ever got enough of it to test its quality," replied mrs. brooke, "poor mama was so reduced at the end of a month that she had to take up three inches of her bodice." "it's quite clear to me now," observed beverly, delightedly, "it was not that the food was unpleasant, but that it was scarce--very scarce." he had finished his supper; and when he had risen from the table with his last amiable words, he proceeded to install himself, without apparent selection, into the only comfortable chair which the room contained. drawing out his pipe a moment afterward, he waved ordway, with a hospitable gesture, to a stiff wooden seat, and invited him in a persuasive tone, to join him in a smoke. "my tobacco is open to you," he observed, "but i regret to say that i am unable to offer you a cigar. yet a cigar, i maintain, is the only form in which a gentleman should use tobacco." ordway took out the leather case he carried and offered it to him with a smile. "i'm afraid they are not all that they might be," he remarked, as beverly supplied himself with a murmured word of thanks. mrs. brooke brought out her darning, and emily, after disappearing into the pantry, sent back the small servant for the dishes. the girl did not return again before ordway took his candle from the mantel-piece and went upstairs; and he remembered after he had reached his bedroom that she had spoken hardly two words during the entire evening. had she any objection, he asked himself now, to his presence in the household? was it possible, indeed, that mrs. brooke should have taken him in against her sister-in-law's inclination, or even without her knowledge? in the supposition there was not only embarrassment, but a sympathetic resentment; and he resolved that if such proved to be the case, he was in honour bound to return immediately to tappahannock. then he remembered the stifling little room under the tin roof with a feeling of thankfulness for at least this one night's escape. awaking at dawn he lay for a while contentedly listening to the flutter of the sparrows in the ivy, and watching the paling arch of the sky beyond the pointed tops of the cedars. a great peace seemed to encompass him at the moment, and he thought with gratitude of the quiet evening he had spent with beverly. it was dull enough probably, when one came to think of it, yet the simple talk, the measured courtesies, returned to him now as a part of the pleasant homeliness of his surroundings. the soft starlight on the sheepmint and clover, the chirp of the small insects in the trees, the refreshing moisture which had crept toward him with the rising dew, the good-night kisses of the children, delivered under protest and beneath mrs. brooke's eyes--all these trivial recollections were attended in his thoughts by a train of pensive and soothing associations. across the hall he heard the soft opening and closing of a door, and immediately afterward the sound of rapid footsteps growing fainter as they descended the staircase. already the room was full of a pale golden light, and as he could not sleep again because of the broken shutter to the window which gave on the lawn, he rose and dressed himself with an eagerness which recalled the early morning risings of his childhood. a little later when he went downstairs, he found that the front door was still barred, and removing the heavy iron fastenings, he descended the steps into the avenue, where the faint sunbeams had not yet penetrated the thick screen of boughs. remembering the garden, while he stood watching the sunrise from the steps, he turned presently into the little footpath which led by the house, and pushing aside the lilacs, from which the blossoms had all dropped, he leaned on the swinging gate before the beds he had spaded on those enchanted nights. now the rank weeds were almost strangling the plants, and it occurred to him that there was still work ready for his hand in the brooke's garden. he was telling himself that he would begin clearing the smothered rows as soon as his morning at the warehouse was over, when the old hound ran suddenly up to him, and turning quickly he saw emily coming from the springhouse with a print of golden butter in her hand. "so it was you i heard stirring before sunrise!" he exclaimed impulsively, as his eyes rested on her radiant face, over which the early mist had scattered a pearly dew like the fragrant moisture upon a rose. "yes, it was i. at four o'clock i remembered there was no butter for breakfast, so i got up and betook myself to the churn." "and this is the result?" he asked, glancing down at the delicious creamy mould she had just worked into shape and crowned with a printed garland of thistles. "it makes me hungry enough for my muffins upon the minute." "you shall have them shortly," she said, smiling, "but do you prefer pop-overs or plain?" he met the question with serious consideration. "well, if the choice is mine i think i'll have pop-overs," he replied. before his unbroken gravity her quick humour rippled forth. "then i must run to aunt mehitable," she responded merrily, "for i suspect that she has already made them plain." with a laughing nod she turned from him, and following the little path entered the house under the honeysuckle arbour on the back porch. chapter iv shows that a laugh does not heal a heartache when emily entered the dining-room, she found that beverly had departed from his usual custom sufficiently to appear in time for breakfast. "i hardly got a wink of sleep last night, my dear," he remarked, "and i think it was due entirely to the heavy supper you insisted upon giving us." "but, beverly, we must have hot things now," said emily, as she arranged the crocheted centrepiece upon the table. "mr. smith is our boarder, you know, not our guest." "the fact that he is a boarder," commented beverly, with dignity, "entirely relieves me of any feeling of responsibility upon his account. if he were an invited guest in the house, i should feel as you do that hot suppers are a necessity, but when a man pays for the meals he eats, we are no longer under an obligation to consider his preferences." "his presence in the household is a great trial to us all," observed his wife, whose attitude of general acceptance was modified by the fact that she accepted everything for the worst. her sense of tragic values had been long since obliterated by a gray wash of melancholy that covered all. "well, i don't see that he is very zealous about interfering with us," remarked emily, almost indignantly, "he doesn't appear to be of a particularly sociable disposition." "yes, i agree with you that he is unusually depressing," rejoined mrs. brooke. "it's a pity, perhaps, that we couldn't have secured a blond person--they are said to be of a more sanguine temperament, and i remember that the blond boarder at miss jennie colton's, when i called there once, was exceedingly lively and entertaining. but it's too late, of course, to give advice now; i can only hope and pray that his morals, at least, are above reproach." as the entire arrangement with baxter had been made by mrs. brooke herself upon the day that wilson, the grocer, had sent in his bill for the fifth time, emily felt that an impatient rejoinder tripped lightly upon her tongue; but restraining her words with an effort, she observed cheerfully an instant later that she hoped mr. smith would cause no inconvenience to the family. "well, he seems to be a respectable enough person," admitted beverly, in his gracious manner, "but, of course, if he were to become offensively presuming it would be a very simple matter to drop him a hint." "it reminds me of a case i read of in the newspaper a few weeks ago," said mrs. brooke, "where a family in roanoke took a stranger to board with them and shortly afterward were all poisoned by a powder in the soup. no, they weren't all poisoned," she corrected herself thoughtfully, "for i am positive now that the boarder was the only one who died. it was the cook who put the poison into the soup and the boarder who ate all of it. i remember the coroner remarked at the inquest that he had saved the lives of the entire family." "all the same i hope mr. smith won't eat all the soup," observed emily. "it terrifies me at times," murmured amelia, "to think of the awful power that we place so carelessly in the hands of cooks." "in that case, my dear, it might be quite a safeguard always to have a boarder at the table," suggested beverly, with his undaunted optimism. "but surely, amelia," laughed emily, "you can't suppose that after she has lived in the family for seventy years, aunt mehitable would yield at last to a passing temptation to destroy us?" "i imagine the poor boarder suspected nothing while he ate his soup," returned mrs. brooke. "no, i repeat that in cases like that no one is safe, and the only sensible attitude is to be prepared for anything." "well, if i'm to be poisoned, i think i'd prefer to take it without preparation," rejoined emily. "there is mr. smith now in the hall, so we may as well send malviny to bring in breakfast." when ordway entered an instant later with his hearty greeting, even mrs. brooke unbent a trifle from her rigid melancholy and joined affably in the conversation. by a curious emotional paradox she was able to enjoy him only as an affliction; and his presence in the house had served as an excuse for a continuous parade of martyrdom. from the hour of his arrival, she had been perfectly convinced not only that he interfered with her customary peace of mind, but that he prevented her as surely from receiving her supply of hot water upon rising and her ordinary amount of food at dinner. but as the days went by he fell so easily into his place in the family circle that they forgot at last to remark either his presence or his personal peculiarities. after dinner he would play his game of dominoes with beverly in the breezy hall, until the sunlight began to slant across the cedars, when he would go out into the garden and weed the overgrown rows. emily had seen him but seldom alone during the first few weeks of his stay, though she had found a peculiar pleasure in rendering him the small domestic services of which he was quite unconscious. how should he imagine that it was her hand that arranged the flowers upon his bureau, that placed his favourite chair near the window, and that smoothed the old-fashioned dimity coverlet upon his bed. still less would he have suspected that the elaborate rag carpet upon his floor was one which she had contributed to his comfort from her own room. had he known these things he would probably have been melancholy enough to have proved congenial company even to mrs. brooke, though, in reality, there was, perhaps, nothing he could have offered emily which would have exceeded the pleasure she now found in these simple services. ignorant as she was in all worldly matters, in grasping this essential truth, she had stumbled unawares upon the pure philosophy of love--whose satisfaction lies, after all, not in possession, but in surrender. she was still absorbed in the wonder of this discovery, when going out into the garden one afternoon to gather tomatoes for a salad, she found him working among the tall, green corn at the end of the long walk. as he turned toward her in the late sunshine, which slanted across the waving yellow tassels, she noticed that there was the same eager, youthful look in his face that she had seen on the night when she had come down to find him spading by the moonbeams. in response to her smile he came out from among the corn, and went with her down the narrow space which separated two overgrown hills of tomato plants. he wore no coat and his striped cotton shirt was open at the throat and wrists. "it's delicious in the corn now," he said; "i can almost fancy that i hear the light rustle along the leaves." "you love the country so much that you ought to have been a farmer," she returned, "then you might have raised tobacco." "that reminds me that i worked yesterday in your brother's crop--but it's too sticky for me. i like the garden better." "then you ought to have a garden of your own. is all your chopping and your digging merely for the promotion of the general good?" "isn't it better so?" he asked, smiling, "particularly when i share in the results as i shall in this case? who knows but that i shall eat this wonderful tomato to-night at supper?" she took it from his hand and placed it on the lettuce leaves in the bottom of the basket upon her arm. "you make a careful choice, i see," she observed, "it is a particularly fine one." "i suppose your philosophy would insist that after plucking it i should demand the eating of it also?" "i don't know about my philosophy--i haven't any--but my common sense would." "i'm not sure," he returned half seriously, "that i have much opinion of common sense." "but you would have," she commented gravely, "if you had happened to be born with beverly for a brother. i used to think that all men were alike," she added, "but you don't remind me of beverly in the very least." as she spoke she turned her face slightly toward him, and still leaning over the luxuriant tomato row, looked up at him joyously with her sparkling eyes. her breath came quickly and he saw her bosom rise and fall under the scant bodice of her blue cotton gown. almost unconsciously he had drifted into an association with her which constituted for him the principal charm of his summer at cedar hill. "on the other hand i've discovered many points of resemblance," he retorted in his whimsical tone. "well, you're both easy to live in the house with, i admit that." "and we're both perfectly amiable as long as everybody agrees with us and nobody crosses us," he added. "i shouldn't like to cross you," she said, laughing, "but then why should i? isn't it very pleasant as it is now?" "yes, it is very pleasant as it is now," he repeated slowly. turning away from her he stood looking in silence over the tall corn to the amber light that fell beyond the clear outline of a distant hill. the association was, as she had just said, very pleasant in his thoughts, and the temptation he felt now was to drift on with the summer, leaving events to shape themselves as they would in the future. what harm, he demanded, could come of any relation so healthful, so simple as this? "i used to make dolls of ears of corn when i was little," said emily, laughing; "they were the only ones i had except those beverly carved for me out of hickory nuts. the one with yellow tassels i named princess goldylocks until she began to turn brown and then i called her princess fadeaway." at her voice, which sounded as girlish in his imagination as the voice of alice when he had last heard it, he started and looked quickly back from the sunset into her face. "has it ever occurred to you," he asked, "how little--how very little you know of me? by you i mean all of you, especially your brother and mrs. brooke." her glowing face questioned him for a moment. "but what is knowledge," she demanded, "if it isn't just feeling, after all?" "i wonder why under heaven you took me in?" he went on, leaving her words unanswered. had mrs. brooke stood in emily's place, she would probably have replied quite effectively, "because the grocer's bill had come for the fifth time"; but the girl had learned to wear her sincerity in a less conspicuous fashion, so she responded to his question merely by a polite evasion. "we have certainly had no cause to regret it," was what she said. "what i wanted to say to you in the beginning and couldn't, was just this," he resumed, choosing his words with a deliberation which sounded strained and unnatural, "i suppose it can't make any difference to you--it doesn't really concern you, of course--that's what i felt--but," he hesitated an instant and then went on more rapidly, "my daughter's birthday is to-day. she is fifteen years old and it is seven years since i saw her." "seven years?" repeated emily, as she bent over and carefully selected a ripe tomato. "doubtless i shouldn't know her if i were to pass her in the street," he pursued, after a minute. "but it's worse than that and it's harder--for it's as many years since i saw my wife." she had not lifted her head from the basket, and he felt suddenly that her stillness was not the stillness of flesh, but of marble. "perhaps i ought to have told you all this before," he went on again, "perhaps it wasn't fair to let you take me in in ignorance of this and of much else?" raising her head, she stood looking into his face with her kind, brown eyes. "but how could these things possibly affect us?" she asked, smiling slightly. "no," he replied slowly, "they didn't affect you, of course--they don't now. it made no difference to any of you, i thought. how could it make any?" "no, it makes no difference to any of us," she repeated quietly. "then, perhaps, i've been wrong in telling you this to-day?" she shook her head. "not in telling me, but," she drew a long breath, "it might be as well not to speak of it to beverly or amelia--at least for a while." "you mean they would regret their kindness?" "it would make them uncomfortable--they are very old-fashioned in their views. i don't know just how to put it, but it seems to them--oh, a terrible thing for a husband and wife to live apart." "well, i shan't speak of it, of course--but would it not be better for me to return immediately to tappahannock?" for an instant she hesitated. "it would be very dreadful at mrs. twine's." "i know it," he answered, "but i'm ready to go back, this minute if you should prefer it." "but i shouldn't," she rejoined in her energetic manner. "why should i, indeed? it is much wiser for you to stay here until the end of the summer." when she had finished he looked at her a moment without replying. the light had grown very faint and through the thin mist that floated up from the fields her features appeared drawn and pallid. "what i can't make you understand is that even though it is all my fault--every bit my fault from the beginning--yet i have never really wanted to do evil in my heart. though i've done wrong, i've always wanted to do right." if she heard his words they made little impression upon her, for going out into the walk, she started, without speaking, in the direction of the house. then, when she had moved a few steps from him, she stopped and looked back as if she had forgotten something that had been in her thoughts. "i meant to tell you that i hope--i pray it will come right again," she said. "i thank you," he answered, and drew back into the corn so that she might go on alone. a moment later as emily walked rapidly down the garden path, it seemed to her that the distance between the gate and the house covered an immeasurable space. her one hope was that she might go to her room for at least the single hour before supper, and that there, behind a locked door with her head buried in the pillows, she might shed the hot tears which she felt pressing against her eyelids. entering the hall, she had started swiftly up the staircase, with the basket of tomatoes still on her arm, when mrs. brooke intercepted her by descending like a phantom from the darkened bend. "o emily, i've been looking for you for twenty minutes," she cried in despairing tones. "the biscuits refused to rise and aunt mehitable is in a temper. will you run straight out to the kitchen and beat up a few quick muffins for supper." drawing back into the corner of the staircase, emily glanced down upon the tomatoes lying in the bottom of the basket; then without raising her eyes she spoke in a voice which might have uttered appropriately a lament upon the universal tragedy of her sex. "i suppose i may as well make them plain?" she said. chapter v treats of a great passion in a simple soul for several weeks in august ordway did not go into tappahannock, and during his vacation from the warehouse he made himself useful in a number of small ways upon the farm. the lawn was trimmed, the broken fences mended, the garden kept clear of wiregrass, and even mrs. brooke's "rockery" of portulaca, with which she had decorated a mouldering stump, received a sufficient share of his attention to cause the withered plants to grow green again and blossom in profusion. when the long, hot days had drawn to a close, he would go out with a watering-pot and sprinkle the beds of petunias and geraniums which emily had planted in the bare spots beside the steps. "the truth is i was made for this sort of thing, you know," he remarked to her one day. "if it went on forever i should never get bored or tired." something candid and boyish in his tone caused her to look up at him quickly with a wondering glance. since the confession of his marriage her manner to him had changed but little, yet she was aware, with a strange irritation against herself, that she never heard his voice or met his eyes without remembering instantly that he had a wife whom he had not seen for seven years. the mystery of the estrangement was as great to her as it had ever been, for since that afternoon in the garden he had not referred again to the subject; and judging the marriage relation by the social code of beverly and amelia, she had surmised that some tremendous tragedy had been the prelude to a separation of so many years. as he lifted the watering-pot he had turned a little away from her, and while her eyes rested upon his thick dark hair, powdered heavily with gray above the temples, and upon the strong, sunburnt features of his profile, she asked herself in perplexity where that other woman was and if it were possible that she had forsaken him? "i wonder what she is like and if she is pretty or plain?" she thought. "i almost hope she isn't pretty, and yet it's horrid of me and i wonder why i hope so? what can it matter since he hasn't seen her for seven years, and if he ever sees her again, she will probably be no longer young. i suppose he isn't young, and yet i've never thought so before and somehow it doesn't seem to matter. no, i'm sure his wife is beautiful," she reflected a moment later, as a punishment for her uncharitable beginning, "and she has fair hair, i hope, and a lovely white skin and hands that are always soft and delicate. yes, that is how it is and i am very glad," she concluded resolutely. and it seemed to her that she could see distinctly this woman whom she had imagined and brought to life. "i can't help believing that you would tire of it in time," she said presently aloud. "do you tire of it?" he asked in a softened voice, turning his gaze upon her. "i?" she laughed, with a bitterness he had never heard in her tone before, "oh, yes, but i suppose that doesn't count in the long run. did there ever live a woman who hasn't felt at times like railing against the milk pans and denying the eternal necessity of ham and eggs?" though she spoke quite seriously the simplicity of her generalisation brought a humorous light to his eyes; and in his imagination he saw lydia standing upon the white bearskin rug against the oval mirror and the gold-topped bottles upon her dressing-table. "well, if i'd made as shining a success at my job as you have at yours, i think i'd be content," was all he said. she laughed merrily, and he saw that the natural sweetness of her temper was proof against idle imaginings or vain desires. "you think then that it is better to do a small thing well than a big thing badly?" she inquired. "but it isn't a small thing," he protested, "it's a great big thing--it's the very biggest thing of all." a provoking smile quivered on her lips, and he saw the dimple come and go in her cheek. "i am glad at least that you like my ham and eggs," she retorted mockingly. "i do," he answered gravely, "i like your ham and eggs, but i admire your courage, also." she shook her head. "it's the cheapest of the virtues." "not your kind, my dear child--it's the rarest and the costliest of achievements." "oh, i don't know how serious you are," she answered lightly, "but it's a little like putting a man on a desert island and saying, 'make your bed or lie on the rocks.' he's pretty apt to make his bed, isn't he?" "not in the least. he usually puts up a flag of distress and then sits down in the sand and looks out for a ship." her voice lost its merriment. "when my ship shows on the horizon, it will be time enough to hoist my flag." a reply was on his lips, but before he could utter it, she had turned away and was moving rapidly across the lawn to the house. the next morning ordway went into tappahannock, not so much on account of the little business he found awaiting him at the warehouse, as urged by the necessity of supplying beverly with cigars. to furnish beverly three times a day with the kind of cigar he considered it "worth while for a gentleman to smoke"--even though his choice fell, in ordway's opinion, upon a quite inferior brand--had become in the end a courtesy too extravagant for him to contemplate with serenity. yet he knew that almost in spite of himself this tribute to beverly was now an established fact, and that as long as he remained at cedar hill he would continue to supply with eagerness the smoke which beverly would accept with affability. the town was dull enough at mid august, he remembered from the blighting experience of last summer; and now, after a fierce drought which had swept the country, he saw the big, fan-shaped leaves on mrs. twine's evening glory hanging like dusty rags along the tin roof of the porch. banks was away, baxter was away, and the only acquaintance he greeted was bill twine, sitting half drunk, in his shirt sleeves and collarless, on the front steps. there was positive relief when, at the end of an hour, he retraced his steps, with beverly's cigars under his right arm. after this the summer declined slowly into autumn, and ordway began to count the long golden afternoons as they dropped one by one into his memory of cedar hill. an appeal to mrs. brooke, whom he had quite won over by his attentions to beverly and the children, delayed his moving back into tappahannock until the beginning of november, and he told himself with satisfaction that it would be possible to awake on frosty october mornings and look out upon the red and gold of the landscape. late in september banks returned from his vacation, and during his first visit to cedar hill, he showed himself painfully nervous and ill at ease. but coming out for a walk with ordway one afternoon, he suggested at the end of their first mile that they should sit down and have a smoke beneath a young cherry tree upon the roadside. as he lit his pipe he held the match in his hand until it burned his fingers; then throwing it into the grass, he turned upon his companion as eloquently despairing a look as it is in the power of a set of naturally cheerful features to assume. "smith," he asked in a hollow voice, "do you suppose it's really any worse to die by your own hand than by disease?" "by jove!" exclaimed ordway, and the moment afterward, "come, now, out with it, banks. how has she been behaving this time?" banks lowered his voice, while he glanced suspiciously up at the branches of the cherry tree beneath which they sat. "she hates the sight of me," he answered, with a groan. "nonsense," rejoined ordway, cheerfully. "love has before now worn the mask of scorn." "but it hasn't worn the mask of boredom," retorted the despairing banks. for a minute his answer appeared final even to ordway, who stared blankly over the ripened cornfield across the road, without, for the life of him, being able to frame a single encouraging sentence in reply. "if it's the last word i speak," pursued banks, biting desperately at the stem of his pipe, "she cannot abide the sight of me." "but how does she show it?" demanded ordway, relieved that he was not expected to combat the former irrefutable statement. "she tried to keep me away from the springs where she went, and when i would follow her, whether or no, she hardly opened her mouth to me for the first two days. then if i asked her to go to walk she would say it was too hot for walking, and if i asked her to drive she'd answer that she didn't drive with men. as if she and i hadn't been together in a dog-cart over every road within twenty miles of tappahannock!" "but perhaps the custom of the place was different?" "no, sir, it was not custom that kept her," replied banks, in a bitterness that scorned deception, "for she went with others. it was the same thing about dancing, too, for if i asked her to dance, she would always declare that she didn't have the strength to use her fan, and the minute after i went away, i'd see her floating round the ball-room in somebody else's arms. once i did get her to start, but she left off after the first round, because, she said, we could not keep in step. and yet i'd kept in step with her ever since we went on roller skates together." he broke off for an instant, knocked the cold ashes out of his pipe, and plucking a long blade of grass, began chewing it nervously as he talked. "and yet if you could only have seen her when she came down to the ball-room in her white organdie and blue ribbons," he exclaimed presently, in an agony of recollection. "well, i'm rather glad on the whole that i didn't," rejoined ordway. "you'd have fallen in love with her if you had--you couldn't have helped it." "then, thank heaven, i escaped the test. it's a pretty enough pickle as it is now." "i could have stood it all," said banks, "if it hadn't been for the other man. she might have pulled every single strand of my hair out if she'd wanted to, and i'd have grit my teeth and pretended that i liked it. i didn't care how badly she treated me. what hurt me was how well she treated the other man." "did she meet him for the first time last summer?" asked ordway. "oh no, she's known him ever since she went north in the spring--but it's worse now than it's ever been and, upon my word, she doesn't seem to have eyes or ears for anybody else." "so you're positive she means to marry him?" "she swears she doesn't--that it's only fun, you know. but in my heart i believe it is as good as settled between them." "well, if she's made up her mind to it, i don't, for the life of me, see how you're going to stop her," returned ordway, smiling. "but a year ago she'd made up her mind to marry me," groaned banks. "if she's as variable as that, my dear boy, perhaps the wind will blow her heart back to you again." "i don't believe she's got one," rejoined banks, with the merciless dissection of the pure passion; "i sometimes think that she hasn't any more heart than--than--i don't know what." "in that case i'd drag myself together and let her alone. i'd go back to my work and resolve never to give her another thought." "then," replied banks, "you might have all the good sense that there is in the business, but you wouldn't be in love. now i love her for what she is, and i don't want her changed even if it would make her kinder. when she used to be sweet i thought sweetness the most fascinating thing on earth, and now that she bangs me, i've come to think that banging is." "i begin to understand," remarked ordway, laughing, "why you are not what might be called a successful lover." "it isn't because i don't know the way," returned banks gloomily, "it's because i can't practice it even after i've planned it out. don't i lie awake at night making up all sorts of speeches i'm going to say to her in the morning? oh, i can be indifferent enough when i'm dressing before the mirror--i've even put on a purple cravat because she hated it, but i've always taken it off again before i went downstairs to breakfast. then as soon as i lay my eyes upon her, i feel my heart begin to swell as if it would burst out of my waistcoat, and instead of the flippant speeches i've planned, i crawl and whimper just as i did the day before." they were seated under a cherry tree by the side of the road which led to tappahannock, and as banks finished his confessions, a large, dust covered buggy was seen approaching them from the direction of the town. as ordway recognised baxter through the cloud of dust raised by the wheels, he waved his hat with a shout of welcome, and a minute later the buggy reached them and drew up in the patch of briars upon the roadside. "i was just on my way to see you, smith," said baxter, as he let fall the reins and held out his great dirty hand, "but i'm too heavy to get out, and if i once sat down on the ground, i reckon it would take more than the whole of tappahannock to pull me up again." "well, go ahead to cedar hill," suggested ordway, "and we'll follow you at a brisk walk." "no, i won't do that. i can say what i have got to say right here over the wheel, if you'll stand awhile in the dust. major leary was in to see me again this morning, and the notion he's got in his head now is that you're the man to run for mayor of tappahannock." "i!" exclaimed ordway, drawing back slightly as he spoke. "he forgets that i'm out of the question. i refuse, of course." "well, you see, he says you're the only man we've got strong enough to defeat jasper trend--and he's as sure as shot that you'd have something like a clean walk-over. he's already drawn up a big red flag with 'the people's candidate: ten commandment smith,' upon it. i asked him why he wouldn't put just plain 'daniel,' but he said that little biblical smack alone was worth as much as a bushel of votes to you. if you drew the line at 'ten commandment' he's going to substitute 'daniel-in-the-lions'-den smith' or something of that kind." "tell him to stop it," broke in ordway, with a smothered anger in his usually quiet voice, "he's said nothing to me about it, and i decline it absolutely and without consideration!" "you mean you won't run?" inquired baxter, in astonishment. "i mean i won't run--i can't run--put it any way you please." "i thought you'd put your whole heart and soul into defeating trend." "i have, but not that way--where's trenton whom we've been talking of all summer?" "he's out of it--consumption, the doctor says--anyway he's going south." "then there's but one other man," said ordway, decisively, "and that's baxter." "me?" said baxter softly, "you mean me, do you say?" his chuckle shook the buggy until it creaked upon its rusty wheels. "i can't," he added, with a burst of humour, "to tell the truth, i'm afraid." "afraid?" repeated ordway, "you're afraid of jasper trend?" "no," said baxter, "it ain't jasper--it's my wife." he winked slowly as he caught ordway's eyes, and then picking up the reins, made a movement as if to turn back to tappahannock. "so you're dead sure then that you can't be talked over?" he asked. "as sure as you are," returned ordway promptly; then as the buggy started back in the direction from which it had come, he went over to banks, who had risen to his feet and was leaning heavily against the cherry tree, with the long blade of grass still between his teeth. "what do you think of their wanting to make me mayor, banks?" he inquired, with a laugh. banks started from his gloomy reverie. "mayor!" he exclaimed almost with animation. "why, they've shown jolly good sense, that's what i think!" "well, you needn't begin to get excited," responded ordway, "for i didn't accept, and you won't have to quarrel either with me or with jasper trend." "there's one thing you may be sure of," said banks with energy, "and that is that i'd quarrel with jasper every time." "in spite of milly?" laughed ordway. "in spite of milly," repeated banks in an awed but determined voice; "she may manage my hair and my cravats and my life to come, but i'll be darned if she's going to manage my vote!" "all the same i'm glad you can honestly stick to jasper," said ordway, "he counts on you now, doesn't he?" "oh, i suppose so," returned banks, without enthusiasm; "at any rate, i think he'd rather she'd marry me than brown." there was a moment's silence in which the name brought no association into ordway's consciousness. then in a single flashing instant the truth leaped upon him, and the cornfields across the road surged up to meet his eyes like the waves of a high sea. "than whom?" he demanded in so loud a tone that banks fell back a step and looked at him with blinking eyelids. "than marry whom?" asked ordway for the second time, dropping his voice almost to a whisper before the blank surprise in the other's face. "oh, his name's brown--horatio brown--i thought i'd told you," answered banks, and he added a moment later, "you've met him, i believe." "yes," said ordway, with an effort, "he's the handsome chap who came here last june, isn't he?" "oh, he's handsome enough," admitted banks, and he groaned out presently. "you liked him, didn't you?" ordway smiled slightly as he met the desperation in the other's look. "i like him," he answered quietly, "as much as i like a toad." chapter vi in which baxter plots when baxter reached the warehouse the following morning, he found major leary pacing restlessly back and forth under the brick archway, with the regular military step at which, during the four years' war, he had marched into battle. "come in, sir, come in and sit down," said baxter, leading the way into his office, and sweeping a pile of newspapers from an armchair with a hospitable gesture. "have you seen smith? and is he all right?" were the major's first words, as he placed his hat upon the table and took a quick, impatient turn about the room before throwing himself into the chair which the other had emptied. he was a short, erect, nervous man, with a fiery face, a pair of small gray eyes, like steel points, and a long white moustache, discoloured where it overhung his mouth by the faint yellow stain of tobacco. "oh, i've see him," answered baxter in a soothing voice, "but he won't run--there's no use talking. he's dead set against it." "won't run?" cried the major, furiously. "nonsense, sir, he must run. there's no help for it. did you tell him that we'd decided that he should run?" "i told him," returned baxter, "but, somehow, it didn't look as if he were impressed. he was so positive that he would not even let me put in a word more on the subject. 'are you dead sure, smith?' i said, and he answered, 'i'm as dead sure as you are yourself, baxter.'" the major crossed his knees angrily, stretched himself back in his chair, and began pulling nervously at the ends of his moustache. "well, i'll have to see him myself," he said authoritatively. "you may see him as much as you please," replied baxter, with a soft, offended dignity, "but i'll be mightily surprised, sir, if you get him to change his mind." "well, i reckon you're right, bob," admitted the other, after a moment's reflection, "what he won't do for you, it isn't likely that he'll do for the rest of tappahannock--but the fact remains that somebody has got to step up and defeat jasper trend. now i ask you pointblank--where'll you get your man?" "the lord knows!" sighed baxter, and he sucked hard at the stem of his pipe. "then i tell you if you can't make smith come out, it's your duty as an honest citizen to run yourself." baxter relapsed into a depressed silence, in the midst of which his thoughts were invaded not so much by the political necessity of the occasion as by the small, but dominant figure of his wife. the big man, who had feared neither shot nor bayonet, trembled in spirit as he imagined the outraged authority that could express itself in a person that measured hardly a fraction more than five feet from her shoes to the curling gray fringe above her forehead. he remembered that once in the early days of his marriage, he had allowed himself to be seduced by the promise of political honours, and that for a whole miserable month he had gone without griddle cakes and syrup for his breakfast. "no--no, i could never tell marthy," he thought, desperately, still seeing in imagination the pretty, indignant face of mrs. baxter. "it's your duty as an honest citizen to run yourself," repeated the major, rapping the arm of his chair to enforce his words. "i can't," rejoined baxter, hopelessly, "i can't sir," and he added an instant afterward, "you see women have got the idea somehow, that politics ain't exactly moral." "women!" said the major, in the dry, contemptuous tone in which he might have uttered the word, "pshaw!" "i don't mean just 'women,'" replied baxter, "i mean my wife." "oh!" said the major, "you mean your wife would be opposed to the whole thing?" "she wouldn't hear of it, sir, she simply wouldn't hear a word of it." for a long pause the major made no answer; then rising from his chair he began pacing with his military stride up and down the floor of the little room. at the end of five minutes he turned upon baxter with an exclamation of triumph, and threw himself again into the armchair beside the desk. "i have it, bob!" he said, slapping his knee until the dust flew out of his striped trousers, "i knew i'd get it in the end and here it is. the very thing, on my word, sir, i've discovered the very thing." "then i'm out of it," said baxter, "an' i'm mighty glad of that." "oh, no, you aren't out of it--not just yet," said the major, "we're to start you in, bob, you're to start in as a candidate; and then a week before the nomination, something will crop up to make you fall out of the race, and you'll turn over all your votes to smith. it would be too late, then, for him to back out--he'd simply have to keep in to save the day." in spite of the roar of delight with which the major ended his speech, baxter sat unconvinced and unmoved, shaking his great head in a voiceless protest against the plot. "it's the only way, i tell you," urged the major, half pleased, half angry. "after smith you're by long odds the most popular man in tappahannock, and if it isn't one of you, it's jasper trend and his everlasting barrooms." "but suppose smith still declines," said baxter remembering his wife. "oh, he won't--he isn't a blamed fool," returned the major, "and if he does," he added impressively, "if he does i swear to you i'll go into the race myself." he held out his hand and baxter grasped it in token of good faith. "then i'll do it," said the big man, "provided--" he hesitated, cleared his throat, and went on bravely, "provided there's no objection to my telling my wife the scheme"--bending his ear an instant, he drew back with an embarrassed and guilty face, "that's smith's step in the warehouse. he'll be in here in less than two minutes." the major took up his hat, and flung back the door with a hurried movement. "well, good-bye, i'll see smith later about the plans," he returned, "and meanwhile, we'll go hard to work to whip our friend jasper." meeting ordway an instant later upon the threshold, he passed him with a flourish of his hat, and marched rapidly under the brick archway out into the street. as his bookkeeper entered baxter appeared to be absorbed in a newspaper which he had picked up hastily from the pile upon the floor. "good-morning," said ordway, a little surprised; "it looks as if i'd put the fiery major to flight." "smith," said baxter, dropping his paper, and lifting his big, simple face to the younger man, "smith, you've got me into a hole, and i want you to pull me out again." "a hole?" repeated ordway; then as light broke on him, he laughed aloud and held out his hand. "oh, i see, he's going to make you mayor of tappahannock!" with a groan baxter prodded fresh tobacco into his pipe, and applying a match, sat for several minutes brooding in silence amid the cloud of smoke. "he says it's got to be either you or me," he pursued presently, without noticing ordway's ejaculation, "and on my word, smith, seeing i've got a wife who's all against it, i think it would be but fair to me to let me off. you're my friend now, ain't you? well, i'm asking you, smith, as friend to friend." a flush passed slowly over ordway's face, and the unusual colour lent a peculiar animation to his glance. as baxter met his eyes, he was conscious that they pierced through him, bright blue, sparkling, as incisive as a blade. "to tell the truth, the thing is all but impossible," said ordway, after a long pause. "you don't know, i suppose, that i've never even touched politics in tappahannock." "that ain't the point, smith--it's going on three years since you came here--am i right?" "yes--three years next march, and it seems a century." "well, anyway, you've as good a right as i to be mayor, and a long sight better one than jasper trend has. come, now, smith, if you don't get me out of this hole i'm in, heaven knows how i 'm going to face the major." "give me time," said ordway, quickly, "give me time--a week from to-morrow i am to make my first speech in the town hall. may i have till then?" "till thursday week? oh, i say, smith, you've got to give in in the end--and a week sooner or later, what's the difference?" without replying, ordway walked slowly to the window and stood looking out upon the steep street that crawled up from the railroad track, where an engine whistled. he had held out till now, but with baxter's last words he had heard in his thoughts a question larger and older than any of which his employer had dreamed. "why not?" he asked himself again as he looked out upon the sunshine. "why should not daniel smith, for a good purpose, resume the rights which daniel ordway has forfeited?" and it appeared to him while he stood there that his decision involved not himself alone, and that the outcome had ceased to be merely an election to the highest office in tappahannock. infinitely deep and wide, the problem belonged not only to his individual life, but to the lives of all those who had sinned and paid the penalty of sin and asked of humanity the right and the freedom to begin anew. the impulsive daring which he had almost lived down stirred for an instant in his pulses, and turning quickly he looked at baxter with a boyish laugh. "if i go in, baxter, i go in to win!" he cried. at the moment it had seemed to him that he was obliging rather than ambitious in the choice that he had made; but several days later, when he came out of the warehouse to find the major's red flag flying in the street, he felt the thrill of his youthful enthusiasm quicken in his blood. there was a strangely martial air about the red flag in the sunshine, and the response in his pulses was not unlike the ardour of battle. "after all the world is no smaller here than it is in new york," he thought, "only the littleness of the one is different from the littleness of the other. in either place success would have meant nothing in itself, but in tappahannock i can be more than successful, i can be useful." with the words it seemed to him that his heart dissolved in happiness, and as he looked now on the people who passed him in the street--on the old negro midwife waddling down the board walk; on the italian who kept a fruit stand at the corner; on the pretty girl flirting in the door of the harness shop; and on the rough-coated, soft-eyed country horses--he felt that one and all of these must recognise and respond to the goodwill that had overflowed his thoughts. so detached from personal bitterness, indeed, was even his fight against jasper trend that he went out of his way at the top of the hill to pick up a small whip which the mayor had dropped from horseback as he rode by. the scowling thanks with which jasper received the courtesy puzzled him for a moment until he remembered that by the man in the harness shop they were regarded probably as enemies. at the recollection he stopped short in his walk and laughed aloud--no, he was not interested in fighting anything so small, so insignificant as jasper trend. it was the injustice, the social disease he combated and not the man. "i wonder if he really hates me?" he thought, for it seemed to him absurd and meaningless that one man should waste his strength in hating another. "if he'd been five years in prison he would have learned how foolish it all is," he added; and an instant afterward he asked himself almost with terror if his punishment had been, in reality, the greatest good that had come to him in life? without that terrible atonement would he have gone on like jasper trend from fraud to fraud, from selfishness to damnation? looking round him in the perfect october weather, he felt that the emotion in his heart swelled suddenly to rapture. straight ahead the sunshine sifted in drops through the red and yellow trees that bordered the roadside, while in the field on his right the brown cornricks crowded in even rows to where the arch of the hill was outlined against the deep blue sky. here was not only peace, but happiness, and his old life, as he glanced back upon it, appeared hollow, futile, a corpse without breath or animation. that was the mere outward form and body of existence; but standing here in the deserted road, with his eyes on the brilliant october fields, he could tell himself that he had come at last into the ways and the understanding of faith. as he had once walked by sight alone and stumbled, so he moved now blindly like a child that is led step by step through the dark. from the road behind him a happy laugh struck on his ears, and turning quickly he saw that a dog-cart was rolling rapidly from tappahannock. as he stepped back upon the roadside to avoid the dust raised by the wheels, he lifted his eyes to the face of milly trend, who sat, flushed and smiling, under a pink sunshade. she bowed joyfully; and it was not until a moment afterward, when the cart had gone by, that ordway realised, almost with the force of a blow struck unawares, that he had acknowledged the obsequious greeting of gus wherry. after the pink sunshade had vanished, milly's laugh was still blown back to him on the rising wind. with the happy sound of it in his ears, he watched the dust settle again in the road, the tall golden poplars close like a screen after the passing wheels, and the distance resume its aspect of radiant loneliness. nothing was changed at which he looked, yet he was conscious that the rapture had passed from his thoughts and the beauty from the october landscape. the release that he had won appeared to him as an illusion and a cheat, and lifting his face to the sunshine, he watched, like a prisoner, the flight of the swallows across the sky. at dinner beverly noticed his abstraction, and recommended a mint julep, which emily went out immediately to prepare. "the blood is easily chilled at this season," he said, "and care should be taken to keep it warm by means of a gentle stimulant. i am not a great drinker, sir, as you may have remarked, but in cases either of sickness or sorrow, i have observed that few things are more efficacious than a thimbleful of whiskey taken at the proper time. when i had the misfortune to break to my uncle colonel algernon brooke the distressing news of the death of his wife by drowning, i remember that, though he was one of the most abstemious men alive, his first articulate words were: 'bring the whiskey jug.'" even with the cheering assistance of the mint julep, however, it was impossible for ordway to eat his dinner; and making an excuse presently, he rose from the table and went out into the avenue, where he walked slowly up and down in the shadow of the cedars. at the end of his last restless turn, he went indoors for his hat, and coming out again started rapidly toward tappahannock. with his first decisive step he felt that the larger share of his burden had fallen from him. * * * * * the tappahannock hotel was a low, whitewashed frame building, withdrawn slightly from the street, where several dejected looking horses, with saddle-bags attached to them, were usually fastened to the iron rings in the hitching-rail upon the sidewalk. the place was the resort chiefly of commercial travellers or of neighbouring farmers, who drove in with wagon loads of garden produce or of sun-cured tobacco; and the number of loungers reclining on the newly painted green benches upon the porch made ordway aware that the fall trade was already beginning to show signs of life. in answer to his questions, the proprietor an unctuous person, whose mouth was distorted by a professional habit of welcome--informed him that a gentleman by the name of brown had registered there the evening before, and that he was, to the best of his belief, upstairs in number eighteen at the present moment. "to tell the truth i can't quite size him up," he concluded confidentially. "he don't seem to hev' come either to sell or to buy an' thar's precious little else that ever brings a body to tappahannock." "please add that i wish particularly to see him in private," said ordway. without turning his head the proprietor beckoned, by a movement of his thumb delivered backward over his left shoulder, to a negro boy, who sat surreptitiously eating peanuts out of a paper bag in his pocket. "tell the gentleman in number eighteen, sol, that mr. smith, the people's candidate for mayor, would like to have a little talk with him in private. i'm mighty glad to see you out in the race, suh," he added, turning again to ordway, as the negro disappeared up the staircase. "thank you," replied ordway, with a start, which brought him back from his approaching interview with gus wherry to the recollection that he was fighting to become the mayor of tappahannock. "thar's obleeged to be a scrummage, i reckon," resumed the loquacious little man, when he had received ordway's acknowledgments--"but i s'pose thar ain't any doubt as to who'll come off with the scalps in the end." his manner changed abruptly, and he looked round with a lurking curiosity in his watery eyes. "you knew mr. brown, didn't you say, suh?--before you came here?" ordway glanced up quickly. "did you tell me he got here yesterday?" he asked. "last night on the eight-forty-five, which came in two hours after time." "an accident on the road, wasn't it?" "wreck of a freight--now, mr. brown, as i was saying----" at this instant, to ordway's relief, the messenger landed with a bound on the floor of the hall, and picking himself up, announced with a cheerful grin, that "the gentleman would be powerful pleased to see mr. smith upstairs in his room." nodding to the proprietor, ordway followed the negro up to the first landing, and knocked at a half open door at the end of the long, dark hall. chapter vii shows that politeness, like charity, is an elastic mantle when ordway entered the room, he turned and closed the door carefully behind him, before he advanced to where wherry stood awaiting him with outstretched hand. "i can't begin to tell you how i appreciate the honour, mr. smith. i didn't expect it--upon my word, i didn't," exclaimed wherry, with the effusive amiability which made ordway bite his lip in anger. "i don't know that i mean it for an honour, but i hope we can get straight to business," returned ordway shortly. "ah, then there's business?" repeated the other, as if in surprise. "i had hoped that you were paying me merely a friendly call. to tell the truth i've the very worst head in the world for business, you know, and i always manage to dodge it whenever i get half a chance." "well, you can't dodge it this time, so we may as well have it out." "then since you insist upon that awful word 'business,' i suppose you mean that you've come formally to ratify the treaty?" asked wherry, smiling. "the treaty? i made no treaty," returned ordway gravely. laughing pleasantly, wherry invited his visitor to be seated. then turning away for an instant, he flung himself into a chair beside a little marble topped table upon which stood a half-emptied bottle of rye whiskey and a pitcher of iced water on a metal tray. "do you mean to tell me you've forgotten our conversation in that beastly road?" he demanded, "and the prodigal? surely you haven't forgotten the prodigal? why, i never heard anything in my life that impressed me more." "you told me then distinctly that you had no intention of remaining in tappahannock." "i'll tell you so again if you'd like to hear it. will you have a drink?" ordway shook his head with an angry gesture. "what i want to know," he insisted bluntly, "is why you are here at all?" wherry poured out a drink of whiskey, and adding a dash of iced water, tossed it down at a swallow. "i thought i told you then," he answered, "that i have a little private business in the town. as it's purely personal i hope you'll have no objection to my transacting it." "you said that afternoon that your presence was, in some way, connected with jasper trend's cotton mills." wherry gave a low whistle. "did i?" he asked politely, "well, perhaps, i did. i can't remember." "i was fool enough to believe that you wanted an honest job," said ordway; "it did not enter my head that your designs were upon trend's daughter." "didn't it?" inquired wherry with a smile in which his white teeth flashed brilliantly. "well, it might have, for i was honest enough about it. didn't i tell you that a woman was at the bottom of every mess i was ever in?" "where is your wife?" asked ordway. "dead," replied wherry, in a solemn voice. "if i am not mistaken, you had not less than three at the time of your trial." "all dead," rejoined wherry in the same solemn tone, while he drew out his pocket handkerchief and wiped his eyes with a flourish, "there ain't many men that have supported such a treble affliction on the same day." "i may as well inform you that i don't believe a word you utter." "it's true all the same. i'll take my oath on the biggest bible you can find in town." "your oath? pshaw!" "well, i always said my word was better," observed wherry, without the slightest appearance of offence. he wore a pink shirt which set off his fine colouring to advantage, and as he turned aside to pour out a second drink of whiskey, ordway noticed that his fair hair was brushed carefully across the bald spot in the centre of his head. "whether they are dead or alive," responded ordway, "i want you to understand plainly that you are to give up your designs upon milly trend or her money." "so you've had your eye on her yourself?" exclaimed wherry. "i declare i'm deuced sorry. why, in thunder, didn't you tell me so last june?" a mental nausea that was almost like a physical spasm seized ordway suddenly, and crossing to the window, he stood looking through the half-closed shutters down into the street below, where a covered wagon rolled slowly downhill, the driver following on foot as he offered a bunch of fowls to the shop-keepers upon the sidewalk. then the hot, stale, tobacco impregnated air came up to his nostrils, and he turned away with a sensation of disgust. "if you'd only warned me in time--hang it--i'd have cut out and given you the field," declared wherry in such apparent sincerity that ordway resisted an impulse to kick him out into the hall. "that's my way. i always like to play fair and square when i get the chance." "well, you've got the chance now, and what's more you've got to make it good." "and leave you the open?" "and leave me tappahannock--yes." "i don't want tappahannock. to tell the truth i'm not particularly struck by its attractions." "in that case you've no objection to leaving immediately, i suppose?" "i've no objection on earth if you'll allow me a pretty woman to keep me company. i'm a deuced lonely bird, and i can't get on by myself--it's not in my nature." ordway placed his hand upon the table with a force which started the glasses rattling on the metal tray. "i repeat for the last time that you are to leave milly trend alone," he said. "do you understand me?" "i'm not sure i do," rejoined wherry, still pleasantly enough. "would you mind saying that over again in a lower tone?" "what i want to make plain is that you are not to marry milly trend--or any other women in this town," returned ordway angrily. "so there are others!" commented wherry jauntily with his eye on the ceiling. the pose of his handsome head was so remarkably effective, that ordway felt his rage increased by the mere external advantages of the man. "what i intend you to do is to leave tappahannock for good and all this very evening," he resumed, drawing a sharp breath. the words appeared to afford wherry unspeakable amusement. "i can't," he responded, after a minute in which he had enjoyed his humour to the full, "the train leaves at seven-ten and i've an engagement at eight o'clock." "you'll break it, that's all." "but it wouldn't be polite--it's with a lady." "then i'll break it for you," returned ordway, starting toward the door, "for i may presume, i suppose, that the lady is miss trend?" "oh, come back, i say. hang it all, don't get into a fury," protested wherry, clutching the other by the arm, and closing the door which he had half opened. "here, hold on a minute and let's talk things over quietly. i told you, didn't i? that i wanted to be obliging." "then you will go?" asked ordway, in a milder tone. "well, i'll think about it. i've a quick enough wit for little things, but on serious matters my brain works slowly. in the first place now didn't we promise each other that we'd play fair?" "but you haven't--that's why i came here." "you're dead wrong. i'm doing it this very minute. i'll keep my mouth shut about you till judgment day if you'll just hold off and not pull me back when i'm trying to live honest." "honest!" exclaimed ordway, and turned on his heel. "well, i'd like to know what you call it, for if it isn't honesty, it certainly isn't pleasure. my wife's dead, i swear it's a fact, and i swear again that i don't mean the girl any harm. i was never so much gone on a woman in my life, though a number of 'em have been pretty soft on me. so you keep off and manage your election--or whatever it is--while i go about my business. great scott! after all it ain't as if a woman were a bank note, is it?" "the first question was mine. will you leave to-day or will you not?" "and if i will not what are you going to do about it?" "as soon as i hear your decision, i shall let you know." "well, say i won't. what is your next move then?" "in that case i shall go straight to the girl's father after i leave this room." "by jove you will! and what will you do when you get there?" "i shall tell him that to the best of my belief you have a wife--possibly several--now living." "then you'll lie," said wherry, dropping for the first time his persuasive tone. "that remains to be proved," rejoined ordway shortly. "at any rate if he needs to be convinced i shall tell him as much as i know about you." "and how much," demanded wherry insolently, "does that happen to be?" "enough to stop the marriage, that is all i want." "and suppose he asks you--as he probably will--how in the devil it came to be any business of yours?" for a moment ordway looked over the whiskey bottle and through the open window into the street below. "i don't think that will happen," he answered slowly, "but if it does i shall tell him the whole truth as i know it--about myself as well as about you." "the deuce you will!" exclaimed wherry. "it appears that you want to take the whole job out of my hands now, doesn't it?" the flush from the whiskey had overspread his face, and in the midst of the general redness his eyes and teeth flashed brilliantly in an angry laugh. an imaginative sympathy for the man moved ordway almost in spite of himself, and he wondered, in the long pause, what wherry's early life had been and if his chance in the world were really a fair one? "i don't want to be hard on you," said ordway at last; "it's out of the question that you should have milly trend, but if you'll give up that idea and go away i'll do what i can to help you--i'll send you half my salary for the next six months until you are able to find a job." wherry looked at him with a deliberate wink. "so you'd like to save your own skin, after all, wouldn't you?" he inquired. taking up his hat from the table, ordway turned toward the door and laid his hand upon the knob before he spoke. "is it decided then that i shall go to jasper trend?" he asked. "well, i wouldn't if i were you," said wherry, "but that's your affair. on the whole i think that you'll pay more than your share of the price." "it's natural, i suppose, that you should want your revenge," returned ordway, without resentment, "but all the same i shall tell him as little as possible about your past. what i shall say is that i have reason to believe that your wife is still living." "one or more?" enquired wherry, with a sneer. "one, i think, will prove quite sufficient for my purpose." "well, go ahead," rejoined wherry, angrily, "but before you strike you'd better be pretty sure you see a snake in the grass. i'd advise you for your own sake to ask milly trend first if she expects to marry me." "what?" cried ordway, wheeling round, "do you mean she has refused you?" "oh, ask her--ask her," retorted wherry airily, as he turned back to the whiskey bottle. in the street, a moment later, ordway passed under the red flag, which, inflated by the wind, swelled triumphantly above his head. from the opposite sidewalk a man spoke to him; and then, turning, waved his slouch hat enthusiastically toward the flag. "if he only knew," thought ordway, looking after him; and the words brought to his imagination what disgrace in tappahannock would mean in his life. as he passed the dim vacancy of the warehouse he threw toward it a look which was almost one of entreaty. "no, no, it can't be," he insisted, as if to reassure himself, "it is impossible. how could it happen?" and seized by a sudden rage against circumstances, he remembered the windy afternoon upon which he had come for the first time to tappahannock--the wide stretches of broomsedge; the pale red road, which appeared to lead nowhere; his violent hunger; and the negro woman who had given him the cornbread at the door of her cabin. a hundred years seemed to have passed since then--no, not a hundred years as men count them, but a dissolution and a resurrection. it was as if his personality--his whole inner structure had dissolved and renewed itself again; and when he thought now of that march afternoon it was with the visual distinctness that belongs to an observer rather than to an actor. his point of view was detached, almost remote. he saw himself from the outside alone--his clothes, his face, even his gestures; and these things were as vivid to him as were the negro cabin, the red clay road, and the covered wagon that threw its shadow on the path as it crawled by. in no way could he associate his immediate personality either with the scene or with the man who had sat on the pine bench ravenously eating the coarse food. at the moment it seemed to him that he was released, not only from any spiritual bondage to the past, but even from any physical connection with the man he had been then. "what have i to do with gus wherry or with daniel ordway?" he demanded. "above all, what in heaven have i to do with milly trend?" as he asked the question he flushed with resentment against the girl for whom he was about to sacrifice all that he valued in his life. he thought with disgust of her vanity, her shallowness, her insincerity; and the course that he had planned showed in this sudden light as utterly unreasonable. it struck him on the instant that in going to wherry he had been a fool. "yes, i should have thought of that before. i have been too hasty, for what, after all, have i to do with milly trend?" with an effort he put the question aside, and in the emotional reaction which followed, he felt that his spirit soared into the blue october sky. emily, looking at him at dinner, thought that she had never seen him so animated, so light-hearted, so boyishly unreserved. when his game of dominoes with beverly was over, he followed the children out into the orchard, where they were gathering apples into great straw hampers; and as he stood under the fragrant clustering boughs, with the childish laughter in his ears, he felt that his perplexities, his troubles, even his memories had dissolved and vanished into air. an irresponsible happiness swelled in his heart while he watched the golden orchard grass blown like a fringe upon the circular outline of the hill. but when night fell the joy of the sunshine went from him, and it was almost with a feeling of heaviness that he lit his lamp and sat down in the chintz-covered chair under the faded sampler worked by margaret, aged nine. without apparent cause or outward disturbance he had passed from the exhilaration of the afternoon into a pensive, almost a melancholy mood. the past, which had been so remote for several hours, had leaped suddenly to life again--not only in his memory, but in every fibre of his body as well as in every breath he drew. "no, i cannot escape it, for is it not a part of me--it is i myself," he thought; and he knew that he could no more free himself from his duty to milly trend than he could tear the knowledge of her existence from his brain. "after all, it is not milly trend," he added, "it is something larger, stronger, far more vital than she." a big white moth flew in from the dusk, and fluttered blindly in the circle of light which the lamp threw on the ceiling. he heard the soft whirring of its wings against the plaster, and gradually the sound entered into his thoughts and became a part of his reflections. "will the moth fall into the flame or will it escape?" he asked, feeling himself powerless to avert the creature's fate. in some strange way his own destiny seemed to be whirling dizzily in that narrow circle of light; and in the pitiless illumination that surrounded it, he saw not only all that was passed, but all that was present as well as all that was yet to come. at the same instant he saw his mother's face as she lay dead with her look of joyous surprise frozen upon her lips; and the face of lydia when she had lowered a black veil at their last parting; and the face of alice, his daughter; and of the girl downstairs as he had seen her through the gray twilight; and the face of the epileptic little preacher, who had preached in the prison chapel. and as these faces looked back at him he knew that the illumination in which his soul had struggled so blindly was the light of love. "yes, it is love," he thought, "and that is the meaning of the circle of light into which i have come out of the darkness." he looked up startled, for the white moth, after one last delirious whirl of ecstasy, had dropped from the ceiling into the flame of the lamp. chapter viii the turn of the wheel at eight o'clock the next morning ordway entered jasper trend's gate, and passed up the gravelled walk between borders of white and yellow chrysanthemums. in a window on his right a canary was singing loudly in a gilt cage; and a moment later, the maid invited him into a room which seemed, as he entered it, to be filled with a jubilant burst of music. as he waited here for the man he had come to see, he felt that, in spite of his terrible purpose, he had found no place in tappahannock so cheerful as this long room flooded with sunshine, in the midst of which the canary swung back and forth in his wire cage. the furniture was crude enough, the colours of the rugs were unharmonious, the imitation lace of the curtains was offensive to his eyes. yet the room was made almost attractive by the large windows which gave on the piazza, the borders of chrysanthemums and the smoothly shaven plot of lawn. his back was turned toward the door when it opened and shut quickly, and jasper trend came in, hastily swallowing his last mouthful of breakfast. "you wanted to see me, mr. smith, i understand," he said at once, showing in his manner a mixture of curiosity and resentment. it was evident at the first glance that even in his own house he was unable to overcome the political antagonism of the man of little stature. the smallest social amenity he would probably have regarded as a kind of moral subterfuge. "i must ask you to overlook the intimate nature of my question," began ordway, in a voice which was so repressed that it sounded dull and lifeless, "but i have heard that your daughter intends to marry horatio brown. is this true?" at the words jasper, who had prepared himself for a political onslaught, fell back a step or two and stood in the merciless sunlight, blinking at his questioner with his little, watery, pale gray eyes. each dull red vein in his long nose became suddenly prominent. "horatio brown?" he repeated, "why, i thought you'd come about nothing less than the nomination. what in the devil do you want anyway with horatio brown. he can't vote in tappahannock, can he?" "i'll answer that in time," replied ordway, "my motive is more serious than you can possibly realise--it is a question which involves your daughter's happiness--perhaps her life." "good lord, is that so?" exclaimed jasper, "i don't reckon you're sweet on her yourself, are you?" ordway's only reply was an impatient groan which sent the other stumbling back against a jar of goldfish on the centre table. though he had come fully prepared for the ultimate sacrifice, he was unable to control the repulsion aroused in him by the bleared eyes and sunken mouth of the man before him. "well, if you ain't," resumed jasper presently, with a fresh outburst of hilarity, "you're about the only male critter in tappahannock that don't turn his eyes sooner or later toward my door." "i've barely a speaking acquaintance with your daughter," returned ordway shortly, "but her reputation as a beauty is certainly very well deserved." mollified by the compliment, jasper unbent so far as to make an abrupt, jerky motion in the direction of a chair; but shaking his head, ordway put again bluntly the question he had asked upon the other's entrance. "am i to understand seriously that she means to marry brown?" he demanded. jasper twisted his scraggy neck nervously in his loose collar. "lord, how you do hear things!" he ejaculated. "now, as far as i can see, thar ain't a single word of truth in all that talk. just between you and me i don't believe my girl has had her mind on that fellow brown more'n a minute. i'm dead against it and that'll go a long way with her, you may be sure. why, only this morning she told me that if she had to choose between the two of 'em, she'd stick to young banks every time." with the words it seemed to ordway that the sunshine became fairly dazzling as it fell through the windows, while the song of the canary went up rapturously like a pæan. only by the relief which flooded his heart like warmth could he measure the extent of the ruin he had escaped. even jasper trend's face appeared no longer hideous to him, and as he held out his hand, the exhilaration of his release lent a note that was almost one of affection to his voice. "don't let her do it--for god's sake don't let her do it," he said, and an instant afterward he was out on the gravelled walk between the borders of white and yellow chrysanthemums. at the gate milly was standing with a letter in her hand, and when he spoke to her, he watched her face change slowly to the colour of a flower. never had she appeared softer, prettier, more enticing in his eyes, and he felt for the first time an understanding of the hopeless subjection of banks. "oh, it's you, mr. smith!" she exclaimed, smiling and blushing as she had smiled and blushed at wherry the day before, "i was asking harry banks yesterday what had become of you?" "what had become of me?" he repeated in surprise, while he drew back quickly with his hand on the latch of the gate. "i hadn't seen you for so long," she answered, with a laugh which bore less relation to humour than it did to pleasure. "you used to pass by five times a day, and i got so accustomed to you that i really missed you when you went away." "well, i've been in the country all summer, though that hardly counts, for you were out of town yourself." "yes, i was out of town myself." she lingered over the words, and her voice softened as she went on until it seemed to flow with the sweetness of liquid honey, "but even when i am here, you never care to see me." "do you think so?" he asked gaily, and the next instant he wondered why the question had passed his lips before it had entered into his thoughts, "the truth is that i know a good deal more about you than you suspect," he added; "i have the honour, you see, to be the confidant of harry banks." "oh, harry banks!" she exclaimed indifferently, as she turned from the gate, while ordway opened it and passed out into the street. for the next day or two it seemed to him that the lightness of his heart was reflected in the faces of those about him--that baxter, mrs. brooke, emily, beverly each appeared to move in response to some hidden spring within himself. he felt no longer either beverly's tediousness or mrs. brooke's melancholy, for these early october mornings contained a rapture which transfigured the people with whom he lived. with this unlooked for renewal of hope he threw himself eagerly into the political fight for the control of tappahannock. it was now tuesday and on thursday evening he was to deliver his first speech in the town hall. already the preparations were made, already the flags were flying from the galleries, and already baxter had been trimmed for his public appearance upon the platform. "by george, i believe the major's right and it's the ten commandment part that has done it," said the big man, settling his person with a shake in the new clothes he had purchased for the occasion. "i reckon this coat's all right, smith, ain't it? my wife wouldn't let me come out on the platform in those old clothes i've been wearing." "oh, you're all right," returned ordway, cheerfully--so cheerfully that baxter was struck afresh by the peculiar charm which belonged less to manner than to temperament, "you're all right, old man, but it isn't your clothes that make you so." "all the same i'll feel better when i get into my old suit again," said baxter, "i don't know how it is, but, somehow, i seem to have left two-thirds of myself behind in those old clothes. i just wore these down to show 'em off, but i shan't put 'em on again till thursday." it was the closing hour at the warehouse, and after a few eager words on the subject of the approaching meeting, ordway left the office and went out into the deserted building where the old negro was sweeping the floor with his twig broom. a moment later he was about to pass under the archway, when a man, hurrying in from the street, ran straight into his arms and then staggered back with a laugh of mirthless apology. "my god, smith," said the tragic voice of banks, "i'm half crazy and i must have a word with you alone." catching his arm ordway drew him into the dim light of the warehouse, until they reached the shelter of an old wagon standing unhitched against the wall. the only sound which came to them here was the scratching noise made by the twig broom on the rough planks of the floor. "speak now," said ordway, while his heart sank as he looked into the other's face, "it's quite safe--there's no one about but old abraham." "i can't speak," returned banks, preserving with an effort a decent composure of his features, "but it's all up with me--it's worse than i imagined, and there's nothing ahead of me but death." "i suppose it's small consolation to be told that you look unusually healthy at the minute," replied ordway, "but don't keep me guessing, banks. what's happened now?" "all her indifference--all her pretence of flirting was pure deception," groaned the miserable banks, "she wanted to throw dust, not only in my eyes, but in jasper's, also." "why, he told me with his own lips that his daughter had given him to understand that she preferred you to brown." "and so she did give him to understand--so she did," affirmed banks, in despair, "but it was all a blind so that he wouldn't make trouble between her and brown. i tell you, smith," he concluded, bringing his clenched fist down on the wheel of the wagon, from which a shower of dried mud was scattered into ordway's face, "i tell you, i don't believe women think any more of telling a lie than we do of taking a cocktail!" "but how do you know all this, my dear fellow? and when did you discover it?" "that's the awful part, i'm coming to it." his voice gave out and he swallowed a lump in his throat before he could go on. "oh, smith, smith, i declare, if it's the last word i speak, i believe she means to run away with brown this very evening!" "what?" cried ordway, hardly raising his voice above a whisper. a burning resentment, almost a repulsion swept over him, and he felt that he could have spurned the girl's silly beauty if she had lain at his feet. what was a woman like milly trend worth, that she should cost him, a stranger to her, so great a price? "tell me all," he said sharply, turning again to his companion. "how did you hear it? why do you believe it? have you spoken to jasper?" banks blinked hard for a minute, while a single large round teardrop trickled slowly down his freckled nose. "i should never have suspected it," he answered, "but for milly's old black mammy delphy, who has lived with her ever since she was born. aunt delphy came upon her this morning when she was packing her bag, and by hook or crook, heaven knows how, she managed to get at the truth. then she came directly to me, for it seems that she hates brown worse than the devil." "when did she come to you?" "a half hour ago. i left her and rushed straight to you." ordway drew out his watch, and stood looking at the face of it with a wondering frown. "that must have been five o'clock," he said, "and it is now half past. shall i catch milly, do you think, if i start at once?" "you?" cried banks, "you mean that you will stop her?" "i mean that i must stop her. there is no question." as he spoke he had started quickly down the warehouse, scattering as he walked, a pile of trash which the old negro had swept together in the centre of the floor. so rapid were the long strides with which he moved that banks, in spite of his frantic haste, could barely keep in step with him as they passed into the street. ordway's face had changed as if from a spasm of physical pain, and as banks looked at it in the afternoon light he was startled to find that it was the face of an old man. the brows were bent, the mouth drawn, the skin sallow, and the gray hair upon the temples had become suddenly more prominent than the dark locks above. "then you knew brown before?" asked banks, with an accession of courage, as they slackened their pace with the beginning of the hill. "i knew him before--yes," replied ordway, shortly. his reserve had become not only a mask, but a coffin, and his companion had for a minute a sensation that was almost uncanny as he walked by his side--as if he were striving to keep pace uphill with a dead man. banks had known him to be silent, gloomy, uncommunicative before now, but he had never until this instant seen that look of iron resolve which was too cold and still to approach the heat of passion. had he been furious banks might have shared his fury with him; had he shown bitterness of mood banks might have been bitter also; had he given way even to sardonic merriment, banks felt that it would have been possible to have feigned a mild hilarity of manner; but before this swift, implacable pursuit of something he could not comprehend, the wretched lover lost all consciousness of the part which he himself must act, well or ill, in the event to come. at trend's gate ordway stopped and looked at his companion with a smile which appeared to throw an artificial light upon his drawn features. "will you let me speak to her alone first," he asked, "for a few minutes?" "i'll take a turn up the street then," returned banks eagerly, still panting from his hurried walk up the long hill. "she's in the room on the right now," he added, "i can see her feeding the canary." ordway nodded indifferently. "i shan't be long," he said, and going inside the gate, passed deliberately up the walk and into the room where milly stood at the window with her mouth close against the wires of the gilt cage. at his step on the threshold the girl turned quickly toward the door with a fluttering movement. surprise and disappointment battled for an instant in her glance, and he gathered from his first look that he had come at the moment when she was expecting wherry. he noticed, too, that in spite of the mild autumn weather, she wore a dark dress which was not unsuitable for a long journey, and that her sailor hat, from which a blue veil floated, lay on a chair in one corner. a deeper meaning had entered into the shallow prettiness of her face, and he felt that she had passed through some subtle change in which she had left her girlhood behind her. for the first time it occurred to him that milly trend was deserving not only of passion, but of sympathy. at the withdrawal of the lips that had offered him his bit of cake, the canary fluttered from his perch and uttered a sweet, short, questioning note; and in milly's face, as she came forward, there was something of this birdlike, palpitating entreaty. "oh, it is you, mr. smith," she said, "i did not hear your ring." "i didn't ring," responded ordway, as he took her trembling outstretched hand in which she still held the bit of sponge cake, "i saw you at the window so i came straight in without sending word. what i have to say to you is so important that i dared not lose a minute." "and it is about me?" asked milly, with a quiver of her eyelids. "no, it is about someone else, though it concerns you in a measure. the thing i have to tell you relates directly to a man whom you know as horatio brown----" he spoke so quickly that the girl divined his meaning from his face rather than from his words. "then you know him?" she questioned, in a frightened whisper. "i know more of his life than i can tell you. it is sufficient to say that to the best of my belief he has a wife now living--that he has been married before this under different names to at least two living women----" he stopped and put out his hand with an impulsive protecting gesture, for the wounded vanity in the girl's face had pierced to his heart. "will you let me see your father?" he asked gently, "would it not be better for me to speak to him instead of to you?" "no, no!" cried milly sharply, "don't tell him--don't dare to tell him--for he would believe it and it is a lie--it is a lie! i tell you it is a lie!" "as god is my witness it is the truth," he answered, without resentment. "then you shall accuse him to his face. he is coming in a little while, and you shall accuse him before me----" she stopped breathlessly and the pity in his look made her wince sharply and shrink away. with her movement the piece of sponge cake fell from her loosened fingers and rolled on the floor at her feet. "but if it were true how could you know it?" she demanded. "no, it is not true--i don't believe it! i don't believe it!" she repeated in a passion of terror. at her excited voice the canary, swinging on his perch, broke suddenly into an ecstasy of song, and milly's words, when she spoke again, were drowned in the liquid sweetness that flowed from the cage. for a minute ordway stood in silence waiting for the music to end, while he watched the angry, helpless tremor of the girl's outstretched hands. "will you promise me to wait?" he asked, raising his voice in the effort to be heard, "will you promise me to wait at least until you find out the truth or the falsehood of what i tell you?" "but i don't believe it," repeated milly in the stubborn misery of hopeless innocence. "ask yourself, then, what possible reason i could have in coming to you--except to save you?" "wait!" cried the girl angrily, "i can't hear--wait!" picking up a shawl from a chair, she flung it with an impatient gesture over the cage, and turning immediately from the extinguished bird, took up his sentence where he had broken off. "to save me?" she repeated, "you mean from marriage?" "from a marriage that would be no marriage. am i right in suspecting that you meant to go away with him to-night?" she bowed her head--all the violent spirit gone out of her. "i was ready to go to-night," she answered, like a child that has been hurt and is still afraid of what is to come. "and you promise me that you will give it up?" he went on gently. "i don't know--i can't tell--i must see him first," she said, and burst suddenly into tears, hiding her face in her hands with a pathetic, shamed gesture. turning away for a moment, he stood blankly staring down into the jar of goldfish. then, as her sobs grew presently beyond her control, he came back to the chair into which she had dropped and looked with moist eyes at her bowed fair head. "before i leave you, will you promise me to give him up?--to forget him if it be possible?" he asked. "but it is not possible," she flashed back, lifting her wet blue eyes to his. "how dare you come to me with a tale like this? oh, i hate you! i shall always hate you! will you go?" before her helpless fury he felt a compassion stronger even than the emotion her tears had aroused. "it is not fair that i should tell you so much and not tell you all, milly," he said. "it is not fair that in accusing the man you love, i should still try to shield myself. i know that these things are true because brown's--wherry is his name--trial took place immediately before mine--and we saw each other during the terms which we served in prison." then before she could move or speak he turned from her and went rapidly from the house and out into the walk. chapter ix at the cross-roads at the corner he looked down the street and saw the red flag still swelling in the wind. a man spoke to him; the face was familiar, but he could not recall the name, until after a few congratulatory words about his political prospects, he remembered, with a start, that he was talking to major leary. "you may count on a clean sweep of votes, mr. smith--there's no doubt of it," said the major, beaming with his amiable fiery face. "there's no doubt of it?" repeated ordway, while he regarded the enthusiastic politician with a perplexed and troubled look. the major, the political campaign, the waving red flag and the noisy little town had receded to a blank distance from the moment in which he stood. he wondered vaguely what connection he--daniel ordway--had ever held with these things? yet his smile was still bright and cheerful as he turned away, with an apologetic word, and passed on into the road to cedar hill. the impulse which had driven him breathlessly into milly's presence had yielded now to the mere dull apathy of indifference, and it mattered to him no longer whether the girl was saved or lost in the end. he thought of her vanity, of her trivial pink and white prettiness with a return of his old irritation. well, he had done his part--his temperament had ruled him at the decisive instant, and the ensuing consequences of his confession had ceased now to affect or even to interest him. then, with something like a pang of thought, he remembered that he had with his own hand burned his bridges behind him, and that there was no way out for him except the straight way which led over the body of daniel smith. his existence in tappahannock was now finished; his victory had ended in flight; and there was nothing ahead of him except the new beginning and the old ending. a fresh start and then what? and afterward the few years of quiet again and at the end the expected, the inevitable recurrence of the disgrace which he had begun to recognise as some impersonal natural law that followed upon his footsteps. as the future gradually unrolled itself in his imagination, he felt that his heart sickened in the clutch of the terror that had sprung upon him. was there to be no end anywhere? could no place, no name even afford him a permanent shelter? looking ahead now he saw himself as an old man wandering from refuge to refuge, pursued always by the resurrected corpse of his old life, which though it contained neither his spirit nor his will, still triumphed by the awful semblance it bore his outward body. was he to be always alone? was there no spot in his future where he could possess himself in reality of the freedom which was his in name? without seeing, without hearing, he went almost deliriously where his road led him, for the terror in his thought had become a living presence before which his spirit rather than his body moved. he walked rapidly, yet it seemed to him that his feet were inert and lifeless weights which were dragged forward by the invincible torrent of his will. in the swiftness of his flight, he felt that he was a conscious soul chained to a body that was a corpse. when he came at last to the place where the two roads crossed before the ruined gate, he stopped short, while the tumult died gradually in his brain, and the agony through which he had just passed appeared as a frenzy to his saner judgment. looking up a moment later as he was about to enter the avenue, he saw that emily brooke was walking toward him under the heavy shadow of the cedars. in the first movement of her surprise the mask which she had always worn in his presence dropped from her face, and as she stepped from the gloom into the sunlight, he felt that the sweetness of her look bent over him like protecting wings. for a single instant, as her eyes gazed wide open into his, he saw reflected in them the visions from which his soul had shrunk back formerly abashed. nothing had changed in her since yesterday; she was outwardly the same brave and simple woman, with her radiant smile, her blown hair, and her roughened hands. yet because of that revealing look she appeared no longer human in his eyes, but something almost unearthly bright and distant, like the sunshine he had followed so often through the bars of his prison cell. "you are suffering," she said, when he would have passed on, and he felt that she had divined without words all that he could not utter. "don't pity me," he answered, smiling at her question, because to smile had become for him the easier part of habit, "i'm not above liking pity, but it isn't exactly what i need. and besides, i told you once, you know, that whatever happened to me would always be the outcome of my own failure." "yes, i remember you told me so--but does that make it any easier to bear?" "easier to bear?--no, but i don't think the chief end of things is to be easy, do you?" she shook her head. "but isn't our chief end just to make them easier for others?" she asked. the pity in her face was like an illumination, and her features were enkindled with a beauty he had never found in them before. it was the elemental motherhood in her nature that he had touched; and he felt as he watched her that this ecstasy of tenderness swelled in her bosom and overflowed her lips. confession to her would have been for him the supreme luxury of despair; but because his heart strained toward her, he drew back and turned his eyes to the road, which stretched solitary and dim beyond them. "well, i suppose, i've got what i deserved," he said, "the price that a man pays for being a fool, he pays but once and that is his whole life long." "but it ought not to be so--it is not just," she answered. "just?" he repeated, bitterly, "no, i dare say, it isn't--but the facts of life don't trouble themselves about justice, do they? is it just, for instance, that you should slave your youth away on your brother's farm, while he sits and plays dominoes on the porch? is it just that with the instinct for luxury in your blood you should be condemned to a poverty so terrible as this?" he reached out and touched the little red hand hanging at her side. "is this just?" he questioned with an ironical smile. "there is some reason for it," she answered bravely, "i feel it though i cannot see it." "some reason--yes, but that reason is not justice--not the little human justice that we can call by the name. it's something infinitely bigger than any idea that we have known." "i can trust," she said softly, "but i can't reason." "don't reason--don't even attempt to--let god run his world. do you think if we didn't believe in the meaning--in the purpose of it all that you and i could stand together here like this? it's because we believe that we can be happy even while we suffer." "then you will be happy again--to-morrow?" "surely. perhaps to-night--who knows? i've had a shock. my brain is whirling and i can't see straight. in a little while it will be over and i shall steady down." "but i should like to help you now while it lasts," she said. "you are helping me--it's a mercy that you stand there and listen to my wild talk. do you know i was telling myself as i came along the road just now that there wasn't a living soul to whom i should dare to say that i was in a quake of fear." "a quake of fear?" she looked at him with swimming eyes, and by that look he saw that she loved him. if he had stretched out his arms, he knew that the passion of her sorrow would have swept her to his breast; and he felt that every fibre of his starved soul and body cried out for the divine food that she offered. at the moment he did not stop to ask himself whether it was his flesh or his spirit that hungered after her, for his whole being had dissolved into the longing which drew him as with cords to her lips. all he understood at the instant was that in his terrible loneliness love had been offered him and he must refuse the gift. a thought passed like a drawn sword between them, and he saw in his imagination lydia lowering her black veil at their last parting. "it's a kind of cowardliness, i suppose," he went on with his eyes on the ground, "but i was thinking that minute how greatly i needed help and how much--how very much--you had given me. if i ever learn really to live it will be because of you--because of your wonderful courage, your unfailing sweetness----" for the first time he saw in her face the consciousness of her own unfulfilment. "if you only knew how often i wonder if it is worth while," she answered. at this he made a sudden start forward and then checked himself. "the chief tragedy in my life," he said, "is that i knew you twenty years too late." until his words were uttered he did not realise how much of a confession he had put into them; and with the discovery he watched her face bloom softly like a flower that opens its closed petals. "if i could have helped you then, why cannot i help you now?" she asked, while the innocence in her look humbled him more than a divine fury would have done. the larger his ideal of her became, the keener grew his sense of failure--of bondage to that dead past from which he could never release his living body. as he looked at her now he realised that the supreme thing he had missed in life was the control of the power which lies in simple goodness; and the purity of lydia appeared to him as a shining blank--an unwritten surface beside the passionate humanity in the heart of the girl before him. "you will hear things from others which i can't tell you and then you will understand," he said. "i shall hear nothing that will make me cease to believe in you," she answered. "you will hear that i have done wrong in my life and you will understand that if i have suffered it has been by my own fault." she met his gaze without wavering. "i shall still believe in you," she responded. her eyes were on his face and she saw that the wan light of the afterglow revealed the angularities of his brow and chin and filled in with shadows the deeper hollows in his temples. the smile on his lips was almost ironical as he answered. "those from whom i might have expected loyalty, fell away from me--my father, my wife, my children----" "to believe against belief is a woman's virtue," she responded, "but at least it is a virtue." "you mean that you would have been my friend through everything?" he asked quickly, half blinded by the ideal which seemed to flash so closely to his eyelids. there was scorn in her voice as she answered: "if i had been your friend once--yes, a thousand times." before his inward vision there rose the conception of a love that would have pardoned, blessed and purified. bending his head he kissed her little cold hand once and let it fall. then without looking again into her face, he entered the avenue and went on alone. chapter x between man and man when he entered tappahannock the following morning, he saw with surprise that the red flag was still flying above the street. as he looked into the face of the first man he met, he felt a sensation of relief, almost of gratitude because he received merely the usual morning greeting; and the instant afterward he flinched and hesitated before replying to the friendly nod of the harness-maker, stretching himself under the hanging bridles in the door of the little shop. entering the warehouse he glanced nervously down the deserted building, and when a moment later he opened the door into baxter's office, he grew hot at the familiar sight of the local newspaper in his employer's hands. the years had divided suddenly and he saw again the crowd in fifth avenue as he walked home on the morning of his arrest. he smelt the smoke of the great city; he heard the sharp street cries around him; and he pushed aside the fading violets offered him by the crippled flower seller at the corner. he even remembered, without effort, the particular bit of scandal retailed to him over a cigar by the club wit who had joined him. all his sensations to-day were what they had been then, only now his consciousness was less acute, as if the edge of his perceptions had been blunted by the force of the former blow. "howdy, smith, is that you?" remarked baxter, crushing the top of the paper beneath the weight of his chin as he looked over it at ordway. "did you meet banks as you came in? he was in here asking for you not two minutes ago." "banks? no, i didn't see him. what did he want?" as he put the ordinary question the dull level of his voice surprised him. "oh, he didn't tell me," returned baxter, "but it was some love-lorn whining he had to do, i reckon. now what i can't understand is how a man can be so narrow sighted as only to see one woman out of the whole bouncing sex of 'em. it would take more than a refusal--it would take a downright football to knock out my heart. good lord! in this world of fine an' middling fine women, the trouble ain't to get the one you want, but to keep on wanting the one you get. i've done my little share of observing in my time, and what i've learned from it is that the biggest trial a man can have is not to want another man's wife, but to _want_ to want his own." a knock at the door called ordway out into the warehouse, where he yielded himself immediately to the persuasive voice of banks. "come back here a minute, will you, out of hearing? i tried to get to you last night and couldn't." "has anything gone wrong?" inquired ordway, following the other to a safe distance from baxter's office. at first he had hardly had courage to lift his eyes to banks' face, but reassured by the quiet opening of the conversation, he stood now with his sad gaze fixed on the beaming freckled features of the melancholy lover. "i only wanted to tell you that she didn't go," whispered banks, rolling his prominent eyes into the dusky recesses of the warehouse, "she's ill in bed to-day, and brown left town on the eight-forty-five this morning." "so he's gone for good!" exclaimed ordway, and drew a long breath as if he had been released from an emotional tension which had suspended, while it lasted, the ordinary movement of life. since he had prepared himself for the worst was it possible that his terror of yesterday would scatter to-day like the delusions of an unsettled brain? had wherry held back in mercy or had milly trend? even if he were spared now must he still live on here unaware how widely--or how pitifully--his secret was known? would this ceaseless dread of discovery prove again, as it had proved in the past, more terrible even than the discovery itself? would he be able to look fearlessly at milly trend again?--at baxter? at banks? at emily? "well, i've got to thank you for it, smith?" said banks. "how you stopped it, i don't know for the life of me, but stop it you did." the cheerful selfishness in such rejoicing struck ordway even in the midst of his own bitter musing. though banks adored milly, soul and body, he was frankly jubilant over the tragic ending of her short romance. "i hope there's little danger of its beginning anew," ordway remarked presently, with less sympathy than he would have shown his friend twelve hours before. "i suppose you wouldn't like to tell me what you said to her?" inquired banks, his customary awe of his companion swept away in the momentary swing of his elation. "no, i shouldn't like to tell you," returned ordway quietly. "then it's all right, of course, and i'll be off to drape the town hall in bunting for to-morrow night. we're going to make the biggest political display for you that tappahannock has ever seen." at the instant ordway was hardly conscious of the immensity of his relief, but some hours later, after the early closing of the warehouse, when he walked slowly back along the road to cedar hill, it seemed to him that his life had settled again into its quiet monotonous spaces. the peaceful fields on either side, with their short crop of live-ever-lasting, in which a few lonely sheep were browsing, appeared to him now as a part of the inward breadth and calm of the years that he had spent in tappahannock. in the loneliness of the road he could tell himself that the fear of gus wherry was gone for a time at least, yet the next day upon going into town he was aware of the same nervous shrinking from the people he passed, from the planters hanging about the warehouse, from baxter buried behind his local newspaper. "they've got a piece as long as your arm about you in the tappahannock _herald_, smith," cried baxter, chuckling; and ordway felt himself redden painfully with apprehension. not until the evening, when he came out upon the platform under the floating buntings in the town hall, did he regain entirely the self-possession which he had lost in the presence of milly trend. in its white and red decorations, with the extravagant glare of its gas-jets, the hall had assumed almost a festive appearance; and as ordway glanced at the crowded benches and doorways, he forgot the trivial political purpose he was to serve, in the more human relation in which he stood to the men who had gathered to hear him speak. these men were his friends, and if they believed in him he felt a triumphant conviction that they had seen their belief justified day by day, hour by hour, since he had come among them. in the crowd of faces before him, he recognised, here and there, workingmen whom he had helped--operatives in jasper trend's cotton mills, or in the smaller factories which combined with the larger to create the political situation in tappahannock. closer at hand he saw the shining red face of major leary; the affectionate freckled face of banks; the massive benevolent face of baxter. as he looked at them an emotion which was almost one of love stirred in his breast, and he felt the words he had prepared dissolve and fade from his memory to reunite in an appeal of which he had not thought until this minute. there was something, he knew now, for him to say to-night--something so infinitely large that he could utter it only because it rose like love or sorrow to his lips. of all the solemn moments when he had stood before these men, with his open bible, in the green field or in the little grove of pines, there was none so solemn, he felt, as the approaching instant in which he would speak to them no longer as a man to children, but as a man to men. on the stage before him baxter was addressing the house, his soft, persuasive voice mingling with a sympathetic murmur from the floor. the applause which had broken out at ordway's entrance had not yet died away, and with each mention of his name, with each allusion to his services to tappahannock, it burst forth again, enthusiastic, irrepressible, overwhelming. never before, it seemed to him, sitting there on the platform with his roughened hands crossed on his knees, had he felt himself to be so intimately a part of the community in which he lived. never before--not even when he had started this man in life, had bought off that one's mortgage or had helped another to struggle free of drink, had he come quite so near to the pathetic individual lives that compose the mass. they loved him, they believed in him, and they were justified! at the moment it seemed to him nothing--less than nothing--that they should make him mayor of tappahannock. in this one instant of understanding they had given him more than any office--than any honour. while he sat there outwardly so still, so confident of his success, it seemed to him that in the exhilaration of the hour he was possessed of a new and singularly penetrating insight into life. not only did he see further and deeper than he had ever seen before, but he looked beyond the beginning of things into the causes and beyond the ending of them into the results. he saw himself and why he was himself as clearly as he saw his sin and why he had sinned. out of their obscurity his father and his mother returned to him, and as he met the bitter ironical smile of the one and the curved black brows and red, half open mouth of the other, he knew himself to be equally the child of each, for he understood at last why he was a mixture of strength and weakness, of gaiety and sadness, of bitterness and compassion. his short, troubled childhood rushed through his thoughts, and with that swiftness of memory which comes so often in tragic moments, he lived over again--not separately and in successive instants--but fully, vitally, and in all the freshness of experience, the three events which he saw now, in looking back, as the milestones upon his road. again he saw his mother as she lay in her coffin, with her curved black brows and half open mouth frozen into a joyous look, and in that single fleeting instant he passed through his meeting with the convict at the wayside station, and through the long suspended minutes when he had waited in the stock exchange for the rise in the market which did not come. and these things appeared to him, not as detached and obscure remnants of his past, but clear and delicate and vivid as if they were projected in living colours against the illumination of his mind. they were there not to bewilder, but to make plain; not to accuse, but to vindicate. "everything is clear to me now and i see it all," he thought, "and if i can only keep this penetration of vision nothing will be harder to-morrow than it is to-night." in his whole life there was not an incident too small for him to remember it and to feel that it was significant of all the rest; and he knew that if he could have seen from the beginning as clearly as he saw to-night, his past would not have been merely different, it would have been entirely another than his own. baxter had stopped, and turning with an embarrassed upheaval of his whole body, he spoke to ordway, who rose at his words and came slowly forward to the centre of the stage. a hoarse murmur, followed by a tumult of shouts, greeted him, while he stood for a moment looking silently among those upturned faces for the faces of the men to whom he must speak. "that one will listen because i nursed him back to life, and that one because i brought him out of ruin--and that one and that one--" he knew them each by name, and as his gaze travelled from man to man he felt that he was seeking a refuge from some impending evil in the shelter of the good deeds that he had done. though he held a paper in his hand, he did not look at it, for he had found his words in that instant of illumination when, seated upon the stage, he had seen the meaning of his whole life made plain. the present event and the issue of it no longer concerned him; he had ceased to fear, even to shrink from the punishment that was yet to come. in the completeness with which he yielded himself to the moment, he felt that he was possessed of the calm, almost of the power of necessity; and he experienced suddenly the sensation of being lifted and swept forward on one of the high waves of life. he spoke rapidly, without effort, almost without consciousness of the words he uttered, until it seemed to him presently that it was the torrent of his speech which carried him outward and upward with that strange sense of lightness, of security. and this lightness, this security belonged not to him, but to some outside current of being. * * * * * his speech was over, and he had spoken to these factory workers as no man had spoken before him in tappahannock. with his last word the silence had held tight and strained for a minute, and then the grateful faces pressed round him and the ringing cheers passed through the open windows out into the street. his body was still trembling, but as he stood there with his sparkling blue eyes on the house, he looked gay and boyish. he had made his mark, he had spoken his best speech, and he had touched not merely the factory toilers in tappahannock, but that common pulse of feeling in which all humanity is made one. then the next instant, while he still waited, he was aware of a new movement upon the platform behind him, and a man came forward and stopped short under the gas jet, which threw a flickering yellow light upon his face. though he had seen him but once, he recognized him instantly as the short, long-nosed, irascible manager of the cotton mills, and with the first glance into his face he had heard already the unspoken question and the reply. "may i ask you, mr. smith," began the little man, suddenly, "if you can prove your right to vote or to hold office in virginia?" ordway's gaze passed beyond him to rest upon baxter and major leary, who sat close together, genial, elated, rather thirsty. at the moment he felt sorry for baxter--not for himself. "no," he answered with a smile which threw a humorous light upon the question, "i cannot--can you prove yours?" the little man cleared his throat with a sniffling sound, and when he spoke again it was in a high nasal voice, as if he had become suddenly very excited or very angry. "is your name daniel smith?" he asked, with a short laugh. the question was out at last and the silence in which ordway stood was like the suspension between thought and thought. all at once he found himself wondering why he had lived in hourly terror of this instant, for now that it was upon him, he saw that it was no more tragic, no less commonplace, than the most ordinary instant of his life. as in the past his courage had revived in him with the first need of decisive action, so he felt it revive now, and lifting his head, he looked straight into the angry, little eyes of the man who waited, under the yellow gaslight, on the platform before him. "my name," he answered, still smiling, "is daniel ordway." there was no confusion in his mind, no anxiety, no resentment. instead the wonderful brightness of a moment ago still shone in his thoughts, and while he appeared to rest his sparkling gaze on the face of his questioner, he was seeing, in reality, the road by which he had come to tappahannock, and at the beginning of the road the prison, and beyond the prison the whole of his past life. "did you serve a term in prison before you came here?" "yes." "were you tried and convicted in new york?" "yes." "were you guilty?" looking over the head of the little man, ordway's gaze travelled slowly across the upturned faces upon the floor of the house. hardly a man passed under his look whom he had not assisted once at least in the hour of his need. "i saved that one from drink," he thought almost joyfully, "that one from beggary--i stood side by side with that other in the hour of his shame----" "were you guilty?" repeated the high nasal voice in his ear. his gaze came quickly back, and as it passed over the head of baxter, he was conscious again of a throb of pity. "yes," he answered for the last time. then, while the silence lasted, he turned from the platform and went out of the hall into the night. chapter xi between man and woman he walked rapidly to the end of the street, and then slackened his pace almost unconsciously as he turned into the country road. the night had closed in a thick black curtain over the landscape, and the windows of the negroes' cabins burned like little still red flames along the horizon. straight ahead the road was visible as a pale, curving streak across the darkness. a farmer, carrying a lantern, came down the path leading from the fields, and hearing ordway's footsteps in the road, flashed the light suddenly into his face. upon recognition there followed a cheerful "good-night!" and the offer of the use of the lantern to cedar hill. "it's a black night and you'll likely have trouble in keeping straight. i've been to look after a sick cow, but i can feel my way up to the house in two minutes." "thank you," returned ordway, smiling as the light shone full in his face, "but my feet are accustomed to the road." he passed on, while the farmer turned at the gate by the roadside, to shout cheerfully after him: "well, good-night--mayor!" the gate closed quickly, and the ray of the lantern darted like a pale yellow moth across the grass. as ordway went on it seemed to him that the darkness became tangible, enveloping--that he had to fight his way through it presently as through water. the little red flames danced along the horizon until he wondered if they were burning only in his imagination. he felt tired and dazed as if his body had been beaten into insensibility, but the hour through which he had just passed appeared to have left merely a fading impression upon his brain. not only had he ceased to care, he had ceased to think of it. when he tried now to recall the manager of the cotton mills, it was to remember, with aversion, his angry little eyes, his high nasal voice, and the wart upon the end of his long nose. at the instant these physical details were the only associations which the man's name presented to his thoughts. the rest was something so insignificant that it had escaped his memory. he felt in a vague way that he was sorry for baxter, yet this very feeling of sympathy bored and annoyed him. it was plainly ridiculous to be sorry for a person as rich, as fat, as well fed as his employer. wherever he looked the little red flames flickered and waved in the fields, and when he lifted his eyes to the dark sky, he saw them come and go in short, scintillant flashes, like fire struck from an anvil. they were in his brain, he supposed, after all, and so was this tangible darkness, and so, too, was this indescribable delicacy and lightness with which he moved. everything was in his brain, even his ridiculous pity for baxter and the angry-eyed little manager with the wart on his long nose. he could see these things distinctly, though he had forgotten everything that had been so clear to him while he stood on the stage of the town hall. his past life and the prison and even the illumination in which he had remembered them so vividly were obscured now as if they, too, had been received into the tangible darkness. from the road behind him the sound of footsteps reached him suddenly, and he quickened his pace with an impulse, rather than a determination of flight. but the faster he walked the faster came the even beat of the footsteps, now rising, now falling with a rhythmic regularity in the dust of the road. once he glanced back, but he could see nothing because of the encompassing blackness, and in the instant of his delay it seemed to him that the pursuit gained steadily upon him, still moving with the regular muffled beat of the footsteps in the thick dust. a horror of recognition had come over him, and as he walked on breathlessly, now almost running, it occurred to him, like an inspiration, that he might drop aside into the fields and so let his pursuer pass on ahead. the next instant he realised that the darkness could not conceal the abrupt pause of his flight--that as those approaching footsteps fell on his ears, so must the sound of his fall on the ears of the man behind him. then a voice called his name, and he stopped short, and stood, trembling from head to foot, by the side of the road. "smith!" cried the voice, "if it's you, smith, for god's sake stop a minute!" "yes, it's i," he answered, waiting, and a moment afterward the hand of banks reached out of the night and clasped his arm. "hold on," said banks, breathing hard, "i'm all blown." his laboured breath came with a struggling violence that died gradually away, but while it lasted the strain of the meeting, the awkwardness of the emotional crisis, seemed suddenly put off--suspended. now in the silence the tension became so great that, drawing slightly away from the detaining hold, ordway was about to resume his walk. at his first movement, however, banks clung the more firmly to his arm. "oh, damn it, smith!" he burst out, and with the exclamation ordway felt that the touch of flesh and blood had reached to the terrible loneliness in which he stood. in a single oath banks had uttered the unutterable spirit of prayer. "you followed me?" asked ordway quietly, while the illusions of the flight, the physical delicacy and lightness, the tangible darkness, the little red flames in the fields, departed from him. with the first hand that was laid on his own, his nature swung back into balance, and he felt that he possessed at the moment a sanity that was almost sublime. "as soon as i could get out i came. there was such a crush," said banks, "i thought i'd catch up with you at once, but it was so black i couldn't see my hand before me. in a little while i heard footsteps, so i kept straight on." "i wish you hadn't, banks." "but i had to." his usually cheerful voice sounded hoarse and throaty. "i ain't much of a chap at words, smith, you know that, but i want just to say that you're the best friend i ever had, and i haven't forgot it--i haven't forgot it," he repeated, and blew his nose. "nothing that that darn fool of a manager said to-night can come between you and me," he went on laboriously after a minute. "if you ever want my help, by thunder, i'll go to hell and back again for you without a word." stretching out his free hand ordway laid it upon his friend's shoulder. "you're a first-rate chap, banks," he said cheerfully, at which a loud sob burst from banks, who sought to disguise it the instant afterward in a violent cough. "you're a first-rate chap," repeated ordway gently, "and i'm glad, in spite of what i said, that you came after me just now. i'm going away to-morrow, you know, and it's probable that i shan't see you again." "but won't you stay on in tappahannock? in two weeks all this will blow over and things will be just what they were before." ordway shook his head, a movement which banks felt, though he did not see it. "no, i'll go away, it's best," he answered, and though his voice had dropped to a dull level there was still a cheerful sound to it, "i'll go away and begin again in a new place." "then i'll go, too," said banks. "what! and leave milly? no, you won't come. banks, you'll stay here." "but i'll see you sometimes, shan't i?" "perhaps?--that's likely, isn't it?" "yes, that's likely," repeated banks, and fell silent from sheer weight of sorrow. "at least you'll let me go with you to the station?" he said at last, after a long pause in which he had been visited by one of those acute flashes of sympathy which are to the heart what intuition is to the intellect. "why, of course," responded ordway, more touched by the simple request than he had been even by the greater loyalty. "you may do that, banks, and i'll thank you for it. and now go back to tappahannock," he added, "i must take the midday train and there are a few preparations i've still to make." "but where will you go?" demanded banks, swinging round again after he had turned from him. "where?" repeated ordway blankly, and he added indifferently, "i hadn't thought." "the midday train goes west," said banks. "then, i'll go west. it doesn't matter." banks had already started off, when turning back suddenly, he caught ordway's hand and wrung it in a grip that hurt. then without speaking again, he hurried breathlessly in the direction from which he had come. a few steps beyond the cross-roads ordway saw through the heavy foliage the light in the dining-room at cedar hill. then as he entered the avenue, he lost sight of it again, until he had rounded the curve that swept up to the front porch. at his knock emily opened the door, with a lamp held in her hand, and he saw her face, surrounded by dim waves of hair, shining pale and transparent in the glimmering circle of light. as he followed her into the dining-room, he realised that after the family had gone upstairs to bed, she had sat at her sewing under the lamp and waited for his knock. at the knowledge a sense of comfort, of homeliness came over him, and he felt all at once that his misery was not so great as he had believed it to be a moment ago. "may i get you something?" she asked, placing the lamp upon the table and lowering the wick that the flame might not shine on his pallid and haggard face. he shook his head; then as she turned from him toward the hearth, he followed her and stood looking down at the smouldering remains of a wood fire. her work-basket and a pile of white ruffles which she had been hemming were on the table, but moved by a feeling of their utter triviality in the midst of a tragedy she vaguely understood, she swept them hurriedly into a chair, and came over to lay her hand upon his arm. "what can i do? oh, what can i do?" she asked. taking her hand from his sleeve, he held it for an instant in his grasp, as if the pressure of her throbbing palm against his revived some living current under the outer deadness that enveloped him. "i am going away from tappahannock to-morrow, emily," he said. "to-morrow?" she repeated, and laid her free hand upon his shoulder with a soothing, motherly gesture--a gesture which changed their spiritual relations to those of a woman and a child. "a man asked me three questions to-night," he went on quietly, yet in a voice which seemed to feel a pang in every word it uttered. "he asked me if my name was daniel smith, and i answered--no." as he hesitated, she lifted her face and smiled at him, with a smile which he knew to be the one expression of love, of comprehension, that she could offer. it was a smile which a mother might have bent upon a child that was about to pass under the surgeon's knife, and it differed from tears only in that it offered courage and not weakness. "he asked me if i had been in prison before i came to tappahannock--and i answered--yes." his voice broke, rather than ceased, and lifting his gaze from her hands he looked straight into her wide-open eyes. the smile which she had turned to him a moment before was still on her lips, frozen there in the cold pallor of her face. her eyes were the only things about her which seemed alive, and they appeared to him now not as eyes but as thoughts made visible. bending her head quickly she kissed the hand which enclosed her own. "i still believe," she said, and looked into his face. "but it is true," he replied slowly. "but it is not the whole truth," she answered, "and for that reason it is half a lie." "yes, it is not the whole truth," he repeated, in his effort to catch something of her bright courage. "why should they judge you by that and by nothing else?" she demanded with passion. "if that was true, is not your life in tappahannock true also?" "to you--to you," he answered, "but to-morrow everything will be forgotten about me except the fact that because i had been in prison, i have lived a lie." "you are wrong--oh, believe me, you are wrong," she said softly, while her tears broke forth and streamed down her white face. "no," he returned patiently, as if weighing her words in his thoughts, "i am right, and my life here is wasted now from the day i came. all that i do from this moment will be useless. i must go away." "but where?" she questioned passionately, as banks had questioned before her. "where?" he echoed, "i don't know--anywhere. the midday train goes west." "and what will you do in the new place?" she asked through her tears. he shook his head as if the question hardly concerned him. "i shall begin again," he answered indifferently at last. she was turning hopelessly from him, when her eyes fell upon a slip of yellow paper which beverly had placed under a vase on the mantel, and drawing it out, she glanced at the address before giving it into ordway's hands. "this must have come for you in the afternoon," she said, "i did not see it." taking the telegram from her, he opened it slowly, and read the words twice over. "your father died last night. will you come home? "richard ordway." book third the larger prison chapter i the return to life as the train rounded the long curve, ordway leaned from the window and saw spread before him the smiling battlefields that encircled botetourt. from the shadow and sunlight of the distance a wind blew in his face, and he felt suddenly younger, fresher, as if the burden of the years had been lifted from him. the botetourt to which he was returning was the place of his happiest memories; and closing his eyes to the landscape, he saw lydia standing under the sparrows that flew out from the ivied walls of the old church. he met her pensive gaze; he watched her faint smile under the long black feather in her hat. "his death was unexpected," said a strange voice in his ear, "but for the past five years i've seen that he was a failing man." the next instant his thoughts had scattered like startled birds, and without turning his head, he sat straining his ears to follow the conversation that went on, above the roar of the train, in the seat behind him. "had a son, didn't he?" inquired the man who had not spoken. "what's become of him, i'd like to know? i mean the chap who went to smash somewhere in the north." "oh, he misappropriated trust funds and got found out and sent to prison. when he came out, he went west, i heard, and struck a gold mine, but, all the same, he left his wife and children for the old man to look after. ever seen his wife? well, she's a downright saint, if there ever lived one." "and yet he went wrong, the more's the pity." "it's a funny thing," commented the first speaker, who was evidently of a philosophic bent, "but i've often noticed that a good wife is apt to make a bad husband. it looks somehow as if male human nature, like the irish members, is obliged to sit on the opposition bench. the only example that ever counts with it, is an example that urges the other way." "well, what about this particular instance? i hope at least that she has come into the old man's money?" "nobody can tell, but it's generally believed that the two children will get the most of it. the son left a boy and a girl when he went to prison, you know." "ah, that's rather a pity, isn't it?" "well, i can't say--they've got good blood as well as bad, when it comes to that. my daughter went to school with the girl, and she was said to be, by long odds, the most popular member of her class. she graduated last spring, and people tell me that she has turned out to be the handsomest young woman in botetourt." "like the mother?" "no, dark and tall, with those snapping blue eyes of her grandmother's----" * * * * * so alice was no longer the little girl in short white skirts, outstanding like a ballet dancer's! there was a pang for him in the thought, and he tried in vain to accustom himself to the knowledge that she would meet him to-night as a woman, not as a child. he remembered the morning when she had run out, as he passed up the staircase, to beg him to come in to listen to her music lesson; and with the sound of the stumbling scales in his ears, he felt again that terrible throbbing of his pulses and the dull weight of anguish which had escaped at last in an outburst of bitterness. with a jolting motion the train drew up into the little station, and following the crowd that pressed through the door of the car, he emerged presently into the noisy throng of negro drivers gathered before the rusty vehicles which were waiting beside the narrow pavement. pushing aside the gaily decorated whips which encircled him at his approach, he turned, after a moment's hesitation, into one of the heavily shaded streets, which seemed to his awakened memory to have remained unaltered since the afternoon upon which he had left the town almost twenty years ago. the same red and gold maples stirred gently above his head; the same silent, green-shuttered houses were withdrawn behind glossy clusters of microphylla rose-creepers. even the same shafts of sunshine slanted across the roughly paved streets, which were strewn thickly with yellowed leaves. it was to ordway as if a pleasant dream had descended upon the place, and had kept unchanged the particular golden stillness of that autumn afternoon when he had last seen it. all at once he realised that what tappahannock needed was not progress, but age; and he saw for the first time that the mellowed charm of botetourt was relieved against the splendour of an historic background. not the distinction of the present, but the enchantment of the past, produced this quality of atmosphere into which the thought of tappahannock entered like a vulgar discord. the dead, not the living, had built these walls, had paved these streets, had loved and fought and starved beneath these maples; and it was the memory of such solemn things that steeped the little town in its softening haze of sentiment. a thrill of pleasure, more intense than any he had known for months, shot through his heart, and the next instant he acknowledged with a sensation of shame that he was returning, not only to his people, but to his class. was this all that experience, that humiliation, could do for one--that he should still find satisfaction in the refinements of habit, in the mere external pleasantness of life? as he passed the old church he saw that the sparrows still fluttered in and out of the ivy, which was full of twittering cries like a gigantic bird's nest, and he had suddenly a ghostly feeling as if he were a moving shadow under shadowy trees and unreal shafts of sunlight. a moment later he almost held his breath lest the dark old church and the dreamy little town should vanish before his eyes and leave him alone in the outer space of shadows. coming presently under a row of poplars to the street in which stood his father's house--a square red brick building with white doric columns to the portico--he saw with a shock of surprise that the funeral carriages were standing in a solemn train for many blocks. until that moment it had not occurred to him that he might come in time to look on the dead face of the man who had not forgiven him while he was alive; and at first he shivered and shrank back as if hesitating to enter the door that had been so lately closed against him. an old negro driver, who sat on the curbing, wiping the broad black band on his battered silk hat with a red bandanna handkerchief, turned to speak to him with mingled sympathy and curiosity. "ef'n you don' hurry up, you'll miss de bes' er hit, marster," he remarked. "dey's been gwine on a pow'ful long time, but i'se been a-lisenin' wid all my years en i ain' hyearn nairy a sh'ut come thoo' de do'. lawd! lawd! dey ain' mo'n like i mo'n, caze w'en dey buried my salviny i set up sech a sh'uttin' dat i bu'st two er my spar ribs clean ter pieces." still muttering to himself he fell to polishing his old top hat more vigorously, while ordway quickened his steps with an effort, and entering the gate, ascended the brick walk to the white steps of the portico. a wide black streamer hung from the bell handle, so pushing open the door, which gave noiselessly before him, he entered softly into the heavy perfume of flowers. from the room on his right, which he remembered dimly as the formal drawing-room in the days of his earliest childhood, he heard a low voice speaking as if in prayer; and looking across the threshold, he saw a group of black robed persons kneeling in the faint light which fell through the chinks in the green shutters. the intense odour of lilies awoke in him a sharp anguish, which had no association in his thoughts with his father's death, and which he could not explain until the incidents of his mother's funeral crowded, one by one, into his memory. the scent of lilies was the scent of death in his nostrils, and he saw again the cool, high-ceiled room in the midst of which her coffin had stood, and through the open windows the wide green fields in which spring was just putting forth. that was nearly thirty years ago, yet the emotion he felt at this instant was less for his father who had died yesterday than for his mother whom he had lost while he was still a child. at his entrance no one had observed him, and while the low prayer went on, he stood with bowed head searching among the veiled figures about the coffin for the figure of his wife. was that lydia, he wondered, kneeling there in her mourning garments with her brow hidden in her clasped hands? and as he looked at her it seemed to him that she had never lifted the black veil which she had lowered over her face at their last parting. though he was outwardly now among his own people, though the physical distance which divided him from his wife and children was barely a dozen steps, the loneliness which oppressed him was like the loneliness of the prison; and he understood that his real home was not here, but in tappahannock--that his true kinship was with the labourers whose lives he had shared and whose bitter poverty he had lessened. in the presence of death he was conscious of the space, the luxury, the costly funeral wreaths that surrounded him; and these external refinements of living produced in him a sensation of shyness, as if he had no longer a rightful place in the class in which he had been born. against his will he grew ashamed of his coarse clothes and his roughened hands; and with this burning sense of humiliation a wave of homesickness for tappahannock swept over him--for the dusty little town, with its hot, close smells and for the blue tent of sky which was visible from his ivied window at cedar hill. then he remembered, with a pang, that even from tappahannock he had been cast out. for the second time since his release from prison, he felt cowed and beaten, like an animal that is driven to bay. the dead man in his coffin was more closely woven into his surroundings than was the living son who had returned to his inheritance. as the grave faces looked back at him at the end of the prayer, he realised that they belonged to branches, near or distant, of the ordway connections. with the first glimpse of his figure in the doorway there came no movement of recognition; then he observed a slight start of surprise--or was it dismay? he knew that lydia had seen him at last, though he did not look at her. it appeared to him suddenly that his return was an insult to her as well as to the dead man who lay there, helpless yet majestic, in the centre of the room. flight seemed to him at the instant the only amendment in his power, and he had made an impulsive start back from the threshold, when the strained hush was broken by a word that left him trembling and white as from a blow. "father!" cried a voice, in the first uncontrollable joy of recognition; and with an impetuous rush through the crowd that surrounded her, alice threw herself into his arms. a mist swam before his eyes and he lost the encircling faces in a blur of tears; but as she clung to his breast and he held her close, he was conscious of a fierce joy that throbbed, like a physical pain, in his throat. the word which she had uttered had brought his soul up from the abyss as surely as if it were lifted by the hands of angels; and with each sobbing breath of happiness she drew, he felt that her nature was knit more firmly into his. the repulse he had received the moment before was forgotten, and while he held her drawn apart in the doorway, the silence of lydia, and even the reproach of the dead man, had ceased to affect him. in that breathless, hysterical rush to his embrace alice saved him to-day as emily's outstretched hand had saved him three years before. "they did not tell me! oh, why, did they not tell me?" cried the girl, lifting her head from his breast, and the funeral hush that shrouded the room could not keep back the ecstasy in her voice. even when after the first awkward instant the others gathered around him, nervous, effusive, friendly, alice still clung to his hands, kissing first one and then the other and then both together, with the exquisite joyous abandonment of a child. lydia had kissed him, weeping softly under her long black veil, and hiding her pale, lovely face the moment afterwards in her clasped hands. dick, his son, had touched his cheek with his fresh young mouth; richard ordway, his father's brother, had shaken him by the hand; and the others, one and all, kinsmen and kinswomen, had given him their embarrassed, yet kindly, welcome. but it was on alice that his eyes rested, while he felt his whole being impelled toward her in a recovered rapture that was almost one of worship. in her dark beauty, with her splendid hair, her blue, flashing ordway eyes, and her lips which were too red and too full for perfection, she appeared to him the one vital thing among the mourning figures in this house of death. her delight still ran in little tremors through her limbs, and when a moment later, she slipped her hand through his arm, and followed lydia and richard ordway down the steps, and into one of the waiting carriages, he felt that her bosom quivered with the emotion which the solemn presence of his father had forced back from her lips. chapter ii his own place some hours later when he sat alone in his room, he told himself that he could never forget the drive home from the cemetery in the closed carriage. lydia had raised her veil slightly, as if in a desire for air, and as she sat with her head resting against the lowered blind, he could trace the delicate, pale lines of her mouth and chin, and a single wisp of her ash blond hair which lay heavily upon her forehead. not once had she spoken, not once had she met his eyes of her own accord, and he had discovered that she leaned almost desperately upon the iron presence of richard ordway. had his sin, indeed, crushed her until she had not power to lift her head? he asked passionately, with a sharper remorse than he had ever felt. "i am glad that you were able to come in time," richard ordway remarked in his cold, even voice; and after this the rattle of the wheels on the cobblestones in the street was the only sound which broke the death-like stillness in which they sat. no, he could never forget it, nor could he forget the bewildering effect of the sunshine when they opened the carriage door. beside the curbing a few idle negroes were left of the crowd that had gathered to watch the coffin borne through the gate, and the pavement was thick with dust, as if many hurrying feet had tramped by since the funeral had passed. as they entered the house the scent of lilies struck him afresh with all the agony of its associations. the shutters were still closed, the chairs were still arranged in their solemn circle, the streamer of crape, hurriedly untied from the bell handle, still lay where it had been thrown on the library table; and as he crossed the threshold, he trod upon some fading lilies which had fallen, unnoticed, from a funeral wreath. then, in the dining-room, richard ordway poured out a glass of whiskey, and in the very instant when he was about to raise it to his lips, he put it hurriedly down and pushed the decanter aside with an embarrassed and furtive movement. "do you feel the need of a cup of coffee, daniel?" he asked in a pleasant, conciliatory tone, "or will you have only a glass of seltzer?" "i am not thirsty, thank you," daniel responded shortly, and the next moment he asked alice to show him the room in which he would stay. with laughing eagerness she led him up the great staircase to the chamber in which he had slept as a boy. "it's just next to dick's," she said, "and mother's and mine are directly across the hall. at first we thought of putting you in the red guest-room, but that's only for visitors, so we knew you would be sure to like this better." "yes, i'll like this better," he responded, and then as she would have moved away, he caught her, with a gesture of anguish, back to his arms. "you remember me, alice, my child? you have not forgotten me?" she laughed merrily, biting her full red lips the moment afterward to check the sound. "why, how funny of you! i was quite a big girl--don't you remember?--when you went away. it was so dull afterwards that i cried for days, and that was why i was so overjoyed when mamma told me you would come back. it was never dull when you lived at home with us, because you would always take me to the park or the circus whenever i grew tired of dolls. nobody did that after you went away and i used to cry and kick sometimes thinking that they would tell you and bring you back." "and you remembered me chiefly because of the park and the circus?" he asked, smiling for joy, as he kissed her hand which lay on his sleeve. "oh, i never forget anything, you know. mamma even says that about me. i remember my first nurse and the baker's boy with red cheeks who used to bring me pink cakes when i was three years old. no, i never forget--i never forget," she repeated with vehemence. animation had kindled her features into a beauty of colour which made her eyes bluer and brighter and softened the too intense contrast of her full, red lips. "all these years i've hoped that you would come back and that things would change," she said impulsively, her words tripping rapidly over one another. "everything is so dreadfully grave and solemn here. grandfather hated noise so that he would hardly let me laugh if he was in the house. then mamma's health is wrecked, and she lies always on the sofa, and never goes out except for a drive sometimes when it is fair." "mamma's health is wrecked?" he repeated inquiringly, as she paused. "oh, that's what everybody says about her--her health is wrecked. and uncle richard is hardly any better, for he has a wife whose health is wrecked also. and dick--he isn't sick, but he might as well be, he is so dull and plodding and over nice----" "and you alice?" "i? oh, i'm not dull, but i'm unhappy--awfully--you'll find that out. i like fun and pretty clothes and new people and strange places. i want to marry and have a home of my own and a lot of rings like mamma's, and a carriage with two men on the box, and to go to europe to buy things whenever i please. that's the way molly burridge does and she was only two classes ahead of me. how rough your hands are, papa, and what a funny kind of shirt you have on. do people dress like that where you came from? well, i don't like it, so you'll have to change." she had gone out at last, forgetting to walk properly in her mourning garments, tripping into a run on the threshold, and then checking herself with a prim, mocking look over her shoulder. not until the door had closed with a slam behind her black skirt, did ordway's gaze turn from following her and fix itself on the long mirror between the windows, in which he could see, as alice had seen the moment before, his roughened hands, his carelessly trimmed hair and his common clothes. he was dressed as the labourers dressed on sundays in tappahannock; though, he remembered now, that in that crude little town he had been conspicuous for the neatness, almost the jauntiness, of his attire. as he laid out presently on the bed his few poor belongings, he told himself, with determination, that for alice's sake even this must be changed. he was no longer of the class of baxter, of banks, of mrs. twine. all that was over, and he must return now into the world in which his wife and his children had kept a place. to do alice honour--at least not to do her further shame--would become from this day, he realised, the controlling motive of his life. then, as he looked down at the coarse, unshapely garments upon the delicate counterpane, he knew that daniel smith and daniel ordway were now parted forever. he was still holding one of the rough blue shirts in his hand, when a servant entered to inquire if there was anything that he might need. the man, a bright young mulatto, was not one of the old family slaves; and while he waited, alert and intelligent, upon the threshold, ordway was seized by a nervous feeling that he was regarded with curiosity and suspicion by the black rolling eyes. "where is uncle boaz? he used to wait upon me," he asked. "he's daid, suh. he drapped down daid right on de do' step." "and aunt mirandy?" "she's daid, too, en' i'se her chile." "oh, you are, are you?" said ordway, and he had again the sensation that he was watched through inquisitive eyes. "that is all now," he added presently, "you may go," and it was with a long breath of relief that he saw the door close after the figure of aunt mirandy's son. when a little later he dressed himself and went out into the hall, he found, to his annoyance, that he walked with a cautious and timid step like that of a labourer who has stumbled by accident into surroundings of luxury. as he descended the wide curving staircase, with his hand on the mahogany balustrade, the sound of his footsteps seemed to reverberate disagreeably through the awful funereal silence in which he moved. if he could only hear alice's laugh, dick's whistle, or even the garrulous flow of the negro voices that he had listened to in his childhood. with a pang he recalled that uncle boaz was dead, and his heart swelled as he remembered how often he had passed up and down this same staircase on the old servant's shoulder. at that age he had felt no awe of the shining emptiness and the oppressive silence. then he had believed himself to be master of all at which he looked; now he was conscious of that complete detachment from his surroundings which produces almost a sense of the actual separation of soul and body. reaching the hall below, he found that some hurried attempt had been made to banish or to conceal the remaining signs of the funeral. the doors and windows were open, the shreds of crape had disappeared from the carpet, and the fading lilies had been swept out upon the graveled walk in the yard. upon entering the library, which invited him by its rows of calf-bound books, he discovered that richard ordway was patiently awaiting him in the large red leather chair which had once been the favourite seat of his father. "before i go home, i think it better to have a little talk with you, daniel," began the old man, as he motioned to a sofa on the opposite side of the turkish rug before the open grate. "it has been a peculiar satisfaction to me to feel that i was able to bring you back in time for the service." "i came," replied daniel slowly, "as soon as i received your telegram." he hesitated an instant and then went on in the same quiet tone in which the other had spoken, "do you think, though, that he would have wished me to come at all?" after folding the newspaper which he had held in his hand, richard laid it, with a courteous gesture upon the table beside him. as he sat there with his long limbs outstretched and relaxed, and his handsome, severe profile resting against the leather back of his chair, the younger man was impressed, as if for the first time, by the curious mixture of strength and refinement in his features. he was not only a cleverer man than his brother had been, he was gentler, smoother, more distinguished on every side. in spite of his reserve, it was evident that he had wished to be kind--that he wished it still; yet this kindness was so removed from the ordinary impulse of humanity that it appeared to his nephew to be in a way as detached and impersonal as an abstract virtue. the very lines of his face were drawn with the precision, the finality, of a geometrical figure. to imagine that they could melt into tenderness was as impossible as to conceive of their finally crumbling into dust. "he would have wished it--he did wish it," he said, after a minute. "i talked with him only a few hours before his death, and he told me then that it was necessary to send for you--that he felt that he had neglected his duty in not bringing you home immediately after your release. he saw at last that it would have been far better to have acted as i strongly advised at the time." "it was his desire, then, that i should return?" asked daniel, while a stinging moisture rose to his eyes at the thought that he had not looked once upon the face of the dead man. "i wish i had known." a slight surprise showed in the other's gesture of response, and he glanced hastily away as he might have done had he chanced to surprise his nephew while he was still without his boots or his shirt. "i think he realised before he died that the individual has no right to place his personal pride above the family tie," he resumed quietly, ignoring the indecency of emotion as he would have ignored, probably, the unclothed body. "i had said much the same thing to him eight years ago, when i told him that he would realise before his death that he was not morally free to act as he had done with regard to you. as a matter of fact," he observed in his trained, legal voice, "the family is, after all, the social unit, and each member is as closely related as the eye to the ear or the right arm to the left. it is illogical to speak of denying one's flesh and blood, for it can't be done." so this was why they had received him. he turned his head away, and his gaze rested upon the boughs of the great golden poplar beyond the window. "it is understood, then," he asked "that i am to come back--back to this house to live?" when he had finished, but not until then, richard ordway looked at him again with his dry, conventional kindness. "if you are free," he began, altering the word immediately lest it should suggest painful associations to his companion's mind, "i mean if you have no other binding engagements, no decided plans for the future." "no, i have made no other plans. i was working as a bookkeeper in a tobacco warehouse in tappahannock." "as a bookkeeper?" repeated richard, as he glanced down inquiringly at the other's hands. "oh, i worked sometimes out of doors, but the position i held was that of confidential clerk." the old man nodded amiably, accepting the explanation with a readiness for which the other was not prepared. "i was about to offer you some legal work in my office," he remarked. "dry and musty stuff, i fear it is, but it's better--isn't it?--for a man to have some kind of occupation----" though the words were uttered pleasantly enough, it seemed to the younger man that the concluding and significant phrase was left unspoken. "some kind of occupation to keep you out of temptation" was what richard had meant to say--what he had withheld, from consideration, if not from humanity. while the horror of the whole situation closed over daniel like a mental darkness, he remembered the sensitive shrinking of lydia on the drive home, the prying, inquisitive eyes of the mulatto servant, the furtive withdrawal of the whiskey by the man who sat opposite to him. with all its attending humiliation and despair, there rushed upon him the knowledge that by the people of his own household he was regarded still as a creature to be restrained and protected at every instant. though outwardly they had received him, instinctively they had repulsed him. the thing which stood between them and himself was neither of their making nor of his. it belonged to their very nature and was woven in with their inner fibre. it was a creation, not of the individual, but of the race, and the law by which it existed was rooted deep in the racial structure. tradition, inheritance, instinct--these were the barriers through which he had broken and which had closed like the impenetrable sea-gates behind him. though he were to live on day by day as a saint among them, they could never forget: though he were to shed his heart's blood for them, they would never believe. to convince them of his sincerity was more hopeless, he understood, than to reanimate their affection. in their very forgiveness they had not ceased to condemn him, and in the shelter which they offered him there would be always a hidden restraint. with the thought it seemed to him that he was stifling in the closeness of the atmosphere, that he must break away again, that he must find air and freedom, though it cost him all else besides. the possibility of his own weakness seemed created in him by their acceptance of it; and he felt suddenly a terror lest the knowledge of their suspicion should drive him to justify it by his future in botetourt. "yes, it is better for me to work," he said aloud. "i hope that i shall be able to make myself of some small use in your office." "there's no doubt of that, i'm sure," responded richard, in his friendliest tone. "it is taken for granted, then, that i shall live on here with my wife and children?" "we have decided that it is best. but as for your wife, you must remember that she is very much of an invalid. do not forget that she has had a sad--a most tragic life." "i promise you that i shall not forget it--make your mind easy." after this it seemed to daniel that there was nothing further to be said; but before rising from his chair, the old man sat for a moment with his thin lips tightly folded and a troubled frown ruffling his forehead. in the dim twilight the profile outlined against the leather chair appeared to have been ground rather than roughly hewn out of granite. "about the disposition of the estate, there were some changes made shortly before your father's death," remarked richard presently. "in the will itself you were not mentioned; a provision was made for your wife and the bulk of the property left to your two children. but in a codicil, which was added the day before your father died, he directed that you should be given a life interest in the house as well as in investments to the amount of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. this is to be paid you in the form of a quarterly allowance, which will yield you a personal income of about six thousand a year." "i understand," replied the younger man, without emotion, almost without surprise. at the moment he was wondering by what name his father had alluded to him in his will. had he spoken of him as "my son," or merely as "daniel ordway"? "that is all, i think," remarked the other, with a movement which expressed, in spite of him, a sensation of relief. with a smile which appeared to be little more than a muscular contraction of his mouth, he held out his hand and stood for a moment, vainly searching for a phrase or a word that would fit the delicate requirements of the occasion. "well, i shall never cease to be thankful that you were with us at the cemetery," he said at last in a tone which was a patent admission that he had failed. then, with a kindly inclination of his head, he released the hand he held and passed at his rapid, yet dignified step out of the house. chapter iii the outward pattern the front door had hardly closed when a breath of freshness blew into the library with the entrance of alice, and a moment afterwards the butler rolled back the mahogany doors of the dining-room and they saw the lighted candles and the chrysanthemums upon the dinner table. "we hardly ever dress," said alice, slipping her hand through his arm, "i wish we did." "well, if you'll only pardon these clothes to-night i'll promise to call on the tailor before breakfast," he returned, smiling, conscious that he watched in anxiety lest the look of delight in his presence should vanish from her face. "oh, it doesn't matter now, because we're in the deepest grief--aren't we?--and mamma isn't coming down. she wants to see you, by the way, just for a minute when you go upstairs. it is to be just for a minute, i was to be very particular about that, as she is broken down. i wonder why they have put so many covers. there is nobody but you and dick. i asked uncle richard, but he said that he wouldn't stay. it's just as well he didn't--he's so dreadfully dull, isn't he, papa?" "all i wish is that i were dull in uncle richard's way," remarked dick, with his boyish air of superiority, "i'd be the greatest lawyer in the state then, when my turn came." "and you'd be even more tiresome than you are now," retorted the girl with a flash of irritation which brought out three fine, nervous wrinkles on her delicate forehead. "well, i shouldn't have your temper anyway," commented dick imperturbably, as he ate his soup. "do you remember, papa, how alice used to bite and scratch as a baby? she'd like to behave exactly that way now if she weren't so tall." "oh, i know alice better than you do," said ordway, in a voice which he tried to make cheerful. the girl sat on his right, and while she choked back her anger, he reached out and catching her hand, held it against his cheek. "we stand together, alice and i," he said softly--"alice and i." as he repeated the words a wave of joy rose in his heart, submerging the disappointment, the bitterness, the hard despair, of the last few hours. here also, as well as in tappahannock, he found awaiting him his appointed task. dick laughed pleasantly, preserving always the unshakable self-possession which reminded his father of richard ordway. he was a good boy, daniel knew, upright, honest, manly, all the things which his grandfather and his great-grandfather had been before him. "then you'll have to stand with geoffrey heath," he said jestingly, "and, by jove, i don't think i'd care for his company." "geoffrey heath?" repeated ordway inquiringly, with his eyes on his daughter, who sat silent and angry, biting her lower lip. her mouth, which he had soon discovered to be her least perfect feature, was at the same time her most expressive one. at her slightest change of mood, he watched it tremble into a smile or a frown, and from a distance it was plainly the first thing one noticed about her face. now, as she sat there, with her eyes on her plate, her vivid lips showed like a splash of carmine in the lustreless pallor of her skin. "oh, he's one of alice's chums," returned dick with his merciless youthful sneer, "she has a pretty lot of them, too, though he is by long odds the worst." "well, he's rich enough anyway," protested alice defiantly, "he keeps beautiful horses and sends me boxes of candy, and i don't care a bit for the rest." "who is he, by the way?" asked daniel. "there was a family of heaths who lived near us in the country when i was a boy. is he one of these?" "he's the son of old rupert heath, who made a million out of some panic in stocks. uncle richard says the father was all right, but he's tried his best to break up alice's craze about geoffrey. but let her once get her nose to the wind and nobody can do anything with her." "well, i can, can't i, darling?" asked ordway, smiling in spite of a jealous pang. the appeal of the girl to him was like the appeal of the finer part of his own nature. her temptations he recognised as the old familiar temptations of his youth, and the kinship between them seemed at the moment something deeper and more enduring than the tie of blood. yet the thought that she was his daughter awoke in him a gratitude that was almost as acute as pain. the emptiness of his life was filled suddenly to over-flowing, and he felt again that he had found here as he had found at tappahannock both his mission and his reward. when dinner was over he left the boy and girl in the library and went slowly, and with a nervous hesitation, upstairs to the room in which lydia was lying on her couch, with a flower-decked tray upon the little inlaid table beside her. as he entered the room something in the luxurious atmosphere--in the amber satin curtains, the white bearskin rugs, the shining mirrors between the windows--recalled the early years of his marriage, and as he remembered them, he realised for the first time the immensity of the change which divided his present existence from his past. the time had been when he could not separate his inner life from his surroundings, and with the thought he saw in his memory the bare cleanliness of the blue guest-room at cedar hill--with its simple white bed, its rag carpet, its faded sampler worked in blue worsteds. that place had become as a sanctuary to him now, for it was there that he had known his most perfect peace, his completest reconciliation with god. as he entered the room lydia raised herself slightly upon her elbow, and without turning her head, nervously pushed back a white silk shawl which she had thrown over her knees. a lamp with an amber shade cast its light on her averted profile, and he noticed that its perfect outline, its serene loveliness, was untouched by suffering. already he had discovered those almost imperceptible furrows between alice's eyebrows, but when lydia looked up at him at last, he saw that her beautiful forehead, under its parting of ash blond hair, was as smooth as a child's. was it merely the madonna-like arrangement of her hair, after all, he wondered, not without bitterness, that had bestowed upon her that appealing expression of injured innocence? "you wished to speak to me, alice said," he began with an awkward gesture, acutely conscious, as he stood there, of the amber light in the room, of the shining waves of her hair, of the delicate perfume which floated from the gold-topped boxes upon her dressing-table. an oval mirror above the mantel gave back to him the reflection of his own roughly clad figure, and the violent contrast between himself and his surroundings stung him into a sense of humiliation that was like a physical smart. "i thought it better to speak to you--uncle richard and dick advised me to----" she broke off in a gentle confusion, lifting her lovely, pensive eyes for the first time to his face. "of course it is better, lydia," he answered gravely. "you must let me know what you wish--you must tell me quite frankly just what you would rather that i should do----" the look of gratitude in her face gave him a sudden inexplicable pang. "i am hardly more than an invalid," she said in a voice that had grown firm and sweet, "uncle richard will tell you----" her reliance upon richard ordway aroused in him a passion of resentment, and for an instant the primitive man in him battled hotly against the renunciation his lips had made. "i know, i understand," he said hurriedly at last. "i appreciate it all and i shall do whatever is in my power to make it easier for you." as he looked at her bowed head a wave of remorse rose in his breast and swept down, one by one, the impulses of anger, of pride, of self-righteousness. "o my dear, my dear, don't you think i know what i have done to you?" he asked, and going a step toward her, he fell on his knees beside the couch and kissed passionately the hand that lay in her lap. "don't you think i know that i have ruined your life?" for a moment her eyes dwelt thoughtfully upon his, and she let her hand lie still beneath his remorseful kisses, until her withdrawal of it had lost any appearance of haste or of discourtesy. "then you will not object to my living on in this way? you will not seek to change anything? you will----" she hesitated and broke off, not impulsively, but with the same clear, sweet voice in which she had put her question. lifting his head, he looked up at her from his knees, and the dumb loneliness in his eyes caused her at last to drop her own to the rug upon which he knelt. "if you will only let me care for you--serve you--work for you," he implored brokenly. "if you will only let me make up, however poorly, something of what you have suffered." a vague discomfort, produced in her by the intensity of his gaze, moved her to draw slightly away from him, while she turned restlessly on her pillows. at the first shade of perplexity, of annoyance, that showed in her face, he felt, with a terrible power of intuition, that she was seeking in vain to estimate each of his heartbroken words at its full value--to read calmly by the light of experience the passion for atonement to which his lips had tried hopelessly to give expression. the wall of personality rose like a visible object between them. he might beat against it in desperation until his strength was gone, yet he knew that it would remain forever impenetrable, and through its thickness there would pass only the loud, unmeaning sound of each other's voice. "have you lost all love for me, lydia?" he asked. "have you even forgotten that i am the father of your children?" as soon as his words were uttered, he stumbled to his feet, horrified by the effect upon her. a change that was like a spasm of physical nausea had shaken her limbs, and he felt rather than saw that she had shrunk from him, convulsed and quivering, until she was crushed powerless against the back of the sofa on which she lay. her whole attitude, he realised, was the result, not of a moral judgment, but of a purely physical antipathy. her horror of him had become instinctive, and she was no more responsible for its existence than a child is responsible for the dread aroused in it by the goblins of nursery rhymes. his life as a convict had not only unclassed him in her eyes, it had put him entirely outside and below the ordinary relations of human beings. to his wife he must remain forever an object of pity, perhaps, but of intense loathing and fear also. the wave of remorse turned to bitterness on his lips, and all the tenderer emotions he had felt when he knelt by her side--the self-reproach, the spiritual yearning, the passion for goodness, all these were extinguished in the sense of desolation which swept over him. "don't be afraid," he said coldly, "i shall not touch you." "it was nothing--a moment's pain," she answered, in a wistful, apologetic voice. she was playing nervously with the fringe of the silk shawl, and he stood for a minute in silence while he watched her long, slender fingers twine themselves in and out of the tasseled ends. then turning aside she pushed away the coffee service on the little table as if its fragrance annoyed her. "is it in your way? do you wish it removed?" he inquired, and when she had nodded in reply, he lifted the tray and carried it in the direction of the door. "don't be afraid. it is all right," he repeated as he went out. back in his own room again, he asked himself desperately if this existence could be possible? would it not be better for him to lose himself a second time--to throw in his lot with a lower class, since his own had rejected him? flinging himself on the floor beside the window, he pressed his forehead against the white painted wood as if the outward violence could deaden the throbbing agony he felt within. again he smelt the delicate, yet intense perfume of lydia's chamber; again he saw her shrinking from him until she lay crushed and white against the back of the sofa; again he watched her features contract with the instinctive repulsion she could not control. the pitiful deprecating gesture with which she had murmured: "it is nothing--a moment's pain," was seared forever like the mark from a burning iron into his memory. "no, no--it cannot be--it is impossible," he said suddenly aloud. and though he had not the strength to frame the rest of his thought into words, he knew that the impossible thing he meant was this life, this torture, this slow martyrdom day by day without hope and without end except in death. after all there was a way of escape, so why should it be closed to him? what were these people to him beside those others whom he might yet serve--the miserable, the poor, the afflicted who would take from him the gifts which his own had rejected? what duty remained? what obligation? what responsibility? step by step he retraced the nineteen years of his marriage, and he understood for the first time, that lydia had given him on her wedding day nothing of herself beyond the gentle, apologetic gesture which had followed that evening her involuntary repulsion. from the beginning to the end she had presided always above, not shared in his destiny. she had wanted what he could give, but not himself, and when he could give nothing more she had shown that she wanted him no longer. while he knelt there, still pressing his forehead against the window sill, the image of her part in his life rose out of the darkness of his mind, which opened and closed over it, and he saw her fixed, shining and immovable, to receive his offerings, like some heathen deity above the sacrificial altar. the next instant the image faded and was replaced by emily as she had looked at him on that last evening with her soft, comforting gaze. the weakness of self pity came over him, and he asked himself in the coward's luxury of hopeless questioning, what emily would have done had she stood to him in lydia's place? he saw her parting from him with her bright courage at the prison doors; he saw her meeting him with her smile of welcome and of forgiveness when he came out. as once before he had risen to the vision of service, so now in the agony of his humiliation he was blessed at last with the understanding of love. for many minutes he knelt there motionless by the open window, beyond which he could see the dimly lighted town on which a few drops of rain had begun to fall. the faint perfume of lilies came up to him from the walk below, where the broken sprays swept from the house were fading under the slow, soft rain. with the fragrance the image of emily dissolved as in a mist to reappear the minute afterwards in a more torturing and human shape. he saw her now with her bright dark hair blown into little curls on her temples, with her radiant brown eyes that penetrated him with their soft, yet animated glance. the vigorous grace of her figure, as he had seen it outlined in her scant blue cotton gown against the background of cedars, remained motionless in his thoughts, bathed in a clear golden light that tormented his senses. rising from his knees with an effort, he struck a match and raised the green shade from the lamp on the table. then while the little blue flame flickered out in his hand, he felt that he was seized by a frantic, an irresistible impulse of flight. gathering his clothes from the bed in the darkness, he pushed them hurriedly back into the bag he had emptied, and with a last glance at the room which had become unendurable to him, opened the door and went with a rapid step down the great staircase and into the hall below. the direction of his journey, as well as the purpose of it, was obscure in his mind. yesterday he had told himself that he could not remain in tappahannock, and to-day he knew that it was impossible for him to live on in his father's house. to pass the hall door meant release--escape to him; beyond that there lay only the distance and the unknown. the lights burned dimly on the staircase, and when he reached the bottom he could see on the carpet the thin reddish stream which issued from the closed door of the library. as he was about to pass by, a short sob fell on his ear, arresting him as authoritatively as if it had been the sound of his own name. while he stood there listening the sobs ceased and then broke out more loudly, now violent, now smothered, now followed by quick, furious steps across the floor within. alice was shut in the room alone and suffering! with the realisation the bag fell from his hand, and turning the knob softly, he opened the door and paused for an instant upon the threshold. at the noise of the opening door the girl made a single step forward, and as she raised her hands to conceal her distorted features, her handkerchief, torn into shreds, fell to the carpet at her feet. around her the room showed other signs of an outbreak of anger--the chairs were pushed hurriedly out of place, the books from the centre table were lying with opened backs on the floor, and a vase of dahlias lay overturned and scattered upon the mantel. "i don't care--i don't care," she repeated, convulsively. "why do they always interfere with me? what right has dick or uncle richard to say whom i shall see or whom i shall not? i hate them all. mamma is always against me--so is uncle richard--so is everybody. they side with dick--always--always." a single wave of her dark hair had fallen low on her forehead, and this, with the violent colour of her mouth, gave her a look that was almost barbaric. the splendid possibilities in her beauty caused him, in the midst of his pity, a sensation of dread. "alice," he said softly, almost in a whisper, and closing the door after him, he came to the middle of the room and stood near her, though still without touching her quivering body. "they side with dick always," she repeated furiously, "and you will side with him, too--you will side with him, too!" for a long pause he looked at her in silence, waiting until the convulsive tremors of her limbs should cease. "i shall never side against my daughter," he said very slowly. "alice, my child, my darling, are you not really mine?" a last quivering sob shook through her and she grew suddenly still. "they will tell you things about me and you will believe them," she answered sternly. "against you, alice? against you?" "you will blame me as they do." "i love you," he returned, almost as sternly as she had spoken. an emotional change, so swift that it startled him, broke in her look, and he saw the bright red of her mouth tremble and open like a flower in her glowing face. at the sight a sharp joy took possession of him--a joy that he could measure only by the depth of the agony out of which he had come. without moving from his place, he stretched out his arms and stood waiting. "alice, i love you," he said. then his arms closed over her, for with the straight flight of a bird she had flown to his breast. chapter iv the letter and the spirit awaking before dawn, he realised with his first conscious thought that his life had been irrevocably settled while he slept. his place was here; he could not break away from it without leaving a ragged edge; and while he had believed himself to be deciding his future actions, that greater destiny, of which his will was only a part, had arranged them for him during the dim pause of the night. he could feel still on his arm, as if it had persisted there through his sleep, the firm, almost viselike pressure of alice's hands, and his whole sensitive nature thrilled in response to this mute appeal to his fatherhood. yes, his purpose, his mission, and his happiness were here in his father's house. at breakfast he found a white rosebud on his plate, and as he took it up, alice rushed in from the garden and threw herself into his arms. "i thought you were never, never coming down!" she exclaimed, choking with laughter, and utterly forgetful of the shadow of death which still lay over the house. "at first i was afraid you might have gone away in the night--just as you went that awful day eight years ago. then i peeped out and saw your boots, so i went back to bed again and fell asleep. oh, i'm so glad you've come! why did you stay away such an age? now, at last, i'll have somebody to take my side against mamma and dick and uncle richard----" "but why against them, alice? surely they love you just as i do?" biting her lips sharply, she bent her heavy brows in a stern and frowning expression. "oh, they're horrid," she said angrily, "they want me to live just as mamma does--shut up all day in a hot room on a hateful sofa. she reads novels all the time, and i despise books. i want to go away and see things and to have plenty of clothes and all the fun i choose. they let dick do just as he pleases because he's a boy, but they try to make me dull and stupid and foolish all because i'm a girl. i won't have it like that and it makes them angry----" "oh, well, we'll have fun together, you and i," returned ordway, with a sinking heart, "but you must wait a bit till i catch up with you. don't be in a precious hurry, if you please." "shall we have a good time, then? shall we?" she persisted, delighted, kissing him with her warm mouth until he was dazzled by her beauty, her fascination, her ardent vitality. "and you will do just what i wish, won't you?" she whispered in his ear as she hung on his shoulder, "you will be good and kind always? and you will make them leave me alone about geoffrey heath?" "about geoffrey heath?" he repeated, and grew suddenly serious. "oh, he's rich and he's fun, too," she responded irritably. "he has asked me to ride one of his horses--the most beautiful chestnut mare in the world--but mamma scolds me about it because she says he's not nice and that he did something once years ago about cards. as if i cared about cards!" by the fear that had gripped him he could judge the strength of her hold on his heart. "alice, be careful--promise me to be careful!" he entreated. at his words he felt her arms relax from their embrace, and she seemed instantly to turn to marble upon his breast. "oh, you're just like the others now. i knew you would be!" she exclaimed, as she drew away from him. before the coldness of her withdrawal he felt that his will went out of him; and in one despairing flight of imagination he saw what the loss of her affection would mean now in his life. an emotion which he knew to be weakness pervaded not only his heart, but his soul and his senses and the remotest fibre of his physical being. "whatever comes i shall always stand by you, alice," he said. though she appeared to be mollified by his subjection, the thin almost imperceptible furrows caused by the moment's anger, were still visible between her eyebrows. there was a certain fascination, he found, in watching these marks of age or of experience come and go on her fresh, childlike forehead, with its lustrous pallor, from which her splendid dark hair rolled back, touched with light, like a moonlit cloud. it was a singular characteristic of her beauty that its appeal was rather to the imagination than to the eye, and the moments, perhaps, when she dazzled least were those in which she conquered most through her enigmatical charm. "you will buy some clothes, first of all, will you not?" she said, when, having finished his breakfast, he rose from the table and went out into the hall. he met her eyes laughing, filled with happiness at the playful authority she assumed, and yet fearful still lest some incautious word of his should bring out those fine nervous wrinkles upon her forehead. "give me a week and i'll promise you a fashion plate," he responded gaily, kissing his hand to her as he went down the steps, and, under the trailing rose creepers at the gate, out into the street. rain had fallen in the night, and the ground was covered with shining puddles beneath which a few autumn leaves showed drenched and beaten. from the golden and red maples above a damp odour was wafted down into his face by the october wind, which now rose and now died away with a gentle sound. in the pale sunshine, which had not yet drained the moisture from the bricks, a wonderful freshness seemed to emanate from the sky and the earth and the white-pillared houses. as he approached the corner, he heard his name called in a clear emphatic voice from the opposite sidewalk, and turning his head, he saw hastening toward him, a little elderly lady in a black silk gown trimmed heavily with bugles. as she neared him, followed by a young negro maid bearing a market basket filled with vegetables, he recognised her as an intimate friend of his mother's, whom he had known familiarly in his childhood as "aunt lucy." it seemed so long now since his mother's death that he was attacked by a ghostly sensation, as if he were dreaming over his past life, while he stood face to face with the old lady's small soldierly figure and listened to the crisp, emphatic tones in which she welcomed him back to botetourt. he remembered his frequent visits to her solemn old house, which she kept so dark that he had always stumbled over the two embroidered ottomans on the parlour hearth. he recalled the smell of spices which had hung about her storeroom, and the raspberry preserves which she had never failed to give him out of a blue china jar. "why, my dear, blessed child, it's such a pleasure to have you back!" she exclaimed now with an effusion which he felt to be the outward veil of some hidden embarrassment. "you must come sometimes and let me talk to you about your mother. i knew your mother so well--i was one of her bridesmaids." seizing his arm in her little firm, clawlike hands, she assured him with animation of her delight at his return, alluding in a shaking voice to his mother, and urging him to come to sit with her whenever he could stand the gloom of her empty house. "and you will give me raspberry preserves out of the blue china jar?" he asked, laughing, "and let me feed crackers to the green parrot?" "what a boy! what a boy!" she returned. "you remember everything. the parrot is dead--my poor polly!--but there is a second." her effusiveness, her volubility, which seemed to him to be the result of concealed embarrassment, produced in him presently a feeling of distrust, almost of resentment, and he remembered the next instant that, in his childhood, she had been looked upon as a creature of uncontrolled charitable impulses. upon the occasion of his last meeting with her was she not hastening upon some ministering errand to the city gaol? at the casual recollection an unreasoning bitterness awoke in his mind; her reiterated raptures fell with a strange effect of irritation upon his ears; and he knew now that he could never bring himself to enter her house again, that he could never accept her preserved raspberries out of the blue china jar. her reception of him, he saw, was but a part of the general reception of botetourt. like her the town would be voluble, unnatural, overdone in its kindness, hiding within itself a furtive constraint as if it addressed its speeches to the sensitive sufferer from some incurable malady. the very tenderness, the exaggerated sympathy in its manner would hardly have been different, he understood, if he had been recently discharged as harmless, yet half-distraught, from an asylum for the insane. as the days went on this idea, instead of dissolving, became unalterably lodged in his brain. gradually he retreated further and further into himself, until the spiritual isolation in which he lived appeared to him more and more like the isolation of the prison. his figure had become a familiar one in the streets of botetourt, yet he lived bodily among the people without entering into their lives or sharing in any degree the emotions that moved their hearts. only in periods of sorrow did he go willingly into the houses of those of his own class, though he had found a way from the beginning to reach the poor, the distressed, or the physically afflicted. his tall, slightly stooping figure, in its loose black clothes, his dark head, with the thick locks of iron gray hair upon the temples, his sparkling blue eyes, his bright, almost boyish smile, and the peculiar, unforgettable charm of his presence--these were the things which those in sickness or poverty began to recognise and to look for. in his own home he lived, except for the fitful tenderness of alice, as much apart as he felt himself to be in the little town. they were considerate of him, but their consideration, he knew, contained an ineradicable suspicion, and in the house as outside, he was surrounded by the watchful regard that is given to the infirm or the mentally diseased. he read this in lydia's gently averted eyes; he felt it in richard ordway's constrained manner; he detected it even in the silent haste with which the servants fulfilled his slightest wish. his work in his uncle's office, he had soon found to be of the most mechanical character, a mere pretext to give him daily employment, and he told himself, in a moment of bitterness that it was convincing proof of the opinion which the older man must hold of his honesty or of his mental capacity. it became presently little more than a hopeless round to him--this morning walk through the sunny streets, past the ivied walls of the old church, to the clean, varnish scented office, where he sat, until the luncheon hour, under the hard, though not unkind, eyes of the man who reminded him at every instant of his dead father. and the bitterest part of it, after all, was that the closer he came to the character of richard ordway, the profounder grew his respect for his uncle's unwavering professional honour. the old man would have starved, he knew, rather than have held back a penny that was not legally his own or have owed a debt that he felt had begun to weigh, however lightly, upon his conscience. yet this lawyer of scrupulous rectitude was the husband, his nephew suspected, of a neglected, a wretchedly unhappy wife--a small, nervous creature, whom he had married, shortly after the death of his first wife, some twenty years ago. the secret of this unhappiness daniel had discovered almost by intuition on the day of his father's funeral, when he had looked up suddenly in the cemetery to find his uncle's wife regarding him with a pair of wonderful, pathetic eyes, which seemed to gaze at him sadly out of a blue mist. so full of sympathy and understanding was her look that the memory of it had returned to him more than a year later, and had caused him to stop at her gate one november afternoon as he was returning from his office work. after an instant's pause, and an uncertain glance at the big brick house with its clean white columns, he ascended the steps and rang the bell for the first time since his boyhood. the house was one of the most charming in botetourt, but as he followed the servant down the hall to the library, it seemed to him that all these high, imposing walls, with their fine white woodwork, enclosed but so much empty space to fill with loneliness. his uncle had no children, and the sad, fair-haired little wife appeared to be always alone and always suffering. she was seated now in a low rocking-chair beside the window, and as she turned her head at his entrance, he could see, through the lace curtains, a few pale november leaves, which fluttered down from an elm tree beside the porch. when she looked at him he noticed that her eyes were large and beautiful and of a changeable misty colour which appeared now gray, now violet. "it is so good of you, daniel," she said, in a soft, grateful voice, removing her work-basket from the chair at her side so that he might come within the reach of her short-sighted gaze. "i've wanted to come ever since i saw you for the first time after my return," he answered cheerfully. "it is strange, isn't it?--that i hardly remember you when i lived here. you were always ill, were you not?" "yes, ill almost always," she replied, smiling as she met his glance. "when you were married i remember i couldn't go to the wedding because i had been in bed for three months. but that's all over now," she added, fearing to produce in him a momentary depression. "i am well again, you see, so the past doesn't matter." "the past doesn't matter," he repeated in a low voice, struck by the words as if they held more than their surface meaning for his ears. she nodded gravely. "how can it matter if one is really happy at last." "and you are happy at last?" as he watched her it seemed to him that a pale flame burned in her face, tinging its sallow wanness with a golden light. "i am at peace and is that not happiness?" she asked. "but you were sad once--that day in the cemetery? i felt it." "that was while i was still struggling," she answered, "and it always hurts one to struggle. i wanted happiness--i kept on wanting it even after i ceased to believe in its existence. i fought very hard--oh, desperately hard--but now i have learned that the only way to get anything is to give it up. happiness is like everything else, it is only when one gives it back to god that one really possesses it." he had never seen a face in which the soul spoke so clearly, and her look rather than her words came to him like the touch of divine healing. "when i saw you standing beside your father's grave, i knew that you were just where i had been for so many years--that you were still telling your self that things were too hard, that they were unendurable. i had been through it all, you see, so i understood." "but how could you know the bitterness, the shame of feeling that it was all the result of my own mistake--of my own sin." taking his hand in hers, she sat for a moment in silence with her ecstatic gaze fixed on his face. "i know that in spite of your sin you are better than they are," she said at last, "because your sin was on the outside--a thing to be sloughed off and left far behind, while their self-righteousness is of their very souls----" "oh, hush, hush," he interrupted sternly, "they have forgiven me for what i did, that is enough." "sixteen years ago," she returned, dropping her voice, "my husband forgave me in the same way, and he has never forgotten it." at his start of surprise, he felt that she clung the more closely to the hand she held. "oh, it wasn't so big a thing," she went on, "i had been married to him for five years, and i was very unhappy when i met someone who seemed to understand and to love me. for a time i was almost insane with the wonder and delight of it--i might have gone away with him--with the other--in my first rapture, had not richard found it all out two days before. he behaved very generously--he forgave me. i should have been happier," she added a little wistfully, "if he had not." as she broke off trembling, he lifted her hand to his lips, kissing it with tenderness, almost with passion. "then that was the beginning of your unhappiness--of your long illness!" he exclaimed. she nodded smiling, while a tear ran slowly down her flushed cheek. "he forgave me sixteen years ago and he has never allowed me to forget it one hour--hardly a minute since." "then you understand how bitter--how intolerable it is!" he returned in an outbreak of anger. "i thought i knew," she replied more firmly than he had ever heard her speak, "but i learned afterwards that it was a mistake. i see now that they are kind--that they are good in their way, and i love them for it. it isn't our way, i know, but the essence of charity, after all, is to learn to appreciate goodness in all its expressions, no matter how different they may be from our own. even richard is kind--he means everything for the best, and it is only his nature that is straightened--that is narrow--not his will. i felt bitterly once, but not now because i am so happy at last." beyond the pale outline of her head, he saw the elm leaves drifting slowly down, and beyond them the low roofs and the dim church spires of the quiet town. was it possible that even here he might find peace in the heart of the storm? "it is only since i have given my happiness back to god that it is really mine," she said, and it seemed to him again that her soul gathered brightness and shone in her face. chapter v the will of alice when he reached home the servant who helped him out of his overcoat, informed him at the same time that his uncle awaited him in the library. with the news a strange chill came over him as if he had left something warm and bright in the november sunset outside. for an instant it seemed to him that he must turn back--that he could not go forward. then with a gesture of assent, he crossed the hall and entered the library, where he found lydia and the children as well as richard ordway. the lamps were unlit, and the mellow light of the sunset fell through the interlacing half-bared boughs of the golden poplar beyond the window. this light, so rich, so vivid, steeped the old mahogany furniture and the faded family portraits in a glow which seemed to daniel to release, for the first time, some latent romantic spirit that had dwelt in the room. in the midst of this glamor of historic atmosphere, the four figures, gathered so closely together against the clear space of the window, with its network of poplar leaves beyond the panes, borrowed for the moment a strange effectiveness of pose, a singular intensity of outline. not only the figures, but the very objects by which they were surrounded appeared to vibrate in response to a tragic impulse. richard ordway was standing upon the hearthrug, his fine head and profile limned sharply against the pale brown wall at his side. his right hand was on lydia's shoulder, who sat motionless, as if she had fallen there, with her gentle, flower-like head lying upon the arm of her son. before them, as before her judges, alice was drawn to her full height, her girlish body held tense and quivering, her splendid hair loosened about her forehead, her trembling mouth making a violent contrast to the intense pallor of her face. right or wrong ordway saw only that she was standing alone, and as he crossed the threshold, he turned toward her and held out his hand. "alice," he said softly, as if the others were not present. without raising her eyes, she shrank from him in the direction of richard ordway, as if shielding herself behind the iron fortitude of the man whom she so bitterly disliked. "alice has been out driving alone with geoffrey heath all the afternoon," said lydia in her clear, calm voice. "we had forbidden it, but she says that you knew of it and did not object to her going." with the knowledge of the lie, ordway grew red with humiliation, while his gaze remained fastened on the figure in the carpet at alice's feet. he could not look at her, for he felt that her shame was scorching him like a hot wind. to look at her at the moment meant to convict her, and this his heart told him he could never do. he was conscious of the loud ticking of the clock, of the regular tapping of richard's fingers upon the marble mantel-piece, of the fading light on the poplar leaves beyond the window, and presently of the rapid roll of a carriage that went by in the street. each of these sounds produced in him a curious irritation like a physical smart, and he felt again something of the dumb resentment with which he had entered his wife's dressing-room on the morning of his arrest. then a smothered sob reached his ear, and alice began to tremble from head to foot at his side. lifting his eyes at last, he made a step forward and drew her into his arms. "was it so very wrong? i am sorry," he said to lydia over the bowed head of their child. until the words were uttered, and he felt alice's tense body relax in his arms, he had not realised that in taking sides with her, he was not only making himself responsible for her fault, he was, in truth, actually sharing in the lie that she had spoken. the choice was an unconscious one, yet he knew even in the ensuing moment of his clearer judgment that it had been inevitable--that from the first instant, when he had paused speechless upon the threshold, there had been open to him no other course. "i am sorry if it was wrong," he repeated, turning his glance now upon richard ordway. "do you know anything of geoffrey heath? have you heard him spoken of by decent people since you have been in botetourt?" asked the old man sternly. "i have heard little of him," answered daniel, "and that little was far from good. we are sorry, alice, are we not? it must not happen again if we can help it." "it has happened before," said lydia, lifting her head from dick's arm, where it had lain. "it was then that i forbade her to see him alone." "i did not know," responded daniel, "but she will do as you wish hereafter. will you not, alice?" "how does it concern them? what have they to do with me?" demanded alice, turning in his arms to face her mother with a defiant and angry look, "they have never cared for me--they have always preferred dick--always, even when i was a little child." he saw lydia grow white and hide her drooping face again on dick's shoulder. "you are unjust to your mother, alice," he said gravely, "she has loved you always, and i have loved you." "oh, you are different--i would die for you!" she exclaimed passionately, as she wept on his breast. while he stood there holding her in his arms, it seemed to him that he could feel like an electric current the wave of feeling which had swept alice and himself together. the inheritance which was his had descended to her also with its keen joys and its sharp anguish. even the road which he had travelled so lately in weariness was the one upon which her brave young feet were now set. not his alone, but his child's also, was this mixture of strength and weakness, of gaiety and sadness, of bitterness and compassion. "if you will leave me alone with her, i think i can make her understand what you wish," he said, lifting his eyes from the dark head on his breast to lydia, who had risen and was standing before him with her pensive, inquiring gaze fixed on his face. "she is like me," he added abruptly, "in so many ways." "yes, she is like you, i have always thought so," returned lydia, quietly. "and for that reason, perhaps, you have never quite understood her," he responded. she bowed her head as if too polite or too indifferent to dissent from his words; and then slipping her hand through richard ordway's arm, she stood waiting patiently while the old man delivered his last bit of remonstrance. "try to curb her impulses, daniel, or you will regret it." he went out, still holding lydia's hand, and a moment afterwards, when daniel looked up at the sound of the hall door closing quickly, he saw that dick also had vanished, and that he was alone in the library with alice, who still sobbed on his breast. a few moments before it had seemed to him that he needed only to be alone with her to make all perfectly clear between them. but when the others had passed out, and the door had closed at last on the empty silence in which they stood, he found that the words which he had meant to utter had vanished hopelessly from his mind. he had said to lydia that alice was like himself, but there had never been an hour in his life when his hatred of a lie had not been as intense, as uncompromising, as it was to-day. and this lie which she had spoken appeared to divide them now like a drawn sword. "alice," he said, breaking with an effort through the embarrassment which had held him speechless, "will you give me your word of honour that you will never tell me a falsehood again?" she stirred slightly in his arms, and he felt her body grow soft and yielding. "i didn't to you," she answered, "oh, i wouldn't to you." "not to the others then. will you promise?" her warm young arm tightened about his neck. "i didn't mean to--i didn't mean to," she protested between her sobs, "but they forced me to do it. it was more than half their fault--they are so--so hateful! i tried to think of something else, but there was nothing to say, and i knew you would stand by me----" "you have almost broken my heart," he answered, "for you have lied, alice, you have lied." she lifted her head and the next instant he felt her mouth on his cheek, "i wish i were dead! i have hurt you and i wish i were dead!" she cried. "it is not hurting me that i mind--you may do that and welcome. it is hurting yourself, my child, my alice," he answered; and pressing her upturned face back on his arm, he bent over her in an ecstasy of emotion, calling her his daughter, his darling, the one joy of his life. the iron in his nature had melted beneath her warm touch, and he felt again the thrill, half agony, half rapture, with which he had received her into his arms on the day of her birth. that day was nearer to him now than was the minute in which he stood, and he could trace still the soft, babyish curves in the face which nestled so penitently on his arm. his very fear for her moved him into a deeper tenderness, and the appeal she made to him now was one with the appeal of her infancy, for its power lay in her weakness, not in her strength. "be truthful with me, alice," he said, "and remember that nothing can separate me from you." an hour later when he parted from her and went upstairs, he heard lydia's voice calling to him through her half open door, and turning obediently, he entered her bedroom for the first time since the night of his return. now as then the luxury, the softness, of his wife's surroundings produced in him a curious depression, an enervation of body; and he stood for an instant vainly striving to close his nostrils against the delicious perfume which floated from her lace-trimmed dressing-table. lydia, still in her light mourning gown, was standing, when he entered, before a little marquetry desk in one corner, her eyes on an open letter which she appeared to have left partially unread. "i wanted to tell you, daniel," she began at once, approaching the point with a directness which left him no time to wonder as to the purpose of her summons, "that alice's intimacy with geoffrey heath has already been commented upon in botetourt. cousin paulina has actually written to me for an explanation." "cousin paulina?" he repeated vaguely, and remembered immediately that the lady in question was his wife's one rich relation--an elderly female who was greatly respected for her fortune, which she spent entirely in gratifying her personal passion for trinkets. "oh, yes," he added flippantly, "the old lady who used to look like a heathen idol got up for the sacrifice." he felt that his levity was out of place, yet he went on rashly because he knew that he was doomed forever to appear at a disadvantage in lydia's presence. she would never believe in him--his best motives would wear always to her the covering of hypocrisy; and the very hopelessness of ever convincing her goaded him at times into the reckless folly of despair. "she writes me that people are talking of it," she resumed, sweetly, as if his untimely mirth had returned still-born into the vacancy from which it emerged. "who is this geoffrey heath you speak of so incessantly?" he demanded. "there was a heath, i remember, who had a place near us in the country, and kept a barroom or a butcher's shop or something in town." "that was the father," replied lydia, with a shudder which deepened the slightly scornful curve of her lip. "he was a respectable old man, i believe, and made his fortune quite honestly, however it was. it was only after his son began to grow up that he became socially ambitious----" "and is that all you have against him?" "oh, there's nothing against the old man--nothing at least except the glaring bad taste he showed in that monstrous house he built in henry street. he's dead now, you know." "then the son has all the money and the house, too, hasn't he?" "all he hasn't wasted, yes." as she spoke she subsided into a chair, with a graceful, eddying motion of her black chiffon draperies, and continued the conversation with an expression of smiling weariness. all her attitudes were effective, and he was struck, while he stood, embarrassed and awkward, before her, by the plaintive grace that she introduced into her smallest gesture. though he was aware that he saw her now too clearly for passion, the appeal of her delicate fairness went suddenly to his head. "then there's not much to be said for the chap, i suppose?" he asked abruptly, fearing the prolonged strain of the silence. "very little for him, but a good deal about him, according to cousin paulina. it seems that three years ago he was sent away from the university for something disgraceful--cheating at cards, i believe; and since then he has been conspicuous chiefly because of his low associations. how alice met him, i could never understand--i can't understand now." "and do you think she cares for him--that she even imagines that she does?" he demanded, while his terror rose in his throat and choked back his words. "she will not confess it--how could she?" replied lydia wearily, "i believe it is only wildness, recklessness, lack of discipline that prompts her. yet he is good-looking--in a vulgar way," she added in disgust, "and alice has always seemed to like vulgar things." her eyes rested on him, not directly, but as if they merely included him in their general pensive survey of the world; yet he read the accusation in her gentle avoidance of his gaze as plainly as she had uttered in it her clear, flute-like tones. "it is very important," she went on, "that she should be curbed in her impulses, in her extravagance. already her bills are larger than mine and yet she is never satisfied with the amount of her allowance. we can do nothing with her, uncle richard and i, but she seems to yield, in a measure, to your influence, and we thought--we hoped----" "i will--i will," he answered. "i will give my life to help her if need be. but lydia," he broke out more earnestly, "you must stand by and aid me for her sake, for the sake of our child, we must work together----" half rising in her chair, she looked at him fixedly a moment, while he saw her pupils dilate almost as if she were in physical fear. "but what can i do? i have done all i could," she protested, with an injured look. by this look, without so much as a gesture, she put the space of the whole room between them. the corners of her mouth quivered and drooped, and he watched the pathos creep back into her light blue eyes. "i have given up my whole life to the children since--since----" she broke off in a frightened whisper, but the unfinished sentence was more expressive than a volley of reproaches would have been. there was something in her thoughts too horrible to put into words, and this something of which she could not bring herself to speak, would have had no place in her existence except for him. he felt cowed suddenly, as if he had been physically beaten and thrust aside. "you have been very brave--i know--i appreciate it all," he said, and while he spoke he drew away from her until he stood with his back against one of the amber satin curtains. instinctively he put out his hand for support, and as it closed over the heavy draperies, he felt that the hard silken texture made his flesh creep. the physical sensation, brief as it was, recalled in some strange way the effect upon him of lydia's smooth and shining surface when he had knelt before her on the night of his homecoming. yet it was with difficulty even now that he could free himself from the conviction that her emotional apathy was but one aspect of innocence. would he admit to-day that what he had once worshipped as purity of soul was but the frost of an unnatural coldness of nature? all at once, as he looked at her, he found himself reminded by her calm forehead, her classic features, of the sculptured front of a marble tomb which he had seen in some foreign gallery. was there death, after all, not life hidden for him in her plaintive beauty? the next instant, as he watched her, he told himself that such questions belonged to the evil promptings of his own nature. "i realise all that you have been, all that you have suffered," he said at last, aware that his words sounded hysterical in the icy constraint which surrounded them. when his speech was out, his embarrassment became so great that he found himself presently measuring the distance which divided him from the closed door. with a last effort of will, he went toward her and stretched out his hand in a gesture that was almost one of entreaty. "lydia," he asked, "is it too painful for you to have me here? would it be any better for you if i went away?" as he moved toward her she bent over with a nervous, mechanical movement to arrange her train, and before replying to his question, she laid each separate fold in place. "why, by no means," she answered, looking up with her conventional smile. "it would only mean--wouldn't it?--that people would begin to wonder all over again?" chapter vi the iron bars as the days went on it seemed to him that his nature, repressed in so many other directions, was concentrated at last in a single channel of feeling. the one outlet was his passion for alice, and nothing that concerned her was too remote or too trivial to engross him--her clothes, her friendships, the particular chocolate creams for which she had once expressed a preference. to fill her life with amusements that would withdraw her erring impulses from geoffrey heath became for a time his absorbing purpose. at first he told himself in a kind of rapture that success was apparent in his earliest and slightest efforts. for weeks alice appeared to find interest and animation in his presence. she flattered, scolded, caressed and tyrannised, but with each day, each hour, she grew nearer his heart and became more firmly interwoven into his life. then suddenly a change came over her, and one day when she had been kissing him with "butterfly kisses" on his forehead, he felt her suddenly grow restless and draw back impatiently as if seeking a fresh diversion. a bored look had come into her eyes and he saw the three little wrinkles gather between her eyebrows. "alice," he said, alarmed by the swift alteration, "are you tired of the house? shall we ride together?" she shook her head, half pettishly, half playfully, "i can't--i've an engagement," she responded. "an engagement?" he repeated inquiringly. "why, i thought we were always to ride when it was fair." "i promised one of the girls to go to tea with her," she repeated, after a minute. "it isn't a real tea, but she wanted to talk to me, so i said i would go." "well, i'm glad you did--don't give up the girls," he answered, relieved at once by the explanation. in the evening when she returned, shortly after dark, "one of the girls" as she called laughingly from the library, had come home for the night with her. ordway heard them chatting gayly together, but, when he went in for a moment before going upstairs to dress, they lapsed immediately into an embarrassed silence. alice's visitor was a pretty, gray-eyed, flaxen-haired young woman named jenny lane, who smiled in a frightened way and answered "yes--no," when he spoke to her, as if she offered him the choice of his favourite monosyllable from her lips. clearly the subject which animated them was one in which, even as alice's father, he could have no share. for weeks after this it seemed to him that a silence fell gradually between them--that silence of the heart which is so much more oppressive than the mere outward silence of the lips. it was not, he told himself again and again, that there had come a perceptible change in her manner. she still met him at breakfast with her flower and her caress, still flung herself into his arms at unexpected moments, still coaxed and upbraided in her passionate, childish voice. nevertheless, the difference was there, and he recognised it with a pang even while he demanded of himself in what breathless suspension of feeling it could consist? her caresses were as frequent, but the fervour, the responsiveness, had gone out of them; and he was brought at last face to face with the knowledge that her first vivid delight in him had departed forever. the thing which absorbed her now was a thing in which he had no share, no recognition; and true to her temperament, her whole impulsive being had directed itself into this new channel. "she is young and it is only natural that she should wish to have her school friends about her," he thought with a smile. in the beginning it had been an easy matter to efface his personality and stand out of the way of alice's life, but as the weeks drew on into months and the months into a year, he found that he had been left aside not only by his daughter, but by the rest of the household as well. in his home he felt himself to exist presently in an ignored, yet obvious way like a familiar piece of household furniture, which is neither commented upon nor wilfully overlooked. it would have occasioned, he supposed, some vague exclamations of surprise had he failed to appear in his proper place at the breakfast table, but as long as his accustomed seat was occupied all further use for his existence seemed at an end. he was not necessary, he was not even enjoyed, but he was tolerated. before this passive indifference, which was worse to him than direct hostility, he found that his sympathies, his impulses, and even his personality, were invaded by an apathy that paralysed the very sources of his will. he beheld himself as the cause of the gloom, the suspicion, the sadness, that surrounded him, and as the cause, too, of alice's wildness and of the pathetic loneliness in which lydia lived. but for him, he told himself, there would have been no shadow upon the household; and his wife's pensive smile was like a knife in his heart whenever he looked up from his place at the table and met it unawares. at tappahannock he had sometimes believed that his past was a skeleton which he had left behind; here he had grown, as the years went by, to think of it as a coffin which had shut over him and from which there was no escape. and with the realisation of this, a blighting remorse, a painful humbleness awoke in his soul, and was revealed outwardly in his face, in his walk, in his embarrassed movements. as he passed up and down the staircase, he went softly lest the heavy sound of his footsteps should become an annoyance to lydia's sensitive ears. his manner lost its boyish freedom and grew awkward and nervous, and when he gave an order to the servants it seemed to him that a dreadful timidity sounded in his voice. he began to grow old suddenly in a year, before middle age had as yet had time to soften the way. looking in the glass one morning, when he had been less than three years in botetourt, he discovered that the dark locks upon his forehead had turned almost white, and that his shoulders were losing gradually their youthful erectness of carriage. and it seemed to him that the courage with which he might have once broken away and begun anew had departed from him in this new and paralysing humility, which was like the humility of a helpless and burdensome old age. after a day of peculiar loneliness, he was returning from richard's office on this same afternoon, when a voice called to him from beneath the fringed linen cover of a little phaeton which had driven up to the crossing. turning in surprise he found aunt lucy holding the reins over a fat pony, while she sat very erect, with her trim, soldierly figure emerging from a mountain of brown-paper parcels. "this is the very chance i've been looking for, daniel ordway!" she exclaimed, in her emphatic voice. "do you know, sir, that you have not entered my house once in the last three years?" "yes," he replied, "i know--but the fact is that i have hardly been anywhere since i came back." "and why is that?" she demanded sharply. he shook his head, "i don't know. perhaps you can tell me." "yes, i can tell you," she snapped back, with a rudeness which, in some singular way, seemed to him kinder than the studied politeness that he had met. "it's because, in spite of all you've gone through, you are still more than half a fool, daniel ordway." "oh, you're right, i dare say," he acknowledged bitterly. with a frown, which struck him curiously as the wrong side of a smile, she nodded her head while she made room for him among the brown-paper parcels on the low linen covered seat of the phaeton. "come in here, i want to talk to you," she said, "there's a little matter about which i should like your help." "my help?" he repeated in astonishment, as a sensation of pleasure shot through his heart. it was so seldom that anybody asked his help in botetourt. "is the second green parrot dead, and do you want me to dig the grave?" he inquired, checking his unseemly derision as he met her warning glance. "polly is perfectly well," she returned, rapping him smartly upon the knee with her little tightly closed black fan which she carried as if it were a baton, "but i do not like richard ordway." the suddenness of her announcement, following so inappropriately her comment upon the health of the green parrot, caused him to start from his seat in the amazement with which he faced her. then he broke into an echo of his old boyish merriment. "you don't?" he retorted flippantly. "well, lydia does." her eyes blinked rapidly in the midst of her wrinkled little face, and bending over she flicked the back of the fat pony gently with the end of the whip. "oh, i'm not sure i like lydia," she responded, "though, of course, lydia is a saint." "yes, lydia is a saint," he affirmed. "well, i'm not talking about lydia," she resumed presently, "though there's something i've always had a burning curiosity to find out." for an instant she held back, and then made her charge with a kind of desperate courage. "is she really a saint?" she questioned, "or is it only the way that she wears her hair?" her question was so like the spoken sound of his own dreadful suspicion that it took away his breath completely, while he stared at her with a gasp that was evenly divided between a laugh and a groan. "oh, she's a saint, there's no doubt of that," he insisted loyally. "then i'll let her rest," she replied, "and i'm glad, heaven knows, to have my doubts at an end. but where do you imagine that i am taking you?" "for a drive, i hope," he answered, smiling. "it's not," she rejoined grimly, "it's for a visit." "a visit?" he repeated, starting up with the impulse to jump over the moving wheel, "but i never visit." she reached out her wiry little fingers, which clung like a bird's claw, and drew him by force back upon the seat. "i am taking you to see adam crowley," she explained, "do you remember him?" "crowley?" he repeated the name as he searched his memory. "why, yes, he was my father's clerk for forty years, wasn't he? i asked when i came home what had become of him. so he is still living?" "he was paralysed in one arm some years ago, and it seems he has lost all his savings in some investment your father had advised him to make. of course, there was no legal question of a debt to him, but until the day your father died he had always made ample provision for the old man's support. crowley had always believed that the allowance would be continued--that there would be a mention made of him in the will." "and there was none?" "it was an oversight, crowley is still convinced, for he says he had a distinct promise." "then surely my uncle will fulfil the trust? he is an honourable man." she shook her head. "i don't know that he is so much 'honourable' as he is 'lawful.' the written obligation is the one which binds him like steel, but i don't think he cares whether a thing is right or wrong, just or unjust, as long as it is the law. the letter holds him, but i doubt if he has ever even felt the motion of the spirit. if he ever felt it," she concluded with grim humour, "he would probably try to drive it out with quinine." "are we going there now--to see crowley, i mean?" "if you don't mind. of course there may be nothing that you can do--but i thought that you might, perhaps, speak to richard about it." he shook his head, "no, i can't speak to my uncle, though i think you are unjust to him," he answered, after a pause in which the full joy of her appeal had swept through his heart, "but i have an income of my own, you know, and out of this, i can help crowley." for an instant she did not reply, and he felt her thin, upright little figure grow rigid at his side. then turning with a start, she laid her hand, in its black lace mitten, upon his knee. "o my boy, you are your mother all over again!" she said. after this they drove on in silence down one of the shaded streets, where rows of neat little houses, packed together like pasteboard boxes, were divided from the unpaved sidewalks by low whitewashed fences. at one of these doors the phaeton presently drew up, and dropping the reins on the pony's back, aunt lucy alighted with a bound between the wheels, and began with ordway's help, to remove the paper parcels from the seat. when their arms were full, she pushed open the gate, and led him up the short walk to the door where an old man, wearing a knitted shawl, sat in an invalid's chair beyond the threshold. at the sound of their footsteps crowley turned on them a cheerful wrinkled face which was brightened by a pair of twinkling black eyes that gave him an innocent and merry look. "i knew you'd come around," he said, smiling with his toothless mouth like an amiable infant. "matildy has been complaining that the coffee gave out at breakfast, but i said 'twas only a sign that you were coming. everything bad is the sign of something good, that's what i say." "i've brought something better than coffee to-day, adam," replied aunt lucy, seating herself upon the doorstep. "this is daniel ordway--do you remember him?" the old man bent forward, without moving his withered hand, which lay outstretched on the cushioned arm of the chair, and it seemed to ordway that the smiling black eyes pierced to his heart. "oh, i remember him, i remember him," said crowley, "poor boy--poor boy." "he's come back now," rejoined aunt lucy, raising her voice, "and he has come to see you." "he's like his mother," remarked crowley, almost in a whisper, "and i'm glad of that, though his father was a good man. but there are some good people who do more harm than bad ones," he added, "and i always knew that old daniel ordway would ruin his son." a chuckle broke from him, "but your mother: i can see her now running out bareheaded in the snow to scold me for not having on my overcoat. she was always seeing with other people's eyes, bless her, and feeling with other people's bodies." dropping upon the doorstep, ordway replaced the knitted shawl which had slipped from the old man's shoulder. "i wonder how it is that you keep so happy in spite of everything?" he said. "happy?" repeated crowley with a laugh. "well, i don't know, but i am not complaining. i've seen men who hadn't an ache in their bodies, who were worse off than i am to-day. i tell you it isn't the thing that comes to you, but the way you look at it that counts, and because you've got a paralysed arm is no reason that you should have a paralysed heart as well. i've had a powerful lot of suffering, but i've had a powerful lot of happiness, too, and the suffering somehow, doesn't seem to come inside of me to stay as the happiness does. you see, i'm a great believer in the lord, sir," he added simply, "and what i can't understand, i don't bother about, but just take on trust." all the cheerful wrinkles of his face shone peacefully as he talked. "it's true there've been times when things have gone so hard i've felt that i'd just let go and drop down to the bottom, but the wonderful part is that when you get to the bottom there's still something down below you. it's when you fall lowest that you feel most the lord holding you up. it may be that there ain't any bottom after all but i know if there is one the lord is surely waiting down there to catch you when you let go. he ain't only there, i reckon, but he's in all the particular hard places on earth much oftener than he's up in his heaven. he knows the poorhouse, you may be sure, and he'll be there to receive me and tell me it ain't so bad as it looks. i don't want to get there, but if i do it will come a bit easier to think that the lord has been there before me----" the look in his smiling, toothless face brought to ordway, as he watched him, the memory of the epileptic little preacher who had preached in the prison chapel. here, also, was that untranslatable rapture of the mystic, which cannot be put into words though it passes silently in its terrible joy from the heart of the speaker to the other heart that is waiting. again he felt his whole being dissolve in the emotion which had overflowed his eyes that sunday when he was a prisoner. he remembered the ecstasy with which he had said to himself on that day: "i have found the key!" and he knew now that this ecstasy was akin to the light that had shone for him while he sat on the stage of the town hall in tappahannock. a chance word from the lips of a doting old man, who saw the doors of the poorhouse swing open to receive him, had restored to ordway, with a miraculous clearness, the vision that he had lost; and he felt suddenly that the hope with which he had come out of the prison had never really suffered disappointment or failure. chapter vii the vision and the fact as he walked home along one of the side streets, shaded by an irregular row of flowering linden trees, it appeared to him that his life in botetourt, so unendurable an hour before, had been rendered suddenly easy by a miracle, not in his surroundings, but in himself. his help had been asked, and in the act of giving there had flowed back into his heart the strength by which he might live his daily life. his unrest, his loneliness, his ineffectiveness, showed to him now as the result of some fatal weakness in his own nature--some failure in his personal attitude to the people among whom he lived. straight ahead of him a fine white dust drifted down from the blossoming lindens, lying like powder on the roughly paved street, where the wind blew it in soft swirls and eddies against the crumbling stone steps which led down from the straight doorways of the old-fashioned houses. the boughs overhead made a green arch through which the light fell, and it was under this thick tent of leaves, that, looking up presently, he saw emily brooke coming toward him. not until she was so close to him that he could hear the rustle of her dress, did she lift her eyes from the pavement and meet his cry of welcome with a look of joyful surprise. "emily!" he cried, and at his voice, she stretched out her hand and stood smiling at him with the soft and animated gaze which, it seemed to him now, he had but dimly remembered. the thought of her had dwelt as a vision in his memory, yet he knew, as he looked into her face, that the ideal figure had lacked the charm, the radiance, the sparkling energy, of the living substance. "so you came to botetourt and did not send me word," he said. "no, i did not send you word," she answered, "and now i am leaving within an hour." "and you would have gone without seeing me?" for an instant she hesitated, and he watched the joy in her face melt into a sorrowful tenderness. "i knew that you were well and i was satisfied. would it have been kind to appear to you like an arisen ghost of tappahannock?" "the greatest kindness," he answered gravely, "that you--or anyone could do me." she shook her head: "kindness or not, i found that i could not do it." "and you go in an hour?" "my train leaves at seven o'clock. is it nearly that?" he drew out his watch, a mechanical action which relieved the emotional tension that stretched like a drawn cord between them. "it is not yet six. will you walk a little way with me down this street? there is still time." as she nodded silently, they turned and went back along the side street, under the irregular rows of lindens, in the direction from which he had come. "one of the girls i used to teach sent for me when she was dying," she said presently, as if feeling the need of some explanation of her presence in botetourt. "that was three days ago and the funeral was yesterday. it is a great loss to me, for i haven't so many friends that i can spare the few i love." he made no answer to her remark, and in the silence that followed, he felt, with a strange ache at his heart, that the distance that separated them was greater than it had been when she was in tappahannock and he in botetourt. then there had stretched only the luminous dream spaces between their souls; now they stood divided by miles and miles of an immovable reality. was it possible that in making her a part of his intense inner life, he had lost, in a measure, his consciousness of her actual existence? then while the vision still struggled blindly against the fact, she turned toward him with a smile which lifted her once more into the shining zone of spirits. "if i can feel that you are happy, that you are at peace, i shall ask nothing more of god," she said. "i am happy to-day," he answered, "but if you had come yesterday, i should have broken down in my weakness. oh, i have been homesick for tappahannock since i came away!" "yet botetourt is far prettier to my eyes." "to mine also--but it isn't beauty, it is usefulness that i need. for the last two years i have told myself night and day that i had no place and no purpose--that i was the stone that the builders rejected." "and it is different now?" "different? yes, i feel as if i had been shoved suddenly into a place where i fitted--as if i were meant, after all, to help hold things together. and the change came--how do you think?" he asked, smiling. "a man wanted money of me to keep him out of the poorhouse." the old gaiety was in his voice, but as she looked at him a ray of faint sunshine fell on his face through a parting in the leaves overhead, and she saw for the first time how much older he had grown since that last evening in tappahannock. the dark hair was all gray now, the lines of the nose were sharper, the cheek bones showed higher above the bluish hollows beneath. yet the change which had so greatly aged him had deepened the peculiar sweetness in the curves of his mouth, and this sweetness, which was visible also in his rare smile, moved her heart to a tenderness which was but the keener agony of renouncement. "i know how it is," she said slowly, "just as in tappahannock you found your happiness in giving yourself to others, so you will find it here." "if i can only be of use--perhaps." "you can be--you will be. what you were with us you will be again." "yet it was different. there i had your help, hadn't i?" "and you shall have it here," she responded, brightly, though he saw that her eyes were dim with tears. "will you make me a promise?" he asked, stopping suddenly before some discoloured stone steps "will you promise me that if ever you need a friend--a strong arm, a brain to think for you--you will send me word?" she looked at him smiling, while her tears fell from her eyes. "i will make no promise that is not for your sake as well as for mine," she answered. "but it is for my sake--it is for my happiness." "then i will promise," she rejoined gravely, "and i will keep it." "i thank you," he responded, taking the hand that she held out. at his words she had turned back, pausing a moment in her walk, as if she had caught from his voice or his look a sense of finality in their parting. "i have but a few minutes left," she said, "so i must walk rapidly back or i shall be late." a sudden clatter of horses' hoofs on the cobblestones in the street caused them to start away from each other, and turning his head, ordway saw alice gallop furiously past him with geoffrey heath at her side. "how beautiful!" exclaimed emily beneath her breath, for alice as she rode by had looked back for an instant, her glowing face framed in blown masses of hair. "yes, she is beautiful," he replied, and added after a moment as they walked on, "she is my daughter." her face brightened with pleasure. "then you are happy--you must be happy," she said. "why, she looked like brunhilde." for a moment he hesitated. "yes," he answered at last, "she is very beautiful--and i am happy." after this they did not speak again until they reached the iron gate before the house in which she was staying. on his side he was caught up into some ideal realm of feeling, in which he possessed her so utterly that the meeting could not bring her nearer to him nor the parting take her farther away. his longing, his unrest, and his failure, were a part of his earthly nature which he seemed to have left below him in that other life from which he had escaped. without doubt he would descend to it again, as he had descended at moments back into the body of his sin; but in the immediate exaltation of his mood, his love had passed the bounds of personality and entered into a larger and freer world. when they parted, presently, after a casual good-bye, he could persuade himself, almost without effort, that she went on with him in the soft may twilight. at his door he found lydia just returning from a drive, and taking her wraps from her arm, he ascended the steps and entered the house at her side. she had changed her mourning dress for a gown of pale gray cloth, and he noticed at once that her beauty had lost in transparency and become more human. "i thought you had gone riding with alice," she said without looking at him, as she stooped to gather up the ends of a lace scarf which had slipped from her arm. "no, i was not with her," he answered. "i wanted to go, but she would not let me." "are you sure, then, that she was not with geoffrey heath?" "i am sure that she was with him, for they passed me not a half hour ago as i came up." they had entered the library while he spoke, and crossing to the hearth, where a small fire burned, lydia looked up at him with her anxious gaze. "i hoped at first that you would gain some influence over her," she said, in a distressed voice, "but it seems now that she is estranged even from you." "not estranged, but there is a difference and i am troubled by it. she is young, you see, and i am but a dull and sober companion for her." she shook her head with the little hopeless gesture which was so characteristic of her. only yesterday this absence of resolution, the discontented droop of her thin, red lips, had worked him into a feeling of irritation against her. but his vision of her to-day had passed through some softening lens; and he saw her shallowness, her vanity, her lack of passion, as spiritual infirmities which were not less to be pitied than an infirmity of the body. "the end is not yet, though," he added cheerfully after a moment, "and she will come back to me in time when i am able really to help her." "meanwhile is she to be left utterly uncontrolled?" "not if we can do otherwise. only we must go quietly and not frighten her too much." again she met his words with the resigned, hopeless movement of her pretty head in its pearl gray bonnet. "i have done all i can," she said, "and it has been worse than useless. now you must try if your method is better than mine." "i am trying," he answered smiling. for an instant her gaze fluttered irresolutely over him, as if she were moved by a passing impulse to a deeper utterance. that this impulse concerned alice he was vaguely aware, for when had his wife ever spoken to him upon a subject more directly personal? apart from their children he knew there was no bond between them--no memories, no hopes, no ground even for the building of a common interest. lydia adored her children, he still believed, but when there was nothing further to be said of dick or of alice, their conversation flagged upon the most trivial topics. upon the few unfortunate occasions when he had attempted to surmount the barrier between them, she had appeared to dissolve, rather than to retreat, before his approach. yet despite her soft, cloud-like exterior, he had discovered that the rigour of her repulsion had hardened to a vein of iron in her nature. what must her life be, he demanded in a sudden passion of pity, when the strongest emotion she had ever known was the aversion that she now felt to him? all the bitterness in his heart melted into compassion at the thought, and he resisted an impulse to take her into his arms and say: "i know, i understand, and i am sorry." yet he was perfectly aware that if he were to do this, she would only shrink farther away from him, and look up at him with fear and mystification, as if she suspected him of some hidden meaning, of some strategic movement against her impregnable reserve. her whole relation to him had narrowed into the single instinct of self-defence. if he came unconsciously a step nearer, if he accidentally touched her hand as he passed, he had grown to expect the flaring of her uncontrollable repugnance in the heightened red in her cheeks. "i know that i am repulsive to her, that when she looks at me she still sees the convict," he thought, "and yet the knowledge of this only adds to the pity and tenderness i feel." lydia had moved through the doorway, but turning back in the hall, she spoke with a return of confidence, as if the fact of the threshold, which she had put between them, had restored to her, in a measure, the advantage that she had lost. "then i shall leave alice in your hands. i can do nothing more," she said. "give me time and i will do all that you cannot," he answered. when she had gone upstairs, he crossed the hall to the closed door of the library, and stopped short on hearing alice's voice break out into song. the girl was still in her riding habit, and the gay french air on her lips was in accord with the spirited gesture with which she turned to him as he appeared. her beauty would have disarmed him even without the kiss with which she hastened to avert his reproach. "alice, can you kiss me when you know you have broken your promise?" "i made no promise," she answered coldly, drawing away. "you told me not to go riding with geoffrey, but it was you that said it, not i, and you said it only because mamma made you. oh, i knew all the time that it was she!" her voice broke with anger and before he could restrain her, she ran from the room and up the staircase. an instant afterward he heard a door slam violently above his head. was she really in love with geoffrey heath? he asked in alarm, or was the passion she had shown merely the outburst of an undisciplined child? chapter viii the weakness in strength at breakfast alice did not appear, and when he went upstairs to her room, she returned an answer in a sullen voice through her closed door. all day his heart was oppressed by the thought of her, but to his surprise, when he came home to luncheon, she met him on the steps with a smiling face. it was evident to him at the first glance that she meant to ignore both the cause and the occasion of last evening's outburst; and he found himself yielding to her determination before he realised all that his evasion of the subject must imply. but while she hung upon his neck, with her cheek pressed to his, it was impossible that he should speak any word that would revive her anger against him. anything was better than the violence with which she had parted from him the evening before. he could never forget his night of anguish, when he had strained his ears unceasingly for some stir in her room, hoping that a poignant realisation of his love for her would bring her sobbing and penitent to his door before dawn. now when he saw her again for the first time, she had apparently forgotten the parting which had so tortured his heart. "you've been working too hard, papa, and you're tired," she remarked, rubbing the furrows between his eyebrows in a vain endeavour to smooth them out. "are you obliged to go back to that hateful office this afternoon?" "i've some work that will keep me there until dark, i fear," he replied. "it's a pity because i'd like a ride of all things." "it is a pity, poor dear," protested alice, but he noticed that there was no alteration in her sparkling gaiety. was there, indeed, almost a hint of relief in her tone? and was this demonstrative embrace but a guarded confession of her gratitude for his absence? something in her manner--a veiled excitement in her look, a subtle change in her voice--caused him to hold her to him in a keener tenderness. it was on his lips to beg for her confidence, to remind her of his sympathy in whatever she might feel or think--to assure her even of his tolerance of geoffrey heath. but in the instant when he was about to speak, a sudden recollection of the look with which she had turned from him last evening, checked the impulse before it had had time to pass into words. and so because of his terror of losing her, he let her go at last in silence from his arms. his office work that afternoon was heavier than usual, for in the midst of his mechanical copying and filing, he was abstracted by the memory of that strange, unnatural vivacity in alice's face. then in the effort to banish the disturbing recollection, he recalled old adam crowley, wrapped in his knitted shawl, on the doorstep of his cottage. a check of richard's contributing six hundred dollars toward the purchase of a new organ for the church he attended gave daniel his first opportunity to mention the old man to his uncle. "i saw crowley the other day," he began abruptly, "the man who was my father's clerk for forty years, and whose place," he added smiling, "i seem to have filled." "ah, indeed," remarked richard quietly. "so he is still living?" "his right arm has been paralysed, as you know, and he is very poor. all his savings were lost in some investments he made by my father's advice." "so i have heard--it was most unfortunate." "he had always been led to believe, i understand, that he would be provided for by my father's will." richard laid down his pen and leaned thoughtfully back in his chair. "he has told me so," he rejoined, "but we have only his word for it, as there was no memorandum concerning him among my brother's papers." "but surely it was well known that father had given him a pension. aunt lucy was perfectly aware of it--they talked of it together." "during his lifetime he did pay crowley a small monthly allowance in consideration of his past services. but his will was an extremely careful document--his bequests are all made in a perfectly legal form." "was not this will made some years ago, however, before the old man became helpless and lost his money?" richard nodded: "i understood as much from crowley when he came to me with his complaint. but, as i reminded him, it would have been a perfectly simple matter for daniel to have made such a bequest in a codicil--as he did in your case," he concluded deliberately. the younger man met his gaze without flinching. "the will, i believe, was written while i was in prison," he observed. "upon the day following your conviction. by a former will, which he then destroyed, he had bequeathed to you his entire estate. you understand, of course," he pursued, after a pause in which he had given his nephew full time to possess himself of the information, as well as of the multiplied suggestions that he had offered, "that the income you receive now comes from money that is legally your own. if it should ever appear advisable for me to do so, i am empowered to make over to you the sum of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in securities. the principal is left in my hands merely because it is to your interest that i should keep an eye on the investments." "yes, i understand, and i understand, too, that but for your insistence my father would probably have left me nothing." "i felt very strongly that he had no right to disinherit you," returned richard. "in my eyes he made a grave mistake in refusing to lend you support at your trial----" "as you did, i acknowledge gratefully," interrupted daniel, and wondered why the fact had aroused in him so little appreciation. as far as the observance of the conventional virtues were concerned, richard ordway, he supposed, was, and had been all his life, a good man, yet something in his austere excellence froze instantly all the gentler impulses in his nephew's heart. it was impossible after this to mention again the subject of crowley, so going back to his work, he applied himself to his copying until richard put down his papers and left the office. then he locked his desk wearily and followed his uncle out into the street. a soft may afternoon was just closing, and the street lamps glimmered, here and there, like white moths out of the mist which was fragrant with honeysuckle and roses. an old lamplighter, who was descending on his ladder from a tall lamppost at the corner, looked down at ordway with a friendly and merry face. "the days will soon be so long that you won't be needing us to light you home," he remarked, as he came down gingerly, his hands grasping the rungs of the ladder above his head. when he landed at daniel's side he began to tell him in a pleasant, garrulous voice about his work, his rheumatism and the strange sights that he had seen in his rounds for so many years. "i've seen wonders in my day, you may believe it," he went on, chuckling, "i've seen babies in carriages that grew up to be brides in orange blossoms, and then went by me later as corpses in hearses. i've seen this town when it warn't mo'n a little middlin' village, and i've seen soldiers dyin' in blood in this very street." a train went by with a rush along the gleaming track that ran through the town. "an' i've known the time when a sight like that would have skeered folks to death," he added. for a minute ordway looked back, almost wistfully, after the flying train. then with a friendly "good-bye!" he parted from the lamplighter and went on his way. when he reached home he half expected to find alice waiting for him in the twilight on the piazza, but, to his surprise, lydia met him as he entered the hall and asked him, in a voice which sounded as if she were speaking in the presence of servants, to come with her into the library. there she closed the door upon him and inquired in a guarded tone: "has alice been with you this afternoon? have you seen or heard anything of her?" "not since luncheon. why, i thought that she was at home with one of the girls." "it seems she left the house immediately after you. she wore her dark blue travelling dress, and one of the servants saw her at the railway station at three o'clock." for an instant the room swam before his eyes. "you believe, then, that she has gone off?" he asked in an unnatural voice, "that she has gone off with geoffrey heath?" in the midst of his own hideous anguish he was impressed by the perfect decency of lydia's grief--by the fact that she wore her anxiety as an added grace. "i have telephoned for uncle richard," she said in a subdued tone, "and he has just sent me word that after making inquiries, he learned that geoffrey heath went to washington on the afternoon train." "and alice is with him!" "if she is not, where is she?" her eyes filled with tears, and sinking into a chair she dropped her face in her clasped hands. "oh, i wish uncle richard would come," she moaned through her fingers. again he felt a smothered resentment at this implicit reliance upon richard ordway. "we must make sure first that she is gone," he said, "and then it will be time enough to consider ways and means of bringing her back." turning abruptly away from her, he went out of the library and up the staircase to alice's room, which was situated directly across the hall from his own. at the first glance it seemed to him that nothing was missing, but when he looked at her dressing-table in the alcove, he found that it had been stripped of her silver toilet articles, and that her little red leather bag, which he had filled with banknotes a few days ago, was not in the top drawer where she kept it. something in the girl's chamber, so familiar, so redolent of associations with her bright presence, tore at his heart with a fresh sense of loss, like a gnawing pain that fastens into a new wound. on the bed he saw her pink flannel dressing-gown, with the embroidered collar which had so delighted her when she had bought it; on the floor at one side lay her pink quilted slippers, slightly soiled from use; and between the larger pillows was the delicate, lace-trimmed baby's pillow upon which she slept. the perfume of her youth, her freshness, was still in the room, as if she had gone from it for a little while through a still open door. at a touch on his arm he looked round startled, to find one of the servants--the single remaining slave of the past generation--rocking her aged body as she stood at his side. "she ain' gwine come back no mo'--yes, lawd, she ain' gwine come back no mo'. whut's done hit's done en hit cyarn be undone agin." "why, aunt mehaley, what do you mean?" he demanded sternly, oppressed, in spite of himself by her wailing voice and her african superstition. "i'se seen er tur'ble heap done in my day wid dese hyer eyes," resumed the old negress, "but i ain' never seen none un um undone agin atter deys wunst been done. you kin cut down er tree, but you cyarn' mek hit grow back togedder. you kin wring de neck er a rooster, but you cyarn' mek him crow. yes, my lawd, hit's easy to pull down, but hit's hard to riz up. i'se ole, marster, en i'se mos' bline wid lookin', but i ain' never seen whut's done undone agin." she tottered out, still wailing in her half-crazed voice, and hastily shutting the drawers of the dressing-table, he went downstairs again to where lydia awaited him in the library. "there's no doubt, i fear, that she's gone with heath," he said, with a constraint into which he had schooled himself on the staircase. "as he appears to have stopped at washington, i shall take the next train there, which leaves at nine-twenty-five. if they are married----" he broke off, struck by the pallor that overspread her face. "but they are married! they must be married!" she cried in terror. for an instant he stared back at her white face in a horror as great as hers. was it the first time in his life, he questioned afterwards, that he had been brought face to face with the hideous skeletons upon which living conventions assume a semblance of truth? "i hope to heaven that he has _not_ married her!" he exclaimed in a passion from which she shrank back trembling. "good god! do you want me to haggle with a cad like that to make him marry my child?" "and if he doesn't? what then?" moaned lydia, in a voice that seemed to fade away while she spoke. "if he doesn't i shall be almost tempted to bless his name. haven't you proved to me that he is a cheat and a brute and a libertine, and yet you dare to tell me that i must force him to marry alice. oh, if he will only have the mercy to leave her free, i may still save her!" he said. she looked at him with dilated eyes as if rooted in fear to the spot upon which she stood. "but the consequences," she urged weakly at last in a burst of tears. "oh, i'll take the consequences," he retorted harshly, as he went out. an hour later, when he was settled in the rushing train, it seemed to him that he was able to find comfort in the words with which he had separated from his wife. let alice do what she would, there was always hope for her in the thought that he might help her to bear, even if he could not remove from her, the consequences of her actions. could so great a force as his love for her fail to avert from her young head at least a portion of her inevitable disillusionment? the recollection of her beauty, of her generosity, and of the wreck of her womanhood almost before it had begun, not only added to his suffering, but seemed in some inexplicable way to increase his love. the affection he had always felt for her was strengthened now by that touch of pity which lends a deeper tenderness to all human relations. upon reaching washington he found that a shower had come up, and the pavements were already wet when he left the station. he had brought no umbrella, but he hardly heeded this in the eagerness which drove him from street to street in his search for his child. after making vain inquiries at several of the larger hotels, he had begun to feel almost hopeless, when going into the newest and most fashionable of them all, he discovered that "mr. and mrs. geoffrey heath" had been assigned an apartment there an hour before. in answer to his question the clerk informed him that the lady had ordered her dinner served upstairs, leaving at the same time explicit instructions that she was "not at home" to anyone who should call. but in spite of this rebuff, he drew out his card, and sat down in a chair in the brilliantly lighted lobby. he had selected a seat near a radiator in the hope of drying his damp clothes, and presently a little cloud of steam rose from his shoulders and drifted out into the shining space. as he watched the gorgeous, over-dressed women who swept by him, he remembered as one remembers a distant dream, the years when his life had been spent among such crowds in just such a dazzling glare of electric light. it appeared false and artificial to him now, but in the meantime, he reflected, while he looked on, he had been in prison. a voice at his elbow interrupted his thoughts, and turning in response to an invitation from a buttoned sleeve, he entered an elevator and was borne rapidly aloft among a tightly wedged group of women who were loudly bewailing their absence from the theatre. it was with difficulty that he released himself at the given signal from his escort, and stepped out upon the red velvet carpet which led to alice's rooms. in response to a knock from the boy who had accompanied him, the door flew open with a jerk, and alice appeared before him in a bewildering effect of lace and pink satin. "o papa, papa, you naughty darling!" she exclaimed, and was in his arms before he had time to utter the reproach on his lips. with her head on his breast, he was conscious at first only of an irresponsible joy, like the joy of the angels for whom evil no longer exists. to know that she was alive, that she was safe, that she was in his arms, seemed sufficient delight, not only unto the day, but unto his whole future as well. then the thought of what it meant to find her thus in her lace and satin came over him, and drawing slightly away he looked for the first time into her face. "alice, what does it mean?" he asked, as he kissed her. pushing the loosened hair back from her forehead, she met his question with a protesting pout. "it means that you're a wicked boy to run away from home like this and be all by yourself in a bad city," she responded with a playful shake of her finger. then she caught his hand and drew him down on the sofa beside her in the midst of the filmy train of her tea-gown. "if you promise never to do it again, i shan't tell mamma on you," she added, with a burst of light-hearted merriment. "where were you married, alice? and who did it?" he asked sternly. at his tone a ripple of laughter broke from her lips, and reaching for her little red leather bag on the table, she opened it and tossed a folded paper upon his knees. "i didn't ask his name," she responded, "but you can find it all written on that, i suppose." "and you cared nothing for me?--nothing for my anxiety, my distress?" "i always meant to telegraph you, of course. geoffrey has gone down now to do it." "but were you obliged to leave home in this way? if you had told me you loved him, i should have understood--should have sympathised." "oh, but mamma wouldn't, and i had to run off. of course, i wanted a big wedding like other girls, and a lot of bridesmaids and a long veil, but i knew you'd never consent to it, so i made up my mind just to slip away without saying a word. geoffrey is so rich that i can make up afterwards for the things i missed when i was married. this is what he gave me to-day. isn't it lovely?" baring her throat she showed him a pearl necklace hidden beneath her lace collar. "we're sailing day after to-morrow," she went on, delightedly, "and we shall go straight to paris because i am dying to see the shops. i wouldn't run away with him until he promised to take me there." there was no regret in her mind, no misgiving, no disquietude. the thought of his pain had not marred for an instant the pleasure of her imaginary shopping. "o papa, i am happy, so happy!" she sang aloud, springing suddenly to her full height and standing before him in her almost barbaric beauty--from the splendid hair falling upon her shoulders to the little feet that could not keep still for sheer joy of living. he saw her red mouth glow and tremble as she bent toward him. "to think that i'm really and truly out of botetourt at last!" she cried. "then you've no need of me and i may as well go home?" he said a little wistfully as he rose. at this she hung upon his neck for a minute with her first show of feeling. "i'd rather you wouldn't stay till geoffrey comes back," she answered, abruptly releasing him, "because it would be a surprise to him and he's always so cross when he's surprised. he has a perfectly awful temper," she confided in a burst of frankness, "but i've learned exactly how to manage him, so it doesn't matter. then he's so handsome, too. i shouldn't have looked at him twice if he hadn't been handsome. now, go straight home and take good care of yourself and don't get fat and bald before i come back." she kissed him several times, laughing in little gasps, while she held him close in her arms. then putting him from her, she pushed him gently out into the hall. as the door closed on her figure, he felt that it shut upon all that was living or warm in his heart. book fourth liberation chapter i the inward light on the day that he returned to botetourt, it seemed to ordway that the last vestige of his youth dropped from him; and one afternoon six months later, as he passed some schoolboys who were playing ball in the street, he heard one of them remark in an audible whisper: "just wait till that old fellow over there gets out of the way." since coming home again his interests, as well as his power of usefulness, had been taken from him; and the time that he had spent in prison had aged him less than the three peaceful years which he had passed in botetourt. all that suffering and experience could not destroy had withered and died in the monotonous daily round which carried him from his home to richard's office and back again from richard's office to his home. outwardly he had grown only more quiet and gentle, as people are apt to do who approach the middle years in a position of loneliness and dependence. to richard and to lydia, who had never entirely ceased to watch him, it appeared that he had at last "settled down," that he might be, perhaps, trusted to walk alone; and it was with a sensation of relief that his wife observed the intense youthful beam fade from his blue eyes. when his glance grew dull and lifeless, and his features fell gradually into the lines of placid repose which mark the body's contentment rather than the spirit's triumph, it seemed to her that she might at last lay aside the sleepless anxiety which had been her marriage portion. "he has become quite like other people now," she said one day to richard, "do you know that he has grown to take everything exactly as a matter of course, and i really believe he enjoys what he eats." "i'm glad of that," returned richard, "for i've noticed that he is looking very far from well. i advised him several weeks ago to take care of that cough, but he seems to have some difficulty in getting rid of it." "he hasn't been well since alice's marriage," observed lydia, a little troubled. "you know he travelled home from washington in wet clothes and had a spell of influenza afterward. he's had a cold ever since, for i hear him coughing a good deal after he first goes to bed." "you'd better make him attend to it, i think, though with his fine chest there's little danger of anything serious." "do you suppose alice's marriage could have sobered him? he's grown very quiet and grave, and i dare say it's a sign that his wildness has gone out of him, poor fellow. you remember how his laugh used to frighten me? well, he never laughs like that now, though he sometimes stares hard at me as if he were looking directly through me, and didn't even know that he was doing it." as she spoke she glanced out of the window and her eyes fell on daniel, who came slowly up the gravelled walk, his head bent over an armful of old books he carried. "he visits a great deal among the poor," remarked richard, "and i think that's good for him, provided, of course, that he does it with discretion." "i suppose it is," said lydia, though she added immediately, "but aren't the poor often very immoral?" a reply was on richard's lips, but before he could utter it, the door opened and daniel entered with the slow, almost timid, step into which he had schooled himself since his return to botetourt. as he saw richard a smile--his old boyish smile of peculiar sweetness--came to his lips, but without speaking, he crossed to the table and laid down the books he carried. "if those are old books, won't you remember to take them up to your room, daniel?" said lydia, in her tone of aggrieved sweetness. "they make such a litter in the library." he started slightly, a nervous affection which had increased in the last months, and looked at her with an apologetic glance. as he stood there she had again that singular sensation of which she had spoken to richard, as if he were gazing through her and not at her. "i beg your pardon," he answered, "i remember now that i left some here yesterday." "oh, it doesn't matter, of course," she responded pleasantly, "it's only that i like to keep the house tidy, you know." "they do make rather a mess," he admitted, and gathering them up again, he carried them out of the room and up the staircase. they watched his bent gray head disappear between the damask curtains in the doorway, and then listened almost unconsciously for the sound of his slow gentle tread on the floor above. "there was always too much of the dreamer about him, even as a child," commented richard, when the door was heard to close over their heads, "but he seems contented enough now with his old books, doesn't he?" "contented? yes, i believe he is even happy. i never say much to him because, you see, there is so very little for us to talk about. it is a dreadful thing to confess," she concluded resolutely, "but the truth is i've been always a little afraid of him since--since----" "afraid?" he looked at her in astonishment. "well, not exactly afraid--but nervous with a kind of panic shudder at times--a dread of his coming close to me, of his touching me, of his wanting things of me." a shiver ran through her and she bit her lip as if to hide the expression of horror upon her face. "there's nobody else on earth that i would say it to, but when he first came back i used to have nightmares about it. i could never get it out of my mind a minute and if they left me alone with him, i wanted almost to scream with nervousness. it's silly i know, and i can't explain it even to you, but there were times when i shrieked aloud in my sleep because i dreamed that he had come into my room and touched me. i felt that i was wrong and foolish, but i couldn't help it, and i tried--tried--oh, so hard to bear things and to be brave and patient." the tears fell from her eyes on her clasped hands, but her attitude of sorrow only made more appealing the madonna-like loveliness of her features. "you've been a saint, lydia," he answered, patting her drooping shoulder as he rose to his feet. "poor girl, poor girl! and no daughter of my own could be dearer to me," he added in his austere sincerity of manner. "i have tried to do right," replied lydia, lifting her pure eyes to his in an overflow of religious emotion. meanwhile the harmless object of their anxiety sat alone in his room under a green lamp, with one of the musty books he had bought open upon his knees. he was not reading, for his gaze was fixed on the opposite wall, and there was in his eyes something of the abstracted vision which lydia dreaded. it was as if his intellect, forced from the outward experience back into the inner world of thought, had ended by projecting an image of itself into the space at which he looked. while he sat there the patient, apologetic smile with which he had answered to his wife was still on his lips. "i suppose it's because i'm getting old that people and things no longer make me suffer," he said to himself, "it's because i'm getting old that i can look at lydia unmoved, that i can feel tenderness for her even while i see the repulsion creep into her eyes. it isn't her fault, after all, that she loathes me, nor is it mine. yes, i'm certainly an old fellow, the boy was right. at any rate, it's pleasanter, on the whole, than being young." closing the book, he laid it on the table, and leaned forward with his chin on his hands. "but if i'd only known when i was young!" he added, "if i'd only known!" his past life rose before him as a picture that he had seen, rather than as a road along which he had travelled; and he found himself regarding it almost as impersonally as he might have regarded the drawing upon the canvas. the peril of the inner life had already begun to beset him--that mysterious power of reliving one's experience with an intensity which makes the objective world appear dull and colourless by contrast. it was with an effort at times that he was able to detach his mind from the contemplative habit into which he had fallen. between him and his surroundings there existed but a single bond, and this was the sympathy which went out of him when he was permitted to reach the poor and the afflicted. to them he could still speak, with them he could still be mirthful; but from his wife, his uncle, and the members of his own class, he was divided by that impenetrable wall of social tradition. in his home he had ceased to laugh, as lydia had said; but he could still laugh in the humbler houses of the poor. they had received him as one of themselves, and for this reason alone he could remember how to be merry when he was with them. to the others, to his own people, he felt himself to be always an outsider, a reclaimed castaway, a philanthropic case instead of an individual; and he knew that if there was one proof the more to lydia that he was in the end a redeemed character, it was the single fact that he no longer laughed in her presence. it was, he could almost hear her say, unbecoming, if not positively improper, that a person who had spent five years in prison should be able to laugh immoderately afterward; and the gravity of his lips was in her eyes, he understood, the most satisfactory testimony to the regeneration of his heart. and yet lydia, according to her vision, was a kind, as well as a conscientious woman. the pity of it was that if he were to die now, three years after his homecoming, she would probably reconstruct an imaginary figure of him in her memory, and wear crape for it with appropriate grace and dignity. the works of the imagination are manifold, he thought with a grim humour, even in a dull woman. but as there was not likely to occur anything so dramatic, in the immediate present, as his death, he wondered vaguely what particular form of aversion his wife's attitude would next express. or could it be that since he had effaced himself so utterly, he hardly dared to listen to the sound of his footsteps in the house, she had grown to regard him with a kind of quiet tolerance, as an object which was unnecessary, perhaps, yet entirely inoffensive? he remembered now that during those terrible first years in prison he had pursued the thought of her with a kind of hopeless violence, yet to-day he could look back upon her desertion of him in his need with a compassion which forgave the weakness that it could not comprehend. that, too, he supposed was a part of the increasing listlessness of middle age. in a little while he would look forward, it might be, to the coming years without dread--to the long dinners when he sat opposite to her with the festive bowl of flowers between them, to the quiet evenings when she lingered for a few minutes under the lamp before going to her room--those evenings which are the supreme hours of love or of despair. oh, well, he would grow indifferent to the horror of these things, as he had already grown indifferent to the soft curves of her body. yes, it was a thrice blessed thing, this old age to which he was coming! then another memory flooded his heart with the glow of youth, and he saw emily, as she had appeared to him that night in the barn more than six years ago, when she had stood with the lantern held high above her head and the red cape slipping back from her upraised arm. a sharp pain shot through him, and he dropped his eyes as if he had met a blow. that was youth at which he had looked for one longing instant--that was youth and happiness and inextinguishable desire. for a moment he sat with bent head; then with an effort he put the memory from him, and opened his book at the page where he had left off. as he did so there was a tap at his door, and when he had spoken, lydia came in timidly with a letter in her hand. "this was put into uncle richard's box by mistake," she said, "and he has just sent it over." he took it from her and seeing that it was addressed in baxter's handwriting, laid it, still unopened, upon the table. "won't you sit down?" he asked, pushing forward the chair from which he had risen. a brief hesitation showed in her face; then as he turned away from her to pick up some scattered papers from the floor, she sat down with a tentative, nervous manner. "are you quite sure that you're well, daniel?" she inquired. "uncle richard noticed to-day that you coughed a good deal in the office. i wonder if you get exactly the proper kind of food?" he nodded, smiling. "oh, i'm all right," he responded, "i'm as hard as nails, you know, and always have been." "even hard people break down sometimes. i wish you would take a tonic or see a doctor." her solicitude surprised him, until he remembered that she had never failed in sympathy for purely physical ailments. if he had needed bodily healing instead of mental, she would probably have applied it with a conscientious devotedness. "i am much obliged to you, but i'm really not sick," he insisted, "it is very good of you, however." "it is nothing more than my duty," she rejoined, sweetly. "well, that may be, but there's nothing to prevent my being obliged to you for doing your duty." puzzled as always by his whimsical tone, she sat looking at him with her gentle, uncomprehending glance. "i wish, all the same," she murmured, "that you would let me send you a mustard plaster to put on your chest." he shook his head without replying in words to her suggestion. "do you know it is three months since we had a letter from alice," he said, "and six since she went away?" "oh, it's that then? you have been worrying about alice?" "how can i help it? we hardly know even that she is living." "i've thought of her day and night since her marriage, though it's just as likely, isn't it, that she's taken up with the new countries and her new clothes?" "oh, of course, it may be that, but it is the awful uncertainty that kills." with a sigh she looked down at her slippered feet. "i was thinking to-day what a comfort dick is to me--to us all," she said, "one is so sure of him and he is doing so splendidly at college." "yes," he agreed, "dick is a comfort. i wish poor alice was more like him." "she was always wild, you remember, never like other children, and it was impossible to make her understand that some things were right and some wrong. yet i never thought that she would care for such a loud, vulgar creature as geoffrey heath." "did she care for him?" asked daniel, almost in a whisper, "or was it only that she wanted to see paris?" "well, she may have improved him a little--at least let us hope so," she remarked as if she had not heard his question. "he has money, at any rate, and that is what she has always wanted, though i fear even geoffrey's income will be strained by her ceaseless extravagance." as she finished he thought of her own youth, which she had evidently forgotten, and it seemed to him that the faults she blamed most in alice were those which she had overcome patiently in her own nature. "i could stand anything better than this long suspense," he said gently. "it does wear one out," she rejoined. "i am very, very sorry for you." some unaccustomed tone in her voice--a more human quality, a deeper cadence, made him wonder in an impulse of self-reproach if, after all, the breach between them was in part of his own making? was it still possible to save from the ruin, if not love, at least human companionship? "lydia," he said, "it isn't alice, it is mostly loneliness, i think." rising from her chair she stood before him with her vague, sweet smile playing about her lips. "it is natural that you should feel depressed with that cough," she remarked, "i really wish you would let me send you a mustard plaster." as the cough broke out again, he strangled it hilariously in a laugh. "oh, well, if it's any comfort to you, i don't mind," he responded. when she had gone he picked up baxter's letter from the table and opened it with trembling fingers. what he had expected to find, he hardly knew, but as he read the words, written so laboriously in baxter's big scrawling writing, he felt that his energy returned to him with the demand for action--for personal responsibility. "i don't know whether or not you heard of mrs. brooke's death three months ago," the letter ran, "but this is to say that mr. beverly dropped down with a paralytic stroke last week; and now since he's dead and buried, the place is to be sold for debt and the children sent off to school to a friend of miss emily's where they can go cheap. miss emily has a good place now in the tappahannock bank, but she's going north before christmas to some big boarding school where they teach riding. there are a lot of things to be settled about the sale, and i thought that, being convenient, you might take the trouble to run down for a day and help us with your advice, _which is of the best always_. "hoping that you are in good health, i am at present, baxter." as he folded the letter a flush overspread his face. "i'll go," he said, with a new energy in his voice, "i'll go to-morrow." then turning in response to a knock, he opened the door and received the mustard plaster which lydia had made. chapter ii at tappahannock again he had sent a telegram to banks, and as the train pulled into the station, he saw the familiar sandy head and freckled face awaiting him upon the platform. "by george, this is a bully sight, smith," was the first shout that reached his ears. "you're not a bit more pleased than i am," he returned laughing with pleasure, as he glanced from the station, crowded with noisy negroes, up the dusty street into which they were about to turn. "it's like coming home again, and upon my word, i wish i were never to leave here. but how are you, banks? so you are married to milly and going to live contented forever afterward." "yes, i'm married," replied banks, without enthusiasm, "and there's a baby about which milly is clean crazy. milly has got so fat," he added, "that you'd never believe i could have spanned her waist with my hands three years ago." "indeed? and is she as captivating as ever?" "well, i reckon she must be," said banks, "but it doesn't seem so mysterious, somehow, as it used to." his silly, affectionate smile broke out as he looked at his companion. "to tell the truth," he confessed, "i've been missing you mighty hard, smith, marriage or no marriage. it ain't anything against milly, god knows, that she can't take your place, and it ain't anything against the baby. what i want is somebody i can sit down and look up to, and i don't seem to be exactly able to look up to milly or to the baby." "the trouble with you, my dear banks, is that you are an incorrigible idealist and always will be. you were born to be a poet and i don't see to save my life how you escaped." "i didn't. i used to write a poem every sunday of my life when i first went into tobacco. but after that milly came and i got used to spending all my sundays with her." "well, now that you have her in the week, you might begin all over again." they were walking rapidly up the long hill, and as ordway passed, he nodded right and left to the familiar faces that looked out from the shop doors. they were all friendly, they were all smiling, they were all ready to welcome him back among them. "the queer part is," observed banks, with that stubborn vein of philosophy which accorded so oddly with his frivolous features, "that the thing you get doesn't ever seem to be the same as the thing you wanted. this milly is kind to me and the other wasn't, but, somehow, that hasn't made me stop regretting the other one that i didn't marry--the milly that banged and snapped at me about my clothes and things all day long. i don't know what it means, smith, i've studied about it, but i can't understand." "the meaning of it is, banks, that you wanted not the woman, but the dream." "well, i didn't get it," rejoined banks, gloomily. "yet milly's a good wife and you're happy, aren't you?" "i should be," replied banks, "if i could forget how darn fascinating that other milly was. oh, yes, she's a good wife and a doting mother, and i'm happy enough, but it's a soft, squashy kind of happiness, not like the way i used to feel when i'd walk home with you after the preaching in the old field." while he spoke they had reached baxter's warehouse, and as ordway was recognized, there was a quiver of excitement in the little crowd about the doorway. a moment later it had surrounded him with a shout of welcome. a dozen friendly hands were outstretched, a dozen breathless lips were calling his name. as the noise passed through the neighbouring windows, the throng was increased by a number of small storekeepers and a few straggling operatives from the cotton mills, until at last he stopped, half laughing, half crying, in their midst. ten minutes afterward, when baxter wedged his big person through the archway, he saw ordway standing bareheaded in the street, his face suffused with a glow which seemed to give back to him a fleeting beam of the youth that he had lost. "well, i reckon it's my turn now. you can just step inside the office, smith," remarked baxter, while he grasped ordway's arm and pulled him back into the warehouse. as they entered the little room, daniel saw again the battered chair, the pile of smith's almanacs, and the paper weight, representing a gambolling kitten, upon the desk. "i'm glad to see you--we're all glad to see you," said baxter, shaking his hand for the third time with a grasp which made ordway feel that he was in the clutch of a down cushion. "it isn't the way of tappahannock to forget a friend, and she ain't forgotten you." "it's like her," returned ordway, and he added with a sigh, "i only wish i were coming back for good, baxter." "there now!" exclaimed baxter, chuckling, "you don't, do you? well, all i can say, my boy, is that you've got a powerful soft spot that you left here, and your old job in the warehouse is still waiting for you when you care to take it. i tell you what, smith, you've surely spoiled me for any other bookkeeper, and i ain't so certain, when it comes to that, that you haven't spoiled me for myself." he was larger, softer, more slovenly than ever, but he was so undeniably the perfect and inimitable baxter, that ordway felt his heart go out to him in a rush of sentiment. "oh, baxter, how is it possible that i've lived without you?" he asked. "i don't know, smith, but it's a plain fact that after my wife--and that's nature--there ain't anybody goin' that i set so much store by. why, when i was in botetourt last spring, i went so far as to put my right foot on your bottom step, but, somehow, the left never picked up the courage to follow it." "do you dare to tell me that you've been to botetourt?" demanded ordway with indignation. "well, i could have stood the house you live it, though it kind of took my breath away," replied baxter, with an embarrassed and guilty air, "but when it came to facing that fellow at the door, then my courage gave out and i bolted. i studied him a long while, thinking i might get my eyes used to the sight of him, but it did no good. i declar', smith, i could no more have put a word to him than i could to the undertaker at my own funeral. bless my soul, suh, poor mr. beverly, when he was alive, didn't hold a tallow candle to that man." "you might have laid in wait for me in the street, then, that would have been only fair." "but how did i know, smith, that you wan't livin' up to the man at your door?" "it wouldn't have taken you long to find out that i wasn't. so poor mr. beverly is dead and buried, then, is he?" baxter's face adopted instantly a funereal gloom, and his voice, when he spoke, held a quaver of regret. "there wasn't a finer gentleman on earth than mr. beverly," he said, "and he would have given me his last blessed cent if he'd ever had one to give. i've lost a friend, smith, there's no doubt of that, i've lost a friend. and poor mrs. brooke, too," he added sadly. "many and many is the time i've heard mr. beverly grieven' over the way she worked. 'if things had only come out as i planned them, baxter,' he'd say to me, 'my wife should never have raised her finger except to lift food to her lips.'" "and yet i've seen him send her downstairs a dozen times a day to make him a lemonade," observed ordway cynically. "that wasn't his fault, suh, he was born like that--it was just his way. he was always obliged to have what he wanted." "well, i can forgive him for killing his wife, but i can't pardon him for the way he treated his sister. that girl used to work like a farm hand when i was out there." "she was mighty fond of him all the same, was miss emily." "everybody was, that's what i'm quarreling about. he didn't deserve it." "but he meant well in his heart, smith, and it's by that that i'm judgin' him. it wasn't his fault, was it, if things never went just the way he had planned them out? i don't deny, of course, that he was sort of flighty at times, as when he made a will the week before he died and left five hundred dollars to the tappahannock orphan asylum." "to the orphan asylum? why, his own children are orphans, and he didn't have five hundred dollars to his name!" "of course, he didn't, that's just the point," said baxter with a placid tolerance which seemed largely the result of physical bulk, "and so they have had to sell most of the furniture to pay the bequest. you see, just the night before his stroke, he got himself considerably worked up over those orphans. so he just couldn't help hopin' he would have five hundred dollars to leave 'em when he came to die, an' in case he did have it he thought he might as well be prepared. then he sat right down and wrote the bequest out, and the next day there came his stroke and carried him off." "oh, you're a first-rate advocate, baxter, but that doesn't alter my opinion of mr. beverly. what about his own orphans now? how are they going to be provided for?" "it seems miss emily is to board 'em out at some school she knows of, and i've settled it with her that she's to borrow enough from me to tide over any extra expenses until spring." "then we are to wind up the affairs of cedar hill, are we? i suppose it's best for everybody, but it makes me sad enough to think of it." "and me, too, smith," said baxter, sentimentally. "i can see mr. beverly to the life now playin' with his dominoes on the front porch. but there's mighty little to wind up, when it comes to that. it's mortgaged pretty near to the last shingle, and when the bequest to the orphans is paid out of what's over, there'll be precious few dollars that miss emily can call her own. the reason i sent for you, smith," he added in a solemn voice, "was that i thought you might be some comfort to that poor girl out there in her affliction. if you feel inclined, i hoped you'd walk out to cedar hill and read her a chapter or so in the bible. i remembered how consolin' you used to be to people in trouble." with a prodigious effort ordway swallowed his irreverent mirth, while baxter's pious tones sounded in his ears. "of course i shall go out to cedar hill," he returned, "but i was wondering, baxter," he broke off for a minute and then went on again with an embarrassed manner, "i was wondering if there was any way i could help those children without being found out? it would make me particularly happy to feel that i might share in giving them an education. do you think you could smuggle the money for their school bills into their christmas stockings?" baxter thought over it a moment. "i might manage it," he replied, "seein' that the bills are mostly to come through my hands, and i'm to settle all that i can out of what's left of the estate." as he paused daniel looked hastily away from him, fearful lest baxter might be perplexed by the joy that shone in his face. to be connected, even so remotely, with emily in the care of beverly's children, was a happiness for which, a moment ago, he had not dared to hope. "let me deposit the amount with you twice a year," he said, "that will be both the easiest and the safest way." "maybe you're right. and now it's settled, ain't it, that you're to come to my house to stay?" "i must go back on the night train, i'm sorry to say, but if you'll let me i'll drop in to supper. i remember your wife's biscuits of old," he added, smiling. "you don't mean it! well, it'll tickle her to death, i reckon. it ain't likely, by the way, that you'll find much to eat out at cedar hill, so you'd better remember to have a snack before you start." "oh, i can fast until supper," returned daniel, rising. "well, don't forget to give my respects to miss emily, and tell her i say not to worry, but to let the lord take a turn. you'll find things pretty topsy-turvy out there, smith," he added, "but if you don't happen to have your bible handy, i'll lend you one and welcome. there's the big one with gilt clasps the boys gave me last christmas right on top of my desk." "oh, they're sure to have one around," replied ordway gravely, as he shook hands again before leaving the office. from the top of the hill by the brick church, he caught a glimpse of the locust trees in mrs. twine's little yard, and turning in response to a remembered force of habit, he followed the board sidewalk to the whitewashed gate, which hung slightly open. in the street a small boy was busily flinging pebbles at the driver of a coal wagon, and calling the child to him, ordway inquired if mrs. twine still lived in that house. "thar ain't no mrs. twine," replied the boy, "she's mrs. buzzy. she married my pa, that's why i'm here," he explained with a wink, as the door behind him flew open, and the lady in question rushed out to welcome her former lodger. "i hear her now--she's a-comin'. my, an' she's a tartar, she is!" "it's the best sight i've laid eyes on sense i saw po', dear bill on his deathbed," exclaimed the tartar, with delight. "come right in, suh, come right in an' set down an' let me git a look at you. thar ain't much cheer in the house now sence i've lost bill an' his sprightly ways, but the welcome's warm if the house ain't." she brought him ceremoniously into her closed parlour, and then at his request led him out of the stagnant air back into her comfortable, though untidy, kitchen. "i jest had my hand in the dough, suh, when i heard yo' voice," she observed apologetically, as she wiped off the bottom of a chair with her blue gingham apron. "i knew you'd be set back to find out i didn't stay long a widder." "i hadn't even heard of bill's death," he returned, "so it was something of a surprise to discover that you were no longer mrs. twine. was it very sudden?" "yes, suh, 'twas tremens--delicious tremens--an' they took him off so quick we didn't even have the crape in the house to tie on the front do' knob. you could a heard him holler all the way down to the cotton mills. he al'ays had powerful fine lungs, had bill, an' if he'd a-waited for his lungs to take him, he'd be settin' thar right now, as peart as life." her eyes filled with tears, but wiping them hastily away with her apron, she took up a pan of potatoes and began paring them with a handleless knife. "after your former marriages," he remarked doubtful as to whether he should offer sympathy or congratulations, "i should have thought you would have rested free for a time at least." "it warn't my way, mr. smith," she responded, with a mournful shake of her head. "to be sure i had a few peaceful months arter bill was gone, but the queer thing is how powerful soon peace can begin to pall on yo' taste. why, i hadn't been in mo'nin' for bill goin' on to four months, when silas trimmer came along an' axed me, an' i said 'yes' as quick as that, jest out a the habit of it. i took off my mo'nin' an' kep' comp'ny with him for quite a while, but we had a quarrel over bill's tombstone, suh, for, bein' a close-fisted man, he warn't willin' that i should put up as big a monument as i'd a mind to. well, i broke off with him on that account, for when it comes to choosin' between respect to the dead an' marriage to the livin' silas trimmer, i told him 'i reckon it won't take long for you to find out which way my morals air set.' he got mad as a hornet and went off, and i put on mo'nin' agin an' wo' it steddy twil the year was up." "and at the end of that time, i presume, you were wearied of widowhood and married buzzy?" "it's a queer thing, suh," she observed, as she picked up a fresh potato and inspected it as attentively as if it had been a new proposal, "it's a queer thing we ain't never so miserable in this world as when we ain't got the frazzle of an excuse to be so. now, arter bill went from me, thar was sech a quiet about that it began to git on my nerves, an' at last it got so that i couldn't sleep at nights because i was no longer obleeged to keep one ear open to hear if he was comin' upstairs drunk or sober. bless yo' heart, thar's not a woman on earth that don't need some sort of distraction, an bill was a long sight better at distractin' you than any circus i've ever seen. why, i even stopped goin' to 'em as long as he was livin', for it was a question every minute as to whether he was goin' to chuck you under the chin or lam you on the head, an' thar was a mortal lot a sprightliness about it. i reckon i must have got sort a sp'iled by the excitement, for when 't was took away, i jest didn't seem to be able to settle down. but thar are mighty few men with the little ways that bill had," she reflected sadly. "yet your present husband is kind to you, is he not?" "oh, he's kind enough, suh," she replied, with unutterable contempt, "but thar ain't nothin' in marriage that palls so soon as kindness. it's unexpectedness that keeps you from goin' plum crazy with the sameness of it, an' thar ain't a bit of unexpectedness about jake. he does everything so regular that thar're times when i'd like to bust him open jest to see how he is wound up inside. naw, suh, it ain't the blows that wears a woman out, it's the mortal sameness." clearly there was no comfort to be afforded her, and after a few words of practical advice on the subject of the children's education, he shook hands with her and started again in the direction of cedar hill. the road with its november colours brought back to him the many hours when he had tramped over it in cheerfulness or in despair. the dull brown stretches of broomsedge, rolling like a high sea, the humble cabins, nestling so close to the ground, the pale clay road winding under the half-bared trees, from which the bright leaves were fluttering downward--these things made the breach of the years close as suddenly as if the divided scenery upon a stage had rolled together. while he walked alone here it was impossible to believe in the reality of his life in botetourt. as he approached cedar hill, the long melancholy avenue appeared to him as an appropriate shelter for beverly's gentle ghost. he was surprised to discover with what tenderness he was able to surround the memory of that poetic figure since he stood again in the atmosphere which had helped to cultivate his indefinable charm. in tappahannock beverly's life might still be read in the dry lines of prose, but beneath the historic influences of cedar hill it became, even in ordway's eyes, a poem of sentiment. beyond the garden, he could see presently, through a gap in the trees, the silvery blur of life everlasting in the fallow land, which was steeped in afternoon sunshine. somewhere from a nearer meadow there floated a faint call of "coopee! coopee! coopee!" to the turkeys lost in the sassafras. then as he reached the house aunt mehitable's face looked down at him from a window in the second story: and in response to her signs of welcome, he ascended the steps and entered the hall, where he stopped upon hearing a child's voice through the half open door of the dining-room. "may i wear my coral beads even if i am in mourning, aunt emily?" "not yet, bella," answered emily's patient yet energetic tones. "put them away awhile and they'll be all the prettier when you take them out again." "but can't i mourn for papa and mamma just as well in my beads as i can without them?" "that may be, dear, but we must consider what other people will say." "what have other people got to do with my mourning, aunt emily?" "i don't know, but when you grow up you'll find that they have something to do with everything that concerns you." "well, then, i shan't mourn at all," replied bella, defiantly. "if you won't let me mourn in my coral beads, i shan't mourn a single bit without them." "there, there, bella, go on with your lesson," said emily sternly, "you are a naughty girl." at the sound of ordway's step on the threshold, she rose to her feet, with a frightened movement, and stood, white and trembling, her hand pressed to her quivering bosom. "you!" she cried out sharply, and there was a sound in her voice that brought him with a rush to her side. but as he reached her she drew quickly away, and hiding her face in her hands, broke into passionate weeping. it was the first time that he had seen her lose her habit of self-command, and while he watched her, he felt that each of her broken sobs was wrung from his own heart. "i was a fool not to prepare you," he said, as he placed a restraining hand on the awe-struck bella. "you've had so many shocks i ought to have known--i ought to have foreseen----" at his words she looked up instantly, drying her tears on a child's dress which she was mending. "you came so suddenly that it startled me, that is all," she answered. "i thought for a minute that something had happened to you--that you were an apparition instead of a reality. i've got into the habit of seeing ghosts of late." "it's a bad habit," he replied, as he pushed bella from the room and closed the door after her. "but i'm not a ghost, emily, only a rough and common mortal. baxter wrote me of beverly's death, so i came thinking that i might be of some little use. remember what you promised me in botetourt." as he looked at her now more closely, he saw that the clear brown of her skin had taken a sallow tinge, as if she were very weary, and that there were faint violet shadows in the hollows beneath her eyes. these outward signs of her weakness moved him to a passion deeper and tenderer than he had ever felt before. "i have not forgotten," she responded, after a moment in which she had recovered her usual bright aspect, "but there is really nothing one can do, it is all so simple. the farm has already been sold for debt, and so i shall start in the world without burdens, if without wealth." "and the children? what of them?" "that is arranged, too, very easily. blair is fifteen now, and he will be given a scholarship at college. the girls will go to a friend of mine, who has a boarding school and has made most reasonable terms." "and you?" he asked in a voice that expressed something of the longing he could not keep back. "is there to be nothing but hard work for you in the future?" "i am not afraid of work," she rejoined, smiling, "i am afraid only of reaching a place where work does not count." as he made no answer, she talked on brightly, telling him of her plans for the future, of the progress the children had shown at their lessons, of the arrangements she had made for aunt mehitable and micah, and of the innumerable changes which had occurred since he went away. so full of life, of energy, of hopefulness, were her face and voice that but for her black dress he would not have suspected that she had stood recently beside a deathbed. yet as he listened to her, his heart was torn by the sharp anguish of parting, and when presently she began to question him about his life in botetourt, it was with difficulty that he forced himself to reply in a steady voice. all other memories of her would give way, he felt, before the picture of her in her black dress against the burning logs, with the red firelight playing over her white face and hands. an hour later, when he rose to go, he took both of her hands in his, and bending his head laid his burning forehead against her open palms. "emily," he said, "tell me that you understand." for a moment she gazed down on him in silence. then, as he raised his eyes, she kissed him so softly that it seemed as if a spirit had touched his lips. "i understand--forever," she answered. at her words he straightened himself, as though a burden had fallen from him, and turning slowly away he went out of the house and back in the direction of tappahannock. chapter iii alice's marriage it was after ten o'clock when he returned to botetourt, and he found upon reaching home that lydia had already gone to bed, though a bottle of cough syrup, placed conspicuously upon his bureau, bore mute witness to the continuance of her solicitude. after so marked a consideration it seemed to him only decent that he should swallow a portion of the liquid; and he was in the act of filling the tablespoon she had left, when a ring at the door caused him to start until the medicine spilled from his hand. a moment later the ring was repeated more violently, and as he was aware that the servants had already left the house, he threw on his coat, and lighting a candle, went hurriedly out into the hall and down the dark staircase. the sound of a hand beating on the panels of the door quickened his steps almost into a run, and he was hardly surprised, when he had withdrawn the bolts, to find alice's face looking at him from the darkness outside. she was pale and thin, he saw at the first glance, and there was an angry look in her eyes, which appeared unnaturally large in their violent circles. "i thought you would never open to me, papa," she said fretfully as she crossed the threshold. "oh, i am so glad to see you again! feel how cold my hands are, i am half frozen." taking her into his arms, he kissed her face passionately as it rested for an instant against his shoulder. "are you alone, alice? where is your husband?" without answering, she raised her head, shivering slightly, and then turning away, entered the library where a log fire was smouldering to ashes. as he threw on more wood, she came over to the hearth, and stretched out her hands to the warmth with a nervous gesture. then the flame shot up and he saw that her beauty had gained rather than lost by the change in her features. she appeared taller, slenderer, more distinguished, and the vivid black and white of her colouring was intensified by the perfect simplicity of the light cloth gown and dark furs she wore. "oh, he's at home," she answered, breaking the long silence. "i mean he's in the house in henry street, but we had a quarrel an hour after we got back, so i put on my hat again and came away. i'm not going back--not unless he makes it bearable for me to live with him. he's such--such a brute that it's as much as one can do to put up with it, and it's been killing me by inches for the last months. i meant to write you about it, but somehow i couldn't, and yet i knew that i couldn't write at all without letting you see it. oh, he's unbearable!" she exclaimed, with a tremor of disgust. "you will never know--you will never be able to imagine all that i've been through!" "but is he unkind to you, alice? is he cruel?" she bared her arm with a superb disdainful gesture, and he saw three rapidly discolouring bruises on her delicate flesh. the sight filled him with loathing rather than anger, and he caught her to him almost fiercely as if he would hold her not only against geoffrey heath, but against herself. "you shall not go back to him," he said, "i will not permit it!" "the worst part is," she went on vehemently, as if he had not spoken, "that it is about money--money--always money. he has millions, his lawyers told me so, and yet he makes me give an account to him of every penny that i spend. i married him because i thought i should be rich and free, but he's been hardly better than a miser since the day of the wedding. he wants me to dress like a dowdy, for all his wealth, and i can't buy a ring that he doesn't raise a terrible fuss. i hate him more and more every day i live, but it makes no difference to him as long as he has me around to look at whenever he pleases. i have to pay him back for every dollar that he gives me, and if i keep away from him and get cross, he holds back my allowance. oh, it's a dog's life!" she exclaimed wildly, "and it is killing me!" "you shan't bear it, alice. as long as i'm alive you are safe with me." "for a time i could endure it because of the travelling and the strange countries," she resumed, ignoring the tenderness in his voice, "but geoffrey was so frightfully jealous that if i so much as spoke to a man, he immediately flew into a rage. he even made me leave the opera one night in paris because a russian grand duke in the next box looked at me so hard." throwing herself into a chair, she let her furs slip from her shoulders, and sat staring moodily into the fire. "i've sworn a hundred times that i'd leave him," she said, "and yet i've never done it until to-night." while she talked on feverishly, he untied her veil, which she had tossed back, and taking off her hat, pressed her gently against the cushions he had placed in her chair. "you look so tired, darling, you must rest," he said. "rest! you may as well tell me to sleep!" she exclaimed. then her tone altered abruptly, and for the first time, she seemed able to penetrate beyond her own selfish absorption. "oh, you poor papa, how very old you look!" she said. taking his head in her arms, she pressed it to her bosom and cried softly for a minute. "it's all my fault--everything is my fault, but i can't help it. i'm made that way." then pushing him from her suddenly, she sprang to her feet and began walking up and down in her restless excited manner. "let me get you a glass of wine, alice," he said, "you are trembling all over." she shook her head. "it isn't that--it isn't that. it's the awful--awful money. if it wasn't for the money i could go on. oh, i wish i'd never spent a single dollar! i wish i'd always gone in rags!" again he forced her back into her chair and again, after a minute of quiet, she rose to her feet and broke into hysterical sobs. "all that i have is yours, alice, you know that," he said in the effort to soothe her, "and, besides, your own property is hardly less than two hundred thousand." "but uncle richard won't give it to me," she returned angrily. "i wrote and begged him on my knees and he still refused to let me have a penny more than my regular income. it's all tied up, he says, in investments, and that until i am twenty-one it must remain in his hands." with a frantic movement, she reached for her muff, and drew from it a handful of crumpled papers, which she held out to him. "geoffrey found these to-night and they brought on the quarrel," she said. "yesterday he gave me this bracelet and he seems to think i could live on it for a month!" she stretched out her arm, as she spoke, and showed him a glittering circle of diamonds immediately below the blue finger marks. "there's a sable coat still that he doesn't know a thing of," she finished with a moan. bending under the lamp, he glanced hurriedly over the papers she had given him, and then rose to his feet still holding them in his hand. "these alone come to twenty thousand dollars, alice," he said with a gentle sternness. "and there are others, too," she cried, making no effort to control her convulsive sobs. "there are others which i didn't dare even to let him see." for a moment he let her weep without seeking to arrest her tears. "are you sure this will be a lesson to you?" he asked at last. "will you be careful--very careful from this time?" "oh, i'll never spend a penny again. i'll stay in botetourt forever," she promised desperately, eager to retrieve the immediate instant by the pledge of a more or less uncertain future. "then we must help you," he said. "among us all--uncle richard, your mother and i--it will surely be possible." pacified at once by his assurance, she sat down again and dried her eyes in her muff. "it seems a thousand years since i went away," she observed, glancing about her for the first time. "nothing is changed and yet everything appears to be different." "and are you different also?" he asked. "oh, i'm older and i've seen a great deal more," she responded, with a laugh which came almost as a shock to him after her recent tears, "but i still want to go everywhere and have everything just as i used to." "but i thought you were determined to stay in botetourt for the future?" he suggested. "well, so i am, i suppose," she returned dismally, "there's nothing else for me to do, is there?" "nothing that i see." "then i may as well make up my mind to be miserable forever. it's so frightfully gloomy in this old house, isn't it? how is mamma?" "she's just as you left her, neither very well nor very sick." "so it's exactly what it always was, i suppose, and will drive me to distraction in a few weeks. is dick away?" "he's at college, and he's doing finely." "of course he is--that's why he's such a bore." "let dick alone, alice, and tell me about yourself. so you went to europe immediately after i saw you in washington?" "two days later. i was dreadfully seasick, and geoffrey was as disagreeable as he could be, and made all kinds of horrid jokes about me." "you went straight to paris, didn't you?" "as soon as we landed, but geoffrey made me come away in three weeks because he said i spent so much money." her face clouded again at the recollection of her embarrassments. "oh, we had awful scenes, but i hadn't even a wedding dress, you know, and french dressmakers are so frightfully expensive. one of them charged me five thousand dollars for a gown--but he told me that it was really cheap, because he'd sold one to another american the day before for twelve thousand. i don't know who her husband is," she added wistfully, "but i wish i were married to him." the wildness of her extravagance depressed him even more than her excessive despair had done; and he wondered if the vagueness of her ideas of wealth was due to the utter lack in her of the imagination which foresees results? she had lived since her girlhood in a quiet virginia town, her surroundings had been comparatively simple, and she had never been thrown, until her marriage, amid the corrupting influences of great wealth, yet, in spite of these things, she had squandered a fortune as carelessly as a child might have strewed pebbles upon the beach. her regret at last had come not through realisation of her fault, but in the face of the immediate punishment which threatened her. "so he got you out of paris? well, i'm glad of that," he remarked. "he was perfectly brutal about it, i wish you could have heard him. then we went down into italy and did nothing for months but look at old pictures--at least i did, he wouldn't come--and float around in a gondola until i almost died from the monotony. it was only after i found a lace shop, where they had the most beautiful things, that he would take me away, and then he insisted upon going to some little place up in the alps because he said he didn't suppose i could possibly pack the mountains into my trunks. oh, those dreadful mountains! they were so glaring i could never go out of doors until the afternoon, and geoffrey would go off climbing or shooting and leave me alone in a horrid little hotel where there was nobody but a one-eyed german army officer, and a woman missionary who was bracing herself for south africa. she wore a knitted jersey all day and a collar which looked as if it would cut her head off if she ever forgot herself and bent her neck." her laughter, the delicious, irresponsible laughter of a child, rippled out: "she asked me one day if our blacks wore draperies? the ones in south africa didn't, and it made it very embarrassing sometimes, she said, to missionary to them. oh, you can't imagine what i suffered from her, and geoffrey was so horrid about it, and insisted that she was just the sort of companion that i needed. so one day when he happened to be in the writing-room where she was, i locked the door on the outside and threw the key down into the gorge. there wasn't any locksmith nearer than twenty miles, and when they sent for him he was away. oh, it was simply too funny for words! geoffrey on the inside was trying to break the heavy lock and the proprietor on the outside was protesting that he mustn't, and all the time we could hear the missionary begging everybody please to be patient. she said if it were required of her she was quite prepared to stay locked up all night, but geoffrey wasn't, so he swung himself down by the branches of a tree which grew near the window." all her old fascination had come back to her with her change of mood, and he forgot to listen to her words while he watched the merriment sparkle in her deep blue eyes. it was a part of his destiny that he should submit to her spell, as, he supposed, even geoffrey submitted at times. he was about to make some vague comment upon her story, when her face changed abruptly into an affected gravity, and turning his head, he saw that lydia had come noiselessly into the room, and was advancing to meet her daughter with outstretched arms. "why, alice, my child, what a beautiful surprise! when did you come?" as alice started forward to her embrace, ordway noticed that there was an almost imperceptible tightening of the muscles of her body. "only a few minutes ago," she replied, with the characteristic disregard of time which seemed, in some way, to belong to her inability to consider figures, "and, oh, i am so glad to be back! you are just as lovely as ever." "well, you are lovelier," said lydia, kissing her, and adding a moment afterward, as the result of her quick, woman's glance, "what a charming gown!" alice shrugged her shoulders, with a foreign gesture which she had picked up. "oh, you must see some of my others," she replied, "i wish that my trunks would come, but i forgot they were all sent to the other house, and i haven't even a nightgown. will you lend me a nightgown, mamma? i have some of the loveliest you ever saw which were embroidered for me by the nuns in a french convent." "so, you'll spend the night?" said lydia, "i'm so glad, dear, and i'll go up and see if your bed has sheets on it." "oh, it's not only for the night," returned alice, defiantly, "i've come back for good. i've left geoffrey, haven't i, papa?" "i hope so, darling," answered ordway, coming for the first time over to where they stood. "left geoffrey?" repeated lydia. "do you mean you've separated?" "i mean i'm never going back again--that i detest him--that i'd rather die--that i'll kill myself before i'll do it." lydia received her violence with the usual resigned sweetness that she presented to an impending crisis. "but, my dear, my dear, a divorce is a horrible thing!" she wailed. "well, it isn't half so horrible as geoffrey," retorted alice. ordway, who had turned away again as lydia spoke, came forward at the girl's angry words, and caught the hand that she had stretched out as if to push her mother from her. "let's be humbly grateful that we've got her back," he said, smiling, "while we prepare her bed." chapter iv the power of the blood when he came out into the hall the next morning, lydia met him, in her dressing-gown, on her way from alice's room. "how is she?" he asked eagerly. "did she sleep?" "no, she was very restless, so i stayed with her. she went home a quarter of an hour ago." "went home? do you mean she's gone back to that brute?" a servant's step sounded upon the staircase, and with her unfailing instinct for propriety, she drew back into his room and lowered her voice. "she said that she was too uncomfortable without her clothes and her maid, but i think she had definitely made up her mind to return to him." "but when did she change? you heard her say last night that she would rather kill herself." "oh, you know alice," she responded a little wearily; and for the first time it occurred to him that the exact knowledge of alice might belong, after all, not to himself, but to her. "you think, then," he asked, "that she meant none of her violent protestations of last night?" "i am sure that she meant them while she uttered them--not a minute afterward. she can't help being dramatic any more than she can help being beautiful." "are you positive that you said nothing to bring about her decision? did you influence her in any way?" "i did nothing more than tell her that she must make her choice once for all--that she must either go back to geoffrey heath and keep up some kind of appearances, or publicly separate herself from him. i let her see quite plainly that a state of continual quarrels was impossible and indecent." her point of view was so entirely sensible that he found himself hopelessly overpowered by its unassailable logic. "so she has decided to stick to him for better or for worse, then?" "for the present at all events. she realised fully, i think, how much she would be obliged to sacrifice by returning home?" "sacrifice? good god, what?" he demanded. "oh, well, you see, geoffrey lives in a fashion that is rather grand for botetourt. he travels a great deal, and he makes her gorgeous presents when he is in a good humour. she seemed to feel that if we could only settle these bills for her, she would be able to bring about a satisfactory adjustment. i was surprised to find how quietly she took it all this morning. she had forgotten entirely, i believe, the scene she made downstairs last night." this was his old alice, he reflected in baffled silence, and apparently he would never attain to the critical judgment of her. well, in any case, he was able to do justice to lydia's admirable detachment. "i suppose i may have a talk with heath anyway?" he said at last. "she particularly begs you not to, and i feel strongly that she is right." "does she expect me to sit quietly by and see it go on forever? why, there were bruises on her arm that he had made with his fingers." lydia paled as she always did when one of the brutal facts of life was thrust on her notice. "oh, she doesn't think that will happen again. it appears that she had lost her temper and tried her best to infuriate him. he is still very much in love with her at times, and she hopes that by a little diplomacy she may be able to arrange matters between them." "diplomacy with that insufferable cad! pshaw!" lydia sighed, not in exasperation, but with the martyr's forbearance. "it is really a crisis in alice's life," she said, "and we must treat it with seriousness." "i was never more serious in my life. i'm melancholy. i'm abject." "last night she told me that geoffrey threatened to go west and get a divorce, and this frightened her." "but i thought it was the very thing she wanted," he urged in bewilderment. "hadn't she left him last night for good and all?" "she might leave him, but she could not give up his money. it is impossible, i suppose, for you to realise her complete dependence upon wealth--the absurdity of her ideas about the value of money. why, her income of five thousand which uncle richard allows her would not last her a month." "i realised a little of this when i glanced over those bills she gave me." "of course we shall pay those ourselves, but what is twenty thousand dollars to her, when geoffrey seems to have paid out a hundred thousand already. he began, i can see, by being very generous, but she confessed to me this morning that other bills were still to come in which she would not dare to let him see. i told her that she must try to meet these out of her income, and that we would reduce our living expenses as much as possible in order to pay those she gave you." "i shall ask uncle richard to advance this out of my personal property," he said. "but he will not do it. you know how scrupulous he is about all such matters, and he told me the other day that your father's will had clearly stated that the money was not to be touched unless he should deem it for your interest to turn it over to you." her command of the business situation amazed him, until he remembered her long conversations with richard ordway, whose interests were confined within strictly professional limits. his fatal mistake in the past, he saw now, was that he had approached her, not as a fellow mortal, but as a divinity; for the farther he receded from the attitude of worship, the more was he able to appreciate the quality of her practical virtues. in spite of her poetic exterior, it was in the rosy glow of romance that she showed now as barest of attractions. the bottle of cough syrup on his bureau still testified to her ability to sympathise in all cases where the imagination was not required to lend its healing insight. "but surely it is to my interest to save alice," he said after a pause. "i think he will feel that it must be done by the family, by us all," she answered, "he has always had so keen a sense of honour in little things." an hour later, when he broached the subject to richard in his office, he found that lydia was right, as usual, in her prediction; and with a flash of ironic humour, he pictured her as enthroned above his destiny, like a fourth fate who spun the unyielding thread of common sense. "of course the debt must be paid if it is a condition of alice's reconciliation with her husband," said the old man, "but i shall certainly not sacrifice your securities in order to do it. such an act would be directly against the terms of your father's will." there was no further concession to be had from him, so daniel turned to his work, half in disappointment, half in admiration of his uncle's loyalty to the written word. when he went home to luncheon lydia told him that she had seen alice, who had appeared seriously disturbed, though she had shown her, with evident enjoyment, a number of exquisite paris gowns. "she had a sable coat, also, in her closet, which could not have cost less, i should have supposed, than forty thousand dollars--the kind of coat that a russian grand duchess might have worn--but when i spoke of it, she grew very much depressed and changed the subject. did you talk to uncle richard? and was i right?" "you're always right," he admitted despondently, "but do you think, then, that i'd better not see alice to-day?" "perhaps it would be wiser to wait until to-morrow. geoffrey is in a very difficult humour, she says, more brutally indifferent to her than he has been since her marriage." "isn't that all the more reason she ought to have her family about her?" "she says not. it's easier to deal with him, she feels, alone--and any way uncle richard will call there this afternoon." "oh, uncle richard!" he groaned, as he went out. in the evening there was no news beyond a reassuring visit from richard ordway, who stopped by, for ten minutes, on his way from an interview with geoffrey heath. "to tell the truth i found him less obstinate than i had expected," he said, "and there's no doubt, i fear, that he has some show of justice upon his side. he has agreed now to make alice a very liberal allowance from the first of april, provided she will promise to make no more bills, and to live until then within her own income. he told me that he was obliged to retrench for the next six months in order to meet his obligations without touching his investments. it seems that he had bought very largely on margin, and the shrinkages in stocks has forced him to pay out a great deal of money recently." "i knew you would manage it, uncle, i relied on you absolutely," said lydia, sweetly. "i did only my duty, my child," he responded, as he held out his hand. the one good result of the anxiety of the last twenty-four hours--the fact that it had brought lydia and himself into a kind of human connection--had departed, daniel observed, when he sat down to dinner, separated from her by six yellow candle shades and a bowl of gorgeous chrysanthemums. after a casual comment upon the soup, and the pleasant reminder that dick would be home for thanksgiving, the old uncomfortable silence fell between them. she had just remarked that the roast was a little overdone, and he had agreed with her from sheer politeness, when a sharp ring at the bell sent the old negro butler hurrying out into the hall. an instant later there was a sound of rapid footsteps, and alice, wearing a long coat, which slipped from her bare shoulders as she entered, came rapidly forward and threw herself into ordway's arms, with an uncontrollable burst of tears. "my child, my child, what is it?" he questioned, while lydia, rising from the table with a disturbed face, but an unruffled manner, remarked to the butler that he need not serve the dessert. "come into the library, alice, it is quieter there," she said, putting her arm about her daughter, with an authoritative pressure. "o, papa, i will never see him again! you must tell him that. i shall never see him again," she cried, regardless alike of lydia's entreaties and the restraining presence of the butler. "go to him to-night and tell him that i will never--never go back." "i'll tell him, alice, and i'll do it with a great deal of pleasure," he answered soothingly, as he led her into the library and closed the door. "but you must go at once. i want him to know it at once." "i'll go this very hour--i'll go this very minute, if you honestly mean it." "would it not be better to wait until to-morrow, alice?" suggested lydia. "then you will have time to quiet down and to see things rationally." "i don't want to quiet down," sobbed alice, angrily, "i want him to know now--this very instant--that he has gone too far--that i will not stand it. he told me a minute ago--the beast!--that he'd like to see the man who would be fool enough to keep me--that if i went he'd find a handsomer woman within a week!" "well, i'll see him, darling," said ordway. "sit here with your mother, and have a good cry and talk things over." as he spoke he opened the door and went out into the hall, where he got into his overcoat. "remember last night and don't say too much, daniel," urged lydia in a warning whisper, coming after him, "she is quite hysterical now and does not realise what she is saying." "oh, i'll remember," he returned, and a minute later, he closed the front door behind him. on his way to the heath house in henry street, he planned dispassionately his part in the coming interview, and he resolved that he would state alice's position with as little show of feeling as it was possible for him to express. he would tell heath candidly that, with his consent, alice should never return to him, but he would say this in a perfectly quiet and inoffensive manner. if there was to be a scene, he concluded calmly, it should be made entirely by geoffrey. then, as he went on, he said to himself, that he had grown tired and old, and that he lacked now the decision which should carry one triumphantly over a step like this. even his anger against alice's husband had given way to a dragging weariness, which seemed to hold him back as he ascended the brown-stone steps and laid his hand on the door bell. when the door was opened, and he followed the servant through the long hall, ornamented by marble statues, to the smoking-room at the end, he was conscious again of that sense of utter incapacity which had been bred in him by his life in botetourt. geoffrey, after a full dinner, was lounging, with a cigar and a decanter of brandy, over a wood fire, and as his visitor entered he rose from his chair with a lazy shake of his whole person. "i don't believe i've ever met you before, mr. ordway," he remarked, as he held out his hand, "though i've known you by sight for several years. won't you sit down?" with a single gesture he motioned to a chair and indicated the cigars and the brandy on a little table at his right hand. at his first glance ordway had observed that he had been in a rage or drinking heavily--probably both; and he was seized by a sudden terror at the thought that alice had been so lately at the mercy of this large red and black male animal. yet, in spite of the disgust with which the man inspired him, he was forced to admit that as far as a mere physical specimen went, he had rarely seen his equal. his body was superbly built, and but for his sullen and brutal expression, his face would have been remarkable for its masculine beauty. "no, i won't sit down, thank you," replied ordway, after a short pause. "what i have to say can be said better standing, i think." "then fire away!" returned geoffrey, with a coarse laugh. "it's about alice, i suppose, and it's most likely some darn rot she's sent you with." "it's probably less rot than you imagine. i have taken it upon myself to forbid her returning to you. your treatment of her has made it impossible that she should remain in your house." "well, i've treated her a damned sight better than she deserved," rejoined geoffrey, scowling, while his face, inflamed by the brandy he had drunk, burned to a dull red; "it isn't her fault, i can tell you, that she hasn't put me into the poorhouse in six months." "i admit that she has been very extravagant, and so does she." "extravagant? so that is what you call it, is it? well, she spent more in three weeks in paris than my father did in his whole lifetime. i paid out a hundred thousand for her, and even then i could hardly get her away. but i won't pay the bills any longer, i've told her that. they may go into court about it and get their money however they can." "in the future there will be no question of that." "you think so, do you? now i'll bet you whatever you please that she's back here in this house again before the week is up. she knows on which side her bread is buttered, and she won't stay in that dull old place, not for all you're worth." "she shall never return to you with my consent." "did she wait for that to marry me?" demanded geoffrey, laughing uproariously at his wit, "though i can tell you now, that it makes precious little difference to me whether she comes or stays." "she shall never do it," said ordway, losing his temper. then as he uttered the words, he remembered lydia's warning and added more quietly, "she shall never do it if i can help it." "it makes precious little difference to me," repeated geoffrey, "but she'll be a blamed fool if she doesn't, and for all her foolishness, she isn't so big a fool as you think her." "she has been wrong in her extravagance, as i said before, but she is very young, and her childishness is no excuse for your brutality." rage, or the brandy, or both together, flamed up hotly in geoffrey's face. "i'd like to know what right you have to talk about brutality?" he sneered. "i've the right of any man to keep another from ill-treating his daughter." "well, you're a nice one with your history to put on these highfaluting, righteous airs, aren't you?" for an instant the unutterable disgust in ordway's mind was like physical nausea. what use was it, after all, to bandy speeches, he questioned, with a mere drunken animal? his revulsion of feeling had moved him to take a step toward the door, when the sound of the words geoffrey uttered caused him to stop abruptly and stand listening. "much good you'll do her when she hears about that woman you've been keeping down at tappahannock. as if i didn't know that you'd been running back there again after that brooke girl----" the words were choked back in his throat, for before they had passed his lips ordway had swung quickly round and struck him full in the mouth. with the blow it seemed to daniel that all the violence in his nature was loosened. a sensation that was like the joy of health, of youth, of manhood, rushed through his veins, and in the single exalted instant when he looked down on geoffrey's prostrate figure, he felt himself to be not only triumphant, but immortal. all that his years of self-sacrifice had not done for him was accomplished by that explosive rush of energy through his arm. there was blood on his hand and as he glanced down, he saw that geoffrey, with a bleeding mouth, was struggling, dazed and half drunk, to his feet. ordway looked at him and laughed--the laugh of the boastful and victorious brute. then turning quickly, he took up his hat and went out of the house and down into the street. the physical exhilaration produced by the muscular effort was still tingling through his body, and while it lasted he felt younger, stronger, and possessed of a courage that was almost sublime. when he reached home and entered the library where lydia and alice were sitting together, there was a boyish lightness and confidence in his step. "oh, papa!" cried alice, standing up, "tell me about it. what did he do?" ordway laughed again, the same laugh with which he had looked down on geoffrey lying half stunned at his feet. "i didn't wait to see," he answered, "but i rather think he got up off the floor." "you mean you knocked him down?" asked lydia, in an astonishment that left her breathless. "i cut his mouth, i'm sure," he replied, wiping his hand from which the blood ran, "and i hope i knocked out one or two of his teeth." then the exhilaration faded as quickly as it had come, for as lydia looked up at him, while he stood there wiping the blood from his bruised knuckles, he saw, for the first time since his return to botetourt, that there was admiration in her eyes. so it was the brute, after all, and not the spirit that had triumphed over her. chapter v the house of dreams from that night there was a new element in lydia's relation to him, an increased consideration, almost a deference, as if, for the first time, he had shown himself capable of commanding her respect. this change, which would have pleased him, doubtless, twenty years before, had only the effect now of adding to his depression, for he saw in it a tribute from his wife not to his higher, but to his lower nature. all his patient ideals, all his daily self-sacrifice, had not touched her as had that one instant's violence; and it occurred to him, with a growing recognition of the hopeless inconsistency of life, that if he had treated her with less delicacy, less generosity, if he had walked roughshod over her feminine scruples, instead of yielding to them, she might have entertained for him by this time quite a wholesome wifely regard. then the mere possibility disgusted him, and he saw that to have compromised with her upon any lower plane would have been always morally repugnant to him. after all, the dominion of the brute was not what he was seeking. on the morning after his scene with geoffrey, alice came to him and begged for the minutest particulars of the quarrel. she wanted to know how it had begun? if geoffrey had been really horrible? and if he had noticed the new bronze dragon she had bought for the hall? upon his replying that he had not, she seemed disappointed, he thought, for a minute. "it's very fine," she said, "i bought it from what's-his-name, that famous man in paris? if i ever have money enough i shall get the match to it, so there'll be the pair of them." then seeing his look of astonishment, she hastened to correct the impression she had made. "of course, i mean that i'd like to have done it, if i had been going to live there." "it would take more than a bronze dragon, or a pair of them, to make that house a home, dear," was his only comment. "but it's very handsome," she remarked after a moment, "everything in it is so much more costly than the things here." he made no rejoinder, and she added with vehemence, "but of course, i wouldn't go back, not even if it were a palace!" then a charming merriment seized her, and she clung to him and kissed him and called him a dozen silly pet names. "no, she won't ever, ever play in that horrid old house again," she sang gaily between her kisses. for several days these exuberant spirits lasted, and then he prepared himself to meet the inevitable reaction. her looks drooped, she lost her colour and grew obviously bored, and in the end she complained openly that there was nothing for her to do in the house, and that she couldn't go out of doors because she hadn't the proper clothes. to his reminder that it was she herself who had prevented his sending for her trunks, she replied that there was plenty of time, and that "besides nobody could pack them unless she was there to overlook it." "if anybody is obliged to go back there, for heaven's sake, let me be the one," he urged desperately at last. "to knock out more of poor geoffrey's teeth? oh, you naughty, naughty, papa!"--she cried, lifting a reproving finger. the next instant her laughter bubbled out at the delightful picture of "papa in the midst of her paris gowns. i'd be so afraid you'd roll up geoffrey in my precious laces," she protested, half seriously. for a week nothing more was said on the subject, and then she remarked irritably that her room was cold and she hadn't her quilted silk dressing-gown. when he asked her to ride with him, she declared that her old habit was too tight for her and her new one was at the other house. when he suggested driving instead, she replied that she hadn't her fur coat and she would certainly freeze without it. at last one bright, cold day, when he came up to luncheon, lydia told him, with her strange calmness, that alice had gone back to her husband. "i knew it would come in time," she said, and he bowed again before her unerring prescience. "do you mean to tell me that she's willing to put up with heath for the sake of a little extra luxury?" he demanded. "oh, that's a part of it. she likes the newness of the house and the air of costliness about it, but most of all, she feels that she could never settle down to our monotonous way of living. geoffrey promised her to take her to europe again in the summer and i think she began to grow restless when it appeared that she might have to give it up." "but one of us could have taken her to europe, if that's all she wanted. you could have gone with her." "not in alice's way, we could never have afforded it. she told me this when i offered to go with her if she would definitely separate from geoffrey." "then you didn't want her to go back? you didn't encourage it?" "i encouraged her to behave with decency--and this isn't decent." "no, i admit that. it decidedly is not." "yet we have no assurance that she won't fly in upon us at dinner to-night, with all the servants about," she reflected mournfully. his awful levity broke out as it always did whenever she invoked the sanctity of convention. "in that case hadn't we better serve ourselves until she has made up her mind?" he inquired. but the submission of the martyr is proof even against caustic wit, and she looked at him, after a minute, with a smile of infinite patience. "for myself i can bear anything," she answered, "but i feel that for her it is shocking to make things so public." it was shocking. in spite of his flippancy he felt the vulgarity of it as acutely as she felt it; and he was conscious of something closely akin to relief, when richard ordway dropped in after dinner to tell them that alice and geoffrey had come to a complete reconciliation. "but will it last?" lydia questioned, in an uneasy voice. "we'll hope so at all events," replied the old man, "they appeared certainly to be very friendly when i came away. whatever happens it is surely to alice's interest that she should be kept out of a public scandal." they were still discussing the matter, after richard had gone, when the girl herself ran in, bringing geoffrey, and fairly brilliant with life and spirits. "we've decided to forget everything disagreeable," she said, "we're going to begin over again and be nice and jolly, and if i don't spend too much money, we are going to egypt in april." "if you're happy, then i'm satisfied," returned ordway, and he held out his hand to geoffrey by way of apology. to do the young man justice, he appeared to cherish no resentment for the blow, though he still bore a scar on his upper lip. he looked heavy and handsome, and rather amiable in a dull way, and the one discovery daniel made about him was that he entertained a profound admiration for richard ordway. still, when everybody in botetourt shared his sentiment, this was hardly deserving of notice. as the weeks went on it looked as if peace were really restored, and even lydia's face lost its anxious foreboding, when she gazed on the assembled family at thanksgiving. dick had grown into a quiet, distinguished looking young fellow, more than ever like his uncle richard, and it was touching to watch his devotion to his delicate mother. at least lydia possessed one enduring consolation in life, ordway reflected, with a rush of gratitude. in the afternoon alice drove with him out into the country, along the pale brown november roads, and he felt, while he sat beside her, with her hand clasped tightly in his under the fur robe, that she was again the daughter of his dreams, who had flown to his arms in the terrible day of his homecoming. she was in one of her rare moods of seriousness, and when she lifted her eyes to his, it seemed to him that they held a new softness, a deeper blueness. something in her face brought back to him the memory of emily as she had looked down at him when he knelt before her; and again he was aware of some subtle link which bound together in his thoughts the two women whom he loved. "there's something i've wanted to tell you, papa, first of all," said alice, pressing his hand, "i want you to know it before anybody else because you've always loved me and stood by me from the beginning. now shut your eyes while i tell you, and hold fast to my hand. o papa, there's to be really and truly a baby in the spring, and even if it's a boy--i hope it will be a girl--you'll promise to love it and be good to it, won't you?" "love your child? alice, my darling!" he cried, and his voice broke. she raised her hand to his cheek with a little caressing gesture, which had always been characteristic of her, and as he opened his eyes upon her, her beauty shone, he thought, with a light that blinded him. "i hope it will be a little girl with blue eyes and fair hair like mamma's," she resumed softly. "it will be better than playing with dolls, won't it? i always loved dolls, you know. do you remember the big wax doll you gave me when i was six years old, and how her voice got out of order and she used to crow instead of talking? well, i kept her for years and years, and even after i was a big girl, and wore long dresses, and did up my hair, i used to take her out sometimes and put on her clothes. only i was ashamed of it and used to lock the door so no one could see me. but this little girl will be real, you know, and that's ever so much more fun, isn't it? and you shall help teach her to walk, and to ride when she's big enough; and i'll dress her in the loveliest dresses, with french embroidered ruffles, and a little blue bonnet with bunches of feathers, like one in paris. only she can't wear that until she's five years old, can she?" "and now you will have something to think of, alice, you will be bored no longer?" "i shall enjoy buying the little things so much, but it's too soon yet to plan about them. papa, do you think geoffrey will fuss about money when he hears this?" "i hope not, dear, but you must be careful. the baby won't need to be extravagant, just at first." "but she must have pretty clothes, of course, papa. it wouldn't be kind to the little thing to make her look ugly, would it?" "are simple things always ugly?" "oh, but they cost just as much if they're fine--and i had beautiful clothes when i came. mamma has told me about them." she ran on breathlessly, radiant with the promise of motherhood, dwelling in fancy upon the small blond ideal her imagination had conjured into life. it was dark when they returned to town, and when daniel entered his door, after leaving alice in henry street, he found that the lamps were already lit in the library. as he passed up the staircase, he glanced into the room, and saw that lydia and dick were sitting together before the fire, the boy resting his head on her knees, while her fragile hand played caressingly with his hair. they did not look up at his footsteps, and his heart was so warm with happiness that even the picture of mother and son in the firelit room appeared dim beside it. when he opened his door he found a bright fire in his grate, and throwing off his coat, he sat down in an easy chair with his eyes on the glowing coals. the beneficent vision that he had brought home with him was reflected now in the red heart of the fire, and while he gazed on it, he told himself that the years of his loneliness, and his inner impoverishment, were ended forever. the path of age showed to him no longer as hard and destitute, but as a peaceful road along which he might travel hopefully with young feet to keep him company. with a longing, which no excess of the imagination could exhaust, he saw alice's child as she had seen it in her maternal rapture--as something immortally young and fair and innocent. he thought of the moment so long ago, when they had first placed alice in his arms, and it seemed to him that this unborn child was only a renewal of the one he had held that day--that he would reach out his arms to it with that same half human, half mystic passion. even to-day he could almost feel the soft pressure of her little body, and he hardly knew whether it was the body of alice or of her child. then suddenly it seemed to him that the reality faded from his consciousness and the dream began, for while he sat there he heard the patter of the little feet across his floor, and felt the little hands creep softly over his lips and brow. oh, the little hands that would bring healing and love in their touch! and he understood as he looked forward now into the dreaded future, that the age to which he was travelling was only an immortal youth. chapter vi the ultimate choice on christmas eve a heavy snowstorm set in, and as there was but little work in the office that day, he took a long walk into the country before going home to luncheon. by the time he came back to town the ground was already covered with snow, which was blown by a high wind into deep drifts against the houses. through the thick, whirling flakes the poplars stood out like white ghosts of trees, each branch outlined in a delicate tracery, and where the skeletons of last spring's flowers still clung to the boughs, the tiny cups were crowned with clusters of frozen blossoms. as he passed richard's house, the sight of his aunt's fair head at the window arrested his steps, and going inside, he found her filling yarn stockings for twenty poor children, to whose homes she went every christmas eve. the toys and the bright tarleton bags of candy scattered about the room gave it an air that was almost festive; and for a few minutes he stayed with her, watching the glow of pleasure in her small, pale face, while he helped stuff the toes of the yarn stockings with oranges and nuts. as he stood there, surrounded by the little gifts, he felt, for the first time since his childhood, the full significance of christmas--of its cheer, its mirth and its solemnity. "i am to have a tree at twelve o'clock to-morrow. will you come?" she asked wistfully, and he promised, with a smile, before he left her and went out again into the storm. in the street a crowd of boys were snowballing one another, and as he passed a ball struck him, knocking his hat into a drift. turning in pretended fury, he plunged into the thick of the battle, and when he retreated some minutes afterward, he was powdered from head to foot with dry, feathery flakes. when he reached home, he discovered, with dismay, that he left patches of white on the carpet from the door to the upper landing. after he had entered his room he shook the snow from his clothes, and then looking at his watch, saw to his surprise, that luncheon must have been over for at least an hour. in a little while, he told himself, he would go downstairs and demand something to eat from the old butler; but the hearth was so bright and warm that after sinking into his accustomed chair, he found that it was almost impossible to make the effort to go out. in a moment a delicious drowsiness crept over him, and he fell presently asleep, while the cigar he had lighted burned slowly out in his hand. the sound of the opening and closing door brought him suddenly awake with a throb of pain. the gray light from the windows, beyond which the snow fell heavily, was obscured by the figure of lydia, who seemed to spring upon him out of some dim mist of sleep. at first he saw only her pale face and white outstretched hands; then as she came rapidly forward and dropped on her knees in the firelight, he saw that her face was convulsed with weeping and her eyes red and swollen. for the first time in his life, it occurred to him with a curious quickness of perception, he looked upon the naked soul of the woman, with her last rag of conventionality stripped from her. in the shock of the surprise, he half rose to his feet, and then sank back helplessly, putting out his hand as if he would push her away from him. "lydia," he said, "don't keep me waiting. tell me at once." she tried to speak, and he heard her voice strangle like a live thing in her throat. "is alice dead?" he asked quietly, "or is dick?" at this she appeared to regain control of herself and he watched the mask of her impenetrable reserve close over her features. "it is not that--nobody is dead--it is worse," she answered in a subdued and lifeless voice. "worse?" the word stunned him, and he stared at her blankly, like a person whose mind has suddenly given way. "alice is in my room," she went on, when he had paused, "i left her with uncle richard while i came here to look for you. we did not hear you come in. i thought you were still out." her manner, even more than her words, impressed him only as an evasion of the thing in her mind, and seizing her hands almost roughly, he drew her forward until he could look closely into her face. "for god's sake--speak!" he commanded. but with his grasp all animation appeared to go out of her, and she fell across his knees in an immovable weight, while her eyes still gazed up at him. "if you can't tell me i must go to uncle richard," he added. as he attempted to rise she put out her hands to restrain him, and in the midst of his suspense, he was amazed at the strength there was in a creature so slight and fragile. "uncle richard has just come to tell us," she said in a whisper. "a lawyer--a detective--somebody. i can't remember who it is--has come down from new york to see geoffrey about a check signed in his name, which was returned to the bank there. at the first glance it was seen to be--to be not in his writing. when it was sent to him, after the bank had declined to honour it, he declared it to be a forgery and sent it back to them at once. it is now in their hands----" "to whom was it drawn?" he asked so quietly that his voice sounded in his own ears like the voice of a stranger. "to damon & hanska, furriers in fifth avenue, and it was sent in payment for a sable coat which alice had bought. they had already begun a suit, it seems, to recover the money." as she finished he rose slowly to his feet, and stood staring at the snow which fell heavily beyond the window. the twisted bough of a poplar tree just outside was rocking back and forth with a creaking noise, and presently, as his ears grew accustomed to the silence in the room, he heard the loud monotonous ticking of the clock on the mantel, which seemed to grow more distinct with each minute that the hands travelled. lydia had slipped from his grasp as he rose, and lay now with her face buried in the cushions of the chair. it was a terrible thing for lydia, he thought suddenly, as he looked down on her. "and geoffrey heath?" he asked, repeating the question in a raised voice when she did not answer. "oh, what can we expect of him? what can we expect?" she demanded, with a shudder. "alice is sure that he hates her, that he would seize any excuse to divorce her, to outrage her publicly. he will do nothing--nothing--nothing," she said, rising to her feet, "he has returned the check to the bank, and denied openly all knowledge of it. after some violent words with alice in the lawyer's presence, he declared to them both that he did not care in the least what steps were taken--that he had washed his hands of her and of the whole affair. she is half insane with terror of a prosecution, and can hardly speak coherently. oh, i wonder why one ever has children?" she exclaimed in anguish. with her last words it seemed to him that the barrier which had separated him from lydia had crumbled suddenly to ruins between them. the space which love could not bridge was spanned by pity; and crossing to where she stood, he put his arms about her, while she bowed her head on his breast and wept. "poor girl! poor girl!" he said softly, and then putting her from him, he went out of the room and closed the door gently upon her grief. from across the hall the sound of smothered sobs came to him, and entering lydia's room, he saw alice clinging hysterically to richard's arm. as she looked round at his footsteps, her face showed so old and haggard between the splendid masses of her hair, that he could hardly believe for a minute that this half distraught creature was really his daughter. for an instant he was held dumb by the horror of it; then the silence was broken by the cry with which alice threw herself into his arms. once before she had rushed to his breast with the same word on her lips, he remembered. "o papa, you will help me! you must help me!" she cried. "oh, make them tell you all so that you may help me!" "they have told me--your mother has told me, alice," he answered, seeking in vain to release himself from the frantic grasp of her arms. "then you will make geoffrey understand," she returned, almost angrily. "you will make geoffrey understand that it was not my fault--that i couldn't help it." richard ordway turned from the window, through which he had been looking, and taking her fingers, which were closed in a vice-like pressure about daniel's arm, pried them forcibly apart. "look at me, alice," he said sternly, "and answer the question that i asked you. what did you say to geoffrey when he spoke to you in the lawyer's presence? did you deny, then, that you had signed the check? don't struggle so, i must hear what you told them." but she only writhed in his hold, straining her arms and her neck in the direction of daniel. "he was very cruel," she replied at last, "they were both very cruel. i don't know what i said, i was so frightened. geoffrey hurt me terribly--he hurt me terribly," she whimpered like a child, and as she turned toward daniel, he saw her bloodless gum, from which her lower lip had quivered and dropped. "i must know what you told them, alice," repeated the old man in an unmoved tone. "i can do nothing to help you, if you will not speak the truth." even when her body struggled in his grasp, no muscle altered in the stern face he bent above her. "let me go," she pleaded passionately, "i want to go to papa! i want papa!" at her cry daniel made a single step forward, and then fell back because the situation seemed at the moment in the command of richard. again he felt the curious respect, the confidence, with which his uncle inspired him in critical moments. "i shall let you go when you have told me the truth," said richard calmly. she grew instantly quiet, and for a minute she appeared to hang a dead weight on his arm. then her voice came with the whimpering, childlike sound. "i told them that i had never touched it--that i had asked papa for the money, and he had given it to me," she said. "i thought so," returned richard grimly, and he released his hold so quickly that she fell in a limp heap at his feet. "i wanted it from her own lips, though mr. cummins had already told me," he added, as he looked at his nephew. for a moment daniel stood there in silence, with his eyes on the gold-topped bottles on lydia's dressing table. he had heard alice's fall, but he did not stoop to lift her; he had heard richard's words, but he did not reply to them. in one instant a violent revulsion--a furious anger against alice swept over him, and the next he felt suddenly, as in his dream, the little hands pass over his brow and lips. "she is right about it, uncle richard," he said, "i gave her the check." at the words richard turned quickly away, but with a shriek of joy, alice raised herself to her knees, and looked up with shining eyes. "i told you papa would know! i told you papa would help me!" she cried triumphantly to the old man. without looking at her, richard turned his glance again to his nephew's face, and something that was almost a tremor seemed to pass through his voice. "daniel," he asked, "what is the use?" "she has told you the truth," repeated daniel steadily, "i gave her the check." "you are ready to swear to this?" "if it is necessary, i am." alice had dragged herself slowly forward, still on her knees, but as she came nearer him, daniel retreated instinctively step by step until he had put the table between them. "it is better for me to go away, i suppose, at once?" he inquired of richard. the gesture with which richard responded was almost impatient. "if you are determined--it will be necessary for a time at least," he replied. "there's no doubt, i hope, that the case will be hushed up, but already there has been something of a scandal. i have made good the loss to the bank, but geoffrey has been very difficult to bring to reason. he wanted a divorce and he wanted revenge in a vulgar way upon alice." "but she is safe now?" asked daniel, and the coldness in his tone came as a surprise to him when he spoke. "yes, she is safe," returned richard, "and you, also, i trust. there is little danger, i think, under the circumstances, of a prosecution. if at any time," he added, with a shaking voice, "before your return you should wish the control of your property, i will turn it over to you at once." "thank you," said daniel quietly, and then with an embarrassed movement, he held out his hand. "i shall go, i think, on the four o'clock train," he continued, "is that what you would advise?" "it is better, i feel, to go immediately. i have an appointment with the lawyer for the bank at a quarter of five." he put out his hand again for his nephew's. "daniel, you are a good man," he added, as he turned away. not until a moment later, when he was in the hall, did ordway remember that he had left alice crouched on the floor, and coming back he lifted her into his arms. "it is all right, alice, don't cry," he said, as he kissed her. then turning from her, with a strange dullness of sensation, he crossed the hall and entered his room, where he found lydia still lying with her face hidden in the cushions of the chair. at his step she looked up and put out her hand, with an imploring gesture. "daniel!" she called softly, "daniel!" before replying to her he went to his bureau and hurriedly packed some clothes into a bag. then, with the satchel still in his hand, he came over and stopped beside her. "i can't wait to explain, lydia; uncle richard will tell you," he said. "you are going away? do you mean you are going away?" she questioned. "to-morrow you will understand," he answered, "that it is better so." for a moment uncertainty clouded her face; then she raised herself and leaned toward him. "but alice? does alice go with you?" she asked. "no, alice is safe. go to her." "you will come back again? it is not forever?" he shook his head smiling. "perhaps," he answered. she still gazed steadily up at him, and he saw presently a look come into her face like the look with which she had heard of the blow he had struck geoffrey heath. "daniel, you are a brave man," she said, and sobbed as she kissed him. following him to the threshold, she listened, with her face pressed against the lintel, while she heard him go down the staircase and close the front door softly behind him. chapter vii flight not until the train had started and the conductor had asked for his ticket, did ordway realize that he was on his way to tappahannock. at the discovery he was conscious of no surprise--scarcely of any interest--it seemed to matter to him so little in which direction he went. a curious numbness of sensation had paralysed both his memory and his perceptions, and he hardly knew whether he was glad or sorry, warm or cold. in the same way he wondered why he felt no regret at leaving botetourt forever--no clinging tenderness for his home, for lydia, for alice. if his children had been strangers to him he could not have thought of his parting from them with a greater absence of feeling. was it possible at last that he was to be delivered from the emotional intensity, the power of vicarious suffering, which had made him one of the world's failures? he recalled indifferently alice's convulsed features, and the pathetic quiver of her lip, which had drooped like a child's that is hurt. these things left him utterly unmoved when he remembered them, and he even found himself asking the next instant, with a vague curiosity, if the bald-headed man in the seat in front of him was going home to spend christmas with his daughter? "but what has this bald-headed man to do with alice or with me?" he demanded in perplexity, "and why is it that i can think of him now with the same interest with which i think of my own child? i am going away forever and i shall never see them again," he continued, with emphasis, as if to convince himself of some fact which he had but half understood. "yes, i shall never see them again, and alice will be quite happy without me, and alice's child will grow up probably without hearing my name. yet i did it for alice. no, i did not do it for alice, or for alice's child," he corrected quickly, with a piercing flash of insight. "it was for something larger, stronger--something as inevitable as the law. i could not help it, it was for myself," he added, after a minute. and it seemed to him that with this inward revelation the outer covering of things was stripped suddenly from before his eyes. as beneath his sacrifice he recognised the inexorable law, so beneath alice's beauty he beheld the skeleton which her radiant flesh clothed with life, and beneath lydia's mask of conventionality her little naked soul, too delicate and shivering to stand alone. it was as if all pretence, all deceit, all illusions, had shrivelled now in the hard dry, atmosphere through which he looked. "yes, i am indifferent to them all and to everything," he concluded; "lydia, and dick and even alice are no closer to me than is the bald-headed man on the front seat. nobody is closer to another when it comes to that, for each one of us is alone in an illimitable space." the swinging lights of the train were reflected in the falling snow outside, like orbed blue flames against a curtain of white. through the crack under the window a little cold draught entered, blowing the cinders from the sill into his face. it was the common day coach of a local train, and the passengers were, for the most part, young men or young women clerks, who were hastening back to their country homes for christmas. once when they reached a station several girls got off, with their arms filled with packages, and pushed their way through the heavy drifts to a sleigh waiting under the dim oil lamp outside. for a minute he followed them idly in his imagination, seeing the merry party ploughing over the old country roads to the warm farm house, where a bright log fire and a christmas tree were prepared for them. the window panes were frosted over now, and when the train started on its slow journey he could see only the orbed blue flames dancing in the night against the whirling snowflakes. it was nine o'clock when they pulled into tappahannock and when he came out upon the platform he found that the storm had ceased, though the ground lay white and hard beneath the scattered street lamps. straight ahead of him, as he walked up the long hill from the station, he heard the ring of other footsteps on the frozen snow. the lights were still burning in the little shops, and through the uncurtained windows he could see the variegated display of christmas decorations. here and there a woman, with her head wrapped in a shawl, was peering eagerly at a collection of toys or a wreath of evergreens, but, for the rest, the shops appeared singularly empty even for so late an hour on christmas eve. in the absorption of his thoughts, he scarcely noticed this, and he was conscious of no particular surprise when, as he reached the familiar warehouse, he saw baxter's enormous figure loom darkly under the flickering light above the sidewalk. behind him the vacant building yawned like a sepulchral cavern, the dim archway hung with a glistening fringe of icicles. "is that you, baxter?" he asked, and stretched out his hand with a mechanical movement. "why, bless my soul, smith!" exclaimed baxter, "who'd ever have believed it!" "i've just got off the train," returned ordway, feeling vaguely that some explanation of his presence was needed, "and i'm trying to find a place where i can keep warm until i take the one for the west at midnight. it didn't occur to me that you would be in your office. i was going to mrs. buzzy's." "you'd better come along with me, for i don't believe you'll find a living soul at mag buzzy's--not even a kid," replied baxter, "her husband is one of jasper trend's overseers, you know, and they're most likely down at the cotton mills." "at the cotton mills? why, what's the matter there?" "you haven't heard then? i thought it was in all the papers. there's been a big strike on for a week--jasper lowered wages the first of the month--and every operative has turned out and demanded more pay and shorter hours. the old man's hoppin', of course, and the funny part is, smith, that he lays every bit of the trouble at your door. he says that you started it all by raisin' the ideas of the operatives." "but it's a pretty serious business for them, baxter. how are they going to live through this weather?" "they ain't livin', they're starvin', though i believe the union is comin' to their help sooner or later. but what's that in such a blood-curdlin' spell as this?" a sudden noise, like that of a great shout, rising and falling in the bitter air, came to them from below the slope of the hill, and catching ordway's arm, baxter drew him closer under the street lamp. "they're hootin' at the guards trend has put around the mills," he said, while his words floated like vapour out of his mouth into the cold, "he's got policemen stalkin' up an' down before his house, too." "you mean he actually fears violence?" "oh, well, when trouble is once started, you know, it is apt to go at a gallop. a policeman got his skull knocked in yesterday, and one of the strikers had his leg broken this afternoon. somebody has been stonin' jasper's windows in the back, but they can't tell whether it's a striker or a scamp of a boy. the truth is, smith," he added, "that jasper ought to have sold the mills when he had an offer of a hundred thousand six months ago. but he wouldn't do it because he said he made more than the interest on that five times over. i reckon he's sorry enough now he didn't catch at it." for a moment ordway looked in silence under the hanging icicles into the cavernous mouth of the warehouse, while he listened to the smothered sounds, like the angry growls of a great beast, which came toward them from the foot of the hill. into the confusion of his thoughts there broke suddenly the meaning of richard ordway's parting words. "baxter," he said quietly, "i'll give jasper trend a hundred thousand dollars for his mills to-night." baxter let go the lamp post against which he was leaning, and fell back a step, rubbing his stiffened hands on his big shaggy overcoat. "you, smith? why, what in thunder do you want with 'em? it's my belief that they will be afire before midnight. do you hear that noise? well, there ain't men enough in tappahannock to put those mills out when they are once caught." ordway turned his face from the warehouse to his companion, and it seemed to baxter that his eyes shone like blue lights out of the darkness. "but they won't burn after they're mine, baxter," he answered. "i'll buy the mills and i'll settle this strike before i leave tappahannock at midnight." "you mean you'll go away even after you've bought 'em?" "i mean i've got to go--to go always from place to place--but i'll leave you here in my stead." he laughed shortly, but there was no merriment in the sound. "i'll run the mills on the cooperative plan, baxter, and i'll leave you in charge of them--you and banks." then he caught baxter's arm with both hands, and turned his body forcibly in the direction of the church at the top of the hill. "while we are talking those people down there are freezing," he said. "an' so am i, if you don't mind my mentionin' it," observed baxter meekly. "then let's go to trend's. there's not a minute to lose, if we are to save the mills. are you coming, baxter?" "oh, i'm comin'," replied baxter, waddling in his shaggy coat like a great black bear, "but i'd like to git up my wind first," he added, puffing clouds of steam as he ascended the hill. "there's no time for that," returned ordway, sharply, as he dragged him along. when they reached jasper trend's gate, a policeman, who strolled, beating his hands together, on the board walk, came up and stopped them as they were about to enter. then recognising baxter, he apologised and moved on. a moment later the sound of their footsteps on the porch brought the head of banks to the crack of the door. "who are you? and what is your business?" he demanded. "banks!" said ordway in a whisper, and at his voice the bar, which banks had slipped from the door, fell with a loud crash from his hands. "good lord, it's really you, smith!" he cried in a delirium of joy. "harry, be careful or you'll wake the baby," called a voice softly from the top of the staircase. "darn the baby!" growled banks, lowering his tone obediently. "the next thing she'll be asking me to put out the mills because the light wakes the baby. when did you come, smith? and what on god's earth are you doing here?" "i came to stop the strike," responded ordway, smiling. "i've brought an offer to mr. trend, i must speak to him at once." "he's in the dining-room, but if you've come from the strikers it's no use. his back's up." "well, it ain't from the strikers," interrupted baxter, pushing his way in the direction of the dining-room. "it's from a chap we won't name, but he wants to buy the mills, not to settle the strike with jasper." "then he's a darn fool," remarked jasper trend from the threshold, "for if i don't get the ringleaders arrested befo' mornin' thar won't be a brick left standin' in the buildings." "the chap i mean ain't worryin' about that," said baxter, "provided you'll sign the agreement in the next ten minutes. he's ready to give you a hundred thousand for the mills, strikers an' all." "sign the agreement? i ain't got any agreement," protested jasper, suspecting a trap, "and how do i know that the strike ain't over befo' you're making the offer?" "well, if you'll just step over to the window, and stick your head out, you won't have much uncertainty about that, i reckon," returned baxter. crossing to the window, ordway threw it open, waiting with his hand on the sash, while the threatening shouts from below the hill floated into the room. "papa, the baby can't sleep for the noise those men make down at the mills," called a peremptory voice from the landing above. "i told you so!" groaned banks, closing the window. "i ain't got any agreement," repeated jasper, in helpless irritation, as he sank back into his chair. "oh, i reckon smith can draw up one for you as well as a lawyer," said baxter, while ordway, sitting down at a little fancy desk of milly's in one corner, wrote out the agreement of sale on a sheet of scented note paper. when he held the pen out to jasper, the old man looked up at him with blinking eyes. "is it to hold good if the damned thing burns befo' mornin'?" he asked. "if it burns before morning--yes." with a sigh of relief jasper wrote his name. "how do i know if i'm to get the money?" he inquired the next instant, moved by a new suspicion. "i shall telegraph instructions to a lawyer in botetourt," replied ordway, as he handed the pen to baxter, "and you will receive an answer by twelve o'clock to-morrow. i want your signature, also, banks," he continued, turning to the young man. "i've made two copies, you see, one of which i shall leave with baxter." "then you're going away?" inquired banks, gloomily. ordway nodded. "i am leaving on the midnight train," he answered. "so you're going west?" "yes, i'm going west, and i've barely time to settle things at the mills before i start. god bless you, banks. good-bye." without waiting for baxter, who was struggling into his overcoat in the hall, he broke away from the detaining hold of banks, and opening the door, ran down the frozen walk, and out into the street, where the policeman called a "merry christmas!" to him as he hurried by. when he gained the top of the hill, and descended rapidly toward the broad level beyond, where the brick buildings of the cotton mills stood in the centre of a waste of snow, the shouts grew louder and more frequent, and the black mass on the frozen ground divided itself presently into individual atoms. a few bonfires had started on the outskirts of the crowd, and by their fitful light, which fell in jagged, reddish shadows on the snow, he could see the hard faces of the men, the sharpened ones of the women, and the pinched ones of little children, all sallow from close work in unhealthy atmospheres and wan from lack of nourishing and wholesome food. as he approached one of these fires, made from a burning barrel, a young woman, with a thin, blue face, and a baby wrapped in a ragged shawl on her breast, turned and spat fiercely in his direction. "this ain't no place for swells!" she screamed, and began laughing shrilly in a half-crazed voice. in the excitement no one noticed her, and her demented shrieks followed him while he made his way cautiously along the outskirts of the strikers, until he came to the main building, before which a few men with muskets had cleared a hollow space. they looked cowed and sullen, he saw, for their sympathies were evidently with the operatives, and he realised that the first organised attack would force them from their dangerous position. approaching one of the guards, whom he remembered, ordway touched him upon the arm and asked to be permitted to mount to the topmost step. "i have a message to deliver to the men," he said. the guard looked up with a start of fear, and then, recognising him, exclaimed in a hoarse whisper, "my god, boys, it's 'ten commandment smith' or it's his ghost!" "let me get through to the steps," said ordway, "i must speak to them." "well, you may speak all you want to, but i doubt if they'd listen to an angel from heaven if he were to talk to them about jasper trend. they are preparing a rush on the doors now, and when they make it they'll go through." passing him in silence, ordway mounted the steps, and stood with his back against the doors of the main building, in which, when he had last entered it, the great looms had been at work. before him the dark mass heaved back and forth, and farther away, amid the bonfires in the waste of frozen snow, he could hear the shrill, mocking laughter of the half-crazed woman. "we won't hear any talk," cried a spokesman in the front ranks of the crowd. "it's too late to haggle now. we'll have nothin' from jasper trend unless he gives us what we ask." "and if he says he'll give it who will believe him?" jeered a woman, farther back, holding a crying child above her head. "he killed the father and he's starvin' the children." "no--no, we'll have no damned words. we'll burn out the scabs!" shouted a man, lifting a torch he had just lit at a bonfire. as the torch rose in a splendid blaze, it lighted up the front of the building, and cast a yellow flame upon ordway's face. "i have nothing to do with jasper trend!" he called out, straightening himself to his full height. "he has no part in the mills from to-night! i have bought them from him!" with the light on his face, he stood there an instant before them, while the shouts changed in the first shock of recognition from anger to surprise. the minute afterward the crowd was rocked by a single gigantic emotion, and it hurled itself forward, bearing down the guards in its efforts to reach the steps. as it swayed back and forth its individual members--men, women and children--appeared to float like straws on some cosmic undercurrent of feeling. "from to-night the mills belong to me!" he cried in a voice which rang over the frozen ground to where the insane woman was laughing beside a bonfire. "your grievances after to-night are not against jasper trend, but against me. you shall have fair pay, fair hours and clean rooms, i promise you----" he went on still, but his words were drowned in the oncoming rush of the crowd, which rolled forward like great waters, surrounding him, overwhelming him, sweeping him off his feet, and bearing him out again upon its bosom. the cries so lately growls of anger had changed suddenly, and above all the din and rush he heard rising always the name which he had made honoured and beloved in tappahannock. it was the one great moment of his life, he knew, when on the tremendous swell of feeling, he was borne like a straw up the hillside and back into the main street of tappahannock. an hour later, bruised, aching and half stunned, he entered the station and telegraphed twice to richard ordway before he went out upon the platform to take the train. he had left his instructions with baxter, from whom he had just parted, and now, as he walked up and down in the icy darkness, broken by the shivering lights of the station, it seemed to him that he was like a man, who having been condemned to death, stands looking back a little wistfully at life from the edge of the grave. he had had his great moment, and ahead of him there was nothing. a freight train passed with a grating noise, a station hand, holding a lantern ran hurriedly along the track, a whistle blew, and then again there was stillness. his eyes were wearily following the track, when he felt a touch on his arm, and turning quickly, saw banks, in a fur-lined overcoat, looking up at him with an embarrassed air. "smith," he said, strangling a cough, "i've seen baxter, and neither he nor i like your going west this way all by yourself and half sick. if you don't mind, i've arranged to take a little holiday and come along. to tell the truth, it's just exactly the chance i've been looking for. i haven't been away from milly twenty-four hours since i married her, and a change does anybody good." "no, you can't come, banks, i don't want you. i'd rather be alone," replied ordway, almost indignantly. "but you ain't well," insisted banks stubbornly. "we don't like the looks of you, baxter and i." "well, you can't come, that's all," retorted ordway, as the red eyes of the engine pierced the darkness. "there, go home, banks," he added, as he held out his hand, "i'm much obliged to you. you're a first-rate chap. good-bye." "then good-bye," returned banks hastily turning away. a minute afterward, as ordway swung himself on the train, he heard the bells of a church, ringing cheerfully in the frosty air, and remembered, with a start, that it was christmas morning. chapter viii the end of the road in the morning, after a short sleep on the hard plush seat, he awoke with a shooting pain in his head. when the drowsiness of exhaustion had overcome him, he remembered, he had been idly counting the dazzling electric lights of a town through which they were passing. by the time he had reached "twenty-one" he had dropped off into unconsciousness, though it seemed to him that a second self within him, wholly awake, had gone on through the night counting without pause, "twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five--" still in his brain the numbers went on, and still the great globular lights flashed past his eyes. struggling awake in the gray dawn, he lay without changing his position, until the mist gave place slowly to the broad daylight. then he found that they were approaching another town, which appeared from a distant view to resemble a single gigantic factory, composed chiefly of a wilderness of chimneys. when he looked at his watch, he saw that it was eight o'clock; and the conductor passing through the coach at the instant, informed the passengers generally that they must change cars for the west. the name of the town ordway failed to catch, but it made so little difference to him that he followed the crowd mechanically, without inquiring where it would lead him. the pain in his head had extended now to his chest and shoulders, and presently it passed into his lower limbs, with a racking ache that seemed to take from him the control of his muscles. yet all the while he felt a curious drowsiness, which did not in the least resemble sleep, creeping over him like the stealthy effect of some powerful drug. after he had breathed the fresh air outside, he felt it to be impossible that he should return to the overheated car, and pushing his way through the crowded station, where men were rushing to the luncheon counter in one corner, he started along a broad street, which looked as if it led to an open square at the top of a long incline. on either side there were rows of narrow tenements, occupied evidently by the operatives in the imposing factories he had observed from the train. here and there a holly wreath suspended from a cheap lace curtain, reminded him again that it was christmas morning, and by some eccentricity of memory, he recalled vividly a christmas before his mother's death, when he had crept on his bare feet, in the dawn, to peep into the bulging stocking before her fireplace. at the next corner a small eating house had hung out its list of christmas dainties, and going inside he sat down at one of the small deserted tables and asked for a cup of coffee. when it was brought he swallowed it in the hope that it might drive away the heaviness in his head, but after a moment of relief the stupor attacked him again more oppressively than ever. he felt that even the growing agony in his forehead and shoulders could not keep him awake if he could only find a spot in which to lie down and rest. after he came out into the street again he felt stronger and better, and it occurred to him that his headache was due probably to the fact that he had eaten nothing since breakfast the day before. he remembered now that he had missed his luncheon because of his long walk into the country, and the recollection of this trivial incident seemed to make plain all the subsequent events. everything that had been so confused a moment ago stood out quite clearly now. his emotions, which had been benumbed when he left botetourt, revived immediately in the awakening of his memory; and he was seized with a terrible longing to hold alice in his arms and to say to her that he forgave her and loved her still. it seemed to him impossible that he should have come away after a single indifferent kiss, without glancing back--and her face rose before him, not convulsed and haggard as he had last seen it, but glowing and transfigured, with her sparkling blue eyes and her lips that were too red and too full for beauty. then, even while he looked at her with love, the old numbness crept back, and his feeling for her died utterly away. "no, i have ceased to care," he thought indifferently. "it does not matter to me whether i see her again or not. i must eat and lie down, nothing else is of consequence." he had reached the open space at the end of the long graded hill, and as he stopped to look about him he saw that a small hotel, frequented probably by travelling salesmen, stood directly across the square, which was now deep in snow. following the pavement to the open door of the lobby, he went inside and asked for a room, after which he passed into the restaurant and drank a second cup of coffee. then turning away from his untasted food, he went upstairs to the large, bare apartment, with a broken window pane, which they had assigned him, and throwing himself upon the unmade bed, fell heavily asleep. when he awoke the pain was easier, and feeling oppressed by the chill vacancy of the room, he went downstairs and out into the open square. though it was a dull gray afternoon, the square was filled with children, dragging bright new sleds over the snow. one of them, a little brown-haired girl, was trundling her christmas doll and as she passed him, she turned and smiled into his face with a joyful look. something in her smile was vaguely familiar to him, and he remembered, after a minute, that emily had looked at him like that on the morning when he had met her for the first time riding her old white horse up the hill in tappahannock. "yes, it was that look that made me love her," he thought dispassionately, as if he were reviewing some dimly remembered event in a former life, "and it is because i loved her that i was able to do these things. if i had not loved her, i should not have saved milly trend, nor gone back to botetourt, nor sacrificed myself for alice. yes, all these have come from that," he added, "and will go back, i suppose, to that in the end." the little girl ran by again, still trundling her doll, and again he saw emily in her red cape on the old horse. for several hours he sat there in the frozen square, hardly feeling the cold wind that blew over him. but when he rose presently to go into the hotel, he found that his limbs were stiff, and the burning pain had returned with violence to his head and chest. the snow in the square seemed to roll toward him as he walked, and it was with difficulty that he dragged himself step by step along the pavement to the entrance of the hotel. after he was in his room again he threw himself, still dressed, upon the bed, and fell back into the stupor out of which he had come. when he opened his eyes after an hour, he was hardly sure, for the first few minutes, whether he was awake or asleep. the large, bare room in which he had lost consciousness had given place, when he awoke, to his prison cell. the hard daylight came to him through the grated windows, and from a nail in the wall he saw his gray prison coat, with the red bars, won for good behaviour, upon the sleeve. then while he looked at it, the red bars changed quickly to the double stripes of a second term, and the double stripes became three, and the three became four, until it seemed to him that he was striped from head to foot so closely that he knew that he must have gone on serving term after term since the beginning of the world. "no, no, that is not mine. i am wearing the red bars!" he cried out, and came back to himself with a convulsive shudder. as he looked about him the hallucination vanished, and he felt that he had come out of an eternity of unconsciousness into which he should presently sink back again. the day before appeared to belong to some other life that he had lived while he was still young, yet when he opened his eyes the same gray light filled the windows, the same draught blew through the broken pane, the same vague shadows crawled back and forth on the ceiling. the headache was gone now, but the room had grown very cold, and from time to time, when he coughed, long shivers ran through his limbs and his teeth chattered. he had thrown his overcoat across his chest as a coverlet, but the cold from which he suffered was an inward chill, which was scarcely increased by the wind that blew through the broken pane. there was no confusion in his mind now, but a wonderful lucidity, in which he saw clearly all that had happened to him last night in tappahannock. "yes, that was my good moment," he said "and after such a moment there is nothing, but death. if i can only die everything will be made entirely right and simple." as he uttered the words the weakness of self pity swept over him, and with a sudden sense of spiritual detachment, he was aware of a feeling of sympathy for that other "i," who seemed so closely related to him, and yet outside of himself. the real "i" was somewhere above amid the crawling shadows on the ceiling, but the other--the false one--lay on the bed under the overcoat; and he saw, when he looked down that, though he himself was young, the other "i" was old and haggard and unshaven. "so there are two of us, after all," he thought, "poor fellows, poor fellows." but the minute afterward the perception of his dual nature faded as rapidly as the hallucination of his prison cell. in its place there appeared the little girl, who had passed him, trundling her christmas doll, in the square below. "i have seen her before--she is vaguely familiar," he thought, troubled because he could not recall the resemblance. from this he passed to the memory of alice when she was still a child, and she came back to him, fresh and vivid, as on the day when she had run out to beg him to come in to listen to her music. the broken scales ran in his head again, but there was no love in his heart. his gaze dropped from the ceiling and turned toward the door, for in the midst of his visions, he had seen it open softly and banks come into the room on tiptoe and stop at the foot of the bed, regarding him with his embarrassed and silly look "what in the devil, am i dreaming about banks for?" he demanded aloud, with an impatient movement of his feet, as if he meant to kick the obtruding dream away from his bed. at the kick the dream stopped rolling its prominent pale eyes and spoke. "i hope you ain't sick, smith," it said, and with the first words he knew that it was banks in the familiar flesh and not the disembodied spirit. "no i'm not sick, but what are you doing here?" he asked. "enjoying myself," replied banks gloomily. "well, i wish you'd chosen to enjoy yourself somewhere else." "i couldn't. if you don't mind i'd like to stuff the curtain into that window pane." "oh, i don't mind. when did you get here?" "i came on the train with you." "on the train with me? where did you get on? i didn't see you." "you didn't look," replied banks, from the window, where he was stuffing the red velveteen curtain into the broken pane. "i was in the last seat in the rear coach." "so you followed me," said ordway indignantly. "i told you not to. why did you do it?" banks came back and stood again at the foot of the bed, looking at him with his sincere and kindly smile. "well, the truth is, i wanted an outing," he answered, "it's a good baby as babies go, but i get dog-tired of playing nurse." "you might have gone somewhere else. there are plenty of places." "i couldn't think of 'em, and, besides, this seems a nice town. the're a spanking fine lot of factories. but i hope you ain't sick smith? what are you doing in bed?" "oh, i've given up," replied ordway gruffly. "every man has a right to give up some time, hasn't he?" "i don't know about every man," returned banks, stolidly, "but you haven't, smith." "well, i've done it anyway," retorted ordway, and turned his face to the wall. as he lay there with closed eyes, he had an obscure impression that banks--banks, the simple; banks, the impossible--was in some way operating the forces of destiny. first he heard the bell ring, then the door open and close, and a little later, the bleak room was suffused with a warm rosy light in which the vague shadows melted into a shimmering background. the crackling of the fire annoyed him because it suggested the possibility of physical comfort, and he no longer wanted to be comfortable. "smith," said banks, coming over to the bed and pulling off the overcoat, "i've got a good fire here and a chair. i wish you'd get up. good lord, your hands are as hot as a hornet's nest. when did you eat anything?" "i had breakfast in botetourt," replied ordway, as he rose from the bed and came over to the chair banks had prepared. "i can't remember when it was, but it must have been since the creation of the world, i suppose." the fire grew suddenly black before him, "i'd rather lie down," he added, "my head is splitting and i can't see." "oh, you'll see all right in a minute. wait till i light this candle, so the electric light won't hurt your eyes. the boy's gone for a little supper, and as soon as you've swallowed a mouthful you'll begin to feel better." "but i'm not hungry. i won't eat," returned ordway, with an irritable feeling that banks was looming into a responsibility. anything that pulled one back to life was what he wanted to escape, and even the affection of banks might prove, he thought, tenaciously clinging. one resolution he had made in the beginning--he would not take up his life again for the sake of banks. "yes, you must, smith," remonstrated the other, with an angelic patience which gave him, if possible, a more foolish aspect. "it's after six o'clock and you haven't had a bite since yesterday at eight. that's why your head's so light and you're in a raging fever." "it isn't that, banks, it's because i've got to die," he answered. "if they don't hush things up with money, i may have to go back to prison." as he said the words he saw again the prison coat, with the double stripes of a second term, as in the instant of his hallucination. "i know," said banks, softly, as he bent over to poke the fire. "there was a line or two about it in a new york paper. but they'll hush it up, and besides they said it was just suspicion." "you knew all the time and yet you wanted me to go back to tappahannock?" "oh, they don't read the papers much there, except the _tappahannock herald_, and it won't get into that. it was just a silly little slip anyway, and not two dozen people will be likely to know what it meant." "and you, banks? what do you think?" he asked with a mild curiosity. banks shook his head. "why, what's the use in your asking?" he replied. "of course, i know that you didn't do it, and if you had done it, it would have been just because the other man ought to have written his name and wouldn't," he concluded, unblushingly. for a moment ordway looked at him in silence. "you're a good chap, banks," he said at last in a dull voice. again he felt, with an awakened irritation, that the absurd banks was pulling him back to life. was it impossible, after all, that a man should give up, as long as there remained a soul alive who believed in him? it wasn't only the love of women, then, that renewed courage. he had loved both emily and alice, and yet they were of less importance in his life at this hour than was banks, whom he had merely endured. yet he had thought the love of emily a great thing and that of banks a small one. his gaze went back to the flames, and he did not remove it when a knock came at the door, and supper was brought in and placed on a little table before the fire. "i ordered a bowl of soup for you, smith," said banks, crumbling the bread into it as he spoke, as if he were preparing a meal for a baby, "and a good stout piece of beefsteak for myself. now drink this whiskey, won't you." "i'm not hungry," returned ordway, pushing the glass away, after it had touched his lips. "i won't eat." banks placed the bowl of soup on the fender, and then sat down with his eyes fastened on the tray. "i haven't had a bite myself since breakfast," he remarked, "and i'm pretty faintish, but i tell you, smith, if it's the last word i speak, that i won't put my knife into that beefsteak until you've eaten your soup--no, not if i die right here of starvation." "well, i'm sorry you're such a fool, for i've no intention of eating it. i left you my whiskey, you can take that." "i shouldn't dare to on an empty stomach. i get drunk too quick." for a few minutes he sat in silence regarding the supper with a hungry look; then selecting a thin slice of bread, he stuck it on the end of a fork, and kneeling upon the hearthrug, held it out to the glowing coals. as it turned gradually to a delicious crisp brown, the appetising smell of it floated to ordway's nostrils. "i always had a particular taste for toast," remarked banks as he buttered the slice and laid it on a hot plate on the fender. when he took up a second one, ordway watched him with an attention of which he was almost unconscious, and he did not remove his gaze from the fire, until the last slice, brown and freshly buttered, was laid carefully upon the others. as he finished banks threw down his fork, and rising to his feet, looked wistfully at the beefsteak, keeping hot before the cheerful flames. "it's kind of rare, just as i like it," he observed, "thick and juicy, with little brown streaks from the broiler, and a few mushrooms scattered gracefully on top. tappahannock is a mighty poor place for a steak," he concluded resignedly, "it ain't often i have a chance at one, but i thought to-night being christmas----" "then, for god's sake, eat it!" thundered ordway, while he made a dash for his soup. but an hour after he had taken it, his fever rose so high that banks helped him into bed and rushed out in alarm for the doctor. chapter ix the light beyond out of the obscurity of the next few weeks, he brought, with the memory of banks hovering about his bed, the vague impression of a woman's step across his floor and a woman's touch on his brow and hands. when he returned to consciousness the woman's step and touch had vanished, but banks was still nursing him with his infinite patience and his silly, good-humoured smile. the rest was a dream, he said to himself, resignedly, as he turned his face to the wall and slept. on a mild january morning, when he came downstairs for the first time, and went with banks out into the open square in front of the hotel, he put almost timidly the question which had been throbbing in his brain for weeks. "was there anybody else with me, banks? i thought--i dreamed--i couldn't get rid of it----" "who else could there have been?" asked banks, and he stared straight before him, at the slender spire of the big, gray church in the next block. so the mystery would remain unsolved, ordway understood, and he would go back to life cherishing either a divine memory or a phantasy of delirium. after a little while banks went off to the chemists' with a prescription, and ordway sat alone on a bench in the warm sunshine, which was rapidly melting the snow. it was sunday morning, and presently the congregation streamed slowly past him on its way to the big gray church just beyond. a bright blue sky was overhead, the sound of bells was in the air, and under the melting snow he saw that the grass was still fresh and green. as he sat there in the wonderful sabbath stillness, he felt, with a new sense of security, of reconciliation, that his life had again been taken out of his hands and adjusted without his knowledge. this time it had been banks--banks, the impossible--who had swayed his destiny, and lacking all other attributes, banks had accomplished it through the simple power of the human touch. in the hour of his need it had been neither religion nor philosophy, but the outstretched hand, that had helped. then his vision broadened and he saw that though the body of love is one, the members of it are infinite; and it was made plain to him at last, that the love of emily, the love of alice, and the love of banks, were but different revelations of the same immortality. he had gone down into the deep places, and out of them he had brought this light, this message. as the people streamed past him to the big gray church, he felt that if they would only stop and listen, he could tell them in the open, not in walls, of the thing that they were seeking. yet the time had not come, though in the hope of it he could sit there patiently under the blue sky, with the snow melting over the grass at his feet. at the end of an hour banks returned, and stood over him with affectionate anxiety. "in a few days you'll be well enough to travel, smith, and i'll take you back with me to tappahannock." ordway glanced up, smiling, and banks saw in his face, so thin that the flesh seemed almost transparent, the rapt and luminous look with which he had stood over his bible in the green field or in the little grove of pines. "you will go back to tappahannock and baxter will take you in until you grow strong and well, and then you can start your schools, or your library, and look after the mills instead of letting baxter do it." "yes," said ordway, "yes," but he had hardly heard banks's words, for his gaze was on the blue sky, against which the spire of the church rose like a pointing finger. his face shone as if from an inward flame, and this flame, burning clearly in his blue eyes, transfigured his look. ah, smith was always a dreamer, thought banks, with the uncomprehending simplicity of a child. but ordway was looking beyond banks, beyond the church spire, beyond the blue sky. he saw himself, not as banks pictured him, living quietly in tappahannock, but still struggling, still fighting, still falling to rise and go on again. his message was not for tappahannock alone, but for all places where there were men and women working and suffering and going into prison and coming out. he heard his voice speaking to them in the square of this town; then in many squares and in many towns---- "come," said banks softly, "the wind is changing. it is time to go in." with an effort ordway withdrew his gaze from the church spire. then leaning upon banks's arm, he slowly crossed the square to the door of the hotel. but before going inside, he turned and stood for a moment looking back at the grass which showed fresh and green under the melting snow. d'hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org les misÉrables by victor hugo part premier fantine authorized translation by sir lascelles wraxall. _boston:_ little, brown, and company. [illustration: victor hugo ( )] publishers' preface. the present edition of "les misÉrables," in five volumes, has been made with the special object of supplying the work in a proper form for library use, embodying the two great requisites, clear type and handy size. it is in the main a reprint of the english translation, in three volumes, by sir lascelles wraxall, which was made with the sanction and advice of the author. chapters and passages omitted in the english edition have been specially translated for the present issue; numerous errors of the press, etc., have been corrected; and the author's own arrangement of the work in five parts, and his subdivisions into books and chapters, have been restored. boston, _sept_. , . preface so long as, by the effect of laws and of customs, social degradation shall continue in the midst of civilization, making artificial hells, and subjecting to the complications of chance the divine destiny of man; so long as the three problems of the age,--the debasement of man by the proletariat, the ruin of woman by the force of hunger, the destruction of children in the darkness,--shall not be solved; so long as anywhere social syncope shall be possible: in other words, and from a still broader point of view, so long as ignorance and misery shall remain on earth, books like this cannot fail to be useful. hauteville-house, . table of contents. fantine. book i. a just man. i. m. myriel ii. m. myriel becomes monseigneur welcome iii. a good bishop and a hard bishopric iv. works resembling words v. monseigneur's cassocks last too long vi. by whom the house was guarded vii. cravatte viii. philosophy after drinking ix. the brother described by the sister x. the bishop faces a new light xi. a restriction xii. monseigneur's solitude xiii. what he believed xiv. what he thought book ii the fall. i. the close of a day's march ii. prudence recommended to wisdom iii. the heroism of passive obedience iv. cheesemaking at pontarlier v. tranquillity vi. jean valjean vii. a desperate man's heart viii. the wave and the darkness ix. new wrongs x. the man awake xi. what he did xii. the bishop at work xiii. little gervais book iii. in the year . i. the year ii. a double quartette iii. four to four iv. tholomyÈs sings a spanish song v. at bombarda's vi. in which people adore each other vii. the wisdom of tholomyÈs viii. the death of a horse ix. the joyous end of joy book iv. to confide is sometimes to abandon. i. two mothers meet ii. a sketch of two ugly faces iii. the lark book v. the descent. i. progress in black-bead making ii. madeleine iii. sums lodged at lafitte's iv. m. madeleine goes into mourning v. vague flashes on the horizon vi. father fauchelevent vii. fauchelevent becomes a gardener at paris viii. madame victurnien spends thirty francs on morality ix. success of madame victurnien x. result of her success xi. christus nos libera vit xii. m. bamatabois' idleness xiii. the police office book vi. javert. i. the commencement of repose ii. how "jean" may become "champ" book vii the champmathieu affair. chapter i. sister simplice ii. scaufflaire's perspicacity iii. a tempest in a brain iv. sufferings in sleep v. obstacles vi. sister simplice is sorely tried vii. the traveller takes precautions for returning viii. inside the court ix. the trial x. the system of denial xi. champmathieu is astounded book viii. the counterstroke. i. m. madeleine looks at his hair ii. fantine is happy iii. javert is satisfied iv. authority resumes its rights v. a very proper tomb illustrations victor hugo ( ) vol. i. frontispiece. "'your blessing,' said the bishop, and knelt down" drawn by g. jeanniot. father fauchelevent drawn by g. jeanniot. fauchelevent and the grave-digger, vol. ii. frontispiece drawn by g. jeanniot. "she glided along rather than walked" drawn by g. jeanniot. le grand bourgeois vol. iii. frontispiece drawn by g. jeanniot. beginning of a great malady drawn by g. jeanniot. "one morning when the sun was shining, and both were on the garden steps" vol. iv. frontispiece drawn by g. jeanniot. recruits drawn by g. jeanniot. "a night behind which is a day" vol. v. frontispiece drawn by g. jeanniot. the death of gavroche drawn by g. jeanniot. fantine. book i. a just man. chapter i. m. myriel. in m. charles françois bienvenu myriel was bishop of d----. he was a man of about seventy-five years of age, and had held the see of d---- since . although the following details in no way affect our narrative, it may not be useless to quote the rumors that were current about him at the moment when he came to the diocese, for what is said of men, whether it be true or false, often occupies as much space in their life, and especially in their destiny, as what they do. m. myriel was the son of a councillor of the aix parliament. it was said that his father, who intended that he should be his successor, married him at the age of eighteen or twenty, according to a not uncommon custom in parliamentary families. charles myriel, in spite of this marriage (so people said), had been the cause of much tattle. he was well built, though of short stature, elegant, graceful, and witty; and the earlier part of his life was devoted to the world and to gallantry. the revolution came, events hurried on, and the parliamentary families, decimated and hunted down, became dispersed. m. charles myriel emigrated to italy in the early part of the revolution, and his wife, who had been long suffering from a chest complaint, died there, leaving no children. what next took place in m. myriel's destiny? did the overthrow of the old french society, the fall of his own family, and the tragic spectacles of ' , more frightful perhaps to the emigrés who saw them from a distance with the magnifying power of terror, cause ideas of renunciation and solitude to germinate in him? was he, in the midst of one of the distractions and affections which occupied his life, suddenly assailed by one of those mysterious and terrible blows which often prostrate, by striking at his heart, a man whom public catastrophes could not overthrow by attacking him in his existence and his fortune? no one could have answered these questions; all that was known was that when he returned from italy he was a priest. in m. myriel was curé of b---- (brignolles). he was already aged, and lived in great retirement. towards the period of the coronation a small matter connected with his curacy, no one remembers what, took him to paris. among other powerful persons he applied to cardinal fesch on behalf of his parishioners. one day, when the emperor was paying a visit to his uncle, the worthy curé, who was waiting in the ante-room, saw his majesty pass. napoleon, noticing this old man regard him with some degree of curiosity, turned and asked sharply,-- "who is this good man who is staring at me?" "sire," m. myriel said, "you are looking at a good man and i at a great man. we may both profit by it." the emperor, on the same evening, asked the cardinal the curé's name, and some time after m. myriel, to his great surprise, learned that he was nominated bishop of d----. what truth, by the way, was there in the stories about m. myriel's early life? no one knew, for few persons had been acquainted with his family before the revolution. m. myriel was fated to undergo the lot of every new comer to a little town, where there are many mouths that speak, and but few heads that think. he was obliged to undergo it, though he was bishop, and because he was bishop. but, after all, the stories in which his name was mingled were only stories, rumors, words, remarks, less than words, mere _palabres_, to use a term borrowed from the energetic language of the south. whatever they might be, after ten years of episcopacy and residence at d----, all this gossip, which at the outset affords matter of conversation for little towns and little people, had fallen into deep oblivion. no one would have dared to speak of it, no one have dared to remember it. m. myriel had arrived at d----, accompanied by an old maid, mlle. baptistine, who was his sister, and ten years younger than himself. their only servant was a female of the same age as mademoiselle, of the name of madame magloire, who, after having been the servant of m. le curé, now assumed the double title of waiting-woman to mademoiselle, and house-keeper to monseigneur. mlle. baptistine was a tall, pale, slim, gentle person; she realized the ideal of what the word "respectable" expresses, for it seems necessary for a woman to be a mother in order to be venerable. she had never been pretty, but her whole life, which had been but a succession of pious works, had eventually cast over her a species of whiteness and brightness, and in growing older she had acquired what may be called the beauty of goodness. what had been thinness in her youth had become in her maturity transparency, and through this transparency the angel could be seen. she seemed to be a shadow, there was hardly enough body for a sex to exist; she was a little quantity of matter containing a light--an excuse for a soul to remain upon the earth. madame magloire was a fair, plump, busy little body, always short of breath,--in the first place, through her activity, and, secondly, in consequence of an asthma. on his arrival m. myriel was installed in his episcopal palace with all the honors allotted by the imperial decrees which classify the bishop immediately after a major-general. the mayor and the president paid him the first visit, and he on his side paid the first visit to the general and the prefect. when the installation was ended the town waited to see its bishop at work. chapter ii. m. myriel becomes monseigneur welcome. the episcopal palace of d---- adjoined the hospital. it was a spacious, handsome mansion, built at the beginning of the last century by monseigneur henri puget, doctor in theology of the faculty of paris, and abbé of simore, who was bishop of d---- in . this palace was a true seigneurial residence: everything had a noble air in it,--the episcopal apartments, the reception rooms, the bed-rooms, the court of honor, which was very wide, with arcades after the old florentine fashion, and the gardens planted with magnificent trees. in the dining-room, a long and superb gallery on the ground floor, monseigneur henri puget had given a state dinner on july , , to messeigneurs charles brûlart de genlis, archbishop, prince of embrun; antoine de mesgrigny, capuchin and bishop of grasse; philip de vendôme, grand prior of france and abbé of st. honoré de lérins; françois de berton de grillon, baron and bishop of vence; cæsar de sabran de forcalquier, bishop and lord of glandève, and jean soanen, priest of the oratory, preacher in ordinary to the king, and bishop and lord of senez. the portraits of these seven reverend personages decorated the dining-room, and the memorable date, july , , was engraved in golden letters on a white marble tablet. the hospital was a small, single-storeyed house with a little garden. three days after his arrival the bishop visited it, and when his visit was over asked the director to be kind enough to come to his house. "how many patients have you at this moment?" he asked. "twenty-six, monseigneur." "the number i counted," said the bishop. "the beds are very close together," the director continued. "i noticed it." "the wards are only bed-rooms, and difficult to ventilate." "i thought so." "and then, when the sun shines, the garden is very small for the convalescents." "i said so to myself." "during epidemics, and we have had the typhus this year, and had miliary fever two years ago, we have as many as one hundred patients, and do not know what to do with them." "that thought occurred to me." "what would you have, monseigneur!" the director said, "we must put up with it." this conversation had taken place in the dining-hall on the ground floor. the bishop was silent for a moment, and then turned smartly to the director. "how many beds," he asked him, "do you think that this room alone would hold?" "monseigneur's dining-room?" the stupefied director asked. the bishop looked round the room, and seemed to be estimating its capacity. "it would hold twenty beds," he said, as if speaking to himself, and then, raising his voice, he added,-- "come, director, i will tell you what it is. there is evidently a mistake. you have twenty-six persons in five or six small rooms. there are only three of us, and we have room for fifty. there is a mistake, i repeat; you have my house and i have yours. restore me mine; this is yours." the next day the twenty-six poor patients were installed in the bishop's palace, and the bishop was in the hospital. m. myriel had no property, as his family had been ruined by the revolution. his sister had an annuity of francs, which had sufficed at the curacy for personal expenses. m. myriel, as bishop, received from the state , francs a year. on the same day that he removed to the hospital, m. myriel settled the employment of that sum once for all in the following way. we copy here a note in his own handwriting. note for regulating my household expenses. for the little seminary francs. congregation of the mission -- for the lazarists of montdidier -- seminary of foreign missions at paris -- congregation of saint esprit -- religious establishments in the holy land -- societies of maternal charity -- additional for the one at aries francs works for improvement of prisons -- relief and deliverance of prisoners -- for liberation of fathers of family imprisoned for debt -- addition to the salary of poor schoolmasters in the diocese -- distribution of grain in the upper alps -- ladies' society for gratuitous instruction of poor girls at d----, manosque, and sisteron -- for the poor -- personal expenses -- total , -- during the whole time he held the see of d----, m. myriel made no change in this arrangement. he called this, as we see, regulating his household expenses. the arrangement was accepted with a smile by mlle. baptistine, for that sainted woman regarded m. myriel at once as her brother and her bishop; her friend according to nature, her superior according to the church. she loved and venerated him in the simplest way. when he spoke she bowed, when he acted she assented. the servant alone, madame magloire, murmured a little. the bishop, it will have been noticed, only reserved francs, and on this sum, with mlle. baptistine's pension, these two old women and old man lived. and when a village curé came to d-, the bishop managed to regale him, thanks to the strict economy of madame magloire and the sensible management of mlle. baptistine. one day, when he had been at d---- about three months, the bishop said,-- "for all that, i am dreadfully pressed." "i should think so," exclaimed madame magloire. "monseigneur has not even claimed the allowance which the department is bound to pay for keeping up his carriage in town, and for his visitations. that was the custom with bishops in other times." "true," said the bishop, "you are right, madame magloire." he made his claim, and shortly after the council-general, taking the demand into consideration, voted him the annual sum of francs, under the heading, "allowance to the bishop for maintenance of carriage, posting charges, and outlay in visitations." this caused an uproar among the cits of the town, and on this occasion a senator of the empire, ex-member of the council of the five hundred, favourable to the th brumaire, and holding a magnificent appointment near d----, wrote to the minister of worship, m. bigot de préameneu, a short, angry, and confidential letter, from which we extract these authentic lines: "----maintenance of carriage! what can he want one for in a town of less than inhabitants? visitation charges! in the first place, what is the good of visitations at all? and, secondly, how can he travel post in this mountainous country, where there are no roads, and people must travel on horseback? the very bridge over the durance at château arnoux can hardly bear the weight of a cart drawn by oxen. these priests are all the same, greedy and avaricious! this one played the good apostle when he arrived, but now he is like the rest, and must have his carriage and post-chaise. he wishes to be as luxurious as the old bishops. oh this priesthood! my lord, matters will never go on well till the emperor has delivered us from the skullcaps. down with the pope! (there was a quarrel at the time with rome). as for me, i am for cæsar and cæsar alone, etc., etc., etc." the affair, on the other hand, greatly gladdened madame magloire. "come," she said to mlle. baptistine, "monseigneur began with others, but he was obliged to finish with himself. he has regulated all his charities, and here are francs for us at last!" the same evening the bishop wrote, and gave his sister, a note conceived thus:-- carriage and travelling expenses. to provide the hospital patients with broth francs. the society of maternal charity at aix -- the society of maternal charity at draguignan -- for foundlings -- for orphans -- total -- such was m. myriel's budget. as for the accidental receipts, such as fees for bans, christenings, consecrating churches or chapels, marriages, &c., the bishop collected them from the rich with so much the more eagerness because he distributed them to the poor. in a short time the monetary offerings became augmented. those who have and those who want tapped at m. myriel's door, the last coming to seek the alms which the former had just deposited. the bishop in less than a year became the treasurer of all charity and the cashier of all distress. considerable sums passed through his hands, but nothing could induce him to make any change in his mode of life, or add the slightest superfluity to his expenditure. far from it, as there is always more wretchedness at the bottom than paternity above, all was given, so to speak, before being received; it was like water on dry ground: however much he might receive he had never a farthing. at such times he stripped himself. it being the custom for the bishops to place their christian names at the head of their mandates and pastoral letters, the poor people of the country had selected the one among them which conveyed a meaning, and called him monseigneur welcome (bienvenu). we will do like them, and call him so when occasion serves. moreover, the name pleased him. "i like that name," he would say. "the welcome corrects the monseigneur." we do not assert that the portrait we are here drawing is probably as far as fiction goes: we confine ourselves to saying that it bears a likeness to the reality. chapter iii. a good bishop and a hard bishopric. the bishop, though he had converted his coach into alms, did not the less make his visitations. the diocese of d---- is fatiguing; there are few plains and many mountains, and hardly any roads, as we saw just now: twenty-two curacies, forty-one vicarages, and two hundred and eighty-five chapels of ease. it was a task to visit all these, but the bishop managed it. he went on foot when the place was near, in a carriage when it was in the plain, and on a mule when it was in the mountains. the two old females generally accompanied him, but when the journey was too wearying for them he went alone. one day he arrived at senez, which is an old episcopal town, mounted on a donkey; his purse, which was very light at the time, had not allowed him any other equipage. the mayor of the city came to receive him at the door of the bishop's palace, and saw him dismount with scandalized eyes. a few cits were laughing round him. "m. mayor and gentlemen," the bishop said, "i see what it is that scandalizes you. you consider it great pride for a poor priest to ride an animal which our saviour once upon a time bestrode. i did so through necessity, i assure you, and not through vanity." on his tours the bishop was indulgent and gentle, and preached less than he conversed. his reasonings and models were never far-fetched, and to the inhabitants of one country he quoted the example of an adjacent country. in those cantons where people were harsh to the needy he would say, "look at the people of briançon. they have given the indigent, the widows, and the orphans, the right of mowing their fields three days before all the rest. they rebuild their houses gratuitously when they are in ruins. hence it is a country blessed of god. for one hundred years not a single murder has been committed there." to those eager for grain and good crops, he said, "look at the people of embrun. if a father of a family at harvest-time has his sons in the army, his daughters serving in the town, or if he be ill or prevented from toil, the curé recommends him in his sermon; and on sunday after mass all the villagers, men, women, and children, go into his field, and cut and carry home his crop." to families divided by questions of money or inheritance he said, "look at the highlanders of devolny, a country so wild that the nightingale is not heard once in fifty years. well, when the father of a family dies there the boys go off to seek their fortune, and leave the property to the girls, so that they may obtain husbands." in those parts where the farmers are fond of lawsuits, and ruin themselves in writs, he would say, "look at those good peasants of the valley of queyras. there are three thousand souls there. why, it is like a little republic. neither judge nor bailiff is known there, and the mayor does everything. he divides the imposts, taxes everybody conscientiously, settles quarrels gratis, allots patrimonies without fees, gives sentences without costs, and is obeyed because he is a just man among simple men." in villages where there was no schoolmaster he again quoted the people of queyras. "do you know what they do? as a small place, containing only twelve or fifteen hearths, cannot always support a master, they have schoolmasters paid by the whole valley, who go from village to village, spending a week in one, ten days in another, and teaching. these masters go the fairs, where i have seen them. they can be recognized by the pens they carry in their hat-band. those who only teach reading have but one pen: those who teach reading and arithmetic have two: those who teach reading, arithmetic, and latin, have three. but what a disgrace it is to be ignorant! do like the people of queyras." he spoke thus, gravely and paternally. when examples failed him he invented parables, going straight to the point, with few phrases and a good deal of imagery. his was the eloquence of the apostles, convincing and persuading. chapter iv. works resembling words. the bishop's conversation was affable and lively. he condescended to the level of the two old females who spent their life near him, and when he laughed it was a schoolboy's laugh. madame magloire was fond of calling him "your grandeur." one day he rose from his easy chair and went to fetch a book from his library: as it was on one of the top shelves, and as the bishop was short, he could not reach it "madame magloire," he said, "bring me a chair, for my grandeur does not rise to that shelf." one of his distant relatives, the countess de lô, rarely let an opportunity slip to enumerate in his presence what she called the "hopes" of her three sons. she had several very old relatives close to death's door, of whom her sons were the natural heirs. the youngest of the three would inherit from a great-aunt , francs a year; the second would succeed to his uncle's dukedom, the third to his grandfather's peerage. the bishop generally listened in silence to this innocent and pardonable maternal display. once, however, he seemed more dreamy than usual, while madame de lô was repeating all the details of their successions and "hopes." she broke off somewhat impatiently. "good gracious, cousin," she said, "what are you thinking, about?" "i am thinking," said the bishop, "of something singular, which, if my memory is right, is in st. augustine. place your hopes in the man to whom it is impossible to succeed." on another occasion, receiving a letter announcing the death of a country gentleman, in which, in addition to the dignities of the defunct, all the feudal and noble titles of all his relatives were recorded,--"what a back death has! what an admirable burthen of titles he is made lightly to bear," he exclaimed, "and what sense men must possess thus to employ the tomb in satisfying their vanity." he displayed at times a gentle raillery, which nearly always contained a serious meaning. during one lent a young vicar came to d---- and preached at the cathedral. he was rather eloquent, and the subject of his sermon was charity. he invited the rich to give to the needy in order to escape hell, which he painted in the most frightful way he could, and reach paradise, which he made desirable and charming. there was among the congregation a rich, retired merchant, somewhat of a usurer, who had acquired two million francs by manufacturing coarse cloths, serges, and caddis. in his whole life-time m. géborand had never given alms to a beggar, but after this sermon it was remarked that he gave every sunday a sou to the old women begging at the cathedral gate. there were six of them to share it. one day the bishop saw him bestowing his charity, and said to his sister, with a smile, "look at m. géborand buying heaven for a sou." when it was a question of charity he would not let himself be rebuffed even by a refusal, and at such times made remarks which caused people to reflect. once he was collecting for the poor in a drawing-room of the town. the marquis de champtercier was present, a rich old avaricious man, who contrived to be at once ultra-royalist and ultra-voltairian. this variety has existed. the bishop on reaching him touched his arm, "monsieur le marquis, you must give me something." the marquis turned and answered dryly: "i have my own poor, monseigneur." "give them to me," said the bishop. one day he delivered the following sermon at the cathedral:-- "my very dear brethren, my good friends, there are in france thirteen hundred and twenty thousand peasants' houses which have only three openings; eighteen hundred and seventeen thousand which have only two openings, the door and the window; and, lastly, three hundred and forty-six thousand cabins which have only one opening, the door, and this is because of a thing called the door and window tax. just place poor families, aged women and little children, in these houses, and then see the fevers and maladies! alas! god gives men fresh air, and the law sells it to them. i do not accuse the law, but i bless god. in the isère, in the var, in the two alps, upper and lower, the peasants have not even trucks, but carry manure on their backs: they have no candles, and burn resinous logs and pieces of rope steeped in pitch. it is the same through all the high parts of dauphiné. they make bread for six months, and bake it with dried cow-dung. in winter they break this bread with axes and steep it in water for four-and-twenty hours before they can eat it. brethren, have pity, see how people suffer around you!" a provençal by birth, he easily accustomed himself to all the dialects of the south: this greatly pleased the people, and had done no little in securing him admission to all minds. he was, as it were, at home in the hut and on the mountain. he could say the grandest things in the most vulgar idioms, and as he spoke all languages he entered all hearts. however, he was the same to people of fashion as to the lower classes. he never condemned anything hastily or without taking the circumstances into calculation. he would say, let us look at the road by which the fault has come. being, as he called himself with a smile, an ex-sinner, he had none of the intrenchments of rigorism, and, careless of the frowns of the unco' good, professed loudly a doctrine which might be summed up nearly as follows,-- "man has upon him the flesh which is at once his burden and his temptation. he carries it with him and yields to it. he must watch, restrain, and repress it, and only obey it in the last extremity. in this obedience there may still be a fault: but the fault thus committed is venial. it is a fall, but a fall on the knees, which may end in prayer. to be a saint is the exception, to be a just man is the rule. err, fail, sin, but be just. the least possible amount of sin is the law of man: no sin at all is the dream of angels. all that is earthly is subjected to sin, for sin is a gravitation." when he saw everybody cry out and grow indignant, all of a sudden, he would say with a smile, "oh! oh, it seems as if this is a great crime which all the world is committing. look at the startled hypocrites, hastening to protest and place themselves under cover." he was indulgent to the women and the poor on whom the weight of human society presses. he would say, "the faults of women, children, servants, the weak, the indigent, and the ignorant are the fault of husbands, fathers, masters, the strong, the rich, and the learned." he also said, "teach the ignorant as much as you possibly can: society is culpable for not giving instruction gratis, and is responsible for the night it produces. this soul is full of darkness, and sin is committed, but the guilty person is not the man who commits the sin, but he who produces the darkness." as we see, he had a strange manner, peculiarly his own, of judging things. i suspect that he obtained it from the gospels. he one day heard in a drawing-room the story of a trial which was shortly to take place. a wretched man, through love of a woman and a child he had by her, having exhausted his resources, coined false money, which at that period was an offence punished by death. the woman was arrested while issuing the first false piece manufactured by the man. she was detained, but there was no proof against her. she alone could accuse her lover and ruin him by confessing. she denied. they pressed her, but she adhered to her denial. upon this, the attorney for the crown had an idea: he feigned infidelity on the lover's part, and contrived, by cleverly presenting the woman with fragments of letters, to persuade her that she had a rival, and that the man was deceiving her. then, exasperated by jealousy, she denounced her lover, confessed everything, proved everything. the man was ruined, and would shortly be tried with his accomplice at aix. the story was told, and everybody was delighted at the magistrate's cleverness. by bringing jealousy into play he brought out the truth through passion, and obtained justice through revenge. the bishop listened to all this in silence, and when it was ended he asked: "where will this man and woman be tried?" "at the assizes." then he continued, "and where will the attorney for the crown be tried?" a tragical event occurred at d----. a man was condemned to death for murder. he was a wretched fellow, not exactly educated, not exactly ignorant, who had been a mountebank at fairs and a public writer. the trial attracted the attention of the towns-people. on the eve of the day fixed for the execution the prison chaplain was taken ill, and a priest was wanted to assist the sufferer in his last moments. the curé was sent for, and it seems that he refused, saying, "it is no business of mine, i have nothing to do with the mountebank, i am ill too, and besides, that is not my place." this answer was carried to the bishop, who said, "the curé is right, it is not his place, it is mine." he went straight to the prison, entered the mountebank's cell, called him by name, took his hand, and spoke to him. he spent the whole day with him, forgetting sleep and food while praying to god for the soul of the condemned man. he told him the best truths, which are the most simple. he was father, brother, friend--bishop only to bless. he taught him everything, while reassuring and consoling him. this man was about to die in desperation: death was to him like an abyss, and he shuddered as he stood on its gloomy brink. he was not ignorant enough to be completely indifferent, and his condemnation, which was a profound shock, had here and there broken through that partition which separates us from the mystery of things, and which we call life. he peered incessantly out of this world through these crevices, and only saw darkness; but the bishop showed him a light. on the morrow, when they came to fetch the condemned man, the bishop was with him. he followed him, and showed himself to the mob in his purple cassock, and with the episcopal cross round his neck, side by side with this rope-bound wretch. he entered the cart with him, he mounted the scaffold with him. the sufferer, so gloomy and crushed on the previous day, was radiant; he felt that his soul was reconciled, and he hoped for heaven. the bishop embraced him, and at the moment when the knife was about to fall, said: "the man whom his fellow-men kill, god resuscitates. he whom his brothers expel finds the father again. pray, believe, enter into life! the father is there!" when he descended from the scaffold there was something in his glance which made the people open a path for him; it was impossible to say whether his pallor or his serenity were the more admirable. on returning to the humble abode, which he called smilingly his palace, he said to his sister: "i have just been officiating pontifically." as the most sublime things are often those least understood, there were persons in the town who said, in commenting on the bishop's conduct, "it is affectation." this, however, was only the talk of drawing-rooms; the people who do not regard holy actions with suspicion were affected, and admired. as for the bishop, the sight of the guillotine was a shock to him, and it was long ere he recovered from it. the scaffold, in fact, when it stands erect before you, has something about it that hallucinates. we may feel a certain amount of indifference about the punishment of death, not express an opinion, and say yes or no, so long as we have never seen a guillotine; but when we have come across one the shock is violent, and we must decide either for or against. some admire it, like de maistre, others execrate it, like beccaria. the guillotine is the concretion of the law, it calls itself _vindicta_; it is not neutral, and does not allow you to remain neutral. the person who perceives it shudders with the most mysterious of shudders. all the social questions raise their notes of interrogation round this cutter. the scaffold is a vision, it is not carpenter's work, it is not a machine, it is not a lifeless mechanism made of wood, steel, and ropes. it seems to be a species of being possessing a gloomy intuition; you might say that the wood-work lives, that the machine hears, that the mechanism understands, that the wood, the steel, and the ropes, have a volition. in the frightful reverie into which its presence casts the mind the scaffold appears terrible, and mixed up with what it does. the scaffold is the accomplice of the executioner; it devours, it eats flesh and drinks blood. the scaffold is a species of monster, manufactured by the judge and the carpenter, a spectre that seems to live a sort of horrible life made up of all the death it has produced. hence the impression was terrible and deep; on the day after the execution, and for many days beyond, the bishop appeared crushed. the almost violent serenity of the mournful moment had departed; the phantom of social justice haunted him. he who usually returned from all his duties with such radiant satisfaction seemed to be reproaching himself. at times he soliloquized, and stammered unconnected sentences in a low voice. here is one which his sister overheard and treasured up: "i did not believe that it was so monstrous. it is wrong to absorb oneself in the divine law so greatly as no longer to perceive the human law. death belongs to god alone. by what right do men touch that unknown thing?" with time these impressions were attenuated, and perhaps effaced. still it was noticed that from this period the bishop avoided crossing the execution square. m. myriel might be called at any hour to the bedside of the sick and the dying. he was not ignorant that his greatest duty and greatest labor lay there. widowed or orphaned families had no occasion to send for him, for he came of himself. he had the art of sitting down and holding his tongue for hours by the side of a man who had lost the wife he loved, or of a mother bereaved of her child. as he knew the time to be silent, he also knew the time to speak. what an admirable consoler he was! he did not try to efface grief by oblivion, but to aggrandize and dignify it by hope. he would say: "take care of the way in which you turn to the dead. do not think of that which perishes. look fixedly, and you will perceive the living light of your beloved dead in heaven." he knew that belief is healthy, and he sought to counsel and calm the desperate man by pointing out to him the resigned man, and to transform the grief that gazes at a grave by showing it the grief that looks at a star. chapter v. monseigneur's cassocks last too long. m. myriel's domestic life was full of the same thoughts as his public life. to any one who could inspect it closely, the voluntary poverty in which the bishop lived would have been a solemn and charming spectacle. like all old men, and like most thinkers, he slept little, but that short sleep was deep. in the morning he remained in contemplation for an hour, and then read mass either at the cathedral or in his house. mass over, he breakfasted on rye bread dipped in the milk of his own cows. then he set to work. a bishop is a very busy man. he must daily receive the secretary to the bishopric, who is generally a canon, and almost every day his grand vicars. he has congregations to control, permissions to grant, a whole ecclesiastical library to examine, in the shape of diocesan catechisms, books of hours, etc.; mandates to write, sermons to authorize, curés and mayors to reconcile, a clerical correspondence, an administrative correspondence, on one side the state, on the other the holy see; in a word, a thousand tasks. the time which these thousand tasks, his offices, and his breviary left him, he gave first to the needy, the sick, and the afflicted; the time which the afflicted, the sick, and the needy left him he gave to work. sometimes he hoed in his garden, at others he read and wrote. he had only one name for both sorts of labor, he called them gardening. "the mind is a garden," he would say. toward mid-day, when the weather was fine, he went out and walked in the country or the town, frequently entering the cottages. he could be seen walking alone in deep thought, looking down, leaning on his long cane, dressed in his violet wadded and warm great coat, with his violet stockings thrust into clumsy shoes, and wearing his flat hat, through each corner of which were passed three golden acorns as tassels. it was a festival wherever he appeared, it seemed as if his passing had something warming and luminous about it; old men and children came to the door to greet the bishop as they did the sun. he blessed them and they blessed him, and his house was pointed out to anybody who was in want of anything. now and then he stopped, spoke to the little boys and girls, and smiled on their mothers. he visited the poor so long as he had any money; when he had none he visited the rich. as he made his cassocks last a long time, and he did not wish the fact to be noticed, he never went into town save in his wadded violet coat. this was rather tiresome in summer. on returning home he dined. the dinner resembled the breakfast. at half-past eight in the evening he supped with his sister, madame magloire standing behind them and waiting on them. nothing could be more frugal than this meal; but if the bishop had a curé to supper, madame magloire would take advantage of it to serve monseigneur with some excellent fish from the lake, or famous game from the mountain. every curé was the excuse for a good meal, and the bishop held his tongue. on other occasions his repast only consisted of vegetables boiled in water and soup made with oil. hence it was said in the town: "when the bishop does not fare like a curé he fares like a trappist." after supper he conversed for half an hour with mlle. baptistine and madame magloire; then he returned to his room and began writing again, either on loose leaves or on the margin of some folio. he was well read, and a bit of a _savant_, and has left five or six curious mss. on theological subjects, among others a dissertation on the verse from genesis, "in the beginning the spirit of god moved upon the face of the waters." he compared this verse with three texts,--the arabic, which says, "the winds of god breathed;" flavius josephus, who said, "a wind from on high fell upon the earth;" and lastly the chaldaic of onkelos, "a wind coming from god breathed on the face of the waters." in another dissertation he examines the works of hugo, bishop of ptolemaïs, great-grand-uncle of him who writes this book, and he proves that to this bishop must be attributed the various opuscules published in the last century under the pseudonym of barleycourt. at times, in the midst of his reading, no matter what book he held in his hands, he would suddenly fall into a deep meditation, from which he only emerged to write a few lines on the pages of the book. these lines have frequently no connection with the book that contains them. we have before us a note written by him on the margin of a quarto entitled, "correspondence of lord germain with generals clinton and cornwallis, and the admirals of the american station. versailles, prinçot; and paris, pissot, quai des augustins." here is the note. "o thou who art! ecclesiastes calls you omnipotence; the maccabees call you creator; the epistle to the ephesians calls you liberty; baruch calls you immensity; the psalms call you wisdom and truth; st. john calls you light; the book of kings calls you lord; exodus calls you providence; leviticus, holiness; esdras, justice; creation calls you god; man calls you the father; but solomon calls you mercy, and that is the fairest of all your names." about nine o'clock the two females withdrew and went up to their bed-rooms on the first floor, leaving him alone till morning on the ground floor. here it is necessary that we should give an exact idea of the bishop's residence. chapter vi. by whom the house was guarded. the house the bishop resided in consisted, as we have said, of a ground floor and one above it, three rooms on the ground, three bed-rooms on the first floor, and above them a store-room. behind the house was a quarter of an acre of garden. the two females occupied the first floor, and the bishop lodged below. the first room, which opened on the street, served him as dining-room, the second as bed-room, the third as oratory. you could not get out of the oratory without passing through the bed-room, or out of the bed-room without passing through the sitting-room. at the end of the oratory was a closed alcove with a bed, for any one who stayed the night, and the bishop offered this bed to country curés whom business or the calls of their parish brought to d----. the hospital surgery, a small building added to the house and built on a part of the garden, had been transformed into kitchen and cellar. there was also in the garden a stable, which had been the old hospital kitchen, and in which the bishop kept two cows. whatever the quantity of milk they yielded, he invariably sent one half every morning to the hospital patients. "i am paying my tithes," he was wont to say. his room was rather spacious, and very difficult to heat in the cold weather. as wood is excessively dear at d----, he hit on the idea of partitioning off with planks a portion of the cow-house. here he spent his evenings during the great frosts, and called it his "winter drawing-room." in this room, as in the dining-room, there was no other furniture but a square deal table and four straw chairs. the dining-room was also adorned with an old buffet stained to imitate rosewood. the bishop had made the altar which decorated his oratory out of a similar buffet, suitably covered with white cloths and imitation lace. his rich penitents and the religious ladies of d---- had often subscribed to pay for a handsome new altar for monseigneur's oratory; each time he took the money and gave it to the poor. "the finest of all altars," he would say, "is the soul of an unhappy man who is consoled and thanks god." there were in his oratory two straw priedieus, and an arm-chair, also of straw, in his bed-room. when he by chance received seven or eight persons at the same time, the prefect, the general, the staff of the regiment quartered in the town, or some pupils of the lower seminary, it was necessary to fetch the chairs from the winter drawing-room, the priedieus from the oratory, and the easy chair from the bed-room: in this way as many as eleven seats could be collected for the visitors. at each new visit a room was unfurnished. it happened at times that there would be twelve; in such a case the bishop concealed the embarrassing nature of the situation by standing before the chimney if it were winter, or walking up and down the room were it summer. there was also another chair in the alcove, but it was half robbed of the straw, and had only three legs to stand on, so that it could only be used when resting against a wall. mlle. baptistine also had in her bed-room a very large settee of wood, which had once been gilt and covered with flowered chintz, but it had been necessary to raise this settee to the first floor through the window, owing to the narrowness of the stairs: and hence it could not be reckoned on in any emergency. it had been mlle. baptistine's ambition to buy drawing-room furniture of mahogany and covered with yellow utrecht velvet, but this would have cost at least francs, and seeing that she had only succeeded in saving for this object francs sous in five years, she gave up the idea. besides, who is there that ever attains his ideal? nothing more simple can be imagined than the bishop's bed-room. a long window opening on the garden; opposite the bed, an iron hospital bed with a canopy of green serge; in the shadow of the bed, behind a curtain, toilet articles, still revealing the old elegant habits of the man of fashion; two doors, one near the chimney leading to the oratory, the other near the library leading to the dining-room. the library was a large glass case full of books; the chimney of wood, painted to imitate marble, was habitually fireless; in the chimney were a pair of iron andirons ornamented with two vases, displaying garlands and grooves which had once been silvered, which was a species of episcopal luxury; over the chimney a crucifix of unsilvered copper fastened to threadbare black velvet, in a frame which had lost its gilding; near the window was a large table with an inkstand, loaded with irregularly arranged papers and heavy tomes; before the table the straw arm-chair; in front of the bed a priedieu borrowed from the oratory. two portraits, in oval frames, hung on the wall on either side of the bed. small gilded inscriptions on the neutral tinted ground of the canvas by the side of the figures indicated that the portraits represented, one the abbé de chaliot, bishop of st. claude; the other the abbé tourteau, vicar-general of agde, and abbé of grand champs, belonging to the cistertian order in the diocese of chartres. the bishop, on succeeding to the hospital infirmary, found the pictures there and left them. they were priests, probably donors,--two motives for him to respect them. all he knew of the two personages was that they had been nominated by the king, the one to his bishopric, the other to his benefice, on the same day, april , . madame magloire having unhooked the portraits to remove the dust, the bishop found this circumstance recorded in faded ink on a small square of paper which time had turned yellow, and fastened by four wafers behind the portrait of the abbé of grand champs. he had at his window an antique curtain of heavy woollen stuff, which had grown so old that madame magloire, in order to avoid the expense of a new one, was obliged to make a large seam in the very middle of it. the seam formed a cross, and the bishop often drew attention to it. "how pleasant that is," he would say. all the rooms in the house, ground floor and first floor, were white-washed, which is a barrack and hospital fashion. still, some years later, madame magloire discovered, as we shall see further on, paintings under the white-washed paper, in mlle. baptistine's bed-room. the rooms were paved with red bricks which were washed every week, and there were straw mats in front of all the beds. this house, moreover, managed by two females, was exquisitely clean from top to bottom. this was the only luxury the bishop allowed himself, for, as he said, "it takes nothing from the poor." we must allow, however, that of the old property there still remained six silver spoons and forks and a soup-ladle, which madame magloire daily saw with delight shining splendidly on the coarse white table-cloth. and as we are here depicting the bishop of d---- as he was, we must add that he had said, more than once, "i do not think i could give up eating with silver." to this plate must be added two heavy candlesticks of massive silver, which the bishop inherited from a great-aunt. these branched candlesticks each held two wax candles, and usually figured on the bishop's chimney. when he had any one to dinner, madame magloire lit the candles and placed the two candlesticks on the table. there was in the bishop's bed-room, at the head of his bed, a small cupboard in the wall, in which madame magloire each night placed the plate and the large ladle. i am bound to add that the key was never taken out. the garden, spoiled to some extent by the ugly buildings to which we have referred, was composed of four walks, radiating round a cesspool; another walk ran all round the garden close to the surrounding white wall. between these walks were four box-bordered squares. in three of them madame magloire grew vegetables; in the fourth the bishop had placed flowers; here and there were a few fruit-trees. once madame magloire had said, with a sort of gentle malice, "monseigneur, although you turn everything to use, here is an unemployed plot. it would be better to have lettuces there than bouquets." "madame magloire," the bishop answered, "you are mistaken; the beautiful is as useful as the useful." he added, after a moment's silence, "more so, perhaps." this square, composed of three or four borders, occupied the bishop almost as much as his books did. he liked to spend an hour or two there, cutting, raking, and digging holes in which he placed seeds. he was not so hostile to insects as a gardener would have liked. however, he made no pretensions to botany; he was ignorant of groups and solidism; he did not make the slightest attempt to decide between tournefort and the natural method; he was not a partisan either of jussieu or linnæus. he did not study plants, but he loved flowers. he greatly respected the professors, but he respected the ignorant even more; and without ever failing in this respect, he watered his borders every summer evening with a green-painted tin pot. the house had not a single door that locked. the door of the dining-room, which, as we said, opened right on the cathedral square, had formerly been adorned with bolts and locks like a prison gate. the bishop had all this iron removed, and the door was only hasped either night or day: the first passer-by, no matter the hour, had only to push it. at the outset the two females had been greatly alarmed by this never-closed door; but the bishop said to them, "have bolts placed on the doors of your rooms if you like." in the end they shared his confidence, or at least affected to do so: madame magloire alone was from time to time alarmed. as regards the bishop, his idea is explained, or at least indicated, by these three lines, which he wrote on the margin of a bible: "this is the distinction: the physician's doors must never be closed, the priest's door must always be open." on another book, entitled "philosophy of medical science," he wrote this other note: "am i not a physician like them? i also have my patients: in the first place, i have theirs, whom they call the sick, and then i have my own, whom i call the unhappy." elsewhere he also wrote: "do not ask the name of the man who seeks a bed from you, for it is before all the man whom his name embarrasses that needs an asylum." it came about that a worthy curé--i forget whether it were he of couloubroux or he of pompierry--thought proper to ask him one day, probably at the instigation of madame magloire, whether monseigneur was quite certain that he was not acting to some extent imprudently by leaving his door open day and night for any who liked to enter, and if he did not fear lest some misfortune might happen in a house so poorly guarded. the bishop tapped his shoulder with gentle gravity, and said to him, "nisi dominus custodierit domum, in vanum vigilant qui custodiunt eam." then he spoke of something else. he was fond of saying too, "there is the priest's bravery as well as that of the colonel of dragoons. the only thing is that ours must be quiet." chapter vii. cravatte. here naturally comes a fact which we must not omit, for it is one of those which will enable us to see what manner of man the bishop of d---- was. after the destruction of the band of gaspard bès, which had infested the gorges of ollioules, cravatte, one of his lieutenants, took refuge in the mountains. he concealed himself for a while with his brigands, the remnant of bès' band, in the county of nice, then went to piedmont, and suddenly re-appeared in france, via barcelonnette. he was seen first at jauziers, and next at tuiles; he concealed himself in the caverns of the joug de l'aigle, and descended thence on the hamlets and villages by the ravines of the ubaye. he pushed on even as far as embrun, entered the church one night and plundered the sacristy. his brigandage desolated the country, and the gendarmes were in vain placed on his track. he constantly escaped, and at times even offered resistance, for he was a bold scoundrel. in the midst of all this terror the bishop arrived on his visitation, and the mayor came to him and urged him to turn back. cravatte held the mountain as far as arche and beyond, and there was danger, even with an escort. it would be uselessly exposing three or four unhappy gendarmes. "for that reason," said the bishop, "i intend to go without escort." "can you mean it, monseigneur?" the mayor exclaimed. "i mean it so fully that i absolutely refuse gendarmes, and intend to start in an hour." "monseigneur, you will not do that!" "there is in the mountain," the bishop continued, "a humble little parish, which i have not visited for three years. they are good friends of mine, and quiet and honest shepherds. they are the owners of one goat out of every thirty they guard; they make very pretty woollen ropes of different colors, and they play mountain airs on small six-holed flutes. they want to hear about heaven every now and then, and what would they think of a bishop who was afraid? what would they say if i did not go?" "but, monseigneur, the brigands." "ah," said the bishop, "you are right; i may meet them. they too must want to hear about heaven." "but this band is a flock of wolves." "monsieur mayor, it may be that this is precisely the flock of which christ has made me the shepherd. who knows the ways of providence?" "monseigneur, they will plunder you." "i have nothing." "they will kill you." "a poor old priest who passes by, muttering his mummery? nonsense, what good would that do them?" "oh, good gracious, if you were to meet them!" "i would ask them for alms for my poor." "monseigneur, do not go. in heaven's name do not, for you expose your life." "my good sir," said the bishop, "is that all? i am not in this world to save my life, but to save souls." there was no help for it, and he set out only accompanied by a lad, who offered to act as his guide. his obstinacy created a sensation in the country, and caused considerable alarm. he would not take either his sister or madame magloire with him. he crossed the mountain on a mule, met nobody, and reached his good friends the goat-herds safe and sound. he remained with them a fortnight, preaching, administering the sacraments, teaching, and moralizing. when he was ready to start for home he resolved to sing a te deum pontifically, and spoke about it to the curé. but what was to be done? there were no episcopal ornaments. all that could be placed at his disposal was a poor village sacristy, with a few old faded and pinchbeck covered chasubles. "pooh!" said the bishop; "announce the te deum in your sermon for all that. it will come right in the end." inquiries were made in the surrounding churches: but all the magnificence of these united humble parishes would not have been sufficient decently to equip a cathedral chorister. while they were in this embarrassment a large chest was brought and left at the curacy for the bishop by two strange horse-men, who started again at once. the chest was opened and found to contain a cope of cloth of gold, a mitre adorned with diamonds, an archiepiscopal cross, a magnificent crozier, and all the pontifical robes stolen a month back from the treasury of our lady of embrun. in the chest was a paper on which were written these words: "cravatte to monseigneur welcome." "did i not tell you that it would be all right?" the bishop said; then he added with a smile, "god sends an archbishop's cope to a man who is contented with a curé's surplice." "monseigneur," the curé muttered, with a gentle shake of his head, "god--or the devil." the bishop looked fixedly at the curé and repeated authoritatively, "god!" when he returned to chastelon, and all along the road, he was regarded curiously. he found at the presbytery of that town mlle. baptistine and madame magloire waiting for him, and he said to his sister, "well, was i right? the poor priest went among these poor mountaineers with empty hands, and returns with his hands full. i started only taking with me my confidence in heaven, and i bring back the treasures of a cathedral." the same evening before retiring he said too, "never let us fear robbers or murderers. these are external and small dangers; let us fear ourselves; prejudices are the real robbers, vices the true murderers. the great dangers are within ourselves. let us not trouble about what threatens our head or purse, and only think of what threatens our soul." then, turning to his sister, he added, "sister, a priest ought never to take precautions against his neighbor. what his neighbor does god permits, so let us confine ourselves to praying to god when we believe that a danger is impending over us. let us pray, not for ourselves, but that our brother may not fall into error on our account." events, however, were rare in his existence. we relate those we know, but ordinarily he spent his life in always doing the same things at the same moment. a month of his year resembled an hour of his day. as to what became of the treasure of embrun cathedral, we should be greatly embarrassed if questioned on that head. there were many fine things, very tempting and famous to steal on behalf of the poor. stolen they were already, one moiety of the adventure was accomplished: the only thing left to do was to change the direction of the robbery, and make it turn slightly towards the poor. still, we affirm nothing on the subject; we merely mention that among the bishop's papers a rather obscure note was found, which probably refers to this question, and was thus conceived: "the question is to know whether it ought to go to the cathedral or the hospital." chapter viii. philosophy after drinking. the senator, to whom we have already alluded, was a skilful man, who had made his way with a rectitude that paid no attention to all those things which constitute obstacles, and are called conscience, plighted word, right, and duty: he had gone straight to his object without once swerving from the line of his promotions and his interest. he was an ex-procureur, softened by success, anything but a wicked man, doing all the little services in his power for his sons, his sons-in-law, his relatives, and even his friends: he had selected the best opportunities, and the rest seemed to him something absurd. he was witty, and just sufficiently lettered to believe himself a disciple of epicurus, while probably only a product of pigault lebrun. he was fond of laughing pleasantly at things infinite and eternal, and at the crotchets "of our worthy bishop." he even laughed at them with amiable authority in m. myriel's presence. on some semi-official occasion the count--(this senator) and m. myriel met at the prefect's table. at the dessert the senator, who was merry but quite sober, said,-- "come, bishop, let us have a chat. a senator and a bishop can hardly meet without winking at each other, for we are two augurs, and i am about to make a confession to you. i have my system of philosophy." "and you are right," the bishop answered; "as you make your philosophy, so you must lie on it. you are on the bed of purple." the senator, thus encouraged, continued,--"let us be candid." "decidedly." "i declare to you," the senator went on, "that the marquis d'argens, pyrrho, hobbes, and naigeon are no impostors. i have in my library all my philosophers with gilt backs." "like yourself, count," the bishop interrupted him. the senator proceeded,-- "i hate diderot; he is an ideologist, a declaimer, and a revolutionist, believing in his heart in deity, and more bigoted than voltaire. the latter ridiculed needham, and was wrong, for needham's eels prove that god is unnecessary. a drop of vinegar in a spoonful of flour supplies the _fiat lux_; suppose the drop larger, and the spoonful bigger, and you have the world. man is the eel; then, of what use is the eternal father? my dear bishop, the jehovah hypothesis wearies me; it is only fitted to produce thin people who think hollow. down with the great all which annoys me! long live zero, who leaves me at peace! between ourselves, and in order to confess to my pastor, as is right and proper, i confess to you that i possess common sense. i am not wild about your saviour, who continually preaches abnegation and sacrifice. it is advice offered by a miser to beggars. abnegation, why? sacrifice, for what object? i do not see that one wolf sacrifices itself to cause the happiness of another wolf. let us, therefore, remain in nature. we are at the summit, so let us have the supreme philosophy. what is the use of being at the top, if you cannot see further than the end of other people's noses? let us live gayly, for life is all in all. as for man having a future elsewhere, up there, down there, somewhere, i do not believe a syllable of it. oh yes! recommend sacrifices and abnegation to me. i must take care of all i do. i must rack my brains about good and evil, justice and injustice, fas et nefas. why so? because i shall have to give account for my actions. when? after my death. what a fine dream! after death! he will be a clever fellow who catches me. just think of a lump of ashes seized by a shadowy hand. let us speak the truth, we who are initiated and have raised the skirt of isis; there is no good, no evil, but there is vegetation. let us seek reality and go to the bottom; hang it all, we must scent the truth, dig into the ground for it and seize it. then it offers you exquisite delights; then you become strong and laugh. i am square at the base, my dear bishop, and human immortality is a thing which anybody who likes may listen to. oh! what a charming prospect! what a fine billet adam has! you are a soul, you will be an angel, and have blue wings on your shoulder-blades. come, help me, is it not tertullian who says that the blessed will go from one planet to the other? very good; they will be the grasshoppers of the planets. and then they will see god; ta, ta, ta. these paradises are all nonsense, and god is a monstrous fable. i would not say so in the _moniteur_, of course, but i whisper it between friends, _inter pocula_. sacrificing the earth for paradise is giving up the substance for the shadow. i am not such an ass as to be the dupe of the infinite. i am nothing, my name is count nothing, senator. did i exist before my birth? no; shall i exist after my death? no. what am i? a little dust aggregated by an organism. what have i to do on this earth? i have the choice between suffering and enjoyment. to what will suffering lead me? to nothingness, but i shall have suffered. to what will enjoyment lead me? to nothingness, but i shall have enjoyed. my choice is made; a man must either eat or be eaten, and so i eat, for it is better to be the tooth than the grass. that is my wisdom; after which go on as i impel you; the grave-digger is there, the pantheon for such as us, and all fall into the large hole. _finis_, and total liquidation, that is the vanishing point death is dead, take my word for it; and i laugh at the idea of any one present affirming the contrary. it is an invention of nurses, old bogey for children, jehovah for men. no, our morrow is night; behind the tomb there is nothing but equal nothings. you may have been sardanapalus, you may have been st. vincent de paul: it all comes to the same--nothing. that is the truth, so live above all else; make use of your _me_, so long as you hold it. in truth, i tell you, my dear bishop, i have my philosophy, and i have my philosophers, and i do not let myself be deluded by fables. after all, something must be offered persons who are down in the world,--the barefooted, the strugglers for existence and the wretched: and so they are offered pure legends--chimeras--the soul--immortality--paradise--the stars--to swallow. they chew that and put it on their dry bread. the man who has nothing has god, and that is something at any rate. i do not oppose it, but i keep m. naigeon for myself; god is good for the plebs." the bishop clapped his hands. "that is what i call speaking," he exclaimed. "ah, what an excellent and truly wonderful thing this materialism is! it is not every man who wishes that can have it. ah! when a man has reached that point, he is no longer a dupe; he does not let himself be stupidly exiled, like cato; or stoned, like st. stephen; or burnt, like joan of arc. those who have succeeded in acquiring this materialism have the joy of feeling themselves irresponsible, and thinking that they can devour everything without anxiety, places, sinecures, power well or badly gained, dignities, lucrative tergiversations, useful treachery, folly, capitulations with their consciences, and that they will go down to the tomb after digesting it all properly. how agreeable this is! i am not referring to you, my dear senator, still i cannot refrain from congratulating you. you great gentlemen have, as you say, a philosophy of your own, and for yourselves, exquisite, refined, accessible to the rich alone, good with any sauce, and admirably seasoning the joys of life. this philosophy is drawn from the profundities, and dug up by special searchers. but you are kind fellows, and think it no harm that belief in god should be the philosophy of the populace, much in the same way as a goose stuffed with chestnuts is the truffled turkey of the poor." chapter ix. the brother described by the sister. to give an idea of the domestic life of the bishop of d----, and the manner in which these two saintly women subordinated their actions, their thoughts, even their feminine instincts, which were easily startled, to the habits and intentions of the bishop, before he required to express them in words, we cannot do better than copy here a letter from mlle baptistine to the viscountess de boischevron, her friend of childhood. this letter is in our possession. "d----, th dec., ----. "my dear madame,--not a day passes in which we do not talk about you. that is our general habit, but there is an extra reason at present. just imagine that, in washing and dusting the ceilings and walls, madame magloire has made a discovery, and now our two rooms papered with old white-washed paper would not disgrace a chateau like yours. madame magloire has torn down all the paper, and there are things under it. my sitting-room, in which there was no furniture, and in which we used to hang up the linen to dry, is fifteen feet in height, eighteen wide, and has a ceiling which was once gilded, and rafters, as in your house. it was covered with canvas during the time this mansion was an hospital. but it is my bed-room, you should see; madame magloire has discovered, under at least ten layers of paper, paintings which, though not excellent, are endurable. there is telemachus dubbed a knight by minerva; and there he is again in the gardens: i forget their names, but where the roman ladies only went for a single night. what can i tell you? i have roman ladies (_here an illegible word_), and so on. madame magloire has got it all straight. this summer she intends to repair a little damage, re-varnish it all, and my bed-room will be a real museum. she has also found in a corner of the garret two consoles in the old fashion; they want twelve francs to regild them, but it is better to give that sum to the poor: besides, they are frightfully ugly, and i should prefer a round mahogany table. "i am very happy, for my brother is so good; he gives all he has to the sick and the poor, and we are often greatly pressed. the country is hard in winter, and something must be done for those who are in want. we are almost lighted and warmed, and, as you can see, that is a great comfort. my brother has peculiar habits; when he does talk, he says 'that a bishop should be so.' just imagine that the house door is never closed: any one who likes can come in, and is at once in my brother's presence. he fears nothing, not even night; and he says that is his way of showing his bravery. he does not wish me to feel alarmed for him, or for madame magloire to do so; he exposes himself to all dangers, and does not wish us to appear as if we even noticed it. we must understand him. he goes out in the rain, he wades through the water, and travels in winter. he is not afraid of the night, suspicious roads, or encounters. last year he went all alone into a country of robbers, for he would not take us with him. he stayed away a whole fortnight, and folk thought him dead, but he came back all right, and said, 'here's the way in which i was robbed,' and he opened a chest full of all the treasures of embrun cathedral, which the robbers had given him. that time i could not refrain from scolding him a little, but was careful only to speak when the wheels made a noise, so that no one could hear me. "at first i said to myself; there is no danger that checks him, and he is terrible; but at present i have grown accustomed to it. i make madame magloire a sign not to annoy him, and he risks his life as he pleases. i carry off magloire, go to my bed-room, pray for him, and fall asleep. i am tranquil because i know that if any harm happened to him it would be the death of me. i shall go to heaven with my brother and my bishop. madame magloire has had greater difficulty than myself in accustoming herself to what she calls his imprudence, but at present she has learned to put up with it. we both pray; we are terrified together, and fall asleep. if the fiend were to enter the house no one would try to stop him, and after all what have we to fear in this house? there is always some one with us who is the stronger, the demon may pass by, but our lord lives in it. that is enough for me, and my brother no longer requires to say a word to me. i understand him without his speaking, and we leave ourselves in the hands of providence, for that is the way in which you must behave to a man who has grandeur in his soul. "i have questioned my brother about the information you require concerning the de faux family. you are aware that he knows everything, and what a memory he has, for he is still a good royalist. it is really a very old norman family belonging to the generalty of caen. five hundred years ago there were a raoul, a john, and a thomas de faux, who were gentlemen, and one of them seigneur of rochefort. the last was guy stephen alexander, who was major-general, and something in the brittany light horse: his daughter, maria louisa, married adrian charles de gramont, son of duke louis de gramont, peer of france, colonel of the french guards, and lieutenant-general in the army. the name is written faux, fauq, and faouq. "my dear madam, recommend us to the prayers of your holy relative the cardinal. as for your dear sylvanie, she has done well in not wasting the few moments she passes by your side in writing to me. she is well, works according to your wishes, and loves me still: that is all i desire. her souvenir sent me through you safely reached me, and i am delighted at it. my health is not bad, and yet i grow thinner every day. good-by, my paper is running out and compels me to break off. a thousand kind regards from your baptistine. "p.s. your little nephew is delightful: do you know that he is nearly five years of age? yesterday he saw a horse pass with knee-caps on, and he said, 'what has he got on his knees?' he is such a dear child. his little brother drags an old broom about the room like a coach, and cries, 'hu!'" as may be seen from this letter, the two women managed to yield to the bishop's ways, with the genius peculiar to woman, who comprehends a man better than he does himself. the bishop of d----, beneath the candid, gentle air which never broke down, at times did grand, bold, and magnificent things, without even appearing to suspect the fact. they trembled, but let him alone. at times madame magloire would hazard a remonstrance beforehand, but never during or after the deed. they never troubled him either by word or sign when he had once begun an affair. at certain moments, without his needing to mention the fact, or perhaps when he was not conscious of it, so perfect was his simplicity, they vaguely felt that he was acting episcopally, and at such times they were only two shadows in the house. they served him passively, and if disappearance were obedience, they disappeared. they knew, with an admirable intuitive delicacy, that certain attentions might vex him, and hence, though they might believe him in peril, they understood, i will not say his thoughts, but his nature, and no longer watched over him. they intrusted him to god. moreover, baptistine said, as we have just read, that her brother's death would be her death. madame magloire did not say so, but she knew it. chapter x. the bishop faces a new light. at a period rather later than the date of the letter just quoted he did a thing which the whole town declared to be even more venturesome than his trip in the mountains among the bandits. a man lived alone in the country near d----: this man, let us out with the great word at once, was an ex-conventionalist, of the name of g----. people talked about him in the little world of d---- with a species of horror. a conventionalist, only think of that! those men existed at the time when people "thou-ed" one another and were called citizens. this man was almost a monster: he had not voted for the king's death, but had done all but that, and was a quasi-regicide. how was it that this man had not been tried by court-martial, on the return of the legitimate princes? they need not have cut his head off, for clemency is all right and proper, but banishment for life would have been an example, and so on. moreover, he was an atheist, like all those men. it was the gossip of geese round a vulture. and was this g---- a vulture? yes, if he might be judged by his ferocious solitude. as he had not voted the king's death, he was not comprised in the decree of exile, and was enabled to remain in france. he lived about three miles from the town, far from every village, every road, in a nook of a very wild valley. he had there, so it was said, a field, a hut, a den. he had no neighbors, not even passers-by; since he had lived in the valley the path leading to it had become overgrown with grass. people talked of the spot as of the hangman's house. yet the bishop thought of it, and from time to time gazed at a spot on the horizon where a clump of trees pointed out the old conventionalist's valley, and said "there is a soul there alone," and he added to himself, "i owe him a visit." but, let us confess it, this idea, which at the first blush was natural, seemed to him after a moment's reflection strange and impossible, almost repulsive. for, in his heart, he shared the general impression, and the conventionalist inspired him, without his being able to account for it, with that feeling which is the border line of hatred, and which is so well expressed by the word "estrangement." still the shepherd ought not to keep aloof from a scabby sheep; but then what a sheep it was! the good bishop was perplexed; at times he started in that direction, but turned back. one day a rumor spread in the town, that a shepherd boy who waited on g---- in his den, had come to fetch a doctor: the old villain was dying, paralysis was overpowering him, and he could not last out the night. happy release! some added. the bishop took his stick, put on his overcoat to hide his well-worn cassock, as well as to protect him against the night breeze which would soon rise, and set out. the sun had almost attained the horizon when the bishop reached the excommunicated spot. he perceived with a certain heart-beating that he was close to the wild beast's den. he strode across a ditch, clambered over a hedge, entered a neglected garden, and suddenly perceived the cavern behind some shrubs. it was a low, poor-looking hut, small and clean, with a vine nailed over the front. in front of the door an old white-haired man, seated in a worn-out wheel-chair, was smiling in the sun. by his side stood a boy, who handed him a pot of milk. while the bishop was looking at him the old man uplifted his voice. "thanks," he said, "i want nothing further," and his smile was turned from the sun to rest on the boy. the bishop stepped forward, and at the noise of his footsteps the seated man turned his head, and his face expressed all the surprise it is possible to feel after a long life. "since i have lived here," he said, "you are the first person who has come to me. who may you be, sir?" the bishop answered, "my name is bienvenu myriel." "i have heard that name uttered. are you not he whom the peasants call monseigneur welcome?" "i am." the old man continued, with a half-smile, "in that case you are my bishop?" "a little." "come in, sir." the conventionalist offered his hand to the bishop, but the bishop did not take it--he confined himself to saying,-- "i am pleased to see that i was deceived. you certainly do not look ill." "i am about to be cured, sir," the old man said; then after a pause he added, "i shall be dead in three hours. i am a bit of a physician, and know in what way the last hour comes. yesterday only my feet were cold; to-day the chill reached my knees; now i can feel it ascending to my waist, and when it reaches the heart i shall stop. the sun is glorious, is it not? i had myself wheeled out in order to take a farewell glance at things. you can talk to me, for it does not weary me. you have done well to come and look at a dying man, for it is proper that there should be witnesses. people have their fancies, and i should have liked to go on till dawn. but i know that i can hardly last three hours. it will be night, but, after all, what matter? finishing is a simple affair, and daylight is not necessary for it. be it so, i will die by star-light." then he turned to the lad: "go to bed. you sat up the other night, and must be tired." the boy went into the cabin; the old man looked after him, and added, as if speaking to himself,-- "while he is sleeping i shall die; the two slumbers can keep each other company." the bishop was not so moved as we might imagine he would be. he did not think that he saw god in this way of dying: and--let us out with it, as the small contradictions of great hearts must also be indicated--he, who at times laughed so heartily at his grandeur, was somewhat annoyed at not being called monseigneur, and was almost tempted to reply, citizen. he felt an inclination for coarse familiarity, common enough with doctors and priests, but to which he was not accustomed. this man after all, this conventionalist, this representative of the people, had been a mighty one of the earth: for the first time in his life, perhaps, the bishop felt disposed to sternness. the republican, in the mean while, regarded him with modest cordiality, in which, perhaps, could be traced that humility which is so becoming in a man who is on the point of returning to the dust. the bishop, on his side, though he generally guarded against curiosity, which according to him was akin to insult, could not refrain from examining the conventionalist with an attention which, as it did not emanate from sympathy, would have pricked his conscience in the case of any other man. the conventionalist produced the effect upon him of being beyond the pale of the law, even the law of charity. g----, calm, almost upright, and possessing a sonorous voice, was one of those grand octogenarians who are the amazement of the physiologist. the revolution possessed many such men, proportioned to the age. the thoroughly tried man could be seen in him, and, though so near his end, he had retained all the signs of health. there was something which would disconcert death in his bright glance, his firm accent, and the robust movement of his shoulders: azrael, the mohammedan angel of the tomb, would have turned back fancying that he had mistaken the door. g---- seemed to be dying because he wished to do so; there was liberty in his agony, and his legs alone, by which the shadows clutched him, were motionless. while the feet were dead and cold, the head lived with all the power of life and appeared in full light. g---- at this awful moment resembled the king in the oriental legend, flesh above and marble below. the bishop sat down on a stone and began rather abruptly:-- "i congratulate you," he said, in the tone people employ to reprimand; "_at least_ you did not vote the king's death." the republican did not seem to notice the covert bitterness of this remark, _at least_; he replied, without a smile on his face,-- "do not congratulate me, sir: i voted the death of the tyrant." it was the accent of austerity opposed to that of sternness. "what do you mean?" the bishop continued. "i mean that man has a tyrant, ignorance, and i voted for the end of that tyrant which engendered royalty, which is the false authority, while knowledge is the true authority. man must only be governed by knowledge." "and by his conscience," the bishop added. "that is the same thing. conscience is the amount of innate knowledge we have in us." monseigneur welcome listened in some surprise to this language, which was very novel to him. the republican continued,-- "as for louis xvi. i said no. i do not believe that i have the right to kill a man, but i feel the duty of exterminating a tyrant, and i voted for the end of the tyrant. that is to say, for the end of prostitution for women; the end of slavery for men; and the end of night for children. in voting for the republic i voted for all this: i voted for fraternity, concord, the dawn! i aided in the overthrow of errors and prejudices, and such an overthrow produces light; we hurled down the old world, and that vase of wretchedness, by being poured over the human race, became an urn of joy." "mingled joy," said the bishop. "you might call it a troubled joy, and now, after that fatal return of the past which is called , a departed joy. alas! the work was incomplete, i grant; we demolished the ancient régime in facts, but were not able to suppress it completely in ideas. it is not sufficient to destroy abuses, but morals must also be modified. though the mill no longer exists, the wind still blows." "you demolished: it may be useful, but i distrust a demolition complicated with passion." "right has its passion, sir bishop, and that passion is an element of progress. no matter what may be said, the french revolution is the most powerful step taken by the human race since the advent of christ. it may be incomplete, but it was sublime. it softened minds, it calmed, appeased, and enlightened, and it spread civilization over the world. the french revolution was good, for it was the consecration of humanity." the bishop could not refrain from muttering,--"yes? ' !" the republican drew himself up with almost mournful solemnity, and shouted, as well as a dying man could shout,-- "ah! there we have it! i have been waiting for that. a cloud had been collecting for fifteen hundred years, and at the end of that period it burst: you are condemning the thunder-clap." the bishop, without perhaps confessing it to himself, felt that the blow had gone home; still he kept a good countenance, and answered,-- "the judge speaks in the name of justice; the priest speaks in that of pity, which is only a higher form of justice. a thunder-clap must not deceive itself." and he added as he looked fixedly at the conventionalist,-- "and louis xvii.?" the republican stretched forth his hand and seized the bishop's arm. "louis xvii. let us consider. whom do you weep for? is it the innocent child? in that case i weep with you. is it the royal child? in that case i must ask leave to reflect. for me, the thought of the brother of cartouche, an innocent lad, hung up under the armpits in the place de grève until death ensued, for the sole crime of being cartouche's brother, is not less painful than the grandson of louis xv., the innocent boy martyrized in the temple tower for the sole crime of being the grandson of louis xv." "i do not like such an association of names, sir," said the bishop. "louis xv.? cartouche? on behalf of which do you protest?" there was a moment's silence; the bishop almost regretted having come, and yet felt himself vaguely and strangely shaken. the conventionalist continued,-- "ah! sir priest, you do not like the crudities of truth, but christ loved them; he took a scourge and swept the temple. his lightning lash was a rough discourser of truths. when he exclaimed, 'suffer little children to come unto me,' he made no distinction among them. he made no difference between the dauphin of barabbas and the dauphin of herod. innocence is its own crown, and does not require to be a highness; it is as august in rags as when crowned with _fleurs de lis_." "that is true," said the bishop in a low voice. "you have named louis xvii.," the conventionalist continued; "let us understand each other. shall we weep for all the innocents, martyrs, and children of the lowest as of the highest rank? i am with you there, but as i said, in that case we must go back beyond ' , and begin our tears before louis xvii. i will weep over the children of the kings with you, provided that you weep with me over the children of the people." "i weep for all," said the bishop. "equally!" g---- exclaimed; "and if the balance must be uneven, let it be on the side of the people, as they have suffered the longest." there was again a silence, which the republican broke. he rose on his elbow, held his chin with his thumb and forefinger, as a man does mechanically when he is interrogating and judging, and fixed on the bishop a glance full of all the energy of approaching death. it was almost an explosion. "yes, sir; the people have suffered for a long time. but let me ask why you have come to question and speak to me about louis xvii.? i do not know you. ever since i have been in this country i have lived here alone, never setting my foot across the threshold, and seeing no one but the boy who attends to me. your name, it is true, has vaguely reached me, and i am bound to say that it was pronounced affectionately, but that means nothing, for clever people have so many ways of making the worthy, simple folk believe in them. by the bye, i did not hear the sound of your coach; you doubtless left it down there behind that clump of trees at the cross roads. i do not know you, i tell you; you have informed me that you are the bishop, but that teaches me nothing as to your moral character. in a word--i repeat my question, who are you? you are a bishop, that is to say, a prince of the church, one of those gilded, escutcheoned annuitants who have fat prebends--the bishopric of d----, with , francs income, , francs fees, or a total of , francs,--who have kitchens, liveries, keep a good table, and eat water-fowl on a friday; who go about, with lackeys before and behind, in a gilded coach, in the name of the saviour who walked barefoot! you are a prelate; you have, like all the rest, income, palace, horses, valets, a good table, and like all the rest you enjoy them: that is all very well, but it says either too much or too little; it does not enlighten me as to your intrinsic and essential value when you come with the probable intention of bringing me wisdom. to whom am i speaking--who are you?" the bishop bowed his head, and answered, "i am a worm." "a worm in a carriage!" the republican growled. it was his turn to be haughty, the bishop's to be humble; the latter continued gently,-- "be it so, sir. but explain to me how my coach, which is a little way off behind the trees, my good table, and the water-fowl i eat on friday, my palace, my income, and my footmen, prove that pity is not a virtue, that clemency is not a duty, and that ' was not inexorable." the republican passed his hand over his forehead, as if to remove a cloud. "before answering you," he said, "i must ask you to forgive me. i was in the wrong, sir, for you are in my house and my guest. you discuss my ideas, and i must restrict myself to combating your reasoning. your wealth and enjoyments are advantages which i have over you in the debate, but courtesy bids me not employ them. i promise not to do so again." "i thank you," said the bishop. g---- continued: "let us return to the explanation you asked of me. where were we? what was it you said, that ' was inexorable?" "yes, inexorable," the bishop said; "what do you think of marat clapping his hands at the guillotine?" "what do you think of bossuet singing a te deum over the dragonnades?" the response was harsh, but went to its mark with the rigidity of a minié bullet. the bishop started, and could not parry it, but he was hurt by this way of mentioning bossuet. the best minds have their fetishes, and at times feel vaguely wounded by any want of respect on the part of logic. the conventionalist was beginning to gasp; that asthma which is mingled with the last breath affected his voice; still he retained perfect mental clearness in his eyes. he continued,-- "let us say a few words more on this head. beyond the revolution, which, taken in its entirety, is an immense human affirmation, ' , alas, is a reply. you consider it inexorable, but what was the whole monarchy? carrier is a bandit, but what name do you give to montrevel? fouquier tainville is a scoundrel, but what is your opinion about lamoignon-bâville? maillard is frightful, but what of saulx-tavannes, if you please? father duchêne is ferocious, but what epithet will you allow me for père letellier? jourdan coupe-tête is a monster, but less so than the marquis de louvois. i pity marie antoinette, archduchess and queen, but i also pity the poor huguenot woman who, in , while suckling her child, was fastened, naked to the waist, to a stake, while her infant was held at a distance. her breast was swollen with milk, her heart with agony; the babe, hungry and pale, saw that breast and screamed for it, and the hangman said to the wife, mother, and nurse, 'abjure!' giving her the choice between the death of her infant and the death of her conscience. what do you say of this punishment of tantalus adapted to a woman? remember this carefully, sir, the french revolution had its reasons, and its wrath will be absolved by the future. its result is a better world; and a caress for the human race issues from its most terrible blows. i must stop, for the game is all in my favor--besides, i am dying." and ceasing to regard the bishop, the republican finished his thought with the following few calm words,-- "yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions, but when they are ended, this fact is recognized; the human race has been chastised, but it has moved onwards." the republican did not suspect that he had carried in turn every one of the bishop's internal intrenchments. one still remained, however, and from this, the last resource of monseigneur's resistance, came this remark, in which all the roughness of the commencement was perceptible. "progress must believe in god, and the good cannot have impious servants. a man who is an atheist is a bad guide for the human race." the ex-representative of the people did not reply. he trembled, looked up to the sky, and a tear slowly collected in his eye. when the lid was full the tear ran down his livid cheek, and he said in a low, shaking voice, as if speaking to himself,-- "oh thou! oh ideal! thou alone existest!" the bishop had a sort of inexpressible commotion; after a silence the old man raised a finger to heaven and said,-- "the infinite is. it is there. if the infinite had not a me, the i would be its limit; it would not be infinite; in other words, it would not be. but it is. hence it has a me. this i of the infinite is god." the dying man uttered these words in a loud voice, and with a shudder of ecstasy as if he saw some one. when he had spoken his eyes closed, for the effort had exhausted him. it was evident that he had lived in one minute the few hours left him. the supreme moment was at hand. the bishop understood it; he had come here as a priest, and had gradually passed from extreme coldness to extreme emotion; he looked at these closed eyes, he took this wrinkled and chilly hand and bent down over the dying man. "this hour is god's. would you not consider it matter of regret if we had met in vain?" the republican opened his eyes again; a gravity which suggested the shadow of death was imprinted on his countenance. [illustration: "'your blessing,' said the bishop, and knelt down"] "monsieur le bishop," he said, with a slowness produced perhaps more by the dignity of the soul than by failing of his strength, "i have spent my life in meditation, contemplation, and study. i was sixty years of age when my country summoned me and ordered me to interfere in its affairs. i obeyed. there were abuses, and i combated them; tyranny, and i destroyed it; rights and principles, and i proclaimed and confessed them; the territory was invaded, and i defended it; france was menaced, and i offered her my chest; i was not rich, and i am poor. i was one of the masters of the state; the bank cellars were so filled with specie that it was necessary to prop up the walls, which were ready to burst through the weight of gold and silver, but i dined in the rue de l'arbre sec, at two-and-twenty sous a head. i succored the oppressed. i relieved the suffering. i tore up the altar cloth, it is true, but it was to stanch the wounds of the country. i ever supported the onward march of the human race towards light, and i at times resisted pitiless progress. when opportunity served, i protected my adversaries, men of your class. and there is at peteghem in flanders, on the same site where the merovingian kings had their summer palace, a monastery of urbanists, the abbey of st. claire en beaulieu, which i saved in . i did my duty according to my strength, and what good i could. after which i was driven out, tracked, pursued, persecuted, maligned, mocked, spat upon, accursed, and proscribed. for many years i have felt that persons believed they had a right to despise me. my face has been held accursed by the poor ignorant mob, and, while hating no one, i accepted the isolation of hatred. now, i am eighty-six years of age and on the point of death; what have you come to ask of me?" "your blessing!" said the bishop, and knelt: down. when the bishop raised his head again, the conventionalist's countenance had become august: he had just expired. the bishop returned home absorbed in the strangest thoughts, and spent the whole night in prayer. on the morrow curious worthies tried to make him talk about g---- the republican, but he only pointed to heaven. from this moment he redoubled his tenderness and fraternity for the little ones and the suffering. any allusion to "that old villain of a g----" made him fall into a singular reverie; no one could say that the passing of that mind before his, and the reflection that great conscience cast upon his, had not something to do with this approach to perfection. this "pastoral visit" nearly created a stir among the small local coteries. "was it a bishop's place to visit the death-bed of such a man? it was plain that he had no conversion to hope for, for all these revolutionists are relapsed! then why go? what had he to see there? he must have been very curious to see the fiend carry off a soul." one day a dowager, of the impertinent breed which believes itself witty, asked him this question, "monseigneur, people are asking when your grandeur will have the red cap?" "oh, oh!" the bishop answered, "that is an ominous color. fortunately those who despise it in a cap venerate it in a hat." chapter xi. a restriction. we should run a strong risk of making a mistake were we to conclude from this that monseigneur welcome was "a philosophic bishop," or "a patriotic curé." his meeting, which might almost be called his conjunction, with the conventionalist g---- produced in him a sort of amazement, which rendered him more gentle than ever. that was all. though monseigneur was anything rather than a politician, this is perhaps the place to indicate briefly what was his attitude in the events of that period, supposing that monseigneur ever dreamed of having an attitude. we will, therefore, go back for a few years. a short time after m. myriel's elevation to the episcopate, the emperor made him a baron, simultaneously with some other bishops. the arrest of the pope took place, as is well known, on the night of july , , at which time m. myriel was called by napoleon to the synod of french and italian bishops convened at paris. this synod was held at notre dame and assembled for the first time on june , , under the presidency of cardinal fesch. m. myriel was one of the ninety-five bishops convened, but he was only present at one session and three or four private conferences. as bishop of a mountain diocese, living so near to nature in rusticity and poverty, it seems that he introduced among these eminent personages ideas which changed the temperature of the assembly. he went back very soon to d----, and when questioned about this hurried return, he replied, "i was troublesome to them. the external air came in with me and i produced the effect of an open door upon them." another time he said, "what would you have? those messeigneurs are princes, while i am only a poor peasant bishop." the fact is, that he displeased: among other strange things he let the following remarks slip out, one evening when he was visiting one of his most influential colleagues: "what fine clocks! what splendid carpets! what magnificent liveries! you must find all that very troublesome? oh! i should not like to have such superfluities to yell incessantly in my ears: there are people who are hungry; there are people who are cold; there are poor, there are poor." let us remark parenthetically, that a hatred of luxury would not be an intelligent hatred, for it would imply a hatred of the arts. still in churchmen any luxury beyond that connected with their sacred office is wrong, for it seems to reveal habits which are not truly charitable. an opulent priest is a paradox, for he is bound to live with the poor. now, can a man incessantly both night and day come in contact with distress, misfortune, and want, without having about him a little of that holy wretchedness, like the dust of toil? can we imagine a man sitting close to a stove and not feeling hot? can we imagine a workman constantly toiling at a furnace, and have neither a hair burned, a nail blackened, nor a drop of perspiration, nor grain of soot on his face? the first proof of charity in a priest, in a bishop especially, is poverty. this was doubtless the opinion of the bishop of d----. we must not believe either that he shared what we might call the "ideas of the age" on certain delicate, points; he mingled but slightly in the theological questions of the moment, in which church and state are compromised; but had he been greatly pressed we fancy he would have been found to be ultramontane rather than gallican. as we are drawing a portrait, and do not wish to conceal anything, we are forced to add that he was frigid toward the setting napoleon. from he adhered to or applauded all hostile demonstrations, he refused to see him when he passed through on his return from elba, and abstained from ordering public prayers for the emperor during the hundred days. besides his sister, mlle. baptistine, he had two brothers, one a general, the other a prefect. he wrote very frequently to both of them. for some time he owed the former a grudge, because the general, who at the time of the landing at cannes held a command in provence, put himself at the head of twelve hundred men and pursued the emperor as if he wished to let him escape. his correspondence was more affectionate with the other brother, the ex-prefect, a worthy, honest man, who lived retired at paris. monseigneur welcome, therefore, also had his hour of partisan spirit, his hour of bitterness, his cloud. the shadow of the passions of the moment fell athwart this gentle and great mind, which was occupied by things eternal. certainly such a man would have deserved to have no political opinions. pray let there be no mistake as to our meaning: we do not confound what are called "political opinions" with the grand aspiration for progress, with that sublime, patriotic, democratic and human faith, which in our days must be the foundation of all generous intelligence. without entering into questions which only indirectly affect the subject of this book, we say, it would have been better had monseigneur welcome not been a royalist, and if his eye had not turned away, even for a moment, from that serene contemplation, in which the three pure lights of truth, justice, and charity are seen beaming above the fictions and hatreds of this world, and above the stormy ebb and flow of human affairs. while allowing that god had not created monseigneur welcome for political functions, we could have understood and admired a protest in the name of justice and liberty, a proud opposition, a perilous and just resistance offered to napoleon, all-powerful. but conduct which pleases us towards those who are rising, pleases us less towards those who are falling. we only like the contest so long as there is danger; and, in any case, only the combatants from the beginning have a right to be the exterminators at the end. a man who has not been an obstinate accuser during prosperity must be silent when the crash comes; the denouncer of success is the sole legitimate judge of the fell. for our part, when providence interferes and strikes we let it do so. begins to disarm us; in the cowardly rupture of silence by the taciturn legislative corps, emboldened by catastrophes, could only arouse indignation; in , in the presence of the traitor marshals, in the presence of that senate, passing from one atrocity to another, and insulting after deifying, and before the idolaters kicking their idol and spitting on it, it was a duty to turn one's head away; in , as supreme disasters were in the air, as france had a shudder of their sinister approach, as waterloo, already open before napoleon could be vaguely distinguished, the dolorous acclamation offered by the army and the people had nothing laughable about it, and--leaving the despot out of the question--a heart like the bishop of d----'s ought not to have misunderstood how much there was august and affecting in this close embrace between a great nation and a great man on the verge of an abyss. with this exception, the bishop was in all things just, true, equitable, intelligent, humble, and worthy; beneficent, and benevolent, which is another form of beneficence. he was a priest, a sage, and a man. even in the political opinions with which we have reproached him, and which we are inclined to judge almost severely, we are bound to add that he was tolerant and facile, more so perhaps than the writer of these lines. the porter of the town hall had been appointed by the emperor; he was an ex-non-commissioned officer of the old guard, a legionary of austerlitz, and as bonapartist as the eagle. this poor fellow now and then made thoughtless remarks, which the law of that day qualified as seditious. from the moment when the imperial profile disappeared from the legion of honor, he never put on his uniform again, that he might not be obliged, as he said, to bear his cross. he had himself devotedly removed the imperial effigy from the cross which napoleon had given him with his own hands, and though this made a hole he would not let anything be put in its place. "sooner die," he would say, "than wear the three frogs on my heart." he was fond of ridiculing louis xviii. aloud. "the old gouty fellow with his english gaiters, let him be off to prussia with his salsifies." it delighted him thus to combine in one imprecation the two things he hated most, england and prussia. he went on thus till he lost his place, and then he was starving in the street with wife and children. the bishop sent for him, gave him a gentle lecturing, and appointed him beadle to the cathedral. in nine years, through his good deeds and gentle manners, monseigneur welcome had filled the town of d---- with a sort of tender and filial veneration. even his conduct to napoleon had been accepted, and, as it were, tacitly pardoned, by the people, an honest weak flock of sheep, who adored their emperor but loved their bishop. chapter xii. monseigneur's solitude. there is nearly always round a bishop a squad of little abbés, as there is a swarm of young officers round a general. they are what that delightful st. francis de sales calls somewhere "sucking priests." every career has its aspirants, who pay their respects to those who have reached the goal; there is not a power without its following, not a fortune without its court. the seekers for a future buzz round the splendid present. every metropolitan has his staff: every bishop who is at all influential has his patrol of seminarist cherubim, who go the rounds, maintain order in the episcopal palace, and mount guard round monseigneur's smile. pleasing a bishop is a foot in the stirrup for a sub-deaconry; after all, a man must make his way, and apostles do not despise canonries. in the same way as there are "gros bonnets," otherwhere, there are large mitres in the church. they are bishops who stand well with the court, well endowed, clever, favorites of society, who doubtless know how to pray, but also how to solicit, not scrupulous about having a whole diocese waiting in their ante-rooms, connecting links between the sacristy and diplomacy, more abbés than priests, rather prelates than bishops. happy the man who approaches them! as they stand in good credit they shower around them, on the obsequious and their favored, and on all the youth who know the art of pleasing, fat livings, prebends, archdeaconries, chaplaincies, and cathedral appointments, while waiting for episcopal dignities. while themselves advancing, they cause their satellites to progress, and it is an entire solar system moving onwards. their beams throw a purple hue over their suite, and their prosperity is showered over the actors behind the scenes in nice little bits of promotions. the larger the patron's diocese, the larger the favorite's living. and then there is rome. a bishop who contrives to become an archbishop, an archbishop who manages to become a cardinal, takes you with him as a conclavist; you enter the rota, you have the pallium, you are an auditor, a chamberlain, a monsignore, and from grandeur to eminence there is but a step, and between eminence and holiness there is only the smoke of the balloting tickets. every cassock can dream of the tiara. the priest is in our days the only man who can regularly become a king, and what a king! the supreme king! hence what a hotbed of longings is a seminary! how many blushing choristers, how many young abbés, have on their head perrette's milk-jar! how easily ambition calls itself a profession! and perhaps it does so in good faith and in self-deception, for it is so unworldly. monseigneur welcome, humble, poor, and out of the world, was not counted among the large mitres. this was visible in the utter absence of young priests around him. we have seen that at paris "he did not take," and not an aspirant tried to cling to this solitary old man; not the most youthful ambition tried to flourish in his shade. his canons and vicars were good old men, walled up like him in this diocese which had no issue to the cardinal's hat, and who resembled their bishop with this difference, that they were finished while he was completed. the impossibility of growing up near monseigneur welcome was so well felt, that young priests whom he ordained at once obtained letters commendatory to the archbishop of aix, or auch, and went off at score. for, after all, we repeat, men wish to be pushed upward. a saint who lives in a state of excessive self-denial is a dangerous neighbor, he might possibly communicate to you by contagion an incurable poverty, a stiffening of the joints useful for advancement, and, in a word, more renunciation than you care for: and such scabby virtue is shunned. hence came the isolation of monseigneur welcome. we live in the midst of a gloomy society. succeed,--such is the teaching which falls drop by drop from the corruption hanging over us. success is a very hideous thing, and its resemblance with merit deceives men. for the herd, success has nearly the same profile as supremacy. success, that twin brother of talent, has a dupe,--history. tacitus and juvenal alone grumble at it. in our days an almost official philosophy wears the livery of success, and waits in its ante-room. succeed, that is the theory, for prosperity presupposes capacity. win in the lottery and you are a clever man, for he who triumphs is revered. all you want is to be born under a fortunate star. have luck and you will have the rest, be fortunate and you will be thought a great man; leaving out five or six immense exceptions, which form the lustre of an age, contemporary admiration is blear-eyedness. gilding is gold, and it does you no harm to be any one so long as you are the parvenu. the mob is an old narcissus, adoring itself and applauding the mob. that enormous faculty by which a man is a moses, Æschylus, dante, michael angelo, or napoleon, the multitude decrees broadcast and by acclamation to any one who attains his object, no matter in what. let a notary transfigure himself into a deputy; a false corneille produce tiridates; an eunuch contrive to possess a harem; a military prudhomme accidentally gain the decisive battle of an age; an apothecary invent cardboard soles for the army of the sambre-et-meuse, and make out of the cardboard sold for leather an income of , francs a year; a pedler espouse usury and put it to bed with seven or eight millions, of which he is the father and she the mother; a preacher become a bishop by his nasal twang; let the steward of a good family be so rich on leaving service that he is made chancellor of the exchequer--and men will call it genius, in the same way as they call mousqueton's face beauty and claude's mien majesty. they confound with the constellations of profundity the stars which the duck's feet make in the soft mud of the pond. chapter xiii. what he believed. it is not our business to gauge the bishop of d---- from an orthodox point of view. in the presence of such a soul we only feel inclined to respect. the conscience of the just man must be believed on its word; besides, certain natures granted, we admit the possibility of the development of all the beauties of human virtue in a creed differing from our own. what did he think of this dogma or that mystery? these heart-secrets are only known to the tomb which souls enter in a state of nudity. what we are certain of is, that he never solved difficulties of faith by hypocrisy. it is impossible for the diamond to rot. he believed as much as he possibly could, and would frequently exclaim, "i believe in the father." he also derived from his good deeds that amount of satisfaction which suffices the conscience, and which whispers to you, "you are with god." what we think it our duty to note is that, beyond his faith, he had an excess of love. it was through this, _quia multum amavit_, that he was considered vulnerable by "serious men," "grave persons," and "reasonable people," those favorite phrases of our melancholy world in which selfishness is under the guidance of pedantry. what was this excess of love. it was a serene benevolence, spreading over men, as we have already indicated, and on occasion extending even to things. he loved without disdain, and was indulgent to god's creation. every man, even the best, has in him an unreflecting harshness, which he reserves for animals, but the bishop of d---- had not this harshness, which is, however, peculiar to many priests. he did not go so far as the brahmin, but seemed to have meditated on the words of ecclesiastes--"who knoweth the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?" an ugly appearance, a deformity of instinct, did not trouble him or render him indignant; he was moved, almost softened, by them. it seemed as if he thoughtfully sought, beyond apparent life, for the cause, the explanation, or the excuse. he examined without anger, and with the eye of a linguist deciphering a palimpsest, the amount of chaos which still exists in nature. this reverie at times caused strange remarks to escape from him. one morning he was in his garden and fancied himself alone; but his sister was walking behind, though unseen by him. he stopped and looked at something on the ground. it was a large black, hairy, horrible spider. his sister heard him mutter, "poor brute, it is not thy fault." why should we not repeat this almost divine childishness of goodness? it may be puerile, but of such were the puerilities of st. francis d'assisi and marcus aurelius. one day he sprained himself because he did not wish to crush an ant. such was the way in which this just man lived: at times he fell asleep in his garden, and then nothing could be more venerable. monseigneur welcome had been formerly, if we may believe the stories about his youth and even his manhood, a passionate, perhaps violent man. his universal mansuetude was less a natural instinct than the result of a grand conviction, which had filtered through life into his heart, and slowly dropped into it thought by thought, for in a character, as in a rock, there may be waterholes. such hollows, however, are ineffaceable, such formations indestructible. in , as we think we have said, he reached his seventy-fifth year, but did not seem sixty. he was not tall, and had a tendency to stoutness, which he strove to combat by long walks; he stood firmly, and was but very slightly built. but these are details from which we will not attempt to draw any conclusion, for gregory xvi. at the age of eighty was erect and smiling, which did not prevent him being a bad priest. monseigneur welcome had what people call "a fine head," which was so amiable that its beauty was forgotten. when he talked with that infantine gayety which was one of his graces you felt at your ease by his side, and joy seemed to emanate from his whole person. his fresh, ruddy complexion, and all his white teeth, which he had preserved and displayed when he laughed, gave him that open facile air which makes you say of an aged man, "he is a worthy person." that, it will be remembered, was the effect he produced on napoleon. at the first glance, and when you saw him for the first time, he was in reality only a worthy man, but if you remained some hours in his company, and saw him in thought, he became gradually transfigured and assumed something imposing; his wide and serious brow, already august through the white hair, became also august through meditation; majesty was evolved from the goodness; though the latter did not cease to gleam, you felt the same sort of emotion as you would if you saw a smiling angel slowly unfold his wings without ceasing to smile. an inexpressible respect gradually penetrated you and ascended to your head, and you felt that you had before you one of those powerful, well-bred, and indulgent souls whose thoughts are so great that they cannot but be gentle. as we have seen, prayer, celebration of the mass, almsgiving, consoling the afflicted, tilling a patch of ground, frugality, hospitality, self-denial, confidence, study, and labor, filled every day of his life. _filled_ is the exact word, and certainly the bishop's day was full of good thoughts, good words, and good actions. still, it was not complete. if cold or wet weather prevented him from spending an hour or two in the garden before going to bed after the two females had retired, it seemed as it were a species of rite of his to prepare himself for sleep by meditation, in the presence of the grand spectacle of the heavens by night. at times, even at an advanced hour of night, if the women were not asleep, they heard him slowly pacing the walks. he was then alone with himself, contemplative, peaceful, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart with that of ether, affected in the darkness by the visible splendor of the constellations, and the invisible splendor of god, and opening his soul to thoughts which fall from the unknown. at such moments, offering up his heart at the hour when the nocturnal flowers offer up their perfumes, he could not have said himself, possibly, what was passing in his mind; but he felt something fly out of him and something descend into him. he dreamed of the grandeur and presence of god; of future eternity, that strange mystery; of past eternity, that even stranger mystery; of all the infinities which buried themselves before his eyes in all directions: and without seeking to comprehend the incomprehensible, he gazed at it. he did not study god; he was dazzled by him. he considered this magnificent concourse of atoms which reveals forces, creates individualities in unity, proportions in space, innumerability in the infinite, and through light produces beauty. such a concourse incessantly takes place, and is dissolved again, and hence come life and death. he would sit down on a wood bench with his back against a rickety trellis, and gaze at the stars through the stunted sickly profiles of his fruit trees. this quarter of an acre, so poorly planted, and so encumbered with sheds and out-houses, was dear to him, and was sufficient for him. what more was wanting to this aged man, who divided the leisure of his life, which knew so little leisure, between gardening by day and contemplation by night? was not this limited enclosure with the sky for its roof sufficient for him to be able to adore god by turns in his most delicious and most sublime works? was not this everything, in fact? and what could be desired beyond? a small garden to walk about in, and immensity to dream in; at his feet, what can be cultivated and gathered; over his head, what can be studied and meditated; a few flowers on the earth, and all the stars in the heavens. chapter xiv. what he thought. one last word. as these details might, especially at the present day, and to employ an expression which is now fashionable, give the bishop of d---- a certain "pantheistic" physiognomy, and cause it to be believed, either to his praise or blame, that he had in him one of those personal philosophies peculiar to our age, which germinate sometimes in solitary minds, and grow until they take the place of religion, we must lay stress on the fact that not one of the persons who knew monseigneur welcome believed himself authorized in thinking anything of the sort. what enlightened this man was his heart, and his wisdom was the product of the light which emanates from it. he had no systems, but abundance of deeds. abstruse speculations contain vertigo, and nothing indicates that he ventured his mind amid the apocalypses. the apostle may be bold, but the bishop must be timid. he probably refrained from going too deep into certain problems reserved to some extent for great and terrible minds. there is a sacred horror beneath the portals of the enigma; the dark chasms gape before you, but something tells you that you must not enter: woe to him who penetrates. geniuses, in the profundities of abstraction and pure speculation, being situated, so to speak, above dogmas, propose their ideas to god; their prayer audaciously offers a discussion, and their adoration interrogates. this is direct religion, full of anxiety and responsibility for the man who attempts to carry the escarpment by storm. human meditation has no limits; at its own risk and peril it analyzes and produces its own bedazzlement; we might almost say that, through a species of splendid reaction, it dazzles nature with it. the mysterious world around us gives back what it receives, and it is probable that the contemplators are contemplated. however this may be, there are in the world men--are they men?--who distinctly perceive on the horizon of dreamland the heights of the absolute, and have the terrible vision of the mountain of the infinite. monseigneur welcome was not one of these men, for he was not a genius. he would have feared these sublimities, on which even very great men, like swedenborg and pascal, fell in their insanity. assuredly, such powerful reveries have their utility, and by these arduous routes ideal perfection is approached, but he took a short-cut,--the gospel. he did not attempt to convert his chasuble into elijah's cloak, he cast no beam of the future over the gloomy heaving of events; there was nothing of the prophet or the magus about him. this humble soul loved, that was all. it is probable that he expanded prayer into a superhuman aspiration; but a man can no more pray too much than he can love too much, and if it were a heresy to pray further than the text, st theresa and st jérôme would be heretics. he bent down over all that groaned and all that expiated; the universe appeared to him an immense malady; he felt a fever everywhere; he heard the panting of suffering all around him, and without trying to solve the enigma, he sought to heal the wound. the formidable spectacle of created things developed tenderness in him; he was solely engaged in finding for himself and arousing in others the best way of pitying and relieving. existence was to this good and rare priest a permanent subject of sorrow seeking for consolation. there are some men who toil to extract gold, but he labored to extract pity; the universal wretchedness was his mine. sorrow all around was only an opportunity for constant kindness. "love one another" he declared to be complete; he wished for nothing more, and that was his entire doctrine. one day the senator, who believed himself a "philosopher," said to the bishop: "just look at the spectacle of the world; all are fighting, and the strongest man is the cleverest. your 'love one another' is nonsense." "well," monseigneur welcome replied, without discussion, "if it be nonsense, the soul must shut itself up in it like the pearl in the oyster." he consequently shut himself up in it, lived in it, was absolutely satisfied with it, leaving on one side those prodigious questions which attract and terrify, the unfathomable perspectives of the abstract, the precipices of metaphysics, all those depths which for the apostle converge in god, for the atheist in nothingness: destiny, good, and evil, the war of being against being, human consciousness, the pensive somnambulism of the animal, transformation through death, the recapitulation of existences which the grave contains, the incomprehensible grafting of successive loves on the enduring me, essence, substance, the nil and ens nature, liberty, necessity; in a word, he avoided all the gloomy precipices over which the gigantic archangels of the human mind bend, the formidable abysses which lucretius, manou, st. paul, and dante contemplate with that flashing eye which seems, in regarding infinity, to make stars sparkle in it. monseigneur welcome was simply a man who accepted mysterious questions without scrutinizing, disturbing them, or troubling his own mind, and who had in his soul a grave respect for the shadow. book ii. the fall. chapter i. the close of a day's march. at the beginning of october, , and about an hour before sunset, a man travelling on foot entered the little town of d----. the few inhabitants, who were at the moment at their windows or doors, regarded this traveller with a species of inquietude. it would be difficult to meet a wayfarer of more wretched appearance; he was a man of middle height, muscular and robust, and in the full vigor of life. he might be forty-six to forty-eight years of age. a cap with a leather peak partly concealed his sunburnt face, down which the perspiration streamed. his shirt of coarse yellow calico, fastened at the neck by a small silver anchor, allowed his hairy chest to be seen; he had on a neck-cloth twisted like a rope, trousers of blue ticking worn and threadbare, white at one knee and torn at the other; an old gray ragged blouse patched at one elbow with a rag of green cloth; on his back a large new well-filled and well-buckled knapsack, and a large knotty stick in his hand. his stockingless feet were thrust into iron-shod shoes, his hair was clipped, and his beard long. perspiration, heat, travelling on foot, and the dust, added something sordid to his wretched appearance. his hair was cut close and yet was bristling, for it was beginning to grow a little, and did not seem to have been cut for some time. no one knew him; he was evidently passing through the town. where did he come from? the south perhaps, the sea-board, for he made his entrance into d---- by the same road napoleon had driven along seven months previously when going from cannes to paris. the man must have been walking all day, for he seemed very tired. some women in the old suburb at the lower part of the town had seen him halt under the trees on the gassendi boulevard, and drink from the fountain at the end of the walk. he must have been very thirsty, for the children that followed him saw him stop and drink again at the fountain on the market-place. on reaching the corner of the rue poichevert, he turned to the left and proceeded to the mayor's office. he went in and came out again a quarter of an hour after. a gendarme was sitting on the stone bench near the door, on which general drouot had mounted on march th, to read to the startled town-folk of d---- the proclamation of the gulf of juan. the man doffed his cap and bowed humbly to the gendarme; the latter, without returning his salute, looked at him attentively, and then entered the office. there was at that time at d---- a capital inn, with the sign of the cross of colbas. this inn was kept by a certain jacquin labarre, a man highly respected in the town for his relationship to another labarre, who kept the three dolphins at grenoble, and had served in the guides. when the emperor landed, many rumors were current in the country about the three dolphins; it was said that general bertrand, in the disguise of a wagoner, had stopped there several times in the month of january, and distributed crosses of honor to the soldiers, and handsful of napoleons to the towns-people. the fact was that the emperor on entering grenoble refused to take up his quarters at the prefecture; he thanked the mayor, and said, "i am going to a worthy man whom i know," and he went to the three dolphins. the glory of the grenoble labarre was reflected for a distance of five-and-twenty leagues on the labarre of the cross of colbas. the towns-people said of him, "he is cousin to the one at grenoble." the man proceeded to this inn, which was the best in the town, and entered the kitchen, the door of which opened on the street. all the ovens were heated, and a large fire blazed cheerily in the chimney. the host, who was at the same time head-cook, went from the hearth to the stew-pans, very busy in attending to a dinner intended for the carriers, who could be heard singing and talking noisily in an adjoining room. any one who has travelled knows that no people feed so well as carriers. a fat marmot, flanked by white-legged partridges and grouse, was turning on a long spit before the fire; while two large carp from lake lauzet and an alloz trout were baking in the ovens. the landlord, on hearing the door open and a stranger enter, said, without raising his eyes from his stew-pans,-- "what do you want, sir?" "supper and a bed," the man replied. "nothing easier," said mine host. at this moment he looked up, took in the stranger's appearance at a glance, and added, "on paying." the man drew a heavy leathern purse from the pocket of his blouse, and replied,-- "i have money." "in that case i am at your service," said the host. the man returned the purse to his pocket, took off his knapsack, placed it on the ground near the door, kept his stick in his hand, and sat down on a low stool near the fire. d---- is in the mountains, and the evenings there are cold in october. while going backwards and forwards the landlord still inspected his guest. "will supper be ready soon?" the man asked. "directly." while the new-comer had his back turned to warm himself, the worthy landlord took a pencil from his pocket, and then tore off the corner of an old newspaper which lay on a small table near the window. on the white margin he wrote a line or two, folded up the paper, and handed it to a lad who seemed to serve both as turnspit and page. the landlord whispered a word in the boy's ear, and he ran off in the direction of the mayor's house. the traveller had seen nothing of all this, and he asked again whether supper would be ready soon. the boy came back with the paper in his hand, and the landlord eagerly unfolded it, like a man who is expecting an answer. he read it carefully, then shook his head, and remained thoughtful for a moment. at last he walked up to the traveller, who seemed plunged in anything but a pleasant reverie. "i cannot make room for you, sir," he said. the man half turned on his stool. "what do you mean? are you afraid i shall bilk you? do you want me to pay you in advance? i have money, i tell you." "it is not that" "what is it, then?" "you have money." "yes," said the man. "but i have not a spare bed-room." the man continued quietly: "put me in the stables." "i cannot." "why?" "the horses take up all the room." "well," the man continued, "a corner in the loft and a truss of straw: we will see to that after supper." "i cannot give you any supper." this declaration, made in a measured but firm tone, seemed to the stranger serious. he rose. "nonsense, i am dying of hunger. i have been on my legs since sunrise, and have walked twelve leagues. i can pay, and demand food." "i have none," said the landlord. the man burst into a laugh, and turned to the chimney and the oven. "nothing! why, what is all this?" "all this is ordered." "by whom?" "by the carriers." "how many are there of them?" "twelve." "there is enough food here for twenty." the man sat down again, and said without raising his voice,-- "i am at an inn, i am hungry, and so shall remain." the landlord then stooped down, and whispered with an accent which made him start, "be off with you!" the stranger at this moment was thrusting some logs into the fire with the ferule of his stick, but he turned quickly, and as he was opening his mouth to reply, the landlord continued in the same low voice: "come, enough of this. do you wish me to tell you your name? it is jean valjean. now, do you wish me to tell you who you are? on seeing you come in i suspected something, so i sent to the police office, and this is the answer i received. can you read?" while saying this, he handed the stranger the paper which had travelled from the inn to the office and back again. the man took a glance at it, and mine host continued after a moment's silence,-- "i am accustomed to be polite with everybody. be off." the man stooped, picked up his knapsack, and went off. he walked along the high street hap-hazard, keeping close to the houses like a sad and humiliated man. he did not look back once; had he done so he would have seen the landlord of the cross of colbas in his doorway surrounded by all his guests and the passers-by, talking eagerly and pointing to him: and judging from the looks of suspicion and terror, he might have guessed that ere long his arrival would be the event of the whole town. he saw nothing of all this, for men who are oppressed do not look back, as they know only too well that an evil destiny is following them. he walked on thus for a long time, turning down streets he did not know, and forgetting his fatigue, as happens in sorrow. all at once he was sharply assailed by hunger: night was approaching, and he looked round to see whether he could not discover a shelter. the best inn was closed against him, and he sought some very humble pot-house, some wretched den. at this moment a lamp was lit at the end of the street, and a fir-branch hanging from an iron bar stood out on the white twilight sky. he went towards it: it was really a pot-house. the stranger stopped for a moment and looked through the window into the low tap-room, which was lighted up by a small lamp on the table and a large fire on the hearth. some men were drinking, and the landlord was warming himself; over the flames bubbled a caldron hanging from an iron hook. this pot-house, which is also a sort of inn, has two entrances, one on the street, the other opening on a small yard full of manure. the traveller did not dare enter by the street door: he slipped into the yard, stopped once again, and then timidly raised the latch and opened the door. "who's there?" the landlord asked. "some one who wants a supper and bed." "very good. they are to be had here." he went in, and all the topers turned to look at him; they examined him for some time while he was taking off his knapsack. said the landlord to him, "here is a fire; supper is boiling in the pot: come and warm yourself, comrade." he sat down in the ingle and stretched out his feet, which were swollen with fatigue. a pleasant smell issued from the caldron. all that could be distinguished of his face under his cap-peak assumed a vague appearance of comfort blended with the other wretched appearance which the habit of suffering produces. it was, moreover, a firm, energetic, and sad profile; the face was strangely composed, for it began by appearing humble and ended by becoming severe. his eyes gleamed under his brows, like a fire under brushwood. one of the men seated at the table was a fishmonger, who, before entering the pot-house, had gone to put up his horse in labarre's stables. accident willed it, that on the same morning he had met this ill-looking stranger walking between bras d'asse and--(i have forgotten the name, but i fancy it is escoublon). now, on meeting him, the man, who appeared very fatigued, had asked the fishmonger to give him a lift, which had only made him go the faster. this fishmonger had been half an hour previously one of the party surrounding jacquin labarre, and had told his unpleasant encounter in the morning to the people at the cross of colbas. he made an imperceptible sign to the landlord from his seat, and the latter went up to him, and they exchanged a few whispered words. the man had fallen back into his reverie. the landlord went up to the chimney, laid his hand sharply on the man's shoulder, and said to him,-- "you must be off from here." the stranger turned and replied gently, "ah, you know?" "yes." "i was turned out of the other inn." "and so you will be out of this." "where would you have me go?" "somewhere else." the man took his knapsack and stick and went away. as he stepped out, some boys who had followed him from the cross of colbas, and seemed to have been waiting for him, threw stones at him. he turned savagely, and threatened them with his stick, and the boys dispersed like a flock of birds. he passed in front of the prison, and pulled the iron bell-handle; a wicket was opened. "mr. jailer," he said, as he humbly doffed his cap, "would you be kind enough to open the door and give me a nights lodging?" a voice answered, "a prison is not an inn; get yourself arrested, and then i will open the door." the man entered a small street, in which there are numerous gardens, some of them being merely enclosed with hedges, which enliven the street. among these gardens and hedges he saw a single-storeyed house, whose window was illuminated, and he looked through the panes as he had done at the pot-house. it was a large white-washed room, with a bed with printed chintz curtains, and a cradle in a corner, a few chairs, and a double-barrelled gun hanging on the wall. a table was laid for supper in the middle of the room; a copper lamp lit up the coarse white cloth, the tin mug glistening like silver and full of wine, and the brown smoking soup-tureen. at this table was seated a man of about forty years of age, with a hearty, open face, who was riding a child on his knee. by his side a woman, still young, was suckling another child. the father was laughing, the children were laughing, and the mother was smiling. the stranger stood for a moment pensively before this gentle and calming spectacle; what was going on within him? it would be impossible to say, but it is probable that he thought that this joyous house would prove hospitable, and that where he saw so much happiness he might find a little pity. he tapped very slightly on a window pane, but was not heard; he tapped a second time, and he heard the woman say, "husband, i fancy i can hear some one knocking." "no," the husband answered. he tapped a third time. the husband rose, took the lamp, and walked to the front door. he was a tall man, half peasant, half artisan; he wore a huge, leathern apron, which came up to his left shoulder, and on which he carried a hammer, a red handkerchief, a powder-flask, and all sorts of things, which his belt held like a pocket. as he threw back his head, his turned-down shirt-collar displayed his full neck, white and bare. he had thick eye-brows, enormous black whiskers, eyes flush with his head, a bull-dog lower jaw, and over all this that air of being at home, which is inexpressible. "i beg your pardon, sir," the traveller said, "but would you, for payment, give me a plateful of soup and a corner to sleep in in your garden outhouse?" "who are you?" the owner of the cottage asked. the man answered, "i have come from puy moisson, i have walked the whole day. could you do it,--for payment of course?" "i would not refuse," the peasant answered, "to lodge any respectable person who paid. but why do you not go to the inn?" "there is no room there." "nonsense! that is impossible; it is neither market nor fair day. have you been to labarre's?" "yes." "well?" the traveller continued, with some hesitation, "i do not know why, but he refused to take me in." "have you been to what is his name, in the rue de chauffaut?" the stranger's embarrassment increased; he stammered, "he would not take me in either." the peasant's face assumed a suspicious look, he surveyed the new comer from head to foot, and all at once exclaimed with a sort of shudder,-- "can you be the man?..." he took another look at the stranger, placed the lamp on the table, and took down his gun. on hearing the peasant say "can you be the man?" his wife had risen, taken her two children in her arms, and hurriedly sought refuge behind her husband, and looked in horror at the stranger as she muttered, "the villain!" all this took place in less time than is needed to imagine it. after examining the man for some minutes as if he had been a viper, the peasant returned to the door and said: "be off!" "for mercy's sake," the man continued,--"a glass of water." "a charge of shot!" the peasant said. then he violently closed the door, and the stranger heard two bolts fastened. a moment after the window shutters were closed, and the sound of the iron bar being put in reached his ear. night was coming on apace: the cold wind of the alps was blowing. by the light of the expiring day the stranger noticed in one of the gardens a sort of hut which seemed to him to be made of sods of turf. he boldly clambered over a railing and found himself in the garden; he approached the hut, which had as entrance a narrow, extremely low door, and resembled the tenements which road-menders construct by the side of the highway. he doubtless thought it was such: he was suffering from cold and hunger, and though he had made up his mind to starve, it was at any rate a shelter against the cold. as this sort of residence is not usually occupied at night, he lay down on his stomach and crawled into the hut: it was warm, and he found a rather good straw litter in it. he lay for a moment motionless on this bed as his fatigue was so great: but as his knapsack hurt his back and was a ready-made pillow, he began unbuckling one of the thongs. at this moment a hoarse growl was audible: he raised his eyes, and the head of an enormous mastiff stood out in the shadow at the opening of the hut, which was its kennel. the dog itself was strong and formidable, hence he raised his stick, employed his knapsack as a shield, and left the kennel as he best could, though not without enlarging the rents in his rags. he also left the garden, but backwards, and compelled to twirl his stick in order to keep the dog at a respectful distance. when he, not without difficulty, had leaped the fence again, and found himself once more in the street, alone, without a bed, roof, or shelter, and expelled even from the bed of straw and the kennel, he fell rather than sat on a stone, and a passer-by heard him exclaim, "i am not even a dog." he soon rose and recommenced his walk. he left the town hoping to find some tree or mill in the fields which would afford him shelter. he walked on thus for some time with hanging head; when he found himself far from all human habitations, he raised his eyes and looked around him. he was in a field, and had in front of him one of those low hills with close-cut stubble, which after harvest resemble cropped heads. the horizon was perfectly black, but it was not solely the gloom of night, but low clouds, which seemed to be resting on the hill itself, rose and filled the whole sky. still, as the moon was about to rise shortly, and a remnant of twilight still hovered in the zenith, these clouds formed a species of whitish vault whence a gleam of light was thrown on the earth. the ground was therefore more illumined than the sky, which produces a peculiarly sinister effect, and the hill with its paltry outlines stood out vaguely and dully on the gloomy horizon. the whole scene was hideous, mean, mournful, and confined; there was nothing in the field or on the hill but a stunted tree, which writhed and trembled a few yards from the traveller. this man was evidently far from possessing those delicate habits of mind which render persons sensible of the mysterious aspects of things, still there was in the sky, this hill, this plain, and this tree, something so profoundly desolate, that after standing motionless and thoughtful for a while he suddenly turned back. there are instants in which nature seems to be hostile. he went back and found the gates of the town closed. d----, which sustained sieges in the religious wars, was still begirt in by old walls flanked by square towers, which have since been demolished. he passed through a breach, and re-entered the town. it might be about eight o'clock in the evening, and as he did not know the streets he wandered about without purpose. he thus reached the prefecture and then the seminary; on passing through the cathedral square he shook his fist at the church. there is at the corner of this square a printing-office, where the proclamations of the emperor and the imperial guard to the army, brought from elba, and drawn up by napoleon himself, were first printed. worn out with fatigue, and hopeless, he sat down on the stone bench at the door of this printing-office. an old lady who was leaving the church at the moment saw the man stretched out in the darkness. "what are you doing there, my friend?" she said. he answered, harshly and savagely, "you can see, my good woman, that i am going to sleep." the good woman, who was really worthy of the name, was the marchioness de r----. "on that bench?" she continued. "i have had for nineteen years a wooden mattress," the man said, "and now i have a stone one." "have you been a soldier?" "yes, my good woman." "why do you not go to the inn?" "because i have no money." "alas!" said madame de r----, "i have only two-pence in my purse." "you can give them to me all the same." the man took the money, and madame de r---- continued, "you cannot lodge at an inn for so small a sum, still you should make the attempt, for you cannot possibly spend the night here. doubtless you are cold and hungry, and some one might take you in for charity." "i have knocked at every door." "well?" "and was turned away at all." the "good woman" touched the man's arm and pointed to a small house next to the bishop's palace. "you have," she continued, "knocked at every door. have you done so there?" "no." "then do it." chapter ii prudence recommended to wisdom. on this evening, the bishop of d----, after his walk in the town, had remained in his bed-room till a late hour. he was engaged on a heavy work on the "duties," which he unfortunately has left incomplete. he was still working at eight o'clock, writing rather uncomfortably on small squares of paper, with a large book open on his knees, when madame magloire came in as usual to fetch the plate from the wall-cupboard near the bed. a moment after, the bishop, feeling that supper was ready, and that his sister might be waiting, closed his book, rose from the table, and walked into the dining-room. it was an oblong apartment, as we have said, with a door opening on the street, and a window looking on the garden. madame magloire had laid the table, and while attending to her duties, was chatting with mademoiselle baptistine. a lamp was on the table, which was close to the chimney, in which a tolerable fire was lighted. we can easily figure to ourselves the two females, who had both passed their sixtieth year: madame magloire, short, stout, and quick: mademoiselle baptistine, gentle, thin, and frail, somewhat taller than her brother, dressed in a puce-colored silk gown, the fashionable color in , which she had bought in paris in that year and which still held out. madame magloire wore a white cap, on her neck a gold _jeannette,_ the only piece of feminine jewelry in the house, a very white handkerchief emerging from a black stuff gown with wide and short sleeves, a calico red and puce checked apron, fastened round the waist with a green ribbon, with a stomacher of the same stuff fastened with two pins at the top corners, heavy shoes and yellow stockings, like the marseilles women. mademoiselle baptistine's gown was cut after the fashion of , short-waisted, with epaulettes on the sleeves, flaps and buttons, and she concealed her gray hair by a curling front called _à l'enfant_. madame magloire had an intelligent, quick, and kindly air, though the unevenly raised corners of her mouth and the upper lip, thicker than the lower, gave her a somewhat rough and imperious air. so long as monseigneur was silent, she spoke to him boldly with a mingled respect and liberty, but so soon as he spoke she passively obeyed, like mademoiselle, who no longer replied, but restricted herself to obeying and enduring. even when she was young the latter was not pretty; she had large blue eyes, flush with her head, and a long peaked nose; but all her face, all her person, as we said at the outset, breathed ineffable kindness. she had always been predestined to gentleness, but faith, hope, and charity, those three virtues that softly warm the soul, had gradually elevated that gentleness to sanctity. nature had only made her a lamb, and religion had made her an angel. poor holy woman! sweet departed recollection! mademoiselle afterwards narrated so many times what took place at the bishopric on this evening that several persons still living remember the slightest details. at the moment when the bishop entered madame magloire was talking with some vivacity; she was conversing with mademoiselle on a subject that was familiar to her, and to which the bishop was accustomed--it was the matter of the frontdoor latch. it appears that while going to purchase something for supper, madame magloire had heard things spoken of in certain quarters; people were talking of an ill-looking prowler, that a suspicious vagabond had arrived, who must be somewhere in the town, and that it would possibly be an unpleasant thing for any one out late to meet him. the police were very badly managed because the prefect and the mayor were not friendly, and tried to injure each other by allowing things to happen. hence wise people would be their own police, and be careful to close their houses _and lock their doors._ madame magloire italicized the last sentence, but the bishop had come from his room where it was rather cold, and was warming himself at the fire while thinking of other matters; in fact, he did not pick up the words which madame magloire had just let drop. she repeated them, and then mademoiselle, who wished to satisfy madame magloire without displeasing her brother, ventured to say timidly,-- "brother, do you hear what madame magloire is saying?" "i vaguely heard something," the bishop answered; then he half turned his chair, placed his hand on his knees, and looked up at the old servant with his cordial and easily-pleased face, which the fire illumined from below: "well, what is it? what is it? are we in any great danger?" then madame magloire told her story over again, while exaggerating it slightly, though unsuspicious of the fact. it would seem that a gypsy, a barefooted fellow, a sort of dangerous beggar, was in the town at the moment. he had tried to get a lodging at jacquin labarre's, who had refused to take him in. he had been seen prowling about the streets at nightfall, and was evidently a gallows bird, with his frightful face. "is he really?" said the bishop. this cross-questioning encouraged madame magloire; it seemed to indicate that the bishop was beginning to grow alarmed, and hence she continued triumphantly,-- "yes, monseigneur, it is so, and some misfortune will occur in the town this night: everybody says so, and then the police are so badly managed [useful repetition]. fancy living in a mountain town, and not even having lanterns in the streets at nights! you go out and find yourself in pitch darkness. i say, monseigneur, and mademoiselle says--" "i," the sister interrupted, "say nothing; whatever my brother does is right." madame magloire continued, as if no protest had been made,-- "we say that this house is not at all safe, and that if monseigneur permits i will go to paulin musebois, the locksmith, and tell him to put the old bolts on the door again; i have them by me, and it will not take a minute; and i say, monseigneur, that we ought to have bolts if it were only for this night, for i say that a door which can be opened from the outside by the first passer-by is most terrible: besides, monseigneur is always accustomed to say "come in," and in the middle of the night, oh, my gracious! there is no occasion to ask for permission." at this moment there was a rather loud rap at the front door. "come in," said the bishop. chapter iii. the heroism of passive obedience. the door was thrown open wide, as if some one were pushing it energetically and resolutely. a man entered whom we already know; it was the traveller whom we saw just now wandering about in search of a shelter. he entered and stopped, leaving the door open behind him. he had his knapsack on his shoulder, his stick in his hand, and a rough, bold, wearied, and violent expression in his eyes. the fire-light fell on him; he was hideous; it was a sinister apparition. madame magloire had not even the strength to utter a cry, she shivered and stood with widely-open mouth. mademoiselle baptistine turned, perceived the man who entered, and half started up in terror; then, gradually turning her head to the chimney, she began looking at her brother, and her face became again calm and serene. the bishop fixed a quiet eye on the man, as he opened his mouth, doubtless to ask the new-comer what he wanted. the man leaned both his hands on his stick, looked in turn at the two aged females and the old man, and, not waiting for the bishop to speak, said in a loud voice,-- "look here! my name is jean valjean. i am a galley-slave, and have spent nineteen years in the bagne. i was liberated four days ago, and started for pontarlier, which is my destination. i have been walking for four days since i left toulon, and to-day i have marched twelve leagues. this evening on coming into the town i went to the inn, but was sent away in consequence of my yellow passport, which i had shown at the police office. i went to another inn, and the landlord said to me, "be off!" it was the same everywhere, and no one would have any dealings with me. i went to the prison, but the jailer would not take me in. i got into a dogs kennel, but the dog bit me and drove me off, as if it had been a man; it seemed to know who i was. i went into the fields to sleep in the star-light, but there were no stars. i thought it would rain, and as there was no god to prevent it from raining, i came back to the town to sleep in a doorway. i was lying down on a stone in the square, when a good woman pointed to your house, and said, "go and knock there." what sort of a house is this? do you keep an inn? i have money, francs sous, which i earned at the bagne by my nineteen years' toil. i will pay, for what do i care for that, as i have money! i am very tired and frightfully hungry; will you let me stay here?" "madame magloire," said the bishop, "you will lay another knife and fork." the man advanced three paces, and approached the lamp which was on the table. "wait a minute," he continued, as if he had not comprehended, "that will not do. did you not hear me say that i was a galley-slave, a convict, and have just come from the bagne?" he took from his pocket a large yellow paper, which he unfolded. "here is my passport, yellow as you see, which turns me out wherever i go. will you read it? i can read it, for i learned to do so at the bagne, where there is a school for those who like to attend it. this is what is written in my passport: 'jean valjean, a liberated convict, native of'--but that does not concern you--'has remained nineteen years at the galleys. five years for robbery with house-breaking, fourteen years for having tried to escape four times. the man is very dangerous.' all the world has turned me out, and are you willing to receive me? is this an inn? will you give me some food and a bed? have you a stable?" "madame magloire," said the bishop, "you will put clean sheets on the bed in the alcove." we have already explained of what nature was the obedience of the two females. madame magloire left the room to carry out the orders. the bishop turned to the man. "sit down and warm yourself, sir. we shall sup directly, and your bed will be got ready while we are supping." the man understood this at once. the expression of his face, which had hitherto been gloomy and harsh, was marked with stupefaction, joy, doubt, and became extraordinary. he began stammering like a lunatic. "is it true? what? you will let me stay, you will not turn me out, a convict? you call me _sir,_ you do not 'thou' me. 'get out, dog!' that is what is always said to me; i really believed that you would turn me out, and hence told you at once who i am. oh! what a worthy woman she was who sent me here! i shall have supper, a bed with mattresses and sheets, like everybody else. for nineteen years i have not slept in a bed! you really mean that i am to stay. you are worthy people; besides, i have money, and will pay handsomely. by the way, what is your name, mr. landlord? i will pay anything you please, for you are a worthy man. you keep an inn, do you not?" "i am," said the bishop, "a priest living in this house." "a priest!" the man continued. "oh! what a worthy priest! i suppose you will not ask me for money. the curé, i suppose,--the curé of that big church? oh yes, what an ass i am! i did not notice your cassock." while speaking he deposited his knapsack and stick in a corner, returned his passport to his pocket, and sat down. while mademoiselle baptistine regarded him gently, he went on,-- "you are humane, sir, and do not feel contempt. a good priest is very good. then you do not want me to pay?" "no," said the bishop, "keep your money. how long did you take in earning these francs?" "nineteen years." "nineteen years!" the bishop gave a deep sigh. the man went on: "i have all my money still; in four days i have only spent sous, which i earned by helping to unload carts at grasse. as you are an abbé i will tell you: we had a chaplain at the bagne, and one day i saw a bishop, monseigneur, as they call him. he is the curé over the curés, you know. pardon, i express it badly; but it is so far above me, a poor convict, you see. he said mass in the middle of the bagne at an altar, and had a pointed gold thing on his head, which glistened in the bright sunshine; we were drawn up on three sides of a square, with guns and lighted matches facing us. he spoke, but was too far off, and we did not hear him. that is what a bishop is." while he was speaking the bishop had gone to close the door, which had been left open. madame magloire came in, bringing a silver spoon and fork, which she placed on the table. "madame magloire," said the bishop, "lay them as near as you can to the fire;" and turning to his guest, he said, "the night breeze is sharp on the alps, and you must be cold, sir." each time he said the word _sir_ with his gentle grave voice the man's face was illumined. _sir_ to a convict is the glass of water to the shipwrecked sailor of the méduse. ignominy thirsts for respect. "this lamp gives a very bad light," the bishop continued. madame magloire understood, and fetched from the chimney of monseigneur's bed-room the two silver candlesticks, which she placed on the table ready lighted. "monsieur le curé," said the man, "you are good, and do not despise me. you receive me as a friend and light your wax candles for me, and yet i have not hidden from you whence i come, and that i am an unfortunate fellow." the bishop, who was seated by his side, gently touched his hand. "you need not have told me who you were; this is not my house, but the house of christ. this door does not ask a man who enters whether he has a name, but if he has a sorrow; you are suffering, you are hungry and thirsty, and so be welcome. and do not thank me, or say that i am receiving you in my house, for no one is at home here excepting the man who has need of an asylum. i tell you, who are a passer-by, that you are more at home here than i am myself, and all there is here is yours. why do i want to know your name? besides, before you told it to me you had one which i knew." the man opened his eyes in amazement. "is that true? you know my name?" "yes," the bishop answered, "you are my brother." "monsieur le curé," the man exclaimed, "i was very hungry when i came in, but you are so kind that i do not know at present what i feel; it has passed over." the bishop looked at him and said,-- "you have suffered greatly?" "oh! the red jacket, the cannon ball on your foot, a plank to sleep on, heat, cold, labor, the set of men, the blows, the double chain for a nothing, a dungeon for a word, even when you are ill in bed, and the chain-gang. the very dogs are happier. nineteen years! and now i am forty-six; and at present, the yellow passport! there it is!" "yes," said the bishop, "you have come from a place of sorrow. listen to me; there will be more joy in heaven over the tearful face of a repentant sinner than over the white robes of one hundred just men. if you leave that mournful place with thoughts of hatred and anger against your fellow-men you are worthy of pity; if you leave it with thoughts of kindliness, gentleness, and peace, you are worth more than any of us." in the meanwhile madame magloire had served the soup: it was made of water, oil, bread, and salt, and a little bacon, and the rest of the supper consisted of a piece of mutton, figs, a fresh cheese, and a loaf of rye bread. she had herself added a bottle of old mauves wine. the bishop's face suddenly assumed the expression of gayety peculiar to hospitable natures. "to table," he said eagerly, as he was wont to do when any stranger supped with him; and he bade the man sit down on his right hand, while mlle. baptistine, perfectly peaceful and natural, took her seat on his left. the bishop said grace, and then served the soup himself, according to his wont. the man began eating greedily. all at once the bishop said,-- "it strikes me that there is something wanting on the table." madame magloire, truth to tell, had only laid the absolutely necessary silver. now it was the custom in this house, when the bishop had any one to supper, to arrange the whole stock of plate on the table, as an innocent display. this graceful semblance of luxury was a species of childishness full of charm in this gentle and strict house, which elevated poverty to dignity. madame magloire took the hint, went out without a word, and a moment after the remaining spoons and forks glittered on the cloth, symmetrically arranged before each of the guests. chapter iv. cheesemaking at pontarlier. and now, in order to give an idea of what took place at table, we cannot do better than transcribe a passage of a letter written by mademoiselle baptistine to madame boischevron, in which the conversation between the convict and the bishop is recorded with simple minuteness. * * * * * "the man paid no attention to any one; he ate with frightful voracity, but after supper he said,-- "monsieur le curé, all this is much too good for me; but i am bound to say that the carriers who would not let me sup with them have better cheer than you." "between ourselves, this remark slightly offended me, but my brother answered,-- "they are harder worked than i am." "no," the man continued, "they have more money. you are poor, as i can plainly see; perhaps you are not even curé. ah, if heaven were just you ought to be a curé." "heaven is more than just," said my brother. a moment after he added,-- "monsieur jean valjean, i think you said you were going to pontarlier?" "i am compelled to go there." then he continued, "i must be off by sunrise to-morrow morning; it is a tough journey, for if the nights are cold the days are hot." "you are going to an excellent part of the country," my brother resumed. "when the revolution ruined my family i sought shelter first in franche comté, and lived there for some time by the labor of my arms. i had a good will, and found plenty to do, as i need only choose. there are paper-mills, tanneries, distilleries, oil-mills, wholesale manufactories of clocks, steel works, copper works, and at least twenty iron foundries, of which the four at lods, chatillon, audincourt, and beure are very large." "i am pretty sure i am not mistaken, and that they are the names my brother mentioned; then he broke off and addressed me. "my dear sister, have we not some relatives in those parts?" "my answer was, 'we used to have some; among others monsieur de lucinet, who was captain of the gates at pontarlier, under the ancient régime." "yes," my brother continued, "but in ' people had no relatives, but only their arms, and so i worked. in the country to which you are going, monsieur valjean, there is a truly patriarchal and pleasing trade. my dear sister, i mean their cheese manufactures, which they call _fruitières_." "then my brother, while pressing this man to eat, explained in their fullest details the _fruitières_ of pontarlier, which were divided into two classes--the large farms which belong to the rich, and where there are forty or fifty cows, which produce seven to eight thousand cheeses in the summer, and the partnership _fruitières_, which belong to the poor. the peasants of the central mountain district keep their cows in common and divide the produce. they have a cheese-maker, who is called the _grurin_; he receives the milk from the partners thrice a day, and enters the quantities in a book. the cheese-making begins about the middle of april, and the dairy farmers lead their cows to the mountains toward midsummer. "the man grew animated while eating, and my brother made him drink that excellent mauves wine, which he does not drink himself because he says that it is expensive. my brother gave him all these details with that easy gayety of his which you know, mingling his remarks with graceful appeals to myself. he dwelt a good deal on the comfortable position of the _grurin_, as if wishful that this man should understand, without advising him directly and harshly, that it would be a refuge for him. one thing struck me: the man was as i have described him to you; well, my brother, during the whole of supper, and indeed of the evening, did not utter a word which could remind this man of what he was, or tell him who my brother was. it was apparently a good opportunity to give him a little lecture, and let the bishop produce a permanent effect on the galley-slave. it might have seemed to any one else that having this wretched man in hand it would be right to feed his mind at the same time as his body, and address to him some reproaches seasoned with morality and advice, or at any rate a little commiseration, with an exhortation to behave better in future. my brother did not even ask him where he came from, or his history, for his fault is contained in his history, and my brother appeared to avoid everything which might call it to his mind. this was carried to such a point that at a certain moment, when my brother was talking about the mountaineers of pontarlier, 'who had a pleasant task near heaven,' and who, he added, 'are happy because they are innocent,' he stopped short, fearing lest there might be in the remark something which might unpleasantly affect this man. after considerable reflection, i believe i can understand what was going on in my brother's heart: he doubtless thought that this jean valjean had his misery ever present to his mind, that the best thing was to distract his attention, and make him believe, were it only momentarily, that he was a man like the rest, by behaving to him as he would to others. was not this really charity? is there not, my dear lady, something truly evangelical in this delicacy, which abstains from all lecturing and allusions, and is it not the best pity, when a man has a sore point, not to touch it at all? it seemed to me that this might be my brother's innermost thought: in any case, what i can safely say is, that if he had all these ideas, he did not let any of them be visible, even to me; he was from beginning to end the same man he is every night, and he supped with jean valjean with the same air and in the same way as if he had been supping with m. gedeon le prevost, or with the parish curate. "toward the end, when we had come to the figs, there was a knock at the door. it was mother gerbaud with her little baby in her arms. my brother kissed the child's forehead, and borrowed from me sous which i happened to have about me, to give them to the mother. the man, while this was going on, did not seem to pay great attention: he said nothing, and seemed very tired. when poor old mother gerbaud left, my brother said grace, and then said to this man: 'you must need your bed.' madame magloire hastily removed the plate. i understood that we must retire in order to let this traveller sleep, and we both went up-stairs. i, however, sent madame magloire to lay on the man's bed a roebuck's hide from the black forest, which was in my room, for the nights are very cold, and that keeps you wann. it is a pity that this skin is old and the hair is wearing off. my brother bought it when he was in germany, at tottlingen, near the source of the danube, as well as the small ivory-handled knife which i use at meals. "madame magloire came up again almost immediately. we said our prayers in the room where the clothes are hung up to dry, and then retired to our bed-rooms without saying a word to each other." chapter v. tranquillity. after bidding his sister good-night, monseigneur welcome took up one of the silver candlesticks, handed the other to his guest, and said,-- "i will lead you to your room, sir." the man followed him. the reader will remember, from our description, that the rooms were so arranged that in order to reach the oratory where the alcove was it was necessary to pass through the bishop's bed-room. at the moment when he went through this room madame magloire was putting away the plate in the cupboard over the bed-head: it was the last job she did every night before retiring. the bishop led his guest to the alcove, where a clean bed was prepared for him; the man placed the branched candlestick on a small table. "i trust you will pass a good night," said the bishop. "to-morrow morning, before starting, you will drink a glass of milk fresh from our cows." "thank you, monsieur l'abbé," the man said. he had hardly uttered these peaceful words when, suddenly and without any transition, he had a strange emotion, which would have frightened the two old females to death had they witnessed it. even at the present day it is difficult to account for what urged him at the moment. did he wish to warn or to threaten? was he simply obeying a species of instinctive impulse which was obscure to himself? he suddenly turned to the old gentleman, folded his arms, and, fixing on him a savage glance, he exclaimed hoarsely,-- "what! you really lodge me so close to you as that?" he broke off and added with a laugh, in which there was something monstrous,-- "have you reflected fully? who tells you that i have not committed a murder?" the bishop answered: "that concerns god." then gravely moving his lips, like a man who is praying and speaking to himself, he stretched out two fingers of his right hand and blessed the man, who did not bow his head, and returned to his bed-room, without turning his head or looking behind him. when the alcove was occupied, a large serge curtain drawn right across the oratory concealed the altar. the bishop knelt down as he passed before this curtain, and offered up a short prayer; a moment after he was in his garden, walking, dreaming, contemplating, his soul and thoughts entirely occupied by those grand mysteries which god displays at night to eyes that remain open. as for the man, he was really so wearied that he did not even take advantage of the nice white sheets. he blew out the candle with his nostrils, after the fashion of convicts, and threw himself in his clothes upon the bed, where he at once fell into a deep sleep. midnight was striking as the bishop returned from the garden to his room, and a few minutes later everybody was asleep in the small house. chapter vi. jean valjean. toward the middle of the night jean valjean awoke. he belonged to a poor peasant family of la brie. in his childhood he had not been taught to read, and when he was of man's age he was a wood-lopper at faverolles. his mother's name was jeanne mathieu, his father's jean valjean or vlajean, probably a sobriquet and a contraction of _voilà jean._ jean valjean possessed a pensive but not melancholy character, which is peculiar to affectionate natures; but altogether he was a dull, insignificant fellow, at least apparently. he had lost father and mother when still very young: the latter died of a badly-managed milk fever; the former, a pruner like himself, was killed by a fall from a tree. all that was left jean valjean was a sister older than himself, a widow with seven children, boys and girls. this sister brought jean valjean up, and so long as her husband was alive she supported her brother. when the husband died, the oldest of the seven children was eight years of age, the youngest, one, while jean valjean had just reached his twenty-fifth year; he took the place of the father, and in his turn supported the sister who had reared him. this was done simply as a duty, and even rather roughly by jean valjean; and his youth was thus expended in hard and ill-paid toil. he was never known to have had a sweetheart, for he had no time for love-making. at night he came home tired, and ate his soup without saying a word. his sister, mother jeanne, while he was eating, often took out of his porringer the best part of his meal, the piece of meat, the slice of bacon, or the heart of the cabbage, to give it to one of her children; he, still eating, bent over the table with his head almost in the soup, and his long hair falling round his porringer and hiding his eyes, pretended not to see it, and let her do as she pleased. there was at faverolles, not far from the valjeans' cottage, on the other side of the lane, a farmer's wife called marie claude. the young valjeans, who were habitually starving, would go at times and borrow in their mother's name a pint of milk from marie claude, which they drank behind a hedge or in some corner, tearing the vessel from each other so eagerly that the little girls spilt the milk over their aprons. their mother, had she been aware of this fraud, would have severely corrected the delinquents, but jean valjean, coarse and rough though he was, paid marie claude for the milk behind his sister's back, and the children were not punished. he earned in the pruning season eighteen sous a day, and besides hired himself out as reaper, laborer, neat-herd, and odd man. he did what he could; his sister worked too, but what could she do with seven children? it was a sad group, which wretchedness gradually enveloped and choked. one winter was hard, and jean had no work to do, and the family had no bread. no bread, literally none, and seven children! one sunday evening, maubert isabeau, the baker in the church square at faverolles, was just going to bed when he heard a violent blow dealt the grating in front of his shop. he arrived in time to see an arm passed through a hole made by a fist through the grating and window pane; the arm seized a loaf, and carried it off. isabeau ran out hastily; the thief ran away at his hardest, but the baker caught him and stopped him. the thief had thrown away the loaf, but his arm was still bleeding; it was jean valjean. this took place in . jean valjean was brought before the courts of the day, charged "with burglary committed with violence at night, in an inhabited house." he had a gun, was a splendid shot, and a bit of a poacher, and this injured him. there is a legitimate prejudice against poachers, for, like smugglers, they trench very closely on brigandage. still we must remark that there is an abyss between these classes and the hideous assassins of our cities: the poacher lives in the forest; the smuggler in the mountains and on the sea. cities produce ferocious men, because they produce corrupted men; the forest, the mountain, and the sea produce savage men, but while they develop their ferocious side, they do not always destroy their human part. jean valjean was found guilty, and the terms of the code were precise. there are in our civilization formidable hours; they are those moments in which penal justice pronounces a shipwreck. what a mournful minute is that in which society withdraws and consummates the irreparable abandonment of a thinking being! jean valjean was sentenced to five years at the galleys. on april d, , men were crying in the streets of paris the victory of montenotte, gained by the general-in-chief of the army of italy, whom the message of the directory to the five hundred, of the floréal, year iv., calls buona-parte; and on the same day a heavy gang was put in chains at bicetre, and jean valjean formed part of the chain. an ex-jailer of the prison, who is now nearly ninety years of age, perfectly remembers the wretched man, who was chained at the end of the fourth cordon, in the north angle of the court-yard. he was seated on the ground like the rest, and seemed not at all to understand his position, except that it was horrible. it is probable that he also saw something excessive through the vague ideas of an utterly ignorant man. while the bolt of his iron collar was being riveted with heavy hammer-blows behind his head, he wept, tears choked him, and prevented him from speaking, and he could only manage to say from time to time: "i was a wood-cutter at faverolles." then, while still continuing to sob, he raised his right hand, and lowered it gradually seven times, as if touching seven uneven heads in turn, and from this gesture it could be guessed that whatever the crime he had committed, he had done it to feed and clothe seven children. he started for toulon, and arrived there after a journey of twenty-seven days in a cart, with the chain on his neck. at toulon he was dressed in the red jacket. all that had hitherto been his life, even to his name, was effaced. he was no longer jean valjean, but no. , . what became of his sister? what became of the seven children? who troubles himself about that? what becomes of the spray of leaves when the stem of the young tree has been cut at the foot? it is always the same story. these poor living beings, these creatures of god, henceforth without support, guide, or shelter, went off hap-hazard, and gradually buried themselves in that cold fog in which solitary destinies are swallowed up, that mournful gloom in which so many unfortunates disappear during the sullen progress of the human race. they left their country; what had once been their steeple forgot them; what had once been their hedge-row forgot them; and after a few years' stay in the bagne, jean valjean himself forgot them. in that heart where there had once been a wound there was now a scar: that was all. he only heard about his sister once during the whole time he spent at toulon; it was, i believe, toward the end of the fourth year of his captivity, though i have forgotten in what way the information reached him. she was in paris, living in the rue du geindre, a poor street, near st. sulpice, and had only one child with her, the youngest, a boy. where were the other six? perhaps she did not know herself. every morning she went to a printing-office, no. , rue du sabot, where she was a folder and stitcher; she had to be there at six in the morning, long before daylight in winter. in the same house as the printing-office there was a day-school, to which she took the little boy, who was seven years of age, but as she went to work at six and the school did not open till seven o'clock, the boy was compelled to wait in the yard for an hour, in winter,--an hour of night in the open air. the boy was not allowed to enter the printing-office, because it was said that he would be in the way. the workmen as they passed in the morning saw the poor little fellow seated on the pavement, and often sleeping in the darkness, with his head on his satchel. when it rained, an old woman, the portress, took pity on him; she invited him into her den, where there were only a bed, a spinning-wheel, and two chairs, when the little fellow fell asleep in a corner, clinging to the cat, to keep him warm. this is what jean valjean was told; it was a momentary flash, as it were a window suddenly opened in the destiny of the beings he had loved, and then all was closed again; he never heard about them more. nothing reached him from them; he never saw them again, never met them, and we shall not come across them in the course of this melancholy narrative. toward the end of this fourth year, jean valjean's turn to escape arrived, and his comrades aided him as they always do in this sorrowful place. he escaped and wandered about the fields at liberty for two days: if it is liberty to be hunted down; to turn ones head at every moment; to start at the slightest sound; to be afraid of everything,--of a chimney that smokes, a man who passes, a barking dog, a galloping horse, the striking of the hour, of day because people see, of night because they do not see, of the highway, the path, the thicket, and even sleep. on the evening of the second day he was recaptured; he had not eaten or slept for six-and-thirty hours. the maritime tribunal added three years to his sentence for his crime, which made it eight years. in the sixth year, it was again his turn to escape; he tried, but could not succeed. he was missing at roll-call, the gun was fired, and at night the watchman found him hidden under the keel of a ship that was building, and he resisted the _garde chiourme_, who seized him. escape and rebellion: this fact, foreseen by the special code, was punished by an addition of five years, of which two would be spent in double chains. thirteen years. in his tenth year his turn came again, and he took advantage of it, but succeeded no better: three years for this new attempt, or sixteen years in all. finally, i think it was during his thirteenth year that he made a last attempt, and only succeeded so far as to be recaptured in four hours: three years for these four hours, and a total of nineteen years. in october, , he was liberated; he had gone in in for breaking a window and stealing a loaf. let us make room for a short parenthesis. this is the second time that, during his essays on the penal question and condemnation by the law, the author of this book has come across a loaf as the starting point of the disaster of a destiny. claude gueux stole a loaf, and so did jean valjean, and english statistics prove that in london four robberies out of five have hunger as their immediate cause. jean valjean entered the bagne sobbing and shuddering: he left it stoically. he entered it in despair: he came out of it gloomy. what had taken place in this soul? chapter vii. a desperate man's heart. society must necessarily look at these things, because they are created by it. he was, as we have said, an ignorant man, but he was not weak-minded. the natural light was kindled within him, and misfortune, which also has its brightness, increased the little daylight there was in this mind. under the stick and the chain in the dungeon, when at work, beneath the torrid sun of the bagne, or when lying on the convict's plank, he reflected. he constituted himself a court, and began by trying himself. he recognized that he was not an innocent man unjustly punished; he confessed to himself that he had committed an extreme and blamable action; that the loaf would probably not have been refused him had he asked for it; that in any case it would have been better to wait for it, either from pity or from labor, and that it was not a thoroughly unanswerable argument to say, "can a man wait when he is hungry?" that, in the first place, it is very rare for a man to die literally of hunger; next, that, unhappily or happily, man is so made that he can suffer for a long time and severely, morally and physically, without dying; that hence he should have been patient; that it would have been better for the poor little children; that it was an act of madness for him, a wretched weak man, violently to collar society and to imagine that a man can escape from wretchedness by theft; that in any case the door by which a man enters infamy is a bad one by which to escape from wretchedness; and, in short, that he had been in the wrong. then he asked himself if he were the only person who had been in the wrong in his fatal history? whether, in the first place, it was not a serious thing that he, a workman, should want for work; that he, laborious as he was, should want for bread? whether, next, when the fault was committed and confessed, the punishment had not been ferocious and excessive, and whether there were not more abuse on the side of the law in the penalty than there was on the side of the culprit in the crime? whether there had not been an excessive weight in one of the scales, that one in which expiation lies? whether the excess of punishment were not the effacement of the crime, and led to the result of making a victim of the culprit, a creditor of the debtor, and definitively placing the right on the side of the man who had violated it? whether this penalty, complicated by excessive aggravations for attempted escapes, did not eventually become a sort of attack made by the stronger on the weaker, a crime of society committed on the individual, a crime which was renewed every day, and had lasted for nineteen years? he asked himself if human society could have the right to make its members equally undergo, on one side, its unreasonable improvidence, on the other its pitiless foresight, and to hold a man eternally between a want and an excess, want of work and excess of punishment? whether it were not exorbitant that society should treat thus its members who were worst endowed in that division of property which is made by chance, and consequently the most worthy of indulgence? these questions asked and solved, he passed sentence on society and condemned it--to his hatred. he made it responsible for the fate he underwent, and said to himself that he would not hesitate to call it to account some day. he declared that there was no equilibrium between the damage he had caused and the damage caused him; and he came to the conclusion that his punishment was not an injustice, but most assuredly an iniquity. wrath may be wild and absurd; a man may be wrongly irritated; but he is only indignant when he has some show of reason somewhere. jean valjean felt indignant. and then, again, human society had never done him aught but harm, he had only seen its wrathful face, which is called its justice, and shows itself to those whom it strikes. men had only laid hands on him to injure him, and any contact with them had been a blow to him. never, since his infancy, since his mother and his sister, had he heard a kind word or met a friendly look. from suffering after suffering, he gradually attained the conviction that life was war, and that in this war he was the vanquished. as he had no other weapon but his hatred, he resolved to sharpen it in the bagne and take it with him when he left. there was at toulon a school for the chain-gang, kept by the ignorantin brethren, who imparted elementary instruction to those wretches who were willing to learn. he was one of the number, and went to school at the age of forty, where he learned reading, writing, and arithmetic; he felt that strengthening his mind was strengthening his hatred. in certain cases, instruction and education may serve as allies to evil. it is sad to say, that after trying society which had caused his misfortunes, he tried providence, who had made society, and condemned it also. hence, during these nineteen years of torture and slavery, this soul ascended and descended at the same time; light entered on one side and darkness on the other. as we have seen, jean valjean was not naturally bad, he was still good when he arrived at the bagne. he condemned society then, and felt that he was growing wicked; he condemned providence, and felt that he was growing impious. here it is difficult not to meditate for a moment. is human nature thus utterly transformed? can man, who is created good by god, be made bad by man? can the soul be entirely remade by destiny, and become evil if the destiny be evil? can the heart be deformed, and contract incurable ugliness and infirmity under the pressure of disproportionate misfortune, like the spine beneath too low a vault? is there not in every human soul, was there not in that of jean valjean especially, a primary spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world, and immortal for the other, which good can develop, illumine, and cause to glisten splendidly, and which evil can never entirely extinguish? these are grave and obscure questions, the last of which every physiologist would unhesitatingly have answered in the negative, had he seen at toulon, in those hours of repose which were for jean valjean hours of reverie, this gloomy, stern, silent, and pensive galley-slave--the pariah of the law which regarded men passionately--the condemned of civilization, who regarded heaven with severity--seated with folded arms on a capstan bar, with the end of his chain thrust into his pocket to prevent it from dragging. we assuredly do not deny that the physiological observer would have seen there an irremediable misery; he would probably have pitied this patient of the law, but he would not have even attempted a cure: he would have turned away from the caverns he noticed in this soul, and, like dante at the gates of the inferno, he would have effaced from this existence that word which god, however, has written on the brow of every man: _hope!_ was this state of his soul, which we have attempted to analyze, as perfectly clear to jean valjean as we have tried to render it to our readers? did jean valjean see after their formation, and had he seen distinctly as they were formed, all the elements of which his moral wretchedness was composed? had this rude and unlettered man clearly comprehended the succession of ideas by which he had step by step ascended and descended to the gloomy views which had for so many years been the inner horizon of his mind? was he really conscious of all that had taken place in him and all that was stirring in him? this we should not like to assert, and, indeed, we are not inclined to believe it. there was too much ignorance in jean valjean for a considerable amount of vagueness not to remain, even after so much misfortune; at times he did not even know exactly what he experienced. jean valjean was in darkness; he suffered in darkness, and he hated in darkness. he lived habitually in this shadow, groping like a blind man and a dreamer; at times he was attacked, both internally and externally, by a shock of passion, a surcharge of suffering, a pale and rapid flash which illumined his whole soul, and suddenly made him see all around, both before and behind him, in the glare of a frightful light, the hideous precipices and gloomy perspective of his destiny. when the flash had passed, night encompassed him again, and where was he? he no longer knew. the peculiarity of punishments of this nature, in which nought but what is pitiless, that is to say brutalizing, prevails, is gradually, and by a species of stupid transfiguration, to transform a man into a wild beast, at times a ferocious beast. jean valjean's attempted escapes, successive and obstinate, would be sufficient to prove the strange work carried on by the law upon a human soul; he would have renewed these attempts, so utterly useless and mad, as many times as the opportunity offered itself, without dreaming for a moment of the result, or the experiments already made. he escaped impetuously like the wolf that finds its cage open. instinct said to him, "run away;" reasoning would have said to him, "remain;" but in the presence of so violent a temptation, reason disappeared and instinct alone was left. the brute alone acted, and when he was recaptured the new severities inflicted on him only served to render him more wild. one fact we must not omit mentioning is that he possessed a physical strength with which no one in the bagne could compete. in turning a capstan, jean valjean was equal to four men; he frequently raised and held on his back enormous weights, and took the place at times of that instrument which is called a jack, and was formerly called _orgueil_, from which, by the way, the rue montorgueil derived its name. his comrades surnamed him jean the jack. once when the balcony of the town hall at toulon was being repaired, one of those admirable caryatides of puget's which support the balcony, became loose and almost fell. jean valjean, who was on the spot, supported the statue with his shoulder, and thus gave the workmen time to come up. his suppleness even exceeded his vigor. some convicts, who perpetually dream of escaping, eventually make a real science of combined skill and strength; it is the science of the muscles. a full course of mysterious statics is daily practised by the prisoners, those eternal enviers of flies and birds. swarming up a perpendicular, and finding a resting-place where a projection is scarcely visible, was child's play for jean valjean. given a corner of a wall, with the tension of his back and hams, with his elbows and heels clinging to the rough stone, he would hoist himself as if by magic to a third story, and at times would ascend to the very roof of the bagne. he spoke little and never laughed; it needed some extreme emotion to draw from him, once or twice a year, that mournful convict laugh, which is, as it were, the echo of fiendish laughter. to look at him, he seemed engaged in continually gazing at something terrible. he was, in fact, absorbed. through the sickly perceptions of an incomplete nature and a crushed intellect, he saw confusedly that a monstrous thing was hanging over him. in this obscure and dull gloom through which he crawled, wherever he turned his head and essayed to raise his eye, he saw, with a terror blended with rage, built up above him, with frightfully scarped sides, a species of terrific pile of things, laws, prejudices, men, and facts, whose outline escaped him, whose mass terrified him, and which was nothing else but that prodigious pyramid which we call civilization. he distinguished here and there in this heaving and shapeless conglomeration--at one moment close to him, at another on distant and inaccessible plateaux--some highly illumined group;--here the jailer and his stick, there the gendarme and his sabre, down below the mitred archbishop, and on the summit, in a species of sun, the crowned and dazzling emperor. it seemed to him as if this distant splendor, far from dissipating his night, only rendered it more gloomy and black. all these laws, prejudices, facts, men, and things, came and went above him, in accordance with the complicated and mysterious movement which god imprints on civilization, marching over him, and crushing him with something painful in its cruelty and inexorable in its indifférence. souls which have fallen into the abyss of possible misfortune, hapless men lost in the depths of those limbos into which people no longer look, and the reprobates of the law, feel on their heads the whole weight of the human society which is so formidable for those outside it, so terrific for those beneath it. in this situation, jean valjean thought, and what could be the nature of his reverie? if the grain of corn had its thoughts, when ground by the mill-stone, it would doubtless think as did jean valjean. all these things, realities full of spectres, phantasmagorias full of reality, ended by creating for him a sort of internal condition which is almost inexpressible. at times, in the midst of his galley-slave toil, he stopped and began thinking; his reason, at once riper and more troubled than of yore, revolted. all that had happened appeared to him absurd; all that surrounded him seemed to him impossible. he said to himself that it was a dream; he looked at the overseer standing a few yards from him, and he appeared to him a phantom, until the phantom suddenly dealt him a blow with a stick. visible nature scarce existed for him; we might almost say with truth, that for jean valjean there was no sun, no glorious summer-day, no brilliant sky, no fresh april dawn; we cannot describe the gloomy light which illumined his soul. in conclusion, to sum up all that can be summed up in what we have indicated, we will confine ourselves to establishing the fact that in nineteen years, jean valjean, the inoffensive wood-cutter of faverolles, and the formidable galley-slave of toulon, had become, thanks to the manner in which the bagne had fashioned him, capable of two sorts of bad actions: first, a rapid, unreflecting bad deed, entirely instinctive, and a species of reprisal for the evil he had suffered; and, secondly, of a grave, serious evil deed, discussed conscientiously and meditated with the false ideas which such a misfortune can produce. his premeditations passed through the three successive phases which natures of a certain temperament can alone undergo,--reasoning, will, and obstinacy. he had for his motives habitual indignation, bitterness of soul, the profound feeling of iniquities endured, and reaction even against the good, the innocent, and the just, if such exist. the starting-point, like the goal, of all his thoughts, was hatred of human law; that hatred, which, if it be not arrested in its development by some providential incident, becomes within a given time a hatred of society, then a hatred of the human race, next a hatred of creation, and which is expressed by a vague, incessant, and brutal desire to injure some one, no matter whom. as we see, it was not unfairly that the passport described jean valjean as a highly dangerous man. year by year this soul had become more and more withered, slowly but fatally. a dry soul must have a dry eye, and on leaving the bagne, nineteen years had elapsed since he had shed a tear. chapter viii. the wave and the darkness. man overboard! what of it? the ship does not stop. the wind is blowing, and this dark ship has a course which she must keep. she goes right on. the man disappears, then appears again. he goes down and again comes up to the surface; he shouts, he holds up his arms, but they do not hear him. the ship, shivering under the storm, has all she can do to take care of herself. the sailors and the passengers can no longer even see the drowning man; his luckless head is only a speck in the vastness of the waves. his cries of despair sound through the depths. what a phantom that is,--that sail, fast disappearing from view! he gazes after it; his eyes are fixed upon it with frenzy. it is disappearing, it is fading from sight, it is growing smaller and smaller. only just now he was there; he was one of the crew; he was going and coming on the deck with the rest; he had his share of air and sun; he was a living man. what, then, has happened? he has slipped, he has fallen; it is all over with him. he is in the huge waves. there is nothing now under his feet but death and sinking. the fearful waves, torn and frayed by the wind, surround him; the swells of the abyss sweep him along; all the crests of the waves are blown about his head; a crowd of waves spit upon him; uncertain gulfs half swallow him; every time he plunges down he catches a glimpse of precipices black as night; frightful, unknown seaweeds seize him, tie his feet, drag him down to them. he feels that he is becoming a part of the abyss, of the foam; the waves throw him from one to another; he tastes the bitterness; the cowardly ocean has given itself up to drowning him; the vastness sports with his agony. all this water seems to be hate. still he struggles. he tries to save himself, to keep himself up; he strikes out, he swims. he, this pitiful force, at once exhausted, is matched against the inexhaustible. where is the ship now? way down there, barely visible in the pale obscurity of the horizon. the squalls hum about him, the wave-crests wash over him. he raises his eyes, and sees only the lividness of the clouds. in his death struggle he takes part in the madness of the sea. he is tortured by this madness. he hears sounds, strange to man, which seem to come from beyond the earth, and from some terrible world outside. there are birds in the clouds, just as there are angels above human griefs, but what can they do for him? there is one, flying, singing, and hovering, while he has the death-rattle in his throat. he feels himself buried at the same time by these two infinites, the ocean and the heavens; the one a tomb, the other a shroud. night falls; he has been swimming now for hours; his strength has reached its end; this ship, this far-off thing where there were men, is blotted from his sight; he is alone in the fearful gulf of twilight; he sinks, he braces himself, he writhes, he feels below him the roving monsters of the invisible. he cries aloud. "there are no longer any men here." "where is god?" he calls "somebody!" "somebody!" he keeps on calling. nothing on the horizon; nothing in heaven. he implores the waste of waters, the wave, the seaweed, the rock; it is deaf. he supplicates the tempest; the pitiless tempest obeys only the infinite. around him is darkness, mist, solitude, the stormy and unreasoning tumult, the boundless rolling of the wild waters. in him is horror and weariness. under him the abyss. there is nothing to rest on. he thinks of what will happen to his body in the boundless shades. the infinite cold benumbs him. his hands shrivel; they clutch and find nothing. winds, clouds, whirlwinds, puffs, useless stars. what is he to do? in despair, he gives up. worn out as he is, he makes up his mind to die, he abandons himself, he lets himself go, he relaxes himself, and there he is rolling forever into the dismal depths in which he is swallowed up. oh, implacable course of human society! what a loss of men and of souls on the way! ocean into which falls all that the law lets fall. wicked vanishing of help! oh, moral death! the sea is the pitiless social night into which the penal law thrusts its condemned; the sea is boundless wretchedness. the soul, swept with the stream into this gulf, may be drowned. who will bring it to life again? chapter ix. new wrongs. when the hour for quitting the bagne arrived, when jean valjean heard in his ear the unfamiliar words "you are free," the moment seemed improbable and extraordinary, and a ray of bright light, of the light of the living, penetrated to him; but it soon grew pale. jean valjean had been dazzled by the idea of liberty, and had believed in a new life, but he soon saw that it is a liberty to which a yellow passport is granted. and around this there was much bitterness; he had calculated that his earnings, during his stay at the bagne, should have amounted to francs. we are bound to add that he had omitted to take into his calculations the forced rest of sundays and holidays, which, during nineteen years, entailed a diminution of about francs. however this might be, the sum was reduced, through various local stoppages, to francs, sous, which were paid to him when he left the bagne. he did not understand it all, and fancied that he had been robbed. on the day after his liberation, he saw at grasse men in front of a distillery of orange-flower water,--men unloading bales; he offered his services, and as the work was of a pressing nature, they were accepted. he set to work; he was intelligent, powerful, and skilful, and his master appeared satisfied. while he was at work a gendarme passed, noticed him, asked for his paper, and he was compelled to show his yellow pass. this done, jean valjean resumed his toil. a little while previously he had asked one of the workmen what he earned for his day's work, and the answer was sous. at night, as he was compelled to start again the next morning, he went to the master of the distillery and asked for payment; the master did not say a word, but gave him sous, and when he protested, the answer was, "that is enough for you." he became pressing, the master looked him in the face and said, "mind you don't get into prison." here again he regarded himself as robbed; society, the state, by diminishing his earnings, had robbed him wholesale; now it was the turn of the individual to commit retail robbery. liberation is not deliverance; a man may leave the bagne, but not condemnation. we have seen what happened to him at grasse, and we know how he was treated at d----. chapter x. the man awake. as two o'clock pealed from the cathedral bell, jean valjean awoke. what aroused him was that the bed was too comfortable, for close on twenty years he had not slept in a bed, and though he had not undressed, the sensation was too novel not to disturb his sleep. he had been asleep for more than four hours, and his weariness had worn off; and he was accustomed not to grant many hours to repose. he opened his eyes and looked into the surrounding darkness, and then he closed them again to go to sleep once more. when many diverse sensations have agitated a day, and when matters preoccupy the mind, a man may sleep, but he cannot go to sleep again. sleep comes more easily than it returns, and this happened to jean valjean. as he could not go to sleep again, he began thinking. it was one of those moments in which the ideas that occupy the mind are troubled, and there was a species of obscure oscillation in his brain. his old recollections and immediate recollections crossed each other, and floated confusedly, losing their shape, growing enormously, and then disappearing suddenly, as if in troubled and muddy water. many thoughts occurred to him, but there was one which constantly reverted and expelled all the rest. this thought we will at once describe; he had noticed the six silver forks and spoons and the great ladle which madame magloire put on the table. this plate overwhelmed him; it was there, a few yards from him. when he crossed the adjoining room to reach the one in which he now was, the old servant was putting it in a small cupboard at the bed-head,--he had carefully noticed this cupboard; it was on the right as you came in from the dining-room. the plate was heavy and old, the big soup-ladle was worth at least francs, or double what he had earned in nineteen years, though it was true that he would have earned more had not the officials robbed him. his mind oscillated for a good hour, in these fluctuations with which a struggle was most assuredly blended. when three o'clock struck he opened his eyes, suddenly sat up, stretched out his arms, and felt for his knapsack which he had thrown into a corner of the alcove, then let his legs hang, and felt himself seated on the bed-side almost without knowing how. he remained for a while thoughtfully in this attitude, which would have had something sinister about it, for any one who had seen him, the only wakeful person in the house. all at once he stooped, took off his shoes, then resumed his thoughtful posture, and remained motionless. in the midst of this hideous meditation, the ideas which we have indicated incessantly crossed his brain, entered, went out, returned, and weighed upon him; and then he thought, without knowing why, and with the mechanical obstinacy of reverie, of a convict he had known at the bagne, of the name of brevet, whose trousers were only held up by a single knitted brace. the draught-board design of that brace incessantly returned to his mind. he remained in this situation, and would have probably remained so till sunrise, had not the clock struck the quarter or the half-hour. it seemed as if this stroke said to him, to work! he rose, hesitated for a moment and listened; all was silent in the house, and he went on tip-toe to the window, through which he peered. the night was not very dark; there was a full moon, across which heavy clouds were chased by the wind. this produced alternations of light and shade, and a species of twilight in the room; this twilight, sufficient to guide him, but intermittent in consequence of the clouds, resembled that livid hue produced by the grating of a cellar over which people are continually passing. on reaching the window, jean valjean examined it; it was without bars, looked on the garden, and was only closed, according to the fashion of the country, by a small peg. he opened it, but as a cold sharp breeze suddenly entered the room, he closed it again directly. he gazed into the garden with that attentive glance which studies rather than looks, and found that it was enclosed by a white-washed wall, easy to climb over. beyond it he noticed the tops of trees standing at regular distances, which proved that this wall separated the garden from a public walk. after taking this glance, he walked boldly to the alcove, opened his knapsack, took out something which he laid on the bed, put his shoes in one of the pouches, placed the knapsack on his shoulders, put on his cap, the peak of which he pulled over his eyes, groped for his stick, which he placed in the window nook, and then returned to the bed, and took up the object he had laid on it. it resembled a short iron bar, sharpened at one of its ends. it would have been difficult to distinguish in the darkness for what purpose this piece of iron had been fashioned; perhaps it was a lever, perhaps it was a club. by daylight it could have been seen that it was nothing but a miners candlestick. the convicts at that day were sometimes employed in extracting rock from the lofty hills that surround toulon, and it was not infrequent for them to have mining tools at their disposal. the miner's candlesticks are made of massive steel, and have a point at the lower end, by which they are dug into the rock. he took the bar in his right hand, and holding his breath and deadening his footsteps he walked towards the door of the adjoining room, the bishop's as we know. on reaching this door he found it ajar--the bishop had not shut it. chapter xi. what he did. jean valjean listened, but there was not a sound; he pushed the door with the tip of his finger lightly, and with the furtive restless gentleness of a cat that wants to get in. the door yielded to the pressure, and made an almost imperceptible and silent movement, which slightly widened the opening. he waited for a moment, and then pushed the door again more boldly. it continued to yield silently, and the opening was soon large enough for him to pass through. but there was near the door a small table which formed an awkward angle with it, and barred the entrance. jean valjean noticed the difficulty: the opening must be increased at all hazards. he made up his mind, and pushed the door a third time, more energetically still. this time there was a badly-oiled hinge, which suddenly uttered a hoarse prolonged cry in the darkness. jean valjean started; the sound of the hinge smote his ear startlingly and formidably, as if it had been the trumpet of the day of judgment. in the fantastic exaggerations of the first minute, he almost imagined that this hinge had become animated, and suddenly obtained a terrible vitality and barked like a dog to warn and awaken the sleepers. he stopped, shuddering and dismayed, and fell back from tip-toes on his heels. he felt the arteries in his temples beat like two forge hammers, and it seemed to him that his breath issued from his lungs with the noise of the wind roaring out of a cavern. he fancied that the horrible clamor of this irritated hinge must have startled the whole house like the shock of an earthquake; the door he opened had been alarmed and cried for help; the old man would rise, the two aged females would shriek, and assistance would arrive within a quarter of an hour, the town would be astir, and the gendarmerie turned out. for a moment he believed himself lost. he remained where he was, petrified like the pillar of salt, and not daring to make a movement. a few minutes passed, during which the door remained wide open. he ventured to look into the room, and found that nothing had stirred. he listened; no one was moving in the house, the creaking of the rusty hinge had not awakened any one. the first danger had passed, but still there was fearful tumult within him. but he did not recoil, he had not done so even when he thought himself lost; he only thought of finishing the job as speedily as possible, and entered the bed-room. the room was in a state of perfect calmness; here and there might be distinguished confused and vague forms, which by day were papers scattered over the table, open folios, books piled on a sofa, an easy-chair covered with clothes, and a priedieu, all of which were at this moment only dark nooks and patches of white. jean valjean advanced cautiously and carefully, and avoided coming into collision with the furniture. he heard from the end of the room the calm and regular breathing of the sleeping bishop. suddenly he stopped, for he was close to the bed; he had reached it sooner than he anticipated. nature at times blends her effects and scenes with our actions, with a species of gloomy and intelligent design, as if wishing to make us reflect. for nearly half an hour a heavy cloud had covered the sky, but at the moment when jean valjean stopped at the foot of the bed, this cloud was rent asunder as if expressly, and a moonbeam passing through the tall window suddenly illumined the bishop's pale face. he was sleeping peacefully, and was wrapped up in a long garment of brown wool, which covered his arms down to the wrists. his head was thrown back on the pillow in the easy attitude of repose, and his hand, adorned with the pastoral ring, and which had done so many good deeds, hung out of bed. his entire face was lit up by a vague expression of satisfaction, hope, and beatitude--it was more than a smile and almost a radiance. he had on his forehead the inexpressible reflection of an invisible light, for the soul of a just man contemplates a mysterious heaven during sleep. a reflection of this heaven was cast over the bishop, but it was at the same time a luminous transparency, for the heaven was within him, and was conscience. at the moment when the moonbeam was cast over this internal light, the sleeping bishop seemed to be surrounded by a glory, which was veiled, however, by an ineffable semi-light. the moon in the heavens, the slumbering landscape, the quiet house, the hour, the silence, the moment, added something solemn and indescribable to this man's venerable repose, and cast a majestic and serene halo round his white hair and closed eyes, his face in which all was hope and confidence, his aged head, and his infantine slumbers. there was almost a divinity in this unconsciously august man. jean valjean was standing in the shadow with his crow-bar in his hand, motionless and terrified by this luminous old man. he had never seen anything like this before, and such confidence horrified him. the moral world has no greater spectacle than this,--a troubled, restless conscience, which is on the point of committing a bad action, contemplating the sleep of a just man. this sleep in such isolation, and with a neighbor like himself, possessed a species of sublimity which he felt vaguely, but imperiously. no one could have said what was going on within him, not even himself. in order to form any idea of it we must imagine what is the most violent in the presence of what is gentlest. even in his face nothing could have been distinguished with certainty, for it displayed a sort of haggard astonishment. he looked at the bishop, that was all, but what his thoughts were it would be impossible to divine; what was evident was, that he was moved and shaken, but of what nature was this emotion? his eye was not once removed from the old man, and the only thing clearly revealed by his attitude and countenance was a strange indecision. it seemed as if he were hesitating between two abysses, the one that saves and the one that destroys; he was ready to dash out the bishop's brains or kiss his hand. at the expiration of a few minutes his left arm slowly rose to his cap, which he took off; then his arm fell again with the same slowness, and jean valjean recommenced his contemplation, with his cap in his left hand, his crow-bar in his right, and his hair standing erect on his savage head. the bishop continued to sleep peacefully beneath this terrific glance. a moonbeam rendered the crucifix over the mantel-piece dimly visible, which seemed to open its arms for both, with a blessing for one and a pardon for the other. all at once jean valjean put on his cap again, then walked rapidly along the bed, without looking at the bishop, and went straight to the cupboard. he raised his crow-bar to force the lock, but as the key was in it, he opened it, and the first thing he saw was the plate-basket, which he seized. he hurried across the room, not caring for the noise he made, re-entered the oratory, opened the window, seized his stick, put the silver in his pocket, threw away the basket, leaped into the garden, bounded over the wall like a tiger, and fled. chapter xii. the bishop at work. the next morning at sunrise monseigneur welcome was walking about the garden, when madame magloire came running toward him in a state of great alarm. "monseigneur, monseigneur!" she screamed, "does your grandeur know where the plate-basket is?" "yes," said the bishop. "the lord be praised," she continued; "i did not know what had become of it." the bishop had just picked up the basket in a flower-bed, and now handed it to madame magloire. "here it is," he said. "well!" she said, "there is nothing in it; where is the plate?" "ah!" the bishop replied, "it is the plate that troubles your mind. well, i do not know where that is." "good lord! it is stolen, and that man who came last night is the robber." in a twinkling madame magloire had run to the oratory, entered the alcove, and returned to the bishop. he was stooping down and looking sorrowfully at a cochlearia, whose stem the basket had broken. he raised himself on hearing madame magloire scream,-- "monseigneur, the man has gone! the plate is stolen!" while uttering this exclamation her eyes fell on a corner of the garden, where there were signs of climbing; the coping of the wall had been torn away. "that is the way he went! he leaped into cochefilet lane. oh, what an outrage! he has stolen our plate." the bishop remained silent for a moment, then raised his earnest eyes, and said gently to madame magloire,-- "by the way, was that plate ours?" madame magloire was speechless; there was another interval of silence, after which the bishop continued,-- "madame magloire, i had wrongfully held back this silver, which belonged to the poor. who was this person? evidently a poor man." "good gracious!" madame magloire continued; "i do not care for it, nor does mademoiselle, but we feel for monseigneur. with what will monseigneur eat now?" the bishop looked at her in amazement. "why, are there not pewter forks to be had?" madame magloire shrugged her shoulders. "pewter smells!" "then iron!" madame magloire made an expressive grimace. "iron tastes." "well, then," said the bishop, "wood!" a few minutes later he was breakfasting at the same table at which jean valjean sat on the previous evening. while breakfasting monseigneur welcome gayly remarked to his sister, who said nothing, and to madame magloire, who growled in a low voice, that spoon and fork, even of wood, are not required to dip a piece of bread in a cup of milk. "what an idea!" madame magloire said, as she went backwards and forwards, "to receive a man like that, and lodge him by one's side. and what a blessing it is that he only stole! oh, lord! the mere thought makes a body shudder." as the brother and sister were leaving the table there was a knock at the door. "come in," said the bishop. the door opened, and a strange and violent group appeared on the threshold. three men were holding a fourth by the collar. the three men were gendarmes, the fourth was jean valjean. a corporal, who apparently commanded the party, came in and walked up to the bishop with a military salute. "monseigneur," he said. at this word jean valjean, who was gloomy and crushed, raised his head with a stupefied air. "'monseigneur,'" he muttered; "then he is not the curé." "silence!" said a gendarme. "this gentleman is monseigneur the bishop." in the mean while monseigneur welcome had advanced as rapidly as his great age permitted. "ah! there you are," he said, looking at jean valjean. "i am glad to see you. why, i gave you the candlesticks too, which are also silver, and will fetch you francs. why did you not take them away with the rest of the plate?" jean valjean opened his eyes, and looked at the bishop with an expression which no human language could render. "monseigneur," the corporal said; "what this man told us was true then? we met him, and as he looked as if he were running away, we arrested him. he had this plate--" "and he told you," the bishop interrupted, with a smile, "that it was given to him by an old priest at whose house he passed the night? i see it all. and you brought him back here? that is a mistake." "in that case," the corporal continued, "we can let him go?" "of course," the bishop answered. the gendarmes loosed their hold of jean valjean, who tottered back. "is it true that i am at liberty?" he said, in an almost inarticulate voice, and as if speaking in his sleep. "yes, you are let go; don't you understand?" said a gendarme. "my friend," the bishop continued, "before you go take your candlesticks." he went to the mantel-piece, fetched the two candlesticks, and handed them to jean valjean. the two females watched him do so without a word, without a sign, without a look that could disturb the bishop. jean valjean was trembling in all his limbs; he took the candlesticks mechanically, and with wandering looks. "now," said the bishop, "go in peace. by the bye, when you return, my friend, it is unnecessary to pass through the garden, for you can always enter, day and night, by the front door, which is only latched." then, turning to the gendarmes, he said,-- "gentlemen, you can retire." they did so. jean valjean looked as if he were on the point of fainting; the bishop walked up to him, and said in a low voice,-- "never forget that you have promised me to employ this money in becoming an honest man." jean valjean, who had no recollection of having promised anything, stood silent. the bishop, who had laid a stress on these words, continued solemnly,-- "jean valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. i have bought your soul of you. i withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and give it to god." chapter xiii. little gervais. jean valjean left the town as if running away; he walked hastily across the fields, taking the roads and paths that offered themselves, without perceiving that he was going round and round. he wandered thus the entire morning, and though he had eaten nothing, he did not feel hungry. he was attacked by a multitude of novel sensations; he felt a sort of passion, but he did not know with whom. he could not have said whether he was affected or humiliated; at times a strange softening came over him, against which he strove, and to which he opposed the hardening of the last twenty years. this condition offended him, and he saw with alarm that the species of frightful calmness, which the injustice of his misfortune had produced, was shaken within him. he asked himself what would take its place; at times he would have preferred being in prison and with the gendarmes, and that things had not happened thus; for that would have agitated him less. although the season was advanced, there were still here and there in the hedges a few laggard flowers, whose smell recalled childhood's memories as he passed them. these recollections were almost unendurable, for it was so long since they had recurred to him. indescribable thoughts were thus congregated within him the whole day through. when the sun was setting, and lengthening on the ground the shadow of the smallest pebble, jean valjean was sitting behind a bush in a large tawny and utterly-deserted plain. there were only the alps on the horizon, there was not even the steeple of a distant village. jean valjean might be about three leagues from d----, and a path that crossed the plain ran a few paces from the bushes. in the midst of this meditation, which would have contributed no little in rendering his rags startling to any one who saw him, he heard a sound of mirth. he turned his head and saw a little savoyard about ten years of age coming along the path, with his hurdy-gurdy at his side and his dormouse-box on his back. he was one of those gentle, merry lads who go about from place to place, displaying their knees through the holes in their trousers. while singing the lad stopped every now and then to play at pitch and toss with some coins he held in his hand, which were probably his entire fortune. among these coins was a two-franc piece. the lad stopped by the side of the bushes without seeing jean valjean, and threw up the handful of sous, all of which he had hitherto always caught on the back of his hand. this time the two-franc piece fell, and rolled up to jean valjean, who placed his foot upon it. but the boy had looked after the coin, and seen him do it; he did not seem surprised, but walked straight up to the man. it was an utterly deserted spot; as far as eye could extend there was no one on the plain or the path. nothing was audible, save the faint cries of a swarm of birds of passage passing through the sky, at an immense height. the boy had his back turned to the sun, which wove golden threads in his hair, and suffused jean valjean's face with a purpled, blood-red hue. "sir," the little savoyard said, with that childish confidence which is composed of ignorance and innocence, "my coin?" "what is your name?" jean valjean said. "little gervais, sir." "be off," said jean valjean. "give me my coin, if you please, sir." jean valjean hung his head, but said nothing. the boy began again,-- "my two-franc piece, sir." jean valjean's eye remained fixed on the ground. "my coin," the boy cried, "my silver piece, my money." it seemed as if jean valjean did not hear him, for the boy seized the collar of his blouse and shook him, and at the same time made an effort to remove the iron-shod shoe placed on his coin. "i want my money, my forty-sous piece." the boy began crying, and jean valjean raised his head. he was still sitting on the ground, and his eyes were misty. he looked at the lad with a sort of amazement, then stretched forth his hand to his stick, and shouted in a terrible voice, "who is there?" "i, sir," the boy replied. "little gervais; give me back my two francs, if you please. take away your foot, sir, if you please." then he grew irritated, though so little, and almost threatening. "come, will you lift your foot? lift it, i say!" "ah, it is you still," said jean valjean, and springing up, with his foot still held on the coin, he added, "will you be off or not?" the startled boy looked at him, then began trembling from head to foot, and after a few moments of stupor ran off at full speed, without daring to look back or utter a cry. still, when he had got a certain distance, want of breath forced him to stop, and jean valjean could hear him sobbing. in a few minutes the boy had disappeared. the sun had set, and darkness collected around jean valjean. he had eaten nothing all day, and was probably in a fever. he had remained standing and not changed his attitude since the boy ran off. his breath heaved his chest at long and unequal intervals, his eye, fixed ten or twelve yards ahead, seemed to be studying with profound attention the shape of an old fragment of blue earthenware which had fallen in the grass. suddenly he started, for he felt the night chill; he pulled his cap over his forehead, mechanically tried to cross and button his blouse, made a step, and stooped to pick up his stick. at this moment he perceived the two-franc piece, which his foot had half buried in the turf, and which glistened among the pebbles. it had the effect of a galvanic shock upon him. "what is this?" he muttered. he fell back three paces, then stopped, unable to take his eye from the spot his foot had trodden a moment before, as if the thing glistening there in the darkness had an open eye fixed upon him. in a few moments he dashed convulsively at the coin, picked it up, and began looking out into the plain, while shuddering like a straying wild beast which is seeking shelter. he saw nothing, night was falling, the plain was cold and indistinct, and heavy purple mists rose in the twilight. he set out rapidly in a certain direction, the one in which the lad had gone. after going some thirty yards he stopped, looked and saw nothing; then he shouted with all his strength, "little gervais, little gervais!" he was silent, and waited, but there was no response. the country was deserted and gloomy, and he was surrounded by space. there was nothing but a gloom in which his gaze was lost, and a stillness in which his voice was lost. an icy breeze was blowing, and imparted to things around a sort of mournful life. the bushes shook their little thin arms with incredible fury; they seemed to be threatening and pursuing some one. he walked onwards and then began running, but from time to time he stopped, and shouted in the solitude with a voice the most formidable and agonizing that can be imagined: "little gervais, little gervais!" assuredly, if the boy had heard him, he would have felt frightened, and not have shown himself; but the lad was doubtless a long way off by this time. the convict met a priest on horseback, to whom he went up and said,-- "monsieur le curé, have you seen a lad pass?" "no," the priest replied. "a lad of the name of 'little gervais?'" "i have seen nobody." the convict took two five-franc pieces from his pouch and handed them to the priest. "monsieur le curé, this is for your poor. he was a boy of about ten years of age, with a dormouse, i think, and a hurdy-gurdy,--a savoyard, you know." "i did not see him." "can you tell me if there is any one of the name of little gervais in the villages about here?" "if it is as you say, my good fellow, the lad is a stranger. many of them pass this way." jean valjean violently took out two other five-franc pieces, which he gave the priest. "for your poor," he said; then added wildly, "monsieur l'abbé, have me arrested: i am a robber." the priest urged on his horse, and rode away in great alarm, while jean valjean set off running in the direction he had first taken. he went on for a long distance, looking, calling, and shouting, but he met no one else. twice or thrice he ran across the plain to something that appeared to him to be a person lying or sitting down; but he only found heather, or rocks level with the ground. at last he stopped at a spot where three paths met; the moon had risen; he gazed afar, and called out for the last time, "little gervais, little gervais, little gervais!" his shout died away in the mist, without even awakening an echo. he muttered again, "little gervais," in a weak and almost inarticulate voice, but it was his last effort. his knees suddenly gave way under him as if an invisible power were crushing him beneath the weight of a bad conscience. he fell exhausted on a large stone, with his hand tearing his hair, his face between his knees, and shrieked: "i am a scoundrel!" then his heart melted, and he began to weep; it was the first time for nineteen years. when jean valjean quitted the bishop's house he was lifted out of his former thoughts, and could not account for what was going on within him. he stiffened himself against the angelic deeds and gentle words of the old man: "you have promised me to become an honest man. i purchase your soul; i withdraw it from the spirit of perverseness and give it to god." this incessantly recurred to him, and he opposed to this celestial indulgence that pride which is within us as the fortress of evil. he felt indistinctly that this priest's forgiveness was the greatest and most formidable assault by which he had yet been shaken; that his hardening would be permanent if he resisted this clemency; that if he yielded he must renounce that hatred with which the actions of other men had filled his soul during so many years, and which pleased him; that this time he must either conquer or be vanquished, and that the struggle, a colossal and final struggle, had begun between his wickedness and that man's goodness. in the presence of all these gleams he walked on like a drunken man. while he went on thus with haggard eye, had he any distinct perception of what the result of his adventure at d---- might be? did he hear all that mysterious buzzing which warns or disturbs the mind at certain moments of life? did a voice whisper in his ear that he had just gone through the solemn hour of his destiny, that no middle way was now left him, and that if he were not henceforth the best of men he would be the worst; that he must now ascend higher than the bishop, or sink lower than the galley-slave; that if he wished to be good he must become an angel, and if he wished to remain wicked that he must become a monster? here we must ask again the question we previously asked, did he confusedly receive any shadow of all this into his mind? assuredly, as we said, misfortune educates the intellect, still it is doubtful whether jean valjean was in a state to draw the conclusions we have formed. if these ideas reached him, he had a glimpse of them rather than saw them, and they only succeeded in throwing him into an indescribable and almost painful trouble. on leaving that shapeless black thing which is called the bagne the bishop had hurt his soul, in the same way as a too brilliant light would have hurt his eyes on coming out of darkness. the future life, the possible life, which presented itself to him, all pure and radiant, filled him with tremor and anxiety, and he really no longer knew how matters were. like an owl that suddenly witnessed a sunrise the convict had been dazzled and, as it were, blinded by virtue. one thing which he did not suspect is certain, however, that he was no longer the same man; all was changed in him, and it was no longer in his power to get rid of the fact that the bishop had spoken to him and taken his hand. while in this mental condition he met little gervais, and robbed him of his two francs: why did he so? assuredly he could not explain it. was it a final, and as it were supreme, effort of the evil thought he had brought from the bagne, a remainder of impulse, a result of what is called in statics "acquired force"? it was so, and was perhaps also even less than that. let us say it simply, it was not he who robbed, it was not the man, but the brute beast that through habit and instinct stupidly placed its foot on the coin, while the intellect was struggling with such novel and extraordinary sensations. when the intellect woke again and saw this brutish action, jean valjean recoiled with agony and uttered a cry of horror. it was a curious phenomenon, and one only possible in his situation, that, in robbing the boy of that money, he committed a deed of which he was no longer capable. however this may be, this last bad action had a decisive effect upon him: it suddenly darted through the chaos which filled his mind and dissipated it, placed on one side the dark mists, on the other the light, and acted on his soul, in its present condition, as certain chemical re-agents act upon a troubled mixture, by precipitating one element and clarifying another. at first, before even examining himself or reflecting, he wildly strove to find the boy again and return him his money; then, when he perceived that this was useless and impossible, he stopped in despair. at the moment when he exclaimed, "i am a scoundrel!" he had seen himself as he really was, and was already so separated from himself that he fancied himself merely a phantom, and that he had there before him, in flesh and blood, his blouse fastened round his hips, his knapsack full of stolen objects on his back, with his resolute and gloomy face and his mind full of hideous schemes, the frightful galley-slave, jean valjean. as we have remarked, excessive misfortune had made him to some extent a visionary, and this therefore was a species of vision. he really saw that jean valjean with his sinister face before him, and almost asked himself who this man who so horrified him was. his brain was in that violent and yet frightfully calm stage when the reverie is so deep that it absorbs reality. he contemplated himself, so to speak, face to face, and at the same time he saw through this hallucination a species of light which he at first took for a torch. on looking more attentively at this light which appeared to his conscience, he perceived that it had a human shape and was the bishop. his conscience examined in turn the two men standing before him, the bishop and jean valjean. by one of those singular effects peculiar to an ecstasy of this nature, the more his reverie was prolonged, the taller and more brilliant the bishop appeared, while jean valjean grew less and faded out of sight. at length he disappeared and the bishop alone remained, who filled the wretched man's soul with a magnificent radiance. jean valjean wept for a long time, and sobbed with more weakness than a woman, more terror than a child. while he wept the light grew brighter in his brain,--an extraordinary light, at once ravishing and terrible. his past life, his first fault, his long expiation, his external brutalization, his internal hardening, his liberation, accompanied by so many plans of vengeance, what had happened at the bishop's, the last thing he had done, the robbery of the boy, a crime the more cowardly and monstrous because it took place after the bishop's forgiveness, --all this recurred to him, but in a light which he had never before seen. he looked at his life, and it appeared to him horrible; at his soul, and it appeared to him frightful. still a soft light was shed over both, and he fancied that he saw satan by the light of paradise. how many hours did he weep thus? what did he do afterwards? whither did he go? no one ever knew. it was stated, however, that on this very night the mail carrier from grenoble, who arrived at d---- at about three o'clock in the morning, while passing through the street where the bishop's palace stood, saw a man kneeling on the pavement in the attitude of prayer in front of monseigneur welcome's door. book iii in the year . chapter i. the year . is the year which louis xviii., with a certain royal coolness which was not deficient in pride, entitled the twenty-second of his reign. it is the year in which m. bruguière de sorsum was celebrated. all the wig-makers' shops, hoping for powder and the return of the royal bird, were covered with azure and fleurs de lys. it was the candid time when count lynch sat every sunday as churchwarden at st. germain-des-près in the coat of a peer of france, with his red ribbon, his long nose, and that majestic profile peculiar to a man who has done a brilliant deed. the brilliant deed done by m. lynch was having, when mayor of bordeaux, surrendered the town rather prematurely on march , , to the duc d'angoulême; hence his peerage. in fashion buried little boys of the age of six and seven beneath vast morocco leather caps with earflaps, much resembling esquimaux fur-bonnets. the french army was dressed in white, like the austrian; the regiments were called legions, and bore the names of the departments instead of numbers. napoleon was at st helena, and as england refused him green cloth he had his old coats turned. in pellegrini sang, and mlle. bigottini danced, potier reigned, and odry was not as yet. madame saqui succeeded forioso. there were still prussians in france. m. delalot was a personage. legitimacy had just strengthened itself by cutting off the hand and then the head of pleignier, carbonneau, and tolleron. prince de talleyrand, lord high chamberlain, and the abbé louis, minister designate of finance, looked at each other with the laugh of two augurs. both had celebrated on july , , the mass of the confederation in the champ de mars. talleyrand had read it as bishop, louis had served it as deacon. in , in the side walks of the same champ de mars, could be seen large wooden cylinders, lying in the wet and rotting in the grass, painted blue, with traces of eagles and bees which had lost their gilding. these were the columns which two years previously supported the emperor's balcony at the champ de mai. they were partly blackened by the bivouac fires of the austrians encamped near gros caillou, and two or three of the columns had disappeared in the bivouac fires, and warmed the coarse hands of the kaiserlichs. the champ de mai had this remarkable thing about it, that it was held in the month of june, and on the champ de mars. in this year, , two things were popular,--the voltaire touquet and the snuff-box _à la charte_. the latest parisian sensation was the crime of dautun, who threw his brother's head into the basin on the flower market. people were beginning to grow anxious at the admiralty that no news arrived about that fatal frigate _la méduse_, which was destined to cover chaumareix with shame and géricault with glory. colonel selves proceeded to egypt to become soliman pacha there. the palace of the thermes, in the rue de la harpe, served as a shop for a cooper. on the platform of the octagonal tower of the hotel de cluny, could still be seen the little wooden house, which had served as an observatory for messier, astronomer to the admiralty under louis xvi. the duchesse de duras was reading to three or four friends in her boudoir furnished with sky-blue satin x's, her unpublished romance of _ourika_. the n's were scratched off the louvre. the austerlitz bridge was forsworn, and called the kings' gardens' bridge,--a double enigma which at once disguised the austerlitz bridge and the jardin des plantes. louis xviii., while annotating horace with his nail, was troubled by heroes who make themselves emperors and cobblers who make themselves dauphins; he had two objects of anxiety,--napoleon and mathurin bruneau. the french academy offered as subject for the prize essay the happiness produced by study. m. billart was officially eloquent; and in his shadow could be seen growing up that future advocate-general de broë, promised to the sarcasms of paul louis courier. there was a false châteaubriand called marchangy, while waiting till there should be a false marchangy, called d'arlincourt. "claire d'albe" and "malek-adel" were master-pieces; and madame cottin was declared the first writer of the age. the institute erased from its lists the academician napoleon bonaparte. a royal decree constituted angoulême a naval school, for, as the duc d'angoulême was lord high admiral, it was evident that the city from which he derived his title possessed _de jure_ all the qualifications of a seaport; if not, the monarchical principle would be encroached on. in the cabinet-council the question was discussed whether the wood-cuts representing tumblers, which seasoned franconi's bills and caused the street scamps to congregate, should be tolerated. m. paër, author of l'agnese, a square-faced man with a carbuncle on his chin, directed the private concerts of the marchioness de sassenaye in the rue de la ville'd'evêque. all the young ladies were singing, "l'ermite de saint avelle," words by edmond géraud. the yellow dwarf was transformed into the mirror. the café lemblin stood up for the emperor against the café valois, which supported the bourbons. the duc de berry, whom louvel was already gazing at from the darkness, had just been married to a princess of sicily. it was a year since madame de staël had died. the life guards hissed mademoiselle mars. the large papers were all small; their size was limited, but the liberty was great. the _constitutionnel_ was constitutional, and the _minerva_ called châteaubriand, châteaubriant; this _t_ made the city laugh heartily, at the expense of the great writer. prostituted journalists insulted in sold journals the proscripts of . david had no longer talent, arnault wit, carnot probity. soult never had won a battle. it is true that napoleon no longer had genius. everybody knows that it is rare for letters sent by post to reach an exile, for the police make it a religious duty to intercept them. the fact is not new, for descartes when banished complained of it. david having displayed some temper in a belgian paper at not receiving letters written to him, this appeared very amusing to the royalist journals, which ridiculed the proscribed man. the use of the words regicides or voters, enemies or allies, napoleon or buonaparte, separated two men more than an abyss. all persons of common sense were agreed that the era of revolutions was eternally closed by louis xviii., surnamed "the immortal author of the charter." on the platform of the pont neuf the word "redivivus" was carved on the pedestal which was awaiting the statue of henri iv. m. piet was excogitating at no. rue thérèse his council to consolidate the monarchy. the leaders of the right said in grave complications, "bacot must be written to." messieurs canuel, o'mahony, and de chappedelaine, were sketching under the covert approval of monsieur what was destined to be at a later date "the conspiracy du bord de l'eau." the "black pin" was plotting on its side. delaverderie was coming to an understanding with trogoff. m. decazes, a rather liberally-minded man, was in the ascendant. châteaubriand, standing each morning at his no. rue saint dominique, in trousers and slippers, with his gray hair fastened by a handkerchief, with his eyes fixed on a mirror, and a case of dentist's instruments open before him,--was cleaning his teeth, which were splendid, while dictating "the monarchy according to the charter" to m. pilorge, his secretary. authoritative critics preferred lafon to talma. m. de feletz signed a; m. hoffman signed z. charles nodier was writing "thérèse aubert." divorce was abolished. the lyceums were called colleges. the collegians, with a gold fleur de lys on their collar, were fighting about the king of rome. the counter-police of the château denounced to her royal highness madame, the universally exposed portrait of the duc d'orléans, who looked much handsomer in his uniform of colonel general of hussars than the duc de berry did in his uniform as colonel general of dragoons, which was a serious annoyance. the city of paris was having the dome of the invalides regilt at its own cost. serious-minded men asked themselves what m. de trinquelague would do in such and such a case. m. clausel de montais diverged on certain points from m. clausel de coussergues; m. de salaberry was not satisfied. picard the comedian, who belonged to the academy of which molière was not a member, was playing the two philiberts at the odéon, on the façade of which could still be distinctly read: thÉÂtre de l'impÉratrice, although the letters had been torn down. people were taking sides for or against cugnet de montarlot. fabvier was factious; bavoux was revolutionary; pelicier the publisher brought out an edition of voltaire with the title "the works of voltaire, of the académie française." "that catches purchasers," the simple publisher said. it was the general opinion that m. charles loyson would be the genius of the age; envy was beginning to snap at him, which is a sign of glory, and the following line was written about him. "même quand loyson vole, on sent qu'il a des pattes." as cardinal fesch refused to resign, m. de pins, archbishop of amasia, was administering the diocese of lyons. the quarrel about the dappes valley began between switzerland and france, through a memorial of captain dufour, who has since become a general. saint simon, utterly ignored, was building up his sublime dream. there were in the academy of sciences a celebrated fourier whom posterity has forgotten, and in some obscure garret a fourier whom the future will remember. lord byron was beginning to culminate; a note to a poem of millevoye's announced him to france in these terms, "un certain lord baron." david d'angers was trying to mould marble. the abbé caron spoke in terms of praise to a select audience in the alley of the feuillantines of an unknown priest called félicité robert, who was at a later date lamennais. a thing that smoked and plashed on the seine with the noise of a swimming dog, went under the tuileries windows from the pont royal to the pont louis xv.; it was a mechanism not worth much, a sort of plaything, a reverie of a dreamy inventor, an utopia: a steamboat. the parisians looked at this useless thing with indifference. m. de vaublanc, reformer of the institute by coup d'état, and distinguished author of several academicians, after making them, could not succeed in becoming one himself. the faubourg st germain and the pavilion marson desired to have m. delvau as prefect of police on account of his devotion. dupuytren and récamier quarrelled in the theatre of the school of medicine, and were going to fight about the divinity of the saviour. cuvier, with one eye on genesis and the other on nature, was striving to please the bigoted reaction by placing forms in harmony with texts, and letting moses be flattered by the mastodons. m. françois de neufchâteau, the praiseworthy cultivator of the memory of parmentier, was making a thousand efforts to have "pommes de terre" pronounced "parmentière," but did not succeed. the abbé grégoire, ex-bishop, ex-conventionalist, and ex-senator, had reached in the royal polemics the state of the "infamous grégoire," which was denounced as a neologism by m. royer-collard. in the third arch of the pont de jéna, the new stone could still be distinguished through its whiteness, with which two years previously the mine formed by blucher to blow up the bridge was stopped up. justice summoned to her bar a man who, on seeing the comte d'artois enter notre dame, said aloud: "sapristi! i regret the days when i saw napoleon and talma enter the bal sauvage arm in arm," seditious remarks punished with six months' imprisonment. traitors displayed themselves unblushingly; some, who had passed over to the enemy on the eve of a battle, did not conceal their reward, but walked immodestly in the sunshine with the cynicism of wealth and dignities; the deserters at ligny and quatre bras, well rewarded for their turpitude, openly displayed their monarchical devotion. such are a few recollections of the year , which is now forgotten. history neglects nearly all these details, and cannot do otherwise, as the infinity would crush it. still these details, wrongly called little,--there are no little facts in humanity or little leaves in vegetation,--are useful, for the face of ages is composed of the physiognomy of years. in this year four young parisians played a capital joke. chapter ii. a double quartette. these parisians came, one from toulouse, the second from limoges, the third from cahors, the fourth from montauban, but they were students, and thus parisians; for studying in paris is being born in paris. these young men were insignificant, four every-day specimens, neither good nor bad, wise nor ignorant, geniuses nor idiots, and handsome with that charming aprilia which is called twenty years. they were four oscars, for at that period arthurs did not yet exist. "burn for him the perfumes of arabia," the romance said; "oscar is advancing, i am about to see him." people had just emerged from ossian: the elegant world was scandinavian and caledonian, the english style was not destined to prevail till a later date, and the first of the arthurs, wellington, had only just won the battle of waterloo. the names of these oscars were félix tholomyès, of toulouse; listolier, of cahors; fameuil, of limoges; and blachevelle, of montauban. of course each had a mistress; blachevelle loved favourite, so called because she had been to england; listolier adored dahlia, who had taken the name of a flower for her _nom de guerre_; fameuil idolized zéphine, an abridgment of josephine; while tholomyès had fantine, called the blonde, owing to her magnificent suncolored hair. favourite, dahlia, zéphine, and fantine were four exquisitely pretty girls, still to some extent workwomen. they had not entirely laid down the needle, and though unsettled by their amourettes, they still had in their faces a remnant of the serenity of toil, and in their souls that flower of honesty, which in a woman survives the first fall. one of the four was called the young one, because she was the youngest, and one called the old one, who was only three-and-twenty. to conceal nothing, the three first were more experienced, more reckless, and had flown further into the noise of life than fantine the blonde, who was still occupied with her first illusion. dahlia, zéphine, and especially favourite, could not have said the same. there was already more than one episode in their scarce-begun romance, and the lover who was called adolphe in the first chapter, became alphonse in the second, and gustave in the third. poverty and coquettishness are two fatal counsellors: one scolds, the other flatters, and the poor girls of the lower classes have them whispering in both ears. badly-guarded souls listen, and hence come the falls they make, and the stones hurled at them. they are crushed with the splendor of all that is immaculate and inaccessible. alas! what if the jungfrau had hunger? favourite, who had been to england, was admired by zéphine and dahlia. she had a home of her own from an early age. her father was an old brutal and boasting professor of mathematics, unmarried, and still giving lessons in spite of his age. this professor, when a young man, had one day seen a lady's maid's gown caught in a fender; he fell in love with this accident, and favourite was the result. she met her father from time to time, and he bowed to her. one morning, an old woman with a hypocritical look came into her room and said, "do you not know me, miss?" "no." "i am your mother." then the old woman opened the cupboard, ate and drank, sent for a mattress she had, and installed herself. this mother, who was grumbling and proud, never spoke to favourite, sat for hours without saying a word, breakfasted, dined, and supped for half a dozen, and spent her evenings in the porter's lodge, where she abused her daughter. what drew dahlia toward listolier, towards others perhaps, towards idleness, was having too pretty pink nails. how could she employ such nails in working? a girl who wishes to remain virtuous must not have pity on her hands. as for zéphine, she had conquered fameuil by her little saucy and coaxing way of saying "yes, sir." the young men were comrades, the girls friends. such amours are always doubled by such friendships. a sage and a philosopher are two persons; and what proves it is that, after making all reservations for these little irregular households, favourite, zéphine, and dahlia were philosophic girls, and fantine a prudent girl. prudent, it will be said, and tholomyès? solomon would reply, that love forms part of wisdom. we confine ourselves to saying that fantine's love was a first love, a single love, a faithful love. she was the only one of the four who was addressed familiarly by one man alone. fantine was one of those beings who spring up from the dregs of the people; issuing from the lowest depths of the social darkness, she had on her forehead the stamp of the anonymous and the unknown. she was born at m. sur m.; of what parents, who could say? she had never known either father or mother. she called herself fantine, and why fantine? she was never known by any other name. at the period of her birth, the directory was still in existence. she had no family name, as she had no family; and no christian name, as the church was abolished. she accepted the name given her by the first passer-by, who saw her running barefooted about the streets. she was called little fantine, and no one knew any more. this human creature came into the world in that way. at the age of ten, fantine left the town, and went into service with farmers in the neighborhood. at the age of fifteen she went to paris, "to seek her fortune." fantine was pretty and remained pure as long as she could. she was a charming blonde, with handsome teeth; she had gold and pearls for her dower, but the gold was on her head, and the pearls in her mouth. she worked for a livelihood; and then she loved, still for the sake of living, for the heart is hungry too. she loved tholomyès; it was a pastime for him, but a passion with her. the streets of the quartier latin, which are thronged with students and grisettes, saw the beginning of this dream. fantine, in the labyrinth of the pantheon hill, where so many adventures are fastened and unfastened, long shunned tholomyès, but in such a way as to meet him constantly. there is a manner of avoiding which resembles seeking,--in a word, the eclogue was played. blachevelle, listolier, and fameuil formed a sort of group, of which tholomyès was the head, for it was he who had the wit. tholomyès was the antique old student; he was rich, for he had an income of francs a year, a splendid scandal on the montagne st. geneviève. tholomyès was a man of the world, thirty years of age, and in a bad state of preservation. he was wrinkled and had lost teeth, and he had an incipient baldness, of which he himself said without sorrow: "the skull at thirty, the knee at forty." he had but a poor digestion, and one of his eyes was permanently watery. but in proportion as his youth was extinguished, his gayety became brighter; he substituted jests for his teeth, joy for his hair, irony for his health, and his weeping eye laughed incessantly. he was battered, but still flowering. his youth had beaten an orderly retreat, and only the fire was visible. he had had a piece refused at the vaudeville theatre, and wrote occasional verses now and then. in addition, he doubted everything in a superior way, which is a great strength in the eyes of the weak. hence, being ironical and bald, he was the leader. we wonder whether irony, is derived from the english word "iron"? one day tholomyès took the other three aside, made an oracular gesture, and said,-- "it is nearly a year that fantine, dahlia, zéphine, and favorite have been asking us to give them a surprise, and we promised solemnly to do so. they are always talking about it, especially to me. in the same way as the old women of naples cry to saint januarius, "yellow face, perform your miracle!" our beauties incessantly say to me, "tholomyès, when will you be delivered of your surprise?" at the same time our parents are writing to us, so let us kill two birds with one stone. the moment appears to me to have arrived, so let us talk it over." upon this, tholomyès lowered his voice, and mysteriously uttered something so amusing that a mighty and enthusiastic laugh burst from four mouths simultaneously, and blacheville exclaimed "that is an idea!" an _estaminet_ full of smoke presenting itself, they went in, and the remainder of their conference was lost in the tobacco clouds. the result of the gloom was a brilliant pleasure excursion, that took place on the following sunday, to which the four young men invited the girls. chapter iii. four to four. it is difficult to form an idea at the present day of what a pleasure party of students and grisettes was four-and-forty years ago. paris has no longer the same environs; the face of what may be termed circum-parisian life has completely changed during half a century; where there was the old-fashioned coach, there is a railway-carriage; where there was the fly-boat, there is now the steamer; people talk of fécamp as people did in those days of st. cloud. paris of is a city which has france for its suburbs. the four couples conscientiously accomplished all the rustic follies possible at that day. it was a bright warm summer day; they rose at five o'clock; then they went to st. cloud in the stage-coach, looked at the dry cascade, and exclaimed, "that must be grand when there is water;" breakfasted at the tête noire, where castaing had not yet put up, ran at the ring in the quincunx of the great basin, ascended into the diogenes lantern, gambled for macaroons at the roulette board by the sêvres bridge, culled posies at puteaux, bought reed-pipes at neuilly, ate apple tarts everywhere, and were perfectly happy. the girls prattled and chattered like escaped linnets; they were quite wild, and every now and then gave the young men little taps. oh, youthful intoxication of life! adorable years! the wing of the dragon-fly rustles. oh, whoever you may be, do you remember? have you ever walked in the woods, removing the branches for the sake of the pretty head that comes behind you? have you laughingly stepped on a damp slope, with a beloved woman who holds your hand, and cries, "oh, my boots, what a state they are in!" let us say at once, that the merry annoyance of a shower was spared the happy party, although favourite had said on starting, with a magisterial and maternal air, "the slugs are walking about the paths; that is a sign of rain, children." all four were pretty madcaps. a good old classic poet, then renowned, m. le chevalier de labouisse, a worthy man who had an eléanore, wandering that day under the chestnut-trees of st. cloud, saw them pass at about ten in the morning, and exclaimed, "there is one too many," thinking of the graces. favourite, the girl who was three-and-twenty and the old one, ran in front under the large green branches, leaped over ditches, strode madly across bushes, and presided over the gayety with the spirit of a young fawn. zéphine and dahlia, whom accident had created as a couple necessary to enhance each other's beauty by contrast, did not separate, though more through a coquettish instinct than through friendship, and leaning on one another, assumed english attitudes; the first "keepsakes" had just come out, melancholy was culminating for women, as byronism did at a later date for men, and the hair of the tender sex was beginning to become dishevelled. zéphine and dahlia had their hair in rolls. listolier and fameuil, who were engaged in a discussion about their professors, were explaining to fantine the difference there was between m. delvincourt and m. blondeau. blachevelle seemed to have been created expressly to carry favourite's faded shabby shawl on sundays. tholomyès came last; he was very gay, but there was something commanding in his joviality; his principal ornament was nankeen trousers, cut in the shape of elephant's legs, with leathern straps; he had a mighty rattan worth francs in his hand, and, as he was quite reckless, a strange thing called a cigar in his mouth; nothing being sacred to him, he smoked. "that tholomyès is astounding," the others were wont to say with veneration. "what trousers! what energy!" as for fantine she was the personification of joy. her splendid teeth had evidently been made for laughter by nature. she carried in her hand, more willingly than on her head, her little straw bonnet, with its long streamers. her thick, light hair, inclined to float, and which had to be done up continually, seemed made for the flight of galatea under the willows. her rosy lips prattled enchantingly; the corners of her mouth voluptuously raised, as in the antique masks of erigone, seemed to encourage boldness; but her long eyelashes, full of shade, were discreetly lowered upon the seductiveness of the lower part of the face, as if to command respect. her whole toilet had something of song and sunshine about it; she had on a dress of mauve barége, little buskin slippers, whose strings formed an x on her fine, open-worked stockings, and that sort of muslin spencer, a marseillais invention, whose name of canezou, a corrupted pronunciation of _quinze août_ at the cannebière, signifies fine weather and heat. the three others, who were less timid, as we said, bravely wore low-necked dresses, which in summer are very graceful and attractive, under bonnets covered with flowers; but by the side of this bold dress, fantine's canezou, with its transparency, indiscretion, and reticences, at once concealing and displaying, seemed a provocative invention of decency; and the famous court of love, presided over by the vicomtesse de cette with the sea-green eyes, would have probably bestowed the prize for coquettishness on this canezou, which competed for that of chastity. the simplest things are frequently the cleverest. dazzling from a front view, delicate from a side view, with dark blue eyes, heavy eye-lids, arched and small feet, wrists and ankles admirably set on, the white skin displaying here and there the azure arborescences of the veins, with a childish fresh cheek, the robust neck of the Æginetan juno shoulders, apparently modelled by couston, and having in their centre a voluptuous dimple, visible through the muslin; a gayety tempered by reverie; a sculptural and exquisite being,--such was fantine; you could trace beneath the ribbons and finery a statue, and inside the statue a soul. fantine was beautiful, without being exactly conscious of it. those rare dreamers, the mysterious priests of the beautiful, who silently confront everything with perfection, would have seen in this little work-girl the ancient sacred euphony, through the transparency of parisian grace! this girl had blood in her, and had those two descriptions of beauty which are the style and the rhythm. the style is the form of the ideal; the rhythm is its movement. we have said that fantine was joy itself; she was also modesty. any one who watched her closely would have seen through all this intoxication of youth, the season, and love, an invincible expression of restraint and modesty. she remained slightly astonished, and this chaste astonishment distinguishes psyche from venus. fantine had the long white delicate fingers of the vestal, who stirs up the sacred fire with a golden bodkin. though she had refused nothing, as we shall soon see, to tholomyès, her face, when in repose, was supremely virginal; a species of stern and almost austere dignity suddenly invaded it at certain hours, and nothing was so singular and affecting as to see gayety so rapidly extinguished on it, and contemplation succeed cheerfulness without any transition. this sudden gravity, which was at times sternly marked, resembled the disdain of a goddess. her forehead, nose, and chin offered that equilibrium of outline which is very distinct from the equilibrium of proportion, and produces the harmony of the face; in the characteristic space between the base of the nose and the upper lip, she had that imperceptible and charming curve, that mysterious sign of chastity, which made barbarossa fall in love with a diana found in the ruins of iconium. love is a fault; be it so; but fantine was innocence floating on the surface of the fault. chapter iv. tholomyÈs sings a spanish song. the whole of this day seemed to be composed of dawn; all nature seemed to be having a holiday, and laughing. the pastures of st. cloud exhaled perfumes; the breeze from the seine vaguely stirred the leaves; the branches gesticulated in the wind; the bees were plundering the jessamine; a madcap swarm of butterflies settled down on the ragwort, the clover, and the wild oats; there was in the august park of the king of france a pack of vagabonds, the birds. the four happy couples enjoyed the sun, the fields, the flowers, and the trees. and in this community of paradise, the girls, singing, talking, dancing, chasing butterflies, picking bind-weed, wetting their stockings in the tall grass, fresh, madcap, not bad, all received kisses from all the men, every now and then, save fantine, enveloped in her vague resistance, dreamy and shy, and who was in love. "you always look strange," favourite said to her. such passings-by of happy couples are a profound appeal to life and nature, and bring caresses and light out of everything. once upon a time there was a fairy, who made fields and trees expressly for lovers; hence the eternal hedge-school of lovers, which incessantly recommences, and will last so long as there are bushes and scholars. hence the popularity of spring among thinkers; the patrician and the knifegrinder, the duke and the limb of the law, people of the court and people of the city, as they were called formerly, are all subjects of this fairy. people laugh and seek each other; there is the brilliancy of an apotheosis in the air, for what a transfiguration is loving! notary's clerks are gods. and then the little shrieks, pursuits in the grass, waists caught hold of, that chattering which is so melodious, that adoration which breaks out in the way of uttering a word, cherries torn from lips,--all this is glorious! people believe that it will never end; philosophers, poets, artists, regard these ecstasies, and know not what to do, as they are so dazzled by them. the departure for cythera! exclaims watteau; lancret, the painter of the middle classes, regards his cits flying away in the blue sky; diderot stretches out his arms to all these amourettes, and d'urfé mixes up druids with them. after breakfast the four couples went to see, in what was then called the king's square, a plant newly arrived from the indies, whose name we have forgotten, but which at that time attracted all paris to st. cloud; it was a strange and pretty shrub, whose numerous branches, fine as threads and leafless, were covered with a million of small white flowers giving it the appearance of a head of hair swarming with flowers; there was always a crowd round it, admiring it. after inspecting the shrub, tholomyès exclaimed, "i will pay for donkeys;" and after making a bargain with the donkey-man, they returned by vauvres and issy. at the latter place an incident occurred; the park, a national estate held at this time by bourguin the contractor, was accidentally open. they passed through the gates, visited the wax hermit in his grotto, and tried the mysterious effect of the famous cabinet of mirrors, a lascivious trap, worthy of a satyr who had become a millionnaire. they bravely pulled the large swing, fastened to the two chestnut-trees celebrated by the abbé de bernis. while swinging the ladies in turn, which produced, amid general laughter, a flying of skirts by which greuze would have profited, the toulousian tholomyès, who was somewhat of a spaniard, as toulouse is the cousin of tolosa, sang to a melancholy tune the old gallega, which was probably inspired by the sight of a pretty girl swinging between two trees,-- "soy tie badajoz amor me llama toda mi alma es en mis ojos porque enseflas a tus piernas." fantine alone declined to swing. "i do not like people to be so affected," favourite muttered rather sharply. on giving up the donkeys there was fresh pleasure; the seine was crossed in a boat, and from passy they walked to the barrière de l'Étoile. they had been afoot since five in the morning; but no matter! "there is no such thing as weariness on sunday," said favourite; "on sundays fatigue does not work." at about three o'clock, the four couples, wild with delight, turned into the montagnes busses, a singular building, which at that time occupied the heights of beaujon, and whose winding line could be seen over the trees of the champs Élysées. from time to time favourite exclaimed,-- "where's the surprise? i insist on the surprise." "have patience," tholomyès answered. chapter v. at bombarda's. the russian mountain exhausted, they thought about dinner, and the radiant eight, at length somewhat weary, put into the cabaret bombarda, an offshoot established in the champs Élysées by that famous restaurateur bombarda, whose sign could be seen at that time at the rue de rivoli by the side of the delorme passage. a large but ugly room, with an alcove and a bed at the end (owing to the crowded state of the houses on sundays they were compelled to put up with it); two windows from which the quay and river could be contemplated through the elm-trees; a magnificent autumn sun illumining the windows; two tables, on one of them a triumphal mountain of bottles, mixed up with hats and bonnets, at the other four couples joyously seated round a mass of dishes, plates, bottles, and glasses, pitchers of beer, mingled with wine-bottles; but little order on the table, and some amount of disorder under it. "ils faisaient sous la table un bruit, un trique-trac de pieds épouvantable," as molière says. such was the state of the pastoral which began at a.m.; at half-past p.m. the sun was declining and appetite was satisfied. the champs Élysées, full of sunshine and crowd, were nought but light and dust, two things of which glory is composed. the horses of marly, those neighing marbles, reared amid a golden cloud. carriages continually passed along; a squadron of splendid guards, with the trumpeter at their head, rode down the neuilly avenue; the white flag, tinged with pink by the setting sun, floated above the dome of the tuileries. the place de la concorde, which had again become the place louis xv., was crowded with merry promenaders. many wore a silver _fleur de lys_ hanging from a black moiré ribbon, which, in , had not entirely disappeared from the buttonholes. here and there, in the midst of applauding crowds, little girls were singing a royalist _bourrée,_ very celebrated at that time, intended to crush the hundred days, and which had a chorus of,-- "rendez nous notre père de gand, rendez vous notre père." heaps of suburbans, dressed in their sunday clothes, and some wearing _fleur de lys_ like the cits, were scattered over the squares, playing at quintain or riding in roundabouts; others were drinking; some who were printers' apprentices wore paper caps, and their laughter was the loudest. all was radiant; it was a time of undeniable peace, and of profound royalist security; it was a period when a private and special report of anglès, prefect of police to the king, terminated with these lines: "all things duly considered, sire, there is nothing to fear from these people. they are as careless and indolent as cats, and though the lower classes in the provinces are stirring, those in paris are not so. they are all little men, sire, and it would take two of them to make one of your grenadiers. there is nothing to fear from the populace of the capital. it is remarkable that their height has decreased during the last fifty years, and the people of the suburbs of paris are shorter than they were before the revolution. they are not dangerous, and, in a word, are good-tempered _canaille._" prefects of police do not believe it possible that a cat can be changed into a lion; it is so, however, and that is the miracle of the people of paris. the cat, so despised by count anglès, possessed the esteem of the old republics; it was the incarnation of liberty in their eyes, and as if to serve as a pendant to the minerva apteros of the piræus, there was on the public square of corinth a colossal bronze statue of a cat. the simple police of the restoration had too favorable an opinion of the people of paris, and they were not such good-tempered _canaille_ as they were supposed to be. the parisian is to the french-man what the athenian is to the greek; no one sleeps sounder than he; no one is more frankly frivolous and idle than he; no one can pretend to forget so well as he,--but he must not be trusted; he is suited for every species of nonchalance, but when there is a glory as the result, he is admirable for every sort of fury. give him a pike and he will make august ; give him a musket, and you will have austerlitz. he is the support of napoleon, and the resource of danton. if the country is in danger, he enlists; if liberty is imperilled, he tears up the pavement. his hair, full of wrath, is epical, his blouse assumes the folds of a chlamys. take care; for of the first rue grenétat he comes to be will make caudine forks. if the hour strikes, this suburban grows, the little man looks in a terrible manner, his breath becomes a tempest, and from his weak chest issues a blast strong enough to uproot the alps. it was through the parisian suburban that the revolution, joined with armies, conquered europe. he sings, and that forms his delight; proportion his song to his nature, and you shall see! so long as he has no burden but the carmagnole, he will merely overthrow louis xvi.; but make him sing the marseillaise, and he will deliver the world. after writing this note on the margin of count anglès' report, we will return to our four couples. the dinner, as we said, was drawing to a close. chapter vi. in which people adore each other. love talk and table talk are equally indescribable, for the first is a cloud, the second smoke. fantine and dahlia were humming a tune, tholomyès was drinking, zéphine laughing, fantine smiling, listolier was blowing a penny trumpet bought at st. cloud, favourite was looking tenderly at blachevelle and saying,-- "blachevelle, i adore you." this led to blachevelle asking,-- "what would you do, favourite, if i ceased to love you?" "i?" favourite exclaimed, "oh, do not say that, even in fun! if you ceased to love me i would run after you, claw you, throw water over you, and have you arrested." blachevelle smiled with the voluptuous fatuity of a man whose self-esteem is tickled. dahlia, while still eating, whispered to favourite through the noise,-- "you seem to be very fond of your blachevelle?" "i detest him," favourite answered in the same key, as she seized her fork again. "he is miserly, and i prefer the little fellow who lives opposite to me. he is a very good-looking young man; do you know him? it is easy to see that he wants to be an actor, and i am fond of actors. so soon as he comes in, his mother says,--'oh, good heavens! my tranquillity is destroyed: he is going to begin to shout; my dear boy, you give me a headache;' because he goes about the house, into the garrets as high as he can get, and sings and declaims, so that he can be heard from the streets! he already earns sous a day in a lawyer's office. he is the son of an ex-chorister at st. jacques du haut pas. ah! he adores me to such a pitch that one day when he saw me making batter for pancakes, he said to me, 'mamselle, make fritters of your gloves, and i will eat them.' only artists are able to say things like that. ah! he is very good-looking, and i feel as if i am about to fall madly in love with the little fellow. no matter, i tell blachevelle that i adore him: what a falsehood, eh, what a falsehood!" after a pause, favourite continued,-- "dahlia, look you, i am sad. it has done nothing but rain all the summer: the wind annoys me, blachevelle is excessively mean, there are hardly any green peas in the market, one does not know what to eat; i have the spleen, as the english say, for butter is so dear; and then it is horrifying that we are dining in a room with a bed in it, and that disgusts me with life." chapter vii. the wisdom of tholomyÈs. at length, when all were singing noisily, or talking all together, tholomyès interfered. "let us not talk hap-hazard or too quickly," he exclaimed; "we must meditate if we desire to be striking; too much improvisation stupidly empties the mind. gentlemen, no haste; let us mingle majesty with our gayety, eat contemplatively, and let _festina lente_ be our rule. we must not hurry. look at the spring; if it goes ahead too fast it is floored, that is to say, nipped by frost. excessive zeal ruins the peach and apricot trees; excessive zeal kills the grace and joy of good dinners. no zeal, gentlemen; grimaud de la reynière is of the same opinion as talleyrand." a dull rebellion broke out in the party. "tholomyès, leave us at peace," said blachevelle. "down with the tyrant!" said fameuil. "sunday exists," listolier added. "we are sober," fameuil remarked again. "tholomyès," said blachevelle, "contemplate my calmness" (_mon calme._) "you are the marquis of that ilk," tholomyès replied. this poor pun produced the effect of a stone thrown into a pond. the marquis de montcalm was a celebrated royalist at that day. all the frogs were silent. "my friends," tholomyès shouted with the accent of a man who is recapturing his empire, "recover yourselves: too great stupor should not greet this pun which has fallen from the clouds, for everything that falls in such a manner is not necessarily worthy of enthusiasm and respect. far be from me to insult puns: i honor them according to their deserts, and no more. all the most august, sublime, and charming in humanity and perhaps beyond humanity have played upon words. christ made a pun on saint peter, moses on isaac, Æschylus on polynices, and cleopatra on octavius. and note the fact that cleopatra's pun preceded the battle of actium, and that, were it not for that pun, no one would know the town of toryne, a greek word signifying a potladle. this granted, i return to my exhortation. brethren, i repeat, no zeal, no row, no excess, even in witticisms, gayeties, merriments, and playing upon words. listen to me, for i possess the prudence of amphiaralis and the baldness of cæsar; there should be a limit even to the rebus. _est modus in rebus_. there should be a limit even to dinners; you are fond of apple-puffs, ladies, but no abuse; even in the matter of apple-puffs, good sense and art are needed. gluttony chastises the glutton. _gula punit gulax_. indigestion was sent into the world to read a lecture to our stomachs; and, bear this in mind, each of our passions, even love, has a stomach which must not be filled too full. in all things, we must write betimes the word _finis_, we must restrain ourselves when it becomes urgent, put a bolt on our appetites, lock up our fancy, and place ourselves under arrest. the wise man is he who knows how, at a given moment, to arrest himself. place some confidence in me: it does not follow because i know a little law, as my examinations prove; because i have supported a thesis in latin as to the mode in which torture was applied at rome at the time when munatius demens was _quæstor parricidæ_; and because i am going to be a doctor at law, as it seems,--it does not necessarily follow, i say, that i am an ass. i recommend to you moderation in your desires. as truly as my name is félix tholomyès, i am speaking the truth. happy the man who, when the hour has struck, forms an heroic resolve, and abdicates like sylla or origen." favourite was listening with profound attention. "félix!" she said, "what a pretty name; i like it. it is latin, and means happy." tholomyès continued,-- "gentlemen, be suspicious of women; woe to the man who surrenders himself to a woman's fickle heart; woman is perfidious and tortuous, and detests the serpent from professional jealousy. it is the shop opposite." "tholomyès," blachevelle shouted, "you are drunk." "i hope so!" "then be jolly." "i am agreeable," tholomyès answered. and filling his glass, he rose. "glory to wine! _nunc te, bacche, canam_! pardon, ladies, that is spanish, and the proof, señoras, is this: as the country is, so is the measure. the arroba of castille contains sixteen quarts, the cantaro of alicante twelve, the almuda of the canary isles twenty-five, the cuartino of the balearic isles twenty-six, and czar peter's boot thirty. long live the czar who was great, and his boot which was greater still! ladies, take a friend's advice; deceive your neighbor, if you think proper. the peculiarity of love is to wander, and it is not made to crouch like an english servant girl who has stiff knees from scrubbing. it is said that error is human; but i say, error is amorous. ladies, i idolize you all. o zéphine, you with your seductive face, you would be charming were you not all askew; your face looks for all the world as if it had been sat upon by mistake. as for favourite, o ye nymphs and muses! one day when blachevelle was crossing the gutter in the rue guérin-boisseau, he saw a pretty girl with white, well-drawn-up stockings, who displayed her legs. the prologue was pleasing, and blachevelle fell in love; the girl he loved was favourite. o favourite, you have ionian lips; there was a greek painter of the name of euphorion, who was christened the painter of lips, and this greek alone would be worthy to paint your mouth. listen to me: before you there was not a creature deserving of the name; you are made to receive the apple like venus, or to eat it like eve. beauty begins with you, and you deserve a patent for inventing a pretty woman. you alluded to my name just now; it affected me deeply, but we must be distrustful of names, for they may be deceptive. my name is félix, and yet i am not happy. let us not blindly accept the indications they give us; it would be a mistake to write to liège for corks, or to pau for gloves.[ ] miss dahlia, in your place i would call myself rose, for a flower ought to smell agreeably, and a woman have spirit. i say nothing of fantine, for she is a dreamer, pensive and sensitive; she is a phantom, having the form of a nymph, and the modesty of a nun, who has strayed into the life of a grisette, but takes shelter in illusions, and who sings, prays, and looks at the blue sky, without exactly knowing what she sees or what she does, and who, with her eyes fixed on heaven, wanders about a garden in which there are more birds than ever existed. o fantine, be aware of this fact: i, tholomyès, am an illusion--why, the fair girl of chimeræ is not even listening to me! all about her is freshness, suavity, youth, and sweet morning brightness. o fantine, girl worthy to be called margaret or pearl, you are a woman of the fairest east. ladies, here is a second piece of advice; do not marry, for marriage is a risk, and you had better shun it. but nonsense! i am wasting my words! girls are incurable about wedlock; and all that we sages may say will not prevent waistcoat-makers and shoebinders from dreaming of husbands loaded with diamonds. well, beauties, be it so: but bear this in mind, you eat too much sugar. you have only one fault, o women, and that is nibbling sugar. o rodent sex, your pretty little white teeth adore sugar. now, listen to this: sugar is a salt, and salts are of a drying nature, and sugar is the most drying of all salts. it pumps out the fluidity of the blood through the veins; this produces first coagulation and then solidifying of the blood; from this come tubercles in the lungs, and thence death. hence do not nibble sugar, and you will live. i now turn to my male hearers: gentlemen, make conquests. rob one another of your well-beloved ones remorselessly; change partners, for, in love there are no friends. whenever there is a pretty woman, hostilities are opened; there is no quarter, but war to the knife! a pretty woman is a _casus belli_ and a flagrant offence. all the invasions of history were produced by petticoats; for woman is the lawful prey of man. romulus carried off the sabine women, william the saxon women, and cæsar the roman women. a man who is not loved soars like a vulture over the mistresses of other men: and for my part, i offer all these unfortunate widowers, bonaparte's sublime proclamation to the army of italy: 'soldiers, you want for everything; the enemy possesses it.'" here tholomyès broke off. "take a breather, my boy," said blachevelle. at the same time the other three gentlemen struck up to a doleful air one of those studio-songs, as destitute of sense as the motion of a tree or the sound of the wind, which are composed extemporaneously, either in rhyme or prose, which spring up from the smoke of pipes, and fly away with it. the song was not adapted to calm tholomyès' inspiration; hence he emptied his glass, filled it again, and began once more. "down with wisdom! forget all i have said to you. be neither prudish, nor prudent, nor _prud'hommes._ i drink the health of jollity: so let us be jolly. let us complete our legal studies by folly and good food, for indigestion should run in a curricle with digests. let justinian be the male and merriment the female! live, o creation; the world is one large diamond; i am happy, and the birds are astounding. what a festival all around us; the nightingale is a gratis elleviou. summer, i salute thee. o luxembourg! o ye georgics of the rue madame and the allée de l'observatoire! o ye dreaming soldiers! o ye delicious nurses, who, while taking care of children, fancy what your own will be like! the pampas of america would please me if i had not the arcades of the odéon. my soul is flying away to the virgin forests and the savannas. all is glorious: the flies are buzzing in the light; the sun has sneezed forth the humming-bird. kiss me, fantine!" he made a mistake and kissed favourite. [footnote : an untranslatable pun based on _chêne-liège_ and _peau_.] chapter viii. the death of a horse. "it is a better dinner at Édon's than at bombarda's," zéphine exclaimed. "i prefer bombarda," blachevelle declared; "there is more luxury: it is more asiatic. just look at the dining-room with its mirrors: look at the knives, they are silver-handled here and bone at Édon's; now, silver is more precious than bone." "excepting for those persons who have a silver chin," tholomyès observed. he was looking at this moment at the dome of the invalides which was visible from bombardas window. there was a pause. "tholomyès," cried fameuil, "just now, listolier and i had a discussion." "a discussion is good," replied tholomyès; "a quarrel is better." "we discussed philosophy; which do you prefer, descartes or spinoza?" "désangiers," said tholomyès. this judgment rendered, he continued,-- "i consent to live: all is not finished in the world. since men can still be unreasonable, i return thanks to the immortal gods. men lie, but they laugh: they affirm, but they doubt: and something unexpected issues from the syllogism. this is grand: there are still in the world human beings who can joyously open and shut the puzzle-box of paradox. this wine, ladies, which you are drinking so calmly, is madeira, you must know, grown at coural das freiras, which is three hundred and seventeen _toises_ above the sea level. attention while drinking! three hundred and seventeen _toises_, and m. bombarda, the magnificent restaurateur, lets you have these three hundred and seventeen _toises_ for four francs, fifty centimes." tholomyès drained his glass and then continued: "honor to bombarda! he would be equal to memphis of elephanta if he could ladle me up an almeh, and to thygelion of cheronea if he could procure me an hetæra! for, ladies, there were bombardas in greece and egypt, as apuleius teaches us. alas! ever the same thing and nothing new: nothing is left unpublished in the creation of the creator. 'nothing new under the sun,' says solomon: _amor omnibus idem_, and carabine gets into the st. cloud fly-boat with carabin, just as aspasia embarked with pericles aboard the samos fleet. one last word: do you know who aspasia was, ladies? although she lived at a time when women had no soul, she was a soul: a soul of a pink and purple hue, hotter than fire, and fresher than the dawn. aspasia was a creature in whom the two extremes of woman met. she was a prostituted goddess: socrates _plus_ manon lescaut." tholomyès, when started, would hardly have been checked, had not a horse fallen in the street at this very moment. through the shock, cart and orator stopped short. it was a beauce mare, old and lean and worthy of the knacker, dragging a very heavy cart. on getting in front of bombarda's, the beast, exhausted and worn out, refused to go any further, and this incident produced a crowd. the carter, swearing and indignant, had scarce time to utter with the suitable energy the sacramental word, "rascal!" backed up by a pitiless lash, ere the poor beast fell, never to rise again. tholomyès' gay hearers turned their heads away on noticing the confusion, while he wound up his speech by the following sad strophe,-- "elle était de ce monde où coucous et carrosses, ont le même destin, et, rosse, elle a vécu ce que vivent les rosses, l'espace d'un: mâtin!" "poor horse!" fantine said with a sigh; and dahlia shouted,-- "why, here is fantine beginning to feel pity for horses: how can she be such a fool!" at this moment, favourite crossed her arms and threw her head back; she then looked boldly at tholomyès, and said,-- "well, how about the surprise?" "that is true, the hour has arrived," tholomyès answered. "gentlemen, it is time to surprise the ladies. pray wait for us a moment." "it begins with a kiss," said blacheve. "on the forehead," tholomyès added. each solemnly kissed the forehead of his mistress: then they proceeded to the door in indian file, with a finger on their lip. favourite clapped her hands as they went out. "it is amusing already," she said. "do not be long," fantine murmured, "we are waiting for you." chapter ix. the joyous end of joy. the girls, when left alone, leaned out of the windows, two by two, talking, looking out, and wondering. they watched the young men leave the bombarda cabaret arm in arm; they turned round, made laughing signs, and disappeared in that dusty sunday mob which once a week invaded the champs Élysées. "do not be long," fantine cried. "what will they bring us?" said zéphine. "i am certain it will be pretty," said dahlia. "for my part," favourite added, "i hope it will be set in gold." they were soon distracted by the movement on the quay, which they could notice through the branches of the lofty trees, and which greatly amused them. it was the hour for the mail-carts and stages to start, and nearly all those bound for the south and west at that time passed through the champs Élysées. most of them followed the quay and went out by the passy barrier. every moment some heavy vehicle, painted yellow and black, heavily loaded and rendered shapeless by trunks and valises, dashed through the crowd with the sparks of a forge, the dust representing the smoke. this confusion amused the girls. "what a racket!" exclaimed favourite; "one might say a pile of chairs was flying about." one of these vehicles, which could hardly be distinguished through the branches, stopped for a moment, and then started again at a gallop. this surprised fantine. "that is strange," she said; "i fancied that the diligence never stopped." favourite shrugged her shoulders. "this fantine is really amazing, and is surprised at the simplest things. let us suppose that i am a traveller and say to the guard of the stage-coach, "i will walk on and you can pick me up on the quay as you pass." the coach passes, sees me, stops and takes me in. that is done every day; you are ignorant of life, my dear." some time elapsed; all at once favourite started as if waking from sleep. "well," she said, "where is the surprise?" "oh yes," dahlia continued, "the famous surprise." "they are a long time," said fantine. just as fantine had ended this sigh, the waiter who had served the dinner came in; he held in his hand something that resembled a letter. "what is that?" favourite asked. the waiter answered,-- "it is a paper which the gentlemen left for you, ladies." "why did you not bring it to us at once?" "because the gentlemen," the waiter went on, "ordered that it should not be delivered to you for an hour." favourite snatched the paper from the waiter's hands; it was really a letter. "stay," she said; "there is no address, but the following words are written on it: this is the surprise." she quickly opened the letter and read (she could read):-- "well-beloved,--know that we have relatives: perhaps you are not perfectly cognizant what they are; it means fathers and mothers in the civil, puerile, and honest code. well, these relatives are groaning; these old people claim us as their own; these worthy men and women call us prodigal sons. they desire our return home, and offer to kill the fatted calf. we obey them, as we are virtuous; at the hour when you read this, five impetuous steeds will be conveying us back to our papas and mammas. 'we decamp,' as bossuet said; "we are going, gone." we are flying away in the arms of laffitte and on the wings of gaillard. the toulouse coach is dragging us away from the abyss, and that abyss is yourselves, pretty dears. we are re-entering society, duty, and order, at a sharp trot, and at the rate of nine miles an hour. it is important for our country that we should become, like everybody else, prefects, fathers of a family, game-keepers, and councillors of state. revere us, for we are sacrificing ourselves. dry up your tears for us rapidly, and get a substitute speedily. if this letter lacerates your hearts, treat it in the same fashion. good-by. for nearly two years we rendered you happy, so do not owe us any grudge. (signed) blachevelle. fameuil. listolier. felix tholomyÈs. "p.s. the dinner is paid for." the four girls looked at each other, and favourite was the first to break the silence. "i don't care," she said, "it is a capital joke." "it is very funny," zéphine remarked. "it must have been blachevelle who had that idea," favourite continued; "it makes me in love with him. so soon as he has left me i am beginning to grow fond of him; the old story." "no," said dahlia, "that is an idea of tholomyès. that can be easily seen." "in that case," favourite retorted, "down with blachevelle and long live tholomyès!" and they burst into a laugh, in which fantine joined. an hour later though, when she returned to her bed-room, she wept: this was, as we have said, her first love; she had yielded to tholomyès as to a husband, and the poor girl had a child. book iv. to confide is sometimes to abandon. chapter i. two mothers meet. there was in the first quarter of this century a sort of pot-house at montfermeil, near paris, which no longer exists. it was kept by a couple of the name of thénardier, and was situated in the rue du boulanger. over the door a board was nailed to the wall, and on this board was painted something resembling a man carrying on his back another man, who wore large gilt general's epaulettes with silver stars; red dabs represented blood, and the rest of the painting was smoke, probably representing a battle. at the bottom could be read the inscription: the sergeant of waterloo. though nothing is more common than a cart at a pot-house door, the vehicle, or rather fragment of a vehicle, which blocked up the street in front of the sergeant of waterloo, one spring evening in , would have certainly attracted the attention of any painter who had passed that way. it was the forepart of one of those wains used in wood countries for dragging planks and trunks of trees; it was composed of a massive iron axle-tree, in which a heavy pole was imbedded and supported by two enormous wheels. the whole thing was sturdy, crushing, and ugly, and it might have passed for the carriage of a monster gun. the ruts had given the wheels, felloes, spokes, axle-tree, and pole a coating of mud, a hideous yellow plaster, much like that with which cathedrals are so often adorned. the wood-work was hidden by mud and the iron by rust. under the axle-tree was festooned a heavy chain suited for a convict goliath. this chain made you think, not of the wood it was intended to secure, but of the mastodons and mammoths for which it would have served as harness; it had the air of a cyclopean and superhuman bagne, and seemed removed from some monster. homer would have bound polyphemus with it, and shakespeare, caliban. why was this thing at this place in the street? first, to block it up; secondly, to finish the rusting process. there is in the old social order a multitude of institutions which may be found in the same way in the open air, and which have no other reasons for being there. the centre of the chain hung rather close to the ground, and on the curve, as on the rope of a swing, two little girls were seated on this evening, in an exquisite embrace, one about two years and a half, the other eighteen months; the younger being in the arms of the elder. an artfully-tied handkerchief prevented them from falling, for a mother had seen this frightful chain, and said, "what a famous plaything for my children!" the two children, who were prettily dressed and with some taste, were radiant; they looked like two roses among old iron; their eyes were a triumph, their healthy cheeks laughed; one had auburn hair, the other was a brunette; their innocent faces had a look of surprise; a flowering shrub a little distance off sent to passers-by a perfume which seemed to come from them; and the younger displayed her nudity with the chaste indecency of childhood. above and around their two delicate heads, moulded in happiness and bathed in light, the gigantic wheels, black with rust, almost terrible, and bristling with curves and savage angles, formed the porch of a cavern, as it were. a few yards off, and seated in the inn door, the mother, a woman of no very pleasing appearance, but touching at this moment, was swinging the children by the help of a long cord, and devouring them with her eyes, for fear of an accident, with that animal and heavenly expression peculiar to maternity. at each oscillation the hideous links produced a sharp sound, resembling a cry of anger. the little girls were delighted; the setting sun mingled with the joy, and nothing could be so charming as this caprice of accident which had made of a titanic chain a cherub's swing. while playing with her little ones, the mother sang, terribly out of tune, a romance, very celebrated at that day,-- "il le faut, disait un guerrier." her song and contemplation of her daughters prevented her hearing and seeing what took place in the street. some one, however, had approached her, as she began the first couplets of the romance, and suddenly she heard a voice saying close to her ear,-- "you have two pretty children, madame." "--a la belle et tendre imogène," the mother answered, continuing her song, and then turned her head. a woman was standing a few paces from her, who also had a child, which she was carrying in her arms. she also carried a heavy bag. this woman's child was one of the most divine creatures possible to behold; she was a girl between two and three years of age, and could have vied with the two other little ones in the coquettishness of her dress. she had on a hood of fine linen, ribbons at her shoulders, and valenciennes lace in her cap. her raised petticoats displayed her white, dimpled, fine thigh; it was admirably pink and healthy, and her cheeks made one long to bite them. nothing could be said of her eyes, except that they were very large, and that she had magnificent lashes, for she was asleep. she was sleeping with the absolute confidence peculiar to her age; a mother's arms are made of tenderness, and children sleep soundly in them. as for the mother, she looked grave and sorrowful, and was dressed like a work-girl who was trying to become a country-woman again. she was young; was she pretty? perhaps so; but in this dress she did not appear so. her hair, a light lock of which peeped out, seemed very thick, but was completely hidden beneath a nun's hood; ugly, tight, and fastened under her chin. laughter displays fine teeth, when a person happens to possess them; but she did not laugh. her eyes looked as if they had not been dry for a long time; she had a fatigued and rather sickly air, and she looked at the child sleeping in her arms in the manner peculiar to a mother who has suckled her babe. a large blue handkerchief, like those served out to the invalids, folded like a shawl, clumsily hid her shape. her hands were rough and covered with red spots, and her forefinger was hardened and torn by the needle. she had on a brown cloth cloak, a cotton gown, and heavy shoes. it was fantine. it was difficult to recognize her, but, after an attentive examination, she still possessed her beauty. as for her toilette,--that aerian toilette of muslin and ribbons which seemed made of gayety, folly, and music, to be full of bells, and perfumed with lilacs,--it had faded away like the dazzling hoar-frost which looks like diamonds in the sun; it melts, and leaves the branch quite black. ten months had elapsed bince the "good joke." what had taken place during these ten months? we can guess. after desertion, want. fantine at once lost sight of favourite, zéphine, and dahlia, for this tie broken on the side of the men separated the women. they would have been greatly surprised a fortnight after had they been told that they were friends, for there was no reason for it. fantine remained alone when the father of her child had gone away--alas! such ruptures are irrevocable. she found herself absolutely isolated; she had lost her habit of working, and had gained a taste for pleasure. led away by her _liaison_ with tholomyès to despise the little trade she knew, she had neglected her connection, and it was lost. she had no resource. fantine could hardly read, and could not write; she had been merely taught in childhood to sign her name, and she had sent a letter to tholomyès, then a second, then a third, through a public writer, but tholomyès did not answer one of them. one day fantine heard the gossips say, while looking at her daughter, "children like that are not regarded seriously, people shrug their shoulders at them." then she thought of tholomyès who shrugged his shoulders at her child, and did not regard the innocent creature seriously, and her heart turned away from this man. what was she to do now? she knew not where to turn. she had committed a fault, but the foundation of her nature, we must remember, was modesty and virtue. she felt vaguely that she was on the eve of falling into distress, and gliding into worse. she needed courage, and she had it. the idea occurred to her of returning to her native town m. sur m. there some one might know her, and give her work; but she must hide her fault. and she vaguely glimpsed at the possible necessity of a separation more painful still than the first; her heart was contracted, but she formed her resolution. fantine, as we shall see, possessed the stern bravery of life. she had already valiantly given up dress; she dressed in calico, and had put all her silk ribbons and laces upon her daughter, the only vanity left her, and it was a holy one. she sold all she possessed, which brought her in francs; and when she had paid her little debts, she had only about francs left. at the age of two-and-twenty, on a fine spring morning, she left paris, carrying her child on her back. any one who had seen them pass would have felt pity for them; the woman had nothing in the world but her child, and the child nothing but her mother in her world. fantine had suckled her child; this had strained her chest, and she was coughing a little. we shall have no further occasion to speak of m. félix tholomyès. we will merely say that twenty years later, in the reign of louis philippe, he was a stout country lawyer, influential and rich, a sensible elector, and a very strict juror, but always a man of pleasure. about mid-day, after resting herself now and then by travelling from time to time, at the rate of three or four leagues an hour, in what were then called the "little vehicles of the suburbs of paris," fantine found herself at montfermeil, in the ruelle boulanger. as she passed the sergeant of waterloo, the two little girls in their monster swing had dazzled her, and she stopped before this vision of joy. there are charms in life, and these two little girls were one for this mother. she looked at them with great emotion, for the presence of angels is an announcement of paradise. she thought she saw over this inn the mysterious here of providence. these two little creatures were evidently happy! she looked then, and admired them with such tenderness that at the moment when the mother was drawing breath between two verses of her song, she could not refrain from saying to her what we have already recorded. "you have two pretty children, madame." the most ferocious creatures are disarmed by a caress given to their little ones. the mother raised her head, thanked her, and bade her sit down on the door bench. the two women began talking. "my name is madame thénardier," the mother of the little ones said; "we keep this inn." then returning to her romance, she went on humming,-- "il le faut, je suis chevalier, et je pars pour la palestine." this madame thénardier was a red-headed, thin, angular woman, the soldier's wife in all its ugliness, and, strange to say, with a languishing air which she owed to reading romances. she was a sort of lackadaisical male-woman. old romances, working on the imaginations of landladies, produce that effect. she was still young, scarce thirty. if this woman, now sitting, had been standing up, perhaps her height and colossal proportions, fitting for a show, would have at once startled the traveller, destroyed her confidence, and prevented what we have to record. a person sitting instead of standing up--destinies hang on this. the woman told her story with some modification. she was a work-girl, her husband was dead; she could get no work in paris, and was going to seek it elsewhere, in her native town. she had left paris that very morning on foot; as she felt tired from carrying her child, she had travelled by the stage-coach to villemomble, from that place she walked to montfermeil. the little one had walked a little, but not much, for she was so young, and so she had been obliged to cany her, and the darling had gone to sleep,--and as she said this she gave her daughter a passionate kiss, which awoke her. the babe opened her eyes, large blue eyes like her mother's, and gazed at what? nothing, everything, with that serious and at times stern air of infants, which is a mystery of their luminous innocence in the presence of our twilight virtues. we might say that they feel themselves to be angels, and know us to be men. then the child began laughing, and, though its mother had to check it, slipped down to the ground with the undauntable energy of a little creature wishing to run. all at once, she noticed the other two children in their swing, stopped short, and put out her tongue as a sign of admiration. mother thénardier unfastened her children, took them out of the swing, and said,-- "play about, all three." children soon get familiar, and in a minute the little thénardiers were playing with the new-comer at making holes in the ground, which was an immense pleasure. the stranger child was very merry; the goodness of the mother is written in the gayety of the baby. she had picked up a piece of wood which she used as a spade, and was energetically digging a grave large enough for a fly. the two went on talking. "what 's the name of your bantling?" "cosette." for cosette read euphrasie, for that was the child's real name; but the mother had converted euphrasie into cosette, through that gentle, graceful instinct peculiar to mothers and the people, which changes josefa into pépita, and françoise into sellette. it is a species of derivation which deranges and disconcerts the entire science of etymologists. we know a grandmother who contrived to make out of theodore, gnon. "what is her age?" "going on to three." "just the same age as my eldest." in the mean time the children were grouped in a posture of profound anxiety and blessedness; an event had occurred. a large worm crept out of the ground, and they were frightened, and were in ecstasy; their radiant brows touched each other; and they looked like three heads in a halo. "how soon children get to know one another," mother thénardier exclaimed; "why, they might be taken for three sisters." the word was probably the spark which the other mother had been waiting for; she seized the speaker's hand, looked at her fixedly, and said,-- "will you take charge of my child for me?" the woman gave one of those starts of surprise which are neither assent nor refusal. fantine continued,-- "look you, i cannot take the child with me to my town, for when a woman has a baby, it is a hard matter for her to get a situation. people are so foolish in our part. it was heaven that made me pass in front of your inn; when i saw your little ones so pretty, so clean, so happy, it gave me a turn. i said to myself, "she is a kind mother." it is so; they will be three sisters. then i shall not be long before i come back. will you take care of my child?" "we will see, said mother thénardier. "i would pay six francs a month." here a man's voice cried from the back of the tap-room,-- "can't be done under seven, and six months paid in advance." "six times seven are forty-two," said the landlady. "i will pay it," said the mother. "and seventeen francs in addition for extra expenses," the man's voice added. "total fifty-seven francs," said madame thénardier; and through these figures she sang vaguely,-- "il le faut, disait un guerrier." "i will pay it," the mother said; "i have eighty francs, and shall have enough left to get home on foot. i shall earn money there, and so soon as i have a little i will come and fetch my darling." the man's voice continued,-- "has the little one a stock of clothing?" "it is my husband," said mother thénardier. "of course she has clothes, poor little treasure. i saw it was your husband; and a fine stock of clothes too, a wonderful stock, a dozen of everything, and silk frocks like a lady. the things are in my bag." "they must be handed over," the man's voice remarked. "of course they must," said the mother; "it would be funny if i left my child naked." the master's face appeared. "all right," he said. the bargain was concluded, the mother spent the night at the inn, paid her money and left her child, fastened up her bag, which was now light, and started the next morning with the intention of returning soon. such departures are arranged calmly, but they entail despair. a neighbor's wife saw the mother going away, and went home saying,-- "i have just seen a woman crying in the street as if her heart was broken." when cosette's mother had gone, the man said to his wife,-- "that money will meet my bill for one hundred and ten francs, which falls due to-morrow, and i was fifty francs short. it would have been protested, and i should have had a bailiff put in. you set a famous mouse-trap with your young ones." "without suspecting it," said the woman. chapter ii a sketch of two ugly faces. the captured mouse was very small, but the cat is pleased even with a thin mouse. who were the thénardiers? we will say one word about them for the present, and complete the sketch hereafter. these beings belonged to the bastard class, composed of coarse parvenus, and of degraded people of intellect, which stands between the classes called the middle and the lower, and combines some of the faults of the second with nearly all the vices of the first, though without possessing the generous impulse of the workingman or the honest regularity of the tradesman. theirs were those dwarf natures which easily become monstrous when any gloomy fire accidentally warms them. there was in the woman the basis of a witch, in the man the stuff for a beggar. both were in the highest degree susceptible of that sort of hideous progress which is made in the direction of evil. there are crab-like souls which constantly recoil toward darkness, retrograde in life rather than advance, employ experience to augment their deformity, incessantly grow worse, and grow more and more covered with an increasing blackness. this man and this woman had souls of this sort. thénardier was peculiarly troublesome to the physiognomist: there are some men whom you need only look at to distrust them, for they are restless behind and threatening in front. there is something of the unknown in them. we can no more answer for what they have done than for what they will do. the shadow they have in their glance denounces them. merely by hearing them say a word or seeing them make a gesture, we get a glimpse of dark secrets in their past, dark mysteries in their future. this thénardier, could he be believed, had been a soldier--sergeant, he said; he had probably gone through the campaign of , and had even behaved rather bravely, as it seems. we shall see presently how the matter really stood. the sign of his inn was an allusion to one of his exploits, and he had painted it himself, for he could do a little of everything--badly. it was the epoch when the old classical romance--which after being _clélie_, had now become _lodoiska_, and though still noble, was daily growing more vulgar, and had fallen from mademoiselle de scudéri to madame bournon malarme, and from madame de lafayette to madame barthélémy hadot--was inflaming the loving soul of the porters' wives in paris, and even extended its ravages into the suburbs. madame thénardier was just intelligent enough to read books of this nature, and lived on them. she thus drowned any brains she possessed, and, so long as she remained young and a little beyond, it gave her a sort of pensive attitude by the side of her husband, who was a scamp of some depth, an almost grammatical ruffian, coarse and delicate at the same time, but who, in matters of sentimentalism, read pigault lebrun, and, in "all that concerned the sex," as he said in his jargon, was a correct and unadulterated booby. his wife was some twelve or fifteen years younger than he, and when her romantically flowing locks began to grow gray, when the megæra was disengaged from the pamela, she was only a stout wicked woman, who had been pampered with foolish romances. as such absurdities cannot be read with impunity, the result was that her eldest daughter was christened Éponine; as for the younger, the poor girl was all but named gulnare, and owed it to a fortunate diversion made by a romance of ducray duminil's, that she was only christened azelma. by the way, all is not ridiculous and superficial in the curious epoch to which we are alluding, and which might be called the anarchy of baptismal names. by the side of the romantic element, which we have just pointed out, there was the social symptom. it is not rare at the present day for a drover's son to be called arthur, alfred, or alphonse, and for the viscount--if there are any viscounts left--to be called thomas, pierre, or jacques. this displacement which gives the "elegant" name to the plebeian, and the rustic name to the aristocrat, is nothing else than an eddy of equality. the irresistible penetration of the new breeze is visible in this as in everything else. beneath this apparent discord there is a grand and deep thing, the french revolution. chapter iii. the lark. it is not enough to be bad in order to prosper: and the pot-house was a failure. thanks to the fifty-seven francs, thénardier had been able to avoid a protest, and honor his signature; but the next month they wanted money again, and his wife took cosette's outfit to paris and pledged it for sixty francs. so soon as this sum was spent, the thénardiers grew accustomed to see in the little girl a child they had taken in through charity, and treated her accordingly. as she had no clothes, she was dressed in the left-off chemises and petticoats of the little thénardiers, that is to say, in rags. she was fed on the leavings of everybody, a little better than the dog, and a little worse than the cat. dog and cat were her usual company at dinner: for cosette ate with them under the table off a wooden trencher like theirs. the mother, who had settled, as we shall see hereafter, at m. sur m., wrote, or, to speak more correctly, had letters written every month to inquire after her child. the thénardiers invariably replied that cosette was getting on famously. when the first six months had passed, the mother sent seven francs for the seventh month, and continued to send the money punctually month by month. the year had not ended before thénardier said, "a fine thing that! what does she expect us to do with seven francs!" and he wrote to demand twelve. the mother, whom they persuaded that her child was happy and healthy, submitted, and sent the twelve francs. some natures cannot love on one side without hating on the other. mother thénardier passionately loved her own two daughters, which made her detest the stranger. it is sad to think that a mother's love can look so ugly. though cosette occupied so little room, it seemed to her as if her children were robbed of it, and that the little one diminished the air her daughters breathed. this woman, like many women of her class, had a certain amount of caresses and another of blows and insults to expend daily. if she had not had cosette, it is certain that her daughters, though they were idolized, would have received the entire amount; but the strange child did the service of diverting the blows on herself, while the daughters received only the caresses. cosette did not make a movement that did not bring down on her head a hailstorm of violent and unmerited chastisement. the poor weak child, unnecessarily punished, scolded, cuffed, and beaten, saw by her side two little creatures like herself who lived in radiant happiness. as madame thénardier was unkind to cosette, Éponine and azelma were the same; for children, at that age, are copies of their mother; the form is smaller, that is all. a year passed, then another, and people said in the village,-- "those thénardiers are worthy people. they are not well off, and yet they bring up a poor child left on their hands." cosette was supposed to be deserted by her mother; thénardier, however, having learned in some obscure way that the child was probably illegitimate, and that the mother could not confess it, insisted on fifteen francs a month, saying that the creature was growing and eating, and threatening to send her back. "she must not play the fool with me," he shouted, "or i'll let her brat fall like a bomb-shell into her hiding-place. i must have an increase." the mother paid the fifteen francs. year by year the child grew, and so did her wretchedness: so long as cosette was little, she was the scape-goat of the two other children; so soon as she began to be developed a little, that is to say, even before she was five years old, she became the servant of the house. at five years, the reader will say, that is improbable; but, alas! it is true. social suffering begins at any age. have we not recently seen the trial of a certain dumollard, an orphan, who turned bandit, and who from the age of five, as the official documents tell us, was alone in the world and "worked for a living and stole"? cosette was made to go on messages, sweep the rooms, the yard, the street, wash the dishes, and even carry heavy bundles. the thénardiers considered themselves the more justified in acting thus, because the mother, who was still at m. sur m., was beginning to pay badly, and was several months in arrear. if the mother had returned to montfermeil at the end of three years, she would not have recognized her child. cosette, so pretty and ruddy on her arrival in this house, was now thin and sickly. she had a timid look about her; "it's cunning!" said the thénardiers. injustice had made her sulky and wretchedness had made her ugly. nothing was left her but her fine eyes, which were painful to look at, because, as they were so large, it seemed as if a greater amount of sadness was visible in them. it was a heart-rending sight to see this poor child, scarce six years of age, shivering in winter under her calico rags, and sweeping the street before day-break, with an enormous broom in her small red hands and a tear in her large eyes. the country people called her "the lark;" the lower classes, who are fond of metaphors, had given the name to the poor little creature, who was no larger than a bird, trembling, frightened, and starting, who was always the first awake in the house and the village, and ever in the street or the fields by day-break. there was this difference, however,--this poor lark never sung. book v. the descent. chapter i. progress in black-bead making. what had become of the mother, who, according to the people of montfermeil, appeared to have deserted her child? where was she; what was she doing? after leaving her little cosette with the thénardiers, she had continued her journey and arrived at m. sur m. fantine had been away from her province for ten years, and while she had been slowly descending from misery to misery, her native town had prospered. about two years before, one of those industrial facts which are the events of small towns had taken place. the details are important, and we think it useful to develop them; we might almost say, to understand them. from time immemorial m. sur m. had as a special trade the imitation of english jet and german black beads. this trade had hitherto only vegetated, owing to the dearness of the material, which reacted on the artisan. at the moment when fantine returned to m. sur m. an extraordinary transformation had taken place in the production of "black articles." toward the close of , a man, a stranger, had settled in the town, and had the idea of substituting in this trade gum lac for rosin, and in bracelets particularly, scraps of bent plate for welded plate. this slight change was a revolution: it prodigiously reduced the cost of the material, which, in the first place, allowed the wages to be raised, a benefit for the town; secondly, improved the manufacture, an advantage for the consumer; and, thirdly, allowed the goods to be sold cheap, while tripling them the profit, an advantage for the manufacturer. in less than three years the inventor of the process had become rich, which is a good thing, and had made all rich about him, which is better. he was a stranger in the department; no one knew anything about his origin, and but little about his start. it was said that he had entered the town with but very little money, a few hundred francs at the most; but with this small capital, placed at the service of an ingenious idea, and fertilized by regularity and thought, he made his own fortune and that of the town. on his arrival at m. sur m. he had the dress, manners, and language of a workingman. it appears that on the very december night when he obscurely entered m. sur m. with his knapsack on his back, and a knotted stick in his hand, a great fire broke out in the town hall. this man rushed into the midst of the flames, and at the risk of his life saved two children who happened to belong to the captain of gendarmes; hence no one dreamed of asking for his passport. on this occasion his name was learned; he called himself father madeleine. chapter ii. madeleine. he was a man of about fifty, with a preoccupied air, and he was good-hearted. that was all that could be said of him. thanks to the rapid progress of this trade which he had so admirably remodelled, m. sur m. had become a place of considerable trade. spain, which consumes an immense amount of jet, gave large orders for it annually, and in this trade m. sur m. almost rivalled london and berlin. father madeleine's profits were so great, that after the second year he was able to build a large factory, in which were two spacious workshops, one for men, the other for women. any one who was hungry need only to come, and was sure to find there employment and bread. father madeleine expected from the men good-will, from the women purity, and from all probity. he had divided the workshops in order to separate the sexes, and enable the women and girls to remain virtuous. on this point he was inflexible, and it was the only one in which he was at all intolerant. this sternness was the more justifiable because m. sur m. was a garrison town, and opportunities for corruption abounded. altogether his arrival had been a benefit, and his presence was a providence. before father madeleine came everything was languishing, and now all led the healthy life of work. a powerful circulation warmed and penetrated everything; stagnation and wretchedness were unknown. there was not a pocket, however obscure, in which there was not a little money, nor a lodging so poor in which there was not a little joy. father madeleine employed every one. he only insisted on one thing,--be an honest man, a good girl! as we have said, in the midst of this activity, of which he was the cause and the pivot, father madeleine made his fortune, but, singularly enough in a plain man of business, this did not appear to be his chief care; he seemed to think a great deal of others and but little of himself. in , he was known to have a sum of , francs in lafitte's bank; but before he put that amount on one side he had spent more than a million for the town and the poor. the hospital was badly endowed, and he added ten beds. m. sur m. is divided into an upper and a lower town; the latter, in which he lived, had only one school, a poor tenement falling in ruins, and he built two, one for boys and one for girls. he paid the two teachers double the amount of their poor official salary, and to some one who expressed surprise, he said, "the first two functionaries of the state are the nurse and the schoolmaster." he had established at his own charges an infant-school, a thing at that time almost unknown in france, and a charitable fund for old and infirm workmen. as his factory was a centre, a new district, in which there was a large number of indigent families, rapidly sprang up around it, and he opened there a free dispensary. at the beginning, kind souls said, "he is a man who wants to grow rich:" when it was seen that he enriched the town before enriching himself, the same charitable souls said, "he is ambitious." this seemed the more likely because he was religious, and even practised to a certain extent a course which was admired in those days. he went regularly to hear low mass on sundays, and the local deputy, who scented rivalry everywhere, soon became alarmed about this religion. this deputy, who had been a member of the legislative council of the empire, shared the religious ideas of a father of the oratory, known by the name of fouché, duc d'otranto, whose creature and friend he had been. but when he saw the rich manufacturer madeleine go to seven o'clock low mass, he scented a possible candidate, and resolved to go beyond him; he chose a jesuit confessor, and went to high mass and vespers. ambition at that time was, in the true sense of the term, a steeple-chase. the poor profited by the alarm, for the honorable deputy founded two beds at the hospital, which made twelve. in , the report spread one morning through the town that, on the recommendation of the prefect, and in consideration of services rendered the town, father madeleine was about to be nominated by the king, mayor of m----. those who had declared the new-comer an ambitious man, eagerly seized this opportunity to exclaim: "did we not say so?" all m---- was in an uproar; for the rumor was well founded. a few days after, the appointment appeared in the _moniteur_, and the next day father madeleine declined the honor. in the same year, the new processes worked by him were shown at the industrial exhibition; and on the report of the jury, the king made the inventor a chevalier of the legion of honor. there was a fresh commotion in the little town; "well, it was the cross he wanted," but father madeleine declined the cross. decidedly the man was an enigma, but charitable souls got out of the difficulty by saying, "after all, he is a sort of adventurer." as we have seen, the country owed him much, and the poor owed him everything; he was so useful that he could not help being honored, and so gentle that people could not help loving him; his work-people especially adored him, and he bore this adoration with a sort of melancholy gravity. when he was known to be rich, "people in society" bowed to him, and he was called in the town monsieur madeleine; but his workmen and the children continued to call him father madeleine, and this caused him his happiest smile. in proportion as he ascended, invitations showered upon him; and society claimed him as its own. the little formal drawing-rooms, which had of course been at first closed to the artisan, opened their doors wide to the millionnaire. a thousand advances were made to him, but he refused them. this time again charitable souls were not thrown out: "he is an ignorant man of poor education. no one knows where he comes from. he could not pass muster in society, and it is doubtful whether he can read." when he was seen to be earning money, they said, "he is a tradesman;" when he scattered his money, they said, "he is ambitious;" when he rejected honor, they said, "he is an adventurer;" and when he repulsed society, they said, "he is a brute." in , five years after his arrival at m., the services he had rendered the town were so brilliant, the will of the whole country was so unanimous, that the king again nominated him mayor of the town. he refused again, but the prefect would not accept his refusal; all the notables came to beg, the people supplicated him in the open streets, and the pressure was so great, that he eventually assented. it was noticed that what appeared specially to determine him was the almost angry remark of an old woman, who cried to him from her door: "a good mayor is useful; a man should not recoil before the good he may be able to do." this was the third phase of his ascent; father madeleine had become monsieur madeleine, and monsieur madeleine became monsieur le maire. chapter iii. sums lodged at lafitte's. father madeleine remained as simple as he had been on the first day: he had gray hair, a serious eye, the bronzed face of a workingman, and the thoughtful face of a philosopher. he habitually wore a broad-brimmed hat, and a long coat of coarse cloth buttoned up to the chin. he performed his duties as mayor, but beyond that lived solitary; he spoke to few persons, shunned compliments, smiled to save himself from talking, and gave to save himself from smiling. the women said of him, "what a good bear!" and his great pleasure was to walk about the fields. he always took his meals with an open book before him, and he had a well-selected library. he was fond of books, for they are calm and sure friends. in proportion as leisure came with fortune, he seemed to employ it in cultivating his mind: it was noticed that with each year he spent in m---- his language became more polite, chosen, and gentle. he was fond of taking a gun with him on his walks, but rarely fired; when he did so by accident, he had an infallible aim, which was almost terrific. he never killed an inoffensive animal or a small bird. though he was no longer young, he was said to possess prodigious strength: he lent a hand to any one who needed it, raised a fallen horse, put his shoulder to a wheel stuck in the mud, or stopped a runaway bull by the horns. his pockets were always full of half-pence when he went out, and empty when he came home; whenever he passed through a village, the ragged children ran merrily after him, and surrounded him like a swarm of gnats. it was supposed that he must have formerly lived a rustic life, for he had all sorts of useful secrets which he taught the peasants. he showed them how to destroy blight in wheat by sprinkling the granary and pouring into the cracks of the boards a solution of common salt, and to get rid of weevils by hanging up everywhere, on the walls and roots, flowering orviot. he had recipes to extirpate from arable land tares and other parasitic plants which injure wheat, and would defend a rabbit hutch from rats by the mere smell of a little guinea pig, which he placed in it. one day he saw some countrymen very busy in tearing up nettles; he looked at the pile of uprooted and already withered plants and said: "they are dead, and yet they are good if you know how to use them. when nettles are young, the tops are an excellent vegetable. when they are old, they have threads and fibre like hemp and flax. when chopped up, nettles are good for fowls; when pounded, excellent for horned cattle. nettle-seed mixed with the food renders the coats of cattle shining, and the root mixed with salt produces a fine yellow color. the nettle is also excellent hay, which can be mown twice; and what does it require? a little earth, no care, and no cultivation. the only thing is that the seed falls as it ripens, and is difficult to garner. if a little care were taken, the nettle would be useful; but, being neglected, it becomes injurious, and is then killed. how men resemble nettles!" he added after a moment's silence: "my friends, remember this,--there are no bad herbs or bad men; there are only bad cultivators." the children also loved him, because he could make them pretty little toys of straw and cocoa-nut shells. when he saw a church door hung with black, he went in; he went after a funeral as other persons do after a christening. the misfortunes of others attracted him, owing to his great gentleness; he mingled with friends in mourning, and with the priests round a coffin. he seemed to be fond of hearing those mournful psalms which are full of the vision of another world. with his eye fixed on heaven, he listened, with a species of aspiration toward all the mysteries of infinitude, to the sad voice singing on the brink of the obscure abyss of death. he did a number of good actions, while as careful to hide them as if they were bad. he would quietly at night enter houses, and furtively ascend the stairs. a poor fellow, on returning to his garret, would find that his door had been opened, at times forced, during his absence; the man would cry that a robber had been there, but when he entered, the first thing he saw was a gold coin left on the table. the robber who had been there was father madeleine. he was affable and sad: people said, "there is a rich man who does not look proud: a lucky man who does not look happy." some persons asserted that he was a mysterious character, and declared that no one ever entered his bed-room, which was a real anchorite's cell, furnished with winged hour-glasses and embellished with cross-bones and death's-heads. this was so often repeated that some elegant and spiteful ladies of m---- came to him one day, and said, "monsieur le maire, _do_ show us your bed-room, for people say that it is a grotto." he smiled and led them straightway to the "grotto;" they were terribly punished for their curiosity, as it was a bed-room merely containing mahogany furniture as ugly as all furniture of that sort, and hung with a paper at twelve sous a roll. they could not notice anything but two double-branched candlesticks of an antiquated pattern, standing on the mantel-piece, and seeming to be silver, "because they were hall-marked,"--a remark full of the wit of small towns. people did not the less continue to repeat, however, that no one ever entered this bed-room, and that it was a hermitage, a hole, a tomb. they also whispered that he had immense sums lodged with lafitte, and with this peculiarity that things were always at his immediate disposal, "so that," they added, "m. madeleine could go any morning to lafitte's, sign a receipt, and carry off his two or three millions of francs in ten minutes." in reality, these "two or three millions" were reduced, as we have said, to six hundred and thirty or forty thousand francs. chapter iv. m. madeleine goes into mourning. at the beginning of , the papers announced the decease of m. myriel, bishop of d----, "surnamed monseigneur welcome," who had died in the odor of sanctity at the age of eighty-two. the bishop of d----, to add here a detail omitted by the papers, had been blind for several years, and was satisfied to be blind as his sister was by his side. let us say parenthetically that to be blind and to be loved is one of the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness upon this earth, where nothing is perfect. to have continually at your side a wife, a sister, a daughter, a charming being, who is there because you have need of her, and because she cannot do without you; to know yourself indispensable to a woman who is necessary to you; to be able constantly to gauge her affection by the amount of her presence which she gives you, and to say to yourself: "she devotes all her time to me because i possess her entire heart;" to see her thoughts in default of her face; to prove the fidelity of a being in the eclipse of the world; to catch the rustling of a dress like the sound of wings; to hear her come and go, leave the room, return, talk, sing, and then to dream that you are the centre of those steps, those words, those songs; to manifest at every moment your own attraction, and feel yourself powerful in proportion to your weakness; to become in darkness and through darkness the planet round which this angel gravitates,--but few felicities equal this. the supreme happiness of life is the conviction of being loved for yourself, or, more correctly speaking, loved in spite of yourself; and this conviction the blind man has. in this distress to be served is to be caressed. does he want for anything? no. when you possess love, you have not lost the light. and what a love! a love entirely made of virtues. there is no blindness where there is certainty: the groping soul seeks a soul and finds it, and this found and tried soul is a woman. a hand supports you, it is hers; a mouth touches your forehead, it is hers; you hear a breathing close to you, it is she. to have everything she has, from her worship to her pity, to be never left, to have this gentle weakness to succor you, to lean on this unbending reed, to touch providence with her hands, and be able to take her in your arms: oh! what heavenly rapture is this! the heart, that obscure celestial flower, begins to expand mysteriously, and you would not exchange this shadow for all the light! the angel soul is thus necessarily there; if she go away, it is to return; she disappears like a dream, and reappears like reality. you feel heat approaching you, it is she. you overflow with serenity, ecstasy, and gayety; you are a sunbeam in the night. and then the thousand little attentions, the nothings which are so enormous in this vacuum! the most ineffable accents of the human voice employed to lull you, and taking the place of the vanished universe. you are caressed with the soul: you see nothing, but you feel yourself adored; it is a paradise of darkness. it was from this paradise that monseigneur welcome had passed to the other. the announcement of his death was copied by the local paper of m----, and on the next day monsieur madeleine appeared dressed in black, with crape on his hat. the mourning was noticed in the town, and people gossiped about it, for it seemed to throw a gleam, over m. madeleine's origin. it was concluded that he was somehow connected with the bishop. "he is in mourning for the bishop," was said in drawing-rooms; this added inches to m. madeleine's stature, and suddenly gave him a certain consideration in the noble world of m----. the microscopic faubourg st. germain of the town thought about putting an end to the coventry of m. madeleine, the probable relation of a bishop, and m. madeleine remarked the promotion he had obtained in the increased love of the old ladies, and the greater amount of smiles from the young. one evening a lady belonging to this little great world, curious by right of seniority, ventured to say, "m. le maire is doubtless a cousin of the late bishop of d----?" he answered, "no, madame." "but," the dowager went on, "you wear mourning for him." "in my youth i was a footman in his family," was the answer. another thing noticed was, that when a young savoyard passed through the town, looking for chimneys to sweep, the mayor sent for him, asked his name, and gave him money. the savoyard boys told each other of this, and a great many passed through m----. chapter v. vague flashes on the horizon. by degrees and with time all the opposition died out; at first there had been calumnies against m. madeleine,--a species of law which all rising men undergo; then it was only backbiting; then it was only malice; and eventually all this faded away. the respect felt for him was complete, unanimous, and cordial, and the moment arrived in when the name of the mayor was uttered at m---- with nearly the same accent as "monseigneur the bishop" had been said at d---- in . people came for ten leagues round to consult m. madeleine; he settled disputes, prevented lawsuits, and reconciled enemies. everybody was willing to accept him as arbiter, and it seemed as if he had the book of natural law for his soul. it was a sort of contagious veneration, which in six or seven years spread all over the country-side. only one man in the town and bailiwick resisted this contagion, and whatever m. madeleine might do, remained rebellious to it, as if a sort of incorruptible and imperturbable instinct kept him on his guard. it would appear, in fact, as if there is in certain men a veritable bestial instinct, though pure and honest as all instincts are, which creates sympathies and antipathies; which fatally separates one nature from another; which never hesitates; which is not troubled, is never silent, and never contradicts itself; which is clear in its obscurity, infallible, imperious; refractory to all the counsels of intelligence and all the solvents of the reason, and which, whatever the way in which destinies are made, surely warns the man-dog of the man-cat, and the man-fox of the presence of the man-lion. it often happened when m. madeleine passed along a street, calmly, kindly, and greeted by the blessings of all, that a tall man, dressed in an iron-gray great-coat, armed with a thick cane, and wearing a hat with turned-down brim, turned suddenly and looked after him till he disappeared; folding his arms, shaking his head, and raising his upper lip with the lower as high as his nose, a sort of significant grimace, which may be translated,--"who is that man? i am certain that i have seen him somewhere. at any rate, i am not his dupe." this person, who was grave, with an almost menacing gravity, was one of those men who, though only noticed for a moment, preoccupy the observer. his name was javert, and he belonged to the police, and performed at m---- the laborious but useful duties of an inspector. he had not seen madeleine's beginning, for he was indebted for the post he occupied to the secretary of count angle, at that time prefect of police at paris. when javert arrived at m----, the great manufacturer's fortune was made, and father madeleine had become monsieur madeleine. some police officers have a peculiar face, which is complicated by an air of baseness, blended with an air of authority. javert had this face, less the baseness. in our conviction, if souls were visible, we should distinctly see the strange fact that every individual of the human species corresponds to some one of the species of animal creation; and we might occurred to the thinker, that, from the oyster to the eagle, from the hog to the tiger, all animals are in man, and that each of them is in a man; at times several of them at once. animals are nothing else than the figures of our virtues and our vices, wandering before our eyes, the visible phantoms of our souls. god shows these to us in order to make us reflect; but, as animals are only shadows, god has not made them capable of education in the complete sense of the term, for of what use would it be? on the other hand, our souls being realities and having an end of their own, god has endowed them with intelligence; that is to say, possible education. social education, properly carried out, can always draw out of a soul, no matter its nature, the utility which it contains. now, if the reader will admit with me for a moment that in every man there is one of the animal species of creation, it will be easy for us to say what javert the policeman was. the asturian peasants are convinced that in every litter of wolves there is a dog which is killed by the mother, for, otherwise, when it grew it would devour the other whelps. give a human face to this dog-son of a she-wolf, and we shall have javert. he was born in prison; his mother was a fortune-teller, whose husband was at the galleys. when he grew up he thought that he was beyond the pale of society, and despaired of ever entering it. he noticed that society inexorably keeps at bay two classes of men,--those who attack it, and those who guard it; he had only a choice between these two classes, and at the same time felt within him a rigidness, regularity, and probity, combined with an inexpressible hatred of the race of bohemians to which he belonged. he entered the police, got on, and at the age of forty was an inspector. in his youth he was engaged in the southern bagnes. before going further, let us explain the words "human face" which we applied just now to javert. his human face consisted of a stub-nose, with two enormous nostrils, toward which enormous whiskers mounted on his cheeks. you felt uncomfortable the first time that you saw these two forests and these two caverns. when javert laughed, which was rare and terrible, his thin lips parted, and displayed, not only his teeth, but his gums, and a savage flat curl formed round his nose, such as is seen on the muzzle of a wild beast. javert when serious was a bull-dog; when he laughed he was a tiger. to sum up, he had but little skull and plenty of jaw; his hair hid his forehead and fell over his brows; he had between his eyes a central and permanent frown, like a star of anger, an obscure glance, a pinched-up and formidable mouth, and an air of ferocious command. this man was made up of two very simple and relatively excellent feelings, but which he almost rendered bad by exaggerating them,--respect for authority and hatred of rebellion; and in his eyes, robbery, murder, and every crime were only forms of rebellion. he enveloped in a species of blind faith everybody in the service of the state, from the prime minister down to the game-keeper. he covered with contempt, aversion, and disgust, every one who had once crossed the legal threshold of evil. he was absolute, and admitted of no exceptions; on one side he said: "a functionary cannot be mistaken, a magistrate can do no wrong;" on the other he said: "they are irremediably lost: no good can come of them." he fully shared the opinion of those extreme minds that attribute to the human law some power of making or verifying demons, and that place a styx at the bottom of society. he was stoical, stern, and austere; a sad dreamer, and humble yet haughty, like all fanatics. his glance was a gimlet, for it was cold and piercing. his whole life was composed in the two words, watching and overlooking. he had introduced the straight line into what is the most tortuous thing in the world; he was conscious of his usefulness, had religious respect for his duties, and was a spy as well as another is a priest. woe to the wretch who came into his clutches! he would have arrested his father if escaping from prison, and denounced his mother had she broken her ban. and he would have done it with that sort of inner satisfaction which virtue produces. with all this he spent a life of privation, isolation, self-denial, chastity. he was the implacable duty, the police comprehended as the spartans comprehended sparta, a pitiless watchman, a savage integrity, a marble-hearted spy, a brutus contained in a vidocq. javert's entire person expressed the man who spies and hides himself. the mystic school of joseph de maîstre, which at this epoch was seasoning with high cosmogony what were called the ultra journals, would not have failed to say that javert was a symbol. his forehead could not be seen, for it was hidden by his hat; his eyes could not be seen, because they were lost under his eye-brows; his chin was plunged into his cravat, his hands were covered by his cuffs, and his cane was carried under his coat. but when the opportunity arrived, there could be seen suddenly emerging from all this shadow, as from an ambush, an angular, narrow forehead, a fatal glance, a menacing chin, enormous hands, and a monstrous rattan. in his leisure moments, which were few, he read, though he hated books, and this caused him not to be utterly ignorant, as could be noticed through a certain emphasis in his language. as we have said, he had no vice; when satisfied with himself, he indulged in a pinch of snuff, and that was his connecting link with humanity. our readers will readily understand that javert was the terror of all that class whom the yearly statistics of the minister of justice designate under the rubric--vagabonds. the name of javert, if uttered, set them to flight; the face of javert, if seen, petrified them. such was this formidable man. javert was like an eye ever fixed on m. madeleine, an eye fall of suspicion and conjectures. m. madeleine noticed it in the end; but he considered it a matter of insignificance. he did not even ask javert his motive, he neither sought nor shunned him, and endured his annoying glance without appearing to notice it. he treated javert like every one else, easily and kindly. from some remarks that dropped from javert, it was supposed that he had secretly sought, with that curiosity belonging to the breed, and in which there is as much instinct as will, all the previous traces which father madeleine might have left. he appeared to know, and sometimes said covertly, that some one had obtained certain information in a certain district about a certain family which had disappeared. once he happened to say, talking to himself, "i believe that i have got him;" then he remained thoughtful for three days without saying a word. it seems that the thread which he fancied he held was broken. however, there cannot be any theory really infallible in a human creature, and it is the peculiarity of instinct that it can be troubled, thrown out, and routed. if not, it would be superior to intelligence, and the brute would have a better light than man. javert was evidently somewhat disconcerted by m. madeleine's complete naturalness and calmness. one day, however, his strange manner seemed to produce an impression on m. madeleine. the occasion was as follows. chapter vi. father fauchelevent. when m. madeleine was passing one morning through an unpaved lane in the town, he heard a noise and saw a group at some distance, to which he walked up. an old man, known as father fauchelevent, had fallen under his cart, and his horse was lying on the ground. this fauchelevent was one of the few enemies m. madeleine still had at this time. when madeleine came to these parts, fauchelevent, a tolerably well-educated peasant, was doing badly in business; and he saw the simple workman grow rich, while he, a master, was being ruined. this filled him with jealousy, and he had done all in his power, on every possible occasion, to injure madeleine. then bankruptcy came, and in his old days, having only a horse and cart left, and no family, he turned carter to earn a living. the horse had both legs broken and could not get up, while the old man was entangled between the wheels. the fall had been so unfortunate, that the whole weight of the cart was pressing on his chest, and it was heavily loaded. fauchelevent uttered lamentable groans, and attempts had been made, though in vain, to draw him out; any irregular effort, any clumsy help or shock, might kill him. it was impossible to extricate him except by raising the cart from below, and javert, who came up at the moment of the accident, had sent to fetch a jack. when m. madeleine approached, the mob made way respectfully. "help!" old fauchelevent cried; "is there no good soul who will save an old man?" m. madeleine turned to the spectators. "have you a jack?" "they have gone to fetch one," a peasant answered. "how soon will it be here?" "well, the nearest is at flachot the blacksmith's, but it cannot be brought here under a good quarter of an hour." "a quarter of an hour!" madeleine exclaimed. it had rained on the previous night, the ground was soft, the cart sunk deeper into it every moment, and more and more pressed the old man's chest. it was evident that his ribs would be broken within five minutes. "it is impossible to wait a quarter of an hour," said m. madeleine to the peasants who were looking on. "we must." "but do you not see that the cart is sinking into the ground?" "hang it! so it is." "listen to me," madeleine continued; "there is still room enough for a man to slip under the cart and raise it with his back. it will only take half a minute, and the poor man can be drawn out. is there any one here who has strong loins? there are five louis to be earned." no one stirred. "ten louis," madeleine said. his hearers looked down, and one of them muttered, "a man would have to be deucedly strong, and, besides, he would run a risk of being smashed." "come," madeleine began again, "twenty louis." the same silence. "it is not the good-will they are deficient in," a voice cried. m. madeleine turned and recognized javert: he had noticed him when he came up. javert continued,-- "it is the strength. a man would have to be tremendously strong to lift a cart like that with his back." then, looking fixedly at m. madeleine, he continued, laying a marked stress on every word he uttered,-- "monsieur madeleine, i never knew but _one_ man capable of doing what you ask." madeleine started, but javert continued carelessly, though without taking his eyes off madeleine,-- "he was a galley-slave." "indeed!" said madeleine. "at the toulon bagne." madeleine turned pale; all this while the cart was slowly settling down, and father fauchelevent was screaming,-- "i am choking: it is breaking my ribs: a jack! something--oh!" madeleine looked around him. "is there no one here willing to earn twenty louis and save this poor old man's life?" no one stirred, and javert repeated,-- "i never knew but one man capable of acting as a jack, and it was that convict." "oh, it is crushing me!" the old man yelled. madeleine raised his head, met javert's falcon eye still fixed on him, gazed at the peasants, and sighed sorrowfully. then, without saying a word, he fell on his knees, and, ere the crowd had time to utter a cry, was under the cart. there was a frightful moment of expectation and silence. madeleine almost lying flat under the tremendous weight, twice tried in vain to bring his elbows up to his knees. the peasants shouted: "father madeleine, come out!" and old fauchelevent himself said: "monsieur madeleine, go away! i must die, so leave me; you will be killed too." madeleine made no answer; the spectators gasped; the wheels had sunk deeper, and it was now almost impossible for him to get out from under the cart. all at once the enormous mass shook, the cart slowly rose, and the wheels half emerged from the rut. a stifled voice could be heard crying, "make haste, help!" it was madeleine, who had made a last effort. they rushed forward, for the devotion of one man had restored strength and courage to all. the cart was lifted by twenty arms, and old fauchelevent was saved. madeleine rose; he was livid, although dripping with perspiration: his clothes were torn and covered with mud. the old man kissed his knees, and called him his savior, while madeleine had on his face a strange expression of happy and celestial suffering, and turned his placid eye on javert, who was still looking at him. [illustration: father fauchelevent.] chapter vii fauchelevent becomes a gardener at paris. fauchelevent had put out his knee-cap in his fall, and father madeleine had him carried to an infirmary he had established for his workmen in his factory, and which was managed by two sisters of charity. the next morning the old man found a thousand-franc note by his bed-side, with a line in m. madeleine's handwriting, "payment for your cart and horse, which i have bought:" the cart was smashed and the horse dead. fauchelevent recovered, but his leg remained stiff, and, hence m. madeleine, by the recommendation of the sisters and his curé, procured him a situation as gardener at a convent in the st. antoine quarter of paris. some time after, m. madeleine was appointed mayor; the first time javert saw him wearing the scarf which gave him all authority in the town, he felt that sort of excitement a dog would feel that scented a wolf in its master's clothes. from this moment he avoided him as much as he could, and when duty imperiously compelled him, and he could not do otherwise than appear before the mayor, he addressed him with profound respect. the prosperity created in m---- by father madeleine had, in addition to the visible signs we have indicated, another symptom, which, though not visible, was not the less significant, for it is one that never deceives: when the population is suffering, when work is scarce and trade bad, tax-payers exhaust and exceed the time granted them, and the state spends a good deal of money in enforcing payment. when work abounds, when the country is happy and rich, the taxes are paid cheerfully, and cost the state little. we may say that wretchedness and the public exchequer have an infallible thermometer in the cost of collecting the taxes. in seven years these costs had been reduced three-fourths in the arrondissement of m----, which caused it to be frequently quoted by m. de villele, at that time minister of finances. such was the state of the town when fantine returned to it. no one remembered her, but luckily the door of m. madeleine's factory was like a friendly face; she presented herself at it, and was admitted to the female shop. as the trade was quite new to fantine, she was awkward at it and earned but small wages; but that was enough, for she had solved the problem,--she was earning her livelihood. chapter viii. madame victurnien spends thirty francs on morality. when fantine saw that she could earn her own living, she had a moment of joy. to live honestly by her own toil, what a favor of heaven! a taste for work really came back to her: she bought a looking-glass, delighted in seeing in it her youth, her fine hair and fine teeth; forgot many things, only thought of cosette, and her possible future, and was almost happy. she hired a small room and furnished it, on credit, to be paid for out of her future earnings,--this was a relic of her irregular habits. not being able to say that she was married, she was very careful not to drop a word about her child. at the outset, as we have seen, she punctually paid the thénardiers; and as she could only sign her name, she was compelled to write to them through the agency of a public writer. it was noticed that she wrote frequently. it was beginning to be whispered in the shop that fantine "wrote letters," and was "carrying on." no one spies the actions of persons so much as those whom they do not concern. why does this gentleman never come till nightfall? why does so-and-so never hang up his key on thursdays? why does he always take back streets? why does madame always get out of her hackney coach before reaching her house? why does she send out to buy a quire of note-paper, when she has a desk full? and so on. there are people who, in order to solve these inquiries, which are matters of utter indifference to them, spend more money, lavish more time, and take more trouble, than would be required for ten good deeds: and they do it gratuitously for the pleasure, and they are only paid for their curiosity with curiosity. they will follow a gentleman or a lady for whole days, will stand sentry at the corner of a street or in a gateway at night in the cold and rain; corrupt messengers, intoxicate hackney coachmen and footmen, buy a lady's-maid, and make a purchase of a porter,--why? for nothing; for a pure desire to see, know, and find out--it is a simple itch for talking. and frequently these secrets, when made known, these mysteries published, these enigmas brought to daylight, entail catastrophes, duels, bankruptcies, ruin of families, to the great delight of those who found it all out, without any personal motives, through pure instinct. it is a sad thing. some persons are wicked solely through a desire to talk, and this conversation, which is gossip in the drawing-room, scandal in the ante-room, is like those chimneys which consume wood rapidly; they require a great deal of combustible, and this combustible is their neighbor. fantine was observed then, and besides, more than one girl was jealous of her light hair and white teeth. it was noticed that she often wiped away a tear in the shop; it was when she was thinking of her child, perhaps of the man she had loved. it is a painful labor to break off all the gloomy connecting links with the past. it was a fact that she wrote, at least twice a month, and always to the same address, and paid the postage. they managed to obtain the address: "monsieur thénardier, publican, montfermeil." the public writer, who could not fill his stomach with wine without emptying his pocket of secrets, was made to talk at the wine-shop; and, in short, it was known that fantine had a child. a gossip undertook a journey to montfermeil, spoke to the thénardiers, and on her return said, "i do not begrudge my thirty francs, for i have seen the child." the gossip who did this was a gorgon of the name of madame victurnien, guardian and portress of everybody's virtue. she was fifty-six years of age, and covered the mask of ugliness with the mask of old age. astounding to say, this old woman had once been young; in her youth, in ' , she had married a monk, who escaped from the cloisters in a red cap, and passed over from the bernardines to the jacobins. she was dry, crabbed, sharp, thorny, and almost venomous, while remembering the monk whose widow she was and who had considerably tamed her. at the restoration she had turned bigot, and so energetically, that the priests forgave her her monk. she had a small estate which she left with considerable pallor to a religious community, and she was very welcome at the episcopal palace of arras. this madame victurnien, then, went to montfermeil, and when she returned, said, "i have seen the child." all this took time, and fantine had been more than a year at the factory, when one morning the forewoman handed her francs in the mayor's name, and told her that she was no longer engaged, and had better leave the town, so the mayor said. it was in this very month that the thénardiers, after asking for francs instead of , raised a claim for instead of . fantine was startled; she could not leave the town, for she owed her rent and for her furniture, and francs would not pay those debts. she stammered a few words of entreaty, but the forewoman intimated to her that she must leave the shop at once; moreover, fantine was but an indifferent workwoman. crushed by shame more than disgrace, she left the factory, and returned to her room: her fault then was now known to all! she did not feel the strength in her to say a word; she was advised to see the mayor, but did not dare do so. the mayor gave her francs because he was kind, and discharged her because he was just; and she bowed her head to the sentence. chapter ix. success of madame victurnien. the monk's widow, then, was good for something. m. madeleine, however, knew nothing of all this; and they were combinations of events of which the world is fall. m. madeleine made it a rule hardly, ever to enter the female work-room; he had placed at its head an old maid, whom the curé had given him, and he had entire confidence in her. she was really a respectable, firm, equitable, and just person, fall of that charity which consists in giving, but not possessing to the same extent the charity which comprehends and pardons. m. madeleine trusted to her in everything, for the best men are often forced to delegate their authority, and it was with this fall power, and in the conviction she was acting rightly, that the forewoman tried, condemned, and executed fantine. as for the francs, she had given them out of a sum m. madeleine had given her for alms and helping the workwomen, and which she did not account for. fantine tried to get a servant's place in the town, and went from house to house, but no one would have anything to do with her. she could not leave the town, for the broker to whom she was in debt for her furniture--what furniture!--said to her, "if you go away, i will have you arrested as a thief." the landlord to whom she owed her rent, said to her, "you are young and pretty, you can pay." she divided the francs between the landlord and the broker, gave back to the latter three-fourths of the goods, only retaining what was absolutely necessary, and found herself without work, without a trade, with only a bed, and still owing about francs. she set to work making coarse shirts for the troops, and earned at this sixpence a day, her daughter costing her fourpence. it was at this moment she began to fall in arrears with the thénardiers. an old woman, however, who lit her candle for her when she came in at nights, taught her the way to live in wretchedness. behind living on little, there is living on nothing: there are two chambers,--the first is obscure, the second quite dark. fantine learned how she could do entirely without fire in winter, how she must get rid of a bird that cost her a halfpenny every two days, how she could make a petticoat of her blanket and a blanket of her petticoat, and how candle can be saved by taking your meals by the light of the window opposite. we do not know all that certain weak beings, who have grown old in want and honesty, can get out of a halfpenny, and in the end it becomes a talent. fantine acquired this sublime talent, and regained a little courage. at this period she said to a neighbor, "nonsense, i say to myself; by only sleeping for five hours and working all the others at my needle, i shall always manage to earn bread, at any rate. and then, when you are sad, you eat less. well! suffering, anxiety, a little bread on one side and sorrow on the other, all will support me." in this distress, it would have been a strange happiness to have had her daughter with her, and she thought of sending for her. but, what! make her share her poverty? and then she owed money to the thénardiers! how was she to pay it and the travelling expenses? the old woman who had given her lessons in what may be called indigent life, was a pious creature, poor, and charitable to the poor and even to the rich, who could just write her name, "marguerite," and believed in god, which is knowledge. there are many such virtues down here, and one day they will be up above, for this life has a morrow. at the beginning fantine had been so ashamed that she did not dare go out. when she was in the streets, she perceived that people turned round to look at her and pointed to her. every one stared at her, and no one bowed to her; the cold bitter contempt of the passers-by passed through her flesh and her mind like an east wind. in small towns an unhappy girl seems to be naked beneath the sarcasm and curiosity of all. in paris, at least no one knows you, and that obscurity is a garment. oh! how glad she would have been to be back in paris. she must grow accustomed to disrespect, as she had done to poverty. gradually she made up her mind, and after two or three months shook off her shame, and went as if nothing had occurred. "it is no matter to me," she said. she came and went, with head erect and with a bitter smile, and felt that she was growing impudent. madame victurnien sometimes saw her pass from her window; she noticed the distress of "the creature whom she had made know her place," and congratulated herself. the wicked have a black happiness. excessive labor fatigued fantine, and the little dry cough she had grew worse. she sometimes said to her neighbor, "marguerite, just feel how hot my hands are!" still, in the morning, when she passed an old broken comb through her glorious hair, which shone like floss silk, she had a minute of happy coquettishness. chapter x. result of her success. she had been discharged toward the end of winter; the next summer passed away, and winter returned. short days and less work; in winter there is no warmth, no light, no mid-day, for the evening is joined to the morning; there is fog, twilight, the window is gray, and you cannot see clearly. the sky is like a dark vault, and the sun has the look of a poor man. it is a frightful season; winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man. her creditors pressed her, for fantine was earning too little, and her debts had increased. the thénardiers, being irregularly paid, constantly wrote her letters, whose contents afflicted her, and postage ruined her. one day they wrote her that little cosette was quite naked, that she wanted a flannel skirt, and that the mother must send at least ten francs for the purpose. she crumpled the letter in her hands all day, and at nightfall went to a barber's at the corner of the street, and removed her comb. her splendid light hair fell down to her hips. "what fine hair!" the barber exclaimed. "what will you give me for it?" she asked. "ten francs." "cut it off." she bought a skirt and sent to the thénardiers; it made them furious, for they wanted the money. they gave it to Éponine, and the poor lark continued to shiver. fantine thought, "my child is no longer cold, for i have dressed her in my hair." she wore small round caps which hid her shorn head, and she still looked pretty in them. a dark change took place in fantine's heart. when she found that she could no longer dress her hair, she began to hate all around her. she had long shared the universal veneration for father madeleine: but, through the constant iteration that he had discharged her and was the cause of her misfortune, she grew to hate him too, and worse than the rest. when she passed the factory she pretended to laugh and sing. an old workwoman who once saw her doing so, said, "that's a girl who will come to a bad end." she took a lover, the first who offered, a man she did not love, through bravado and with rage in her heart. he was a scoundrel, a sort of mendicant musician, an idle scamp, who beat her, and left her, as she had chosen him, in disgust. she adored her child. the lower she sank, the darker the gloom became around her, the more did this sweet little angel gleam in her soul. she said: "when i am rich, i shall have my cosette with me;" and she laughed. she did not get rid of her cough, and she felt a cold perspiration in her back. one day she received from the thénardiers a letter to the following effect: "cosette is ill with a complaint which is very prevalent in the country. it is called miliary fever. she must have expensive drugs, and that ruins us, and we cannot pay for them any longer. if you do not send us forty francs within a week, the little one will be dead." she burst into a loud laugh, and said to her old neighbor, "oh, what funny people! they want forty francs; where do they expect me to get them? what fools those peasants are!" still, she went to a staircase window and read the letter again; then she went out into the street, still laughing and singing. some one who met her said, "what has made you so merry?" and she answered, "it is a piece of stupidity some country folk have written; they want forty francs of me--the asses." as she passed across the market-place she saw a crowd surrounding a vehicle of a strange shape, on the box of which a man dressed in red was haranguing. he was a dentist going his rounds, who offered the public complete sets of teeth, opiates, powders, and elixirs. fantine joined the crowd and began laughing like the rest at this harangue, in which there was slang for the mob, and scientific jargon for respectable persons. the extractor of teeth saw the pretty girl laughing, and suddenly exclaimed,-- "you have fine teeth, my laughing beauty. if you like to sell me your two top front teeth, i will give you a napoleon apiece for them." "what a horrible idea!" fantine exclaimed. "two napoleons!" an old toothless woman by her side grumbled; "there's a lucky girl." fantine ran away and stopped her ears not to hear the hoarse voice of the man, who shouted,-- "think it over, my dear: two napoleons may be useful. if your heart says yes, come to-night to the _tillac d'argent_, where you will find me." fantine, when she reached home, was furious, and told her good neighbor marguerite what had happened. "can you understand it? is he not an abominable man? how can people like that be allowed to go about the country? pull out my two front teeth! why, i should look horrible; hair grows again, but teeth! oh, the monster! i would sooner throw myself head first out of a fifth-floor window on to the pavement." "and what did he offer you?" marguerite asked. "two napoleons." "that makes forty francs." "yes," said fantine, "that makes forty francs." she became thoughtful and sat down to her work. at the end of a quarter of an hour, she left the room and read thénardier's letter again on the staircase. when she returned, she said to marguerite,-- "do you know what a miliary fever is?" "yes," said the old woman, "it is an illness." "does it require much medicine?" "oh, an awful lot!" "does it attack children?" "more than anybody." "do they die of it?" "plenty," said marguerite. fantine went out and read the letter once again on the staircase. at night she went out, and could be seen proceeding in the direction of the rue de paris, where the inns are. the next morning, when marguerite entered fantine's room before day-break, for they worked together, and they made one candle do for them both, she found her sitting on her bed, pale and chill. her cap had fallen on her knees, and the candle had been burning all night, and was nearly consumed. marguerite stopped in the doorway, horrified by this enormous extravagance, and exclaimed,-- "oh, lord! the candle nearly burnt out! something must have happened." then she looked at fantine, who turned her close-shaven head towards her, and seemed to have grown ten years older since the previous day. "gracious heaven!" said marguerite, "what is the matter with you, fantine?" "nothing," the girl answered; "i am all right. my child will not die of that frightful disease for want of assistance, and i am satisfied." as she said this, she pointed to two napoleons that glistened on the table. "oh, lord!" said marguerite; "why,'t is a fortune; where ever did you get them from?" "i had them by me," fantine answered. at the same time she smiled, the candle lit up her face, and it was a fearful smile. a reddish saliva stained the corner of her lips, and she had a black hole in her mouth; the two teeth were pulled out. she sent the forty francs to montfermeil. it had only been a trick of the thénardiers to get money, for cosette was not ill. fantine threw her looking-glass out of the window; she had long before left her cell on the second floor for a garret under the roof,--one of those tenements in which the ceiling forms an angle with the floor, and you knock your head at every step. the poor man can only go to the end of his room, as to the end of his destiny, by stooping more and more. she had no bed left; she had only a rag she called a blanket, a mattress on the ground, and a bottomless chair; a little rose-tree she had had withered away, forgotten in a corner. in another corner she had a pail to hold water, which froze in winter, and in which the different levels of the water remained marked for a long time by rings of ice. she had lost her shame, and now lost her coquetry; the last sign was, that she went out with dirty caps. either through want of time or carelessness, she no longer mended her linen, and as the heels of her stockings wore out, she tucked them into her shoes. she mended her worn-out gown with rags of calico, which tore away at the slightest movement. the people to whom she owed money made "scenes," and allowed her no rest; she met them in the street, she met them again on the stairs. her eyes were very bright, and she felt a settled pain at the top of her left shoulder-blade, while she coughed frequently. she deeply hated father madeleine, and sewed for seventeen hours a day; but a speculator hired all the female prisoners, and reduced the prices of the free workmen to nine sous a day. seventeen hours' work for nine sous! her creditors were more pitiless than ever, and the broker, who had got back nearly all her furniture, incessantly said to her, "when are you going to pay me, you cheat?" what did they want of her, good heavens! she felt herself tracked, and something of the wild beast was aroused in her. about the same time thénardier wrote to her, that he had decidedly waited too patiently, and that unless he received one hundred francs at once, he would turn poor cosette, who had scarce recovered, out of doors into the cold, and she must do what she could or die. "one hundred francs!" fantine thought; "but where is the trade in which i can earn one hundred sous a day? well! i will sell all that is left!" and the unfortunate girl went on the streets. chapter xl christus nos liberavit. what is this story of fantine? it is society buying a slave. of whom? of misery, of hunger, of cold, of loneliness, of desertion, of destitution. cursed bargain! a soul for a morsel of bread. misery offers its wares, and society accepts. the holy law of jesus christ governs our civilization, but it does not yet pervade it. they say that slavery has disappeared from european civilization. that's a mistake. it still exists; but it weighs now only on woman, and its name is prostitution. it weighs on woman; that is, on grace, on helplessness, on beauty, on motherhood. this is not one of the least reproaches upon man. at the point which we have reached in this painful drama, there is nothing left in fantine of her former self. she became marble when she became mud. whoever touches her is chilled. she is handed along, she submits to you, but she forgets your presence. she is the type of dishonor and rigidity. life and social order have said to her their last word. everything that can happen to her, has already happened. she has felt all, borne all, endured all, suffered all, lost all, wept for all. she is resigned with a resignation which is as like indifference as death is like sleep. she shuns nothing now. she fears nothing now. let the whole sky fall on her, let the whole ocean pass over her! what does she care? she is a sponge soaked full. at least she thinks so; but it is never safe to think that you have drained the cup of misfortune, or that you have reached the end of anything. alas! what are all these destinies driven along thus helter-skelter? where are they going? why are they what they are? he who knows this sees the whole shadow. he is one alone. his name is god. chapter xii. m. bamatabois' idleness. there is in all small towns, and there was at m---- in particular, a class of young men, who squander fifteen hundred francs a year in the provinces with the same air as those of the same set in paris devour two hundred thousand. they are beings of the great neutral species; geldings, parasites, nobodies, who possess a little land, a little folly, and a little wit, who would be rustics in a drawing-room, and believe themselves gentlemen in a pot-house. they talk about my fields, my woods, my peasants, horses, the actresses, to prove themselves men of taste; quarrel with the officers, to prove themselves men of war; shoot, smoke, yawn, drink, smell of tobacco, play at billiards, watch the travellers get out of the stage-coach, live at the café, dine at the inn, have a dog that gnaws bones under the table, and a mistress who places the dishes upon it; haggle over a son, exaggerate the fashions, admire tragedy, despise women, wear out their old boots, copy london through paris, and paris through pont-à-mousson; grow stupidly old, do not work, are of no use, and do no great harm. had m. félix tholomyès remained in his province and not seen paris, he would have been one of them. if they were richer, people would say they are dandies; if poorer, they are loafers; but they are simply men without occupation. among them there are bores and bored, dreamers, and a few scamps. at that day, a dandy was composed of a tall collar, a large cravat, a watch and seals, three waist-coats over one another, blue and red inside, a short-waisted olive-colored coat, with a swallow tail, and a double row of silver buttons, sewn on close together, and ascending to the shoulders, and trousers of a lighter olive, adorned on the seams with an undetermined but always uneven number of ribs, varying from one to eleven, a limit which was never exceeded. add to this, slipper-boots with iron-capped heels, a tall, narrow-brimmed hat, hair in a tuft, an enormous cane, and a conversation improved by potier's puns; over and above all these were spurs and moustachios, for at that period moustachios indicated the civilian, and spurs the pedestrian. the provincial dandy wore longer spurs and more ferocious moustachios. it was the period of the struggle of the south american republics against the king of spain, of bolivar against morillo. narrow-brimmed hats were royalist, and called morillos, while the liberals wore broad brims, which were called bolivars. eight or ten months after the events we have described in the previous chapter, toward the beginning of january, and on a night when snow had fallen, one of these dandies--a man of "right sentiments," for he wore a morillo, and was also warmly wrapped up in one of the large spanish cloaks which at that time completed the fashionable costume in cold weather--was amusing himself by annoying a creature who was prowling about in a low-neck balldress, and with flowers in her hair, before the window of the officers' café. this dandy was smoking, as that was a decided mark of fashion. each time this woman passed him, he made some remark to her, which he fancied witty and amusing, as: "how ugly you are!--why don't you go to kennel?--you have no teeth," etc., etc. this gentleman's name was monsieur bamatabois. the woman, a sad-dressed phantom walking backwards and forwards in the snow, made him no answer, did not even look at him, but still continued silently and with a gloomy regularity her walk, which, every few minutes, brought her under his sarcasms, like the condemned soldier running the gauntlet. the slight effect produced doubtless annoyed the idler, for taking advantage of her back being turned, he crept up behind her, stooped to pick up a handful of snow, and suddenly plunged it between her bare shoulders. the girl uttered a yell, turned, leaped like a panther on the man, and dug her nails into his face with the most frightful language that could fall from a guard-room into the gutter. these insults, vomited by a voice rendered hoarse by brandy, hideously issued from a mouth in which the two front teeth were really missing. it was fantine. at the noise, the officers left the café in a throng, the passers-by stopped, and a laughing, yelling, applauding circle was made round these two beings, in whom it was difficult to recognize a man and a woman,--the man struggling, his hat on the ground, the woman striking with feet and fists, bareheaded, yelling, without teeth or hair, livid with passion, and horrible. all at once a tall man quickly broke through the crowd, seized the woman's satin dress, which was covered with mud, and said: "follow me." the woman raised her hand, and her passionate voice suddenly died out. her eyes were glassy, she grew pale instead of being livid, and trembled with fear. she had recognized javert. the dandy profited by this incident to make his escape. chapter xiii. the police office. javert broke through the circle and began walking with long strides toward the police office, which is at the other end of the market-place, dragging the wretched girl after him. she allowed him to do so mechanically, and neither he nor she said a word. the crowd of spectators, in a paroxysm of delight, followed them with coarse jokes, for supreme misery is an occasion for obscenities. on reaching the police office, which was a low room, heated by a stove, and guarded by a sentry, and having a barred glass door opening on the street, javert walked in with fantine, and shut the door after him, to the great disappointment of the curious, who stood on tip-toe, and stretched out their necks in front of the dirty window trying to see. curiosity is gluttony, and seeing is devouring. on entering, fantine crouched down motionless in a corner like a frightened dog. the sergeant on duty brought in a candle. javert sat down at a table, took a sheet of stamped paper from his pocket, and began writing. women of this class are by the french laws left entirely at the discretion of the police: they do what they like with them, punish them as they think proper, and confiscate the two sad things which they call their trade and their liberty. javert was stoical: his grave face displayed no emotion, and yet he was seriously and deeply preoccupied. it was one of those moments in which he exercised without control, but with all the scruples of a strict conscience, his formidable discretionary power. at this instant he felt that his high stool was a tribunal, and himself the judge. he tried and he condemned: he summoned all the ideas he had in his mind round the great thing he was doing. the more he examined the girl's deed, the more outraged he felt: for it was evident that he had just seen a crime committed. he had seen in the street, society, represented by a householder and elector, insulted and attacked by a creature beyond the pale of everything. a prostitute had assaulted a citizen, and he, javert, had witnessed it. he wrote on silently. when he had finished, he affixed his signature, folded up the paper, and said to the sergeant as he handed it to him: "take these men and lead this girl to prison." then he turned to fantine, "you will have six months for it." the wretched girl started. "six months, six months' imprisonment!" she cried; "six months! and only earn seven sous a day! why, what will become of cosette, my child, my child! why, i owe more than one hundred francs to thénardier, m. inspector; do you know that?" she dragged herself across the floor, dirtied by the muddy boots of all these men, without rising, with clasped hands and taking long strides with her knees. "monsieur javert," she said, "i ask for mercy. i assure you that i was not in the wrong; if you had seen the beginning, you would say so; i swear by our saviour that i was not to blame. that gentleman, who was a stranger to me, put snow down my back. had he any right to do that when i was passing gently, and doing nobody a harm? it sent me wild, for you must know i am not very well, and besides he had been abusing me--"you are ugly, you have no teeth." i am well aware that i have lost my teeth. i did nothing, and said to myself, "this gentleman is amusing himself." i was civil to him, and said nothing, and it was at this moment he put the snow down my back. my good m. javert, is there no one who saw it to tell you that this is the truth? i was, perhaps, wrong to get into a passion, but at the moment, as you are aware, people are not masters of themselves, and i am quick-tempered. and then, something so cold put down your back, at a moment when you are least expecting it! it was; wrong to destroy the gentleman's hat, but why has he gone away? i would ask his pardon. oh! i would willingly do so. let me off this time. m. javert, perhaps you do not know that in prison you can only earn seven sous a day; it is not the fault of government, but you only earn seven sous; and just fancy! i have one hundred francs to pay, or my child will be turned into the street. oh! i cannot have her with me, for my mode of life is so bad! oh, my cosette, oh, my little angel, what ever will become of you, poor darling! i must tell you that the thénardiers are inn-keepers, peasants, and unreasonable; they insist on having their money. oh, do not send me to prison! look you, the little thing will be turned into the streets in the middle of winter to go where she likes, and you must take pity on that, my kind m. javert. if she were older she could earn her living, but at her age it is impossible. i am not a bad woman at heart, it is not cowardice and gluttony that have made me what i am. if i drink brandy, it is through wretchedness; i do not like it, but it makes me reckless. in happier times you need only have looked into my chest of drawers, and you would have seen that i was not a disorderly woman, for i had linen, plenty of linen. take pity on me, m. javert!" she spoke thus, crushed, shaken by sobs, blinded by tears, wringing her hands, interrupted by a sharp dry cough, and stammering softly, with death imprinted on her voice. great sorrow is a divine and terrible ray which transfigures the wretched, and at this moment fantine became lovely again. from time to time she stopped, and tenderly kissed the skirt of the policeman's coat. she would have melted a heart of granite,--but a wooden heart cannot be moved. "well," said javert, "i have listened to you. have you said all? be off now; you have six months. the eternal father in person could not alter it." on hearing this solemn phrase, she understood that sentence was passed; she fell all of a heap, murmuring, "mercy!" but javert turned his back, and the soldiers seized her arm. some minutes previously a man had entered unnoticed; he had closed the door, leaned against it, and heard fantine's desperate entreaties. at the moment when the soldiers laid hold of the unhappy girl, who would not rise, he emerged from the gloom, and said,-- "wait a minute, if you please." javert raised his eyes, and recognized m. madeleine; he took off his hat, and bowed with a sort of vexed awkwardness. "i beg your pardon, m. le maire--" the words "m. le maire" produced a strange effect on fantine; she sprang up like a spectre emerging from the ground, thrust back the soldiers, walked straight up to m. madeleine before she could be prevented, and, looking at him wildly, she exclaimed,-- "so you are the mayor?" then she burst into a laugh, and spat in his face. m. madeleine wiped his face, and said,-- "inspector javert, set this woman at liberty." javert felt for a moment as if he were going mad; he experienced at this instant the most violent emotions he had ever felt in his life, following each other in rapid succession, and almost mingled. to see a girl of the town spit in the mayor's face was so monstrous a thing that he would have regarded it as sacrilege even to believe it possible. on the other side, he confusedly made a hideous approximation in his mind between what this woman was and what this mayor might be, and then he saw with horror something perfectly simple in this prodigious assault. but when he saw this mayor, this magistrate, calmly wipe his face, and say, "set this woman at liberty," he had a bedazzlement of stupor, so to speak; thought and language failed him equally, for he had passed the limits of possible amazement. he remained dumb. his sentence had produced an equally strange effect on fantine; she raised her bare arm, and clung to the chimney-key of the stove like a tottering person. she looked around, and began saying in a low voice, as if speaking to herself,-- "at liberty! i am to be let go! i shall not be sent to prison for six months! who said that? it is impossible that any one said it. i must have heard badly; it cannot be that monster of a mayor. was it you, my kind m. javert, who said that i was to be set at liberty? well, i will tell you all about it, and you will let me go. that monster of a mayor, that old villain of a mayor, is the cause of it all. just imagine, m. javert, he discharged me on account of a parcel of sluts gossiping in the shop. was not that horrible,--to discharge a poor girl who is doing her work fairly! after that i did not earn enough, and all this misfortune came. in the first place, there is an improvement which the police gentry ought to make, and that is to prevent persons in prison injuring poor people. i will explain this to you; you earn twelve sous for making a shirt, but it falls to seven, and then you can no longer live, and are obliged to do what you can. as i had my little cosette i was forced to become a bad woman. you can now understand how it was that beggar of a mayor who did all the mischief. my present offence is that i trampled on the gentleman's hat before the officers' café, but he had ruined my dress with snow; and our sort have only one silk dress for night. indeed, m. javert, i never did any harm purposely, and i see everywhere much worse women than myself who are much more fortunate. oh, monsieur javert, you said that i was to be set at liberty, did you not? make inquiries, speak to my landlord; i pay my rent now, and you will hear that i am honest. oh, good gracious! i ask your pardon, but i have touched the damper of the stove without noticing it, and made a smoke." m. madeleine listened to her with deep attention: while she was talking, he took out his purse, but as he found it empty on opening it, he returned it to his pocket. he now said to fantine,-- "how much did you say that you owed?" fantine, who was looking at javert, turned round to him,-- "am i speaking to you?" then she said to the soldiers,-- "tell me, men, did you see how i spat in his face? ah, you old villain of a mayor! you have come here to frighten me, but i am not afraid of you; i am only afraid of m. javert, my kind monsieur javert." while saying this, she turned again to the inspector,-- "after all, people should be just. i can understand that you are a just man, m. javert; in fact, it is quite simple; a man who played at putting snow down a woman's back, made the officers laugh; they must have some amusement, and we girls are sent into the world for them to make fun of. and then you came up: you are compelled to restore order; you remove the woman who was in the wrong, but, on reflection, as you are kind-hearted, you order me to be set at liberty, for the sake of my little girl, for six months' imprisonment would prevent my supporting her. only don't come here again, fagot! oh, i will not come here again, m. javert; they can do what they like to me in future, and i will not stir. still i cried out to-night because it hurt me; i did not at all expect that gentleman's snow; and then besides, as i told you; i am not very well,--i cough, i have something like a ball in my stomach which burns, and the doctor says: "take care of yourself." here, feel, give me your hand; do not be frightened." she no longer cried, her voice was caressing; she laid javert's large coarse hand on her white, delicate throat, and looked up at him smilingly. all at once she hurriedly repaired the disorder in her clothes, let the folds of her dress fall, which had been almost dragged up to her knee, and walked toward the door, saying to the soldiers with a friendly nod,-- "my lads, m. javert says i may go, so i will be off." she laid her hand on the hasp; one step further, and she would be in the street. up to this moment javert had stood motionless, with his eyes fixed on the ground, appearing in the centre of this scene like a statue waiting to be put up in its proper place. the sound of the hasp aroused him: he raised his head with an expression of sovereign authority,--an expression the more frightful, the lower the man in power stands; it is ferocity in the wild beast, atrocity in the nobody. "sergeant," he shouted, "do you not see that the wench is bolting? who told you to let her go?" "i did," said madeleine. fantine, at the sound of javert's voice, trembled, and let go the hasp, as a detected thief lets fall the stolen article. at madeleine's voice she turned, and from this moment, without uttering a word, without even daring to breathe freely, her eye wandered from madeleine to javert, and from javert to madeleine, according as each spoke. it was evident that javert must have been "lifted off the hinges," as people say, when he ventured to address the sergeant as he had done, after the mayor's request that fantine should be set at liberty. had he gone so far as to forget the mayor's presence? did he eventually declare to himself that it was impossible for "an authority" to have given such an order, and that the mayor must certainly have said one thing for another without meaning it? or was it that, in the presence of all the enormities he had witnessed during the last two hours, he said to himself that he must have recourse to a supreme resolution, that the little must become great, the detective be transformed into the magistrate, and that, in this prodigious extremity, order, law, morality, government, and society were personified in him, javert? however this may be, when m. madeleine said "i did," the inspector of police could be seen to turn to the mayor, pale, cold, with blue lips, with a desperate glance, and an imperceptible tremor all over him, and--extraordinary circumstance!--to say to him, with downcast eye, but in a fierce voice,-- "monsieur le maire, that cannot be." "why so?" "this creature has insulted a gentleman." "inspector javert," m. madeleine replied with a conciliating and calm accent, "listen to me. you are an honest man, and i shall have no difficulty in coming to an explanation with you. the truth is as follows: i was crossing the market-place at the time you were leading this girl away; a crowd was still assembled; i inquired, and know all. the man was in the wrong, and, in common justice, ought to have been arrested instead of her." javert objected,-- "the wretched creature has just insulted m. le maire." "that concerns myself," m. madeleine said; "my insult is, perhaps, my own, and i can do what i like with it." "i ask your pardon, sir; the insult does not belong to you, but to the judicial court." "inspector javert," madeleine replied, "conscience is the highest of all courts. i have heard the woman, and know what i am doing." "and i, monsieur le maire, do not know what i am seeing." "in that case, be content with obeying." "i obey my duty; my duty orders that this woman should go to prison for six months." m. madeleine answered gently,-- "listen to this carefully; she will not go for a single day." on hearing these decided words, javert ventured to look fixedly at the mayor, and said to him, though still with a respectful accent,-- "i bitterly regret being compelled to resist you. monsieur le maire, it is the first time in my life, but you will deign to let me observe that i am within the limits of my authority. as you wish it, sir, i will confine myself to the affair with the gentleman. i was present; this girl attacked m. bamatabois, who is an elector and owner of that fine three-storied house, built of hewn stone, which forms the corner of the esplanade. well, there are things in this world! however this may be, m. le maire, this is a matter of the street police which concerns me, and i intend to punish the woman fantine." m. madeleine upon this folded his arms, and said in a stern voice, which no one in the town had ever heard before,-- "the affair to which you allude belongs to the borough police; and by the terms of articles nine, eleven, fifteen, and sixty-six of the criminal code, i try it. i order that this woman be set at liberty." javert tried a final effort. "but, monsieur le maire--" "i call your attention to article eighty-one of the law of dec. th, , upon arbitrary detention." "permit me, sir--" "not a word!" "still--" "leave the room!" said m. madeleine. javert received the blow right in his chest like a russian soldier; he bowed down to the ground to the mayor, and went out. fantine stood up against the door, and watched him pass by her in stupor. she too was suffering from a strange perturbation: for she had seen herself, so to speak, contended for by two opposite powers. she had seen two men struggling in her presence, who held in their hands her liberty, her life, her soul, her child. one of these men dragged her towards the gloom, the other restored her to the light. in this struggle, which she gazed at through the exaggeration of terror, the two men seemed to her giants,--one spoke like a demon, the other like her good angel. the angel had vanquished the demon, and the thing which made her shudder from head to foot was that this angel, this liberator, was the very man whom she abhorred, the mayor whom she had so long regarded as the cause of all her woes; and at the very moment when she had insulted him in such a hideous way, he saved her. could she be mistaken? must she change her whole soul? she did not know, but she trembled; she listened wildly, she looked on with terror, and at every word that m. madeleine said, she felt the darkness of hatred fade away in her heart, and something glowing and ineffable spring up in its place, which was composed of joy, confidence, and love. when javert had left the room, m. madeleine turned to her, and said in a slow voice, like a serious man who is making an effort to restrain his tears,-- "i have heard your story. i knew nothing about what you have said, but i believe, i feel, that it is true. i was even ignorant that you had left the factory, but why did you not apply to me? this is what i will do for you; i will pay your debts and send for your child, or you can go to it. you can live here, in paris, or wherever you please, and i will provide for your child and yourself. i will give you all the money you require, and you will become respectable again in becoming happy; and i will say more than that: if all be as you say, and i do not doubt it, you have never ceased to be virtuous and holy in the sight of god! poor woman!" this was more than poor fantine could endure. to have her cosette! to leave this infamous life! to live free, rich, happy, and respectable with cosette! to see all these realities of paradise suddenly burst into flower, in the midst of her wretchedness! she looked as if stunned at the person who was speaking, and could only sob two or three times: "oh, oh, oh!" her legs gave way, she fell on her knees before m. madeleine, and before he could prevent it, he felt her seize his hand and press her lips to it. then she fainted. book vi. javert. chapter i. the commencement of repose. m. madeleine had fantine conveyed to the infirmary he had established in his own house, and intrusted her to the sisters, who put her to bed. a violent fever had broken out; she spent a part of the night in raving and talking aloud, but at length fell asleep. on the morrow, at about mid-day, fantine woke, and hearing a breathing close to her bed, she drew the curtain aside, and noticed m. madeleine gazing at something above her head. his glance was full of pity and agony, and supplicated: she followed its direction, and saw that it was fixed on a crucifix nailed to the wall. m. madeleine was now transfigured in fantine's eyes, and seemed to her surrounded by light. he was absorbed in a species of prayer, and she looked at him for some time without daring to interrupt him, but at length said, timidly,-- "what are you doing there?" m. madeleine had been standing at this spot for an hour, waiting till fantine should wake. he took her hand, felt her pulse, and answered,-- "how are you?" "very comfortable; i have slept, and fancy i am better. it will be nothing." he continued answering the question she had asked him first, and as if he had only just heard it,-- "i was praying to the martyr up there;" and he mentally added, "for the martyr down here." m. madeleine had spent the night and morning in making inquiries, and had learned everything; he knew all the poignant details of fantine's history. he continued,-- "you have suffered deeply, poor mother. oh! do not complain, for you have at present the dowry of the elect: it is in this way that human beings become angels. it is not their fault; they do not know what to do otherwise. the hell you have now left is the ante-room to heaven, and you were obliged to begin with that." he breathed a deep sigh, but she smiled upon him with the sublime smile in which two teeth were wanting. javert had written a letter during the past night, and posted it himself the next morning. it was for paris, and the address was: "monsieur chabouillet, secretary to the prefect of police." as a rumor had spread about the affair in the police office, the lady-manager of the post, and some other persons who saw the letter before it was sent off and recognized javert's handwriting, supposed that he was sending in his resignation. m. madeleine hastened to write to the thénardiers. fantine owed them over francs, and he sent them , bidding them pay themselves out of the amount, and bring the child at once to m----, where a sick mother was awaiting it. this dazzled thénardier. "hang it all!" he said to his wife, "we must not let the brat go, for the lark will become a milch cow for us. i see it all; some fellow has fallen in love with the mother." he replied by sending a bill for and odd francs very well drawn up. in this bill two undeniable amounts figure, one from a physician, the other from an apothecary, who had attended Éponine and azelma in a long illness. cosette, as we said, had not been ill, and hence it was merely a little substitution of names. at the bottom of the bill thénardier gave credit for francs received on account. m. madeleine at once sent francs more, and wrote, "make haste and bring cosette." "christi!" said thénardier, "we must not let the child go." in the mean while fantine did not recover, and still remained in the infirmary. the sisters had at first received and nursed "this girl" with some repugnance; any one who has seen the bas-relief at rheims will remember the pouting lower lip of the wise virgins looking at the foolish virgins. this ancient contempt of vestals for ambubaïæ is one of the deepest instincts of the feminine dignity, and the sisters had experienced it, with the increased dislike which religion adds. but in a few days fantine disarmed them; she had all sorts of humble and gentle words, and the mother within her was touching. one day the sisters heard her say in the paroxysm of fever, "i have been a sinner, but when i have my child by my side, that will show that god has forgiven me. while i was living badly, i should not have liked to have cosette with me, for i could not have endured her sad and astonished eyes. and yet it was for her sake that i did wrong, and for that reason god pardons me. i shall feel the blessing of heaven when cosette is here; i shall look at her, and it will do me good to see the innocent creature. she knows nothing, as she is an angel. my sisters, at her age the wings have not yet dropped off." m. madeleine went to see her twice a day, and every time she asked him, "shall i see my cosette soon?" he would answer,-- "to-morrow, perhaps; she may arrive at any moment, for i am expecting her." and the mother's pale face would grow radiant. "oh!" she said, "how happy i shall be!" we have said that she did not improve; on the contrary, her condition seemed to grow worse week by week. the handful of snow placed between her naked shoulder-blades produced a sudden check of perspiration, which caused the illness that had smouldered in her for years suddenly to break out. larmier's fine method for studying and healing diseases of the lungs was just beginning to be employed; the physician placed the stethoscope to fantine's chest, and shook his head. m. madeleine said to him,-- "well?" "has she not a child that she wishes to see?" asked the doctor. "yes." "well, make haste to send for her." madeleine gave a start, and fantine asked him,-- "what did the doctor say to you?" m. madeleine forced a smile. "he said that your child must come at once, for that would cure you." "oh," she replied, "he is right; but what do those thénardiers mean by keeping my cosette? oh, she will come, and then i shall see happiness close to me." thénardier, however, would not let the child go, and alleged a hundred poor excuses. cosette was ailing, and it would be dangerous for her to travel in winter; and then there were some small debts still to pay, which he was collecting, &c. "i will send some one to fetch cosette," said father madeleine; "if necessary, i will go myself." he wrote to fantine's dictation the following letter, which she signed. "m. thÉnardier,--" you will hand over cosette to the bearer, who will pay up all little matters. "yours, fantine." about this time a great incident happened. however cleverly we may have carved the mysterious block of which our life is made, the black vein of destiny ever reappears in it. chapter ii. how "jean" may become "champ." one morning m. madeleine was in his study, engaged in settling some pressing mayoralty matters, in case he decided on the journey to montfermeil, when he was told that inspector javert wished to speak with him. on hearing this name pronounced, m. madeleine could not refrain from a disagreeable impression. since the guard-room adventure javert had avoided him more than ever, and m. madeleine had not seen him again. "show him in," he said. javert entered. m. madeleine remained at his table near the fire-place with a pen in his hand and his eyes fixed on a bundle of papers, which he ran through and annotated. he did not put himself out of the way for javert, for he could not refrain from thinking of poor fantine. javert bowed respectfully to the mayor, who had his back turned to him; the mayor did not look at him, but continued to make his notes. javert walked a little way into the study, and then halted without a word. a physiognomist familiar with javert's nature, and who had studied for any length of time this savage in the service of civilization,--this strange composite of the roman, the spartan, the monk, and the corporal, this spy incapable of falsehood, this virgin detective,--a physiognomist aware of his secret and old aversion to m. madeleine, and his conflict with him about fantine, and who regarded javert at this moment, would have asked himself, what has happened? it was evident to any one who knew this upright, clear, sincere, honest, austere, and ferocious conscience, that javert had just emerged from some great internal struggle. javert had nothing in his mind which he did not also have in his face, and, like all violent men, he was subject to sudden changes. never had his face been stranger or more surprising. on entering, he bowed to m. madeleine with a look in which there was neither rancor, anger, nor suspicion; he had halted a few yards behind the mayor's chair, and was now standing there in an almost military attitude, with the simple cold rudeness of a man who has never been gentle and has ever been patient. he was waiting, without saying a word, without making a movement, in a true humility and tranquil resignation, till the mayor might think proper to turn round,--calm, serious, hat in hand, and with an expression which was half-way between the private before his officer and the culprit before the judge. all the feelings as well as all the resolutions he might be supposed to possess had disappeared: there was nothing but a gloomy sadness on this face, which was impenetrable and simple as granite. his whole person displayed humiliation and firmness, and a sort of courageous despondency. at length the mayor laid down his pen and half turned round. "well, what is the matter, javert?" javert remained silent for a moment, as if reflecting, and then raised his voice with a sad solemnity, which, however, did not exclude simplicity. "a culpable deed has been committed, sir." "what deed?" "an inferior agent of authority has failed in his respect to a magistrate in the gravest matter. i have come, as is my duty, to bring the fact to your knowledge." "who is this agent?" m. madeleine asked "myself." "and who is the magistrate who has cause to complain of the agent?" "you, monsieur le maire." m. madeleine sat up, and javert continued with a stern air and still looking down,-- "monsieur le maire, i have come to request that you will procure my dismissal from the service." m. madeleine in his stupefaction opened his mouth, but javert interrupted him,-- "you will say that i could have sent in my resignation, but that is not enough. such a course is honorable, but i have done wrong, and deserve punishment. i must be dismissed." and after a pause he added,-- "monsieur le maire, you were severe to me the other day unjustly, be so to-day justly." "what is the meaning of all this nonsense?" m. madeleine exclaimed. "what is the culpable act you have committed? what have you done to me? you accuse yourself, you wish to be removed--" "dismissed," said javert. "very good, dismissed. i do not understand it." "you shall do so, sir." javert heaved a deep sigh, and continued still coldly and sadly,-- "six weeks ago, m. le maire, after the scene about that girl, i was furious, and denounced you." "denounced me?" "to the prefect of police at paris." m. madeleine, who did not laugh much oftener than javert, burst into a laugh. "as a mayor who had encroached on the police?" "as an ex-galley slave." the mayor turned livid, but javert, who had not raised his eyes, continued,-- "i thought you were so, and have had these notions for a long time. a resemblance, information you sought at faverolles, the strength of your loins, the adventures with old fauchelevent, your skill in firing, your leg which halts a little--and so on. it was very absurd, but i took you for a man of the name of jean valjean." "what name did you say?" "jean valjean; he is a convict i saw twenty years ago when i was assistant keeper at the toulon bagne. on leaving the galley, this valjean, as it appears, robbed a bishop, and then committed a highway robbery on a little savoyard. for eight years he has been out of the way and could not be found, and i imagined--in a word, i did as i said. passion decided me, and i denounced you to the prefect." m. madeleine, who had taken up the charge-book again, said with a careless accent,-- "and what was the answer you received?" "that i was mad!" "well?" "they were right." "it is fortunate that you allow it." "i must do so, for the real jean valjean has been found." the book m. madeleine was holding fell from his grasp, he raised his head, looked searchingly at javert, said with an indescribable accent,-- "ah!" javert continued,-- "the facts are these, m. le maire. it seems that there was over at ailly le haut clocher, an old fellow who was called father champmathieu. he was very wretched, and no attention was paid to him, for no one knows how such people live. this autumn father champmathieu was arrested for stealing cider apples: there was a robbery, a wall climbed over, and branches broken. this champmathieu was arrested with the branch still in his hand, and was locked up. up to this point it is only a matter for a police court, but here providence interposes. as the lock-up was under repair, the magistrates ordered that champmathieu should be taken to the departmental prison at arras. in this prison there is an ex-convict of the name of brevet, under imprisonment for some offence, and he has been made room-turnkey for his good behavior. champmathieu no sooner arrived than brevet cries out, "why, i know this man: he is an ex-convict. look at me, old fellow: you are jean valjean." "what do you mean?" says champmathieu, affecting surprise. "don't play the humbug with me," says brevet; "you are jean valjean. you were at the toulon bagne twenty years ago, and i was there too." champmathieu denied identity, and, as you may suppose, the affair was thoroughly investigated, with the following result. this champmathieu about thirty years ago was a journeyman wood-cutter at several places, especially at faverolles, where his trail is lost. a long time after he is found again in auvergne, and then in paris, where he says he was a blacksmith, and had a daughter a washer-woman,--though there is no evidence of this,--and lastly, he turned up in these parts. now, before being sent to the galleys, what was jean valjean? a wood-cutter. where? at faverolles. and here is another fact: this valjean's christian name was jean, and his mother's family name mathieu. what is more natural to suppose than that on leaving the bagne he assumed his mother's name as a disguise, and called himself jean mathieu? he went to auvergne, where jean is pronounced chan, and thus he was transformed into champmathieu. you are following me, i suppose? inquiries have been made at faverolles, but jean valjean's family is no longer there, and no one knows where it has gone. as you are aware, in those places families frequently disappear in such a way; these people, if they are not mud, are dust. and then, again, as the beginning of this story dates back thirty years, there is no one in faverolles who knew jean valjean: and beside brevet, there are only two convicts who remember him. these two were brought from the bagne and confronted with the pretended champmathieu, and they did not hesitate for a moment. the same age,-- fifty-four,--the same height, the same look, the same man, in short. it was at this very moment that i sent my denunciation to paris, and the answer i received was that i had lost my senses, for jean valjean was in the hands of justice at arras. you can conceive that this surprised me, as i fancied that i held my jean valjean here. i wrote to the magistrates, who sent for me, and champmathieu was brought in." "well?" m. madeleine interrupted him. javert answered with his incorruptible and sad face,-- "monsieur le maire, truth is truth: i am sorry, but that man is jean valjean: i recognized him too." m. madeleine said in a very low voice,-- "are you sure?" javert burst into that sorrowful laugh which escapes from a profound conviction,-- "oh! certain." he stood for a moment pensive, mechanically taking pinches of saw-dust out of the sprinkler in the inkstand, and added,-- "and now that i have seen the real jean valjean, i cannot understand how i could have believed anything else. i ask your pardon, m. le maire." while addressing these supplicating words to the person who six weeks previously had humiliated him so deeply and bidden him leave the room, this haughty man was unconsciously full of dignity and simplicity. m. madeleine merely answered his entreaty with the hurried question,-- "and what does this man say?" "well, monsieur le maire, it is an ugly business, for if he is jean valjean, he is an escaped convict. scaling a wall, breaking a branch, and stealing apples is a peccadillo with a child, an offence in a man, but a crime in a convict. it is no longer a matter for the police courts, but for the assizes; it is no longer imprisonment for a few days, but the galleys for life. and there is the matter with the savoyard, which, i trust, will be brought up again. there is enough to settle a man, is there not? but jean valjean is artful, and in that i recognize him too. any other man would find it warm; he would struggle, cry out, refuse to be jean valjean, and so on. he pretends though not to understand, and says, "i am champmathieu, and i shall stick to it." he has a look of amazement, and plays the brute-beast, which is better. oh! he is a clever scoundrel! but no matter, the proofs are ready to hand; he has been recognized by four persons, and the old scoundrel will be found guilty. he is to be tried at arras assizes, and i have been summoned as a witness." m. madeleine had turned round to his desk again, taken up his papers, and was quietly turning over the leaves, and busily reading and writing in turn. he now said to the inspector,-- "enough, javert; after all, these details interest me but very slightly; we are losing our time, and have a deal of work before us. javert, you will go at one to mother busaupied, who sells vegetables at the corner of the rue st. saulve, and tell her to take out a summons against pierre the carter; he is a brutal fellow, who almost drove over this woman and her child, and he must be punished. you will then go to m. charcillay in the rue champigny; he complains that there is a gutter next door which leaks, and is shaking the foundation of his house. but i am giving you a deal to do, and i think you said you were going away. did you not state you were going to arras on this matter in a week or ten days?" "sooner than that, sir." "on what day, then?" "i fancied i told you that the trial comes off to-morrow, and that i should start by to-night's coach." "and how long will the trial last?" "a day at the most, and sentence will be passed to-morrow night at the latest. but i shall not wait for that, but return so soon as i have given my evidence." "very good," said m. madeleine; and he dismissed javert with a wave of his hand. but he did not go. "i beg your pardon, m. le maire," he said. "what's the matter now?" m. madeleine asked. "i have one thing to remind you of, sir." "what is it?" "that i must be discharged." m. madeleine rose. "javert, you are a man of honor, and i esteem you; you exaggerate your fault, and besides, it is another insult which concerns me. javert, you are worthy of rising, not of sinking, and i insist on your keeping your situation." javert looked at m. madeleine with his bright eyes, in which it seemed as if his unenlightened but rigid and chaste conscience could be seen, and he said quietly,-- "m. le maire, i cannot allow it." "i repeat," m. madeleine replied, "that the affair concerns myself." but javert, only attending to his own thoughts, continued,-- "as for exaggerating, i am not doing so, for this is how i reason. i suspected you unjustly; that is nothing: it is the duty of men like myself to suspect, though there is an abuse in suspecting those above us. but, without proofs, in a moment of passion and for the purpose of revenge, i denounced you, a respectable man, a mayor and a magistrate; this is serious, very serious,--i, an agent of the authority, insulted that authority in your person. had any of my subordinates done what i have done, i should have declared him unworthy of the service and discharged him. stay, monsieur le maire, one word more. i have often been severe in my life to others, for it was just, and i was doing my duty, and if i were not severe to myself now, all the justice i have done would become injustice. ought i to spare myself more than others? no. what! i have been only good to punish others and not myself? why, i should be a scoundrel, and the people who call me that rogue of a javert, would be in the right! m. le maire, i do not wish you to treat me with kindness, for your kindness caused me sufficient ill-blood when dealt to others, and i want none for myself. the kindness that consists in defending the street-walker against the gentleman, the police agent against the mayor, the lower classes against the higher, is what i call bad kindness, and it is such kindness that disorganizes society. good lord! it is easy enough to be good, but the difficulty is to be just. come! if you had been what i believed you, i should not have been kind to you, as you would have seen. m. le maire, i am bound to treat myself as i would treat another man; when i repressed malefactors, when i was severe with scamps, i often said to myself, "if you ever catch yourself tripping, look out," i have tripped, i have committed a fault, and all the worse for me. i have strong arms and will turn laborer. m. le maire, the good of the service requires an example. i simply demand the discharge of inspector javert." all this was said with a humble, proud, despairing, and convinced accent, which gave a peculiar grandeur to this strangely honest man. "we will see," said m. madeleine, and he offered him his hand; but javert fell back, and said sternly,-- "pardon me, sir, but that must not be; a mayor ought not to give his hand to a spy." he added between his teeth,-- "yes, a spy; from the moment when i misused my authority, i have been only a spy." then he bowed deeply and walked to the door. when he reached it he turned round and said, with eyes still bent on the ground,-- "m. le maire, i will continue on duty till my place is filled up." he went out. m. madeleine thoughtfully listened to his firm, sure step as he walked along the paved passage. book vii the champmathieu affair. chapter i. sister simplice. the incidents we are about to record were only partially known at m----, but the few which were known left such a memory in that town, that it would be a serious gap in this book if we did not tell them in their smallest details. in these details the reader will notice two or three improbable circumstances, which we retain through respect for truth. in the afternoon that followed javert's visit, m. madeleine went to see fantine as usual; but before going to her, he asked for sister simplice. the two nuns who managed the infirmary, who were lazarets, like all sisters of charity, were known by the names of sisters perpetua and simplice. sister perpetua was an ordinary village girl, a clumsy sister of charity, who had entered the service of heaven just as she would have taken a cook's place. this type is not rare, for the monastic orders gladly accept this clumsy peasant clay, which can be easily fashioned into a capuchin friar or an ursuline nun; and these rusticities are employed in the heavy work of devotion. the transition from a drover to a carmelite is no hard task; the common substratum of village and cloister ignorance is a ready-made preparation, and at once places the countryman on a level with the monk. widen the blouse a little and you have a gown. sister perpetua was a strong nun belonging to marnies near pantoise, who talked with a country accent, sang psalms to match, sugared the _tisane_ according to the bigotry or hypocrisy of the patient, was rough with the sick, and harsh with the dying, almost throwing god in their faces, and storming their last moments with angry prayer. withal she was bold, honest, and red-faced. sister simplice was pale, and looked like a wax taper by the side of sister perpetua, who was a tallow candle in comparison. st. vincent de paul has divinely described the sister of charity in those admirable words in which so much liberty is blended with slavery: "they will have no other convent but the hospital, no other cell but a hired room, no chapel but the parish church, no cloister beyond the streets or the hospital wards, no walls but obedience, no grating but the fear of god, and no veil but modesty." sister simplice was the living ideal of this: no one could have told her age, for she had never been young, and seemed as if she would never grow old. she was a gentle, austere, well-nurtured, cold person--we dare not say a woman--who had never told a falsehood; she was so gentle that she appeared fragile, but she was more solid than granite. she touched the wretched with her delicate and pure fingers. there was, so to speak, silence in her language; she only said what was necessary, and possessed an intonation of voice which would at once have edified a confessional and delighted a drawing-room. this delicacy harmonized with the rough gown, for it formed in this rough contact a continual reminder of heaven. let us dwell on one detail; never to have told a falsehood, never to have said, for any advantage or even indifferently, a thing which was not the truth, the holy truth, was the characteristic feature of sister simplice. she was almost celebrated in the congregation for this imperturbable veracity, and the abbé suard alludes to sister simplice in a letter to the deaf, mute massieu. however sincere and pure we may be, we have all the brand of a little white lie on our candor, but she had not. can there be such a thing as a white lie, an innocent lie? lying is the absolute of evil. lying a little is not possible; the man who lies tells the whole lie; lying is the face of the fiend, and satan has two names,--he is called satan and lying. that is what she thought, and she practised as she thought. the result was the whiteness to which we have alluded, a whiteness which even covered with its radiance her lips and eyes, for her smile was white, her glance was white. there was not a spider's web nor a grain of dust on the window of this conscience; on entering the obedience of st. vincent de paul she took the name of simplice through special choice. simplice of sicily, our readers will remember, is the saint who sooner let her bosom be plucked out than say she was a native of segeste, as she was born at syracuse, though the falsehood would have saved her. such a patron saint suited this soul. simplice on entering the order had two faults, of which she had gradually corrected herself; she had a taste for dainties and was fond of receiving letters. now she never read anything but a prayer-book in large type and in latin; though she did not understand the language, she understood the book. this pious woman felt an affection for fantine, as she probably noticed the latent virtue in her, and nearly entirely devoted herself to nursing her. m. madeleine took sister simplice on one side and recommended fantine to her with a singular accent, which the sister remembered afterwards. on leaving the sister he went to fantine. the patient daily awaited the appearance of m. madeleine, as if he brought her warmth and light; she said to the sisters, "i only live when m. le maire is here." this day she was very feverish, and so soon as she saw m. madeleine she asked him,-- "where is cosette?" he replied with a smile, "she will be here soon." m. madeleine behaved to fantine as usual, except that he remained with her an hour instead of half an hour, to her great delight. he pressed everybody not to allow the patient to want for anything, and it was noticed at one moment that his face became very dark, but this was explained when it was learned that the physician had bent down to his ear and said, "she is rapidly sinking." then he returned to the mayoralty, and the office clerk saw him attentively examining a road-map of france which hung in his room, and write a few figures in pencil on a piece of paper. chapter ii scaufflaire's perspicacity. from the mayoralty m. madeleine proceeded to the end of the town, to a fleming called master scaufflaer, gallicized into scaufflaire, who let out horses and gigs by the day. to reach his yard the nearest way was through an unfrequented street, in which stood the house of the parish priest. the curé was said to be a worthy and respectable man, who gave good advice. at the moment when m. madeleine came in front of his house there was only one person in the street, and he noticed the following circumstances: m. le maire, after passing the house, stopped for a moment, then turned back and walked up to the curé's door, which had an iron knocker. he quickly seized the knocker and lifted it; then he stopped again as if in deep thought, and, after a few seconds, instead of knocking, he softly let the knocker fall back in its place and continued his way with a haste which he had not displayed before. m. madeleine found master scaufflaire at home and engaged in mending a set of harness. "master scaufflaire", he inquired, "have you a good horse?" "m. le maire," the fleming replied, "all my horses are good. what do you mean by a good horse?" "i mean a horse that can cover twenty leagues of ground in a day." "harnessed in a gig?" "yes." "and how long will it rest after the journey?" "it must be in a condition to start again the next morning if necessary." "to return the same distance?" "yes." "hang it all! and it is twenty leagues?" m. madeleine took from his pocket the paper on which he had pencilled the figures; they were " , , / ." "you see," he said, "total, nineteen and a half, or call them twenty leagues." "m. le maire," the fleming continued, "i can suit you. my little white horse--you may have seen it pass sometimes--is an animal from the bas boulonnais, and full of fire. they tried at first to make a saddle-horse of it, but it reared and threw everybody that got on its back. it was supposed to be vicious, and they did not know what to do with it; i bought it and put it in a gig. that was just what it wanted; it is as gentle as a maid and goes like the wind. but you must not try to get on its back, for it has no notion of being a saddle-horse. everybody has his ambition, and it appears as if the horse had said to itself,--draw, yes; carry, no." "and it will go the distance?" "at a trot, and under eight hours, but on certain conditions." "what are they?" "in the first place, you will let it breathe for an hour half way; it will feed, and you must be present while it is doing so, to prevent the ostler stealing the oats, for i have noticed that at inns oats are more frequently drunk by the stable-boys than eaten by the horses." "i will be there." "in the next place, is the gig for yourself, sir?" "yes." "do you know how to drive?" "yes." "well, you must travel alone and without luggage, in order not to overweight the horse." "agreed." "i shall expect thirty francs a day, and the days of rest paid for as well,--not a farthing less; and you will pay for the horse's keep." m. madeleine took three napoleons from his purse and laid them on the table. "there are two days in advance." "in the fourth place, a cabriolet would be too heavy for such a journey, and tire the horse. you must oblige me by travelling in a little tilbury i have." "i consent." "it is light, but it is open." "i do not care." "have you thought, sir, that it is now winter?" m. madeleine made no answer, and the fleming continued,-- "that it is very cold?" monsieur madeleine was still silent. "that it may rain?" the mayor raised his head and said,-- "the tilbury and the horse will be before my door at half-past four to-morrow morning." "very good, sir," scaufflaire answered; then scratching with his thumb-nail a stain in the wood of his table, he continued, with that careless air with which the flemings so cleverly conceal their craft,-- "good gracious! i have not thought of asking where you are going? be kind enough to tell me, sir." he had thought of nothing else since the beginning of the conversation, but somehow he had not dared to ask the question. "has your horse good legs?" said m. madeleine. "yes, m. le maire; you will hold it up a little in going down-hill. are there many hills between here and the place you are going to?" "do not forget to be at my door at half-past four exactly," m. madeleine answered, and went away. the fleming stood "like a fool," as he said himself a little while after. m. le maire had been gone some two or three minutes when the door opened again; it was m. le maire. he still wore the same impassive and preoccupied air. "m. scaufflaire," he said, "at how much do you value the tilbury and horse you are going to let me, one with the other?" "do you wish to buy them of me, sir?" "no, but i should like to guarantee them against any accident, and when i come back you can return me the amount. what is the estimated value?" "five hundred francs, m. le maire." "here they are." m. madeleine laid a bank note on the table, then went out, and this time did not come back. master scaufflaire regretted frightfully that he had not said a thousand francs, though tilbury and horse, at a fair valuation, were worth just three hundred. the fleming called his wife and told her what had occurred. "where the deuce can the mayor be going?" they held a council. "he is going to paris," said the wife. "i don't believe it," said the husband. m. madeleine had left on the table the paper on which he had written the figures; the fleming took it up and examined it. "' , , / ;' why, that must mean post stations." he turned to his wife: "i have found it out." "how?" "it is five leagues from here to hesdin, six from there to st. pol, and eight and a half from st. pol to arras. he is going to arras." in the mean while the mayor had returned home, and had taken the longest road, as if the gate of the priest's house were a temptation to him which he wished to avoid. he went up to his bed-room and locked himself in, which was not unusual, for he was fond of going to bed at an early hour. still the factory portress, who was at the same time m. madeleine's only servant, remarked that his candle was extinguished at a quarter-past eight, and mentioned the fact to the cashier when he came in, adding,-- "can master be ill? i thought he looked very strange to-day." the cashier occupied a room exactly under m. madeleine's; he paid no attention to the remarks of the portress, but went to bed and fell asleep. about midnight he woke with a start, for he heard in his sleep a noise above his head. he listened; it was a footfall coming and going, as if some one were walking about the room above him. he listened more attentively, and recognized m. madeleine's step; and this seemed to him strange, for usually no sound could be heard from the mayor's room till he rose. a moment later the cashier heard something like a wardrobe open and shut; a piece of furniture was moved, there was a silence, and the walking began again. the cashier sat up in bed, wide awake, looked out, and through his window noticed on a wall opposite, the red reflection of a lighted window; from the direction of the rays it could only be the window of m. madeleine's bed-room. the reflection flickered as if it came from a fire rather than a candle, while the shadow of the framework could not be traced, which proved that the window was wide open, and this was a curious fact, considering the cold. the cashier fell asleep and woke again some two hours after; the same slow and regular footfall was still audible above his head. the reflection was still cast on the wall, but was now pale and quiet, as if it came from a lamp or a candle. the window was still open. this is what was occurring in m. madeleine's bed-room. chapter iii. a tempest in a brain. the reader has, of course, guessed that m. madeleine is jean valjean. we have already looked into the depths of this conscience, and the moment has arrived to look into them again. we do not do this without emotion or tremor, for there is nothing more terrifying than this species of contemplation. the mental eye can nowhere find greater brilliancy or greater darkness than within man; it cannot dwell on anything which is more formidable, complicated, mysterious, or infinite. there is a spectacle grander than the sea, and that is the sky; there is a spectacle grander than the sky, and it is the interior of the soul. to write the poem of the human conscience, were the subject only one man, and he the lowest of men, would be to resolve all epic poems into one supreme and final epic. conscience is the chaos of chimeras, envies, and attempts, the furnace of dreams, the lurking-place of ideas we are ashamed of; it is the pandemonium of sophistry, the battlefield of the passions. at certain hours look through the livid face of a reflecting man, look into his soul, peer into the darkness. beneath the external silence, combats of giants are going on there, such as we read of in homer; _mêlées_ of dragons and hydras and clouds of phantoms, such as we find in milton; and visionary spirals, as in dante. a sombre thing is the infinitude which every man bears within him, and by which he desperately measures the volitions of his brain and the actions of his life. alighieri one day came to a gloomy gate, before which he hesitated; we have one before us, on the threshold of which we also hesitate, but we will enter. we have but little to add to what the reader already knows as having happened to jean valjean since his adventure with little gervais. from this moment, as we have seen, he became another man, and he made himself what the bishop wished to make him. it was more than a transformation, it was a transfiguration. he succeeded in disappearing, sold the bishop's plate, only keeping the candlesticks as a souvenir, passed through france, reached m----, had the idea we have described, accomplished what we have narrated, managed to make himself unseizable and inaccessible, and henceforth settled at m----, happy at feeling his conscience saddened by the past, and the first half of his existence contradicted by the last half; he lived peacefully, reassured and trusting, and having but two thoughts,--to hide his name and sanctify his life; escape from men and return to god. these two thoughts were so closely blended in his mind, that they only formed one; they were both equally absorbing and imperious, and governed his slightest actions. usually they agreed to regulate the conduct of his life; they turned him toward the shadow; they rendered him beneficent and simple, and they counselled him the same things. at times, however, there was a conflict between them, and in such cases the man whom the whole town of m---- called monsieur madeleine did not hesitate to sacrifice the first to the second,--his security to his virtue. hence, despite all his caution and prudence, he had kept the bishop's candlesticks, worn mourning for him, questioned all the little savoyards who passed through the town, inquired after the family at faverolles, and saved the life of old fauchelevent, in spite of the alarming insinuations of javert. it seemed, as we have already remarked, that he thought, after the example of all those who have been wise, holy, and just, that his first duty was not toward himself. still, we are bound to say, nothing like the present had before occurred; never had the two ideas which governed the unhappy man whose sufferings we are describing, entered upon so serious a struggle. he comprehended confusedly, but deeply, from the first words which javert uttered on entering his study. at the moment when the name which he had buried so deeply was so strangely pronounced, he was struck with stupor, and, as it were, intoxicated by the sinister peculiarity of his destiny. and through this stupor he felt that quivering which precedes great storms; he bowed like an oak at the approach of a storm, like a soldier before a coming assault. he felt the shadows full of thunder and lightning collecting over his head: while listening to javert he had a thought of running off, denouncing himself, taking champmathieu out of prison, and taking his place. this was painful, like an incision in the flesh; but it passed away, and he said to himself, "we will see!" he repressed this first generous movement, and recoiled before his heroism. it would doubtless be grand if, after the bishop's holy remarks, after so many years of repentance and self-denial, in the midst of a penitence so admirably commenced, this man, even in the presence of such a terrible conjuncture, had not failed for a moment, but continued to march at the same pace toward this open abyss, at the bottom of which heaven was: this would be grand, but it did not take place. we are bound to describe all the things that took place in this mind, and cannot say that this was one of them. what carried him away first was the instinct of self-preservation. he hastily collected his ideas, stifled his emotion, deferred any resolution with the firmness of terror, deadened himself against what he had to do, and resumed his calmness as a gladiator puts up his buckler. for the remainder of the day he was in the same state,--a hurricane within, a deep tranquillity outside,--and he only took what may be called "conservative measures." all was still confused and jumbled in his brain; the trouble in it was so great that he did not see distinctly the outline of any idea, and he could have said nothing about himself, save that he had received a heavy blow. he went as usual to fantine's bed of pain, and prolonged his visit, with a kindly instinct, saying to himself that he must act thus, and recommend her to the sisters in the event of his being obliged to go away. he felt vaguely that he must perhaps go to arras; and, though not the least in the world decided about the journey, he said to himself that, safe from suspicion as he was, there would be no harm in being witness of what might take place, and he hired scaufflaire's tilbury, in order to be ready for any event. he dined with considerable appetite, and, on returning to his bed-room, reflected. he examined his situation, and found it extraordinary,--so extraordinary that, in the midst of his reverie, through some almost inexplicable impulse of anxiety, he rose from his chair and bolted his door. he was afraid lest something might enter, and he barricaded himself against the possible. a moment after, he blew out his light, for it annoyed him, and he fancied that he might be overseen. by whom? alas! what he wanted to keep out had entered; what he wished to blind was looking at him. it was his conscience, that is to say, god. still, at the first moment, he deceived himself; he had a feeling of security and solitude. when he put in the bolt, he thought himself impregnable; when the candle was out, he felt himself invisible. he then regained his self-possession; and he put his elbows on the table, leaned his head on his hand, and began dreaming in the darkness. "where am i? am i not dreaming? what was i told? is it really true that i saw that javert, and that he spoke to me so? who can this champmathieu be? it seems he resembles me. is it possible? when i think that i was so tranquil yesterday, and so far from suspecting anything! what was i doing yesterday at this hour? what will be the result of this event? what am i to do?" such was the trouble he was in that his brain had not the strength to retain ideas. they passed like waves, and he clutched his forehead with both hands to stop them. from this tumult which overthrew his wits and reason, and from which he sought to draw an evidence and a resolution, nothing issued but agony. his head was burning; and he went by the window and threw it wide open. there were no stars in the heavens, and he went back to the table and sat down by it. the first hour passed away thus, but gradually vague features began to shape themselves, and become fixed in his thoughts, and he could observe with the precision of reality some details of the situation, if not its entirety. he began by noticing that however critical and extraordinary his situation might be, he was utterly the master of it, and his stupor was only augmented. independently of the stern and religious object he proposed to himself in his actions, all that he had done up to this day was only a hole he dug in which to bury his name. what he had always most feared, in his hours of reflection as in his sleepless nights, was ever to hear _that_ name pronounced. he said to himself that this would be to him the end of everything; that on the day when that name re-appeared, it would cause his new life to fade away, and possibly the new soul he had within him. he shuddered at the mere thought that this could happen. assuredly if any one had told him at such moments that the hour would arrive in which this name would echo in his ear, when the hideous name of jean valjean would suddenly emerge from the night and rise before him, when this formidable light which dissipated the mystery with which he surrounded himself would suddenly shine above his head, and that the name would no longer menace him; that the light would produce only a denser gloom; that this rent veil would increase the mystery; that the earthquake would consolidate his edifice; that this prodigious incident would have no other result, if he thought proper, but to render his existence clearer and yet more impenetrable, and that from his confrontation with the phantom of jean valjean, the good and worthy m. madeleine would come forth more honored, more peaceful, and more respected than ever,--if any one had told him this, he would have shaken his head, and considered such talk insane. and yet all this had really happened, and this heap of impossibilities was a fact, and heaven had permitted all these wild things to become real. his reverie continued to grow clearer, and each moment he comprehended his position better. it seemed to him that he had just awakened from a dream, and that he was descending an incline in the middle of the night, shuddering and recoiling in vain from the brink of an abyss. he distinctly saw in the shadows an unknown man, a stranger, whom destiny took for him, and thrust into the gulf in his place. in order that the gulf should close, either he or another must fall in. he had no necessity to do anything, the clearness became complete, and he confessed to himself--that his place was vacant at the galleys; that, whatever he might do, it constantly expected him, that the robbery of little gervais led him back to it, that this vacant place would wait for him and attract him until he filled it, and that this was inevitable and fatal. and then he said to himself that at this moment he had a substitute,--that it seemed a man of the name of champmathieu had this ill-luck; and that, in future, himself at the bagne in the person of this champmathieu, and present in society under the name of m. madeleine, would have nothing more to fear, provided that he did not prevent justice from laying over the head of this champmathieu the stone of infamy which, like the tombstone, falls once and is never raised again. all this was so violent and so strange, that he suddenly felt within him that species of indescribable movement which no man experiences more than twice or thrice in his life,--a sort of convulsion of the conscience, which disturbs everything doubtful in the heart, which is composed of irony, joy, and despair, and what might be called an internal burst of laughter. he suddenly relit his candle. "well, what am i afraid of?" he said to himself; "what reason have i to have such thoughts? i am saved, and all is settled. there was only one open door through which my past could burst in upon my life: and that door is now walled up forever. that javert, who has so long annoyed me, the formidable instinct which seemed to have scented me, and by heavens! had scented me, the frightful dog ever making a point at me, is routed, engaged elsewhere, and absolutely thrown out! he is henceforth satisfied, he will leave me at peace, for he has got his jean valjean! it is possible that he may wish to leave the town too. and all this has taken place without my interference, and so, what is there so unlucky in it all? on my word, any people who saw me would believe that a catastrophe had befallen me. after all, if some people are rendered unhappy, it is no fault of mine. providence has done it all, and apparently decrees it. have i the right to derange what he arranges? what is it that i am going to interfere in? it does not concern me. what! i am not satisfied? why! what else can i want? i have attained the object to which i have been aspiring for so many years, the dream of my nights, the matter of my prayers,--security. it is heaven that wills it, and i have done nothing contrary to god's desire. and why has heaven decreed it? that i may continue what i have begun; that i may do good; that i may one day be a grand and encouraging example; that it may be said that there is after all a little happiness attaching to the penance i have undergone. i really cannot understand why i was so afraid just now about visiting that worthy curé, telling all to him as to a confessor, and asking his advice, for this is certainly what he would have advised me. it is settled; i will let matters take their course, and leave the decision to heaven." he spoke this in the depths of his conscience, while leaning over what might be called his own abyss. he got up from his chair and walked about the room. "come," he said, "i will think no more of it; i have made up my mind;" but he felt no joy. it is no more possible to prevent thought from reverting to an idea than the sea from returning to the shore. with the sailor this is called the tide, with the culprit it is called remorse; god heaves the soul like the ocean. after a few moments, whatever he might do, he resumed the gloomy dialogue in which it was he who spoke and he who listened, saying what he wished to be silent about, listening to what he did not desire to hear, and yielding to that mysterious power which said to him "think," as it did, two thousand years ago, to another condemned man, "go on." before going further, and in order to be fully understood, let us dwell on a necessary observation. it is certain that men talk to themselves; and there is not a thinking being who has not realized the fact. it is only in this sense that the words frequently employed in this chapter, _he said, he exclaimed,_ must be understood; men talk to themselves, speak to themselves, cry out within themselves, but the external silence is not interrupted. there is a grand tumult; everything speaks to us, excepting the mouth. the realities of the soul, for all that they are not visible and palpable, are not the less realities. he asked himself then, what he had arrived at, and cross-questioned himself about the resolution he had formed. he confessed to himself that all he had arranged in his mind was monstrous, and that leaving "god to act" was simply horrible. to allow this mistake of destiny and of men to be accomplished, not to prevent it, to lend himself to it, do nothing, in short, was to do everything; it was the last stage of hypocritical indignity! it was a low, cowardly, cunning, abject, hideous crime. for the first time during eight years this hapless man had the taste of a bad thought and a bad action, and he spat it out in disgust. he continued to cross-question himself. he asked himself what he had meant by the words, "my object is attained"? he allowed that his life had an object, but what was its nature?--conceal his name! deceive the police. was it for so paltry a thing that he had done all that he had effected? had he not another object which was the great and true one,--to save not his person, but his soul; to become once again honest and good? to be a just man! was it not that he craved solely, and that the bishop had ordered him? close the door on his past? but, great heaven, he opened it again by committing an infamous action. he was becoming a robber once more, and the most odious of robbers! he was robbing another man of his existence, his livelihood, his peace, and his place in the sunshine. he was becoming an assassin, he was killing, morally killing, a wretched man; he was inflicting on him the frightful living death, the open-air death, which is called the galleys. on the other hand, if he gave himself up, freed this man who was suffering from so grievous an error, resumed his name, became through duty the convict jean valjean, that would be really completing his resurrection, and eternally closing the hell from which he was emerging! falling back into it apparently would be leaving it in reality! he must do this: he would have done nothing unless he did this; all his life would be useless, all his penitence wasted. he felt that the bishop was here, that he was the more present because he was dead, that the bishop was steadfastly looking at him, and that henceforth madeleine the mayor would be an abomination to him, and jean valjean the convict admirable and pure in his sight. men saw his mask, but the bishop saw his face; men saw his life, but the bishop saw his conscience. he must consequently go to arras, deliver the false jean valjean, and denounce the true one. alas! this was the greatest of sacrifices, the most poignant of victories, the last step to take; but he must take it. frightful destiny his! he could not obtain sanctity in the sight of heaven unless he returned to infamy in the sight of man. "well," he said, "i will make up my mind to this. i will do my duty and save this man." he uttered those words aloud without noticing he had raised his voice. he fetched his books, verified and put them in order. he threw into the fire a number of claims he had upon embarrassed tradesmen, and wrote a letter, which he addressed "to m. lafitte, banker, rue d'artois, paris." he then took from his desk a pocket-book, which contained a few bank-notes and the passport he had employed just previously to go to the elections. any one who had seen him while he was accomplishing these various acts, with which such grave meditation was mingled, would not have suspected what was taking place in him. at moments his lips moved, at others he raised his head and looked at a part of the wall, as if there were something there which he desired to clear up or question. when the letter to m. lafitte was finished, he put it into his portfolio, and began his walk once more. his reverie had not deviated; he continued to see his duty clearly written in luminous letters which flashed before his eyes, and moved about with his glance, name yourself, denounce yourself! he could also see the two ideas which had hitherto been the double rule of his life--to hide his name and sanctify his life--moving before him as it were in a tangible shape. for the first time they seemed to him absolutely distinct, and he saw the difference that separated them. he recognized that one of these ideas was necessarily good, while the other might become bad; that the former was self-sacrifice, the latter selfishness; that one said, "my neighbor," the other "myself;" that one came from the light and the other from darkness. they strove with each other, and he could see them doing so. while he was thinking, they had grown before his mental eye, and they had now colossal forms, and he fancied he could see a god and a giant wrestling within him, in the infinitude to which we just now alluded, and in the midst of obscurity and flashes of light. it was a horrible sight, but it seemed to him as if the good thought gained the victory. he felt that he was approaching the second decisive moment of his life; that the bishop marked the first phase of his new life, and that this champmathieu marked the second; after the great crisis came the great trial. the fever, appeased for a moment, gradually returned, however. a thousand thoughts crossed his mind, but they continued to strengthen him in his resolution. at one moment he said to himself that he perhaps regarded the matter too seriously; that, after all, this champmathieu did not concern him, and in any case was a thief. he answered himself: if this man has really stolen apples, he will have a month's imprisonment, but that is a long way from the galleys. and then, again, is it proved that he has committed a robbery? the name of jean valjean is crushing him, and seems to dispense with proofs. do not public prosecutors habitually act in this way? a man is believed to be a thief because he is known to be a convict. at another moment the idea occurred to him that, when he had denounced himself, the heroism of his deed might perhaps be taken into consideration, as well as his life of honesty during the last seven years, and the good he had done the town, and that he would be pardoned. but this supposition soon vanished, and he smiled bitterly at the thought that the robbery of the sous from gervais rendered him a relapsed convict; that this affair would certainly be brought forward, and, by the precise terms of the law, sentence him to the galleys for life. he turned away from all illusions, detached himself more and more from earth, and sought consolation and strength elsewhere. he said to himself that he must do his duty: that, perhaps, he would not be more wretched after doing it than he would have been had he eluded it: that, if he let matters take their course and remained at m----, his good name, good deeds, charity, wealth, popularity, and virtue would be tainted by a crime; and what flavor would all these sacred things have, when attached to this hideous thought; while, if he accomplished his sacrifice, he would mingle a heavenly idea with the galleys, the chain, the green cap, the unrelaxing toil, and the pitiless shame. at last he said to himself that it was a necessity, that his destiny was thus shaped, that he had no power to derange the arrangements of heaven, and that in any case he must choose either external virtue and internal abomination, or holiness within and infamy outside him. his courage did not fail him in revolving so many mournful ideas, but his brain grew weary. he began thinking involuntarily of other and indifferent matters. his arteries beat violently in his temples, and he was still walking up and down; midnight struck, first from the parish church, and then from the town hall: he counted the twelve strokes of the two clocks, and compared the sound of the two bells. they reminded him that a few days before he had seen an old bell at a marine store, on which was engraved the name antoine albier, romainville. as he felt cold, he lit a fire, but did not dream of closing the window. then he fell back into his stupor, obliged to make a mighty effort to remember what he had been thinking of before midnight struck. at last he succeeded. "ah, yes," he said to himself, "i had formed the resolution to denounce myself." and then he suddenly began thinking of fantine. "stay," he said; "and that poor woman!" here a fresh crisis broke out: fantine, suddenly appearing in the midst of his reverie, was like a ray of unexpected light. he fancied that all changed around him, and exclaimed,-- "wait a minute! hitherto, i have thought of myself and consulted my own convenience. whether it suits me to be silent or denounce myself--hide my person or save my soul--be a contemptible and respected magistrate, or an infamous and venerable convict--it is always self, nought but self. good heavens! all this is egotism; under different shapes, 't is true, but still egotism. suppose i were to think a little about others! it is the first duty of a christian to think of his neighbor. well, let me examine: when i am effaced and forgotten, what will become of all this? if i denounce myself, that champmathieu will be set at liberty. i shall be sent back to the galleys, and what then? what will occur here? here are a town, factories, a trade, work-people, men, women, old grandfathers, children, and poor people: i have created all this. i keep it all alive: wherever there is a chimney smoking, i placed the brand in the fire and the meat in the pot: i have produced easy circumstances, circulation, and credit. before i came there was nothing of all this; i revived, animated, fertilized, stimulated, and enriched the whole district. when i am gone the soul will be gone; if i withdraw all will die; and then, this woman, who has suffered so greatly, who has so much merit in her fall, and whose misfortune i unwittingly caused, and the child which i intended to go and fetch, and restore to the mother--do not i also owe something to this woman in reparation of the wrong which i have done her? if i disappear, what will happen? the mother dies, and the child will become what it can. this will happen if i denounce myself. if i do not denounce myself? come, let me see." after asking himself this question, he hesitated, and trembled slightly; but this emotion lasted but a short time, and he answered himself calmly:-- "well, this man will go to the galleys, it is true, but, hang it all! he has stolen. although i may say to myself that he has not stolen, he has done so! i remain here and continue my operations: in ten years i shall have gained ten millions. i spread them over the country. i keep nothing for myself; but what do i care? i am not doing this for myself. the prosperity of all is increased; trades are revived, factories and forges are multiplied, and thousands of families are happy; the district is populated; villages spring up where there are only farms, and farms where there is nothing; wretchedness disappears, and with it debauchery, prostitution, robbery, murder, all the vices, all the crimes--and this poor mother brings up her child. why, i was mad, absurd, when i talked about denouncing myself, and i must guard against precipitation. what! because it pleases me to play the grand and the generous--it is pure melodrama after all--because i only thought of myself, and in order to save from a perhaps exaggerated though substantially just punishment a stranger, a thief, and an apparent scoundrel--a whole department must perish, a poor woman die in the hospital, and a poor child starve in the streets, like dogs! why, it is abominable! without the mother seeing her child again, or the child knowing her mother! and all this on behalf of an old scamp of an apple-stealer, who has assuredly deserved the galleys for something else, if not for that. these are fine scruples that save a culprit and sacrifice the innocent; that save an old vagabond who has not many years to live, and will not be more unhappy at the galleys than in his hovel, and destroy an entire population,--mothers, wives, and children. that poor little cosette, who has only me in the world, and is doubtless at this moment shivering with cold in the den of those thénardiers. there is another pair of wretches. and i would fail in my duties to all these poor creatures, and commit such a folly as to denounce myself! let us put things at the worst: suppose that i am committing a bad action in this, and that my conscience reproaches me with it some day; there will be devotion and virtue in accepting, for the good of my neighbor, these reproaches, which only weigh on me, and this bad action, which only compromises my own soul." he got up and began walking up and down again: this time he seemed to be satisfied with himself. diamonds are only found in the darkness of the earth; truths are only found in the depths of thought. it seemed to him that after descending into these depths, after groping for some time in the densest of this darkness, he had found one of these diamonds, one of these truths, which he held in his hand and which dazzled his eyes when he looked at it. "yes," he thought, "i am on the right track and hold the solution of the problem. a man must in the end hold on to something, and my mind is made up. i will let matters take their course, so no more vacillation or backsliding. it is for the interest of all, not of myself. i am madeleine, and remain madeleine, and woe to the man who is jean valjean. i am no longer he. i do not know that man, and if any one happen to be jean valjean at this moment, he must look out for himself, for it does not concern me. it is a fatal name that floats in the night, and if it stop and settle on a head, all the worse for that head." he looked into the small looking-glass over the mantel-piece, and said to himself,-- "how greatly has forming a resolution relieved me! i am quite a different man at present." he walked a little way and then stopped short. "come," he said, "i must not hesitate before any of the consequences of the resolution i have formed. there are threads which still attach me to jean valjean which must be broken. there are in this very room objects which would accuse me,--dumb things which would serve as witnesses, and they must all disappear." he took his purse from his pocket, and drew a small key out of it. he put this key in a lock, the hole of which could scarcely be seen, for it was hidden in the darkest part of the design on the paper that covered the walls. a sort of false cupboard made between the corner of the wall and the mantel-piece was visible. in this hiding-place there were only a few rags,--a blue blouse, worn trousers, an old knapsack, and a large thorn-stick shod with iron at both ends. any one who saw jean valjean pass through d---- in october, , would easily have recognized all these wretched articles. he had preserved them, as he had done the candlesticks, that they might constantly remind him of his starting-point; still he hid what came from the galleys, and displayed the candlesticks which came from the bishop. he took a furtive glance at the door, as if afraid that it might open in spite of the bolt; and then with a rapid movement he made but one armful of the things he had so religiously and perilously kept for so many years, and threw them all--rags, stick, and knapsack--into the fire. he closed the cupboard, and, redoubling his precautions, which were now useless since it was empty, dragged a heavy piece of furniture in front of it. in a few seconds, the room and opposite wall were lit up with a large red and flickering glow; all was burning, and the thorn-stick crackled and threw out sparks into the middle of the room. from the knapsack, as it burned with all the rags it contained, fell something that glistened in the ashes. on stooping it could be easily recognized as a coin; it was doubtless the little savoyard's two-franc piece. he did not look at the fire, and continued his walk backwards and forwards. all at once his eye fell on the two candlesticks which the fire-light caused to shine vaguely on the mantel-piece. "stay," he thought, "all jean valjean is in them, and they must be destroyed too." he seized the candlesticks--there was a fire large enough to destroy their shape, and convert them into unrecognizable ingots. he leaned over the hearth and wanned his hands for a moment; it was a great comfort to him. he stirred up the ashes with one of the candlesticks, and in a moment they were both in the fire. all at once he fancied he heard a voice cry within him, "jean valjean! jean valjean!" his hair stood erect, and he became like a man who is listening to a terrible thing. "yes, that is right; finish!" the voice said: "complete what you are about; destroy those candlesticks, annihilate that reminiscence! forget the bishop! forget everything! rain that champmathieu; that is right. applaud yourself; come, all is settled and resolved on. this old man, who does not know what they want with him, who is perhaps innocent, whose whole misfortune your name causes, on whom your name weighs like a crime, is going to be taken for you, sentenced, and will end his days in abjectness and horror. that is excellent! be an honest man yourself; remain mayor, honorable and honored, enrich the town, assist the indigent, bring up orphans, live happy, virtuous, and applauded; and during this time, while you are here in joy and light, there will be somebody who wears your red jacket, bears your name in ignominy, and drags along your chain at the galleys. yes, that is excellently arranged. oh, you scoundrel!" the perspiration beaded on his forehead, and he fixed his haggard eye upon the candlesticks. the voice within him, however, had not ended yet. "jean valjean! there will be around you many voices making a great noise, speaking very loud and blessing you, and one which no one will hear, and which will curse you in the darkness. well, listen, infamous man! all these blessings will fall back on the ground before reaching heaven, and the curse alone will ascend to god!" this voice, at first very faint, and which spoke from the obscurest nook of his conscience, had gradually become sonorous and formidable, and he now heard it in his ear. he fancied that it was not his own voice, and he seemed to hear the last words so distinctly that he looked round the room with a species of terror. "is there any one here?" he asked, in a loud voice and wildly. then he continued with a laugh, which seemed almost idiotic,-- "what a fool i am! there can be nobody." there was somebody, but not of those whom the human eye can see. he placed the candlesticks on the mantel-piece, and then resumed that melancholy, mournful walk, which aroused the sleeper underneath him. this walking relieved him, and at the same time intoxicated him. it appears sometimes as if on supreme occasions people move about to ask advice of everything they pass. at the end of a few moments he no longer knew what result to arrive at. he now recoiled with equal horror from the two resolutions he had formed in turn; the two ideas that counselled him seemed each as desperate as the other. what a fatality that this champmathieu should be taken for him! he was hurled down precisely by the means which providence at first seemed to have employed to strengthen his position. there was a moment during which he regarded his future. denounce himself! great heavens! give himself up! he thought with immense despair of all that he must give up, of all that he must resume. he would be forced to bid adieu to this good, pure, radiant life,--to the respect of all classes,--to honor, to liberty! he would no longer walk about the fields, he would no longer hear the birds sing in may, or give alms to the little children! he would no longer feel the sweetness of glances of gratitude and love fixed upon him! he would leave this little house, which he had built, and his little bed-room. all appeared charming to him at this moment. he would no longer read those books or write at the little deal table; his old servant would no longer bring up his coffee in the morning. great god! instead of all this, there would be the gang, the red jacket, the chain on his foot, fatigue, the dungeon, the camp-bed, and all the horrors he knew! at his age, after all he had borne! it would be different were he still young. but to be old, coarsely addressed by anybody, searched by the jailer, and receive blows from the keeper's stick! to thrust his naked feet into iron-shod shoes! to offer his leg morning and night to the man who examines the fetters! to endure the curiosity of strangers who would be told, "that is the famous jean valjean, who was mayor of m----!" at night, when pouring with perspiration, and crushed by fatigue, with a green cap on his head, to go up two by two, under the sergeants whip, the side ladder of the hulks! oh, what misery! destiny, then, can be as wicked as an intelligent being and prove as monstrous as the human heart! and whatever he might do, he ever fell back into this crushing dilemma, which was the basis of his reverie,--remain in paradise, and become a demon there; or re-enter hell, and become an angel? what should he do? great god! what should he do? the trouble, from which he had escaped with such difficulty, was again let loose on him, and his thoughts became composed once more. they assumed something stupefied and mechanical, which is peculiar to despair. the name of romainville incessantly returned to his mind, with two lines of a song which he had formerly heard. he remembered that romainville is a little wood, near paris, where lovers go to pick lilac in april. he tottered both externally and internally; he walked like a little child allowed to go alone. at certain moments, he struggled against his lassitude, and tried to recapture his intelligence; he tried to set himself, for the last time, the problem over which he had fallen in a state of exhaustion,--must he denounce himself, or must he be silent? he could not succeed in seeing anything distinct, the vague outlines of all the reasonings sketched in by his reverie were dissipated in turn like smoke. still, he felt that, however he resolved, and without any possibility of escape, something belonging to him was about to die; that he entered a sepulchre, whether on his right hand or his left, and that either his happiness or his virtue would be borne to the grave. alas! all his irresolution had seized him again, and he was no further advanced than at the beginning. thus the wretched soul writhed in agony! eighteen hundred years before this unhappy man, the mysterious being in whom are embodied all the sanctities and sufferings of humanity had also, while the olive-trees shuddered in the fierce wind of the infinite, long put away with his hand the awful cup which appeared to him, dripping with shadow and overflowing with darkness in the starry depths. chapter iv. sufferings in sleep. three a.m. had struck, and he had been walking about in this way for five hours without a break, when he fell into his chair. he fell asleep, and had a dream. this dream, like most dreams, was only connected with his situation by something poignant and mournful, but it made an impression on him. this nightmare struck him so much that he wrote it down at a later date, and we think we are bound to transcribe it verbatim; for whatever the history of this man may be, it would be incomplete if we omitted it. here it is then; on the envelope we notice the line,--_the dream i had on that night._ "i was upon a plain, a large mournful plain, on which no grass grew. it did not seem to me to be day, but it was not night. i was walking with my brother, the brother of my boyish years, of whom i am bound to say i never think, and whom i scarce remember. we were talking, and met travellers. we spoke about a woman, formerly a neighbor of ours, who had always worked with her window open, since she had occupied a front room. while talking, we felt cold on account of this open window. there were no trees on the plain. we saw a man pass close by us; he was a perfectly naked man, of the color of ashes, mounted on a horse of an earthen color. the man had no hair, and i could see his skull, and the veins on his skull. he held in his hand a wand, which was supple as a vine-twig and heavy as lead. this horseman passed and said nothing to us. "my brother said to me: 'let us turn into the hollow way.' "it was a hollow way in which not a bramble or even a patch of moss could be seen; all was earth-colored, even the sky. after going a few yards, i received no answer when i spoke, and i noticed that my brother was no longer with me. i entered a village that i saw, and i fancied that it must be romainville. the first street i entered was deserted; i entered a second street, and behind the angle formed by the two streets a man was standing against the wall. i asked this man, "what is this place? where am i?" but he gave me no answer. i saw the door of a house open, and walked in. "the first room was deserted, and i entered a second. behind the door of this room there was a man leaning against the wall. i asked him, "to whom does this house belong? where am i?" but the man gave me no answer. i went out into the garden of the house, and it was deserted. behind the first tree i found a man standing; i said to the man, "whose is this garden? where am i?" but he made me no answer. "i wandered about this village and fancied that it was a town. all the streets were deserted, all the doors open. not a living soul passed along the street, moved in the rooms, or walked in the gardens. but there was behind every corner, every door, and every tree, a man standing silently. i never saw more than one at a time, and these men looked at me as i passed. "i left the village and began walking about the fields. at the end of some time i turned back and saw a great crowd coming after me. i recognized all the men whom i had seen in the town, and they had strange heads. they did not appear to be in a hurry, and yet they walked faster than i, and made no noise in walking. in an instant this crowd joined me and surrounded me. the faces of these men were earth-colored. then the man i had seen first and questioned when i entered the town said to me, "where are you going? do you not know that you have been dead for a long time?" i opened my mouth to answer, and i perceived that there was no one near me." he woke up, chilled to the marrow, for a wind, cold as the morning breeze, was shaking the open window. the fire had died away, the candle was nearly burned out, and it was still black night. he rose and went to the window; there were still no stars in the sky. from his window he could see the yard and his street, and a dry sharp sound on the ground below him induced him to look out. he saw two red stars whose rays lengthened and shortened curiously in the gloom. as his mind was half submerged in the mist of dreams, he thought, "there are no stars in the sky: they are on the earth now." a second sound like the first completely woke him, and he perceived that those two stars were carriage lamps, and by the light which they projected he could distinguish the shape of the vehicle; it was a tilbury, in which a small white horse was harnessed. the sound he had heard was the pawing of the horse's hoof on the ground. "what's the meaning of this conveyance?" he said to himself. "who can have come at so early an hour?" at this moment there was a gentle tap at his bed-room door; he shuddered from head to foot, and shouted in a terrible voice, "who's there?" some one replied, "i, sir," and he recognized his old servant's voice. "well," he continued, "what is it?" "it is getting on for four o'clock, sir." "what has that to do with me?" "the tilbury has come, sir." "what tilbury?" "did you not order one?" "no," he said. "the ostler says that he has come to fetch m. le maire." "what ostler?" "m. scaufflaire's." this name made him start as if a flash of lightning had passed before his eyes. "ah, yes," he repeated, "m. scaufflaire." could the old woman have seen him at this moment, she would have been horrified. there was a lengthened silence, during which he stupidly examined the candle flame and rolled up some of the wax in his fingers. the old woman, who was waiting, at length mustered up courage to raise her voice again. "m. le maire, what answer am i to give?" "say it is quite right, and that i shall be down directly." chapter v. obstacles. the letter-bags between arras and m---- were still carried in small mail-carts, dating from the empire. they were two-wheeled vehicles, lined with tawny leather, hung on springs, and having only two seats, one for the driver, and another for a passenger. the wheels were armed with those long offensive axle-trees, which kept other carriages at a distance, and may still be seen on german roads. the compartment for the bags was an immense oblong box at the back; it was painted black, and the front part was yellow. these vehicles, like which we have nothing at the present day, had something ugly and humpbacked about them, and when you saw them pass at a distance or creeping up a hill on the horizon, they resembled those insects called, we think, termites, and which with a small body drag a heavy burden after them. they went very fast, however, and the mail which left arras at one in the morning, after the paris mail had arrived, reached m---- a little before five a.m. on this morning, the mail-cart, just as it entered m----, and while turning a corner, ran into a tilbury drawn by a white horse, coming in the opposite direction, and in which there was only one sitter, a man wrapped in a cloak. the wheel of the tilbury received a rather heavy blow, and though the driver of the mail-cart shouted to the man to stop, he did not listen, but went on at a smart trot. "the man is in a deuce of a hurry," said the courier. the man in this hurry was he whom we have just seen struggling in convulsions, assuredly deserving of pity. where was he going? he could not have told. why was he hurrying? he did not know. he was going onwards unthinkingly. where to? doubtless to arras; but he might also be going elsewhere. he buried himself in the darkness as in a gulf. something urged him on; something attracted him. what was going on in him no one could tell, but all will understand it,--for what man has not entered, at least once in his life, this obscure cavern of the unknown? however, he had settled, decided, and done nothing; not one of the acts of his conscience had been definitive, and he was still as unsettled as at the beginning. why was he going to arras? he repeated what he had already said on hiring the gig of scaufflaire--that, whatever the result might be, there would be no harm in seeing with his own eyes, and judging matters for himself--that this was prudent; and he was bound to know what was going on--that he could not decide anything till he had observed and examined--that, at a distance, a man made mountains of molehills--that after all, when he had seen this champmathieu, his conscience would probably be quietly relieved, and he could let the scoundrel go to the galleys in his place: that javert would be there and the three convicts who had known him,--but, nonsense! they would not recognize him, for all conjectures and suppositions were fixed on this champmathieu, and there is nothing so obstinate as conjectures and suppositions,--and that hence he incurred no danger. it was doubtless a black moment, but he would emerge from it. after all, he held his destiny, however adverse it might try to be, in his own hands, and was master of it. he clung wildly to the latter thought. although, to tell the whole truth, he would have preferred not to go to arras, yet he went. while reflecting he lashed the horse, which was going at that regular and certain trot which covers two leagues and a half in an hour; and as the gig advanced, he felt something within him recoil. at day-break he was in the open country, and the town of m---- was far behind him. he watched the horizon grow white; he looked, without seeing them, at all the cold figures of a winter dawn. morning has its spectres like night. he did not see them, but unconsciously, and through a sort of almost physical penetration, these black outlines of trees and hills added something gloomy and sinister to the violent state of his soul. each time that he passed one of those isolated houses which skirt high roads, he said to himself: "and yet there are people asleep in them." the trot of the horse, the bells on the harness, the wheels on the stones, produced a gentle and monotonous sound, which is delightful when you are merry, and mournful when you are sad. it was broad daylight when he reached hesdin, and he stopped at the inn to let the horse breathe and give it a feed. this horse, as scaufflaire had said, belonged to that small boulonnais breed, which has too large a head, too much stomach, and not enough neck, but which also has a wide crupper, lean, slender legs, and a solid hoof: it is an ugly but strong and healthy breed. the capital little beast had done five leagues in two hours, and had not turned a hair. he did not get out of the tilbury; the ostler who brought the oats suddenly stooped down and examined the left wheel. "are you going far in this state?" the man said. he answered almost without emerging from his reverie,-- "why do you ask?" "have you come any distance?" the ostler continued. "five leagues." "ah!" "why do you say, 'ah'?" the ostler bent down again, remained silent for a moment, with his eye fixed on the wheel, and then said as he drew himself up,-- "because this wheel, which may have gone five leagues, cannot possibly go another mile." he jumped out of the tilbury. "what are you saying, my friend?" "i say that it is a miracle you and your horse did not roll into a ditch by the road-side. just look." the wheel was, in fact, seriously damaged. the blow dealt it by the mail-cart had broken two spokes, and almost carried away the axle-tree. "my good fellow," he said to the ostler, "is there a wheelwright here?" "of course, sir." "be good enough to go and fetch him." "he lives close by. hilloh, master bourgaillard." master bourgaillard was standing in his doorway: he examined the wheel, and made a face like a surgeon regarding a broken leg. "can you mend this wheel?" "yes, sir." "when can i start again?" "to-morrow: there is a good day's work. are you in a hurry, sir?" "in a great hurry: i must set out again in an hour at the latest." "it is impossible, sir." "i will pay anything you ask." "impossible." "well, in two hours?" "it is impossible for to-day; you will not be able to go on till to-morrow." "my business cannot wait till to-morrow. suppose, instead of mending this wheel, you were to put another on?" "how so?" "you are a wheelwright, and have probably a wheel you can sell me, and then i could set out again directly." "i have no ready-made wheel to suit your gig, for wheels are sold in pairs, and it is not easy to match one." "in that case, sell me a pair of wheels." "all wheels, sir, do not fit all axle-trees." "at any rate try." "it is useless, sir; i have only cart-wheels for sale, for ours is a small place." "have you a gig i can hire?" the wheelwright had noticed at a glance that the tilbury was a hired vehicle; he shrugged his shoulders. "you take such good care of gigs you hire, that if i had one i would not let it to you." "well, one to sell me?" "i have not one." "what, not a tax-cart? i am not particular, as you see." "this is a small place. i have certainly," the wheelwright added, "an old calèche in my stable, which belongs to a person in the town, and who uses it on the thirty-sixth of every month. i could certainly let it out to you, for it is no concern of mine, but the owner must not see it pass; and besides, it is a calèche, and will want two horses." "i will hire post-horses." "where are you going to, sir?" "to arras." "and you wish to arrive to-day?" "certainly." "by taking post-horses?" "why not?" "does it make any difference to you if you reach arras at four o'clock to-morrow morning?" "of course it does." "there is one thing to be said about hiring post-horses; have you your passport, sir?" "yes." "well, if you take post-horses, you will not reach arras before to-morrow. we are on a cross-country road. the relays are badly served, and the horses are out at work. this is the ploughing season, and as strong teams are required, horses are taken anywhere, from the post-houses like the rest. you will have to wait three or four hours, sir, at each station, and only go at a foot-pace, for there are many hills to ascend." "well, i will ride. take the horse out. i suppose i can purchase a saddle here?" "of course, but will this horse carry a saddle?" "no, i remember now that it will not." "in that case--" "but surely i can hire a saddle-horse in the village?" "what! to go to arras without a break?" "yes." "you would want a horse such as is not to be found in these parts. in the first place, you would have to buy it, as you are a stranger, but you would not find one to buy or hire for five hundred francs,--not for a thousand." "what is to be done?" "the best thing is to let me mend the wheel and put off your journey till to-morrow." "to-morrow will be too late." "hang it!" "is there not the arras mail-cart? when does that pass?" "not till to-night." "what! you will take a whole day in mending that wheel?" "an honest day." "suppose you employed two workmen?" "ay, if i had ten." "suppose the spokes were tied with cords?" "what is to be done with the axle? besides, the felloe is in a bad state." "is there any one who lets out vehicles in the town?" "no." "is there another wheelwright?" the ostler and the wheelwright replied simultaneously--, "no." he felt an immense joy, for it was evident that providence was interfering. providence had broken the tilbury wheel and stopped his journey. he had not yielded to this species of first summons; he had made every possible effort to continue his journey; he had loyally and scrupulously exhausted all resources; he had not recoiled before the season, fatigue, or expense; and he had nothing to reproach himself with. if he did not go farther, it did not concern him; it was not his fault, it was not the doing of his conscience, but of providence. he breathed freely and fully for the first time since javert's visit. he felt as if the iron hand which had been squeezing his heart for twenty hours had relaxed its grasp; god now appeared to be on his side, and declared himself openly. he said to himself that he had done all in his power, and at present need only return home quietly. had the conversation with the wheelwright taken place in an inn-room, it would probably have not been heard by any one,--matters would have remained in this state, and we should probably not have had to record any of the following events; but the conversation took place in the street. any colloquy in the street inevitably produces a crowd, for there are always people who only ask to be spectators. while he was questioning the wheelwright, some passers-by stopped around, and a lad to whom no one paid any attention, after listening for some moments, ran off. at the instant when the traveller made up his mind to turn back, this boy returned, accompanied by an old woman. "sir," the woman said, "my boy tells me that you wish to hire a conveyance?" this simple remark, made by an old woman led by a child, made the perspiration pour down his back. he fancied he saw the hand which had let him loose reappear in the shadow behind him, ready to clutch him again. he replied,-- "yes, my good woman, i want to hire a gig." and he hastily added, "but there is not one in the town." "yes there is," said the old woman. "where?" the wheelwright remarked. "at my house," the old crone answered. he gave a start, for the fatal hand had seized him again. the poor woman really had a sort of wicker-cart under a shed. the wheelwright and the ostler, sorry to see the traveller escape them, interfered:-- "it was a frightful rattle-trap, and had no springs,--it is a fact that the inside seats were hung with leathern straps--the rain got into it--the wheels were rusty, and ready to fall to pieces--it would not go much farther than the tilbury--the gentleman had better not get into it,"--and so on. all this was true; but the rattle-trap, whatever it might be, rolled on two wheels, and could go to arras. he paid what was asked, left the tilbury to be repaired against his return, had the horse put into the cart, got in, and went his way. at the moment when the cart moved ahead, he confessed to himself that an instant before he had felt a sort of joy at the thought that he could not continue his journey. he examined this joy with a sort of passion, and found it absurd. why did he feel joy at turning back? after all, he was making this journey of his free will, and no one forced him to do so. and assuredly nothing could happen, except what he liked. as he was leaving hesdin, he heard a voice shouting to him, "stop, stop!" he stopped the cart with a hurried movement in which there was something feverish and convulsive that resembled joy. it was the old woman's boy. "sir," he said, "it was i who got you the cart." "well?" "you have given me nothing." he who gave to all, and so easily, considered this demand exorbitant, and almost odious. "oh, it's you, scamp," he said; "well, you will not have anything." he flogged his horse, which started again at a smart trot. he had lost much time at hesdin, and would have liked to recover it. the little horse was courageous, and worked for two; but it was february, it had been raining, and the roads were bad. the cart too ran much more heavily than the tilbury, and there were numerous ascents. he took nearly four hours in going from hesdin to st. pol: four hours for five leagues! at st. pol he pulled up at the first inn he came to, and had the horse put in a stable. as he had promised scaufflaire, he stood near the crib while it was eating, and had troubled and confused thoughts. the landlady entered the stable. "do you not wish to breakfast, sir?" "it is true," said he, "i am very hungry." he followed the woman, who had a healthy, ruddy face; she led him to a ground-floor room, in which were tables covered with oil-cloth. "make haste," he remarked, "for i am in a great hurry." a plump flemish servant-girl hastened to lay the cloth, and he looked at her with a feeling of comfort. "that was the trouble," he thought; "i had not breakfasted." he pounced upon the bread, bit a mouthful, and then slowly laid it back on the table, and did not touch it again. a wagoner was sitting at another table, and he said to him,-- "why is their bread so bitter?" the wagoner was a german, and did not understand him; he returned to his horse. an hour later he had left st. pol, and was proceeding toward tinques, which is only five leagues from arras. what did he do during the drive? what was he thinking of? as in the morning, he looked at the trees, the roofs, the ploughed fields, and the diversities of a landscape which every turn in the road changes, as he passed them. to see a thousand different objects for the first and last time is most melancholy! travelling is birth and death at every moment. perhaps in the vaguest region of his mind he made a comparison between the changing horizon and human existence, for everything in this life is continually flying before us. shadow and light are blended; after a dazzling comes an eclipse; every event is a turn in the road, and all at once you are old. you feel something like a shock, all is black, you distinguish an obscure door, and the gloomy horse of life which dragged you, stops, and you see a veiled, unknown form unharnessing it. twilight was setting in at the moment when the school-boys, leaving school, saw this traveller enter tinques. he did not halt there, but as he left the village, a road-mender, who was laying stones, raised his head, and said to him,-- "your horse is very tired." the poor brute, in fact, could not get beyond a walk. "are you going to arras?" the road-mender continued. "yes." "if you go at that pace, you will not reach it very soon." he stopped his horse, and asked the road-mender--, "how far is it from here to arras?" "nearly seven long leagues." "how so? the post-book says only five and a quarter leagues." "ah" the road-mender continued, "you do not know that the road is under repair; you will find it cut up about a mile farther on, and it is impossible to pass." "indeed!" "you must take the road on the left, that runs to carency, and cross the river; when you reach camblin you will turn to the right, for it is the mont st. eloy road that runs to arras." "but i shall lose my way in the dark." "you do not belong to these parts?" "no." "and it is a cross-road; stay, sir," the road-mender continued; "will you let me give you a piece of advice? your horse is tired, so return to tinques, where there is a good inn; sleep there, and go to arras to-morrow." "i must be there to-night." "that is different. in that case go back to the inn all the same, and hire a second horse. the stable boy will act as your guide across the country." he took the road-mender's advice, turned back, and half an hour after passed the same spot at a sharp trot with a strong second horse. a stable lad, who called himself a postilion, was sitting on the shafts of the cart. still he felt that he had lost time, for it was now dark. they entered the cross-road, and it soon became frightful; the cart tumbled from one rut into another, but he said to the postilion,-- "keep on at a trot, and i will give you a double fee." in one of the jolts the whipple-tree broke. "the whipple-tree is broken, sir," said the postilion, "and i do not know how to fasten my horse, and the road is very bad by night. if you will go back and sleep at tinques, we can get to arras at an early hour to-morrow." he answered, "have you a piece of rope and a knife?" "yes, sir." he cut a branch and made a whipple-tree; it was a further loss of twenty minutes, but they started again at a gallop. the plain was dark, and a low, black fog was creeping over the hills. a heavy wind, which came from the sea, made in all the corners of the horizon a noise like that of furniture being moved. all that he could see had an attitude of terror, for how many things shudder beneath the mighty breath of night! the cold pierced him, for he had eaten nothing since the previous morning. he vaguely recalled his other night-excursion, on the great plain of d---- eight years before, and it seemed to him to be yesterday. a clock struck from a distant steeple, and he asked the lad,-- "what o'clock is that?" "seven, sir, and we shall be at arras by eight, for we have only three leagues to go." at this moment he made for the first time this reflection--and considered it strange that it had not occurred to him before--that all the trouble he was taking was perhaps thrown away; he did not even know the hour for the trial, and he might at least have asked about that; it was extravagant to go on thus, without knowing if it would be of any service. then he made some mental calculations: usually the sittings of assize courts began at nine o'clock; this matter would not occupy much time, the theft of the apples would be easily proved, and then there would be merely the identification, four or five witnesses to hear, and little for counsel to say. he would arrive when it was all over. the postilion flogged the horses; they had crossed the river and left mont st hoy behind them; the night was growing more and more dark. chapter vi. sister simplice is sorely tried. at this very moment fantine was joyful. she had passed a very bad night, she had coughed fearfully, and her fever had become worse. in the morning, when the physician paid his visit, she was raving; he felt alarmed, and begged to be sent for so soon as m. madeleine arrived. all the morning she was gloomy, said little, and made folds in sheets, while murmuring in a low voice, and calculating what seemed to be distances. her eyes were hollow and fixed, they seemed almost extinct, and then, at moments, they were relit, and flashed like stars. it seems as if, on the approach of a certain dark hour, the brightness of heaven fills those whom the brightness of earth is quitting. each time that sister simplice asked her how she was, she invariably answered, "well, but i should like to see m. madeleine." a few months previously, at the time when fantine lost her last modesty, her last shame, and her last joy, she was the shadow of herself: now she was the ghost. physical suffering had completed the work of moral suffering. this creature of five-and-twenty years of age had a wrinkled forehead, sunken cheeks, a pinched nose, a leaden complexion, a bony neck, projecting shoulder-blades, thin limbs, an earthy skin, and white hairs were mingled with the auburn. alas! how illness improvises old age! at mid-day, the physician returned, wrote a prescription, inquired whether m. madeleine had been to the infirmary, and shook his head. m. madeleine usually came at three o'clock, and as punctuality was kindness, he was punctual. at about half-past two fantine began to grow agitated, and in the next twenty minutes asked the nun more than ten times, "what o'clock is it?" three o'clock struck: at the third stroke fantine, who usually could scarce move in her bed, sat up; she clasped her thin yellow hands in a sort of convulsive grasp, and the nun heard one of those deep sighs, which seem to remove a crushing weight, burst from her chest. then fantine turned and looked at the door: but no one entered, and the door was not opened. she remained thus for a quarter of an hour, with her eyes fixed on the door, motionless, and holding her breath. the nun did not dare speak to her, and as the clock struck the quarter, fantine fell back on her pillow. she said nothing, and began again making folds in the sheet. the half-hour passed, then the hour, and no one came. each time the clock struck fantine sat up, looked at the door, and then fell back again. her thoughts could be clearly read, but she did not say a word, complain, or make any accusation: she merely coughed in a sad way. it seemed as if something dark was settling down on her, for she was livid and her lips were blue. she smiled every now and then. when five o'clock struck, the nun heard her say very softly and sweetly, "as i am going away to-morrow, it was wrong of him not to come to-day." sister simplice herself was surprised at m. madeleine's delay. in the mean while fantine looked up at the top of her bed, and seemed to be trying to remember something: all at once she began singing in a voice faint as a sigh. it was an old cradle-song with which she had in former times lulled her little cosette to sleep, and which had not once recurred to her during the five years she had been parted from her child. she sang with so sad a voice and to so soft an air, that it was enough to make any one weep, even a nun. the sister, who was accustomed to austere things, felt a tear in her eye. the clock struck, and fantine did not seem to hear it: she appeared not to pay any attention to things around her. sister simplice sent a servant-girl to inquire of the portress of the factory whether m. madeleine had returned and would be at the infirmary soon: the girl came back in a few minutes. fantine was still motionless and apparently engaged with her own thoughts. the servant told sister simplice in a very low voice that the mayor had set off before six o'clock that morning in a small tilbury; that he had gone alone, without a driver; that no one knew what direction he had taken, for while some said they had seen him going along the arras road, others declared they had met him on the paris road. he was, as usual, very gentle, and he had merely told his servant she need not expect him that night. while the two women were whispering with their backs turned to fantine, the sister questioning, and the servant conjecturing, fantine, with the feverish vivacity of certain organic maladies which blend the free movements of health with the frightful weakness of death, had knelt in bed, with her two clenched hands supported by the pillow, and listened with her head thrust between the curtains. all at once she cried,-- "you are talking about m. madeleine: why do you whisper? what is he doing, and why does he not come?" her voice was so loud and hoarse that the two women fancied it a man's voice, and they turned round in alarm. "answer!" fantine cried. the servant stammered,-- "the portress told me that he could not come to-day." "my child," the sister said, "be calm and lie down again." fantine, without changing her attitude, went on in a loud voice and with an accent at once imperious and heart-rending,-- "he cannot come: why not? you know the reason. you were whispering it to one another, and i insist on knowing." the servant hastily whispered in the nun's ear, "tell her that he is engaged at the municipal council." sister simplice blushed slightly, for it was a falsehood that the servant proposed to her. on the other hand it seemed to her that telling the patient the truth would doubtless deal her a terrible blow, and this was serious in fantine's present condition. the blush lasted but a little while: the sister fixed her calm sad eye on fantine, and said,-- "the mayor is gone on a journey." fantine rose and sat up on her heels, her eyes sparkled, and an ineffable joy shone on her sad face. "he has gone to fetch cosette," she exclaimed. then she raised her hands to heaven, and her lips moved: she was praying. when she had finished she said, "my sister, i am willing to lie down again and do everything you wish: i was naughty just now. i ask your pardon for having spoken so loud, for i know that it was wrong, good sister; but, look you, i am so happy. god is good, and m. madeleine is good: only think, he has gone to montfermeil to fetch my little cosette." she lay down again, helped the nun to smooth her pillow, and kissed a little silver cross she wore on her neck, and which sister simplice had given her. "my child," the sister said, "try to go to sleep now, and do not speak any more." "he started this morning for paris, and indeed had no occasion to go there; for montfermeil is a little to the left before you get there. you remember how he said to me yesterday when i asked him about cosette, "soon, soon"? he wishes to offer me a surprise, for, do you know, he made me sign a letter to get her back from the thénardiers. they cannot refuse to give up cosette, can they? for they are paid; the authorities would not allow a child to be kept, for now there is nothing owing. sister, do not make me signs that i must not speak, for i am extremely happy: i am going on very well, i feel no pain at all; i am going to see cosette again, and i even feel very hungry. it is nearly five years since i saw her: you cannot imagine how a mother clings to her child,--and then she must be so pretty. she has such pretty pink fingers, and she will have beautiful hands. she must be a great girl now, for she is going on to seven. i call her cosette, but her real name is euphrasie. this morning i was looking at the dust on the mantel-piece, and i had a notion that i should soon see cosette again. good lord! how wrong it is for a mother to be so many years without seeing her child! she ought to reflect that life is not eternal. oh, how kind it is of the mayor to go! is it true that it is so cold? i hope he took his cloak. he will be here again to-morrow, will he not? and we will make a holiday of it. to-morrow morning, sister, you will remind me to put on my little cap with the lace border. montfermeil is a great distance, and i came from there to this town on foot, and it took me a long time; but the stage-coaches travel so quickly! he will be here to-morrow with cosette. how far is it to montfermeil?" the sister, who had no notion of distances, answered, "oh, i believe he can be here to-morrow." "to-morrow! to-morrow!" said fantine; "i shall see cosette to-morrow, my good sister! i am not ill now; i feel wild, and would dance if you permitted me." any one who had seen her a quarter of an hour before would not have understood it; she was now quite flushed, she spoke with an eager natural voice, and her whole face was a smile. at times she laughed while speaking to herself in a low voice. a mother's joy is almost a childish joy. "well!" the nun said, "you are now happy. so obey me and do not speak any more." fantine laid her head on the pillow, and said in a low voice, "yes, lie down, behave yourself, as you are going to have your child. sister simplice is right: all in this place are right." and then, without stirring, without moving her head, she began looking around with widely opened eyes and a joyous air, and said nothing more. the sister closed the curtains, hoping she would fall off to sleep. the physician arrived between seven and eight o'clock. hearing no sound, he fancied fantine asleep. he entered softly and walked up to the bed on tip-toe. he opened the curtains, and by the light of the lamp saw fantine's large calm eyes fixed on him. she said to him,-- "oh, sir, my child will be allowed to sleep in a little cot by my bed-side?" the physician fancied she was delirious. she added,-- "only look; there is exactly room." the physician took sister simplice on one side who explained the matter to him: that m. madeleine was absent for a day or two, and being in doubt they had not thought it right to undeceive the patient, who fancied that he had gone to montfermeil, and she might possibly be in the right. the physician approved, and drew near to fantine's bed. she said to him,-- "in the morning, when the poor darling wakes, i will say good-day to her, and at night i, who do not sleep, will listen to her sleeping. her gentle little breathing will do me good." "give me your hand," said the physician. "oh yes, you do not know that i am cured. cosette arrives to-morrow." the physician was surprised to find her better: the oppression was slighter, her pulse had regained strength, and a sort of altogether unlooked-for life reanimated the poor exhausted being. "doctor," she continued, "has the sister told you that m. madeleine has gone to fetch my darling?" the physician recommended silence, and that any painful emotion should be avoided: he prescribed a dose of quinine, and if the fever returned in the night, a sedative; and as he went away, he said to the sister: "she is better. if the mayor were to arrive with the child to-morrow, i do not know what would happen: there are such astounding crises; great joy has been known to check diseases; and though hers is an organic malady, and in an advanced stage, it is all a mystery;--we might perchance save her." chapter vii the traveller takes precautions for returning. it was nearly eight in the evening when the cart we left on the road drove under the archway of the post-house at arras. the man whom we have followed up to this moment got out, discharged the second horse, and himself led the white pony to the stables; then he pushed open the door of a billiard room on the ground-floor, sat down, and rested his elbows on the table. he had taken fourteen hours in a journey for which he had allowed himself six. he did himself the justice that it was no fault of his, but in his heart he was not sorry at it. the landlady came in. "will you sleep here, sir?" he nodded in the negative. "the ostler says that your horse is extremely tired." "will it not be able to start again to-morrow morning?" "oh dear, no, sir; it requires at least two days' rest." "is not the postoffice in this house?" "yes, sir." the landlady led him to the office, where he showed his passport, and inquired whether he could return to m---- the same night by the mail-cart. only one seat was vacant, and he took it and paid for it. "do not fail, sir," said the clerk, "to be here at one o'clock precisely." this done, he left the hotel, and began walking about the streets. he was not acquainted with arras, the streets were dark, and he walked about hap-hazard, but he seemed obstinately determined not to ask his way of passers-by. he crossed the little river crinchon, and found himself in a labyrinth of narrow lanes, in which he lost his way. a citizen came toward him with a lantern, whom, after some hesitation, he resolved to address, though not till he had looked before and behind him, as if afraid lest anybody should overhear the question he was about to ask. "will you be kind enough to tell me the way to the courts of justice, sir?" he said. "you do not belong to the town, sir?" replied the man, who was rather old; "well, follow me, i am going in the direction of the courts, that is to say, of the prefecture, for the courts are under repair at present, and the sittings take place temporarily at the prefecture." "are the assizes held there?" he asked. "of course, sir: you must know that what is now the prefecture was the bishop's palace before the revolution. monsieur de conzié, who was bishop in ' , had a large hall built there, and the trials take place in this hall." on the road, the citizen said to him,-- "if you wish to witness a trial you are rather late, for the court usually closes at six o'clock." however, when they arrived in the great square the old man showed him four lofty lighted windows in a vast gloomy building. "on my word, sir," he said, "you have arrived in time, and are in luck's way. do you see those four windows? they belong to the assize courts. as there are lights, it is not closed yet: there must have been a long trial, and they are having an evening session. are you interested in the trial? is it a criminal offence, or are you a witness?" he answered,-- "i have not come for any trial: i only wish to speak to a solicitor." "that is different. that is the door, sir, where the sentry is standing, and you have only to go up the large staircase." he followed the old man's instructions, and a few minutes later was in a large hall, in which there were a good many people, and groups of robed barristers were gossiping together. it is always a thing that contracts the heart, to see these assemblies of men dressed in black, conversing in a low voice on the threshold of a court of justice. it is rare for charity and pity to be noticed in their remarks, for they generally express condemnations settled before trial. all such groups appear to the thoughtful observer so many gloomy hives, in which buzzing minds build in community all sorts of dark edifices. this hall, which was large and only lighted by one lamp, served as a waiting-room: and folding-doors, at this moment closed, separated it from the grand chamber in which the assizes were being held. the obscurity was so great, that he was not afraid of addressing the first barrister he came across. "how is it going, sir?" he said. "it is finished." "finished!" this word was repeated with such an accent, that the barrister turned round. "i beg your pardon, sir, but perhaps you are a relative?" "no, i know no one here. was a verdict of guilty brought in?" "of course; it could not possibly be otherwise." "the galleys?" "for life." he continued in a voice so faint that it was scarce audible,-- "then, the identity was proved?" "what identity?" the barrister retorted. "nothing of the sort was required; the affair was simple,--the woman had killed her child, the infanticide was proved, the jury recommended her to mercy, and she was sentenced to imprisonment for life." "you are alluding to a woman, then?" "why, of course; a girl of the name of limosin. to whom were you referring, pray?" "to nobody; but as the trial is over, how is it that the court is still lighted?" "it is for the other trial, which began about two hours back." "what other trial?" "oh, it is clear too; he is a sort of beggar, a relapsed galley slave, who has been robbing. i forget his name, but he has a regular bandit face, on the strength of which i would send him to the galleys if for nothing else." "is there any way of entering the court, sir?" he asked. "i do not think so, for it is very full. still, the trial is suspended, and some persons have gone out. when the court resumes, you can try." "which is the way in?" "by that large door." the barrister left him; in a few minutes he had experienced almost simultaneously, and confusedly blended, every emotion possible. the words of this indifferent person had by turns pierced his heart like needles of ice and like red-hot sword-blades. when he found that the trial was not over, he breathed again; but he could not have said whether what he felt were satisfaction or pain. he walked up to several groups and listened to what they were saying; as the trial list was very heavy, the president had selected for this day two simple and short cases. they had begun with the infanticide, and were now engaged with the relapsed convict, the "return horse." this man had stolen apples, but it was proved that he had already been at the toulon galleys. it was this that made his case bad. his examination and the deposition of the witnesses were over; but there were still the speech for the defence and the summing up, and hence it would not be finished till midnight. the man would probably be condemned, for the public prosecutor was sharp, and did not let his accused escape; he was a witty fellow who wrote verses. an usher was standing near the door communicating with the court, and he asked him,-- "will this door be opened soon?" "it will not be opened," said the usher. "will it not be opened when the court resumes its sitting?" "it has resumed," the usher replied, "but the door will not be opened." "why not?" "because the hall is full." "what! is there no room?" "for not a soul more. the door is closed, and no one can go in." the usher added after a pause,--"there are certainly two or three seats behind the president, but he only admits public officials to them." after saying this, the usher turned his back on him. he withdrew with hanging head, crossed the waiting-room, and slowly went down the stairs, hesitating at every step. he was probably holding counsel with himself; the violent combat which had been going on in him since the previous day was not finished, and every moment he entered some new phase. on reaching the landing he leaned against the banisters and folded his arms; but all at once he took his pocket-book, tore a leaf from it, wrote in pencil upon it, "m. madeleine, mayor of m. sur m.;" then he hurried up the stairs, cleft the crowd, walked up to the usher, handed him the paper, and said to him with an air of authority,--"hand this to the president." the usher took the paper, glanced at it, and obeyed. chapter viii. inside the court. without suspecting the fact, the mayor of m---- enjoyed a species of celebrity. during the seven years that his reputation for virtue had filled the whole of the bas boulonnais, it had gradually crossed the border line into two or three adjoining departments. in addition to the considerable service he had done the chief town, by restoring the glass-bead trade, there was not one of the one hundred and forty parishes in the bailiwick of m---- which was not indebted to him for some kindness. he had ever assisted and promoted, when necessary, the trades of other departments: thus he had supported with his credit and funds, the tulle factory at boulogne, the flax-spinning machine at nivers, and the hydraulic manufacture of canvas at bourbus sur cauche. the name of m. madeleine was everywhere pronounced with veneration, and arras and douai envied the fortunate little town of m---- its mayor. the councillor of the royal court of douai, who presided at the present arras assizes, like every one else, was acquainted with this deeply and universally honored name. when the usher discreetly opened the door of the judges' robing room, leaned over the president's chair, and handed him the paper, adding, "this gentleman wishes to hear the trial," the president made a deferential movement, took up a pen, wrote a few words at the foot of the paper, and returned it to the usher, saying,--"show him in." the unhappy man whose history we are recording had remained near the door of the court at the same spot and in the same attitude as when the usher left him. he heard through his reverie some one say to him, "will you do me the honor of following me, sir?" it was the same usher who had turned his back on him just before, and who now bowed to the ground. at the same time the usher handed him the paper; he unfolded it, and as he happened to be near the lamps he was able to read, "the president of the assize court presents his respects to m. madeleine." he crumpled the paper in his hands, as if the words had a strange and bitter after-taste for him. he followed the usher, and a few minutes later found himself alone in a room of severe appearance, lighted by two wax candles standing on a green-baize covered table. he still had in his ears the last words of the usher, who had just left him,-- "you are in the judges' chamber; you have only to turn the handle of that door, and you will find yourself in court behind the president's chair." these words were mingled in his thoughts with a confused recollection of narrow passages and dark staircases, which he had just passed through. the usher had left him alone; the supreme moment had arrived. he tried to collect himself, but could not succeed; for it is especially in the hours when men have the most need of thought that all the threads are broken in the brain. he was at the actual spot where the judges deliberate and pass sentence. he gazed with stupid tranquillity at this peaceful and yet formidable room, in which so many existences had been broken, where his name would be echoed ere long, and which his destiny was traversing at this moment. he looked at the walls and then at himself, astonished that it was this room and that it was he. he had not eaten for more than twenty-four hours, he was exhausted by the jolting of the cart, but he did not feel it; it seemed to him that he did not feel anything. he walked up to a black frame hanging on the wall, and which contained under glass an autograph letter of jean nicolas pache, mayor of paris, and minister, dated, doubtless in error, juin an ii., and in which pache sent to the commune a list of the ministers and deputies under arrest at their own houses. any who saw him at this moment would doubtless have imagined that this letter appeared to him very curious, for he did not remove his eyes from it, and read it two or three times. but he read it without paying attention; and unconsciously he was thinking of fantine and cosette. while thinking, he turned, and his eyes met the brass handle of the door that separated him from the assize court. he had almost forgotten this door, but his eye, at first calm, rested on it, then became wild and fixed, and was gradually filled with terror. drops of perspiration started out from his hair and streamed down his temples. at one moment he made with a species of authority blended with rebellion that indescribable gesture which means and says so well,--"by heaven, who forces me?" then he turned hurriedly, saw before him the door by which he had entered, walked up, opened it, and went out. he was no longer in that room, but in a passage, a long narrow passage, cut up by steps and wickets, making all sorts of turns, lit up here and there by reflectors like the night-lamps for the sick,--the passage by which he had come. he breathed, he listened, not a sound behind him, not a sound before him, and he began to fly as if he were pursued. when he had passed several turnings, he listened again,--there was still the same silence and the same gloom around him. he panted, tottered, and leaned against the wall; the stone was cold, the perspiration was chilled on his forehead, and he drew himself up with a shudder. then standing there alone, trembling from cold, and perhaps from something else, he thought. he had thought all night, he had thought all day; but he only heard within him a voice that said, alas! a quarter of an hour passed thus; at length he inclined his head, sighed with agony, let his arms droop, and turned back. he walked slowly and as if stunned; it looked as if he had been caught up in his flight, and was being brought back. he entered the judges chamber, and the first thing he saw was the handle of the door. this handle, which was round and made of polished brass, shone for him like a terrific star; he looked at it as a sheep would look at the eye of a tiger. his eyes would not leave it, and from time to time he took a step which brought him nearer to the door. had he listened he would have heard, like a species of confused murmur, the noise in the adjoining court; but he did not listen and did not hear. all at once, and without knowing how, he found himself close to the door; he convulsively seized the handle, and the door opened. he was in the assize court. chapter ix. the trial. he advanced a step, closed the door mechanically after him, and gazed at the scene before him. it was a dimly-lighted large hall, at one moment full of sounds, and at another of silence, in which all the machinery of a criminal trial was displayed, with its paltry and lugubrious gravity, in the midst of a crowd. at one of the ends of the hall, the one where he was, judges with a vacant look, in shabby gowns, biting their nails or shutting their eye-lids; barristers in all sorts of attitudes; soldiers with honest harsh faces; old stained wainscoting, a dirty ceiling; tables covered with baize, which was rather yellow than green; doors blackened by hands; pot-house sconces that produced more smoke than light, hanging from nails driven into the wall; upon the tables brass candlesticks,--all was obscurity, ugliness, and sadness. but all this yet produced an austere and august impression, for the grand human thing called law, and the great divine thing called justice, could be felt in it. no one in this crowd paid any attention to him, for all eyes converged on a single point,--a wooden bench placed against a little door, along the wall on the left of the president; on this bench, which was illumined by several candles, sat a man between two gendarmes. this man was the man; he did not seek him, he saw him; his eyes went there naturally, as if they had known beforehand where that face was. he fancied he saw himself, aged, not absolutely alike in face, but exactly similar in attitude and appearance, with his bristling hair, with his savage restless eyeballs, and the blouse, just as he was on the day when he entered d----, full of hatred, and concealing in his mind that hideous treasure of frightful thoughts which he had spent nineteen years in collecting on the pavement of the bagne. he said to himself with a shudder, "my god! shall i become again like that?" this being appeared to be at least sixty years of age; he had something about him rough, stupid, and startled. on hearing the sound of the door, persons made way for the new comer, the president had turned his head, and guessing that the gentleman who had just entered was the mayor of m----, he bowed to him. the public prosecutor who had seen m. madeleine at m----, whither his duties had more than once called him, recognized him and also bowed. he scarce noticed it, for he was under a species of hallucination; he was looking at a judge, a clerk, gendarmes, a number of cruelly curious faces,--he had seen all this once, formerly, seven-and-twenty years ago. these mournful things he found again,--they were there, stirring, existing; it was no longer an effort of his memory, a mirage of his mind; they were real gendarmes, real judges, a real crowd, and real men in flesh and bone. he saw all the monstrous aspect of his past reappear, and live again around him, with all the terror that reality possesses. all this was yawning before him; he felt terrified, closed his eyes, and exclaimed in the depths of his mind. never! and by a tragic sport of fate which made all his ideas terrible and rendered him nearly mad, it was another himself who was there. this man who was being tried everybody called jean valjean. he had before him an unheard-of vision, a species of representation of the most horrible moment of his life played by his phantom. all was there,--it was the same machinery, the same hour of the night, almost the same faces of judges, soldiers, and spectators. the only difference was that there was a crucifix over the president's head, which had been removed from the courts at the time of his condemnation. when he was tried god was absent. there was a chair behind him, into which he fell, terrified by the idea that people could see him. when he was seated he took advantage of a pile of paste-board cases on the judges' desk to hide his face from the spectators. he could now see without being seen: he fully regained the feeling of the real, and gradually recovered. he attained that phase of calmness in which a man can listen. monsieur bamatabois was serving on the jury. he looked for javert, but could not see him, for the witnesses' bench was hidden by the clerk's table, and then, as we have said, the court was hardly lighted. at the moment when he came in, the counsel for the defence was ending his speech. the attention of all was excited to the highest pitch; for three hours they had seen a man, a stranger, a species of miserable being, deeply stupid or deeply clever, being gradually crushed by the weight of a terrible resemblance. this man, as we know already, was a vagabond who was found in a field, carrying a branch covered with ripe apples, which had been broken off a tree in a neighboring orchard. who was this man? inquiries had been made, and witnesses heard; they were unanimous, and light had flashed all through the trial. the accusation said,--"we have got hold not only of a fruit-stealer, a marauder, but we hold under our hand a bandit, a man who has broken his ban, an ex-convict, a most dangerous villain, a malefactor of the name of jean valjean, whom justice has been seeking for a long time, and who, eight years ago, on leaving toulon, committed a highway robbery with violence on a savoyard lad, called little gervais, a crime provided for by article of the penal code, for which we intend to prosecute him hereafter, when the identity has been judicially proved. he has just committed a fresh robbery, and that is a case of relapse. find him guilty of the new offence, and he will be tried at a later date for the old one." the prisoner seemed highly amazed at this accusation and the unanimity of the witnesses; he made gestures and signs intended to deny, or else looked at the ceiling. he spoke with difficulty, answered with embarrassment, but from head to foot his whole person denied. he was like an idiot in the presence of all these intellects ranged in battle-array round him, and like a stranger in the midst of this society which seized him. still, a most menacing future was hanging over him; the probability of his being jean valjean increased with each moment, and the entire crowd regarded with greater anxiety than himself the sentence full of calamity which was gradually settling down on him. an eventuality even offered a glimpse of a death-penalty, should the identity be proved, and he was hereafter found guilty of the attack on little gervais. who was this man? of what nature was his apathy? was it imbecility or cunning? did he understand too much, or did he understand nothing at all? these questions divided the crowd, and the jury seemed to share their opinion. there was in this trial something terrific and something puzzling; the drama was not only gloomy, but it was obscure. the counsel for the defence had argued rather cleverly, in that provincial language which for a long time constituted the eloquence of the bar, and which all barristers formerly employed, not only at paris but at romorantin or montbrison, and which at the present day, having become classical, is only spoken by public prosecutors, whom it suits through its serious sonorousness and majestic movements. it is the language in which a husband is called a "consort;" a wife, a "spouse;" paris, "the centre of the arts and of civilization;" the king, "the monarch;" the bishop, a "holy pontiff;" the public prosecutor, the "eloquent interpreter of the majesty of the law;" the pleadings, the "accents which we have just heard;" the age of louis xiv., "the great age;" a theatre, the "temple of melpomene;" the reigning family, the "august blood of our kings;" a concert, "a musical solemnity;" the general commanding in the department, "the illustrious warrior who, etc.;" the pupils of the seminary, "those tender levites;" the mistakes imputed to the newspapers, "the imposture which distils its venom in the columns of these organs," etc., etc. the barrister had, consequently, begun by explaining away the robbery of the apples,--rather a difficult thing in this grand style; but bénigne bossuet himself was obliged to allude to a fowl in the midst of a formal speech, and got out of the difficulty with glory. the barrister had established the fact that the apple robbery was not materially proved,--his client, whom, in his quality as defender, he persistently called champmathieu, had not been seen by any one scaling a wall or breaking the branch; he had been arrested with the branch in his possession, but he declared that he found it on the ground and picked it up. where was the proof of the contrary? this branch had been broken off and then thrown away by the frightened robber, for doubtless there was one. but where was the evidence that this champmathieu was a robber? only one thing, his being an ex-convict. the counsel did not deny that this fact seemed unluckily proved. the prisoner had lived at faverolles; he had been a wood-cutter; the name of champmathieu might possibly be derived from jean mathieu; lastly, four witnesses unhesitatingly recognized champmathieu as the galley slave, jean valjean. to these indications, to this testimony, the counsel could only oppose his client's denial, which was certainly interested: but, even supposing that he was the convict jean mathieu, did that prove he was the apple-stealer? it was a presumption at the most, but not a proof. the accused, it was true,--and his counsel was obliged "in his good faith" to allow it,--had adopted a bad system of defence; he insisted in denying everything,--not merely the robbery, but his quality as convict. a confession on the latter point would have doubtless been better, and gained him the indulgence of his judges; the counsel had advised him to do so, but the prisoner had obstinately refused, probably in the belief that he would save everything by confessing nothing. this was wrong, but should not his scanty intellect be taken into consideration? this man was visibly stupid: a long misery at the galleys, a long wretchedness out of them, had brutalized him, etc., etc.; his defence was bad, but was that a reason to find him guilty? as for the offence on little gervais, the counsel need not argue that, as it was not included in the indictment. the counsel wound up by imploring the jury and the court, if the identity of jean valjean appeared to them proved, to punish him as a criminal who had broken his ban, and not apply the fearful chastisement which falls on the relapsed convict. the public prosecutor replied. he was violent and flowery, as public prosecutors usually are. he congratulated the counsel for the defence on his "fairness," and cleverly took advantage of it; he attacked the prisoner with all the concessions which his counsel had made. he appeared to allow that the prisoner was jean valjean, and he therefore was so. this was so much gained for the prosecution, and could not be contested; and here, reverting cleverly to the sources and causes of criminality, the public prosecutor thundered against the immorality of the romantic school, at that time in its dawn under the name of the "satanic school," which the critics of the _quotidienne_ and the _oriflamme_ had given it; and he attributed, not without some show of reason, the crime of champmathieu, or to speak more correctly, of jean valjean, to this perverse literature. these reflections exhausted, he passed to jean valjean himself. who was this jean valjean? here came a description of jean valjean, a monster in human form, etc. the model of this sort of description will be found in the recitation of théramène, which is not only useful to tragedy but daily renders great services to judicial eloquence. the audience and the jury "quivered," and when the description was ended, the public prosecutor went on, with an oratorical outburst intended to excite to the highest pitch the enthusiasm of the country papers which would appear the next morning. "and it is such a man, etc., etc., etc., a vagabond, a beggar, having no means of existence, etc., etc., etc., accustomed through his past life to culpable actions, and but little corrected by confinement in the bagne, as is proved by the crime committed on little gervais, etc., etc., etc.,--it is such a man, who, found on the high road with the proof of robbery in his hand, and a few paces from the wall he had climbed over, denies the fact, the robbery, denies everything, even to his name and his identity. in addition to a hundred proofs to which we will not revert, four witnesses recognize him,--javert, the upright inspector of police, and three of his old comrades in ignominy, the convicts brevet, chenildieu, and cochepaille. and what does he oppose to this crushing unanimity? he denies. what hardness of heart! but you will do justice, gentlemen of the jury, etc., etc., etc." while the public prosecutor was speaking, the prisoner listened with open mouth, and with a sort of amazement in which there was certainly some admiration. he was evidently surprised that a man could speak like this. from time to time, at the most energetic apostrophes, when eloquence, unable to restrain itself, overflows in a flux of branding epithets, and envelopes the prisoner in a tempest, he slowly moved his head from right to left, and from left to right, in a sort of dumb and melancholy protest, with which he had contented himself ever since the beginning of the trial. twice or thrice the spectators standing nearest to him heard him say in a low voice: "all this comes from not asking monsieur baloup." the public prosecutor drew the attention of the jury to this dull attitude, which was evidently calculated, and which denoted, not imbecility, but skill, cunning, and the habit of deceiving justice, and which brought out in full light the "profound perverseness" of this man. he concluded by reserving the affair of little gervais, and by demanding a severe sentence. the counsel for the defence rose, began by complimenting the public prosecutor on his "admirable speech," and then replied as well as he could, but feebly; it was plain that the ground was giving way under him. chapter x. the system of denial. the moment for closing the trial had arrived: the president ordered the prisoner to stand up, and asked him the usual question: "have you anything to add to your defence?" the man, who was rolling in his hands his hideous cap, made no reply, and the president repeated his question. this time the man heard, and seemed to understand; he moved like a person who is waking up, looked around him, at the public, the gendarmes, his counsel, the jury, and the court, laid his monstrous fist on the wood-work in front of his bench, and, suddenly fixing his eyes on the public prosecutor, began to speak. it was an eruption; from the way in which the words escaped from his lips, incoherent, impetuous, and pell-mell, it seemed as if they were all striving to get out at the same time. he said: "i have this to say: that i was a wheelwright in paris, and worked for master baloup. it is a hard trade, is a wheelwright's; you always work in the open air, in yards, under sheds when you have a good master, but never in a room, because you want space, look you. in winter you are so cold that you swing your arms to warm you, but the masters don't like when there is ice between the stones, is rough work; it soon uses a man up. you are old when quite young in that trade. at forty a man is finished. i was fifty-three, and had hard lines of it. and then the workmen are so unkind. when a man is not so young as he was, they call him an old fool, an old brute! i only earned thirty sous a day, for the masters took advantage of my age, and paid me as little as they could. with that i had my daughter, who was a washer-woman in the river. she earned a little for her part, and the pair of us managed to live. she was bothered too. all day in a tub up to your waist, in the snow and rain, and with the wind that cuts your face. when it freezes, it is all the same, for you must wash; there are persons who have not much linen, and expect it home; if a woman did not wash, she would lose her customers. the planks are badly joined, and drops of water fall on you everywhere. her petticoats were wet through, over and under. that penetrates. she also worked at the wash-house of the enfants rouges, where the water is got from taps. you are no longer in the tub; you wash at the tap before you, and rinse in the basin behind you. as it is shut up, you don't feel so cold. but there is a steam of hot water which ruins your sight. she came home at seven in the evening, and went to bed directly, for she was so tired. her husband used to beat her. he is dead. we were not very happy. she was a good girl, who did not go to balls, and was very quiet. i remember a mardi-gras, on which she went to bed at eight o'clock. i am telling the truth. you need only inquire. oh yes, inquire! what an ass i am! paris is a gulf. who is there that knows father champmathieu? and yet, i tell you, monsieur baloup. ask him. after all, i do not know what you want of me." the man ceased speaking and remained standing; he had said all this in a loud, quick, hoarse, hard voice, with a sort of wretched and savage energy. once he broke off to bow to somebody in the crowd. the affirmations which he seemed to throw out hap-hazard came from him in gasps, and he accompanied each by the gesture of a man who is chopping wood. when he had finished, his hearers burst into a laugh; he looked at the public, seeing they were laughing, and understanding nothing, he began to laugh himself. that did him mischief. the president, a grave and kind man, began speaking. he reminded the "gentlemen of the jury" that "monsieur baloup, formerly a wheelwright in whose service the accused declared that he had been, was a bankrupt, and had not been found when an attempt was made to serve him with a subpoena." then, turning to the prisoner, he requested him to listen to what he was about to say, and added: "you are in a situation which should cause you to reflect. the heaviest presumptions are weighing upon you, and may entail capital punishment. prisoner, i ask you for the last time to explain yourself clearly on the two following facts: in the first place, did you, yes or no, climb over the wall, break a branch, and steal apples, that is to say, commit a robbery with escalade? secondly, yes or no, are you the liberated convict, jean valjean?" the prisoner shook his head with a confident air, like a man who understands and knows what answer he is going to make. he opened his mouth, turned to the president, and said,-- "in the first place--" then he looked at his cap, looked at the ceiling, and held his tongue. "prisoner," the public prosecutor said in a stern voice, "pay attention. you make no answer to the questions that are asked you, and your confusion condemns you. it is evident that your name is not champmathieu, but jean valjean, at first concealed under the name of jean mathieu, your mother's name; that you went to auvergne; that your birth-place is faverolles, and that you are a wood-cutter. it is evident that you stole ripe apples by clambering over a wall, and the gentlemen of the jury will appreciate the fact." the prisoner had sat down again, but he hurriedly rose when the public prosecutor had finished, and exclaimed,-- "you are a wicked man. this is what i wanted to say, but i could not think of it at first. i have stolen nothing. i am a man who does not eat every day. i was coming from ailly, and walking after a flood, which had made the whole country yellow; the very ponds had overflowed, and nothing grew in the sand except a few little blades of grass by the road-side. i found a branch with apples lying on the ground, and picked it up, little thinking that it would bring me into trouble. i have been in prison and bullied for three months, and after that people talk against me, i don't know why, and say to me, answer. the gendarme, who is a good-hearted fellow, nudges me with his elbow, and says, why don't you answer? i cannot explain myself, for i am no scholar, but only a poor man, and you are wrong not to see it. i have not stolen, i only picked up things lying on the ground. you talk about jean valjean and jean mathieu. i do not know these persons, they are countrymen. i used to work for monsieur baloup, boulevard de l'hôpital, and my name is champmathieu. you are a very clever fellow to tell me where i was born, for i don't know. it is not everybody who has a house to come into the world in. that would be too comfortable. i believe that my father and mother were folks who went about on the roads, but i do not know it after all. when i was a boy i was called little, and now i am called old. those are my christian names, and you can take them as you please. i have been in auvergne. i have been at faverolles. well, hang it! may not a man have been at those two places without having been to the galleys? i tell you that i have not stolen, and that my name is champmathieu. i worked for m. baloup, and kept house. you tire me with your foolishness. why is everybody so spiteful against me?" the public prosecutor, who had not sat down, here addressed the president. "in the presence of these confused but very clear denials on the part of the prisoner, who would like to pass for an idiot, but will not succeed,--we warn him,--we request that it may please you, sir, and the court to recall the prisoners brevet, cochepaille, and chenildieu, and police inspector javert, and examine them again as to the identity of the prisoner with jean valjean." "i must remark," said the president, "that inspector javert, having been recalled to his duties at a neighboring town, left the hall and the town immediately after giving his evidence; we authorized him to do so with the consent of the public prosecutor and the counsel for the defence." "perfectly correct, sir," the public prosecutor continued. "in the absence of inspector javert, i believe it my duty to remind the gentlemen of the jury of the statement he made here a few hours ago. javert is a worthy man, who honors by his rigorous and strict probity inferior but important functions. his evidence is as follows: "i do not require moral presumptions and material proof to contradict the prisoner's assertions, for i recognize him perfectly. this man's name is not champmathieu, he is jean valjean, an ex-convict of a very violent and formidable character. it was with great reluctance that he was liberated when he completed his time. he had nineteen years' hard labor for qualified robbery, and made five or six attempts to escape. in addition to the little gervais robbery and the larceny of the apples, i also suspect him of a robbery committed in the house of his grandeur the late bishop of d----. i frequently saw him when i was assistant jailer at toulon, and i repeat that i recognize him perfectly." such a precise declaration seemed to produce a lively effect on the audience and the jury, and the public prosecutor wound up by requesting that the other three witnesses should be brought in and reexamined. the president gave an order to an usher, and a moment after the door of the witness-room opened. the usher, accompanied by a gendarme, brought in the prisoner brevet. the audience were all in suspense, and their chests heaved as if they had but one soul among them. the ex-convict brevet wore the black and gray jacket of the central prisons; he was a man of about sixty years of age, who had the face of a business man and the look of a rogue,--these are sometimes seen together. he had become a sort of jailer in the prison to which new offences had brought him, and was a man of whom the officials said, "he tries to make himself useful." the chaplains bore good testimony to his religious habits, and it must not be forgotten that this trial took place under the restoration. "brevet," said the president, "as you have undergone a degrading punishment, you cannot be sworn." brevet looked down humbly. "still," the president continued, "there may remain, by the permission of heaven, a feeling of honor and equity even in the man whom the law has degraded, and it is to that feeling i appeal in this decisive hour. if it still exist in you, as i hope, reflect before answering me; consider, on one hand, this man whom a word from you may ruin, on the other, the justice which a word from you may enlighten. the moment is a solemn one, and there is still time for you to retract, if you believe that you are mistaken. prisoner, stand up. brevet, look at the prisoner. think over your past recollections, and tell us on your soul and conscience whether you still persist in recognizing this man as your old mate at the galleys, jean valjean." brevet looked at the prisoner, and then turned to the court. "yes, sir, i was the first who recognized him, and i adhere to it. this man is jean valjean, who came to toulon in and left in . i came out a year later. he looks like a brute now, but in that case age has brutalized him, for he was cunning at the hulks. i recognize him positively." "go and sit down," said the president. "prisoner, remain standing." chenildieu was next brought in, a convict for life, as was shown by his red jacket and green cap. he was serving his time at toulon, whence he had been fetched for this trial. he was a little man of about fifty years of age, quick, wrinkled, thin, yellow, bold, and feverish, who had in all his limbs and his whole person a sort of sickly weakness, and immense strength in his look. his mates at the galleys had surnamed him je-nie-dieu. the president addressed him much as he had done brevet. at the moment when he reminded him that his degradation robbed him of the right of taking an oath, chenildieu raised his head and looked boldly at the crowd. the president begged him to reflect, and asked him if he still persisted in recognizing the prisoner. chenildieu burst into a laugh:-- "i should think i do! why, we were fastened to the same chain for five years! so you are sulky, old fellow?" "go and sit down," said the president. the usher brought in cochepaille. this second convict for life, who had been fetched from the galleys and was dressed in red like chenildieu, was a peasant of lourdes and a half-bear of the pyrenees. he had guarded sheep in the mountains, and had gradually drifted into brigandage. cochepaille was no less savage, and appeared even more stupid, than the prisoner; he was one of those wretched men whom nature has outlined as wild beasts and whom society finishes as galley-slaves. the president tried to move him by a few grave and pathetic words, and asked him, like the two others, whether he still persisted, without any hesitation or trouble, in recognizing the man standing before him. "it is jean valjean," said cochepaille. "he was nicknamed jean the jack, because he was so strong." each of the affirmations of these three men, evidently sincere and made in good faith, had aroused in the audience a murmur of evil omen for the prisoner,--a murmur which grew louder and more prolonged each time that a new declaration was added to the preceding one. the prisoner himself listened to them with that amazed face which, according to the indictment, was his principal means of defence. at the first the gendarmes heard him mutter between his teeth, "well, there's one!" after the second he said rather louder, and with an air of satisfaction, "good!" at the third he exclaimed, "famous!" the president addressed him,-- "you have heard the evidence, prisoner; have you any answer to make?" he answered,-- "i say--famous!" a laugh broke out in the audience and almost affected the jury. it was plain that the man was lost. "ushers," said the president, "produce silence in the court: i am about to sum up." at this moment there was a movement by the president's side: and a voice could be heard exclaiming,-- "brevet, chenildieu, and cochepaille, look this way." all those who heard the voice felt chilled to the heart, for it was so lamentable and terrible. all eyes were turned in the direction whence it came: a man seated among the privileged audience behind the court had risen, pushed open the gate that separated the judges' bench from the public court, and stepped down. the president, the public prosecutor, m. bamatabois, twenty persons, recognized him, and exclaimed simultaneously, "monsieur madeleine." chapter xi champmathieu is astounded. it was he in truth; the clerk's lamp lit up his face; he held his hat in his hand, there was no disorder in his attire, and his coat was carefully buttoned. he was very pale and trembled slightly; and his hair, which had been gray when he arrived at arras, was now perfectly white; it had turned so during the hour he had passed in the court. every head was raised, the sensation was indescribable, and there was a momentary hesitation among the spectators. the voice had been so poignant, the man standing there seemed so calm, that at first they did not understand, and asked each other who it was that had spoken. they could not believe that this tranquil man could have uttered that terrific cry. this indecision lasted but a few moments. before the president and the public prosecutor could say a word, before the gendarmes and ushers could make a move, the man, whom all still called at this moment m. madeleine, had walked up to the witnesses, brevet, chenildieu, and cochepaille. "do you not recognize me?" he asked them. all three stood amazed, and gave a nod to show that they did not know him, and cochepaille, who was intimidated, gave a military salute. m. madeleine turned to the jury and the court, and said in a gentle voice,-- "gentlemen of the jury, acquit the prisoner. monsieur le president, have me arrested. the man you are seeking is not he, for--i am jean valjean." not a breath was drawn,--the first commotion of astonishment had been succeeded by a sepulchral silence; all felt that species of religious terror which seizes on a crowd when something grand is being accomplished. the president's face, however, displayed sympathy and sorrow; he exchanged a rapid look with the public prosecutor, and a few words in a low voice with the assistant judges. he then turned to the spectators, and asked with an accent which all understood,-- "is there a medical man present?" the public prosecutor then said,-- "gentlemen of the jury, the strange and unexpected incident which has disturbed the trial inspires us, as it does yourselves, with a feeling which we need not express. you all know, at least by reputation, the worthy m. madeleine, mayor of m----. if there be a medical man here, we join with the president in begging him to attend to m. madeleine and remove him to his house." m. madeleine did not allow the public prosecutor to conclude, but interrupted him with an accent full of gentleness and authority. these are the words he spoke; we produce them literally as they were written down by one of the witnesses of this scene, and as they still live in the ears of those who heard them just forty years ago:-- "i thank you, sir, but i am not mad, as you will soon see. you were on the point of committing a great error; set that man at liberty: i am accomplishing a duty, for i am the hapless convict. i am the only man who sees clearly here, and i am telling you the truth. what i am doing at this moment god above is looking at, and that is sufficient for me. you can seize me, for here i am; and yet i did my best. i hid myself under a name, i became rich, i became mayor, and i wished to get back among honest men, but it seems that this is impossible. there are many things i cannot tell you, as i am not going to describe my life to you, for one day it will be known. it is true that i robbed the bishop; also true that i robbed little gervais, and they were right in telling you that jean valjean was a dangerous villain,--though, perhaps, all the fault did not lie with him. listen, gentlemen of the court. a man so debased as myself cannot remonstrate with providence, or give advice to society; but i will say that the infamy from which i sought to emerge is an injurious thing, and the galleys make the convict. be good enough to bear that fact in mind. before i went to toulon i was a poor peasant with but little intelligence, a sort of idiot; the galleys changed me: i was stupid, and i became wicked; i was a log, and i became a brand. at a later date indulgence and goodness saved me, in the same way as severity had destroyed me. but, forgive me, you cannot understand what i am saying. at my house the two-franc piece i stole seven years ago from little gervais will be found among the ashes in the fire-place. i have nothing more to add. apprehend me. my god! the public prosecutor shakes his head. you say m. madeleine has gone mad, and do not believe me. this is afflicting; at least do not condemn this man. what! these three do not recognize me! oh, i wish that javert were here, for he would recognize me!" no pen could render the benevolent and sombre melancholy of the accent which accompanied these words. he then turned to the three convicts,-- "well, i recognize you. brevet, do you not remember me?" he broke off, hesitated for a moment, and said,-- "can you call to mind the checkered braces you used to wear at the galleys?" brevet gave a start of surprise and looked at him from head to foot in terror. he continued,-- "chenildieu, who named yourself je-nie-dieu, you have a deep burn in your right shoulder, because you placed it one day in a pan of charcoal in order to efface the three letters, t. f. p., which, however, are still visible. answer me--is it so?" "it is true," said chenildieu. "cochepaille, you have near the hollow of your left arm a date made in blue letters with burnt gun-powder; the date is that of the emperor's landing at cannes, march i, . turn up your sleeve." cochepaille did so, and every eye was turned to his bare arm; a gendarme brought up a lamp, and the date was there. the unhappy man turned to the audience and the judges, with a smile which to this day affects those who saw it. it was the smile of triumph, but it was also the smile of despair. "you see plainly," he said, "that i am jean valjean." in the hall there were now neither judges, accusers, nor gendarmes; there were only fixed eyes and heaving hearts. no one thought of the part he might be called on to perform,--the public prosecutor that he was there to prove a charge, the president to pass sentence, and the prisoner's counsel to defend. it was a striking thing that no question was asked, no authority interfered. it is the property of sublime spectacles to seize on all minds and make spectators of all the witnesses. no one perhaps accounted for his feelings, no one said to himself that he saw a great light shining, but all felt dazzled in their hearts. it was evident that they had jean valjean before them. the appearance, of this man had been sufficient to throw a bright light on an affair which was so obscure a moment previously: without needing any explanation, the entire crowd understood, as if through a sort of electric revelation, at once and at a glance the simple and magnificent story of a man who denounced himself in order that another man might not be condemned in his place. details, hesitation, any possible resistance, were lost in this vast luminous fact. it was an impression which quickly passed away, but at the moment was irresistible. "i will not occupy the time of the court longer," jean valjean continued; "i shall go away, as i am not arrested, for i have several things to do. the public prosecutor knows who i am, he knows where i am going, and he will order me to be arrested when he thinks proper." he walked towards the door, and not a voice was raised, not an arm stretched forth to prevent him. all fell back, for there was something divine in this incident, which causes the multitude to recoil and make way for a single man. he slowly walked on; it was never known who opened the door, but it is certain that he found it opened when he reached it. when there, he turned and said,-- "i am at your orders, sir." then he addressed the audience. "i presume that all of you consider me worthy of pity? great god! when i think of what i was on the point of doing, i consider myself worthy of envy. still, i should have preferred that all this had not taken place." he went out, and the door was closed as it had been opened, for men who do certain superior deeds are always sure of being served by some one in the crowd. less than an hour after, the verdict of the jury acquitted champmathieu, and champmathieu, who was at once set at liberty, went away in stupefaction, believing all the men mad, and not at all comprehending this vision. book viii. the counterstroke. chapter i. m. madeleine looks at his hair. day was beginning to dawn. fantine had passed a sleepless and feverish night, though full of bright visions, and towards morning fell asleep. sister simplice, who was watching, took advantage of this slumber to go and prepare a fresh dose of bark. the worthy sister had been for some time in the surgery, stooping over her drugs and bottles, and looking carefully at them on account of the mist which dawn spreads over objects. all at once she turned her head and gave a slight shriek. m. madeleine had entered silently, and was standing before her. "is it you, sir?" she exclaimed. he answered in a low voice,-- "how is the poor creature?" "not so bad just at present, but she has frightened us terribly." she explained to him what had occurred, how fantine had been very ill the previous day, but was now better, because she believed that he had gone to montfermeil to fetch her child. the sister did not dare question him, but she could see from his looks that he had not been there. "all that is well," he said. "you did right in not undeceiving her." "yes," the sister continued; "but now that she is going to see you, sir, and does not see her child, what are we to tell her?" he remained thoughtful for a moment. "god will inspire us," he said. "still, it is impossible to tell a falsehood," the sister murmured in a low voice. it was now bright day in the room, and it lit up m. madeleine's face. the sister raised her eyes by chance. "good gracious, sir!" she exclaimed; "what can have happened to you? your hair is quite white." "what!" he said. sister simplice had no mirror, but she took from a drawer a small looking-glass which the infirmary doctor employed to make sure that a patient was dead. m. madeleine took this glass, looked at his hair, and said, "so it is." he said it carelessly and as if thinking of something else, and the sister felt chilled by some unknown terror of which she caught a glimpse in all this. he asked,-- "can i see her?" "will you not recover her child for her, sir?" the sister said, hardly daring to ask the question. "of course; but it will take at least two or three days." "if she were not to see you till then, sir," the sister continued timidly, "she would not know that you had returned; it would be easy to keep her quiet, and when her child arrived, she would naturally think that you had returned with it. that would not be telling a falsehood." m. madeleine appeared to reflect for a few moments, and then said with his calm gravity,-- "no, sister, i must see her, for i am possibly pressed for time." the nun did not seem to notice the word "possibly," which gave an obscure and singular meaning to the mayor's remark. she answered in a low voice,-- "in that case you can go in, sir, though she is asleep." he made a few remarks about a door that closed badly and whose creaking might awake the patient, then entered fantine's room, went up to the bed, and opened the curtains. she was asleep; her breath issued from her chest with that tragic sound peculiar to these diseases, which crushes poor mothers, who sit up at nights by the side of their sleeping child for whom there is no hope. but this painful breathing scarce disturbed an ineffable serenity spread over her face, which transfigured her in her sleep. her pallor had become whiteness; her cheeks were carnations. her long, fair eyelashes, the sole beauty that remained of her virginity and youth, quivered, though remaining closed. her whole person trembled as if she had wings which were on the point of expanding and bearing her away. to see her thus, no one could have believed that she was in an almost hopeless state, for she resembled rather a woman who is about to fly away than one who is going to die. the branch, when the hand approaches to pluck the flowers, quivers and seems at once to retire and advance. the human body undergoes something like this quiver when the moment arrives for the mysterious fingers of death to pluck the soul. m. madeleine stood for some time motionless near this bed, looking first at the patient and then at the crucifix, as he had done two months previously, on the day when he came for the first time to see her in this asylum. they were both in the same attitude,--she sleeping, he praying; but in those two months her hair had turned gray, and his white. the sister had not come in with him: he was standing by the bed-side, finger on lip, as if there were some one in the room whom he was bidding to be silent. she opened her eyes, saw him, and said calmly and with a smile,-- "and cosette?" chapter ii. fantine is happy. she gave no start of surprise, no start of joy, for she was joy itself. the simple question--"and cosette?" was asked in such profound faith, with so much certainty, with such an utter absence of anxiety and doubt, that he could not find a word to say. she continued,-- "i knew you were there, for though i was asleep, i saw. i have seen you for a long time, and have been following you with my eyes all night; you were in a glory, and had around you all sorts of heavenly faces." she looked up to the crucifix. "but," she continued, "tell me where cosette is? why was she not laid in my bed so that i could see her directly i woke?" he answered something mechanically which he could never remember. luckily the physician, who had been sent for, came to m. madeleine's assistance. "my dear girl," said the physician, "calm yourself; your child is here." fantine's eyes sparkled, and covered her whole face with brightness; she clasped her hands with an expression which contained all the violence and all the gentleness a prayer can have simultaneously. "oh," she exclaimed, "bring her to me!" touching maternal illusion! cosette was still to her the little child who must be carried. "not yet," the physician continued,--"not at this moment; you have a little fever hanging about you; the sight of your own child would agitate you and do you harm. you must get well first." she impetuously interrupted him,-- "but i am well! i tell you i am well! what a donkey this doctor is! i insist on seeing my child." "there, you see," the physician said, "how violent you are! so long as you are like that, i will prevent your having your child. it is not enough to see her, but you must live for her. when you grow reasonable, i will bring her myself." the poor mother hung her head. "doctor, i ask your pardon; i sincerely ask your pardon. in former times i should not have spoken as i did just now, but i have gone through so much unhappiness that i do not know at times what i am saying. i understand; you are afraid of the excitement; i will wait as long as you like, but i swear to you that it would not do me any harm to see my child. is it not very natural that i should want to see my child, who has been fetched from montfermeil expressly for me? i am not angry, for i know very well that i am going to be happy. the whole night i have seen white things and smiling faces. the doctor will bring me cosette when he likes; i have no fever now, because i am cured; i feel that there is nothing the matter with me, but i will behave as if i were ill, and not stir, so as to please these ladies. when you see that i am quite calm, you will say, we must give her her child." m. madeleine had seated himself in a chair by the bed-side; she turned to him, visibly making an effort to appear calm and "very good," as she said in that weakness of illness which resembles childhood, in order that, on seeing her so peaceful, there might be no difficulty in bringing cosette to her. still, while checking herself, she could not refrain from asking m. madeleine a thousand questions. "have you had a pleasant journey, sir? oh, how kind it was of you to go and fetch her for me! only tell me how she is. did she stand the journey well? alas! she will not recognize, she will have forgotten me in all this time, poor darling! children have no memory. they are like the birds; to-day they see one thing and another to-morrow, and do not think about anything. had she got clean underclothing? did those thénardiers keep her clean? what food did they give her? oh, if you only knew how i suffered when i asked myself all these questions during the period of my wretchedness! but now it is all passed away and i am happy. oh, how i should like to see her! did you not find her very pretty, sir? you must have been very cold in the stage-coach? can she not be brought here if only for a moment? she could be taken away again directly afterwards. you could do it if you liked, as you are the mayor." he took her hand and said: "cosette is lovely, she is well, you will see her soon; but calm yourself. you speak too eagerly and put your arms out of bed, which will make you cough." in fact, a fit of coughing interrupted fantine at nearly every word. she did not object; she feared lest she had injured the confidence she had wished to inspire, by some too impassioned entreaties, and she began talking of indifferent matters. "montfermeil is a rather pretty place, is it not? in summer, pleasure parties go there. have those thénardiers a good trade? not many people pass through the village, and theirs is a sort of pot-house." m. madeleine still held her hand, and was looking at her anxiously; it was evident that he had come to tell her something at which he now hesitated. the physician had left, and sister simplice alone remained near them. "i can hear her, i can hear her!" she held out her arms to command silence, held her breath, and began listening with ravishment. a child was playing in the yard, and probably belonged to one of the workmen. it was one of those accidents which constantly occur, and seem to form part of the mysterious _mise-en-scène_ of mournful events. the child, a little girl, was running about to warm herself, laughing and singing loudly. alas! what is there in which children's games are not mingled? "oh," fantine continued, "'t is my cosette! i recognize her voice." the child went away again. her voice died away. fantine listened for some time, and then her face was clouded, and m. madeleine could hear her murmuring, "how unkind that doctor is not to let me see my child! that man has a bad face." still, her merry ideas returned to her, and she continued to talk to herself, with her head on the pillow. "how happy we are going to be! we will have a small garden, for m. madeleine has promised me that. my child will play in the garden. she must know her alphabet by this time, and i will teach her to spell. she will chase butterflies, and i shall look at her. then, she will take her first communion; let me see when that will be." she began counting on her fingers,-- "one, two, three, four,--she is now seven years old; in five years, then, she will wear a white open-work veil, and look like a little lady. oh, my good sister, you cannot think how foolish i am, for i am thinking of my daughter's first communion." and she began laughing. he had let go fantine's hand, and listened to these words, as one listens to the soughing breeze, with his eyes fixed on the ground, and his mind plunged into unfathomable reflections. all at once she ceased speaking, and this made him raise his head mechanically. fantine had become frightful to look at. she no longer spoke, she no longer breathed; she was half sitting up, and her thin shoulder projected from her nightgown; her face, radiant a moment previously, was hard, and she seemed to be fixing her eyes, dilated by terror, upon something formidable that stood at the other end of the room. "great heaven!" he exclaimed; "what is the matter with you, fantine?" she did not answer, she did not remove her eyes from the object, whatever it might be, which she fancied she saw; but she touched his arm with one hand, and with the other made him a sign to look behind him. he turned back and saw javert. chapter iii. javert is satisfied. this is what had occurred. half-past twelve was striking when m. madeleine left the assize court of arras; and he returned to the hotel just in time to start by the mail-cart in which he had booked his place. a little before six a.m. he reached m----, and his first care was to post the letter for m. lafitte, and then proceed to the infirmary and see fantine. still, he had scarce quitted the court ere the public prosecutor, recovering from his stupor, rose on his legs, deplored the act of mania on the part of the honorable mayor of m----, declared that his convictions were in no way modified by this strange incident, which would be cleared up at a later date, and demanded, in the interim, the conviction of this champmathieu, evidently the true jean valjean. the persistency of the public prosecutor was visibly in contradiction with the feelings of all,--the public, the court, and the jury. the counsel for the defence had little difficulty in refuting his arguments, and establishing that through the revelations of m. madeleine, that is to say, the real jean valjean, circumstances were entirely altered, and the jury had an innocent man before them. the barrister deduced a few arguments, unfortunately rather stale, about judicial errors, etc., the president in his summing-up supported the defence, and the jury in a few moments acquitted champmathieu. still, the public prosecutor wanted a jean valjean; and, as he no longer had champmathieu, he took madeleine. immediately after champmathieu was acquitted, he had a conference with the president as to the necessity of seizing the person of the mayor of m----, and after the first emotion had passed, the president raised but few objections. justice must take its course; and then, to tell the whole truth, although the president was a kind and rather sensible man, he was at the same time a very ardent royalist, and had been offended by the way in which the mayor of m----, in alluding to the landing at cannes, employed the words "the emperor" and not "buonaparte." the order of arrest was consequently made out, and the prosecutor at once sent it off by express to m----, addressed to inspector javert, who, as we know, returned home immediately after he had given his evidence. javert was getting up at the moment when the messenger handed him the order of arrest and the warrant. this messenger was himself a very skilful policeman, who informed javert in two words of what had occurred at arras. the order of arrest, signed by the public prosecutor, was thus conceived: "inspector javert will apprehend monsieur madeleine, mayor of m----, who in this day's session was recognized as the liberated convict, jean valjean." any one who did not know javert and had seen him at the moment when he entered the infirmary ante-room, could not have guessed what was taking place, but would have considered him to be as usual. he was cold, calm, serious, his gray hair was smoothed down on his temples, and he went up the stairs with his usual slowness. but any one who was well acquainted with him, and examined him closely, would have shuddered; the buckle of his leathern stock, instead of sitting in the nape of his neck, was under his left ear. this revealed an extraordinary agitation. javert was a complete character, without a crease in his duty or in his uniform: methodical with criminals, and rigid with his coat-buttons. for him to have his stock out of order, it was necessary for him to be suffering from one of those emotions which might be called internal earthquakes. he had merely fetched a corporal and four men from the guardhouse close by, left them in the yard, and had fantine's room pointed out to him by the unsuspecting portress, who was accustomed to see policemen ask for the mayor. on reaching fantine's door, javert turned the key, pushed the door with the gentleness either of a sick-nurse or a spy, and entered. correctly speaking, he did not enter: he stood in the half-opened door with his hat on his head, and his left hand thrust into the breast of his great-coat, which was buttoned to the chin. under his elbow could be seen the leaden knob of his enormous cane, which was concealed behind his back. he remained thus for many a minute, no one perceiving his presence. all at once fantine raised her eyes, saw him, and made m. madeleine turn. at the moment when madeleine's glance met javert's, the latter, without stirring or drawing near, became fearful. no human feeling can succeed in being so horrible as joy. it was the face of a fiend who has just found a condemned soul again. the certainty of at length holding jean valjean caused all he had in his soul to appear on his countenance, and the stirred-up sediment rose to the surface. the humiliation of having lost the trail for a while and having been mistaken with regard to champmathieu was effaced by his pride at having guessed so correctly at the beginning, and having a right instinct for such a length of time. javert's satisfaction was displayed in his sovereign attitude, and the deformity of triumph was spread over his narrow forehead. javert at this moment was in heaven: without distinctly comprehending the fact, but still with a confused intuition of his necessity and his success, he, javert, personified justice, light, and truth in their celestial function of crushing evil. he had behind him, around him, at an infinite depth, authority, reason, the legal conscience, the public vindication, all the stars: he protected order, he drew the lightning from the law, he avenged society, he rendered assistance to the absolute. there was in his victory a remnant of defiance and contest: upright, haughty, and dazzling, he displayed the superhuman bestiality of a ferocious archangel in the bright azure of heaven. the formidable shadow of the deed he was doing rendered visible to his clutching fist the flashing social sword. happy and indignant, he held beneath his heel, crime, vice, perdition, rebellion, and hell: he was radiant, he exterminated, he smiled, and there was an incontestable grandeur in this monstrous st. michael. javert, though terrifying, was not ignoble. probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, and the idea of duty, are things which, by deceiving themselves, may become hideous, but which, even if hideous, remain grand; their majesty, peculiar to the human conscience, persists in horror; they are virtues which have but one vice, error. the pitiless honest joy of a fanatic, in the midst of his atrocity, retains a mournfully venerable radiance. without suspecting it, javert, in his formidable happiness, was worthy of pity, like every ignorant man who triumphs; nothing could be so poignant and terrible as this face, in which was displayed all that may be called the wickedness of good. chapter iv. authority resumes its rights. fantine had not seen javert since the day when the mayor tore her out of his clutches, and her sickly brain could form no other thought but that he had come to fetch her. she could not endure his frightful face: she felt herself dying. she buried her face in her hands, and cried with agony,-- "monsieur madeleine, save me!" jean valjean--we will not call him otherwise in future--had risen, and said to fantine in his gentlest, calmest voice,-- "do not be alarmed: he has not come for you." then he turned to javert and said,-- "i know what you want." and javert answered,-- "come, make haste--" there was something savage and frenzied in the accent that accompanied these words; no orthographer could write it down, for it was no longer human speech, but a roar. he did not behave as usual, he did not enter into the matter or display his warrant. to him jean valjean was a sort of mysterious combatant, a dark wrestler with whom he had been struggling for five years, and had been unable to throw. this arrest was not a beginning but an end, and he confined himself to saying, "come, make haste." while speaking thus, he did not advance: he merely darted at jean valjean the look which he threw out as a grapple, and with which he violently drew wretches to him. it was this look which fantine had felt pierce to her marrow two months before. on hearing javert's roar, fantine opened her eyes again; but the mayor was present, so what had she to fear? javert walked into the middle of the room and cried,-- "well, are you coming?" the unhappy girl looked around her. no one was present but the nun and the mayor; to whom, then, could this humiliating remark be addressed? only to herself. she shuddered. then she saw an extraordinary thing,--so extraordinary that nothing like it had ever appeared in the darkest delirium of fever. she saw the policeman javert seize the mayor by the collar, and she saw the mayor bow his head. it seemed to her as if the end of the world had arrived. "monsieur le maire!" fantine screamed. javert burst into a laugh,--that frightful laugh which showed all his teeth. "there is no monsieur le maire here." jean valjean did not attempt to remove the hand that grasped his collar; he said,-- "javert--" javert interrupted him: "call me monsieur the inspector." "i should like to say a word to you in private, sir," jean valjean continued. "speak up," javert answered; "people talk aloud to me." jean valjean went on in a low voice,-- "it is a request i have to make of you." "i tell you to speak up." "but it must only be heard by yourself--" "what do i care for that? i am not listening!" jean valjean turned to him and said rapidly, and in a very low voice,-- "grant me three days,--three days to go and fetch this unhappy woman's child! i will pay whatever you ask, and you can accompany me if you like." "you must be joking," javert cried. "why, i did not think you such a fool! you ask three days of me that you may bolt! you say that it is to fetch this girl's brat! ah, ah, that is rich, very rich!" fantine had a tremor. "my child!" she exclaimed,--"to go and fetch my child? then she is not here! sister, answer me,--where is cosette? i want my child! monsieur madeleine, m. le maire!" javert stamped his foot. "there's the other beginning now; will you be quiet, wench? a devil's own country, where galley-slaves are magistrates, and street-walkers are nursed like countesses. well, well, it will be altered now, and it's time for it." he looked fixedly at fantine, and added, as he took a fresh hold of jean valjean's cravat, shirt, and coat-collar,-- "i tell you there is no m. madeleine and no monsieur le maire; but there is a robber, a brigand, a convict of the name of jean valjean, and i've got him,--that's what there is!" fantine rose, supporting herself on her stiffened arms and hands; she looked at jean valjean; she looked at javert; she looked at the nun; she opened her mouth as if to speak, but there was a rattle in her throat, her teeth chattered, she stretched out her arms, convulsively opening her hands, clutching like a drowning man, and then suddenly fell back on the pillow. her head struck against the bed-head, and fell back on her breast with gaping mouth and open eyes. she was dead. jean valjean laid his hand on that one of javert's which held him, opened it as if it had been a child's hand, and then said to javert,-- "you have killed this woman." "enough of this!" javert shouted furiously. "i am not here to listen to abuse, so you can save your breath. there is a guard down below, so come quickly, or i shall handcuff you." there was in the corner of the room an old iron bedstead in a bad condition, which the sisters used as a sofa when they were sitting up at night. jean valjean went to this bed, tore off in a twinkling the head piece,--an easy thing for muscles like his,--seized the supporting bar, and looked at javert. javert recoiled to the door. jean valjean, with the iron bar in his hand, walked slowly up to fantine's bed; when he reached it, he turned and said to javert in a scarcely audible voice,-- "i would advise you not to disturb me just at present." one thing is certain,--javert trembled. he thought of going to fetch the guard, but jean valjean might take advantage of the moment to escape. he therefore remained, clutched his stick by the small end, and leaned against the door-post, without taking his eyes off jean valjean. the latter rested his elbow on the bedstead, and his forehead on his hand, and began contemplating fantine, who lay motionless before him. he remained thus, absorbed and silent, and evidently not thinking of anything else in the world. on his face and in his attitude there was only an indescribable pity. after a few minutes passed in this reverie, he stooped over fantine and spoke to her in a low voice. what did he say to her? what could this outcast man say to this dead woman? no one on earth heard the words, but did that dead woman hear them? there are touching illusions, which are perhaps sublime realities. one thing is indubitable, that sister simplice, the sole witness of what took place, has frequently declared that at the moment when jean valjean whispered in fantine's ear, she distinctly saw an ineffable smile playing round her pale lips and in her vague eyeballs, which were full of the amazement of the tomb. jean valjean took fantine's head in his hands, and laid it on the pillow, as a mother might have done to a child. then he tied the strings of her nightgown, and thrust her hair under her cap. when this was done, he closed her eyes. fantine's face at this moment seemed strangely illumined, for death is the entrance into brilliant light. fantine's hand was hanging out of bed; jean valjean knelt down by this hand, gently raised and kissed it. then he rose and turned to javert,-- "now i am at your service." chapter v. a very proper tomb. javert placed jean valjean in the town jail. the arrest of m. madeleine produced an extraordinary commotion in m----, but it is sad to have to say that nearly everybody abandoned him on hearing that he was a galley-slave. in less than two hours all the good he had done was forgotten, and he was only a galley-slave. it is but fair to say, though, that they did not yet know the details of the affair at arras. the whole day through, conversations like the following could be heard in all parts of the town:-- "don't you know? he is a liberated convict.--who is?--the mayor.--nonsense. m. madeleine?--yes.--really?--his name is not madeleine, but some hideous thing like béjean, bojean, boujean.--oh, my goodness--he has been arrested, and will remain in the town jail till he is removed.--removed! where to?--he will be tried at the assizes for a highway robbery which he formerly committed.--well, do you know, i always suspected that man, for he was too kind, too perfect, too devout. he refused the cross, and gave sous to all the little scamps he met. i always thought that there was some black story behind." the "drawing-rooms" greatly improved the occasion. an old lady, who subscribed to the _drapeau blanc_, made this remark, whose depth it is almost impossible to fathom,-- "well, i do not feel sorry at it, for it will be a lesson to the buonapartists." it is thus that the phantom which called itself m. madeleine faded away at m----; only three or four persons in the whole town remained faithful to his memory, and his old servant was one of them. on the evening of the same day this worthy old woman was sitting in her lodge, still greatly startled and indulging in sad thoughts. the factory had been closed all day, the gates were bolted, and the street was deserted. there was no one in the house but the two nuns, who were watching by fantine's body. toward the hour when m. madeleine was wont to come in, the worthy portress rose mechanically, took the key of m. madeleine's bed-room from a drawer, and the candlestick which he used at night to go up-stairs; then she hung the key on the nail from which he usually took it, and placed the candlestick by its side, as if she expected him. then she sat down again and began thinking. the poor old woman had done all this unconsciously. she did not break off her reverie for two or three hours, and then exclaimed: "only think of that! i have hung his key on the nail!" at this moment the window of the lodge was opened, a hand was passed through the opening, which seized the key and lit the candle by hers. the portress raised her eyes, and stood with gaping mouth, but she repressed the cry which was in her throat; for she recognized this hand, this arm, this coat-sleeve, as belonging to m. madeleine. it was some minutes ere she could speak, for she "was struck," as she said afterwards when describing the adventure. "good gracious, m. le maire!" she at length exclaimed, "i fancied--" she stopped, for the end of the sentence would have been disrespectful to the first part. jean valjean was still monsieur le maire with her. he completed her thought. "that i was in prison?" he said. "i was so, but i pulled out a bar, leaped out, and here i am. i am going up to my room; go and fetch sister simplice, who doubtless is by the side of that poor woman." the old servant hastened to obey; he said nothing further to her, for he was quite sure that she would guard him better than he could himself. it was never known how he managed to get into the yard without having the gate opened. he always carried about him a master-key, which opened a little side door, but he must have been searched and this key taken from him. this point was not cleared up. he went up the stairs that led to his room, and on reaching the landing, left the candle on the top stair, closed his window and shutters, and then entered the room with the candle. this precaution was useful, for it will be remembered that his window could be noticed from the street. he took a glance around him, at his table, his chair, his bed, which had not been slept in for three nights. no trace of that night's disorder remained, for the portress "had done his room;" but she had picked out of the ashes and laid neatly on the table the two iron ends of the stick and the forty-sous piece, which was blackened by the fire. he took a sheet of paper, on which he wrote, "this is the two-franc piece stolen from little gervais to which i alluded in court," and he laid the coin on the paper, so that it should be the first thing seen on entering the room. he took from a drawer an old shirt which he tore up, and wrapped the two candlesticks in the rags. still, he displayed no haste or agitation, and while wrapping up the candlesticks he ate a piece of black bread,--probably the prison bread which he took with him on his escape. this fact was proved by the crumbs found on the boards when the authorities made an investigation at a later date. there were two gentle taps at the door. "come in," he said. it was sister simplice; she was pale, her eyes were red, and the candle she held shook in her hand. violent events of destiny have this peculiarity, that however perfect or cold we may be, they draw human nature out of our entrails and compel it to reappear on the surface. in the emotions of this day the nun had become a woman again; she had wept and was trembling. jean valjean had just finished writing some lines on a piece of paper, which he handed to the sister, with the remark, "sister, you will deliver this to the curé?" as the paper was open, she turned her eyes on it. "you may read it," he said. she read, "i request the curé to take charge of all that i leave here. he will be good enough to defray out of it the costs of my trial and the interment of the woman who died this morning. the rest will be for the poor." the sister attempted to speak, but could only produce a few inarticulate sounds: at length she managed to say,-- "do you not wish to see the poor unhappy girl for the last time, sir?" "no," he said; "i am pursued, and if i were to be arrested in her room it would disturb her." he had scarce said this, ere a great noise broke out on the staircase: they heard a tumult of ascending steps, and the old servant cry in her loudest and most piercing voice,-- "my good sir, i can take my oath that no one has come in here all day or all the evening, and i have not left my lodge once." a man answered,-- "but there is a light in that room." they recognized javert's voice. the room was so built that the door, on being thrown open, concealed a nook in the right-hand wall: jean valjean blew out the light and crept into the nook. sister simplice fell on her knees by the table, as the door opened and javert entered. the voices of several men and the protestations of the old portress could be heard. the nun did not raise her eyes: she was praying. her candle was on the chimney and gave but little light, and on noticing the nun, javert halted in great confusion. it will be remembered that the very basis of javert, his element, the air he breathed, was reverence for all authority: he was all of one piece, and allowed no objection or limitation. with him, of course, ecclesiastical authority was the highest of all: he was religious, superficial, and correct on this point as on all. in his eyes, a priest was a spirit that does not deceive, a nun a creature who does not sin. theirs were souls walled up against the world with only one door, which never opened except to let truth pass out. on noticing the sister, his first movement was to withdraw, but he had another duty too, which imperiously urged him in an opposite direction. his second impulse was to remain, and at least venture one question. sister simplice had never told a falsehood in her life: javert was aware of this, and especially revered her for it. "sister," he asked, "are you alone in the room?" there was a terrible moment, during which the old servant felt as if she were going to faint: the sister raised her eyes and said, "yes." "in that case," javert continued, "i beg your pardon for pressing you, but it is my duty,--you have not seen this evening a person, a man who has escaped and we are seeking,--that fellow of the name of jean valjean. have you seen him?" the sister answered "no." she had told two falsehoods, one upon the other, without hesitation, rapidly, as if devoting herself. "i beg your pardon," said javert; and he withdrew with a deep bow. oh, holy woman! it is many years since you were on this earth; you have rejoined in the light your sisters the virgins and your brothers the angels; may this falsehood be placed to your credit in paradise! the sister's assertion was so decisive for javert that he did not notice the singular fact of the candle just blown out, and which was still smoking on the table. an hour later a man, making his way through the fog, was hurrying away from m---- in the direction of paris. this man was jean valjean; and it was proved, by the testimony of two or three carriers who met him, that he was carrying a bundle and was dressed in a blouse. where did he procure this blouse from? it was never known; but a few days before, an old workman had died in the infirmary of the sailors, leaving only a blouse. it might have been that one. one last word about fantine. we have all one mother, the earth, and fantine was given back to that mother. the curé thought he was doing his duty, and perhaps did it, in keeping as much money for the poor as he possibly could out of what jean valjean left him. after all, who were the people interested? a convict and a street-walker: hence he simplified fantine's interment, and reduced it to what is called the "public grave." fantine was therefore interred in the free corner of the cemetery, which belongs to everybody and to nobody, and where the poor are lost. fortunately god knows where to look for a soul. fantine was laid in the darkness among a pile of promiscuous bones in the public grave. her tomb resembled her bed. end of part first. +-------------------------------------------------+ |transcriber's note: | | | |obvious typographic errors have been corrected. | | | +-------------------------------------------------+ the three furlongers [illustration: with outstretched arms she rushed to one of them --page ] the three furlongers by sheila kaye-smith author of "spell land," "isle of thorns," etc. there may be hope above, there may be rest beneath; we know not--only death is palpable--and love. --dolben. [illustration: logo] philadelphia and london j. b. lippincott company copyright, , by j. b. lippincott company issued september, copyright in great britain under the title "three against the world" printed by j. b. lippincott company at the washington square press philadelphia, u. s. a. contents book i three against the world chapter page i. sparrow hall ii. shovelstrode iii. in the rain iv. fate's afterthought v. the hero vi. thick woods vii. over the gates of paradise viii. brambletye ix. some people are happy--in different ways x. tony backs an outsider xi. disillusion at sixteen xii. children dancing in the dusk xiii. keeping christmas xiv. woods at dawn xv. the sermon on forgiveness book ii the world against the three chapter page i. glimpses and dreams ii. the letter that did not come iii. only a boy iv. flames v. cowsanish vi. and i also dreamed vii. woods at night viii. vigil ix. and you also said x. a toast book i three against the world the three furlongers chapter i sparrow hall the twilight was dropping over the fields of three counties--surrey, kent and sussex--all touching in the woods round sparrow hall. in the sky above and in the fields below lights were creeping out one by one. the great wain lit up over cansiron, just as the farmer's wife set the lamp in the window of anstiel, and the lights of dorman's land were like a reflection of the pleiades above them. janet furlonger sat waiting in the kitchen of sparrow hall--now and then springing up to lift the lid off the pot and smell the brown soup, or to put her face to the window-pane and watch the creeping night, seen dimly through the thick green glass and the mists that steamed up from the fields of wilderwick. janet was immensely tall, and her movements were grand and free. in rest she had a kind of statuesque dignity: she did not stoop, as if ashamed of her height, but held herself proudly, with lifted chin. people used to say that she walked as if she were showing off beautiful clothes. this was meant to be a joke, for janet's clothes were terrible--old, and badly made. hats, collars and waist-bands she evidently thought superfluous; it was also fairly obvious that she dispensed with stays--which caused scandal, not because her figure was bad, but because it was too good. wind, sun and rain had tinted her face to a delicate wood-nut brown, through which the red glowed timidly, like the flush on a spring catkin. footsteps sounded on the frosty road, drawing steadily nearer. the next minute the gate clicked. janet started to her feet, flung open the kitchen door, and ran out into the garden, between rows of chrysanthemums still faintly sweet. two men were coming up the path, and with outstretched arms she rushed to one of them. "nigel!--old man!" he did not speak, but folded her to him, bending his face to hers. it was too dark for them to see each other distinctly. all that was clear was the outline of the roof and chimney against the still tremulous west. janet pulled him softly up the path, into the doorway, where it was darker still. she put up her hands to his face and gently felt the outlines of his features. then she began to laugh. "what a fool i am! didn't i say i wasn't going to have any silly sentimentality?--and here i am, simply wallowing in it. come into the kitchen, young men, and see what i've got for the satisfaction of your gross appetites." they followed her into the kitchen, and she turned round and looked at them both. they were very different. the elder brother, leonard, was like janet--dark both of hair and eye, with a healthy red under his tan. the younger's hair was between brown and auburn, and his eyes were large and blue and innocent like a child's. his mouth was not like a child's--indeed, there was a peculiar look of age in its drooping corners, and his teeth flashed suddenly, almost vindictively, when he spoke; it was lucky that they were so white and even, for he showed them with every movement of his lips--two fierce, shining rows. "you're late," said janet. "no, don't look at the clock, unless you've remembered how to do the old sum. it's really something after nine, and the train is supposed to get in at half-past seven." "yes--but i got hung up at grinstead station, playing guardian angel to a kid." "let's hope the kid didn't ask to see your wings," said leonard. "was it a girl-kid or a boy-kid?" "a girl-kid. there were five of 'em in my carriage. they'd been sent home from school for some reason or other, and this one evidently hadn't let her people know, for when she got out at east grinstead there was no one to meet her. all the station cabs had been snapped up, and some loathly bounder got hold of her--goodness knows what would have happened if i hadn't turned up and managed to scatter him. i got her a taxi from the dorset, and sent her off in it to shovelstrode." "shovelstrode!--then she must be old strife's daughter. what age was she?" "i should put her down at sixteen, but very innocent." "pretty?" "ye--es." "nigel, my boy, you haven't let the grass grow under your feet." "idiot!--we never exchanged a word except in the way of business. she wanted to know my name, but i took care to say smith. there was nothing exciting about it at all--only an infernal loss of time." "quite so. you didn't find me in a particularly good temper when you turned up at hackenden." "the first words that passed between us were--'is that you, you ass?' and 'yes, you fool.' we haven't done the thing properly at all--we've forgotten to fall on each other's necks." "let's do it now," said len, and the two boys collapsed into a mock embrace, in the grips of which they staggered up and down the kitchen, knocking over several chairs. "oh, stop, you duffers!" shouted janet; but she was laughing. "nigel hasn't changed a bit," she said to herself. "what have they been doing to your clothes?" asked leonard, as his brother finally hurled him off. "they stink, lad, they stink." "they've been fumigated," said nigel. "i've worn off some of the reek in the train, but to-morrow janey shall peg 'em out to air." "we'll hang 'em across the road from the orchard. lord! won't the wilderwick freaks sit up!" "it'll take ages to get that smell out," said janet ruefully, "and your hair, too, nigel--when'll that look decent again?" "i say, stop your personal remarks, you two--and give me something to eat. i'm all one aching void." janet took the soup off the fire, and slopped it into three blue bowls. nigel went round the table, setting straight the spoons and forks, which janey seemed to have flung on from a distance. "what's that for?" she asked. the young man started, then flushed slightly. "hullo! i didn't notice what i was doing. i always had to do that in prison." "put things straight?--what a good idea!" "yes. everything had to be straight--in rows. ugh!" for the first time he looked self-conscious. "well, it's a very good habit to have got into. you may be quite useful now." "i'm damned if i'd have done it," said leonard. "you had to do it," said nigel; "if you didn't ..." and a shudder passed over him. "what?" asked his brother and sister with interest. he flushed more deeply, and the muscles of his face quivered. then a surprising, terrible thing happened--so surprising and so terrible that leonard and janey could only stand and gape. nigel hid his face in his hands, and began to cry. for some moments they stared at him with blank, horror-stricken eyes. scarcely a minute ago he had been uproarious--forgetting pain and shame in the substantial ecstasies of reunion, smothering--after the furlonger habit--all memories of anguish in a joke. never since his earliest manhood had they seen him cry, not even on the day they had said good-bye to him for so long. now he was crying miserably, weakly, hopelessly--crying quietly like a child, his hands covering his eyes, his shoulders shaking a little. then suddenly he gasped, almost whimpered-- "don't ask me those questions. don't ask me any more questions." "nigel," cried janet, finding her tongue at last, "i'm so sorry. i didn't know you minded. please don't cry any more--it hurts us." "we didn't mean anything, old man," said leonard huskily. "do cheer up, and forget all about it." nigel took away his hands from his eyes, and len and janey glanced quickly at each other. they had expected to see his face swollen and disfigured, but except for a slight redness round the eyes it was quite unchanged. they both knew that it is only the faces of those who cry continually which are so little altered by tears. for a moment they could not speak. a chill seemed to have dropped on sparrow hall, and all three heard the moaning of the wind--as it swept up to the windows, rattled them, then seemed to hurry away, sighing over the fields. "come, drink your soup, old chap," said janet, pulling up his chair to the table. "write me down an ass, a tactless ass," she growled to herself; "but how could i know he would take on that way?" nigel obediently began to swallow the soup, while len and janey talked across him with laboured airiness about the weather. after the soup came bacon and eggs, and potatoes cooked in their skins. nigel's spirits began to rise--he seemed childishly delighted with the food, though janet's cooking was sketchy in the extreme. when the meal was over, he joined in the washing up, which was done at a sink in the corner of the kitchen. "what sort of people are the lowes?" he asked suddenly, polishing a fork with a vigour and thoroughness which made leonard and janey tremble lest he should realise what he was doing. "what sort of people are the lowes?" janet flushed. "oh, they're quite ordinary," said leonard, "quite ordinarily unpleasant, i mean. the old chap's narrow and pious, like most devil-dodgers, and the young 'un's like an ape." "and they've got all the kent land?" "oh, it's nothing to speak of. you know that end was always too low for wheat"--poor len was in a panic lest his brother should begin to cry again. but, strangely enough, nigel was able to discuss the fallen fortunes of sparrow hall with even less emotion than len and janey. the tides of his grief seemed to find their way into small streams only. it was about the side-issues of their tragedy that he asked most questions. was leonard still going to have a man to help him, now his brother had returned?--was any profit likely to be made in their reduced circumstances?--was there any chance of buying back what they had sold to lowe? "we shall have to go quietly," said len, "but i don't see why we shouldn't pull through if we're careful. i've given boorman a week's notice. he can bump round here till it's up, and lend you a hand now and then--i don't suppose you'll tumble into things just at first." nigel suddenly turned away. "i'm going out--to have a look round the place." "now!" "yes--it's a beautiful clear night." janet and leonard moved towards the door. "i'm going alone," said nigel shortly. janet and leonard stood still. they stared at each other, at first with surprise, then a little forlornly, while their brother pulled on his overcoat, and went out of the room. never, since they could remember, had one of the furlongers preferred to be without the others. it was past midnight, and janet was not yet asleep. she lay in bed, with a lighted candle beside her, her hair tumbled over the pillow and over her body, her neck gleaming through the heavy strands. her room was full of warm splashes of colour. the bedspread and carpet, though faded, glowed with sudden reds and gentle browns--faded red roses were on the wall. the window was low, so that when she turned on the pillow she could look straight out of it at a huddled mass of woods. it was uncurtained, and the stars flashed through the thick panes. there was a knock at the door. "come in"--and nigel came in softly. "hullo, old man." "i want to speak to you, janey." "and i want to speak to you. come and sit on the bed." "i--i want to say i'm sorry i cried this evening." "oh, don't!" gasped janet. "it's a habit one gets into in prison--crying about little things. prison is made up of little things and crying about 'em--that's why it's so hellish." her hand groped on the coverlet for his. "i expect i'll get out of it--crying, i mean--now i'm back." "don't let it worry you, old boy--we're pals, you and len and i. but--but--don't you really like us talking to you about prison?" he lifted his head quickly. "it all depends." "you see, there you were ragging and laughing about your clothes and your hair and all that. so how was i to know you'd mind----" "but it's different. oh, i don't suppose you'll understand--but it's different. having one's clothes fumigated and one's hair cut short is a joke--it's funny, it's a joke, so i laughed. but being obliged to have everything exactly straight--every damned fork in its damned place----" he stopped suddenly and ground his teeth. "it's the little things that are so infernal and degrading; big things one has to make oneself big to tackle, somehow, and it helps. but the little things ... one just cries. listen, janey. once a fortnight they used to come and search us in our cells. we used to stand there just in our vests and drawers, and they'd pass their hands over us. well, i could stand that, for it was horrible--sickening and monstrous and horrible. but when you were punished just because your tins weren't in the exact mathematical space allotted to them--it wasn't horrible or monstrous at all, just childish and silly; and when a dozen childish and silly things crowd into your day, why, you become childish and silly yourself, that's all. what i can't forgive prison isn't that it's made me hard or wicked or wretched, but that it's made me childish and silly--so if i deserved hanging when i went in, i'm hardly worth spanking now i've come out." "what i can't forgive prison is the miserable ideas you've picked up in it." "there aren't any ideas in prison--only habits." he hid his face for a minute in the coverlet. janet's hand crept over his hair. "you'll soon be happy again, old boy," she whispered. "perhaps i shall." "i hope to god you will--and now, dear, it's dreadfully late, and you're tired. hadn't you better go to bed?" he turned to her impulsively. "you'll stick to me, you and len?--whatever i'm like--even--even if i'm not quite the same as i used to be." strange to say, her impression of him was of an infinite childishness. she realised with a pang that while for the last three years she and leonard had been growing older in their contact with a world of love and sorrow, this boy, in spite of all he had suffered, had merely been shut up with a few rules and habits. in many ways he was younger than when he first went to gaol, more ignorant and more childish--he had lost his grip of life. in other ways he was terribly, horribly older. she put her arms around his neck, and kissed this pathetic old child, this poor childish old man. chapter ii shovelstrode a row of lights gleamed from shovelstrode manor, on the north slope of ashdown forest. shovelstrode was in sussex, and looked straight over the woods into surrey and kent. round it the pines heaped up till they gave a ragged edge to the hill behind it. into the house they cast many shadows, and even when at night they were curtained out of the lighted rooms, one could hear them rustling and thrumming a strange tune. tony strife crept up the back stairs to the schoolroom. she paused for a moment and listened to a distant buzz of voices. her mother must be having visitors, so she would not go near her--she would sit in the schoolroom till it was time to dress for dinner. tony was sixteen, healthy and clean-limbed, with a thick mouse-coloured plait between her shoulders. she wore a school-girl's blouse and skirt, with a tie of her school cricket-colours. she had in her manner all the mixture of confidence and deference which points to one who is paramount in her own little world, but is for some reason cast adrift in another where she has never been more than subordinate. the schoolroom was in darkness. the fire was unlighted and the blinds were up, so that the shadows of the pines rushed over the square of moonlight on the floor, waving and gliding and curtseying in the wind. tony, who had expected drawn blinds and a cosy fireside, was a little dismayed at the dreariness of her kingdom. "i wonder if they got my postcard," she thought forlornly. but the schoolroom was the schoolroom, with or without a fire, and her own special province now that awdrey had grown up, and exchanged its austere boundaries for a world of calls and dances and chiffons and flirtations. it was a little bit of the glorious land of school from which she had been so abruptly exiled. for the first time since her return a certain warmth glowed in her heart--she sat down on the window-sill and looked out at the pines. she wondered how soon she would be able to go back to school. perhaps there would be no more cases, and the clear, all-sufficient life would start again at the half-term. meantime she would write every week to her three best friends and the mistress she "had a rave on," she would work up her algebra and perhaps get her remove into the sixth next term; and she would finish that beastly nightgown she had been struggling with ever since easter, and be able to start a frock, like the rest of the form. her calculations were interrupted by the sound of footsteps in the passage and a rather strident voice calling-- "tony! tony!" the next minute the door flew open, and a girl a few years older than herself burst in. "hullo!--so you _are_ home! i saw your box in the hall, and swore you must have come back for some reason or other; but of course mother wouldn't believe me. what on earth have you come for?" "they've got whooping-cough at school, and mrs. arkwright sent us all home. didn't mother get my postcard?" "postcard! of course not. we'd no idea you were coming, and your room isn't ready for you, or anything. you ought to have known better than to send only a card--they get kept back for days sometimes. and when you arrived, why didn't you come into the drawing-room and see mother, instead of sneaking up here?" "i thought you had visitors--i could hear them talking. i meant to come down after i'd changed." "i see. well, you'd better come now and speak to mother. she's quite worried about your being here, or rather about my saying you're here when she says you aren't." "right-o!" and tony followed her sister out of the room. in a way awdrey was like her, but with a more piquant, impertinent cast of features. she was dressed in the latest combination of fashion and sport, with a very short skirt to display her pretty ankles and purple silk stockings. she was strongly scented with some pleasant, flower-like scent, which, however, made tony wrinkle up her nose with disgust. "you were quite right about there being visitors," said the elder girl in a more friendly tone. "captain le bourbourg was here, and as only mother and i were in, i went with him to the door--complications, of course!" "ass," said tony shortly. awdrey giggled, apparently without resentment, and the next minute they were in the drawing-room. the drawing-room at shovelstrode was an emasculate room, plunged deep in yellow and dull green. the furniture had a certain ineffectiveness about it, in spite of its beauty. the only thing which was neither delicate nor indefinite was the heavily beamed ceiling, reflecting the firelight. the girls' mother lay on a sofa between the fire and the half-curtained window, just where she could see the moon. she wore a yellow silk wrapper, and on her breast lay dull, strangely set stones. she was reading a little book of unorthodox mysticism, and others, in floppy suède bindings, were on the table beside her. "why, antoinette!" she cried. "whatever are you here for, child?" "they had whooping-cough at school," said awdrey glibly, "and sent her home--and the silly idiot wrote and told us on a postcard, which we'll probably get some time next week." lady strife sighed. "it's very disturbing, my dear, very disturbing--for me, that's to say. and as for your father, i expect he'll be furious. he hates things happening in a disorderly way and people being in the wrong place." "i'm sorry," said tony, "but i'll work all the time i'm here, so i really shan't lose anything by it." "well, it's not your fault, of course," rather doubtfully. "come and give me a kiss," she added, realising that the ceremony had been omitted. "how are you, mother?" "oh, about the same, thank you. weak of body, but not, i trust, weak of soul. i am wonderfully comforted by this little book of sakrata balkrishna's. our soul, he says, tony, sits within us as a watcher, holding aloof from the poor, suffering body, and weaving a new mantle of flesh for its next manvantara." "buddhism?..." asked tony awkwardly. "buddhism! my dear child--as if i would have anything to do with that modern corruption of pure brahminical faith! no, antoinette, this is the ancient vedantin philosophy, as old as the world. by the way, has your box come?" "yes. i brought it with me in the taxi." "the taxi! you were lucky to find one at the station." "i didn't find it. a man got it for me from the dorset arms." "a man!" cried awdrey. "yes, quite an ordinary sort of man, but rather decent." "i wonder who he was. how romantic, tony!" "rats! it wasn't in the least romantic. when i got out of the station i found the car wasn't there to meet me, and all the cabs were gone, and i didn't know what to do. then rather a nasty-looking man came along, and asked me what was the matter, and when i told him, he said i'd better spend the night in east grinstead as it was so late, and he knew of a very nice place i could go to. i didn't like to refuse, as he seemed so polite and interested, but of course i wanted to come here, and i was awfully glad when another man came and said he could get me a cab quite easily. the first man didn't seem to like it, though--perhaps he had some poor relation who let lodgings." "tony!" cried her sister. "you really mustn't go about alone. you're much too innocent." "my darling child," wailed her mother, "my dove unsoiled by knowledge!" tony looked surprised, but her answer was checked by the sound of footsteps in the hall. "girls, there's your father!" cried lady strife. "now, tony, you will have to explain. and remember i hate a scene--it clogs my soul with matter." "right-o, mother!" and tony hurried out into the passage. here she managed to get through the "scene," such as it was. sir gambier strife was a man to whom time and place were all-important, and as the time of term was inevitably linked with the place of school, he felt justly indignant at the separation of the two. "whooping-cough! people were such milksops nowadays. when he was a boy the sooner one got whooping-cough the more one's relations were pleased. how old was tony? sixteen? then the sooner she had whooping-cough the better." this, however, was all said in rather a low voice, sir gambier realising as much as any one the importance of not clogging his wife's soul with matter. by the time he entered the drawing-room, he was talking of other things. "i was down at wilderwick this evening--you know that place at the bottom of wilderwick hill, where the furlongers live?" "yes. sparrow hall." "that's it. well, this evening there was a flag tied to the chimney. i asked old carter what it was all about, and he said they're expecting the other brother home--the one that's been in gaol for the last three years." "it's a long time since i've seen the furlongers," said awdrey, "they've been lying low for the last few months, and i don't think i've ever seen the one who's been in gaol." "i saw him three years ago, just after we came here. he was swaggering about the kent end of their land with his gun. he won't do much swaggering there in future. by jove! it must have hit 'em hard to sell that property to old lowe." "they've only got a poky little farm now. but, father, do tell us what he's like, that youngest furlonger--he sounds interesting." "oh, he wasn't much to look at--a great strong fellow, for ever showing his teeth. but i've been told he's got brains, plenty of 'em, wouldn't have landed himself in prison if he hadn't." "when is he coming out?" "they were expecting him this evening, i believe. hullo! what's the matter?" "oh, it's suddenly struck me," cried awdrey. "perhaps he was tony's man." "tony's man!--what d'you mean?" awdrey poured forth the story of her sister's adventure. "she said he was an awful-looking man, and goodness knows where he'd have landed her if the other man hadn't turned up and scared him away. i'm sure he must have been furlonger, it isn't likely there'd be two scoundrels like that about." sir gambier turned red. "i won't have you girls mixed up in such things." "she didn't want to be mixed up in it," interrupted awdrey, "it wasn't her fault. but it's lucky the other man turned up. you don't know who he was, i suppose, tony?" "he said his name was smith." "that doesn't help us much. but, by jove! how furlonger must hate him!" "we don't know he was furlonger." "he must have been; it's just the thing a ticket-of-leave convict would do--try to victimise an innocent-looking girl." "i'm not innocent-looking!" cried tony indignantly. "well, i shan't argue the point with you. you must have looked pretty green for him to have said what he did. by the way, what was furlonger locked up for, father?" "something to do with the wickham rubber companies. farming wasn't good enough for him, so he took to finance--with the result that the whole family was ruined; had to sell all their land, except a few inches round the house--and the young man got three years in gaol into the bargain." "wickham got ten--so furlonger can't be as bad as wickham." "he's a rotten scoundrel, i tell you. diddled thousands of respectable people out of their money. then put up the most brazen defence--said that at the beginning he had no idea of the unsoundness of the scheme; 'at the beginning,' mark you--confesses quite coolly that he knew it was a fraud before the end." "well, i think it rather sporting of him," said awdrey. "he may have a beautiful soul," murmured lady strife; "why do people always look at actions rather than motives? poor young furlonger may have sinned more divinely than many pray. it's motive that makes all the difference. motive may make the robbing of a till a far finer action than the endowing of a church." "tut, tut, my dear! what a thought to put into the girls' heads. besides, it isn't as if the only thing against the furlongers was that one of 'em's been in gaol. they're the most disreputable lot i ever met, don't care twopence for any one's good opinion." "they're quite well connected really, aren't they?" said awdrey. "yes, that's the worst of it. their mother was a daughter of lord woodshire's, and i believe their father had rather a fine place near chichester. but he went to the bad--ahem! shocking story--died in paris--tut, tut!--the children were left to shift for themselves, and bought sparrow hall with their mother's money--all the chichester estate was chucked away by old furlonger." "i think they sound rather interesting. it's a pity the youngest should have embarked on the white slave traffic." "white slave traffic!--hush, my dear. young girls don't talk about such things." "no--they get mixed up in 'em instead. tony, i hope you'll meet your mr. smith again." "he's not my mr. smith," said tony hotly. "oh, it's impossible to talk to any one rationally to-night! father's started on 'young girls,' and tony's trying to make out she was born yesterday." she seized her sister by the arm. "come upstairs and dress for dinner." tony was only too glad to escape, and they went up to widely different rooms. awdrey's was furnished with a telling combination of coquetry and sport. silver toilet articles and embroidered cushions contrasted with her hunting-crop over the mantelpiece, her tennis racket on the wall. what struck one most, however, was the number of men's photographs which crowded the place. from frames of every conceivable fabric they stared with bold, glassy eyes. awdrey smiled at them lovingly, as they woke either memory or emotion. she had once said that the male sex was roughly divisible into two groups--g.p.'s and h.p.'s--grand passions and hideous pasts. tony gave them a scornful glance as she passed the door. her own room was austere and white. an indefinable coolness haunted its empty corners and clear spaces. there were no photographs, as she had not yet unpacked the photographs of her girl friends which usually adorned the mantelpiece. there were only three pictures--a memling madonna, holbein's portrait of a young woman, and watts' sir galahad, beloved of schoolgirls. tony sat down on the bed and began to unplait her hair. "what a fool awdrey is," she murmured to herself, "always thinking of love, and all that rot." chapter iii in the rain from nigel's bed as well as janey's one could see woods, and in summer he had often lain listening to the night-jar in them--that mysterious whirring, dull and restless, as if ghosts were spinning. that night all was windless silence, and there was no motion in the dark patch of window-view, except the flashing of the stars. towards morning a delicious sense of cold stole over nigel's sleep. soft airs seemed to be baffing him, rippling round him, and there seemed to be water--water and wind. then suddenly a bell rang in his brain. the dream collapsed, pulverised. he sprang up in bed, then scrambled out--then opened his eyes, to see himself still surrounded by his dream. it was five o'clock, and the parkhurst bell had rung in his head just as it had rung at that hour for hundreds of mornings. but he was not at parkhurst, he was still in his dream--water and wind. against the horizon stretched a long dim line of woods, and above them the sky was lucent with the first hope of dawn. into the fields splashed a gentle rain, and in at his window blew the west wind, soft, damp and cold. for the first time nigel realised that he was home, and that he was free. yesterday had all been so strange, he had not had time to think of things. after years of confinement and discipline it had been a terrifying ordeal to walk through the crowded streets of a town and take a long train journey, involving several changes. he had wished then that he had allowed len to come and meet him at parkhurst--the dull fears that had made him insist on his brother coming no nearer than east grinstead had seemed nothing to this terror of carts and horses and motors and trams and trains, these constantly shifting faces and strident voices, this hurry, this disorder, this horrible respect of people who called him "sir," and said "i beg your pardon," if they fell over his big feet. when he came to sparrow hall, it had been worse still--not at first, but afterwards, when janet and leonard had said all those terrible things to him, and hurt him so. they had hurt him, and he had frightened them, and it had all been miserable. but this morning everything had changed. he no longer felt terrified of his independence or of what his brother and sister might say. his heart was warm and happy--his lungs were full of the sweet moist morning air. he crossed the room. it was ecstasy to feel that no one was watching him, that there was no ugly observation hole in the door. why, privacy was as sweet as independence, and not nearly so startling. he pulled off his sleeping-suit, and stood naked by the bed. for the first time in three years he felt the pride of his young manhood, the splendour of his body. the lust of life frothed up in his heart. the dawn, his strong bare limbs, the rain, plunged him into a rapture of thanksgiving. he was home, and he was free. he knelt down by the window, the rain spattering softly on him, and stared out at the woods--ashplats wood and hackenden wood and summer wood, with swites wood in the west. the woods, the dear brown wind-rocked woods!--he would walk in them that morning, there was no one to hinder him--he was home, and he was free among the woods. he rose lightly, and began to dress. he put on old rough clothes that he had worn before he went to prison. they had been old then, and now they were positively disreputable, for janet had folded them away carelessly, so that they had creased and frayed. but he loved them, they seemed even now to smell of the cows he had milked and the soft loam of the fields. he ran downstairs whistling--some music-hall song that had been popular three years ago, but was long forgotten now. to leonard in the yard and janet in the dairy he sounded like a cheerful ghost. they both thought of going to meet him, but both at last decided to leave him alone. the house was full of the delicious smell of rain, and the wind crooned through it tenderly, rattling the doors and windows, and fluttering the untidy rags of wall-paper that here and there hung loose on the walls. nigel went into the kitchen, where the fire was burning. he sat down by it and warmed his hands, though he was not really cold. he had not seen a fire for three years. then suddenly he noticed something in the corner--it was his fiddle-case, wrapped in green baize. nigel had always passed for something of a musician, and during a few stormy years spent in london with his father had been fairly well taught. farming and scheming had never made him forget his fiddle, though occasionally it had lain for weeks as it lay now, wrapped up in dusty cloths in the corner. he stooped down and took it out of its many covers. it was a fairly good instrument of modern make, best in its low tones. all the strings were broken except the g, but he found a coil of the d in the case, and screwed it on. by means of harmonics and the seventh position he could manage fairly well with two strings. it seemed a terribly long time since he had felt a fiddle under his chin, and sniffed its peculiar smell of sweet varnished wood and rosin. he lifted his arm slowly, and the bow dropped on the strings. it was scratchy, and he felt horribly stiff, but in course of time matters improved a little, and len and janey, together in the dutch barn, smiled at each other as the strains of handel's "largo" drifted out to them. "he'll feel better now," said leonard. nigel forgot the "largo" in the middle, and started "o caro nome," from rigoletto. his taste in music had always been the despair of his teachers. he had never seemed able to appreciate the modern school, or, indeed, the more advanced of the ancients. he had a desperate fondness for balfe and donizetti, for the most sugary moods of verdi and gounod. he revelled in high notes, trills and tremolo--"o caro nome" and "i dreamt that i dwelt in marble halls" appealed to a side of him which was definitely sentimental. he stood there by the window, swaying sentimentally from side to side, shaking shrill colorature from his violin, regardless of the squeaking of a nearly rosinless bow. what appealed to nigel was never the technique of a composition, but its emotional quality. music was to him not so much sound as feeling--he did not value a piece for its own intrinsic beauty, but for the emotions it was able to call forth. as he played that morning whole cycles of experience passed before him. all the old dreams that for three years had lain dead in his violin now revived--but a new quality was added to them, a soft twang of sorrow. before his imprisonment his dreams had been winged and shod with fire, wild things compounded of desire and endeavour, tender only in their background of the seasons' moods, rain and sunshine and wind and shadows and stars. but to-day longing took in them the place of endeavour, and all their desire was for forgetfulness. stars and rain were in them still, but the stars and rain of the new heavens and the new earth which suffering had created--the rain which is tears, and the stars which spring from the dumb desire of sorrow brooding over the formless deep of its own immensity--"let there be light." and there was light--one or two faint dream-like constellations, burning over and reflected in the swirling waters of the abyss.... a great wind passed over the face of the waters, and parted them, and out of them rose a little island for a man to stand upon--so the dry land came out of the water. and the suffering man can stand on the island, where there is just room for his feet, and he can see the stars above him--and when he is too weary to lift his head he sees them reflected in the surging waters beneath.... nigel dropped his violin, and looked out with dream-filled eyes at the fields, seen dimly through the rain-drops dripping from the eaves. in the front garden stood a little girl--a little dirty girl with a milk-can. "hullo!" said nigel. he felt an unaccountable desire to talk to this child; not because he liked her particularly--indeed, she was rather an unattractive object--but because he realised suddenly that he was very fond of children. he had never known it before, never imagined that he cared about kids; but, whether it was his long exile in prison he could not tell, he felt quite overwhelmed this morning by his love for them, and realised that he absolutely must make friends with the highly unfavourable specimen before him. "hullo!" he repeated. the maiden vouchsafed no reply. "have you come for the milk?" he asked conversationally. she nodded. then she pointed to his violin. "did the noise come out of that box?" "yes--would you like to hear it again?" "no." he was not to be daunted. "come in, and i'll show you a pussy." "is there a pussy in that box?" "no--but there's a beauty in the chair by the fire." nigel dived out of the window, and caught her up bodily. her clothes smelt strongly of milk and garden mould, not an altogether pleasing combination. but for some reason or other he felt delighted, and carried her in triumph round the kitchen before he introduced her to a large placid-looking cat. "don' like it." this was humiliating, but nigel persevered. "have some of this--" and he offered her a spoonful of jam out of the pot on the table. the little girl sniffed it with the air of a connoisseur. "don' like it." "well, try this--" plunging the same spoon into the sugar basin. "don' like it." fortunately at that moment janey came in. "nigel, what on earth are you doing?--hullo, ivy!" she looked surprised at the scowling infant perched on her brother's shoulder. "she's come for the milk, and i'm giving her some breakfast." "wan'er go 'ome!" shrieked ivy. nigel looked so mortified that janey could hardly help laughing--till suddenly she realised that there was something rather pathetic about it all. nigel had never used to struggle for the good-will of dirty children. "she'd better come with me," she said, "and i'll give her the milk. her mother won't like it if she's kept." ivy alighted with huge satisfaction on the floor, and left the room with janey, after throwing a bit of box-lid at the cat. janey came back in a few minutes. "like to help me get the breakfast, old man?" she asked cheerily. nigel was pacing up and down the kitchen. "what a dear little thing she is!" he said. "who? ivy? i think she's a regular little toad. how funny you are, nigel!" half-an-hour later the three furlongers were at breakfast. nigel had always been subject to moods just like a girl, and sometimes his changes from heights to depths had been irritating. but to-day his brother and sister saw the advantages of such a nature. the two boys fooled together all through the meal, and janet watched them, smiling. nigel had found his tongue to some purpose. strange to say, he was more than ready to talk of his prison experiences, though, as he had already hinted to janey, he had two sets of these. one set, typified by his fumigated clothes, he seemed positively to revel in; the other set he never mentioned of his free will, though he obviously used to brood over them. "hullo! there's the postman!" cried janet suddenly. she rose to go to the door, but nigel was nearest it, and sprang out before her. "morning, winkworth!" he shouted hilariously. "i'm back again." "glad to see you, mus' furlonger," chuckled the postman. "you look in pretty heart." "never was better in my life," and waving a letter in his hand he swung back into the kitchen. "a letter for janey!--janey's the lucky devil"--as he flung it across the table. "i wonder who it's from," said leonard; "open it, janey, and see." letters were always an excitement in the furlonger family--they were few enough to be that. "know the writing, janey?" janey turned the letter over. "it's a bill." the boys' faces fell. "how dull," said leonard, "and how immoral, janet!--another of those ten-guinea hats, i suppose." "and you promised us solemnly," said nigel, "not to buy any more." "it's dreadful of me," said janet. the boys glanced at her in surprise--for she looked as if she meant it. chapter iv fate's afterthought janet did not open her bill till her brothers had gone out to the farm. then she tore the envelope. the bill ran-- "janey sweet, "curse it!--i have to go to brighton on saturday. it's for my father, so i daren't object, in case he should ask too many questions. but i must see you, dear one--it's nearly a month since we met, and i'm dying for the sight of you and the touch of you. can't you come to-day? i'm sure you can get away for an hour or two--your brothers must not take you from me. i'll be waiting in furnace wood, in the old place down by the hedge, at five. come to me, janey sweet. i dreamed of you last night--dreamed of you with your hands full of flowers. "your lover, "quentin." janey stuffed the letter into her pocket. "it's dreadful of me," she repeated, in the same tone as she had said it to the boys. those poor boys! how innocently and trustfully they had swallowed her lie--it was like deceiving children. but she could not tell them--though nigel's strange new reserve made her long all the more to be frank and without secret--they would be furious if they knew her story, now the story of three years. once she had tried hinting it to len, but though he had not half understood her, he had made his feelings about quentin lowe pretty plain, and janet had been only too glad to change the subject before the danger line was passed. nigel would, of course, side with leonard. they would look upon her love as treachery, for though there was no outward breach between the furlongers and the lowes, the former had always suspected the latter of sharp dealing over the kent land--old lowe would never have offered that absurd price if he had not known that the furlongers were absolutely obliged to sell. old lowe was a retired clergyman who had come with his son to redpale farm, just over the kentish border. from the first he had cast a longing eye on the furlonger acres, which touched his on the surrey side. a row of cottages in obvious disrepair and insanitation had given his longing the necessary smack of righteousness. at that time nigel was in prison on remand, and the news soon trickled through the neighbourhood that his brother and sister were in desperate money difficulties, and would have to sell most of their land. lowe at once came forward with what he considered a fair offer, which the furlongers, as no one else seemed inclined to bid, were bound to accept. the negotiations had been carried on chiefly through a solicitor, but young lowe had paid two or three visits to sparrow hall. janet would never forget one of these. leonard was not in that day, but though she had told quentin she could decide nothing without her brother, he had insisted on sitting with her in the kitchen, arguing some obscure point. she remembered it all--the table between them, the firelight on the walls, the square of darkness and stars seen through the uncurtained window, the pipe and rattle of the wind. he had risen to go, and suddenly she had seen that he was trembling--and before she had time to be surprised she saw that she was trembling too. they faced each other for a minute, shaking from head to foot, and dumb. then they stooped together swiftly in a burning kiss, their hearts full of uncontrollable ecstasy and despair. it had all been so sudden. she could not remember having felt the faintest thrill in his presence till that moment. he said the same. when he had sat down opposite her at the table, she had been merely a woman with whom he was doing business. it seemed as if fate had brought them together as an afterthought, and at first janey believed it could not last. but it lasted. it had lasted all through those years, in spite of much wretchedness and a killing need for secrecy on both sides. this need was more vital for quentin than for janey. he was utterly dependent on his father, who, of course, looked on the furlongers with righteous disgust. so for three years meetings had been stolen, letters smuggled, and happiness snatched out of sudden hours. to-day janet was not sure how she could arrange a meeting. meetings with quentin generally needed the most careful planning, and on this occasion he had not given her much time. however, she thought, the boys would very probably go shooting in the early evening, and she could then run over to furnace wood. this was what happened. a little manoeuvring sent nigel and leonard out to pot rabbits, and a minute or so later janey stole from sparrow hall, climbing the gate opposite into the fields of wilderwick. she did not wear a hat--she never did--and over her dress was a disreputable old jacket. she went gaily and innocently to meet her lover in garments many women would not have swept the floor in. it was a long tramp to furnace wood. the rain had cleared, but the grass was wet, and the trees shook down rain-drops and wet leaves. autumn was late that year, still in the fiery stage--whole hedges flamed, and backgrounds were mostly yellow. but everywhere now were the dead leaves, damp as well as dead. her feet splashed through them, they caked her boots, they filled every corner with their smell of sweet rottenness. furnace wood marked the beginning of the chain of hammer ponds below holtye common. for a long time the fields had been sloping eastward, till at last they dropped into a tangled valley stretching from old surrey hall to sweetwoods farm. here was a great stillness and a great solitude--woods, and thick old orchards, with now and then an oast-house or a chimney struggling up among them. in this valley lay redpale farm, clay farm, and scarlet farm, all old, alone, forsaken, beside the gleaming hammer ponds. the waters of the first pond flashed like a shield through the half-naked branches of furnace wood. janet's quick eyes saw quentin standing by the hedge, and she began to run. she splashed over the drenched field, climbed the hedge with an agility she owed to a total disregard for her clothes--and crept warm and panting into his arms, as he stood there among the drifted leaves. "janey," he whispered, kissing her lips and her hair and her wrist wet with rain, "how i love you ... little janey sweet." it pleased quentin to call her little, though as a matter of fact she was considerably taller than he. quentin was a few years younger than janey--delicate-looking, and yet thick-set. his face was pale, though the features were roughly hewn, and his shoulders were so high as to give him almost the appearance of a hunchback. in spite of this, he often struck people as handsome in a strange way--which was due, perhaps, to a certain nobility in the casting of his face, with its idealistic mouth, strong nose, and great bright eyes, which seemed to be burning under his heavy brows. "janey," he continued, "you're beautiful to-day--you're part of the evening. there's rain on your hair, and on your cheek, so that when i kiss it i taste rain--you're brown and red, just like the fields, you're windswept and rumpled like the woods." janey laughed. "and your teeth gleam like that white pond through the trees." "you should put that into a poem, quentin," she said, still laughing, "it sounds funny in prose." "prose! prose!--as if there could be any prose when you are near!" a copper gleam of sunlight came suddenly from under the rim of a leaden cloud. for a moment it flared on the hedge, making the wet leaves shine. it gave a metallic look to the evening--instead of sweetening the soaked landscape it seemed only to make it sadder, with a harsh, reckless sadness it had not worn in the gloom. quentin put up his hand and picked one of the shining sprays, to fasten it in janey's jacket. whenever he saw beautiful things in the hedges, he wanted to give them to janey. he never wanted to give her the beautiful things he saw in shops; he did not, like so many men, stare into shop windows, longing to see her in those clothes, those jewels, and great hats like the moon. but if ever he found a sudden splash of bryony in the hedge, or a flush of bloody-twig, or honeysuckle, or nuts, he wanted to pick them for her. when it was may he had often met her in furnace wood with his arms full of hawthorn, in june he had brought her dog-roses, in august ripe ears of barley, in september wild-apple boughs; and now in october he picked her sprays of red, sodden leaves. there was a little nut on this spray--he picked it off and cracked it with his teeth, and put the kernel into her mouth. then suddenly the sunlight faded, and a soft rush of gloom swept up the valley of the hammer ponds. "nigel came home last night," said janet, breaking the silence that had lasted with the sun. "how is he looking?" "he's changed, quentin." "it's aged him, of course." "that isn't so terrible--we could have endured that, we'd expected it. the awful thing is that it's made him so childish. sometimes you'd really think he was a child, by the way he speaks--and goes on." "he'll soon be all right--you'll heal him, janey." "i don't see how i'm going to. the worst thing is that he's so reserved with me and len. it isn't that he doesn't talk and tell us things, but i know he doesn't tell us the things that really matter. oh, quentin"--turning suddenly to him--"i feel such a wretch, having a secret from the boys when nigel's like this." "you've lost your logic, sweet--or, rather, thank god, you never had any. your brother's secrets ought to make you worry less about your own." "you don't understand--it's just the other way round." she sighed deeply, and her pain irritated him. "you have the power to end it if you like--you're not so badly off as i am. you can tell your brothers any day you choose--they can't interfere." "of course not--but it would make them miserable. they'd be miserable enough at the idea of my marrying any one, and leaving them--and as for marrying you----" "oh, i know they hate me," broke in quentin. "and they despise me because i haven't got their health and muscle. they hate me for what i have got--their land; and they despise me for what i haven't got--their muscle." janet's eyes filled. she knew that he was wretchedly jealous of her brothers, and it hurt her more than anything else. she laid her hand timidly on his arm. "quentin, i wish you wouldn't feel that way towards the boys. i can't help loving them." "but you love them more than me." "i don't, indeed i don't. and you mustn't think they hate you. they've got their hand against every one, you know, and of course they feel sick about the kent lands, there's no denying it. if they knew you loved me, they might hate you then--they'd be jealous; and if i told them now--oh, it would be all misery at home!--for them as well as for me. i'd far rather have my secret--that hurts only me. when we've settled anything definitely, of course i shall tell them. but we may have to go on like this for years." quentin groaned. "yes, janey, that's true--that's the damned truth. you should never have loved a helpless fool like me, all tied up in paper and strings. good lord! my father will have something to answer for--if there's any one to answer to for our muddlings in this muddled hell." "but you'll win your independence." "yes; if two things happen: if my father dies, which he isn't likely to, and which, hang it all, i don't want him to--or if i can make enough by my writing to support two people, which is never done by pessimistic poets in this world of optimistic prose. i ought to hear from baker soon--he's had that manuscript over a month--he's the twenty-eighth man that's had it. oh, damn it all, janey!" they were sitting together on a tree-trunk under the hedge, the darkness creeping up round them. quentin drew very close to janey, and clutched her hand. "i'm a beast to go whining to you like this--but it helps me. it's such a relief to get all my furies off my chest and feel your sympathy--_feel_ it, janey, you needn't speak, words seem to nail things down. oh, why were you and i born into this muddle and never given a chance? i've never had a chance--not the shadow of one. all my life i've suffered that vile plague, dependence, and it's poisoned my blood and sapped my strength and perverted my reason. my father's to blame for it. the whole object of his life has been to keep me dependent on him. he's stinted me of everything--friends, money, education--just to keep me dependent. he's well off, as you know, but he allows me a miserable screw many tradesmen would be ashamed to offer their sons. he's made my bad health an excuse for cutting short my time at college, and for not bringing me up to any profession. he's in terror lest i should strike out a line for myself. he wants me to live my whole life on a negation--'thou shalt not,' he says. he doesn't say it because he's my father, but because he's a clergyman. it's that which has spoiled him, because it hasn't let him go to life for his principles. christianity never does. i hate christianity, janey--christianity's a piece of semitic bargaining--all semitic religions are commercial, but christianity has been so far europeanised that it offers its rewards not for what you do but for what you don't do. i once wrote a poem on the christian heaven--god and all the angels and curly-locked saints yawning their heads off because they're all so tired of doing nothing, and at last all falling asleep together. ugh! one reason i love you, janey, is that you're so beautifully pagan--just like the country here. the country's all pagan at bottom, and that's why every one loves the country, even the christians." janey smiled, and pressed his hand. she knew quentin liked "talking," so she let him "talk," though she troubled very little about the questions that were so vital to him. she knew it relieved him to pour into her ears the torrent of abuse which was always roaring against its sluices, and had no other outlet--unless it found its way into publishers' offices and damaged his poor chances there. "it's christianity which makes my father so damned clever in keeping me dependent," continued lowe. "he's got so used to tying souls up in paper and string that he can make a neat parcel even of a bulky, bulgy soul like mine. you know how we admire shop people for the neat way they tie up parcels--we couldn't do it. well, my father's a kind of celestial shop-keeper, and i'm the goods he's sending out--payment on delivery. oh, damn!" janey's hand went up to his face and stroked it. quentin's furies always struck her as infinitely pathetic. "it'll be all right, dear," she whispered. "i'm sure it will. you're bound to get free." he seized her hand and held it fiercely in his while he stared into her eyes. "janey--i sometimes wonder if i'll ever get free--or if i do, whether i'll find freedom the ecstasy i imagine it. perhaps freedom, like everything else, is a mirage, a snare, a disillusion. yesterday i was reading the _epic of gilgamesh_-- gilgamesh, why dost thou wander around? life which thou seekest thou canst not find. that's the horrible truth--nothing that we seek shall we ever find, unless it's been found over and over again already. and then there's love, janey, that's one of the things we never find, though we seek it till our tears are blood. i've written a poem about that, comparing love to the sea--to salt water, rather, for of course hundreds of poets have compared love to the sea. love is like the salt water that splashes round the poor sailor dying of thirst--he drinks it in his desperation, and the more he drinks the fiercer becomes his thirst, and still he drinks on in despair and hope, till at last he ends in madness--that's love. janey, that's love." he stooped suddenly forward, till his head was buried in her knees. "that's my love, sweet, sweet thing--my love for you. it never sates, it always burns, it tortures, it maddens. there is no rest, no rest in my love--it wakes me from my sleep to long for you--it is a hunger that gnaws through all my meals--it is a darkness that may be felt, a light too blinding to be borne...." his shoulders shook, and tears rushed scalding into janet's eyes. with one hand she stroked and tangled his coarse hair, the other he had seized and laid under his cheek--and she felt one burning tear upon it. her whole heart seemed to open itself to her lover in tender pity, and not only to him, but to all men--men, with their fierceness in desire and gentleness in satiety, with their terrible sudden temptations, their weakness and nobleness, their beasthood and their godhead. men struck her--had always struck her--as intensely pathetic; and now quentin and his love wrung her breast with tears. before that storm of hungry love she bowed her head in mute homage--she worshipped him as he lay there on her knees. he lifted himself suddenly. darkness was creeping fast into the woods, with little shivering gasps. "janey, before you go, there's something i want particularly to ask you. next tuesday week my father's going to london for the day. he won't be back till late--i want you to come to redpale when he's gone." "redpale ... but there are the servants, quentin." "they're all right. i'll send the girls over to grinstead in the afternoon; there'll only be the men about the farm, and they needn't trouble us." "but...." "oh, there's your brothers, of course," he cried harshly; "can't you get away from them for one afternoon?" "yes, i can.... i don't know why i said 'but.'" "you mustn't say 'but'--janey, do you realise that you and i have never had a meal together?" "no." "we must have a meal together--i want to see you eat--i want to drink with you." "very well, i'll come. i'll get over early in the afternoon.... now i must say good-bye." "when i see you next i may have heard from baker. then we shall know our fate." "our fate...?" "yes, for if baker can't take my stuff, no one else will, and my last chance is gone." "don't think of such a thing, dear." "no, i won't. i'll think of you, dream of you--whenever you are so gracious as to let me sleep." he stood up, and drew her head down to his shoulder, holding it there with trembling hands, while his lips sought her face. her mouth was against his sleeve, and she kissed it while he kissed her cheek and neck. for a full minute they stood together thus, and when they drew apart, the first star hung a timid candle above the burnt-out fires of the west. chapter v the hero october dropped from red to brown in a sudden night of rain, and the three counties began to draw over themselves their fallow cloaks of sleep. in every view the ploughed fields spread brown and wet and empty, some with a ruddy touch of kentish clay, others with a white gleam of surrey chalk. nigel flung himself into the farmyard toil, and complained because it was too scanty. their ten acres of grass and orchard, with three or four cows and some poultry, did not give nearly enough work, he thought, to two able-bodied men. he remembered the days when the acres of sparrow hall had rolled through marsh and coppice into kent--when fifteen sweet-mouthed cows had gathered at the gates at milking-time, and golden rye from their high fields had gone in their waggon to honey mill. he was miserably aware that he had no one but himself to blame for this, though his brother and sister never reproached him. he had been impatient of the slow bounties of the fields, he had plunged into quick, adventurous dealings; for a few months he had brought wealth, hurry and excitement into his life--then had come poverty, and the ageless monotony of prison. when he looked round on their reduced estate it was not so much humiliation that ate into his heart as a sense of treachery. he had betrayed the country. impatient of its slow, honest ways, he had sought others, crooked, swift, defiled. he had turned renegade to the quiet fields round his home, and entered a rival camp of reckless strivings and meanness. this had been his sin, and he was being punished for it still. the punishment of the state for his sin against the state was over ... but the punishment for his sin against his home, the country, and himself was still being meted out to him by all three. the high spirits that had seized him on that first rainy morning of his freedom often came and snatched him up again, but they always dropped him back into a depression that was almost horror. he had moments of crazy gaiety and uproariousness, of sheer animal delight in his bodily freedom; but behind them all lurked the consciousness that he was still in prison. he had been sentenced for life. he was shut up in some dreary place, away from the farm, away from len and janey. he might work on the farm the whole day, and fool with his brother and sister the whole evening, but he knew none the less that he was shut up away from them all. during this time he had peculiar dreams. he often fell asleep full of fury and despair, but his dreams were always of sunlit spaces, children and flowers. again and again in them appeared the little girl ivy--not dirty and cross, but lovely and fresh and winsome, smiling and beckoning. it seemed as if behind all the horrors and fogs of his life something divine and innocent was calling--at times it was comfort and peace and healing to him, at others it was the chief of his torments. the furlongers had always lived aloofly at sparrow hall--scorned, even before their downfall, by their own class, they had nevertheless not sought comrades in the classes beneath them. they had always sufficed one another, and had not cared for the distractions of over-the-fence gossip or the public-house. however, since his return from parkhurst, nigel had realised a certain tendency on the part of labourers and small farmers to seek him out and claim equal terms. this was not merely due to the consciousness of his degradation, the delight of patronising the proud furlonger--its chief motive was a strange sort of deference. socially, his crime had reduced him to their level, but morally it had given him an exaltation which had never been his before. he now belonged to that world of which they caught rare dazzling glimpses in their sunday papers. he was only a rank below crippen in their hero-worship, and when they met him in the village they stared at him in much the same way as they stared at the murderer's photograph in _the people_. at first nigel hung back from them, sick and confused with shame, but as the days went by, the emptiness of his life beat him into conciliation. humiliated to the dust, he longed for some sort of regard, however spurious, just as a starving man will eat dung. his brother and sister gave him love and kindness in plenty, but they were much too practical in their emotions any longer to give him deference. before he went to prison he had been, though the youngest, the leader of the family--his stronger brain, his quicker wits had made him the captain of their exploits. but now his brain and wits were discredited. len and janey did not despise him, they were not ashamed of him before men--but he had forfeited his position in the household. they no longer looked upon him as their superior, he was just the younger brother. at first he had scarcely noticed this--everything had been strange, and he had let slip former realities. but as the days went by, and parkhurst became more and more of a horrible and suggestive parenthesis, he was able to recall the old ways and see how things had changed. he made no complaint, but his spirit was chafed, and sought crazily for balms. "come, don't be stand-offish, mus' furlonger," said the shepherd of little cow farm, who, meeting him outside the bells at lingfield, had suggested a drink. "no, you're a better man than me now--aren't you?" said nigel, showing his teeth. "i wurn't hinting such, mus' furlonger--only t'other chaps in there do want to hear about the prison." "why?" "oh, it's always interesting to hear about prison--specially from chaps wot has bin there. we git a lot about 'em in _lloyd's_ and _the people_, but there's nothing like a fust-hand story--surelye!" nigel laughed crudely. "and it's a treat to meet a real convict--none of your petty larceny and misdemeanour fellers...." "well, here's greatness thrust upon me," said furlonger, and swaggered into the bar. the fuggy atmosphere affected him in much the same way as the smell of ether and dressings affects a man entering a hospital--the spirit of the place, assisted by crude outward manifestations, cowed him and made him its slave. "name it," said the shepherd. "porter." it was three years since he had had a really stiff drink. he had never cared for liquor, indeed he had always been a man of singularly temperate life, a spare eater, a water drinker. but to-day a sudden desire consumed him--not only to drink, but to be drunken. he remembered the one occasion which he had been drunk. it was the day he had known definitely of the collapse of wickham's scheme, and his own inevitable disgrace. he had sat in the kitchen at sparrow hall, drinking brandy till his head had fallen forward on the table and his legs trailed back behind his chair. afterwards, there had been a shameful waking, but he could never forget how peace had crept in some mysterious physical way up his spine, from the base of his neck to his brain, with a soft tingling--it had been purely physical at first, then it had passed on to mental dulling and dimming. to-day, as the frothy brown porter ran down his throat, he felt that gracious tingling, that creeping upwards of relief. he looked round the bar. it was full of labouring men and smallholders, who stared at him with round eyes that were curious and would be ingratiating--they wanted to know him, because in their opinion he was better worth knowing than before he went to gaol. "this is mus' breame of gulledge," said the little cow shepherd. "how are you, mus' breame?--this is mus' furlonger of sparrow hall." mus' breame held out a dark and hairy hand. nigel's lips were twitching. somehow he felt much more humiliated by the beery approval of these men than by the cold looks of their betters. however, he gave his short, dry laugh, and shook hands. "and here's mus' dunk of golden compasses, and mus' boorer of kenthouse hatch--this here is old adam harmer, as has been cowman at langerish this sixty year." nigel had seen all the men before, and had once sold a calf to adam harmer, but he realised that now he was meeting them on new terms. "i wur wunst in the lock-up meself for a week," drawled old harmer. "'twas summat to do wud poaching, but so long ago as i forget 'xactly wot. surelye!" "reckon prisons have changed unaccountable since your day," said dunk, throwing a glance at nigel, as if to show that an opening had been tactfully made for him. but harmer clung to speech. "reckon they have: surelye. in my days you'd hemmed liddle o' whitewash and all that--it wur starve and straw and bugs in my day, and two or three fellers together in a cell, either larkin' or murderin' each other." the little cow shepherd looked uneasily at furlonger. "yus--and the constables too, so different. not near so haughty as they is now, but comfortable chaps, as 'ud let yer see yer gal fur a drink, and walk out o' the plaace fur half a sovereign." the conversation was obviously getting into the wrong hands. the only person who looked interested was nigel. "reckon all that's changed now," hastily put in dunk--"they say now as gaol's lik a hotel--but not so free and easy, i take it, not so free and easy. name it, mus' furlonger--see your glass is empty." this time nigel named a brandy. "reckon you can't order wot you lik fur dinner--and got to do your little bit o' work. but the gaol-buildings themselves, they're just lik hotels, they're palisses--handsomer than a workhouse." "they're damned stinking hells," said nigel--the brandy had loosed his tongue. a murmur of approval ran through the bar. the great furlonger had at last been drawn into the conversation. he sat at a small table, his fingers round his empty glass--about half a dozen voices begged him to "name it." at first he hesitated. he was now a hero--for the first time for years--and yet it was a hero-worship he could not swallow sober. but he wanted it. he wanted to be looked up to, for a change--to be deferred to, and exalted; and if he could not stand it sober, he must get drunk, that was all. he named another brandy. the patrons of the bar were drawing round him. the barmaid was patting and pulling at her hair; even "charley," the seedy nondescript that haunts all bars, and, unsalaried and ignored, brings the dirty glasses to the counter from the outlying tables--even "charley" came forward with a deprecating grin and heel-taps of stout. nigel had gulped down the brandy, and, without exactly knowing why, had sprung to his feet. "give us a speech, mus' furlonger!" cried boorer of the kenthouse. "tell us about gaol, and why it's damned and stinking." "have something to cool you fust," suggested breame. nigel shook his head. he was in that convenient state when a man is sober enough to know he is drunk. "gaol's damned and stinking," he began, glaring sharply round him, "in the same way that this bar is damned and stinking--because it's full of men. but in gaol they're divided into two classes, top scoundrels and bottom scoundrels. the top scoundrels are the warders, with their eye at your door, and their hand inside your coat--in case you've got baccy." a murmur of sympathy ran through his listeners, who had been a little taken aback by his opening phrases. "baccy's one of the things you aren't allowed. there's lots of others--drink, and girls, and your own body and soul--the body your mother gave you, and the soul god gave you," he finished sententiously with a hiccup. some one thrust another glass into his hand, and he gulped it down. it burnt his throat. "i once had a body, and i once had a soul, but they aren't mine any longer now. they belong to the state--hic--they're number seventy-six--that's me who's speaking to you--number seventy-six--no other name for three yearsh ... go and see the p'lice every month--convict seventy-six ... made me no better'n a child--hic--what'er you to do with a man when he's got too clever for you?--turn him into a child--a crying child--a damn crying child--like me----" and furlonger burst into tears. the bar looked disconcerted. nigel stood leaning up against the table, sobbing and hiccuping. the barmaid offered him her handkerchief, which was strongly scented, and edged with lace. breame muttered--"we're unaccountable sorry, mus' furlonger," and dunk suggested another brandy. suddenly nigel flung round on them, his lips shrinking from his teeth, his eyes blazing. "damn you!" he cried thickly--"damn you all--you cheap cads--gaping and cringing and pumping--feeding on my misery and my shame--hic ... look at you all grinning ... you're pleased because i'm in hell. you'll go home and gas about me, and say 'poor fellow'--blast you!--i'm better than anything in _lloyd's_ or the _news of the world_--hic--let me go--you're dirt, all of you--let me go----" he plunged forward, and elbowed his way through them to the door. he was very unsteady, and crashed into the doorpost, bruising his forehead. but at last he was out in the sun-spattered afternoon--with a cool breeze bringing the scent of rain from the forest, and little clouds flying low. chapter vi thick woods when len and janey came in from the yard that evening they found nigel in the kitchen, sitting at the table scowling. his hair was damp on the temples, and his cheeks were flushed. "hullo, old man!" cried janey, "when did you come in?" he did not answer, but supplemented his scowl by a grin. it was characteristic of him to scowl and grin at the same time. len went up to his brother, and looked at him closely and rather sternly. "what have you been up to?" still nigel did not speak. then suddenly he dropped his head, rolling it on his arms. "is he drunk?" whispered janey. "what d'you think?" len tried to pull up his brother's head, but nigel growled and shook him off. "nigel!" cried janey. he made no answer. she tried to slip her hand under his forehead, and lift it. "nigel, what have you been doing?" he snarled something at her, and she remembered the other awful occasion when she had seen her brother drunk. "leave him alone, and he'll come to himself," said len. "it's natural for him to get drunk--he's the sort." "oh, no, he isn't!--nigel, come upstairs with me, and let me put something cool on your head." "damn you!" growled the boy, "leave me alone." "oh, nigel, don't hate me--i'm not blaming you--i think i know why you got drunk, and i----" her sentence was never finished. with a yell of fury he sprang to his feet, knocking over his chair, and seized her in a grip of iron. "hold your tongue, you ----!" "oh!" cried janet. leonard vaulted across the table, grasped his brother's collar, and struck him on the side of the head. nigel loosed his grip of janet, and turned to close with len, who was, however, much the better man of the two. he forced nigel down on the table, and proceeded to punish him with all his might. "apologise, you brute ... beg her pardon on your knees," he shouted. nigel did not speak--his lips were tight shut, a thin red streak in the whiteness of his face. "len ... stop!--you'll kill him!" cried janet. she stood petrified, trembling from head to foot. never in her whole life had she witnessed such a scene in the furlonger family. the boys were fighting. she had seen them spar before, but never anything like this. and nigel's drunkenness ... and his words to her ... a sickly, stifling horror crept up her throat and nearly choked her. "len--stop!--he's had enough." "not till he apologises--apologise, you damn brute!" nigel's teeth were set. he struggled mechanically, len had hold of his right wrist, and his left hand was bent under him. suddenly, however, he managed to wrench them both free--the next minute he seized his brother's throat. for a moment or two they struggled desperately, leonard half strangled, and in the end nigel rolled off the table to the floor, where both young men lay together. leonard was the first to rise. "good lord, janey," he said weakly. "nigel--he's dead." "not he!" they both knelt down, and raised him a little. blood began to run out of the corner of his mouth. "you've killed him!" cried janey. "no--he's only bitten his tongue. look"--lifting the corner of his brother's lip--"his teeth are locked like a vice." "oh, all this has been too horrible!" "run and fetch some water--we'll bring him to in a minute." she filled a jug at the tap, and together they bathed nigel's forehead and neck. len's rage had entirely cooled, and he handled his unconscious brother almost tenderly. at last the boy opened his eyes. to the surprise of both len and janet his first glance was quite mild. "oh ..." he said weakly. then suddenly remembrance seemed to come. he shook off his brother's hand, scowled at janey, and struggled to his feet. "i'm going to bed," he muttered, leaning unsteadily against the table. "you mustn't stand," said janet, trying to soothe him, "come and sit here for a minute, and then len shall help you up to bed." "i don't want len, damn him!" he staggered towards the door. "len--go after him." "not if i know it." "he'll never get upstairs without you." "he's much better alone." they heard nigel slipping and stumbling on the stairs. once he fell with a crash, but at last he reached the top. luckily his door was open, and he lurched in. the next minute they heard a thud and a creak as he flung himself on the bed. he woke at dawn from what seemed an eternity of sleep--not one of those swift, deep sleeps which we are unconscious of till we find their healing touch on our lids at waking, but a series of sleeps, heavy, yet tossed, continually broken by grey glimmers of consciousness, by sudden heats and pains, quick stabs of memory, blind spaces of forgetfulness--that feverish, aching forgetfulness, which is memory in its acutest form. he sat up in bed, his temples throbbing, his face flushed and damp. he pushed his hair back from his forehead, and stared out at the morning with eyes that burned. he fully remembered all that had happened, without such reminders as his headache, his sickness, and the rumpled clothes in which he had slept all night. his brain throbbed to the point of torture. sharp cuts of pain tore through it, hideous revisualisations seemed to scorch whole surfaces of it with sudden flames. facts hammered at it with monotonous mercilessness. he fell back on the pillow, and for some minutes lay quite still, staring out at the woods. there they lay in their straight brown line, those woods. he could almost hear the rock of the wind in them, creeping to him over the stillness of the fields. they seemed to whisper peace--peace to his throbbing pulses and burning skin and aching body and breaking heart. all his universe was shattered, except those quiet external things--the woods and fields round his home. they stood unchanged through all his turmoils, they responded only to their own remote influences--the warming and cooling of winds, the waxing and waning of the sun's heat, the frostiness of vapours. he might rage, despair, scream, and curse in them without changing the colour of one leaf. he longed stupidly for tears, but those easy tears of his humiliation would not come. he felt that if he thought of len and janey he might cry. but he would not think of them, though in his heart was an infinite tenderness. len and janey were like the woods, they did not change--then suddenly he realised that nothing had changed, it was only he. he had changed, and could not fit in with his old environment. curse it! damn it! where could he find peace? perhaps he had formally renounced peace on that day he plunged his hands into the pitchy mess of money-making. he had known peace before then--soft dreams that flew to him from the lattices of dawn. he remembered days when he had lain in the corner of some field, among the rustling hay-grass, his soul lost in the eternities of peace within it. but now--he had renounced peace. he had turned from pure things to defiled--and he had sharpened his brain, whetted it on artificialities. for the man with brains there is seldom peace, but an eternal questing. the man without brains suffers only the problem of "what?" it is the man with brains who has to face the seven-times hotter problem of "why?" why was a man, alone of all creatures, allowed to be at war with his environment--a prey to changes that were independent of, and unable to reproduce themselves in, the world around him? why was a man the meeting-place of god and brute, the battle-ground of the two with their unending wars?--and so made that if one should triumph and drive out the other, the vanquished, whether god or brute, took away part of his manhood with him, and peace was won only at the price of incompleteness?... why was consummation only a prelude to destruction?--the lustreless horns of the daylight moon seemed to be telling him that it waxed full only to wane. why was a man given desires that were gratified only at their own expense? why did his young blood call--call into the fire and dark--with only the fire and dark to answer it? it was in this turmoil of "whys" that nigel's longing for the woods became desperate. he raised himself on his elbow, and stared out at them--swites wood, summer wood, and the woods of ashplats and hackenden. he found himself dreaming of their narrow, soaking paths, of their brown undergrowth, and carpet of dead leaves--he seemed to see the long rows of ash, with here and there a yellow leaf fluttering on a bough. he would go to the woods, he would find rest in their silent thickness. he sprang out of bed and across the room, with what seemed one movement of his big, graceful body. he lifted his water-jug from the floor, and drank deeply--then he washed himself and put on fresh clothes. he felt clean and cool, and the mere physical sensation gave him new strength and dignity. he went quietly downstairs. len was up and in the yard, janet was in the kitchen--but neither saw him as he stole out of the house and up the lane. he left it soon after passing wilderwick, and plunged into a field. the grass was covered with frost-crystals, beginning to melt in the lemon glare of the sun. it was a strange, yellow dawn, dream-like, pathetic--a little wind fluttered with it from the east, and smote the hedges into ghostly rustlings. nigel crept through the pasture as if he feared to wake some one asleep, and entered the first of his woods. the rim was touched with flame--one or two fiery maples blazed out of the hedge against a background of yellow. creeping through those golds and scarlets into the sober browns was symbolic. he went a few steps, then flung himself down upon the leaves. on the top they were dry, underneath he felt and smelt their gracious dampness. the fires in his heart seemed to die. he felt bruises where len had struck him, but they galled him no longer; the half-forgotten peace and liberty of other days was beginning to drift like a shower into his breast. why could he not live always in the woods, instead of among people whom he hurt and who hurt him, though he loved them and they loved him? there was no love in the woods--love had passed out of them in september, leaving them very quiet, very peaceful, in a great brown hush of sleep. love was what hurt in life--love and brains; take away these and you take away suffering. oh, if love and thought could go together out of his life as they had gone out of the woods--and leave him in a great brown hush of sleep. for nearly an hour he lay in the brake, hidden by golden tangles of bracken and stiff clumps of tansy. he had begun to drowse, and capture rags of happiness in dreams, when suddenly he heard a rustling in the bushes. hang it all! he could not have peace, even in the woods. the rustling came nearer, and he heard the panting of a dog--with a mumbled oath he sat up in the fern. "oh!..." nigel's head and shoulders were not a reassuring sight to confront one suddenly on a lonely woodland walk, and though tony did not scream her voice was full of alarm. at first nigel did not recognise her, she stirred up in him merely impersonal feelings of annoyance, but the next moment he seemed to see her face in a glow of lamplight on east grinstead platform. this was the lone girl-kid he had befriended--and thought no more of since then. "i beg your pardon," he said hastily, scrambling to his feet, "i'm afraid i startled you." "oh, no"--she looked awkward and embarrassed. "you're mr. smith, aren't you?" nigel stared at her in some bewilderment, then suddenly remembered another of the half-forgotten incidents of that night. "yes--i'm smith," he said slowly. "i--i hope you got home all right in the taxi." "quite all right, thank you--and mother said i ought to be very grateful to you for taking such care of me." there was something about this school-girl, who evidently took him for a man of her own class and position, which filled him with an infinite pain--a pain that was half a wistful pleasure. she stood before him in the path, a slim, unripe promise of womanhood, her long hair plaited simply on her back, her face glowing with health, her eyes bright and shy. he felt unfit, uncouth--and yet she did not seem to see anything strange in his appearance, sudden as it had been. he realised that now at last he was face to face with a human being between whom and him the barrier of his disgrace did not stand. this child did not exalt him for his evil story, neither did she despise him--his crime simply did not exist. its hideousness was not tricked out with tinsel and scarlet, as by the cads in the bar--it was just invisible, put away. strange words thrilled faintly into his mind--"the remission of sins." "i'm glad you came to me at east grinstead," said tony, a little embarrassed by the long pause. "you see, mother never got my postcard, so no wonder there wasn't any one to meet me." "i'm glad i was any use." he spoke stiffly, in a mortal fear lest, for some reason unspecified, her attitude of fragrant ignorance should collapse. "do you live near here?" she asked naïvely. he hesitated. "not very." "i do--quite near. i think i must be going home now." she held out her hand to say good-bye, when suddenly a shrill wailing scream rose from the field outside the wood. "oh!" cried tony. they both turned and listened, their hands still clasped. the next minute it came again--shrill, frantic. "what is it?" asked the girl, shuddering, "it sounds just like a baby." "i think it's a rabbit--perhaps it's caught in a trap." he left hold of her hand and looked over the hedge. the next minute he sprang into it, forcing his way through, while she stared after him with troubled eyes. "yes, it's a rabbit," he cried thickly, "caught in one of those spring traps, poor little devil!" she scrambled after him into the field. "oh, let it out!--poor little thing!--oh, save it!" but he was already struggling with the trap, and she saw blood on his hands where the teeth had caught them. "i'll do it, never fear," he muttered, grinding his teeth. "can you hold the poor little chap?--he'll hurt himself worse than ever if he struggles so." she grasped the soft mass of fur, damp and draggled with its agony, while nigel tried to prise open the steel jaws. "there!" the rabbit bounded out of the trap, but the next minute fell down struggling. "it's leg's broken," cried nigel. "poor little beast!--what a damned infernal shame!" he picked it up tenderly. "hadn't you better destroy it?" asked tony, gulping her tears. "i think perhaps i had--look the other way." she moved off a few steps, and heard nothing till nigel said, "poor little beggar!" he came up to her, holding the dead rabbit by its ears. "that's all you're good for when you've been in a trap--to die. being in a trap breaks parts of you that can never be mended. it's always kind to kill broken things." he stood hesitating a moment, then suddenly he flushed awkwardly, pulled off his cap and turned away. tony stared after him. she saw him go with bowed head across the field. half way he dropped the rabbit, but he did not stop. he walked straight to the fence, and climbed over it into the lane. an impulse seized her--she could not account for it, but she suddenly turned to follow him. she wanted to thank him again, perhaps--to ask him something, she scarcely knew what. but he was gone. there was only the dead rabbit, lying still warm in the grass. chapter vii over the gates of paradise the next day was the day janet had promised to have tea with quentin at redpale farm. she had prepared for it carefully, telling her brothers she was going shopping in east grinstead, and would not be home till late. as soon as dinner was over, she slipped upstairs to dress. she was in a state of fever, and for the first time thought of her clothes. she had never troubled about them when she went to meet quentin in the woods, but now she was going to his house--a thrill ran through her; she had never in her life been inside redpale farm, but now she would see the room where quentin sat and thought of her in the long, dark evenings--which he had told her of so often--when the stars crawled through veils of wrack, and the wind piped down the valley of the hammer ponds. memories of his few pronouncements on clothes rose to guide her. he liked her to come to him as a fragment of the day on which he waited. to-day was a brown day, hiding under rags of mist from a pale, sun-washed sky--so she put on a brown dress, of a long-past fashion, and mended in places, but beautiful in clinging folds about her--and in her breast she pinned the last yellow rose of the garden. "good-bye, janey," called len from the orchard. "good-bye," sang out nigel. she waved her hand to them, not trusting herself to speak. as soon as she was out of sight, she climbed into the fields, and walked across them to old surrey hall. here were the tangled borders of kent--she plunged through a hedge of elder and crack-willow, and was in the next county. quentin always used to say that there was a difference between the three counties, even where they touched in this corner. surrey was park-like, and more sophisticated than the other two; one had wide, green spaces and dotted trees. sussex was moor-like, covered with wild patches and pines, hilly and bare; kent was untidy, tangled and lush, full of small, twisting lanes, weighted orchards and huddled farms. janet passed the flat gable-end of anstiel, buried in the thickets of its garden, and came out on the gated road. this wound down the valley of the hammer ponds to redpale, scarlets and clay. it was seldom used, as there were gates every few hundred yards to prevent the cattle from straying, and in winter the hammer ponds sometimes overflowed. redpale was the first of the valley farms, and stood in a reed-grown hollow beside a wood. it was an old house, with a carnival of reds in its huge, sloping roof. janet stole quickly through the yard and came up the garden to the door. it was opened before she reached it, and quentin seized her hands. "you've come at last--i've been watching for you." he dragged her into the passage, banged the door, and kissed her in the dark. "come into the study," he cried eagerly. "come and hallow me a hundred lonely evenings in one hour." he took her into a low, book-lined room, where a fire was burning. a chair was pulled up to the fire, and over it was spread a gorgeous eastern rug. "you're to sit there, janey. i prepared that rug for you--it has your tintings, your browns and whites and reds. sit down, and i'll sit at your feet." she sat down, but before he did so, he fetched a jug of chrysanthemums, and put them on the table beside her. "now you're posed, janey sweet--posed for me to gaze at and worship. you don't know how often i've dreamed of you in that chair, with old oak at your back, flowers at your elbow, and firelight in your eyes. one night i really thought i saw you there, and i fell at your knees--as i do now--and took your hand--as i do now. but it was only a dream, and i sat on in my own chair and watched our two fetches sitting there before me, you in the chair and i at your feet." he kissed her hands repeatedly, and his poor, hot kisses seemed to drain love and pity in a torrent from her heart. "quentin, i'm so glad i came. is this where you sit in the evenings? now i shall know how to imagine you when i think of you after supper." "'when you think of me after supper'--you quaint woman! how funnily you speak!" he laughed, and hid his face in her knees. but the next moment his head shot up tragically. "i've bad news for you, dear." "oh, what is it?..." "baker has returned my poems." "oh!..." "yes--there they are." he pointed to the grate, where one or two fragments of charred paper showed among the cinders. she bowed her face over his. "i thought you were happy when i came." "happy! of course i was happy _when you came_. janey, if you come to me on my death-bed, i'll be happy--if you come to me in hell, i'll sing for joy." "did baker write about the poems?" "no--only a damned printed slip; he doesn't think 'em worth a letter. it's all over with me, janey--with us both. i'll never be good for anything--i'm a rotter, a waster, a spring poet. we're both done for--our love isn't any more use." "can't you hope, dear?" "can you?" she began to cry. she had always fought hard against tears when she was with quentin, but this afternoon her disappointment was too bitter. she realised the sour facts to which hope and trust had long blinded her--that quentin would never win his independence, and therefore that marriage with him was impossible till his father's death. she saw how much she had unconsciously relied on baker's acceptance of the poems, their last hope. quentin's words had scattered a crowd of little delicate dreams, scarcely realised while she entertained them, known only as they fled like angels from the door. after those three weary years of waiting she had dreamed of being his at last--his wife, his housemate--no longer meeting him in the dark corners of woods, but his before the world, honoured and acknowledged. now that dream was shattered--the three weary years would become four weary years, and the four, five--and on and on to six and seven. the woods would still rustle with their stealthy footsteps, their tongues still burn with lies ... she covered her face, and wept bitterly--with all the impassioned weakness of the strong. "oh, i'm so ashamed...." "why?" "because i'm crying. but, quentin, i feel broken, somehow. our love's so great, and we're parted by such little things." "janey, janey...." she sobbed more dryly now--anguish was stiffening her throat. "must we wait all those years?" he whispered. "what else can we do?" he whispered again. "must we wait all those years?" she lifted her face, understanding him suddenly. "quentin, you and i must do nothing to--degrade our love." "but it's degraded already--it's thwarted, and all thwarted things are degraded. if we fling aside our fears and triumph over circumstances, then it will be exalted, not degraded." she did not speak. "janey," he continued, his voice muffled in her hands, which he held against his mouth. "you and i have been locked out of paradise--but we can climb over the gates." she was still silent. quentin had never spoken to her so openly before--after earlier disappointments he had sometimes hinted what he now expressed; but his love had never made her tremble; violent as it was, it was reverent. "janey ... will you climb over the gates of paradise with me?" "no, dear." "why?" "because our love's not that sort." "it's the sort that waits and is trampled on." "it's strong enough to wait." "how white your face is, janey!--you speak brave words, but you're trembling." "yes, i'm trembling." "because you're not speaking the truth; you're lying--in the face of love. you see plainly that if you and i wait till we can marry, we shall wait for ever. our only chance is to take matters into our own hands, and let circumstances and opportunities be damned. you make out that you're denying love for its own good--that's another lie. 'wait,' you say, because you're afraid. why, what have we been doing all these years but 'wait'?--wait, wait; wait till our hearts are sick and our hopes are dust. if we wait any longer our love will die--and then will you find much comfort in the thought that we have 'waited'?" "but there's the boys, quentin." an oath burst from young lowe. "the boys! the boys!--that's your war-cry, janey. i'm nearly sick of it now. and how appropriate!--your brothers are such models of good behaviour, ain't they?" "don't, quentin--it's for that very reason...." "yes," he said bitterly, "i remember how your reasons go--the boys have their secrets, so you must be without one; the boys have made a pretty general hash of law and order, so you must be a kind of sunday-school ma'am. really, janet!" "you don't understand what it is to live with people who think you ever so much better than you really are--you have to keep it up somehow." "but surely you don't think you'll be committing a crime by giving our love a chance. you can't be such a prude as to stickle for a ceremony--a few lines scribbled, a few words muttered." "it wouldn't be so bad if that were all. but it's no good trying to prove that you're simply offering me marriage with the ceremony left out. in some cases that might be true, but not in ours. you can't give the name of marriage to a few hurried meetings, all secrecy and lies. things are bad enough as they are, without adding--that mockery." quentin sighed. "you're an extraordinary woman, janey; you breathe the pure spirit of recklessness and paganism--and then suddenly you give vent to feelings that would become hesba stretton. you're a moralist at bottom--every woman is. there's no use looking for the greek in a woman--they're all semitic at heart, every one of 'em. you'll begin to quote the ten commandments in a minute." janey said nothing, and for some time they did not move. the wind rushed up to the farmhouse, blustered round it, and sighed away. the sunshine began to slant on the woods, tarnishing their western rims. then suddenly the kettle began to sing. they both lifted their heads as they heard it--it reminded them of the meal they were to have together. "janey, will you make tea?" she stood up quickly as his arms fell from her waist. this sudden, most domestic, diversion was a relief. she began to prepare the meal, and he crouched by the fire and watched her. "you shall pour out tea, love--then we'll do things in the grand style, and smash the tea-pot." while she waited for the tea to draw she came over to the mirror above the fireplace and began to arrange her hair. the firelight played on her as she stood there, her arms lifted, her head thrown back, half her face in shadow, half flushed in the glow. "janey, you are the symbol of love--all light and darkness and disarray. it's cruel of you to stand like that--it's profane. for you're not love, you're morality." "it's funny, quentin, but you never can understand my reasons for what i do--it's because they're not poetic enough, i suppose." "you don't seem to have any reasons at all--only a moral sense." he rose and went to sit at the table, resting his chin on his hands. she came behind him and bent over him. "dear one, i've seen such a lot of unhappy love that i've made up my mind ours shall be different.... i refuse you because i love you too much." quentin sighed impatiently. "if i did what you ask," continued janey tremulously, "our love would die." "nonsense!--how dare you say such things! why should it die?" "i--i don't know--but i'm sure it would. oh, quentin, i know you don't understand my reasons, because i really haven't given them to you properly. they're things i feel more than things i know." she went and sat down opposite him, and began to pour out tea. "let's talk of something that isn't love." he laughed. "let's breathe something that isn't air. everything's love--if we talked about flowers, or books, or animals, or stars, we should be talking about love. without love even our daily newspapers wouldn't appear." "then don't let's talk of anything--let's hold our tongues." "very well, janey." he smiled at the simplicity of the woman who thought she could silence love by holding her tongue. for some minutes they sat opposite each other, swallowing scalding tea, crumbling cake upon their plates. their first meal together, on which they had both set such store, had become an ordeal of mistrust and silence. the sunset was now ruddy on the woods, and the sky became full of little burning wisps of cloud, like brands flung out of the west. they hurried over the sky, and dropped behind a grass-grown hill in the east, crowding after one another, kindling from flame to scarlet, from scarlet to crimson. the wind came and fluttered again round the house--darkness began to drop into the room. outside, a rainbow of colours gleamed and flashed in the sunset, as it struck the hammer ponds and the wet flowers of the garden--but the window looked east, and there was nothing but the firelight to wrestle with the shadows that crept from the corners towards the table. soon the table with the food on it became mysterious, gloomed with shadows and half-lights--then the dimness crept up the bodies of quentin and janey, leaving only their white faces staring at each other. they had given up even the pretence to eat--their eyes were burning, and yet washed in tears. suddenly janey sprang to her feet. "i must go." "go--why, it's barely five." "but i must." he rose hurriedly. for a moment they faced each other over the unfinished meal, then quentin came towards her. "you're frightened, janey?" "yes." "of me?" "no." "but of yourself...." she began to tremble violently, and suddenly his arms were round her, her sobs shaking them both. "my little janey...." "quentin, quentin ... be merciful ... i'm in your power." he looked down into her drowning eyes, at the pure outlines of her face, seen palely through the dusk. "i'm in your power," she repeated vaguely. "janey ... janey," he whispered, "you're in my power ... but i'm in love's. love is stronger than either of us--and love says 'over the gates!--over the gates!'" chapter viii brambletye the next few days were to nigel like a piece of steep hill to a cart-horse. there was only one comfort--he felt no temptation to seek oblivion again as he had sought it at the bells. he turned surlily from the men he had looked to for alleviation--he knew they could not give it. all they could do was to cover his wounds with septic rags--they had no oil and wine for him. so he put down his head, seeing nothing but the little patch of ground over which he moved, planted his feet firmly, and pulled from the shoulder. perhaps it was because he saw such a little of his way that he did not notice janey was doing pretty much the same thing--with the difference that she fretted more, like a horse with a bearing-rein, which cannot pull from the collar. side by side they were plunging up the hill of difficulty--and yet neither saw how the other strained. len vaguely realised that something was wrong with janet, but he put it down to her anxiety about nigel. an atmosphere of reticence and misunderstanding had settled on sparrow hall, frankness had gone and effects were put down to the wrong causes. len tried to help janey by helping nigel. it struck him that his brother would be happier if he had less pottering work to do. so he took upon himself all the monotonous details of the yard, and asked nigel to see to the larger matters, which involved much tramping in the country round. one day towards the end of october, len asked him to attend an auction at forest row. he went by train, but as the auction ended rather earlier than he expected, he decided to walk home. it was a pale afternoon, smelling of rain. the sky was covered with soft mackerel clouds, dappled with light, and the distances were mysterious and tender. nigel had a special love for distances--for three years he had not been able to look further than a wall some thirty yards off, except when he lifted his eyes to that one far view prison could not rob him of, the sky. now the stretch of distant fields, the blur of distant woods, the gleam of distant windows in distant farms, even the distant gape of oxted chalk-pit among the surrey hills, filled him with an ineffable sense of quiet and liberty. for this reason he walked home along the high road, ignoring the dusty cars--so that he might look on either side of him into distances, the shaded sleep of meadows in the east, the pine-bound brows of the forest in the west. he did not feel that resentment at nature's indifference to human moods, which is a man's right and a token of his lordship. on the contrary, the beauty and happiness of the background to his travail gave him a vague sense of ultimate justice. the peace of the country against the restless misery of human life reminded him of those early italian pictures of the crucifixion--in which, behind all the hideous mediæval realism of the subject, lies a tranquil background of vineyard and cypress, lazily shining waters, dream cities on the hills. that was life--a crucifixion against a background of green fields. he was roused from his meditations by being nearly knocked down by a big car. he sprang into the hedge, and cursed with his mouth full of dust. the dust drifted, and he saw some one else crouching in the hedge not a hundred feet away. it was a girl with her bicycle--somehow he felt no surprise when he saw that it was tony strife, the "girl-kid," again. she was obviously in difficulties. one of her tyres was off, and her repairing outfit lay scattered by the roadside. she did not see him, but stooped over her work with a hot face. nigel did not think of greeting her--though their last encounter had impressed him far more than the first; she had even come once or twice into his dreams, standing with little ivy among fields of daisies, in that golden radiance which shines only in sleep. he was passing, when suddenly she lifted her head, and recognition at once filled her eyes-- "oh, mr. smith!..." her voice had in it both relief and entreaty. he stopped at once. "what's happened?" "i've punctured my tyre--and i can't mend it." he knelt down beside her, and searched among the litter on the road. "why, you haven't got any rubber!" "that's just it. i haven't used my bicycle for so long that i never thought of looking to see if everything was there. what shall i do?" "let me wheel it for you to a shop." "there's nowhere nearer than forest row, and that's three miles away." "are you in a great hurry?" "yes--terrible. the others have gone up to fairwarp in the car for a picnic. there wasn't enough room for us all, so awdrey and i were to bicycle; then she said her skirt was too tight, so they squeezed her in, and i bicycled alone. it's quite close really, but i had this puncture, and they all passed me in the car, and never saw me, they were going so fast. i don't know how i can possibly be at fairwarp in time." "no--nor do i. we can't mend your tyre without the stuff, and the nearest shop is two miles from here." "i'll have to go home, that's all. they'll be awfully sick about it--for i've got the nicest cakes on my carrier." nigel laughed. "then perhaps you have the advantage, after all. just think--you can eat them all yourself!" "they're too many for one person. i say, won't you have some?" "that would be a shame." "oh no--do have some. i hate eating alone--and i'm awfully hungry." she began to unstrap the parcel from her carrier. "this is a dusty place for a picnic," said nigel, "let's go down the lane to brambletye, and eat them there." the idea and the words came almost together. he did not pause to think how funny it was that he should suddenly want to go for a picnic with a school-girl of sixteen. it seemed quite natural, somehow. however, he could not help being a little dismayed at his own boldness. this girl would freeze up at once if by any chance he betrayed who he really was. as for her people--but the thought of their scandalised faces was an incitement rather than otherwise. "where's brambletye?" asked tony. "don't you know it?--it's the ruin at the bottom of that lane. you must have passed it often." "i've never been down the lane--only along the road in the car." "and you live so near! why, i've often been to brambletye, and i live much further away than you." "where do you live?" this was a settler, to which nigel had laid himself open by his enthusiasm. he decided to face the situation boldly. "i live over in surrey--at a place called fan's court." "fan's court," she repeated vaguely. "i don't think i've heard of it." "oh, it's a long way from you--beyond blindly heath--and only a little place. i'm not very well off, you know." she glanced at his shabby clothes, and felt embarrassed, for she saw that he had noticed the glance. he picked up the litter from the roadside, and began to wheel her bicycle down the hill. "i say," she breathed softly, "this is an adventure." so it was--for both, in very different ways. for her it was an incursion into lawlessness. her father was tremendously particular, even her girl friends had to pass the censor before intimacy was allowed, and as for men--why, she had never really known a man in her life, and here she was, picnicing with one her parents had never seen! nigel was in exactly the opposite position--he was adventuring into law and respectability. he was with a girl, a school-girl, of the upper middle classes, to whom he was simply a rather poverty-stricken country gentleman--to whom his disgrace was unknown, who admitted him to her society on equal terms, ignorant of the barriers that divided them. he looked down at her as she walked by his side, her soft hair freckled with light, her eyes bright with her thrills--and a faint glow came into his cheeks, a faint flutter to his pulses, nothing fierce or mighty, but a great quiet surge that seemed to pass over him like the sea, and leave him stranded in simplicity. they walked down the steep lane which led from the road, and wound for some yards at the back of brasses wood. here in a hollow stood the shell of a ruined manor, flanked by a moat. two ivy-smothered towers rose side by side, crowned by strange, pointed caps of stone; the walls were lumped with ivy, grown to an enormous density and stoutness. the place looked deserted. there was a small water-mill behind it, and a farm, but no one was about. nigel wheeled tony's bicycle in at the dismantled door. the roof was gone, and all the upper floors--the sky looked down freely at the grass hillocks which filled the inside of the ruins. there were one or two small rooms still partly ceiled, and these were full of farm implements and mangolds. a tremulous peace brooded over brambletye. birds twittered in the ivy, the tall, capped turrets were outlined against a sky that flushed faintly in the heart of its grey, as the sunset crept up it from the hills. both nigel and tony were silent for a moment, standing there in the peace. "fancy my never having been here before," said the girl at last. "how ripping it is!" "i'm glad i brought you." "it's strange," continued tony, as she unfastened the cakes from her bicycle, "that i haven't seen you before--before i met you at east grinstead, i mean." "oh, i've been away, i've not lived at home for some time. you haven't been here long, have you?" he was anxious to shift the conversation from dangerous ground. "we came to shovelstrode about three years ago. before that we lived near seaford. i go to school at seaford, you know." school seemed a fairly safe topic. "tell me about your school," he said, as they began to eat the cakes. school was tony's paramount absorption, and no one else ever asked her to speak of it. indeed, on the rare occasions when she expanded of her own accord, her family would silence her with, "tony, we're sick of that eternal school of yours--one would think it was the whole world, and your home just a corner of it." that was in fact the relative positions of home and school in tony's mind. school was a world of kindred spirits, of things that mattered, home was a place of exile, to which three times a year one was bundled--and ignored. to her delight she realised that her new friend sympathised with her, and understood her feelings. "you know, mr. smith, how beastly it is to be in a place where every one gets hold of the wrong end of what you say--where you don't seem to fit in, somehow." "i do know--it's--it's exactly the same with me." "don't they like you being at home?" "rather!--they like it better than i deserve. but i don't fit in." "and you've nowhere else to go?" "i don't want to go anywhere else." tony looked mystified. his eyes were shining straight into hers, and they seemed to be asking her something, pleading, beseeching. she found a strange feeling invading her, a feeling that had sometimes surged up in her heart when she saw a dying animal, or a bird fluttering against cage-bars. but this time there was a new intensity in it, and a stifling sense of pain. she suddenly put out her hand and laid it on his--then drew it shyly away. the sky had flushed to a fiery purple behind the turrets of brambletye. a mysterious glow trembled on the ivy. the birds were twittering restlessly, and every now and then a robin uttered his harsh signal note. nigel rose to his feet. "you mustn't be late home, or your parents will get anxious." "we've had such a ripping picnic--better than if i'd gone to fairwarp." "i've been dull company for you, i'm afraid." "oh, no--indeed not! i've so enjoyed talking to you about school." nigel smiled at her. "perhaps we can meet and talk about school another day." "yes--i expect we can. i'm generally alone, you see." "haven't you any friends?" "i've heaps at school--but they all seem so far away." he was wheeling her bicycle up the lane, and the sun, struggling through the clouds at last, flung long shadows before them. in summer the lanes are often ugly, white and bare, but in autumn they share the beauty of the fields. this lane, delicately slimed with sussex mud, wound a soft gleaming brown between the hedges, except where the rain-filled ruts were crimson with the sky. "it's only four miles to shovelstrode," said nigel. "i'll wheel your bicycle to wilderwick corner--you won't mind going the rest of the way alone, will you?--it's not more than a hundred yards, and i shall have to go down wilderwick hill and make a bolt across country if i'm to be home in time." "i hope i haven't kept you." "oh, no--i've enjoyed every moment of it." "so have i. that man furlonger did me a good turn after all." "what do you mean?" he asked sharply. "well, if it hadn't been for him, i'd never have met you." "furlonger...." "yes--he was the man who was bothering me at east grinstead station, at least my people say it must have been. he came out of prison that day, you know." "oh...." "have you heard of him?" "yes. i--i know him slightly." "he's a dreadful man, isn't he?" nigel licked his lips. "yes--he's a rotter. but he--he has his good points--all men have." "i don't see how a man like furlonger can. he seems bad all around. i wonder you care to know him." "i don't care--i can't help it." "i suppose you knew him before he went to gaol." "yes--and unluckily i can't drop him now." "i should." nigel stared at her, and suddenly felt angry. "why, you hard-hearted little girl?" "he's bad all through--father says so." "your father doesn't know him. i do, and i say he has his good points." "are you very fond of him?" "no--i'm not." "then why do you stick up for him so? you're quite angry." "no--no, i'm not angry. but i hate to hear you speaking so harshly and--ignorantly." "i have my ideals," said tony, with a primitive attempt at loftiness. "a woman should have clearly defined ideals on morals and things." nigel could not suppress a smile. "certainly--but it's no good having ideals unless you're able to forgive the people who don't come up to 'em. perhaps it isn't their fault--perhaps it's yours." "mine! what are you talking about? are you trying to make out that i'm to blame for a man like furlonger going to gaol?" "no--of course not. but suppose that man furlonger stood before you now, and asked you to help him, and be his friend, and give him a hand out of the mud--what would you do?" she was a little taken aback by his eagerness. she hesitated a moment. "i'd tell him to go to a clergyman----" "oh!" said nigel blankly. chapter ix some people are happy--in different ways tony strife reached shovelstrode in a state of reckless and sublime uncertainty. she was quite uncertain as to whether she meant to confess or not. precedent urged her to do so. whenever she did something of which she was not sure her parents would approve, it was part of her code to confess it. quite possibly her people would not blame her, they might even be grateful to mr. smith, as they had been on a former occasion. on the other hand, they might shake their heads at the picnic part of the business. who was mr. smith, that he should go picnicing with their daughter?--and she would not be so confident in answering as she had been before. during their short interview on east grinstead platform it had not been possible to take more than a superficial view of him, either with eyes or mind; but the close contemplation at brambletye had impressed her with the conviction that he was "rather queer." he evidently did not belong to their set; not because he was poor--they knew several people who were poor--but because of a certain alien quality she could not define. it was not, either, because he was not a "gentleman," though she had her occasional doubts of that, alternating with savage contempt for them. it was because his manner, his look, his behaviour, had all been utterly different from what she was used to, or had met at shovelstrode. she felt that if her parents were to question her searchingly, her answers would be unsatisfactory, and she would not be allowed to meet him again, as he had suggested. and she wanted to meet him again; he had interested her, he had attracted her by that very "queerness" with which he had occasionally repelled her. she wanted to tell him more about her school, to have more of his strange confidences, hear more from him about furlonger, see again that hunted look in his eyes. only one of her memories of him was tender--that was when his infinite suffering had called to her out of his eyes, and she had answered it in a sudden new and divine surge of pain. she caught her breath sharply as she went into the house. yes--she had decided at last--she would keep her secret--her first of any importance. she would not risk interference with what looked like a glowing adventure kindled to brighten her exile. besides, there was another consideration. if awdrey were to hear of it, she would at once begin to weave one of her silly romances--make out mr. smith was in love. ugh! tony's shoulders shrugged high in disdain. it would be quite easy to give an account of her afternoon which did not include her adventure. she would tell how her tyre had punctured, how she had tried in vain to mend it, and had at last come home on foot. her concealment did not afflict her, as she had at first imagined. on the contrary, it gave her a strange, new feeling of importance and independence. for the first time a certain warmth and colour crept into her thoughts, a certain pride invaded the shy dignity of her step. that night she dreamed that she had gone to meet mr. smith at brambletye. she saw the two capped turrets against a background of shimmering light. mr. smith took her hand and looked into her eyes in that strange, troubled way which called up as before an answering pain. he said something she could not remember when she woke. then suddenly a dark shape seemed to rush between them and whirl them apart. she cried out, and mr. smith seemed to be answering her from a great distance: "don't be frightened--it's only furlonger--it's only furlonger." but the fear grew upon her, the darkness wrapt her round, and, struggling in the darkness, she awoke. all that day she wondered if she would meet him. she prowled round shovelstrode with her dog, ignoring an invitation from awdrey to "come for a stroll, and hear the latest about captain le bourbourg." she was used to being alone during her holidays. it was her habit to walk with prince in the little twisting lanes round her home. she never went far, but she used to spend long hours in the fields, gathering wild flowers and leaves for her collection, or making prince go racing in the grass. a rather forlorn little figure, she had gone through the days unconscious of her forlornness. but to-day she felt it--because she was expecting some one who did not come. she did not meet him in any of those thick-rutted lanes, nor in swites wood, nor on the borders of holtye common where she went for blackberries. she began to wonder if he would ever come, or if her glimpse of a world beyond the strait boundaries of her life had been but a flash--a sudden haze of gold in the ruins of brambletye. she felt her loneliness, the blank of having no one to speak to about school, the strange tickling interest of confidences outside her experience. that night as she knelt by the bed and watched the moon behind the pines, she added to her prayers a stiff petition that she might "meet mr. smith again." tony's belief in prayer was quite mechanical, and when the next day she saw her shabby friend on a stile at the top of wilderwick hill, she in no wise connected the sight with those few uncomfortable moments on her knees. "good morning," she said simply; "i'm so glad to see you." nigel smiled at her. at first she had wondered a little whether she liked his smile--to-day she definitely decided that she did. "i hoped we'd meet again," he said. "so did i," answered the virginal candour of sixteen. "you don't think me queer, then?" "ye-es. but i like it." "could we be friends?" "yes--rather!" he held out his hand. he was smiling--but suddenly as her hand took his, she saw the old wretched look creep into his eyes, together with something else that puzzled her. were those tears? did men ever cry? she found herself feeling frightened and vexed. nigel crimsoned with shame, and the fire of his anger licked up the tears of his weakness. the next moment he was looking at her with dry eyes--and, strange to say, from that day his childish fits of weeping troubled him less. he and tony turned almost mechanically down the narrow grass lane leading past old surrey hall to the woods of cowsanish. they did not speak much at first--indeed, a kind of restraint seemed established between them. nigel wondered more than ever what had made him seek her out--this naïve, shy, rather limited little girl. all yesterday he had been struggling with a desperate need of her. he could not understand why he wanted her so; she was not nearly as sympathetic as len and janey, she was not so interesting, even, and yet he wanted her. at first he had thought it was her ignorance of his past life which made her presence such refreshment--the blessed fact that with her he had a clean slate to write over. after all, though len and janey had forgiven, they could not forget--for them his muddled sum was only crossed out, not wiped clean. with tony he could start afresh from the beginning, not merely where his miserable blunder ended. and yet this was not all that drew him to her. he felt deep down in his heart a subtler, more compelling attraction. what brought him to tony was a development of the same feeling that had made him catch up the unlovely ivy in his arms and find her sweet. it was a fragment of that strange, new part of him, which had been born in prison, and frightened len and janey--the child. he could not remember that before his dark years he had felt particularly young for his age, or cared for young society; but now his heart seemed full of irrepressible torrents of youth. he wanted to be with boys and girls, to hear their shouts, to share their laughter, to join in their games--not as a "grown-up," but as one of themselves. why did every one expect him to have grown old in prison? sorrow does not always make old, it often makes young. it sends a man back pleading to the forgotten days of his youth, struggling to recapture them once more, and bring their carelessness into his awful care. to-day he lost his troubles in finding grasses and leaves for tony's collection. after a time her constraint wore off. she chattered to him about school friends, lessons and games, daring adventures and desperate scrapes. that day he found such a mood more sweet to him than any glimpse of pity or understanding she could have shown. he might want her compassion--the woman in her--sometimes, but only transiently; what he wanted most was the child in her, for it answered the sorrow-born child crying in the darkness of his heart. they scrambled in the hedges for bloody-twig and bryony, they gathered the yellowing hazel, and bunches of strange pods. nigel was able to tell her the names of many plants and bushes she had not known before--he was wonderfully enthusiastic, and loved to hear about the botany walks at school, and the other collections she had made, which had sometimes won prizes. it was past noon when they turned home. the distances were dim, hazed with mist and sunshine. a faint wind was stirring in the trees, and now and then a shower of golden leaves swept into the lane, whirled round, then fluttered slowly to the grass. some rain had fallen early in the morning, and the hedges were still wet, sending up sweet steams of perfume to the cloud-latticed sky. nigel spoke suddenly. "do your parents know about me?" "they know about east grinstead, but not about brambletye." "shall you tell them?" "no--i don't think i shall. i--i'm not at all sure what they'd say if they knew all the facts." "nor am i," said nigel grimly. "besides, i hate telling people about things i really enjoy--it spoils it all, somehow. you don't think it's wrong, do you?" "no--why should it be?" "i don't know--only whenever a thing's absolutely heavenly, one can't help thinking there's something wrong about it." "well, i don't see why there should be anything wrong about this. i'm lonely, and so are you--why shouldn't we be friends?" "i've never done anything like it before. it's funny that father and mother are so awfully particular, for they don't bother about me much in other ways. i'm nearly always alone when i'm at shovelstrode. father's busy, and mother's not strong, and awdrey has so many people to go about with." "and when you come back from a long walk, no one asks you where you've been, or whom you've met?" "i'm not supposed to go for long walks by myself--only to potter round the estate--and no one ever asks me any questions." her voice was rather pathetic--in contrast to her proud assurance when she talked about school. "we'll meet again," he said impulsively. "i hope so--i hope so awfully. to-morrow i've got to go over to haxsmiths in the car with awdrey, but i've nothing else all the rest of this week. i wanted father to take me to lingfield races on saturday, but he can't." "do you like race-meetings?" "i've never been to one in my life. i wanted so much to go this time--i'm generally at school, you know, and it seemed such a good chance; but father has to be in lewes, and awdrey's spending the week-end in brighton--besides, i couldn't go with her alone, one wants a man." "i'll take you if you like." "you! oh!" "shouldn't you like it?" "i should love it--but if any one saw us ... father would be furious." "no one shall see us--we won't go into any of the enclosures and risk meeting your friends. do let me take you." tony flushed with pleasure and fright. this was adventure indeed. "i'd love to go. oh, how ripping!" when nigel reached home that morning he went straight to find janey. there was something vital between him and his sister--each brought the other the first-fruits of emotion. janet might find leonard a tenderer comforter, more thoughtful, more demonstrative, but there was not between them that affinity of sorrow there was between her and nigel. not that she ever told him, even hinted, why she suffered, but the mere glance of his eyes, so childish yet so troubled, the mere touch of those hands coarsened and spoiled by the toil of his humiliation, was more comfort to her than len's caresses or tender words. nigel could repeat the magic formula of sympathy--"i too have known...." he felt, unconsciously, the same towards her. but it was more happiness than grief that he brought her. he had acquired the habit of eating his heart out alone, but happiness was so new and strange that he hardly knew what to do with it. so he ran with it to janey, like a child to his mother with something he does not quite understand. to-day he found her in the kitchen, sitting by the fire, and watching some of her doubtful cookery. her back was bent, and her arms rested from the elbow on her lap, the long hands dropping over the knees. her face, thrust forward from the gloom of her hair, wore a strange white look of defiance, while her lips quivered with surrender. he sat down at her feet, and leaned his head against her lap. he vaguely felt she was unhappy, but he did not try to comfort her, merely took one of the long, hot hands in his. she did not speak, either--but her heart kindled at his presence. she knew that he had been happier for the last two days, though yesterday he had also seemed to have some anxiety, fretting and questioning. his happiness meant much to her. all her happiness now was vicarious--quentin's, leonard's or nigel's. in her own heart were only flashes and sparks of it, that scorched as well as gladdened. life was a perplexity--life was pulling her two ways. she seemed to be hanging, a tortured, wind-swung thing, between earth and heaven, and she could hardly tell which hurt her most--her sudden falls down or her sudden snatchings up. earth and heaven, brute and god, were always meeting now, clashing like two ill-tuned cymbals. her shame was that her love and quentin's had not been strong enough to wait. she had looked upon it as an exalted spiritual passion, and it had suddenly shown itself impatient and bodily. it had fallen to the level of a thousand other loves. sometimes she almost wished that it had been a more despised lover who had won her surrender--better fall from the trees than from the stars. moreover, her sacrifice had not won her what she was seeking, but something inferior and makeshift. what she had dreamed of as the crown of love had been a life of kingly, fearless association, the sanctification of every day, an undying together. that was still far away. borne on an undercurrent she had till then hardly suspected, she and quentin had been washed into the backwaters of their dream. she had only one comfort, and that was paradoxically at times the chief of her regrets--quentin was happy. unlike her, he seemed to have found all he had been seeking. she was still unsatisfied, her heart still yearned after higher, sweeter things, but again and again he told her he had all his desire. "i am in paradise--janey, my own janey. we climbed over the gates, and we are there--together in the garden"--and his lips would burn against hers, and even the tears brim from his fiery, sunken eyes. she never let him think she was not happy. she meekly and bravely accepted the vocation of her womanhood--if he was happy, all her wishes, except certain secret personal ones, were gratified. for his sake she put aside her dreams, and fixed her thoughts on what was, forgetting what might have been. she broke her heart like a box of spikenard, that she might anoint him king. a shudder passed through janey, and nigel's head stirred on her knee. he lifted it, and looked into her eyes--then he drew down her face to his and kissed it. "you're tired, my janey." his voice thrilled with a tenderness that carried her back to the days before he went to prison. "no, dear, not tired--but i've a bit of a headache." "i'm so sorry. oughtn't you to lie down?" "no--it will go." "poor old sister!" he put up his hand and laid it gently on her forehead. then suddenly he hid his face. "oh, janey, i'm so happy!" chapter x tony backs an outsider november came in cloth of gold--a hazy sunshine put yellow everywhere, into the bleak rain-washed fields, the white, cold mirrors of ponds, the brown heart of woods. lingfield races were on the first of the month--from noon onwards the race-trains clanked down from london, and disgorged their sordid contents. the public-houses were full, the little village, generally so pure and drowsy, woke up to its monthly contamination. it was the last meeting of the flat-racing season, and most of the "county" was present, crowding the paddock and the more expensive enclosures, eating its lunch to the accompaniment of a band too much engrossed in the betting for the interests of good music. nigel furlonger met tony strife at the top of wilderwick hill. he had dressed himself with more care than usual--in the girl's interest he must look respectable. leonard and janet had been immensely surprised when he told them he meant to go to the races. the furlonger disreputableness owed some of its celebrity to the fact that it ran along channels of its own, neglecting those approved by wealth and fashion. "feel you've got too much cash?" jeered leonard. "i shan't do any betting to speak of." "don't you!" said janey; "we're stony enough as things are." "but i'm not bound to lose--i may win, and retrieve the family fortunes." "look here, my boy," said len, "you leave the family fortunes alone. you've done too much in that line already." nigel coloured furiously--but the next moment his anger cooled; he had been wonderfully gentler during the last few days. he turned, and emptied his pockets on the table. "there--take it all--except five bob for luck--and a half-crown for----" he was going to have said "the little girl's tea," but stopped just in time. he occasionally wondered why he did not tell len and janet about tony. but he felt doubtful as to what they might say. they would never understand how he could find such a comradeship congenial. tony was only sixteen, and lived a very different life from his. they might laugh--no, they would not do that; more likely they would be anxious and compassionate, they would think it one of the unhealthy results of prison, they would be sorry for him, and he could not bear that they should be sorry for what brought him so much happiness. besides, he had a natural habit of reserve--even before he went to prison he had kept secrets from len and janey. tony was waiting for him when he reached their meeting-place. she wore a plain dark coat and skirt, but she had put on a wide hat, with a wreath of crimson leaves round it, and instead of plaiting her hair, she let it stream over her shoulders, thick and sleek, without a curl. in her hand she clutched a little purse. "i'm going to bet on a horse," she said in an awe-struck voice. "which horse?" "i don't know. i'll see when i get there." "i'll try and find something pretty safe for you, and i'll have my money on it too." "isn't it exciting!" whispered tony. "what should i do if i met mrs. arkwright or any of the mistresses!" mrs. arkwright and the mistresses were not the people furlonger dreaded to meet. he and tony swung gaily along the cinder-track leading to the course. it was deserted, except for a little knot at the starting gate. the girl shrank rather close to him as they came into the crowd. the shouting made her nervous and flustered--that people should make such a noise over a shady thing like betting seemed to her extraordinary. she touched nigel's elbow, and showed him her purse, now open, and containing half-a-crown. "which is the best horse?" "i wish i knew." "may i look at the card?" he gave it to her. she seemed puzzled. "how can i tell which horse to bet on?" a man beside them laughed, and nigel flushed indignantly. "you can't tell much by the card; i'll go over to the ring in a moment, and find out what the odds are. but as you don't want to put on more than half-a-crown, i'd keep it till the big race, if i were you." "which is the big race?" "the lingfield cup. it's the last--but we'll enjoy the others, even though we've got nothing on 'em." they enjoyed them thoroughly. hanging over the rail, their shouts were just as noisy and as desperate as if they had all their possessions at stake. tony was thrilled to the depths--the clamour and excitement in the betting ring, the odd, disreputable people all round her, surreptitiously exchanging shillings and horses' names--the clanging bell, the shout of "they're off!" the flash of opera-glasses, the mad rush by, the cheers for the winner ... all plunged her into an orgy of excitement. she felt subtly wicked and daring, and also, when nigel began to explain the technicalities of racing, infinitely worldly-wise. what would the girls at school say when they found out she knew the meaning of "ten to one, bar one," or "money on both ways"? she wrote such phrases down in her "nature note-book," which she carried about with her to record botanical discoveries, birds seen, sunsets, and equally blameless doings. at last the time came for the lingfield cup. tony's hands began to quiver. now was the moment when she should actually become a part of that new world swinging round her. she would have her stake in the game--and a big stake too, for half-a-crown meant more than a fortnight's pocket-money. she looked nervously at mr. smith. "we'll see 'em go past before we put our money on," said he, with a calmness she thought unnatural. "you can tell a lot by the way a horse canters up." they leaned over the rail, and tony gave a little cry at the first sight of colours coming from the paddock. "here they are--oh, what a beautiful horse!" "a bit short in the leg," said nigel, "we won't put our money on him." "what about that bay--the one coming now?" "he's a good 'un, i should say. that's milk-o, the favourite." "let's back him." "wait, here's another. that's midsummer moon, the betting's to against him." "what does that mean?" "it means that he's a rank outsider." "then we mustn't put our money on him." "i've known outsiders win splendidly, and, of course, if they do, their backers get thundering odds. if we put our money on milk-o and he wins we're only in for five shillings each, but if midsummer moon wins for us, why, we get over twelve pounds." "oh!" gasped tony. her eyes grew round. "over twelve pounds"--that would mean all sorts of splendours--a new hockey-stick, a real spliced beauty instead of the silly unspliced thing her father thought "good enough for a girl"; she would be able to get that wonderful illustrated edition of the _idylls of the king_, which she had seen in gladys gates' home and admired so much; and directly she went back to school she could give a gorgeous midnight feast--a feast of the superior order, with lemonade and veal-and-ham pies, not one of those scratch affairs at which you ate only buns and halfpenny meringues and drank a concoction of acid-drops dissolved in the water-jug. nigel saw the enthusiasm growing on her face. "well, would you like to put your money on midsummer moon? of course you're more likely to lose, but if you win, you'll make a good thing out of it." "do you think he'll win?" "i can't say--but it's a sporting chance." "i think it's worth the risk," said tony in a low, thrilled voice. he looked at her intently. "i always like to see any one ready to back an outsider." "don't people generally?" "no--and nor will you, perhaps, when you're older." she gave him her half-crown, and he disappeared with it into the crowd, having first carefully put her next a group of respectable farmers' wives. in some ways, thought tony, he was just as particular as father. she wished he would let her go with him into the ring. he came back in a few moments. then suddenly the bell clanged. "they're off!" silence dropped on the babel almost disconcertingly. opera-glasses flashed towards the start, rows of heads and bodies hung over the rail, tony's breath came in short gasps, so did nigel's--he was desperately anxious for that outsider to win. as they had no glasses they could not see which colours led at the bend, but as the horses swung into the straight, there were shouts of "milk-o!--milk-o!" "damn the brute!" said nigel, which gave tony another thrill of new experience. she had actually spent the afternoon with a man who swore! "milk-o!--milk-o!" "spreadeagle!" shouted some one. then there were more shouts of "spreadeagle!" "milk-o!"--"spreadeagle!"--the yells were deafening--then suddenly changed into a mixture of cheers and groans, as the favourite dashed by the post. "and--where's midsummer moon?" gasped poor tony, as the field clattered in. "never started, lady," said a stout policeman, who, being drafted in from elsewhere, did not recognise nigel as the young fellow on ticket-of-leave who came to report himself every month at east grinstead. "oh, dear!" cried tony, "we've lost our money." "never put your money on an outsider, lady," said the stout constable. nigel turned to her with an odd, beseeching look in his eyes. "i'm sorry ... i'm dreadfully sorry. it's my fault--if it hadn't been for me you'd have backed the favourite." "oh, it doesn't matter the very tiniest bit." "but i'm so sorry--i feel a beast." "please don't. i've enjoyed myself awfully, and it's made the race ever so much more exciting, having some money on it." "all right!" had been sung out from the weighing-ground, and the crowd was either pressing round the bookies, or dispersing along the course. "we'd better go, i think," said nigel, "you mustn't be late home." "it's been perfectly ripping," and tony suddenly slipped her warm gloved hand into his. "it was so kind of you to take me." "but i made you back an outsider." "oh, never mind about it--please don't." she gave his hand a little squeeze as she spoke, and suddenly, over him once again passed that thrill of great simplicity which he had experienced first at brambletye. he became dumb--quite dumb and simple, with infinite rest in his heart. they turned to leave, jostling their way through the crowd towards the cinder-track. soon the clamour and scramble were far behind, and they found the little footpath that ran through the fields near goatsluck farm. "which way are we going home?" asked tony. "we'll have tea before we go home. will you come with me and have tea in a cottage?" "oh, how ripping!..." nigel looked round him. a cottage belonging to goatsluck farm was close at hand--one of those dwarfed, red cottages, where the windows gleam like eyes under the steep roof. "let's ask there," he said, "perhaps we can have it in the garden." the labourer's wife was only too glad of a little incident and pence-earning. she laid a table for them by a clump of lilac bushes, now bare. one or two chrysanthemums were still in bloom, and sent their damp sweetness to the meal that nigel and tony had together. it was a very plain meal--only bread and butter and tea, but simplicity and bread and butter had now become vital things to furlonger. neither he nor tony spoke much, but their silences were no less happy than the words that broke them. the sun had set, a hazy crimson smeared the west, and above it hung one or two dim stars. a little cold wind rustled suddenly in the bushes, and fluttered the table-cloth. tony's face was pale in the twilight, and her eyes looked unnaturally large and dark. then she and nigel realised that they were both leaning forward over the table, as if they had something especially important to say to each other.... the wind dropped suddenly, and the fogs swept up and veiled the stars. the crimson deepened to purple in the west. "are you cold?" asked furlonger awkwardly, and drew back. "no, thank you," said tony, and leaned back too. a few minutes later they rose to go. it was half-past five, and strange shadows were in the lanes, where the ruts and puddles gleamed. an owl called from ashplats wood. the november dusk had suddenly become chill. nigel slipped off his overcoat and wrapped it round tony. "i don't want it," he insisted. "oh, what a funny little thing you look!" "it comes down right over my heels--it's ripping and warm." they walked on in silence for about a quarter of a mile. then the distant throbbing of a car troubled the evening. it drew nearer, and they stood aside to let it pass them in the narrow lane. but instead of passing, it pulled up suddenly, and out jumped sir gambier strife. their surprise and dismay were so great that for a time they could not use their tongues. sir gambier stood before them, his face flushed, his mouth a little open, while the dusk and the arc-lights of the huge motor had games with his figure, making it seem monstrous and misshapen. "father----" began tony, and then stopped. she was really the least disconcerted of the three, for she had only mr. smith to deal with--surely the presence of such a knight could easily be explained and forgiven. but the other two had to face the complication of furlonger. "what the----" broke from strife, after the time-honoured formula of the man who wants to swear, but objects on principle to swearing before women. the colour mounted on nigel's face, from his neck to his cheeks, from his cheeks to his forehead--and gradually his head drooped. tony turned to him with sublime assurance. "father, let me introduce mr. smith." "smith!" nigel opened his mouth to speak, but the words stuck to his tongue. "you know about mr. smith," continued tony, "how helpful he was at east grinstead----" "he told you his name was smith, did he?" "of course. i know him quite well now--he lives at fan's court, near blindley heath, and...." tony's voice trailed off. she wondered why mr. smith did not speak for himself. "you damn liar!" roared strife, swinging round on nigel. "father!" "sir gambier, let me explain...." "i won't hear a word. explanation, indeed! what explanation can there be?--you victimiser of innocent little girls!--antoinette, get into the car at once, and come home. then we'll hear all the lies this furlonger's been cramming you with." "furlonger...." the word came in a long gasp. "yes--furlonger. that's his name. 'smith,' indeed!" "father, he isn't furlonger. furlonger was quite different, short and dark and dirty-looking." "i tell you this is furlonger--and he's quite dirty-looking enough for me. come along, antoinette, i won't have you standing here." "but you aren't furlonger--are you, mr. smith?" her voice rang with entreaty and the first horror of doubt. nigel turned his eyes to hers and tried to plead with them; but they were not understanding--he saw he had only the clumsy weapon of his tongue to fight with. "i am furlonger," he said in a low voice. there was a brief, electric pause. tony had grown very white. "then who was that other man?--why did you tell me your name was smith?" "i've no idea who the other fellow was, and i gave my name as smith because i felt sure you'd have heard of furlonger." "but why--why----" "come along, miss," interrupted sir gambier. "i won't have you talking to this scoundrel." "but i want to know why he told me all those lies." her face had grown hard as well as white. "he had very good reasons, i'm sure," sneered strife. nigel suddenly found his tongue. "tony!" he cried, "tony!" "what damned impudence is this?--'tony' indeed! you'll not dare address my daughter by that name, sir." "tony," repeated nigel, too desperate to realise what he was calling her. "i swear i never meant you any harm. i know it looks like it--but you mustn't think so. i wanted to be your friend because--because you didn't know of my disgrace, you treated me like a human being. you talked to me about simple things--you made me feel good and clean when i was with you. that's why i 'told you all these lies.'" the girl began to tremble. sir gambier laughed. "tony--don't forsake me." "hold your tongue, sir," thundered strife. "i won't have any more of this. get into the car, antoinette." he touched her arm, and for the first time she responded. she turned and climbed into the car, still trembling, her head bowed, tears on her cheek. nigel sprang on to the step. "tony--can't you forgive me? i didn't deceive you from any wrong motive. why do you look like that? is it because i've been in prison?--i--i suffered there...." "oh don't!" gasped the girl, "don't speak to me--i can't bear it. i--i'm so dreadfully--disappointed." his eyes searched her face for some pity or understanding. instead he saw only horror, pain, and something akin to fright. "don't!" she repeated. then he suddenly realised that she was too young to understand. he fell back from the step, and covered his eyes. sir gambier sprang into the driver's seat. tony did not speak again. her father took the steering-wheel, and the car throbbed away into the dusk. she made no protest, and only once looked back--at the man who still stood in the middle of the lane, with his hands over his eyes. chapter xi disillusion at sixteen rather to tony's surprise, she and her father drove in silence. as a matter of fact, sir gambier was baffled by his younger daughter. awdrey he could have dealt with easily enough--he was used to awdrey's scrapes. but tony had always been more or less impersonal--a vague some one for whom one paid school-bills, who came home for the holidays, made herself pretty scarce, and then went back to school again, to write prim letters home every sunday. it was a new idea that this half-realised being should suddenly show herself possessed of a personality in the form of a scrape--and such a scrape too! furlonger! he grunted with fury, but--as would never have been the case if he had had awdrey to deal with--he said nothing. once, however, he looked sideways, and noticed how tony was sitting. her back was bent, and her arms rested on her knees, the hands clenched between them; her chin was a little thrust forward into the darkness through which they rushed. at last they reached shovelstrode. the moon was high above the pines, and they seemed to be waving in waters of silver. the house-front shimmered in the white light, as the motor pulsed up to it. tony climbed down, and stood stiffly on the step. "you'd better go to your room," said sir gambier in muddled rage. "i--i expect your mother will want to speak to you." "very well," said tony. she walked quickly upstairs, went into her room, and sat down on the bed. a square of moonlight lay on the floor, and the moving shadows curtsied across it. they and the pines outside seemed to be nodding to her grotesquely under the moon--they seemed to be mocking her for her great illusion lost. "furlonger...." she repeated to herself. "furlonger...." a sick quake of rage was in her heart. her feelings were still confused, but definite grievances stood out of the jumble. this man whom she had thought so much of--in school-girl language "had a rave on"--had deceived her, told her lies, acted them, and won by them ... well, the horrible thing was that she did not really know how much or how little he had won. but worse still was the realisation that he had made her do unconsciously something she thought wrong. like most girls of her age she had a cast-iron code of morals. when a school-girl sets out to be moral, there is no professor of ethics or minister of religion that can touch her--her morality has behind it all the enormous force of inexperience, it can neither stretch nor bend, and it breaks only at the risk of her whole spiritual life. she was horrified to think she had given her friendship to a scoundrel, even though she had done it ignorantly. it was like befriending a girl who cheated or told tales. for her his crime had no attraction or interest--it was just a hideous blot and defilement. she had often heard the wickham rubber scandal discussed, and now store-housed memories came to appal her. hundreds of people, most of them already poor, had been ruined and plunged into misery--widows with growing families, elderly spinsters with hard-gathered savings, poor old men with the terror of the workhouse closing on them with age, had trusted this furlonger once and execrated him now. he was like that dreadful man in the psalms, who laid wait to murder the innocent--"he doth ravish the poor when he getteth him into his den." and she had allowed this man to be her friend, she had confided her secrets to him, she had dreamed of him and prayed to meet him.... tony's teeth and hands clenched, and her eyes grew miserable and hard. then she began to wonder what had made furlonger want her friendship. what had he and she in common? somehow she could not for a moment believe that he had sought her out from unworthy motives. the fact would always remain that he had wanted her friendship, that he had not given her a word which was not kind or courteous, that he had come to her rescue in her hour of need ... the tears rushed to her eyes; that was the bitterest part of all--her memories of his kindliness and knight-errantry--pictures of east grinstead, swites wood, brambletye, lingfield park, and that little old cottage by goatsluck farm. suddenly she found herself making up her mind not to join her father and mother in condemning him. she would take his part in the scene which she knew was at hand. she soon heard her father calling her, and went down. he pointed into her mother's boudoir, a small room with french windows opening on the lawn. it was full of vague furniture and vague mixed colours, and it seemed to tony as if she were swimming through it up to the couch where her mother lay. it never struck her as strange that her father should seem unable to deal with her himself, but should hand her over to this weak invalid, who lay with closed eyes in the lamplight. "now, i don't want a scene," she said, without opening them. "tony won't make a scene," said sir gambier; "she's a deep one." "oh, antoinette," sighed lady strife--"i never was so surprised in my life as when i heard of your deceit." "my deceit!" said tony quickly. "yes--going about with a man like furlonger, and hiding it from your father and mother--don't you call that deceit?" "i didn't know he was furlonger." "but you knew it was wrong to have a secret friendship with any man whatsoever. i never heard of such a thing in a young girl of your age and position--it's what housemaids do, and not nice housemaids at that." "mother," cried tony, her voice shaking unexpectedly, "it was an adventure." "a what!" shouted sir gambier. his wife winced. "don't startle me, dear. and let the child say what she likes--i'm glad she has a theory to explain her actions." strife muttered something unintelligible, but made no more interruptions. "now tell me, antoinette," said her mother, "exactly how long you have known this man--and what have you and he been doing together?" "mother, i can't explain. i know it sounds deceitful and caddish and all that, but it--it wasn't. it was an adventure, just as i've said. i've _done_ something." the invalid smiled distantly. "when you are older you will realise the superiority of thought to action. the soul is built of thoughts--actions harden and coarsen it. but we won't discuss that now. tell me how you and he got to know each other." "he was the man who was so splendid at east grinstead station. he told me his name was smith, because, of course, he didn't want me to know who he really was. then i met him one morning when i was giving prince a run in swites wood, and then another time when i'd punctured my bicycle, and...." "go on, antoinette." "oh, you'll never understand. but he was so different from any one else i'd met. he spoke so differently--about such different things----" "i can imagine that." "but he wasn't horrid, mother--i swear he wasn't. he was very quiet, and interesting, and rather unhappy--and i liked him--i liked him awfully." lady strife did not speak, but her eyes were wide open. as for sir gambier, an unheard-of thing happened--he became sarcastic. "oh, you liked him, did you? found him a nice-mannered young fellow?--well-informed? i didn't know you were interested in the inner life of his majesty's prisons." "father!" cried tony sharply. "now, listen to me, dear," said her mother; "you are very young, and consequently very inexperienced. a grown-up person would at once have realised that this man's friendship for you could not be disinterested." "what do you mean?" "i mean that he's not the type of man who would naturally want to be the friend of a young and innocent girl like you. he must have had some ulterior motive in seeking your friendship. you have possibly seen no signs of that so far, but it would have been plain enough later." "i don't believe it." "hush, dear. your impertinence disconcerts me. i am trying to view the matter from the standpoint of pure thought, and how am i to do that if you keep on rudely interrupting me and dragging me down into the surge of human annoyance? you must take it from those older and more experienced than yourself that this man's motives in seeking your friendship could not have been disinterested. besides, even suppose for the sake of argument that they were, don't you think you've been acting most disloyally to your father and me in associating with a man you know we disapprove of?" "mother, i've told you i'd no idea who he really was. why, i thought the other man was furlonger. besides, i didn't know you disapproved of him. when all the others were letting fly at him, you said something about his having a beautiful soul and sinning more divinely than many people pray." there is nothing more irritating to the magus than to have his early philosophies cast in his teeth by some one with a better memory than his own. lady strife descended deep into the surge of human annoyance. "really, antoinette, you are a perfectly exasperating child. all this comes from trying to treat you like a reasonable being. your father said that what you really need is a good thrashing, and i'm inclined to agree with him now, though i insisted on having you in, and discussing things with you from the standpoint of pure thought. i shan't waste any more time on you--you can go back to your room, and stay there till your father gets an answer to his telegram to your aunt margaret." "aunt maggie!" "yes," cried sir gambier, "you're going to southsea, to stay with your aunt maggie till your confounded school re-opens or the crack of doom falls--whichever happens first. you're too much trouble at home--going about with a face like a plaster saint, while in reality you're traipsing over the country with men." "father, i wasn't traipsing. oh, please don't send me to aunt maggie's--i shall die." this was that terrible coercion from outside which so effectually routs the forces of sixteen. "my dear little girl," said her mother, who had climbed back to her standpoint of pure thought, "i know you will be reasonable now, and--i think i may be quite sure of that too--grateful afterwards. your father and i are really doing you a great kindness in sending you to your aunt's--here you would never be free from the persecutions of that furlonger." "mother, it wasn't persecutions. i liked it." "antoinette, i shall really begin to think you are utterly silly. to put the matter on its lowest, most materialistic footing, don't you realise that in associating with a man like that you are seriously damaging your prospects?" "my prospects?" "yes--your prospects of making a good marriage and doing credit to your family. come, don't stare at me so blankly. you must realise that you are now approaching--if not actually arrived at--a marriageable age, and that you must do nothing to damage----" "but, mother, i don't want ever to marry. really, i don't want to talk about such things. it makes me feel--oh, mother, don't you see it's bad form?" "what!" shrieked her mother, with extraordinary lung-power for an invalid. "we think it bad form at school to talk about marriage." her parents both stared at her blankly. "well, you can just think it good form to talk about it now," said sir gambier, feeling for some vague reason that he had said something rather witty. "your school must be an extraordinary place," said lady strife. "i shall have to write to the principal--now, don't interrupt--i shall certainly write; i won't have such ideas put into your head. you're quite old enough to think seriously of marriage. why, i'd already had two offers at your age." tony looked surprised. she was very fond of her mother, but always wondered how she had ever managed to get married at all, and that she should have had more than one chance seemed positively miraculous. lady strife saw the surprised look, and spoke more sharply. "really, antoinette, you're no more than a great baby. you need education in the most ordinary matters. i'll write to your aunt margaret, and ask her to get some eligible men to meet you. now don't _cry_." tony was actually crying. she was generally as chary and ashamed of tears as a boy. "i--i can't help it. oh, mother, don't send me to aunt maggie's. oh, don't make her ask el-el-eligible m-men." "don't be a blithering idiot!" shouted sir gambier. "if you can't control yourself, go upstairs and begin packing at once." tony went out, crying into a handkerchief stained with blackberry juice. her demoralisation was complete. awdrey, who had been lurking uneasily in the dining-room, came out as the boudoir door opened and slammed, and for a moment stood horrified at the sight of her sister. "hullo, tony! whenever did i last see you cry? what's the matter, old girl?" "m-mother thinks i'm old enough to-to b-be married." "to whom?" shrieked awdrey, all agog at once. "nobody--only some el-eligible men at--at aunt maggie's." "what rot you're talking. hasn't any one asked you?" "of course not." "then what on earth's all the row about? it's only natural mother should want you to be married some day." "but--but i've sworn never to marry." "ah," said awdrey knowingly, as she tramped upstairs beside her sister; then in a gentler voice, "why can't you marry _him_?" "who's 'him'?" "why, the man who made you swear not to marry." "it wasn't a man--it was a g-girl," and tony's tears burst out afresh, as she remembered how she and gladys gates had sworn to each other never to marry, but always to live together, and had solemnly divided and eaten a lump of sugar in ratification of the covenant. awdrey was speechless with disgust, but she went with tony into her room, because she had not yet found out what she primarily wanted to know. "you're an extraordinary kid, tony--i really should call you only half there. you kick up all this ridiculous fuss at the mere mention of marriage, and yet you go about with a man like furlonger. oh yes, i know all about it. father was bawling loud enough for every one this side of the channel to hear." "but i tell you i didn't know he was furlonger. besides, he didn't want me to marry him. he wouldn't dream of suggesting such a thing." "oh, no, i'm quite sure of that. but you don't tell me your relations with him were entirely platonic." "yes, i do." "you mean to say he never even kissed you?" "kissed me!--of course not!--how dare you, awdrey!" "my dear child, you play the injured innocence game very well, but when you make out you don't know what sort of man furlonger is, you're carrying it a bit too far." "of course, i know he's been in prison," and tony sobbed drily, "but as for kissing me, i'm sure he's not as bad as that." "are you trying to be funny?" asked awdrey sharply. tony only sniffed in reply, and her sister's gaze wandered round the windy, austere room, resting on the few photographs of school-girl friends on the mantelpiece. "i suppose you're in earnest," she said, after a pause, "but really, you're the weirdest thing, even in flappers, i've ever met. perhaps in time you'll realise that even such a heinous crime as a kiss is a degree better than robbing a few score poor widows of their savings." tony stopped crying suddenly, and a quiver passed through her. the expression of her eyes changed. "awdrey--i--i think i'd like to be--alone--to do my packing." half-an-hour later tony's boxes were still empty, except for a foundation layer of the school-girl photographs. the bed and chairs were littered with underclothing, shoes, hats, books and frocks. tony sat on the floor, staring miserably in front of her with tear-blind eyes that did not notice the surrounding confusion, so intent were they on the litter of a broken dream. her dream, once so joyful, fresh and iridescent, was now a mere jumble of shards. she had defended furlonger against her parents and her sister, but it had been the last effort of which her bleeding heart was capable. her hero and his epic had now broken up into a terrible shatter of disillusion, to which her mother and awdrey had added the most humiliating dust. she could not think which was worse--the motives of self-interest attributed by the one, or the love-motives attributed by the other. and though she denied both, at the bottom of her heart was a far worse accusation. her stainless champion was a criminal, a false swearer, a defrauder of the helpless, a devourer of widows' houses. he had not sinned against her in the way her family imagined, but in a far more horrible, subtle way ... she shuddered, sickened and shrank. all the same she was glad that when others accused him she had taken his part. chapter xii children dancing in the dusk nigel was late for supper that evening. he came in very quietly, and slipped into his place without a word. he had very little to say about the races. "lost your money on midsummer moon?" said leonard. "well, you needn't look so glum--it was only five bob." but janey knew that was not the matter, though she knew nothing more. after supper she put her arm through his, and drew him out into the garden. they walked up and down in front of sparrow hall. at first she had meant to ask him questions, but soon she realised that the questions would not come--only a great stillness between her and nigel, and a fierce clutch of their hands. they walked up and down, up and down, breathing the thick scents of the garden--touched with autumn rottenness, sodden with rain and night. gradually they pulled each other closer, till she felt the throb of his heart under her hand.... the next day nigel worked hard with len at weed-burning. it was strange what a lot of weed-burning there was to do, thought he--not only at sparrow hall, but at wilderwick, and swites farm, and golden compasses, and the two-mile cottages, and all those places from which little curls of blue, dream-scented smoke were drifting up against the sky. men were burning the tangles of their summer gardens, they were piling into the flame those trailing sweets, now dead. for autumn was here, and winter was at hand, and a few dead things that must be burnt were all that remained of june. nigel wondered if his june had not gone too, and if he had not better burn at once those few sweet, dead, tangled thoughts it had left him. he thought of the dim lane by goatsluck farm, with the glare of two motor lights on the hedges. he saw the puddles gleam, and tony erect in the trickery of light and darkness, shapeless in his coat. then across the aching silence of his heart came her words--"i can't bear it!--i--i'm so--disappointed." that was the end of june--and he ought to have expected it. his friendship with tony strife could never have lasted in a neighbourhood where both were known and talked about. it had ended a little suddenly, that was all. he did not reproach himself for deceiving her; he did not even regret it, though he guessed what she must think. the doorway of the house of light had stood open, and he had crept in like a beggar, knowing that he must soon be turned out, but resolute meanwhile to bask and be glad. but he wished she had not been "disappointed," that was so pathetic. poor little girl! the memory of him would eat into her heart for a while. girls of her age were righteous, and he had cheated her into friendship with unrighteousness. she would hate him for a bit. "i am so disappointed"--it seemed as if all his seething desires for goodness and peace had died into that little wail of outraged girlhood, and come back to haunt the empty house of his heart. during the first few days of separation he childishly hoped that he might hear from her--surely she would write if only to upbraid. but no letter came. his coat was returned the next morning, but he searched the parcel in vain for a message. how cruel of tony!--and yet all children, even girl-children, are cruel. their experience of sorrow is limited to its tempestuous side--they do not know its aching calms; they quench their thirst with great gulps, and do not know the relief of small drops of water. this was the price he had to pay for seeking his comfort in the gaiety of boys and girls instead of in the more stable sympathy of his contemporaries. the next two weeks were heartsick and lonely. all day long a piteous consciousness of tony was present in the background of his thoughts, waiting till night to creep into the foreground of his dreams, and torment him with hungry wakings. everything that reminded him even of her type was painful. little ridiculous things twanged chords of plaintive memory--a picture of the roedean hockey-team, with their short skirts and pig-tails, the demure flappers he sometimes met in his walks, a correspondence on "moral training in girls' schools" which was being waged in a daily paper--everything that reminded him of healthy, growing, undeveloped girlhood, reminded him of tony, and made his heart ache and yearn and grieve after her. he wandered about by himself a good deal in the lanes, snatching his few free moments after dusk. he no longer tramped furiously--he roamed, with slow steps and dreaming eyes, drinking a faint peace from the darkness of the fields. he found comfort, too, in his fiddle, and every evening he would play through his banal repertory, "o caro nome," from _rigoletto_, "i dreamt i dwelt in marble halls," the overtures to _zampa_ and _la gazza ladra_, the finale from _lucia di lammermoor_. he became wonderfully absorbed in his fiddling, and had recovered a certain amount of his old skill and flexibility. one day he took his violin to east grinstead, as the sounding post had fallen down. he came back by a long road--through hophurst and new chapel and blindley heath. he stopped at the last to have a drink--it was a dreary collection of cottages, scattered round a flat, windswept heath. there were ponds in the corners of the heath, and their waters were always ruffled by a strange wind. right in the middle of the waste was a little house squatting in its own patch of tillage, an island, a tumble-down oasis, in the great dreariness. the scene, with the grey, scudding sky behind it, became stamped on nigel's brain, as he stood with his beer in the pothouse door. it was one of those days when it seems as if our own hopelessness has at last impressed the unfeeling mask of nature, and caused it to put on the grimace of our despair. one or two children were playing in the road in front of the tavern, the wind fluttering their pinafores, and blowing their clothes against their limbs. a little boy with a mouth-organ was playing a vague and plaintive tune, to which two little girls were dancing. nigel stood listening for some minutes, till both the moaning wind and the creaking tune had woven themselves together into a symphony of wretchedness. then he put down his beer, and took up his violin. he unfastened the case, unrolled the chrysalis of wrappings, and laid the instrument against his shoulder. the next minute a shrill wail rose up and challenged the wind. the bar was nearly empty, but nigel would not have cared had it been full. he stood in the doorway, his hair blowing and ruffling madly, his body swaying, as he forced his fiddle into a duet with the wind. he had never before tried to extemporise, his violin had been for him a memory of sugary tunes, each wrapped up in the tinsel of a little past--he had never tried to wring the present out of it in a sudden, fierce expression of the emotions that tortured him as he played. this evening he wanted to join the wind in its wailing race, to rush with it over the common, to tear with it through the hedges, and sweep with it over the water. he forced out of his fiddle the cries of his own heart--they rose up and challenged the wind. the wind hushed a little--fluttered, throbbed--was still ... the fiddle tore through the silence and shattered it ... then the wind rose, and drummed savagely. nigel dashed his bow down on the deep strings, and forced deep sounds out of them. the wind galloped up to a shriek--and nigel's hand tore into harmonics, and wailed there till the wind was only puffing and sobbing. then the fiddle sobbed. the fiddle and the wind sobbed together ... till the wind swung up a scale--up came the fiddle after it ... the wind rushed higher and higher, it whistled in the dark eaves of the inn, and the fiddle squeaked higher and higher, and nigel's fingers strained on the fingerboard--he would not be beaten, blind nature should not defeat him, two should play her game. the wind was like a maniac as it whistled its arpeggios--the casements of the house were rattling like tin, the trees were swishing and bending, the water in the ruts of the lane was rippling, doors were creaking and banging, the fiddle was straining and shrieking ... then suddenly the string broke. nigel dropped his bow, angry and defeated. the duet with the wind was over. then he noticed a strange thing. he had been staring blindly and stupidly ahead of him, all his senses merged into sound, but now he saw that the road was crowded with children, and they were all dancing--little girls with their petticoats held high, little boys jumping aimlessly in their clumsy boots. they stopped as his hand fell, and stared at him in surprise, as if they had expected the music to go on for ever. "hullo!" said nigel--then suddenly he laughed; they all looked so forlorn, holding out their pinafores and pointing their feet. "wait a bit," he said, "my string's broken, but i'll have another on in no time." so he did--but not to play a duet with the wind. he played the intermezzo from _cavalleria_, and the dance went on as raggedly as before. after the intermezzo he played the overture to _zampa_, which was immensely popular, then threaded a patchwork of _la somnambula_, the _bohemian girl_, _la tosca_, and _aida_, till mothers began to appear on the doorsteps with cries of "supper's waiting." supper was waiting for nigel when he appeared at sparrow hall. len and janey asked no questions--it was pathetic how few questions they asked him nowadays--but they both noticed he was happier. he did not speak much--he sat in a kind of dream, with a wistful tremulousness in the corners of his mouth. his mouth had always been the oldest part of him--hard in repose and fierce in movement--but to-night it had taken some of the extreme childishness of his eyes. nigel felt very much the same as a child that cries for the moon and is given a ball to play with--the ball almost makes him forget that he wants the moon so badly. those dancing children had, for some strange reason, partly filled the place of stalwart tony in his heart. that night they came and danced in his dreams--in a pale light, to a tinkling tune. he found himself forming plans for making them dance again. he would never be on the old footing with tony, but those children should dance for him and help him to forget. so the next evening he went out again with his fiddle, and played at blindley heath. again the children danced--with clumping boots and high petticoats they danced outside the sweepers inn. but this time he did not stay long--he went on to dormans land, to see if they would dance there. it was nearly dark now, and one or two misty stars shone above the village roofs--the wind was heavy with approaching rain as it soughed up the street towards him. he did not stand at the inn, but where the road to lingfield joins the road to cowden, close to the schools. one or two children came and looked at him curiously. "he wants a halfpenny," said one, "i'll ask my mumma for it." "no," said nigel, "i want you to dance." the children giggled, but at last the little girl who had suggested the halfpenny picked up her skirts, and then it was not long before they were all dancing to the waltz from _traviata_. every day afterwards, when evening fell, nigel took his violin, and went out into the lanes and the dark-swept villages, and played for the children to dance. they grew to expect him, and to clamour for old tunes. "give us the jiggy one," they would cry, and he would play "o caro nome." "give us the twirly one," and he would play "i dreamt i dwelt in marble halls." but sometimes he would not give them what they wanted--he would play what he chose, strange things that came into his head and would not leave it till he had sent them wailing into the dusk. one day he played a duet with some long grass that rustled and sighed behind him; another day it was with a wood, brown and naked, but full of palpitating mysteries; another time he played an accompaniment to the stars as they crept timidly one by one into the deserts of the sky. he knew the constellations, and gave gentle, bird-like notes to the dim pleiades, and low, sonorous tones to orion, and heavy quavers to the wain; there was a sudden scale for casseopeia, and harmonics for the ram. by the time he had finished all the children had gone, and he was alone in the breeze and darkness, in a great, grief-stricken silence, which, he realised painfully, greeted the stars far more fitly than any strivings of his. it was impossible for this new life to be hidden from the brother and sister at sparrow hall. one evening leonard burst into the kitchen where janey was sitting. "what do you think nigel's up to now?" "what?" "playing the fiddle outside pubs for kids to dance to." janey gasped. "are you sure, len?" "absolutely pos. old pilcher was telling me--the lad was fiddling away for an hour outside the sweepers at blindley heath, and all the brats were on their hind legs, kicking up no end. janet, do you think he's all there?" "i--i don't know--i've been wondering." "there's no doubt that he's been strange ever since he came out of quod. poor old nigel--life's hit him hard, and bruised him a lot." "he was funny about kids from the first. he took a tremendous fancy to that odious little ivy batt who comes for the milk." "i expect this is part of the same game." "i expect it is--but it hurts me to think of it." she turned to the fire, and a sigh shook her breast--life had a habit of hitting hard all round. a few minutes later nigel came in. he set down his violin, and went over to the hearth, kneeling beside janey. she put her arms round him, and drew his head to her shoulder. "old man ... is it really true that you go about the villages fiddling to kids?" "yes--i like to see 'em dance." "are you fond of them?" "only when they dance." "what a funny old man you are." "ain't i, janey!" chapter xiii keeping christmas every evening the three furlongers used to sit by the fire and stare into it. len would sprawl back in his chair with his pipe, and the other two lean forward with needlework and newspapers and cigarettes. they seldom spoke--the wind would howl, and the shadows would creep, and the night drift on through star-strewn silences. at last some one would yawn loudly, and the others laugh--and all go to bed. len was worried about nigel and janey, and usually devoted these evenings and their pipely inspiration to thinking them out in a blundering way. he was not a man given to problems, and hitherto life had held but few. it was an added bitterness that now his problem should be that brother and sister who had always stood to him for all that was simple and beloved. nigel, in his strange fears, his subcurrents of emotion, and quickly changing moods, reminded len of a horse; he did not object to drawing upon his knowledge of horses and their ways for the management of his brother. he humoured him, bore with him, but kept at the same time a tight hand--especially when the boy's seething restiveness and pain found vent in harsh words to janey. janey could not bear harsh words now--she had used to be able to pick them off and throw them back in the true sisterly style, but now she winced and let them stick. janey perplexed len as much as nigel, and worried him far more. her eyes seemed to be growing very large, and her cheeks very hollow. when she smiled her lips twitched in a funny way, and when she laughed it grated. janey cost len many pipes. the explanation of janey was, of course, at redpale farm, sitting glumly by his winter fireside, just as she sat by hers. the love of janet furlonger and quentin lowe had entered on a new phase. quentin was beginning to be dissatisfied. at first janey had imagined that she would welcome this, but it did not come as she had expected. it brought their love into spasmodic silences. up till then quentin and she had always been writing and meeting, but now he wrote to her and met her in strange, sudden jerks of feeling. sometimes he left her for days without even a line, but she could never doubt him, because when at last they met, his love seemed to burn with even greater torment and fierceness than in the months of its more regular expression. he began to give her presents, too--a locket, a ring, a book, which she shrank from, but forced herself to accept because of the evident delight he found in giving. once more he was rambling restlessly and ineffectively on a quest for independence. his efforts always came to nothing, partly through his own incapacity, but always, too, through a sheer perverseness of fate, thwarting developments, wrecking coincidences--so there really seemed truth in his cry that the stars fought against him. she began to realise that, much as she had deplored what looked like his permanent satisfaction with a makeshift, she had found in it a kind of vicarious rest. when anxiety and disillusion lay like stones at the bottom of her heart, she had comforted herself with the thought of the lightness of his. now she could do so no longer--she had the burden of his sorrow as well as her own to bear, and for a woman like janey, this was bound much more than to double her load. her anxiety about nigel was also a pain that bruised through the weeks. he was decidedly "queer," and she could not understand his new craze for fiddling to children. sometimes, too, he would be terribly sentimental, and have fits of more or less maudlin affection for her and leonard. at other times he would be surly, and during his attacks of surliness he would work with desperation, almost with greed, as if he longed to wear himself out. then he would come in, and throw himself down in a chair, and sleep the sleep of utter exhaustion with wide-flung limbs--or he would have a bath by the fire, regardless of any cooking operations she might have on hand, or the difficulty of heating gallons of ice-cold water in a not over-large kettle. len would be furious with him on these occasions, and tell him that if he wanted a turkish bath built on to sparrow hall he had better say so at once. "i hope we'll have a happy christmas," remarked janey rather plaintively to len one evening late in december. "why shouldn't we?" he asked; he was kneeling on the hearthstone, cleaning her boots. "well, we've been counting on it so. you remember last christmas, when i said that next time we'd have nigel with us...." "and we've got him, haven't we?" "yes." she was silent then, and the next minute he lifted his eyes from the blacking and laughed up at her. "there's the rub, janey. we don't know how nigel will take christmas." "no--he'll probably be frightfully sentimental at breakfast, and kiss us both--and then he'll have a boiling bath--and then he'll take his fiddle and go out for hours to play to those wretched kids." "a pretty fair prophecy, i should think." "he's just like a kid himself," sighed janey. "yes--i think he's getting soft in that way. at any rate, he's taken an uncommon fancy to kids. by the bye, that girl he rescued at grinstead station, strife's girl, has come home for christmas. i saw her out with her father this morning, and she'd got her hair up, and looked years older. i expect she'll be getting married soon. her people will see that she settles down early--they don't want two like her sister." "what was that?" cried janey. "what?" "i thought i heard some one in the room." "there's nobody--look, quite empty, except for you and me. you're getting nervy, old girl." "perhaps i am." he stood up, and looked at her closely and rather anxiously. then he put his arms round her. "you're not well, sis--i've noticed it for a long time. i say--there's nothing the matter, is there? you'd tell us if there was, wouldn't you?" "of course ... there's nothing," she whispered, as his rough hand stroked her hair. he held her to him very tenderly, he was always gentler and less exacting with her than nigel. yet, somehow, when she was unhappy it was nigel she wanted to cling to, whose strong arms she liked to feel round her, whose suffering face she wanted close to hers. she wanted nigel now. but nigel had gone out. he walked heavily, his arms folded over his chest, his head hanging. so she was back--and she was grown up--and she would soon be married. these three contingencies had never struck him before. she had gone so inevitably out of his life, that he had never troubled to consider her return to shovelstrode. she had stood so inevitably for adolescence, unformed and free, that he had never thought of her growing up. and as for marriage, it had seemed a thing alien and incongruous, her girlhood had been virgin to his timidest desire. but she was grown up. she was ready for marriage, and most likely would soon be married. he realised that to some other man would be given, probably readily enough, what he had not dared even think about. a shudder passed through him, but the next minute he flung up his head almost triumphantly. he had had from tony what she would never give to another--he had had her free thoughtless comradeship, and she would never give it again. she was grown up now, and unconsciously she would realise her womanhood, put up little barriers, put on little airs. he--he alone--would have the memory of her heedless girlhood innocently displayed--he had what no other man had had, or could have ever. christmas came, a moist day, warm and rather hazy. janey had decorated sparrow hall with holly and evergreens, and had even compounded an ominous-looking plum-pudding. she was desperately anxious that their first christmas together for four years should be a success--she even ventured to hint the same to nigel. "why," he drawled, "do we keep christmas? is it because christ was born in a manger?" "of course not--how queerly you talk!" "because that was why we kept it in prison." "but we aren't in prison here." "aren't we?--aren't we, janey?--would there be any good keeping christmas if we weren't?" she laughed uneasily. "nigel, you're balmy. come along and help me make mince-pies. it's all you're good for." in spite of her fears, christmas morning passed happily enough, and though the dinner was culinarily a failure, socially it was a huge success. the pudding, having triumphantly defeated the onslaughts of knives, forks and teeth, was accorded a hero's death in the kitchen fire, to the accompaniment of the dead march on nigel's fiddle, and various ritual acts extemporised by len from memories both military and ecclesiastical. he was preparing a ceremonial funeral for the mince-pies, when he and janey suddenly realised that nigel had left the room. "now where the devil has he gone?" janey sighed. "some silly game of his. i hope he'll be back soon." "not he!--he's probably off for the day, to fiddle to those blasted kids, if they're not too full of plum-pudding to dance. by christopher, janey--he's mad." the dark was gathering stealthily--crawling up from the kent country in the east, burying the wet winter meadows of surrey and sussex in damp and dusk and fogs. in the west a crimson furnace smouldered, showing up a black outline of hills. moisture was everywhere--the roads gleamed with mud, the banks were sticky with damp tangled grass, and drops quivered and glistened on the bare twigs of the hedges. a great sense of disheartenment was everywhere. it was christmas day, and hundreds of hearths were bright--but outside, away from humanity and its cheerful dreams, all nature mourned, in the curse of the winter solstice, drowned in the water-flood. furlonger had left his hearth with its cheery flames and loved faces and warm, sweet dreams of goodwill, and was out alone with nature, who had no warmth nor love nor make-believe, only wet winds and winter desolation. he came to dormans land. the blinds were down, and through the chinks he saw the leap and spurt of firelight. he stood where three roads met, and the wind swept up from lingfield, where the first stars had hung their lanterns. he began to play--a dreary, springless tune, that struck cold into the hearts of the few it reached through their closed windows. he played the song of christmas as nature keeps it--the festival of life's drowning and despair. no children came to dance. they were happy beside their parents, with sweets and crackers and fun. they were keeping christmas as man keeps it, and drew down the blinds on nature keeping it outside, and the lone fiddler who felt it more congenial to keep it with nature than to keep it with men. nigel stopped playing and looked around him into the gloom. he felt disappointed because the children had not come to dance. he had broken away from his brother and sister because he wanted those dancing children so badly--and they had not come. perhaps he had better go further up into the village, since the children were not playing in the street as usual, but in their homes. so he went up, and stood between the church and the royal oak. the place seemed deserted--only a great, empty car stood outside the inn. nigel began to play, but again there was no response. the darkness came fluttering towards him from the back streets of the village, and seemed to creep right into his heart. then suddenly it struck him that he played too doleful a tune for the children. they liked lively airs--they found it hard to dance to those bizarre mournful extempores of his. so he started "o caro nome," and when that had jigged and rippled to an end, he played airs from flotow's _martha_, and then his old favourite, "i dreamt i dwelt in marble halls." the street was still empty. from a cottage close by came the wheeze of a harmonium. he stood drearily snapping the strings with his fingers. then suddenly he realised how ridiculous he was--playing in the village street, in the damp and the cold and the dark, when he ought to be at home, eating and drinking and singing and joking because christ was born in a manger. he turned away--he was a fool. why did he like seeing children dance?--why did it hurt him so that they were better employed to-day? he did not know. his life, his emotions, his heart, were like the twilight, a dark and cheerless mystery. he could not understand half what he felt in his own breast. he was himself only a child dancing in the dusk, to an unknown fiddler playing a half-comprehended tune. the next moment he heard the inn door open behind him, and turning round saw a short, broad figure on the doorstep, wrapped in an enormous motor-coat. "will you not play something else?" the words came heavily, with a teutonic lumber. nigel saw a round, florid face, and dark, very close-cropped hair. he hesitated--perhaps the stranger was making game of him. "i have been listening to you for some time, and now i have come to see you. i am surprised. i do not think you are a beggar." "not quite," said nigel. "well, play some more." again furlonger hesitated. then he hoisted his fiddle to his shoulder with a short, rather grating, laugh. he played the requiem from _il trovatore_. there was silence. the darkness seemed to pass in waves over the sky, each wave engulfing it deeper. the wind sobbed a strange little tune in the eaves of the inn. "you have tortured my ears," said the stranger. nigel flushed angrily--so after all the idea had been to make game of him--"with your damned verdi." "how do you mean?" "you are too good to play verdi." "oh!" "what are your favourite composers?" "gounod--verdi--balfe----" "ai! ai! ach!" and the stranger put his hands over his ears. nigel was beginning to be faintly amused. "well, what's the matter with 'em?" "the matter?--they are dead." "that'll be the matter with us all, sooner or later." "let us hope it will be sooner for some of us." nigel looked into the stranger's face, and again experienced a slight shock of surprise. the eyes in the midst of its florid circumference were haunted with despair, grief-stricken and appealing. he suddenly realised that it was not normal for a man to spend christmas day in lonely petrol prowlings. "play some more." "i can only play verdi and balfe and those others." "well, i'll try to endure it." "look here," said furlonger, "what's your game? why should you want me to play when you hate my music?" "i hate your music, but i like your playing. you are a wonderful player." "oh, rats!" and nigel felt angry, he did not know why. "i repeat--you are a wonderful player. who taught you?" "carl hauptmann." "hauptmann!--he was a pupil of mine." "then you're eitel von gleichroeder!" "i am." nigel looked interested. memories of his life in london revived--music lessons, concerts, musical jargon, a lost world in which he had once lived, but had now almost forgotten. he seemed to hear hauptmann's strange, coughing laugh as he chid his pupil for what von gleichroeder had just chidden him now--his abominable taste. "you are hobeless, hobeless--you and your balfe and your bellini and your odder vons." von gleichroeder he knew would take an even more serious view of the case, as he had a reputation for ultra-modernism in music. hauptmann's contempt for balfe and bellini he carried on to verdi and gounod, even tschaikowsky, while though he was obliged to grant beethoven supremacy with a grudge, he passed over his works in favour of those of scriabin, d'indy, debussy and strauss. "well, well," said the musician, "play _zampa_, play _lucia di lammermoor_, play _la somnambula_--any abomination you please--but play." nigel, with rather an evil grin, played _zampa_. "why do you like those things?" "because they are pretty tunes." "ach!--and why do you like pretty tunes?" nigel stared at him full of hostility, then his manner changed. "because they remind me of--of things i used to feel." he realised dimly that there was a subtle free-masonry between him and this man. in a way it drew them together, in a way it held them apart. "what you used to feel. so! that is better. it's your heart they tickle, not your ears." furlonger nodded. "do you play for your living?" "no--i am a farmer." "then what are you doing here?" "i play for children to dance." von gleichroeder looked round, and shrugged his shoulders. he did not seem particularly surprised. "would you not like to play for grown-up children to dance? for fashionable society to crowd to hear you, and gather round you like children round a barrel-organ?" "fashionable society won't waste much of its time on me. i've been in prison three years for bogus company promoting." "so! but that is good. without that attraction you could fill the bechstein, but with it you can fill the albert hall." "gammon." "not at all. my dear young man, i see a glorious future ahead of you, if you will only trouble to secure it. come to london and study music----" "please don't talk nonsense." "it is not nonsense. you are wonderfully gifted. i don't say you are a genius, for you are not--but you are wonderfully gifted, and your history will make you interesting to the ladies. with your talent and your history and--and your face, you ought to do really well, if only some enterprising person would take you in hand." "which isn't likely." "i beg your pardon--it is most likely. i will do it." nigel was more surprised than grateful. "no, thank you." "do not be proud. it is purely a business offer. i expect to make money out of you, and--what do you call it?--credit. listen here--if you cannot pay my fees, i will give you a year's tuition free of charge, on condition that i have a percentage on your salaries during the next five years. that is a generous offer--many a young man would give much to have me for professor." nigel shook his head. "thanks awfully--but i'm not keen on it." "and why?" "well, for one thing, i don't want to make my stinking past into an advertisement, and for another i don't want to go back to prison." "prison!--that is a strange name for fame and big salaries." "i'm not thinking of those so much as of what must come before them--all the grind and slavery. my music's the only part of me that has never been in prison, and if i make a trade and treadmill out of it, i shall be degrading it just as i have degraded everything else about me." "it will not be degradation--on the contrary." "and i don't believe i shall ever make myself a name." "that remains to be seen. i don't expect you to become world-famous, but there is no reason why you should not be exceedingly successful in england, where no one bothers very much about taste or technique. taste you have none, technique---- lord help us!--but temperament--ach, temperament! you have suffered--hein?" nigel coloured. he could not answer--because he felt this man had suffered too. "of course, you have suffered--you could not play like that if you had not. without your suffering you would be a clever amateur--just that. but now, because you have suffered, you are something more. 'wer nie sein brod mit thränen ass'--you doubtless know our goethe's wonderful lines. so"--and his dark, restless eyes looked up almost imploringly to the sky--"sorrow has one use in this world." there was another pause. the village was quite dark now--lights twinkled. high above the frosty exhalations of the dusk, piling walls of smoke-scented mist round the cottages, the stars shone like the lights of celestial villages, dotting the dark country of the sky. the wain hung tilted in the north, lonely and ominous, betelgeuse was bright above sussex, aldebaran burned luminous and lonely in his quarter. nigel watched the sign of virgo, which had just risen, and glowed over the woods of langerish. it flickered like candles in the wind. then he dropped his eyes to the darkness round him, and through it came the creak of a harmonium. "well?" said von gleichroeder. "well?" "will you accept my offer?" "no, thank you." "why?" "i've given you my reasons." the subtle sense of hostility put insolence into his voice. "they are no reasons." "they are mine." the foreigner shrugged his shoulders. "so be it. i have made my offer--you have refused it. it is your own concern." he took out his card-case, and presented his card to furlonger. "in case you change your mind." this was anti-climax, and nigel felt irritated. "i'm not in the habit of changing my mind." "just as you please," and von gleichroeder put back the card-case in his pocket. "good evening," he added politely. "good evening," mumbled furlonger. he turned away, and walked down the village to where the foot-path to wilderwick striped the fields. at the stile he paused, and realised that he had been exceptionally insolent. chapter xiv woods at dawn nigel reached home only half-an-hour before supper-time. len and janey did not receive him cordially, but he was too much preoccupied with his adventure to notice their coldness or take their hints. he poured it all out at the evening meal--the subtle sense of outrage which for some unknown reason von gleichroeder's offer had stirred up, contending in his voice with a ridiculous, childish pride. len and janey were unfeignedly surprised. it had never occurred to them that nigel's playing was even tolerable--they had sometimes liked it in the distance, that was all. "fancy his wanting you to go and study in london," said janey. "i'm glad you refused." "so'm i"! "it would have been beastly losing you again, old man--we haven't had you back three months." "wouldn't you like to see me fill the albert hall?" "well--er--if you could really do it, it might be interesting to watch--just for once in a way. but i don't see that it would be worth breaking up the 'appy 'ome, only for that." nigel would have liked them to be more impressed, but they voiced his own feelings exactly. "no--nor do i. well, i've settled the old geyser, anyway--and now let's forget all about him." which they did at once. that night nigel had restless dreams. he dreamed he was playing to crowded audiences in great nightmare-like halls that stretched away to infinity. the circumstances were always unfavourable--sometimes he would have only one string on his violin, and sometimes he would find himself struggling with some horrible dream-begotten instrument with as many strings as a harp. once he dreamed that all the audience got up and danced a hideous rigadoon, another time they all had the same face--a dark, florid face that leered. towards morning he dreamed a quieter dream. he was playing in a very large place, but he had a rational instrument, and he was playing "i dreamt i dwelt in marble halls." the melody floated all through his dreams--the same as in waking hours, and yet not quite the same--celestial, rarefied, wistful in heart and ears. he was also conscious of a presence--he knew he was near tony strife; he felt her close to him, and it was magic in his blood. the melody drifted on--sometimes pouring out of his violin, sometimes seeming to come from very far away. "and i also dreamed, which pleased me most, that you loved me still the same ..." the music ceased abruptly, and he dropped his bow, looking round to see tony. she was not there; the great hall was empty--nothing but empty seats stretching away into dimness--except that in the front row of all sat two figures huddled together. he looked down at them, and at first he did not know them, then he saw that they were len and janey, staring up at him with hungry, loving eyes.... he woke and sat up, shivering a little. it must be late, for the winter sky was white beyond the woods. yet he did not feel inclined to rise. he lay back, and folded his hands behind his head, staring out at the dull line of brown that lay against the quivering, dawn-filled clouds. those woods always put strange thoughts into his head. they made him think of his own life, lonely, windy and sere. but some day the spring would throb in them, their branches would shine with green, their thickets would thrill with song; in their waste, desolate places primroses would push through the dead leaves of last year.... he sat up again with a jerk--for the first time he realised that the woods would not be always brown. the thought gave him a faint shock of surprise. ever since the day he left prison he had looked out on brown woods, rocked by autumn and winter winds, so that he had almost forgotten that autumn and winter would not last for ever. he had never thought of spring, of march and tender green, of april and first flowers, of sweet, quickening rains, and winds full of warmth and the scent of young leaves. it was strange that he should have forgotten spring. now in the darkest day of the year, spring held out its promise to the woods--and to him. the yellow of a hidden sunrise was filling the clouds like hope unbounded--and nigel's dream came back to him, his dream of marble halls and of love that was "still the same." he saw himself playing to thronged audiences, with tony close to him, unseen, intangible, but there--with all the sweet memories of lingfield and brambletye revived and re-established, her friendship, candour, and tenderness "still the same." then he understood. gulfs unbridgeable might lie between the convict with his stained and broken life and the simple little schoolgirl of shovelstrode. but the well-known violinist who played for "big salaries," who "filled the albert hall."... a terrible thing had happened to nigel--he had begun to hope. when hope has been a long time away, the return of it is like the return of sensation to a frost-bitten limb. it pricks, it burns, it tortures. it tortured nigel till a cry of anguish burst from him, bitterer than in any of his fits of despair. he bent forward, clapping his hand to his side. hope showed him the doors of his prison flung wide at last. for long years he had never dreamed of escape, he was a captive, so fast in prison that he could not get forth--free only among the dead. but now the doors were open and he could go out. his music would raise him up out of the pit, bring him back to an earth washed in rain and spring, to touch the trembling innocence of the lilies, and drink the sweetness of the eternal may. "oh, god! oh, god!--i want to be free! i want to be free!" the cry was not a prayer so much as the cry of his great hunger, finding voice at last--"i want to be free! i want to be free!" his mind dropped hastily to practical details. he had seen von gleichroeder's address on his card, and that tough memory of his, which was sometimes a curse to him, held it fast. he would write and tell him he had changed his mind. it would be humiliating, but it must be done. then he would go to london, and work--and work. it was not only the topmost pinnacle that could lift him out of his old life, the name he would make for himself need not be a great name--as long as it was a fair name. that was what he wanted, and would struggle for--a fair name. hard work, an honest livelihood, self-denial, constant communion with the beautiful and inspired, would purge his soul of its defilement. the hideous stain of his crime would be wiped off. when he had lived for years in poverty and honesty, when he had brought by his music a little sunshine into poor lives like those he had smitten, when the fields of three counties had ceased to reproach him for his treachery, and the name of furlonger had some faint lustre from his bearing it--then he would be free. and when he was free he would allow himself--not to claim tony's friendship or anything else beyond him, but just to think of her--think of her with hope. oh, tony, little tony! his little love! for weeks now he had known that he loved her. though he had never dared think of her as a woman, he wanted her. he had wanted women before, he had had his adventures with them--though not perhaps as many as the average man--but they had all been stale and ordinary, the stock line, the job lot, which eager, extravagant youth pays high for as a novelty. now he had something new. he loved a little girl, scarcely more than a child, parted from him by a dozen barriers of his own erecting. he loved her because she was good and innocent, and had given him perfect comradeship; most of all he loved her because of the barriers between them, because she lived utterly apart from him, in a foreign land of liberty and hope and uprightness, towards which he must strive hourly if he were to gain even the frontiers. he scowled a little. he was not blind, and he knew that he would have to go into slavery, perhaps for a long time, before this new freedom was won. even in an hour he had been able to see that von gleichroeder was a technique-fiend, and would make matters hot for his clumsy pupil. he also realized that though the german had borne good humouredly with his insolence, he would not be so patient when he became his master. yes--he would have a master--he would have to practise scales and exercises--he would be reprimanded, lectured, ordered about. herr von gleichroeder would be his master, and the tacit sympathy between them would but make their relations more galling. there would be other sacrifices too. he would have to say good-bye to sparrow hall, and to len and janey. he caught his breath--god! how he loved len and janey! he had been brutal and heartless to them again and again, but he loved them with a love that was half pain in its intensity. he would have to be away from them perhaps for years. yet when he came back he would bring them a gift--the same gift that he would bring tony--a fair name. that was what he owed every one--the world, his brother and sister, his little love. the very fact that he was taking his "stinking past" with him into the future would to some extent remove its offensiveness. it was all very well to talk of "starting afresh under another name." what he wanted was to raise his old name--the name of furlonger--out of the dust. the convict should not just quietly disappear, he should be transfigured into the artist, publicly, before the whole world. as his degradation had been public, the comment of cheap newspapers, so should his exaltation. a thundering knock at the door broke into his dreams. "nigel, in the devil's name, get up!--breakfast's waiting." the next moment len was in the room, tearing the bed-clothes off him. "you _are_ a fat lot of use on the farm!--i've got through half the morning's work without you." "then you won't miss me so much when i'm gone." "gone where?" "to london." nigel began to dress himself--len stared at him gaping. "to london! why, you aren't going there, are you?" "i am." "to that man von what's-his-name?" "of course." len stared harder than ever. then he suddenly lost his temper. "'of course'!--there's no 'of course' about it--except 'of course not.' why, you told him you wouldn't hear of such a thing." "but i may change my mind, mayn't i?" "no--you mayn't. look here, nigel, you've led sister and self an infernal dance for the last three months. can't you chuck it?" "i'm going to chuck it--by leaving this place." leonard saw his brother was in earnest. he came quickly towards him, and laid his hand on his shoulder. "what have we done to upset you, old man?" "nothing--you've always been sports." "then why are you going?" nigel hesitated. he could not bring himself to tell even this brother of his sacred, half-formed plans. "you won't miss me," he faltered. "won't miss you! won't miss you!--what the devil d'you mean?" "i'm no use on the farm--i laze and i slack. you'll get on much better without me." "gammon! you're tumbling into it nicely, and if you go, i'll have to hire a man--and there'll be the expense of your keep in london. no, no, old chap--that won't wash." "wait till you've tried it." "haven't i been trying it for three years? besides, my boy, this is only beating round the bush. the main fact is that janey and i would miss you simply damnably." "not really," said nigel, his mouth drooping with a great tenderness, "you'd soon feel the relief of being rid of me and my tantrums." there was a knock at the door. "that's janey," cried len. "come in, old girl--i want you." janey came in. nigel was nearly dressed, and had begun to shave. "breakfast's----" began janey. "yes--i know all about breakfast. that isn't what's the matter. len wants you to join him in trying to persuade me not to go to london." "but you're not going to london!..." "i'm writing this morning to von gleichroeder to say i've changed my mind." "no!... nigel!" cried janey. for a moment she stood as if paralyzed, then suddenly she darted towards him, and flung her arms round him, looking up beseechingly into his face. "nigel! no!--you mustn't leave us--i can't bear it. oh, say you won't!" "damn you, janey!--can't you see i've got a razor in my hand?" she was taking it even worse than he had expected. she seemed actually terrified. "i can't live here without you," she cried brokenly, "indeed i can't." he gently disengaged himself. "most people's difficulty," he said, deliberately lathering his chin, "has not been how to live without me, but how to live with me." "but i can't live without you." "you've got len." "but he's only--only half." "the better half. i'm a rotten lot, janey. you'll be far happier when i'm gone. i'm a sulky brute--don't contradict me; i know it. i'm a sulky, bad-tempered brute. again and again i've spoiled your happiness and the lad's--i've done nothing but snap and snarl at you, and i've gone whining about the place when you wanted to be cheerful. you've both been utter sports to put up with me so long--you'll notice the difference when i'm away, if you can't realise it now." janey was sitting on the bed, drowned in tears. "aren't you happy with us?" asked leonard. "hardly--or i shouldn't be going." he spoke with all the exaggerated brutality of the man who sees himself obliged to hurt those he loves. "it's not your fault," he continued in a gentler voice, "it's mine. i'm such a waster. i'm a miserable, restless rotter, bound to make myself and every one else unhappy. now if i go to london, i shall work--i shall have something to live for." "fame, you mean," sobbed janey. "well, something of that kind." he had finished shaving, and came and sat down by her on the bed, forcing her drowned eyes to look into his. "janey, don't you want me to be famous? wouldn't you like to be the sister of a well-known violinist instead of convict seventy-six? wouldn't you like to see me fill the albert hall?" "fill hell!" shouted leonard. "d'you really believe all the rot that old bounder spoke?" "well, it isn't likely he'd teach me for nothing if he didn't expect to make something out of me." "yes--that'll be just what he'll do--and he'll make a fat lot more than you will." "oh, don't go!" sobbed janey. nigel looked wretchedly from one to the other. "janey," he cried, drawing her close to him, and quivering in the agony of his appeal, "janey, can't you understand?--i want to start a new life, i want to throw off all my beastly past. i want to make my name--your name--clean and honourable. i dragged it into the mud, and i must pull it out again. oh, i've suffered so, janey. i can't get out of prison, i feel more helplessly shut up than ever i did at parkhurst. but now i--can be--free." the last words burst from him in a choking cry. he flung himself back from her, and looked into her eyes. then he was surprised, for he saw in them, swimming in tears, a glimmer of understanding. "janey," he continued, putting his lips close to her face, and mumbling his appeal almost incoherently, "i can't expect you to grasp all that this means to me. you're good, you're pure--you don't know what it is to have a horrible stain on your heart, which all your tears don't seem able to wash away. but can't you put yourself for a moment in my place and realise what it is to hunger for a decent life, to dream of whiteness and purity and innocence, and burn to make them yours?--to be willing to give the whole world--just to be--clean?" "i think i can," said janey. chapter xv the sermon on forgiveness half-an-hour later the three furlongers sat down to a cold breakfast. they were almost silent, for there was nothing more to be said. the matter was settled. nigel had found an unexpected ally in janet, and had carried his point. directly after breakfast he wrote to von gleichroeder. it was a difficult letter, for it meant nothing less than eating humble pie, but for that very reason he did not take long over it. an envelope addressed in his large, scrawling hand was soon ready to be posted. it was a clear, cold day, this feast of stephen. a frosty sunshine crisped the grass, scattering the damps of yesterday's fog. the lane smelled of frost as nigel walked up it to the post-office. but he did not see it as it was--in the duress and beggarliness of winter; he saw it as it would be, bursting with spring, full of scent and softness and song. he pictured those naked bushes when spring had clothed them, those grey banks when spring had fired them--the hedges were full of future song, the hollows of primroses to be. he posted his letter, then stood for a moment, looking southward. the sunshine was so clear that the rims of distant windows gleamed with white across the fields. he could see the windows of shovelstrode.... dared he? after all, he would have to. he could not leave sparrow hall without seeing tony. he would not tell her of her place in his plans, but he owed it to her and to himself that she should think of him as a man living uprightly, striving after honour. now she was thinking of him as a scoundrel and an outcast--he came into her thoughts with a shudder. it must not be. at the same time he was afraid. it gave him a strange, cold qualm to think he was afraid of tony, once his comrade, now his love--but he was. if he meant to see her, he must go at once, before his resolve lost strength with spontaneity. he turned towards the south, where the sunshine lay. as he came near shovelstrode his quakings grew. after all, by the time he had made himself worthy to think of her, she would have given herself to another. he could not even hint that he wanted her to wait. he must trust to her aloofness to keep her free, and the memory of their friendship to keep alive in her heart a little spark that he could some day fan into flame. but it was all rather hopeless, a leap in the dark. perhaps, even, she would refuse to see him. he remembered the look in her eyes when she had turned from him by goatsluck farm. all the steel-cold virtue, all the ignorant horror, all the cruelty of youth had been in that look. perhaps she had turned from him for ever. perhaps nothing that he could ever achieve or be would wipe out from her memory his foul betrayal of others and herself. but he went too far in his fears for utter despair. reaction set in--hope began once more to lacerate him, and whipped him forward to make his last desperate appeal to the fates that had always hitherto been deaf and blind. he hesitated a moment when he came to the house. the servants might know who he was and not allow him in, or he might be seen by some of the family. it struck him that he had better go and look for her in the park before risking himself on the doorstep. she had once told him that she often wandered among the pines. he slipped round behind the lodge, and was skirting the lawn at the back of the house, when he saw one of the french windows open and a girl come out with her dog. his heart gave a suffocating leap, and something seemed to rise in his throat and stay there, making him gulp idiotically. he had never before felt any emotion at the sight of her--just pleasure, a calm, slow-moving comfort. but to-day his head swam, and he could hardly see her as she came running and skipping across the lawn in a manner wholly at variance with her long skirts and coiled-up hair. she turned aside before she reached the bushes that hid him, and he just managed to call after her-- "tony!--tony!" the dog barked, and the next minute had scented him, and came cantering over the grass. tony stood still and listened. she looked uncertain, and he called again-- "tony!" she turned quickly, and slipped behind the bushes, running to him along the path. when she was a few yards off she stopped dead. "mr. furlonger...." she stood outlined against a patch of wintry sky. it was the first time that he had seen her since her return. he thought that she was paler than in the valiant days of their friendship, and certainly the way she did her hair gave her a grown-up look. the stifling sensation in his throat became worse, and he could not speak. "what is it ... mr. furlonger?" "i--i want to speak to you." "oh, no! i can't!" her voice was quite childish. "i must--please do." she hesitated a moment. "then come into the shrubbery. we can be seen here from the house." "i know. i'm not here to get you into trouble. i--i only came to say good-bye." "good-bye," she repeated vaguely, not quite understanding him, for her heart had said good-bye to him long ago. "yes--i'm going to london." they were walking away from the house to where the pine-needles were thick under their feet--on a little, moist path smelling of winter. the sunshine came slanting down on tony as she stopped, showing up her slim, strong figure in a cold purity of light. it rested on her hair, and he saw golden threads in it--in her eyes, and he saw golden sparks in them. for the first time he realised how beautiful she was in all the assurance and unconsciousness of her youth. he longed to tell her so. instead he muttered-- "how grown-up you look." "do i?--it's my hair, i suppose." "did they make you put it up?" "aunt maggie said i was old enough--and i think so too." "i hope you don't mind my coming here to see you." he was desperately embarrassed, and her manner did not reassure him. "i'm going away, you see, to study music, and i--i thought i should like to say good-bye." "oh, no," she said rather awkwardly, her excessive youth showing nowhere more clearly than in her inability to put him at his ease. "oh, no, i'm glad you came--to say good-bye." "i'm going to work very hard. there's a fellow--eitel von gleichroeder, i don't know if you've heard of him--who's taken a fancy to me, and says he'll coach me if i'll take up the violin professionally." "i didn't know you played." "yes--but i'd no idea i was any good till i met this chap. he says i ought to make quite a decent thing out of it. i--i think it's worth trying." "oh, yes." "you see," he continued, his voice shaking with emotion, "i want to start a new life--to be respectable, i suppose you'd call it. if i win fame as a violinist--and von gleichroeder thinks i may--i--i shall have lived down everything." "yes ... of course." it was embarrassment, not lack of interest, that made her replies so trite. memories of their friendship--now dim and far-off, separated from her by many wonderful happenings--were creeping up to her and filling her with a vague uneasiness. as for nigel, he realised now what had taken place. he understood why his tongue had suddenly become tied in her presence, and his eagerness collapsed into shuffling uncouthness. he had come to shovelstrode to speak to a little girl--and he had found a woman. tony the schoolgirl, the hoyden, the gay comrade, was now nothing but a little ghost haunting the slopes of ashdown and the secret lanes of kent. in her place stood a woman--come suddenly, as the woman always comes--and the woman, he knew, was trying to call back the girl, and see things from her eyes once more--and could not. "tony--miss strife--i wanted to tell you this, just to show you i'm not always going to be a convict on ticket-of-leave." "i'm sure you won't. i hope you'll become very famous." the words passed her lips in jerks. her memories of him carried something very like repulsion. the more she struggled to revisualise the comradeship of two months ago, the greater was her distaste and humiliation. the kindest attitude possible for her now was one of embarrassed shyness. at first she had tried to heal herself with her memories, but as soon as she had worked back to them she found their sweet secrets all sicklied with bitterness and shame. he looked steadfastly at her, and he saw what had happened. "tony--you don't want to know me any longer--you want to forget we ever were friends. there's no good denying it, for i can see it." she stood motionless, her lips white, her hands clenched in front of her. "it's true--i can see it," he repeated. she did not speak. her memories were calling very loud, and there were tears in the voices, softening the shame. "you can't bear the thought of having once been my friend." tears were rising in her throat, and with her tears the little school-girl who had run away came back, and showed her face again before she went for ever. "oh, it's hurt me!" she cried. "you don't know how it's hurt me!" "to know i was a bad 'un?" he grasped the shaking hand she thrust out before her. "yes--i can't bear to think...." "but i've changed--i swear i have. i'm going to live a decent life; and you're going to help me--by just saying you believe i can." she shuddered, and pulled her hand away. "i tell you i've changed," he exclaimed bitterly; "won't you believe me?" she was crying now. "you don't understand ... you don't understand ... what one feels about men like you." he winced. "you don't know what i felt ... when i heard...." "tony!" he cried, "you _must_ forgive me." "i do forgive you--it's not me you've hurt--but----" "'but' you don't forgive me, and it is you i've hurt--that's what your 'but' means." there was another silence, broken only by her muffled crying and the throbbing of the wind in the pine-tops. nigel felt that his old life was struggling in its cerements to spring up and strangle the new life at its birth. "i can't understand," sobbed the girl, "how you or any man could have done such a horrible thing. you've been merciless and cruel and grasping and unworthy--and you won my friendship by false pretences, by lies and shams--when all the time you knew that if i'd had any idea who you really were i wouldn't have let you come near me. oh, it probably seems only a little thing to you, but it's dreadful for me to think i've given my friendship to a man who's been a--a cad." his anger kindled, for her inexperience and ignorance no longer attracted him--they were now only fragments that remained of something he had worshipped. "then are you going to inquire into the history of every man you meet, in case any one else should 'win your friendship under false pretences'? most men have had a little shake up in their pasts." "you don't call yours a little shake up, do you?" the retort was obvious, and he flushed--but at the same time it gave him an unwonted courage. "no, of course not. but you mustn't think it's been just as easy for me to keep straight as for you. do you realise what being a man means?--it means to be tempted." "women are tempted." he laughed. "but not like men." he saw the incredulousness of her eyes, and once more his rage flared up. "you don't understand!" he cried, "you don't understand!" then it struck him that she would never understand, that she would go through life with her narrow ideas, acquired in a girls' school and nurtured in her home. all her divine womanly powers of sympathy and forgiveness would be strangled by her ignorance and her hard-and-fast rules based on inexperience. she was the only woman he knew of her class, but he knew the limitations of that class, and tony would soon be bound by them like the others. janey was so different--janey realised what one felt like when one simply had to go on the bust, when one came beastly muckers. she scolded, but she understood. tony did not scold, and she did not understand. "i want you to understand," he said painfully. "what?" "about me--about other men." "why do you think i don't understand?" "you don't!--you don't! you simply can't--and if you go on as you are, you never will. oh, i wish you could! you're too good to be like--other women." something in his nervous, excited manner frightened her, and strange to say that faint thrill of fear removed the shame which had tarnished her attitude towards him that day. once more she felt the subtle magic of his unusualness--the attraction of mr. smith. "tell me," she said in a low voice, "tell me about yourself." he laughed a little. "oh, my story is just every man's. i've mucked it a bit worse, that's all. but the fight's pretty well as hard with all of us. directly we're grown up, almost before, there are people going about whose paid business it is to tempt us. tempting us, just when nature has made it most difficult for us to resist, is the profession of thousands of human beings. we fall--we often fall--for if we didn't a powerful set would have empty pockets--so they see that we fall. and then we can't pick ourselves up, we sink deeper and deeper into the mud ... and some of us touch bottom." he paused, but she did not speak. her face was turned away. "the horrible thing i did," he continued almost roughly, "which, if you'd only believe me, i loathe as much as you do--i did only as the consequence of other things, not quite so bad, before it. if a woman like you had come along when i first fell--i was only nineteen--she might have pulled me up again. but she didn't come. other women came, and they knocked me flatter. they couldn't forgive. poor devils! i don't blame them--they'd a great deal to forgive. i went down--and down--till it became a sort of habit to lie there in the ditch. then you came, and i--i wanted to get up." she still looked away from him, but her head was bowed. "oh, tony--won't you give me a hand?" "how can i?" "by just believing i can and will do better, and by saying that if i live a decent life, and pull my name out of the dirt, and make myself fit to know you, i may be your--friend. you've a right to punish me, but i ask you to put aside that right for--for pity's sake." "i don't see why you want my forgiveness so much--why it means such a lot to you." "it means the world to me. oh, tony--little pal that was--forgive me! life's a hard, rotten, wretched thing, and if there was no one to forgive...." "i'll try." "oh, please try! if you think, you'll come to understand things presently, even if you can't now. it's for your own sake as well as mine i ask it. think how many a man who lies in the mud wouldn't be there if only he had some woman to forgive him." "i'll try----" she repeated falteringly. "then i've got what'll keep me going for the present. and, tony, you'll believe that i can and will behave decently, and make myself worthy to be your--your friend?" "yes, i'll believe it." "thank you." she was trembling from head to foot. "good-bye," he said. "good-bye." he took her hand, and longed to kiss it. but he was still humble and afraid, and let it fall. "tony--tony--you will have to forgive me a great many things ... because i am so very hungry." book ii the world against the three chapter i glimpses and dreams i there was a foam of anemones in the hollows of furnace wood. the wind crept over the heads of the hazel bushes, bowing them gently, and shaking out of them the scent of their budding. from the young grass and tender, vivid mosses crept up more scents, faint, moist and earthy. the sky was grey behind the stooping hazels, but glimmered with the yellow promise of noon. janet furlonger and quentin lowe had met to say good-bye in furnace wood. the scent of spring was in janey's clothes, and when her lover drew her head down to his shoulder he tasted spring in her hair. but there was not spring on her lips when he sought them--only the salt wash of sorrow. "why do you cry, little janey? this is the beginning of hope." another tear slid down towards her mouth, but she wiped it away--he must not drink her tears. "quentin ... i hope it won't be for long." "no, no--not long, little janey, sweet, not long. it can't be. in six months, perhaps in less, you'll have a letter asking you to come up to town and marry a poor but independent journalist." "you really think that this time you're going to succeed?" "of course. do you imagine i'd touch rider's idiotic rag with the tongs if i didn't look on it as a stepping-stone to better things. there's a mixed metaphor, janey. didn't you notice it?" "no, dear." "you're not critical enough, little one. you're worthy of good prose--when i'm too weak and heavy-hearted for poetry." the wind sighed towards them, bringing the scent of hidden water. "i must leave you, my own--or i shall be late. now for months of hard work and hungry dreams of janey, who will be given at last to my great hunger. little heart, do you know what it is to hunger?" she trembled. "yes." "then pity me. pity me from the fields when you walk in them, as you and i have so often walked, over fallen leaves--pity me from your fire when you sit by it and see in the embers things too beautiful to be--from your meals when you eat them--you and i have had only one meal together, janey--and from your bed when you lie waking in it. janey, janey--pity me." "pity ... yes...." he was holding her in his arms, looking into her beautiful, haggard face. a sudden pang contracted her limbs, then released them into an abandonment of weakness. "quentin ... promise me that you will never forget how much you loved me." "janey!" "promise me." "janey, how dare you!--'loved you'! what do you mean?" "oh, please promise!" she was crying. he had never seen her like this. hitherto at their meetings she had left the stress and earthquake of love to him, fronting it with a sweet, half-timid calm. now she clung to him, twisted and trembled. "promise, quentin." "well, since you're such a silly little thing, i will. listen. 'i promise never to forget how much i loved you.' there, you darling fool." "thank you ..." she said weakly. he drew her close, kissed her, and laughed at her. "janey--you're the spring, with its doubts and distresses. you were the autumn when autumn was here, all tanned and flushed and rumpled, with september in your eyes. now you're the spring, thin, soft, aloof and wondering--you're sunshine behind a cloud--you're the promise of august and heavy apple-boughs." "and you'll never forget how much you loved me...." ii the golden lights of late afternoon were kindled in london, warring with the smoky remnants of an april day. they shone on the wet pavements and mud-slopped streets--down oxford street poured the full blaze of the sunset, flamy, fogged, mysterious, crinkling into dull purples behind the circus and the spire in langham place. the queen's hall was emptying--crowds poured out, taxi-horns answered taxi-whistles, and the surge of the streets swept by, gathering up the units, and whirling them into the nothingness of many people. it gathered up nigel furlonger, and rushed him, like a bubble on a torrent, down regent street, with his face to the darkness of the south--lit from below by the first flash of the electric advertisements in piccadilly circus, from above by the first pale, useless glimmer of a star. he walked quickly, his chin lifted, but mechanically taking his part in the general hustle, not too much in dreamland to make way, shift, pause, or plunge, as the ballet of the pavements might require. his hands were clenched in his pockets. he, perhaps alone among those hundreds, saw the timid star. a dream was threading through his heart, knitting up the tags of longing, regret and hope that fluttered there. a definite scheme seemed now to explain the sorrow of the world. the armies of the sorrowful had received marching orders, had marched to music, had been given a nation, and a song. nigel had heard the eroica symphony. in his ears was still the bourdon of drums, the sigh of strings, the lilt of wood-wind, the restless drone of brasses. he had heard sorrow claim its charter of rights, vindicate its pleadings, fight, triumph and crown itself. he had seen the life-story of the sorrowful man, presented not as a tragedy or a humiliation, a shame to be veiled, but as a pageant, a tremendous spectacle, set to music, lighted, staged, applauded. at first the sorrowful man was half afraid, he sought refuge and disguise in laughter, he pined for distraction and a long sleep. but each time he touched his desire, the wailings of heavenly wood-wind called him onward to holier, darker things. he had dropped the dear, dustless prize, and gone boldly on into the fire and blackness.... a thick, dark cloud swagged on the precipices of frozen mountains, frowned over deserts of snow. the sorrowful man stumbled in the dark, and his loud crying and the flurry of his seeking rose in a wail against the thudding drums of fate. gold crept into the cloud, curling out from under it like a flame, and the sorrowful man seemed to see a human face looking down on him, and a hand that held seven stars.... "who made the seven stars and orion...." it was by the light of those stars in the hero's hand that the sorrowful man saw, in a sudden awful wonder, that he was not alone--he marched in the ranks of a huge army. all round him, over the frozen plain, under the cloud with its lightnings, towards the blackness of the boundless void, marched the army of the sorrowful, unafraid. they marched in mail, helmeted, plated, with drawn swords. the ground shook with the thunder of their tread, the mountains quaked, the darkness smoked, the heavens heeled over, toppled and scattered before the conquering host whom the lord had stricken--triumphant, fearless, proud, crowned and pierced.... footsteps overtook nigel, and he heard the greeting of a fellow student. "you're in the clouds, old man. who sent you there? beethoven?" nigel stared. "but the only cosmic genius is offenbach." "you mean the 'orphée'?" "yes--and 'hoffmann.' life isn't a triumphal march, for all beethoven would make it--it's comic opera, with just a pinch of the bizarre and a spice of the macabre. that's offenbach." furlonger was still marching with the stricken army. "when a man suffers," continued the student, "the gods laugh, the world laughs, and last of all--if he's a sport--the man laughs too." "sorrow is a triumph," said nigel, dreamily. "not at all, old man--sorrow is a commonplace. the question is, what are we to make of the commonplace--a pageant or a joke? i'm not sure that offenbach hasn't given a better answer than beethoven." iii in a small room in gower street a man lay on his bed, his face crammed into the pillow, his shoulders high against his ears, his legs twisted in a rigid lock of endurance. now and then a shudder went through him, but it was the shudder of something taut and stiff, over which the merest surface tremble can pass. in his hand he crushed a letter. behind his teeth words were forming, and fighting through to his colourless lips. "janey!--my janey! oh, my god! i can't bear this." he suddenly twisted himself round on to his back, and faced the aching, yellow square of the window, where a may day was mocked by rain. there was a pipe close to the window, and the water poured from it in a quick tinkling trickle, cheering in rhythm, tragic in tone. quentin unfolded janey's letter. he read it--but that word is inadequate, for he read it in the same spirit as an egyptian priest might read the glyphs of his divinity, seeing in each sign a volume of esoteric meaning, so that every jot and tittle was worthy of long minutes' contemplation. it was some time since janey's letters had ceased to be for quentin what she hoped. literally they were rather bald and laboured, for janey was no penwoman, but she put a wealth of thought and passion into the straggling lines, and for a long while he had seen this. but now he saw much more, she would have trembled to think of the meaning he read into her words--he tested each phrase for the insincerity he felt sure it must conceal, he hunted up and down the pages for that monster unknown to janet, the _arrière pensée_. her letters were a torture to him--they tortured his brain with shadows and seekings, they tortured his heart with blue fires of misgiving and scorchings of jealousy. she did not write oftener than once a week, but the torment of a single letter lasted till its successor at once varied and renewed it. lying there in the hideous dusk of what should have been a summer afternoon, quentin wondered if the doom of love and lovers had not been spoken him--"thou canst not see my face and live." it was a vital fear. before he had brought his love to its consummation, snatched the veil from its mysteries, and looked it in the face, it had, in spite of hours of anguish, been his comfort, the strongest, tenderest, purest thing in his life. but now he saw, without much searching, that this love, though deeper and fiercer than ever, belonged somehow to his lower self. to realise it brought despair instead of comfort, wreckage instead of calm. he dared not, as in former days, plunge his sick heart into it as into a spring of healing waters--rather it was a scalding fountain, bubbling and seething out of death. he had hoped that perhaps separation would make him calmer. of late he had often denied himself the sight of janey in that same vain hope. but now, as then, he found her letters almost as disintegrating as her presence--indeed more so, since they gave wider scope to his familiar demon of doubt. he wondered if he would ever find rest. would marriage give it to him? he started up suddenly on the bed. an awful thought was thrust like a sword against his heart--the thought that even in marriage he would not find peace. he had fallen into the habit of looking on marriage as the end of sorrows--and now, when fate and hard work seemed to have brought it within gazing-distance of hope, he suddenly saw that it would be as full of torment as his present state; or rather, more so--just as his present state was an intensification of the pain of earlier days. he realised--hardly definitely, but with horrible acuteness--that he had allowed love to frustrate love, and that by his demand to look into that great dread face, he had brought on himself scorching and blindness and doom. "thou canst not see my face and live." he sprang off the bed. his pulses were hammering, his blood was thick, a kind of film obscured his eyes, so that he groped his way to the dressing-table. a clock struck four, and he suddenly remembered an engagement he had that afternoon. he would go--it would distract him. he might forget janey--if only for an hour, he would be free of the torment that each thought of her carried like poison in a golden bowl. it was strange, it was terrible, that he should ever have come to want to forget janey--and it was not because he did not love her; he loved her a hundred times more passionately than ever. but the love which had once been his strength and salve had now become a rotten sickness of the soul. he dressed himself, removed as far as possible the stains of sorrow and exhaustion from his face, and plunged out to take his place in the restless, ill-managed pageant of the pavements, where threads are tangled, characters lost, and cues unheard. he was going to a semi-literary gathering at a friend's flat in coleherne gardens. he did not look forward to it particularly, but it might help him in his twofold struggle--to win janey in the future and forget her for the present. the room was crowded. hallidie was presiding over a mixed assembly of more-or-less celebrities with that debonair self-confidence which had helped make him a famous novelist in spite of his novels. there were one or two great ones present, just to raise the level--he did not introduce them to lowe. he knew exactly whom they would like to meet, and lowe, he felt, would let the conversation down, just when it was becoming yeasty with literary wit. there were other people in the room who showed a tendency to do this, and hallidie had carefully introduced them to one another, so that they could all fail mutually in a well-upholstered corner. "ah--lowe. glad to see you. come, let me introduce you to miss strife"--and sweeping quentin past the renowned author of _life and how to bear it_, and dompter, the little, insignificant, world-famous sea-poet, he presented him to a very young girl, sitting alone on a divan. quentin's first feeling was one of outrage. what right had hallidie to drag him away from the pulse of things, so vital to his struggling ambition, and condemn him to atrophy with a flapper. he stared down at her disapprovingly--then something in her wistful look disarmed him. "i believe our fathers are neighbours in the country," he said stiffly. he did not notice her reply. it was not that which made him stop his furious glances at hallidie and sit down beside her. she was evidently very young. there was a lack of sophistication about her hair-dressing which proclaimed an early attempt, her frock was simple and girlish, her face alert and innocent. quentin found himself gulping in his throat, almost as if tears had found their way there at last; for he suddenly realised how new and beautiful it was to sit beside a woman and not be tormented. as he looked at her delicate profile, the pure curves of her chin and collarless neck, his heart became suddenly still. there was a great calm. peace had come down on him like water. simplicity rested on his parched thoughts like rain-clouds on a desert. he seemed suddenly to come back to life, to the world, and to see them in the calm, usual light of every day. the racket, the glare, the sense of being in an abnormal relation to his surroundings--all were gone. for the first time in his complicated, sophisticated, catastrophic life, quentin lowe was at peace. iv it was late in june. a haze wimpled the pine-trees of shovelstrode, and the heather between their trunks was in full flower. the old house shimmered in the haze and sunshine, and stared away to yellow fields of buttercups and distances of brown and blue. tony and awdrey strife were lying in the shadow of a chestnut on the lawn. two young gracious figures in muslins, they lay with their chins on their hands, and looked away towards the golden weald. they did not speak much, for the post had just come, and they were reading their letters. awdrey giggled to herself a good deal over hers, but tony was serious--the corners of her mouth even drooped a little, but whether from sorrow or tenderness or both it would be hard to say. suddenly she made an exclamation. "what's the matter?" asked awdrey. "it's a letter from furlonger." "_the_ furlonger!" "yes--he's written me quite a long letter." "what cheek. i thought you'd seen the last of him." "he came to say good-bye before he went to london." "oh----" awdrey rolled over on her side, and stared hard at her sister. "did he know you were in town last month?" "no--i've never written to him, and this is the first time he's written to me." "then he hasn't shown unseemly eagerness--it's nearly six months since he left. what does he say?--anything exciting?" "exciting for him. von gleichroeder is giving a pupils' concert at the bechstein, and mr. furlonger is going to play." "a solo?" "yes--something by scriabin. he's only had six months' teaching, but von gleichroeder's so pleased with him that he's going to let him play at this concert of his. then he'll finish his course, and then he'll start professionally." "good lord!--it sounds thrilling for an ex-convict. let's see his letter." "here it is. no," changing suddenly, "i think i'd rather read it to you." "right-o! excuse a smile." "don't be an idiot, awdrey. now listen; he says: 'von gleichroeder's concert is fixed for the twenty-seventh'--why, that's next friday--'and it's been settled that i'm to play scriabin's second prelude. it sounds like cats fighting, but it's exciting stuff. von gleichroeder is tremendously keen on the ultra-moderns--nothing makes him madder than to hear verdi or gounod or rossini. so i play d'indy and stravinsky and strauss and sibelius; except when i'm alone in my digs--and then i have the old tunes out, for i like them best.'" she did not read the next paragraph aloud. "i've been having a hard fight for it, tony--but i'm pulling through. music has helped me, and the memory of our friendship, and the thought that you're trying to understand me and forgive me." "well, i wish him luck," said awdrey; "what a good thing von gleichroeder found him out!" "yes, he'll have his chance now--his chance of a decent life." "nonsense, tony! that's not what he's after--fame and dibs, my dear girl, fame and dibs." "he told me he was accepting von gleichroeder's offer because he wanted to be--good." "well, london's a queer place to go for that." "he's gone there to work. he had no chance here." "more chance than he'll have there--you bet he's painted the place pretty red by this time." her sister was about to retort sharply, when a man suddenly came round the corner of the house towards them. "awdrey!" cried tony, springing up. "here's quentin!" chapter ii the letter that did not come the door was wide open at sparrow hall, and a square of sunshine lay on the kitchen floor. in the little flower-stuffed garden bees were humming lazily, and a thrush was singing in the last of the laburnum. tangles of roses trailed over the farm-house walls, they hung round the window-frames, darkening the rooms, and over the door, sending faint perfumes to janey as she sat in the kitchen. she looked pale and washed-out with the heat. the outlines of her splendid figure were drooping, and there was an ominous hollowing of the curves of her face and arms. she sat at the table, her cheek resting on her palm, reading from a pile of letters. they were long letters, closely written in a sharp, scrawling hand, on thin paper that crackled gently as she fingered it. every now and then she looked up anxiously, and seemed to listen. then her head would bow again, and the paper would crackle softly as before. at last the garden gate clicked, and she saw the postman's cap coming up the path between the rows of sweet peas. she sprang to her feet, trembling and fighting for her self-command. she reached the door just as he lifted his hand to knock. "a letter for you, miss," and old winkworth smiled genially. the colour rushed over janey's cheeks like a wave, then as a wave ebbed out again. she took the letter with a hand that shook piteously, her lips parted and a low laugh broke from them. then suddenly her expression changed--in such a manner that winkworth muttered anxiously-- "fine afternoon, ain't it, miss?" "yes--a glorious afternoon. good-day, winkworth." "good-day, miss," and he shambled off. janey turned into the house, and dropping into her chair by the table, began to sob childishly. it was more from exhaustion than grief--the exhaustion of hopes strained to breaking-point, and then allowed to relax again into disappointment and frustration. she was so dreadfully tired--she so longed to sleep, quietly, deeply, at once. she laid her head on the table, and her shoulders heaved, straining and struggling as if the burden of her sorrow were physical. then suddenly she noticed the unopened letter, and her sobs broke out with even greater vehemence. nigel! poor nigel! she had not opened his letter--she had flung it aside and forgotten it, because it was not quentin's. it was the day of his concert, too--what a beast she felt! she tore open the envelope, and wiped away the tears that blinded her. "my own dear janey, "this is just to keep myself from thinking of that damned concert. it's scaring me a bit--more than a bit, in fact. who would have thought that any one with my past could suffer from stage fright?--but that little thing of scriabin's is the very devil. old von g. has been ragging me no end over it--we nearly came to blows last practice. i hope you and the lad don't mind my not wanting you to come up for the show; i feel it would be the last straw for you two to see me make a fool of myself--not that i mean to, but you never know what may happen. cheer up--you shall come and help me when i fill the albert hall. "by the way, i saw that little bounder quentin lowe at a concert at the queen's last sunday. "now, good-bye; i'm turning into bed. this time to-morrow it'll all be over, and i'll send you a telegram. greetings to the lad. "ever yours, dear, "nigel." janey folded the letter with trembling hands. it filled her with a kind of pitiful anguish, for she knew that the only thing in it that interested her was the reference to quentin. nigel's wonderful concert, about which she and len had dreamed so many dreams, had faded into the background of her thoughts, driven out by her sleepless, bruising anxiety for her lover. it was over a fortnight since he had written. she had before her his last letter, in which he said: "i will write again in a day or two, and tell you the exact date of my return." she had waited, but the letter had not come. she had written, but had had no answer. what could have happened? there had been nothing in the past few weeks to make her expect this silence. his last bid for independence had met with more success than the others. he had fought hard against failure and discouragement, and had now found work on one or two good dailies. their marriage was at last in sight. he was expected home for a couple of weeks' holiday, then he would work on through the autumn, and there was no reason why, if things prospered, they should not be married soon after christmas. yes--at last their marriage was a thing to be reckoned with, talked about, and planned for. for the first time janey could consider such things as home and outfit, breaking the news to her brothers, and leaving sparrow hall--all were now within the range of probability and expectation. but a terrible gloom had settled on these last days. it was not merely her sorrow at leaving the farm and the boys--it was something less accountable and more tempestuous than that. it had its source in quentin's letters. she could see that he was not happy--their marriage, their longed-for, prayed-for, wept-for, worked-for marriage, was not bringing him happiness. on the contrary, his suffering seemed to have increased. his doubts and forebodings had been transferred from material circumstances to more subtle terrors of soul--he doubted the future more passionately, because more spiritually, than ever. janey had not been able to understand this at first, but in time his attitude had communicated itself to her, though whether her distrust was independent or merely a reflection of his, it would be hard to say. anyhow, she doubted--fiercely, miserably, despondingly. she had started, on his recommendation, to make herself some clothes, but the work lagged and depressed her. she found herself hungering for the early times of their courtship, when their marriage was a dream made golden by distance. she thought of the days when his name had rung like bells in her heart, without a horrid dissonance of fear, when his letters were pure joy, and the thought of meeting him pure anticipation. would those days return?--and now, here was his silence, consuming her. why didn't he write? he had been so eager in his last letter, though, as usual, eagerness had soon been throttled by despair. "i shall have you--i shall have you at last, my beautiful, tall janey, for whom i hunger. but i am filled with doubts. there are some men in whose mouths manna turns to dust and the water of life to gall. everything i touch is doomed. either my soul or my body betrays me--my soul is so hot and my body so weak--so damnably weak. if only my hot soul had been given a stout body, or my weak body a weak soul ... then i should have been happy. but now it is the eternal fight between fire and water." janey pushed the letter aside, and picked up another. she had been trying to comfort herself with quentin's letters, but they were not on the whole of a comforting nature. his restless misery was in them all. if his last letter had been happy, she would not have worried nearly so much. she would have put down his silence to some trite external cause--pressure of work or indefiniteness of plans--he had always been an erratic correspondent. but his unhappiness opened a dozen roads to her morbid imaginings. it was dreadful to think that all she had given to quentin had only made him more unhappy. perhaps he was too miserable to write--not likely, since he was one of those men whom despair makes voluble, but nevertheless a real terror to her unreason. perhaps he had not received her last letter, and thought that she had played him false--he had always been jealous and inclined to suspicion. this last idea obtained a hold on her that would have been impossible had not her mind been weakened by anxiety. she had heard of letters going astray in the post, and probably quentin had been expecting one from her, and not receiving it had been too proud to write himself. or perhaps he had received it, but had thought it cold. he had often taken her to task for some fancied coldness which she had never meant. in her desperation she resolved to write again. hastily cramming his letters into the boot-box where she unromantically kept them, she seized paper and ink, and began to scrawl despairingly-- "my darling, darling boy, "why don't you write? didn't you get my last letter? i posted it on the th. quentin, i can't stand this suspense. are you unhappy? oh, my boy, my boy, my heart aches for you. i know you suffer--and i can't bear it----" the pen fell from her shaking hand as footsteps sounded in the garden. the next minute leonard came in--luckily for janet he was not very observant. "well, janey--i've sent off the wire." "what wire?" she asked dully. "to the old bounder, of course--to buck him up for to-night. i said 'cheer up. you'll soon be dead.' that ought to encourage him." janey smiled wanly. "meantime i've got a piece of news for you. it'll make you laugh. but let's have a drink first--i'm dreadfully thirsty. this weather dries one up like blazes." "there's beer in the cupboard." "right-o! now we'll drink to nigel's very good health. have some, old girl. no? but i say, you look as if you needed it. you're as white as chalk." "it's only the heat. what's your news, len?" "nothing much, really--only that little misshapen monkey quentin lowe's engaged to be married." "quentin lowe...." janey's voice seemed to her to come from very far away, as if some one in another part of the room were speaking. she grew sick and faint, but at the same time knew it was all ridiculous. "yes--i don't wonder you're surprised. guess whom to." "are you sure--quite sure?" "yes, of course. i had it from his father. guess whom to." "i can't ... i--i can't believe it." "yes, it's no end of a joke, isn't it? you'd never think a woman would be fool enough to have him, when you can get the genuine article from any organ-grinder. but stop laughing, janey, and guess who it is." "i--i can't.... did you really hear it from his father?... it can't be true. quentin's in london." "he's been there for the last three months, but he came home on wednesday." "wednesday----" "yes--why not? but you haven't guessed who the girl is yet." "i can't guess ... tell me, len." "well, it's strife's youngest daughter, the one that's just come out." janet made a grab at leonard's half-emptied glass and drained it. "that's it--drink her health. she'll need it." "len--did--did you really hear it from old lowe?" "well, i heard it first of all in the wheatsheaf. i've been as thirsty as hell all the afternoon, so on my way back from the post-office i turned in at the old pub for a pint. dunk told me, dunk of golden compasses. then no sooner had i got outside than i saw the old devil-dodger prancing along, and i couldn't resist howling to him--'hear your son's engaged--wish him victory in the strife.' he looked poisonous, so i just said, 'you'll be letting strife into your household.' to which he deigned reply, 'i am--ah--um--completely--ah--satisfied with my--ah--son's--um--matrimonial choice." janey managed to reach the window. "he met her a lot in town, i believe. of course, he'd known her father down here, but had never met the girl herself. i believe it all happened pretty quick. dunk says so. i don't see how he knows, but every one always seems to know everything about engaged couples." "is that all?" "what more do you want?--i'm off now to cherrygarden farm--i promised wilsher i'd be round to look at those chicks of his." "don't be long...." "what time's supper?" "any time you like." "well, make it half-past eight. it's a good peg over to cherrygarden, and if i come back by dormans i can send another wire to nigel." "oh, don't, len!" "why ever not?" "i don't see that it's so ... so very important that he should know." "about what?" "the--the engagement." "you silly old girl! i wasn't going to wire him about that--waste of a good sixpence that would be! but don't you realise that at eight to-night _the_ concert begins? i telegraphed to him an hour ago, just to buck him up beforehand--next time i want to catch him in full squeak." "very well--but, len ... don't be late." she was still standing by the window, but something in her words made him go across to her. "you're feeling seedy, janey?" "just a bit washed-out." "it's the heat, i expect. it's made me feel a little queer too." "then ought you to go to cherrygarden?" "i must--and it's getting cooler now. take care of yourself, old sister, and don't sit too much in this hot kitchen." he squeezed her hand, and went out. she watched him go, blessing his obtuseness, even though it was leaving her to fight through her awful hour alone. he went down the path, and out at the gate--then she staggered back into the room, and fell in a heap against the table. she had not fainted, though she longed to faint--to win the respite of forgetfulness at whatever cost, if only for a minute. she lay an inert, huddled mass against the table-leg, motionless except for a long shudder now and then. all power had left her limbs--they indeed might be in a swoon--but her brain throbbed with a dazzling consciousness; it seemed as if it had drawn into itself all the consciousness of her body, leaving senses dull, nerves dumb, and muscles slack, in order to prime itself with the whole range of feeling. strange to say, pain was not the paramount emotion, and despair was scarcely present. rather, she was consumed by a passionate sense of doubt--of quentin, of herself, of the whole world. it was like the sudden removal of a prop which one had thought could not be shaken--it was like a sudden precipitation into a world where the ordinary cosmic laws did not hold--she seemed almost to doubt her own identity in that first gasp of revelation. it could not be true. quentin could not have failed her like this. leonard must be mistaken. if one were to see the sun setting in the east or the sea on fire one would doubt one's senses, one would not doubt the universal laws. neither would she doubt quentin--she rather would doubt leonard's senses, doubt her own. she had not in the whole course of her love doubted quentin. it was he who had doubted her, who had tormented her with his distrusts and jealousies. "i'm only a misshapen little bounder, janey--the first decent man who comes along will snatch you from me. but he will never love you as i do--janey, janey, little janey" ... the words seemed to come from outside her, from the shadowy corners of the room. she sat up and listened. they came again--"janey, my own little love, my little heart--our love wounds, but it is the wound of immortality, the wound which must always be when the infinitely great lifts up and gathers to itself the infinitely little." ... "stand by me, stand by me--i have nothing but my sword. i threw away my shield long ago. if you do not stand by me i shall fall." ... "janey, love, dear little love, with eyes like september."... she crouched back in terror. was she going mad? no, these were only words from quentin's letters--the letters she had just read--ringing in her strung and distracted brain. "love, my little sweet love, do you think of me sometimes in the long evenings when i think of you?--sometimes when i am thinking of you, i tremble lest you should not be thinking of me...." "do you know how often i dream of you, janey? you come to me so often in sleep--once you stood between me and the window, and i saw the stars through your hair. oh, god!--when i dream i hold you in my arms, and wake with them empty."... she could stand it no longer. she sprang to her feet--the strength of desperation had come at last. there was one only who could tell her which she was to doubt--her own senses or, as it seemed to her, the cosmic laws of his love. she would go over to redpale farm--she would see quentin, she would have an explanation. there would be one--and she would take her stand boldly beside him, against his father, against the whole world--though she, like him, had thrown away her shield long ago. chapter iii only a boy it was about four o'clock, and in spite of what leonard said, not much cooler than at noon. the sun scorched on the hay-grass, drawing out of it a drowsy perfume, which a faint, hot breeze scattered into the hedges. the trees scarcely moved, and their shadows were rusted with the curling sorrel. clumps of dog-roses and elder flowers splashed the bushes with sudden pinks and whites, while vetches trailed their purples less startlingly in the hedgerows. janey walked fast, and every now and then she ran for little sprints. her breath sobbed in her throat, her eyes were fixed and her hands clenched. she climbed recklessly over gates, and plunged through copses; her hair was soon almost on her shoulders, flying from her face in wisps, straggling round her ears; her face became flushed and moist with the heat--she tore her sleeve, and scraps of bramble hung on her skirt. what woman but janey would have rushed to confront a faithless lover in such a state? but even now, when almost any one would have realised how much depended on her appearance, she was careless and oblivious. she did not feel in the least dismayed at the start given by the servant who admitted her, nor, later, by her own reflection in a mirror in the study. it was the same little book-lined room in which she had had tea with quentin on her first visit to redpale. there was the glorious eastern rug which he had said "had her tintings--her browns and whites and reds." there was the big pewter jar that had then held chrysanthemums, but held roses now. they were delicate white roses, faintly, sweetly scented. janey went over to them and laid her hot face against them. she could hardly tell why, but they seemed to bring into the room an alien atmosphere. quentin had never given her white roses--as a matter of fact he had given her scarcely any garden flowers, except chrysanthemums--he had once said that only wild flowers were for wild things. she thought of bunches of buttercups, of broom with bursting pods, of hazel sprays and tawny grasses. now she suddenly wished that he would give her a white rose. she took one out of the jar, and was trying to fasten it in her breast when footsteps sounded outside the room. she turned deadly pale, and dropped the rose. for the first time she felt that she had been foolish to come. quentin might be angry with her, for her coming would rouse his father's suspicions. her hurry and desperation might prejudice him against her. in an unaccustomed qualm she realised that she was flushed, dishevelled and perspiring. she felt at a disadvantage, and drew back as the door opened, seeking the shadows by the hearth. "janey!" he stood in the doorway, his hand on the latch, his chin thrust forward, his pale face bright in the gleaming afternoon. his youth struck her with a sudden appeal--his youth and delicacy, both emphasised in the soft yellow light--and a sob tore up through her breast. "oh ..." she said, and moved towards him. he shut the door. "oh, i'm sorry i came!" she cried. he did not speak, but came forward, stopping abruptly a few feet away. "janey--i want to explain...." "explain...." she had not thought there would be any explanation needed--or, if needed, possible. "yes--i ought to have written, but i couldn't, somehow--or rather, i wrote you a dozen letters, and tore them all up." she wondered why she felt so calm. "i--i asked my father to call and see you." "you mean to say--he knows?" "yes." "oh, my god!" her calmness staggered, and all but collapsed. for the first time her doubts gave way to even bitterer realisation. this confession to quentin's father, this betrayal of the secret she had spent her health and happiness for four years to keep, made her grasp what an hour ago had seemed beyond the reach even of credulity. "quentin--why did you tell him?--how could you!--after all we've suffered...." "i--i--i was desperate, janey, i had to tell some one, and he was so sympathetic--much more than i'd expected." "when did you tell him?" "the night i came back from town." "after the--the rest was settled?" he nodded. "quentin, have you told _her_?" she was accepting the impossible quite meekly now. "no, no!--i can't tell _her_." she waited a moment for what she thought the inevitable entreaty not to betray him. thank god!--it did not come. "she would never forgive you," she said slowly. "young girls don't." "and you, janey...." she drew back from him. "you can't ask me that now." "why?" "well--well, can't you see i hardly realise things as yet. an hour ago i preferred to doubt my own senses rather than doubt you. now----" "you doubt me." "no, i don't doubt you. i'm convinced--that you're a cad." her voice, clear at the beginning of the sentence, had sunk almost to a whisper. he shrank back, wincing before her gentleness. she herself wondered how long it would last, this unnatural calm. it came to her quite easily, she did not have to fight for it, and yet the general sensation was of being under an anæsthetic. she only half realised her surroundings, this horrible new earth on which she was wandering homeless; her emotions seemed dull and inadequate to the situation--it would be a relief if she could feel more. then suddenly feeling came--it came in a tide, a tempest, a whirlwind. it shook her like an earthquake and blasted her like a furnace. she staggered sideways, as a great gloom darkled on her eyes. then the shadows parted, and she saw quentin's face, half turned away--pale, fragile, sullen, the face of a boy--of a boy in despair. "quentin!" she cried. "oh, my boy--my little boy! you aren't going to behave like a cad." "but i am a cad, my dear janey." he spoke brutally, in the stress of feeling. "oh, quentin!--quentin!" she was losing not only her calm, but her dignity--yet she did not heed it. she sprang towards him, seized his hands, and gasped her words close to his ear, as unconsciously he turned his head from her. "quentin, you can't forsake me--not now--not after all i've given you--you can't, you can't! you loved me so much--you love me still. you can't have stopped loving me all of a sudden like this. and if you love me, you can't forsake me. quentin, i shall die if you forsake me." "janey--let me explain. i can't explain if you're so frenzied. oh, janey, don't faint." she fell back from him suddenly, and he caught her in his arms. the soft weight of her, her warmth, the familiar scent of her hair and her tumbled gown, snatched him back into departing days. he suddenly lost his self-command, or rather his sense of the present. he clasped her to him, and kissed her and kissed her--as eagerly, passionately and tenderly as ever in furnace wood. she did not resist or shrink, her eyes were closed, and she lay back a dead weight in his arms, drinking her last despairing draught of happiness.... his clasp grew tighter--oh, that he would crush the life out of her as she lay there under his lips!... then suddenly he dropped his arms, and they staggered back from each other, piteously conscious once more of the present and its doom. "janey, janey ... i can't--i mustn't love you." "but you do love me----" she sank into a chair, and covered her face. "yes--i love you. but it's in byways of love. can't you understand?" she shook her head. "don't you see that, all through, my love for you has been unworthy--the worst in me?..." she tried to speak, but her words were unintelligible. "you and i have never been happy together----" "never?..." "yes--at times. but it was a blasting, scorching happiness--there was no peace in it. we doubted each other." "i never doubted you." "yes, you did. when i said good-bye to you before going to london, you made me promise never to forget how much i'd loved you." "but it wasn't you i doubted then. i doubted fate, chance, god, anything you like--but not you." she had recovered her self-control, and her voice was hard and even. "oh, don't, janey!" "why not?--why should i spare you? you haven't spared me." "you mustn't think i intended you to--to hear things in this way. i'd meant to give you an explanation first. but the news leaked out----" "well, you can give me an explanation now." "i'll try--but it will be very difficult," he said falteringly. "you're like a flood to me--i feel giddy and helpless when i'm with you. i don't think i'll ever be able to make you understand. i wish you hadn't come like this--i wish----" "please go on, quentin." her manner disconcerted him. he could not understand her alternations between hysteria and stolid calm. "you mustn't think i don't realise i've behaved like a skunk. but i don't want to dwell on it--it would only be putting mud on my face to make you pity me--but i do ask you to try to understand me.... janey, i've done this for your good as well as mine. you shared the misery and ruin of my love. in saving myself, i've saved you too. janey, janey--don't you see that our love was nothing but a rotten sickness of the soul?" he looked at her anxiously, but her face was expressionless as wood. "you and i have always been more or less wretched together, and though at first i felt our unhappiness was doing us good--strengthening us and purifying us--of late i felt it was doing us harm, it was disorganising and unmanning us...." he paused--even an outburst of fury or denial would have been welcome. "to begin with," he continued in an uncertain voice, "i thought it was the hopelessness of it all that was making it so dreadful, but when our marriage was actually in sight--of hope, at least--i felt matters were only getting worse. my thoughts were like sand and fire--my love was like the salt water i compared it to long ago, with madness in each draught. i felt our marriage would be a bigger hell than anything that had gone before it--and yet, i wanted you! oh, god! i wanted you!" she bowed forward suddenly, over her clenched hands. "janey, janey--i don't want to hurt you more than i must. it's not your fault that every thought of you was fire and poison to me. you were just a weapon in fate's hands to wound me--we were both in fate's hands, to wound each other." paradoxically it was at that moment the old impulse returned. he came forward, holding out his arms to her. but this time she shrank back, cowering into the chair. her movement brought him to his senses. "you see how i can hardly speak to you. i must get on, and get done. i want to tell you how i met _her_ ... tony." janey shuddered. she had now come to the most awful pain of all. "tony ..." repeated quentin. she noticed how he dwelt on the word, as if he were drawing strength from it, and at the same time she saw a slight change in his manner. he lifted his head and spoke more steadily. "i met her at a literary function, and i sat beside her all the evening. i remember every minute--i didn't speak much, nor did she, but a wonderful simplicity and calm seemed to radiate from her, a beautiful innocence---- what is it, janey?" "nothing--go on." "she was so young, scarcely more than a child--young and sweet. when i got home that night i felt for the first time an infinite peace in my soul--i felt all quiet and simple. i didn't worry or brood any more. i wasn't in love with her then--oh, no!--but i wanted to meet her again, just for the quiet of it. i did meet her shortly afterwards, and it was as beautiful as before. then suddenly it all rushed over me--i wanted her, for my own; because she was pure and childlike and simple and inexperienced." the confidence of his voice had grown, and in his eyes was something janey had never seen there before. she now realised a little what tony meant to him--what she, janey, had never meant. she knew now that she could never win him back, and more, that she did not particularly want to. tony stood to quentin for all that was lovely and heroic in womanhood, whereas she, his janey, had never been more to him than the incarnation of his own desperate passions. she stepped back, and the action was symbolical--she stepped out of his way. her pleadings would no longer harass and shake him, she would leave him to his salvation, since he loved it better than the woman who had meekly renounced hers for his sake. "i grew desperate for her," continued quentin, in the new assured voice. "oh, don't think i gave you up without a struggle!--i had a dreadful time. i suffered horribly. but what will not a man do for his soul? i felt that my soul was at stake. it's damned rot to talk of men turning away from salvation--no man can get a real chance of salvation and not grasp it at once. oh, don't think it didn't cut me to the heart to treat you as i did! i felt a swine and a cad, but i saw that i was grasping my only chance of redemption--and yours too. i couldn't help it, i tell you--no man can. oh, don't think that if i could have saved myself with you, i wouldn't have done it rather than.... oh, my god!--but i couldn't." there are moments in a woman's life when she is simply staggered by the selfishness of the male, and yet to every woman there is something inevitable about it, so that it does not stir up her rage and contempt, as it would if she saw it in her own sex. janey felt no anger with quentin, she only thought how pitifully young he looked. there was a pause--a long pause, broken by the rustling of the wind in the garden. janey's eyes were fixed on quentin's face, her whole being seemed concentrated upon it, all her thoughts, all her passion, all her pity. poor child! poor, poor boy! "tony is very young," she said suddenly. "yes, only seventeen." "and she's very good and gentle and well-bred." he nodded. "and she's never done anything really wrong." "no." there was another silence. this time it was quentin who stared at janey. he was still strong in the assurance tony gave him; he was glad that they had begun to discuss her--he had not that feeling of being left alone with janey, which at first had threatened to make the interview so terrible. at one time it had seemed almost as if the past had risen to swamp him--but now tony had come to hold back the floods. the thought of her changed everything somehow, altered the old values, weakened what before had been invincible. janey's face stood out from the shadows, washed in the indiscreet light of the afternoon, and for the first time he noticed a certain age and weariness about it. she was twenty-eight, nearly four years older than he, but he had never thought of her in relation to years and time. she had been to him an eternity of youth, her age was as irrelevant as the age of a play of shakespeare or a symphony of beethoven. but now he realised that she was twenty-eight--and looked it. there were hollows under her cheek-bones, where full, firm flesh should have been; there were tiny lines branching from the corners of her eyes, very faint, still undoubtedly there; and the autumnal colour on her cheeks did not lie as evenly as it might. these discoveries brought him a strange sense of relief. he had hitherto looked on her loveliness as unapproachable, and the thought of her physical perfection had been a mighty factor in the war that had raged so devastatingly in his heart. but now he saw that it was no longer to be reckoned with. tony was, in point of fact, more beautiful than janey. his eyes travelled down from her face, and saw her collar all askew, her blouse hanging sloppily out at the waist, her shoe-string untied. tony always wore such dainty muslins, such soft, pretty white things.... then he noticed janey's hair. for the first time he wondered whether she brushed it often enough. his spirits revived wonderfully during this contemplation, and with them a surge of tender pity towards her. he did not want her to feel humiliated by his unfaithfulness. "janey, you mustn't think i don't thank you and honour you for all you've been to me." "you don't know what i've been to you." "what do you mean?" "you don't realise what i've sacrificed for you. you talk of tony strife's purity and innocence as if it was more to her credit to have them than for me to have given them up--for your sake." "janey----" "listen, quentin. there's one thing this girl will never do for you--i did it--and i think that now you despise me for it, in spite of your words. you don't know what it cost me. i did my best to hide my pain from you, because you were happy; but now i think you ought to know that this thing for which you despise me was--was the greatest act of self-sacrifice in my whole life. oh, quentin, i always meant to keep straight, because of my brothers, and because--because i wanted to be pure and good. oh, i loved goodness and purity--i love them still, quite as much as tony strife loves them--and there were the poor boys, with only my example to restrain them. and then i loved you--and you asked me to climb over the gates of paradise with you, because they would never be unlocked. oh, god! i yielded because i loved you so. i gave up what was dearer to me than anything else in the world, the one thing i was struggling to keep unspotted, for my own sake and the boys'. i gave it up to you--and now ... and now ... you talk about another woman's purity and innocence." her voice died into tearless silence. "janey, you mustn't feel like that--you mustn't think that i reproach you. it's myself i blame--not you." "but you do--you do--and i ought to have known it from the first." he could not speak, the words stuck to his tongue--he wanted to fall at her feet, but could not, for he knew it would be mockery. "i can't say anything," he stammered huskily; "we're just the victims of a damnable mistake, and the less we say about it the better. each word one of us speaks is a wound for the other. there's only this left-- 'and throughout all eternity i forgive you, you forgive me-- as our dear redeemer said: this the wine and this the bread.'" "you don't believe in the dear redeemer, do you?" "of course not--but it's poetry." they had neither of them realised that the interview was near an end, but these last words seemed to have finished it somehow. they were both standing, and the silence remained unbroken. then suddenly janey moved. an absolutely new impulse had seized her. she went over to the glass, and looked at herself in it. then she smoothed her hair, arranged her gown, made it tidy at the waist, and buttoned it at the wrists. quentin watched her in blank wonder--he had never before seen her pay the slightest heed to her appearance. but to-day she stood a full five minutes before the glass, patting, smoothing, arranging--settling every fold of her careless garments with minutest care. then she turned to him. "good-bye, quentin." her head was held high--one would scarcely know her in her sleekness and order. "janey--you forgive me." she did not speak. "janey--for god's sake!--oh, please forgive me!--because i've suffered so much, because i've wanted you so, because i've struggled to find redemption...." his eyes burned, full of entreaty. but at first she could not answer him. she moved slowly towards the door, but stopped on the threshold, and looked back at him, her heart hot and sick in her breast with pity. she had never realised quentin's youth so absolutely and heartrendingly as to-day. "i forgive you," she said, "but not for any of those reasons. i forgive you because you are--oh, god!--only a boy." chapter iv flames janet walked quickly through the darkening country. a power from behind seemed to be driving her on--a hot, smoky power of uttermost shame. it was symbolised by the thunder-vapour that curled in the east, a black, swagging cloud that lumbered towards the sunset over reaches of heat-washed sky. she hardly realised how she had won through that interview at redpale farm. the details were dim and jumbled in her memory, like the details of what has taken place just before an accident or during an illness. she hoped she had not been undignified, but really did not care very much about it. the tension which had characterised both her calmness and her hysteria was gone--her emotions seemed to flop. unlike so many women, pride gave her no support in her dreadful hour. but her feelings were merely relaxed, not subdued, and her loose, run-down nerves quivered as agonisedly as during their stretch and strain. the realisation of all she had lost swept over her heart, engulfing it. the very fields through which she walked were part of this realisation--it was here, or it was there, that she had stood with quentin on such and such a day, or had watched him coming towards her out of the mist-blurred distance, or seen him go from her, stopping to raise his arm in farewell, just there, where the foxgloves lifted purple poles in the ditches of starswhorne. she could see the thickets of furnace wood, hazed over with heat--they were haunted now, she would never go near furnace wood again. two ghosts wandered up and down its heat-baked paths, rustled in the hazels, and stood where the tufted hedge shut off furnace field--loving and dumb. they were not the ghosts of dead bodies, but of dead selves--of two who walked apart in distant ways, who would never again meet each other save in memory and in sleep. a metallic hardness had dropped upon the day. the arch of the sky was steel, sunless, yet bright with a cold sheen; at the rim it dipped to copper, hot and sullen, save where in the west two brazen bars sent out harsh lights to rest on the fields and make them too like brass. janet at last reached sparrow hall, and as she did so, for the first time felt physical fatigue. it came upon her in a spasm--she was just able to stagger into the kitchen, and sink down in her accustomed chair, every muscle aching and exhausted, her head splitting with pain, and her body shuddering with a sudden and unaccountable sickness. for some time she did not move, she just fought with the sheer physical discomfort of it all. her head lay on the table, her arms were spread over the wood, and the collapsed line of her shoulders was of utter powerlessness and pain. then two tears rolled slowly from her eyes--they were part of her physical plight, and for it alone she wept. for the sorrow of her soul it seemed as if she could only weep dry salt. oh, merciful god!--quentin looked upon her love as his ruin, and turned from her in panic to another woman. in this other love he would find the peace and happiness and goodness that janey had ached and striven for years to give him; he would learn to forget the wicked janey furlonger, whose love had all but been his perdition, who had brought him to sin and torture and despair--and now would lie in the background of his heart, as an evil thing we cover up and pray to forget. this young, innocent girl would save him from his memories of the woman who had given more for his sake than tony strife would ever dream of giving. he did not realise her sacrifice--she had given up for his sake the innocence and purity that were more to her simple soul than life, and now he turned from her because she had them not. then for the first time a convulsion of wrath seized janey. for the first time she saw the cruelty and outrage of it all. her anger blazed up--against quentin, against the world, against herself. his last letter lay on the table. she seized it, and thrust it into the fire. then she noticed the box that held his other letters. she seized that too, and crammed it into the grate. long tongues of flame shot out, and suddenly one of them caught her dress--she screamed, flames and smoke seemed to wrap her round, and in madness she rushed to the door. a man was in the passage. he grasped her, and held her to him, beating out the flames. "quentin!" she shrieked, "quentin! quentin!" "janey--darling sister! there! it's all over now. the fire's out. are you much hurt?" "quentin! quentin!" leonard picked her up bodily, and carried her into the kitchen, sitting down by the fire with her on his knee. he began to examine her. her skirt was nothing but charred rags, her face and hands were black with grime, and there was a horrible smell of singed hair, but she did not seem to be actually burnt. she was trembling from head to feet, her face hidden against his breast. "i don't think you're really hurt, dear. what a lucky chance i happened to be there! if i'd done as i said and gone to cherrygarden, you might have been burnt to death. how did you do it, janey?" "i was burning quentin's letters.... oh, quentin! quentin!" the last dregs of janey's self-control were gone. anxiety, shock, grief, humiliation, love, despair and sickening, physical fright, all crowded into a few short hours, had almost deprived her of her reason. "quentin! quentin!" she cried, clinging to leonard. she was so tall that he had difficulty in holding her on his knee while she struggled. "janey, i can't understand, dearest. who's quentin?--not quentin lowe?" "yes--quentin lowe. lenny, lenny--he doesn't love me any more." leonard kissed her smoke-grimed face repeatedly. he was utterly bewildered. "he doesn't love me any more," she continued, gasping. "he loves tony strife--he's going to marry her. lenny, he's a devil." "my darling, can't you tell me what it is? did you ever love him?" "oh, i loved him! i loved him! i gave up all i had to him. lenny, he thinks my love was his ruin ... he wants to be happy and good, and he thinks he can't be either if he loves me ... he says-- 'and throughout all eternity i forgive you, you forgive me.'" "my poor old janey, i'm going to carry you upstairs." "i can walk," and she tried to stand, but he had only just time to catch her. "i'm going to carry you. poor, poor janey--see what a big baby you are." he carried her up the rickety stairs, into her room, laying her on the bed. "would you like to undress?" "no--no--lenny, don't leave me." he was in despair. "janey, dearest, i wish you'd tell me what's happened. i can't comfort you properly when i don't know. do you really mean to say that you love quentin lowe?" "i love him ... oh, i love him ... but he's a devil." "did he know?--did he love you?" "yes, he loved me ... and he made me give up everything for his sake ... and now he's going to marry another woman ... oh, lenny, lenny, i want nigel!" "janey--don't--i simply can't bear this. don't give way so--he isn't worth it." "oh, i knew you'd say that." "i won't say it if you don't like it. but don't be in despair--you'll soon feel better--you'll get over it. and meantime there's nigel and me...." "oh, i want nigel!" "i'll wire to him to come down for the week-end, after his concert." "lenny ... you'll never forsake me?" "what on earth are you talking about?" "i don't expect--i daren't----" "what do you mean?" "the disgrace ..." he stared at her in bewilderment. "oh, lenny ... i don't think you understand." she had made him understand at last--and in the process had strangely enough recovered something of her self-control. at first she had thought his brain could never receive this ghastly new impression; but gradually she had seen the colour fade from his lips, while a terrible sternness crept into his eyes; she had seen his hand go up to his forehead with the swift yet uncertain movement of one who has been smitten. "my god!" leonard stepped back from the bed. she lay gazing at him like a drowning woman. she saw the stern lines of his mouth--had girls any right to expect their brothers to forgive them such things? yet if lenny turned from her ... if she lost not only quentin but the boys.... for a moment there was silence in the little room, with its faded reds and casement open to the fields. then suddenly leonard sprang forward, stooped, and caught janey in his arms, turning her face to his breast. they clung together in silence, both trembling. the first faint wind of the evening crept in and ruffled their hair. "you won't love me so much now." "i will love you more--but, by god! i'll kill that man!" "no--no!--len, no!" "hush, dear, don't get excited again." "but you must promise ... he--he's only a boy." "boy be damned! he's a skunk--he's a loathly little reptile, that's all. he isn't worthy to sweep out your cinders, and he--oh, god, janey! i'd give my life to-morrow for the privilege of wringing his neck to-night." "len, promise me you won't hurt him--i--i shall die if you do." "well, i'll promise to leave him alone for the present, because i've got you to look after. i want you to go to sleep, dear. do you think you could sleep?" "i'm sure i couldn't." "you could if i mixed you some nice hot brandy and water. let me go downstairs and get some." "oh, lenny--i'm frightened of being alone." "but it won't take me a minute--the kettle's on the fire." the combined longing for a stimulant and for oblivion was too intense for janey to resist. "you're sure you won't be long?" "yes--i promise--just down and up again." "then thank you, len." he went down to the kitchen, and mixed a pretty stiff grog--for himself. janey had been too over-wrought to notice that her brother was trembling and flushed, and that there was a strange, drawn look about his face. he had turned back half-way to cherrygarden because he felt "queer," and to this no doubt she owed her life. in the horror and confusion of the last half-hour he had forgotten his own illness, but now it was growing upon him, and he must fight it for her sake. he drank a tumblerful of brandy and water, then mixed some for janey, and went upstairs. he helped her take off her charred skirt and bodice, and wrapped her in a dressing-gown. he bathed her smoky face and hands, then he pulled a rug over her, and gave her the brandy. it was a strong dose for a woman, and in spite of all she had said she was soon asleep. he sat down beside her and closed his eyes. the soft air fanned him, and the scents of the little garden steamed up and scattered themselves in the room. janey lay with her head sunk deep in the pillow, her face half-buried in it, and her breathing came heavily, almost in sobs. her knees were drawn up, and her arms crossed on her breast, the hands twisted together--there was something pathetic and childish in the huddled attitude. leonard thought to himself-- "it's nearly time for nigel's concert--i wonder if he's thinking of janey and me." chapter v cowsanish leonard dozed a little, but he did not sleep. a leaden weariness was in his limbs, but his heart and brain were horribly active, forbidding rest. his heart was full of rage, and his brain was full of images--he could doze only till these last crystallised in dreams, when their vividness woke him up at once. he woke each time with a start and a vague feeling of uneasiness and alarm. he feared he was going to be ill--just when janey needed him so badly. he must bear up till to-morrow; by then she would be better, to-night she was helpless without him. he looked at the cramped figure on the bed, and his throat tightened with sorrow, shame and rage. she should be avenged--he swore it. lowe should be made to realise that it was not with impunity that one dragged women like janey into the mud and then climbed out over their shoulders. he should be made to grovel to her and implore her forgiveness. len had not quite settled his course of action, but he had fixed the results. lowe was a worm, a miserable, loathly, little, wriggling worm, and he had slimed a lily--he should squirm under a decent man's boot.... the room darkened. the curtains, fluttering in the dusk-wind, were like ghosts. the line of woods on the horizon became dim, and an owl called from them suddenly. then a procession of clouds began to flit solemnly across the window--driven from the south-west. they were brown against the bottomless grey, and there was a kind of majestic rhythm in their march before the wind. len rose with a shudder--somehow he could not sit still. he went to the window and looked out. then he remembered that he had not shut in the fowls for the night or stalled the cows. he would have to leave janey for a little and attend to the farm. he stepped back and looked at her. her bed was in darkness, and all he could see was a long, black mass on the paleness of the bed-clothes. she was sleeping heavily, with quick, stertorous breathing, and it was not likely that she would wake for some time--he had certainly better go now, while she slept so well. he crept quietly from the room and down the dark stairs. outside the breeze puffed healingly upon him, cooling him with a sweet dampness as he climbed into the stream-field where the cows were pastured. the mists were too high and clammy for them to be left out at night, and the man had gone home after milking them. he called to them softly, and great shadows began to move out of the fogs towards him. the peace of the twilight and of his work with the calm, milk-smelling beasts, was so great that, in spite of rage and suffering, a kind of dreamy comfort came to len--a quiet he felt only in the fields. he began to whistle as he drove the cows home before him. then suddenly the whistling made him remember nigel's concert. he had meant to send off a second telegram, which nigel would receive just before he went on the platform at the bechstein. the last shattering hour had made him forget his plan, and he realised that if his brother was to have his message of good-cheer it must be sent at once. but how? there was still time, but he could not leave the house, even on such an errand--and yet his brother must be "bucked up" at all costs. to-morrow he would send another wire, asking him to come down for the week-end, but he thought it as well not to risk alarming him to-night. len pondered a minute, then suddenly it occurred to him that he could give his telegram to the postman, who was due to pass sparrow hall on his way back from his round. by a lucky chance there was a telegraph-form in the house; len filled it in, and then ran out with it to the lane. he looked up at janey's window--all was quiet, only the white curtains fluttered out on the wind; anyhow he would hear if she woke and called him. the lane was very dark--the sky was still faintly light above it, but night had fallen between the hedges. he heard footsteps, and saw a figure coming down wilderwick hill. "hullo, winkworth!" he cried, "i want you to do something for me." he stepped out into the middle of the lane, and at the same time the figure began to climb the stile into wilderwick meadows. "hi!" shouted len--he suddenly realised that on fine dry nights the postman would take the field-path to dormans. "hi!" he shouted, running after him. "winkworth!--i've a----". the words died on his tongue. he had reached the stile, and saw standing on the further side of it, on the high ground which the darkness had not reached--with the last of the western light upon his face--quentin lowe. for a moment both men stared at each other, then lowe moved away. len stood stock still, a queer grimace on his features. "were you calling me, sir?" a voice behind him made him start. the postman had come out of the darkness and stood at his elbow. "i thought i heard you shout 'winkworth' when i was far up the hill. anything you want, mus' furlonger?" "yes--yes--would you take this telegram to dormans, and see it sent off? here's a bob...." his voice sounded vague, somehow, as if it were a mechanical process unconnected with his real self. he stood watching the old postman as he climbed the stile and took the turning for dormans, where the track divided. a minute later a figure became silhouetted against the sky on his right; the path to cowden and the valley farms dipped abruptly a few yards beyond the stile, then climbed to the high grounds near goatsluck wood. quentin lowe was clearly visible as he hurried away towards kent--almost as if he feared pursuit. leonard stared after him, his eyes bright with hate and fever. a kind of delirium was in his brain as he watched that thick-set, slouching figure, caricatured into a dwarf by his fury and the cheverel light. then suddenly he bounded forward. he forgot all about the illness that was creeping over him, and janey alone in the dark house. or rather, he told himself that he would be up with quentin in a minute, and would have settled him in a couple more. he would drag him back to sparrow hall by the scruff of the neck, and janey, poor, outraged janey, should be his judge, and taste triumph even in her despair. he climbed the stile and ran up the path, plunging recklessly through the tall, ghostly buttercups, glowing faintly in the twilight. he had soon lost the path, a mere borstall, and was trampling the hay-grass, but he did not slack. quentin had for the moment disappeared. the trees of goatsluck wood waved against the sky: len was conscious of a kind of illusion as he approached them--it seemed as if they were very far away, then suddenly he found himself on the tangled rim of the wood, the boughs shuddering and rustling over him, as he groped his way into the darkness. he had to run along the hedge till he found the stile, and he realised that lowe now had a good start. but he would not stop, nor defer his vengeance to another, more auspicious, day. janey would probably not wake till the next morning--and meantime his blood was up. he was not quite sure what he should do to quentin when he overtook him--he was not worth killing, that would only mean more sorrow for janey, but he had ideas of pounding him more or less to a jelly and then dragging him back to sparrow hall and making him kiss the ground at janey's feet, and grovel and slobber for her forgiveness, with other humiliations which he did not think for a minute his sister would not enjoy. meantime he floundered stupidly among the trees. the path was not often used, and the undergrowth had become tangled across it--branches of ash and hazel whipped his cheeks, and brambles caught his feet and sent him stumbling. once he fell full length, with the soft suck of mud under his body, and once he had to stop and fight for his breath which had been knocked out of him by the low bough of an oak. it was very dark in goatsluck wood--like a dark dream. he looked up and saw shuddering patches of sky, and they intensified the strange dream spell, for he seemed to be moving through them, tossed by the wind and scorched by whirling stars. then suddenly a meadow swam towards him--another meadow full of buttercups, all gleaming faintly in the marriage of twilight and moonlight that revelled over the fields. a soft wind baffed him, and cooled his lips with little drops of rain. he pounded on through the buttercups, thought and self-consciousness both almost swallowed up in the abnormal consciousness of environment that accompanies certain states of fever. he saw the moon hanging low and yellow in the east, he saw long, tangled hedges, and tufts of wood--and all round him, in meadow after meadow, that ceaseless shimmer of buttercups, as the wind puffed through them and bowed them to the moon. then suddenly he saw quentin lowe. his pace had slackened, for he had not seen furlonger for some minutes, but the next moment he looked over his shoulder and hurried on again. "stop!" cried leonard. the figure hunched itself against the wind and plunged on. "stop!" gasped len, and calling up all his strength broke into a run. quentin looked back, and saw that he was running. he himself was too proud to run, but he doubled against the hedge, and changing his direction, walked towards langerish, so that len nearly overran him. but just in time he saw the short, heavy figure groping along the rim of the buttercups, and the chase took a southward direction. len had not the breath to run far--he wondered vaguely what had winded him. he came panting after quentin, always the same distance behind; he no longer cried "stop!"--just padded gasping after him. they skirted the meadow known as watch oak, then followed the grass lane to golden pot and the outhouses of anstiel. quentin was trying to work his way back towards kent and the valley of the hammer ponds, but leonard drove him obstinately southwards. he was beginning to gain on him a little. quentin could hear his footsteps, and he knew why he was following him. a sick dread was creeping up lowe's back--he looked round at the shuddering woods and that strange sky of storm and stars, and he trembled with the presentiment that he saw them all for the last time. furlonger was a great, big, burly brute--and furlonger would kill him. perhaps, after all, he deserved to die--the country through which he plunged in this horrible death-chase had a reproach in each spinney, a regret in each field. and yet his heart was stiff with defiance--what right had the gods to dangle salvation before a man's eyes, and then slay him when he grasped it? a sob rose in his throat. the gates of paradise had rolled back for him at last--and must he die just inside them? his defiance grew. he would not be robbed of his salvation. to grasp it he had let go more than he dared think. the gods should not mock him with their gifts--or rather, merchandise. they should not take his awful price, and then deny the goods. life should not suddenly turn and smile on him, and then hurry away. he called after departing life--"i will not let thee go except thou bless me...." he bent his head and began to run. then suddenly his mood changed. the power that had steadied his voice and straightened his back during his terrible interview with janey, had not forsaken him now. he loved tony strife, and he was too proud in her love to play the coward. he would not run away from fate. it should not be said of tony's lover that he had died running away. he stopped abruptly, swung round and faced furlonger. leonard was so surprised at this change of tactics that for a moment he did not speak. he stood staring at lowe, his hands clenched, his muscles taut, his veins boiling and throbbing. the two men faced each other in the corner of a high field known as cowsanish. on one side a hedgerow was whispering with winds, on the other the ground sloped downwards to a ruined outhouse--then it dipped suddenly, and the distance was full of mists, through which could be seen blotches of woods and farmhouse lights. the sky was still wind-swept and scattered with stars. "what do you want?" asked lowe at last. leonard mumbled a little before he spoke. "to wring your neck." "why?" "you know why." furlonger's mouth was working with passion, and his eyes were deliriously bright. he really meant to wring lowe's neck. he had forgotten his earlier schemes of vengeance--nothing would suffice him now but the extreme, the uttermost. lowe folded his arms across his chest, and called up all his memories of tony. "you want to kill me," he said in a struggling voice, "because of what i've done to janey--but i tell you it's been a blessing to her as well as to me. we were both in the mud together, and now i've got out it'll be easier for her to do so." "you've blighted her with your damned love!" cried leonard incoherently, "she's half dead, she's in the mud, she's in hell. when you got out, as you call it, you kicked her deeper in." "but there's no good killing me for it." "why?" len asked the question almost lamely. he felt giddy and inert, and quentin's words seemed to be trickling past him somehow--it was a strange feeling he could not quite realise. "why?--because you'll probably be hanged for it, and that won't do your sister any good. besides"--and here his voice quickened suddenly into passion--"you've no right to kill me for grasping my only chance of salvation." "damn your salvation!--i'm not going to kill you for getting out of the ditch, but for dragging her into it--janey, my sister, whose shoes you aren't worthy to clean." lowe quailed for a moment. furlonger's eyes were blazing, and he crouched back as if for a spring. "there's no good gassing about it," he said thickly, "if i let you talk, you'll talk me stupid. i'm going to wring your neck because you dragged my janey into your own beastly hell, and then when you saw the chance, climbed out over her shoulders, and left her to rot there. she's ill, i tell you--she's half dead--and i'm going to kill you for it." quentin flung a last imploring look at the silent fields with their waving, whispering grass. the clouds were scattering now, and the sky blazed with stars. the night was full of the scent of hay.... in a moment they would be lost in a black, choking whirl, that sky, those stars--that sweet smell of hay. he sniffed at it. he thought of the huge mown meadow by shovelstrode, where only yesterday he and tony had lounged and played. he heard the voices of the workers, as they turned the great swathes, and shook them on their forks, filling the air with fragrance; he saw tony in a muslin frock, with the white rose he had given her in her breast. he saw the sun on the coils of her mouse-coloured hair--heard her say some little, trivial, slangy thing that had somehow made him kiss her. he remembered that kiss, so sweet, so cool, so calm--and, as he drew back his head, the look of her innocent eyes.... but once more the thought of tony put courage into him. if he must die inside the gates of paradise, he would die worthily of the woman who had opened them to him. for her sake he would die game--it was the only thing he had left to do for her now. he would die with a proud face and a high courage--and his last conscious thought should be of tony, who, if only for a few short days, had allowed him to see what love can be when it comes in white. he braced himself up, flung back his shoulders, and waited for the attack. it came. furlonger sprang forward and seized quentin by the throat. for a moment they swayed together, lowe snatching at the other's hands and struggling with the frenzy of despair. his eyes bulged, his lips blackened, and still he fought. then the darkness began to rush over him--first in little clouds, then in long, black sweeps. "janey!... janey!" he cried. he opened his eyes at last. he was lying under the hedge, his cheek scratched, his hands twisted in the grass. he stirred feebly, then sat up, still crouching back against the hazel. furlonger lay prone among the buttercups, his chin turned up sharply, the moonlight blazing on his face. then lowe remembered how things had happened--how the sickening grip on his throat had suddenly relaxed, and he had gone crashing backwards into the brambles, while something fell with a heavy thud at his feet. he wondered if furlonger was dead. he went and looked into his face. the features were strangely drawn, and there was a look of desperate anxiety in their contraction. then suddenly the eyes opened and looked up into lowe's, full of terror and fever. "what's happened? who's there? oh, my god!" remembrance had come with a spasm of that ghastly face. leonard sat up in the grass, and held his hands to his head. "i'm ill, i think," he muttered. he must have fainted--fainted through the stress and horror of it all, just when his enemy's breath had nearly sobbed away under his hands. "you'd better go home," said quentin. leonard did not speak. he still sat there in a piteous huddle--and then suddenly tremor after tremor began to go through him. he shuddered from head to foot, his teeth chattered, and his limbs shook so that he could not rise. "i want some water--i want something to drink," he panted. quentin put his hands under his shoulders to help him get up. he felt quite generously towards him now. he had been snatched by a timely accident from death, and could afford to pity this poor fellow who had tried to kill him, but failed. "let me help you home." "no--by god!" "let me--you're ill." "yes, i was ill when i started after you--or you wouldn't be alive and grinning at me now. i was a fool--i should have waited. but look out for me another day, you skunk!" the ghastly rigor choked his last words. the look of terror and anxiety deepened on his face. then at last he managed to stumble up. "i--i'm going home," he stuttered, and felt sick as he realised he would have to pass again through goatsluck wood. "and you won't let me go with you?" "no--i shan't let myself owe you anything, for i mean to kill you some day." "i advise you not to threaten me--i might be obliged to take proceedings against you." "a pretty mess you'd be in if you did. i suppose you don't want your new girl to hear about janey?" quentin flushed. "if i wasn't obliged to shield my sister," continued len, "i'd tell that girl myself. but you know my tongue's tied--besides, i'd rather kill you." "the secret might come out that way too. no, furlonger, if you are wise you'll let me alone." he drew back a little as he spoke--the friendly reaction was passing. he had always hated janey's brothers, because he was jealous of her love for them; and now, though the original reason was gone, he still hated them for the cause of that reason--for what he believed was the foundation of janey's love, their physical strength and fitness. however, there was not much of either to be seen in leonard now. he swayed pitifully as he stood there facing quentin, and though his lips moved, no sounds came past them. then he turned away. lowe watched him stagger across the field. he expected him to fall every minute, except once, when for some strange reason he expected him to turn back and confront him again. but he neither fell nor turned. he stumbled blindly on, then disappeared into the next field. for a moment or two quentin stood alone in the great meadow, under the hurrying sky. the scent of hay no longer blew to him wistfully, but triumphantly, like the fragrance of festal wine. he spread out his arms, and stood there in the quivering, scented hush, while the wind cooled his damp forehead, and ruffled the hair back from it tenderly. then he turned homewards from cowsanish. but he had not gone far before he altered his direction. he struck again southwards, through the grass lanes that wind past old surrey hall, towards shovelstrode. he would lay his thankfulness, his deliverance, his redemption, at tony's feet--at the feet of the woman who symbolised them all. chapter vi and i also dreamed behind the stage at the bechstein hall one could hear the applause that burst from the auditorium. nigel listened hungrily. he wondered whether those hands would clap and those feet stamp when it was his turn to leave the platform, his violin under his arm. he stood leaning against the wall, his fiddle already out of its case, but still wrapped tenderly in silks. the little group of girls and men who were whispering together not far off sent him from time to time glances of mingled curiosity and admiration. there was a big difference between the convict with his close-cropped hair and disreputable clothes, and this young man in orthodox evening dress, whose hair was brushed in a heavy, shining mass from his forehead, to hang over his ears and neck in the approved musician's style. nigel had been unable to resist this rather primitive piece of swank--besides, it was symbolical, it marked the contrast between what he had been in the days of his shame, and what he was now in the days of regeneration. the girl who had just come off the stage stared at him half amused, half envying. "do you come on soon?" "yes--after this next thing." "just a little bit nervous?" he nodded. as a matter of fact, he was in a mortal funk. he would not have believed it possible that he could be afraid of a crowd of strangers, who were nothing to him and to whom he was nothing. but infinite things were at stake. if he failed, if he made an ass of himself, he pushed further away, if not altogether out of sight, the dream in which for the last six months he had worked and lived. on the other hand, if he succeeded, if to-morrow's papers took his name out of the gutter, just as four years ago they had helped to kick it in, his dream would be transmuted into hope. the violin he clutched so desperately was no mere instrument of music, but an instrument of redemption, the token of that dear salvation which if a man but see truly he must grasp. six months had gone by since he left sparrow hall, and during them he had worked desperately with scanty rest. he had flung his proud self-will and undisciplined love of prettiness into mechanical exercises for fingers and bow, he had subjected his taste for the tuneful and sentimental to herr von gleichroeder's dissonantal preferences. but he had been happy--his dream had always been with him, and had breathed all the sentimentality of hope into the dry bones of chabrier, chausson and strauss. he had found it everywhere--even in his bow exercises. he was happy, too, in his environment--the companionship of his fellow-students with their young, clear spirits and enthusiasm. most of them knew his story, but in their careless code it did not tell much against him, for every one admired him for his originality and liked him for his desperate pluck. so nigel found a new form of gratification for that strange part of him born in prison. the companionship of an unripe little school-girl with her slang, the sight of children dancing in the dusk, had been succeeded by many a racket with young men and women of his own age--bohemian supper-parties, followed by impromptu concerts or startling variety turns; expeditions in rowdy throngs to a theatre or music-hall; small, friendly meals with some fellow-enthusiast, who confessed in private an admiration for gounod.... it was a draught of new life to him; he loved it all--down to the constant musical jargon, the endless "shop." much of his bitterness was leaving him, his sullen bouts were rarer, even the lines of his face were growing rounded and more boyish. chausson's "chanson perpetuelle" drawled and wailed its way towards a close. nigel's muscles tightened to prevent a shudder. to-night the hall would be full of the friends and relations of the students; they had come out to encourage their respective prodigies, and his item on the programme would belong, so to speak, to no one. he almost wished he had not forbidden len and janey to come--at least they would have made a noise. the thought of len and janey brought an additional stake into the game. he must succeed for their sakes too. he must justify to them his departure from sparrow hall. if he failed, they would look upon it as a mere piece of obstinate cruelty, they would plague him to return, and he, in all the sickness of failure, would find it hard to resist them. another round of applause ... the "chanson perpetuelle" had ended, and the singer, a self-confident little contralto, came off, with the string quartet which had accompanied her. herr von gleichroeder bustled up, and there was some talk of an encore, which was in the end refused. then he turned to nigel. "you'd better go on at once. here are two telegrams for you--but you mustn't wait." nigel stuffed the two yellow envelopes into his pocket, and moved mechanically towards the stage. two telegrams--a sick hope was in his heart--one was from len, he knew; but the other ... tony knew the date of his concert; perhaps.... he dared not think it, yet that "perhaps" made him hold his head high as he walked on the stage. he bowed stiffly. von gleichroeder had spent a long time trying to teach him a graceful bow. he remembered his last public appearance, and it made him not only stiff but a trifle hard. there was no applause at first--no one in the hall knew him; then a kind-hearted old lady felt sorry for the poor young man who had no one to encourage him, and gave a feeble clap, which was more disconcerting than silence. the accompanist struck the chord--his fiddle was soon in tune and he lifted it to his shoulder. a cold chill ran down his back--he had entirely forgotten the first bars of the prelude. the accompanist had some preliminary business. nigel listened to him in detached horror, as if he were the spectator of some dreadful scene with which he had absolutely no connection. he heard the music crashing through familiar phrases--only five bars more--only three--only one-- then there was a pause-bar--a very long pause. then suddenly he realised that he had been playing for some time. the violin was warm under his chin, the bow warm between his fingers. he knew that if he stopped to think about it all, he was lost. it was always fatal for him to think of his music as so many little black signs on paper, and it was nearly as fatal for him to think of it as so many movements of his bow or positions of his fingers. von gleichroeder had always had to combat his pupil's tendency to play almost entirely by ear, lost meanwhile in a kind of sentimental dream--in the transports of which he swayed violently from side to side and generally looked ridiculous. to-night he slapped into the scriabin with tremendous vigour--the infinite pains he had spent during the last six months showing clearly in the ease with which he surmounted its technical difficulties. but the watchful ear of von gleichroeder told him that his pupil was playing subconsciously, so to speak--from his heart, rather than his head. if anything--the slipping of a peg or a sudden noise in the hall--were to interrupt him, to wake him up, all would be lost. but luckily nothing happened. nigel was roused only by the last crash of his bow on the strings. the prelude was finished, and at the same time a desperate panic seized him. he forgot to bow, and bolted headlong from the stage. the audience applauded heartily, and his fellow-students crowded round him with congratulations. "well done, old man!--pulled it off splendidly," and his back was vigorously thumped. "worked up beautifully over the climax." "but played g instead of b in the last bar but one," added a precise youth. "muddled your runs in that chromatic bit," put in some one else, encouraged. "go on and bow--go on and bow," blustered von gleichroeder, hurrying up. nigel bowed perfunctorily and came back. the clapping did not subside. "i don't allow encores," said the german, "but you're in luck, my friend, in luck." the colour was darkening on nigel's face. it was his hour of triumph. he wished tony was there, and janey and leonard--he would let them come to his next concert. he went on and bowed again--he had to appear several times before the demand for an encore was given up as hopeless, and the applause gradually died away. he went to the back of the stage and sat down, holding his head in his hands. he wanted to be alone, and to read his telegrams. the future was now a flaming promise--his feet at last were set on the honourable way. he let his mind lose itself in its dream, and for a moment he was conscious of nothing but infinite hope. from the stage a plaintive, bizarre air of moussorgski's came to him. to be russian was to von gleichroeder synonymous with to be modern, and moussorgski and rimsky korsakov were encouraged where their french or italian contemporaries were banned. every now and then a little slow ripple brought an end to strange wailing dissonances; it was played without much fire--without much feeling--but it haunted. nigel opened his first telegram. it read-- "go it, old chap--laurels is cheap." that was from leonard, and a half tender, half humorous smile crept over furlonger's grim mouth. dear old len!--dear old janey! how he wished they were there! he would wire to them the first thing to-morrow and tell them of his success. then suddenly the smile passed away, and his hands shook a little. who had sent the second telegram? he tore nervously at the envelope. had tony remembered him? one word of encouragement from her was worth all the clappings and stampings of the audience, all the eulogies of the press.... "and i also dreamed, which pleased me most, that you loved me still the same...." he took out the telegram and unfolded it. it ran-- "come at once. leonard is ill. janey." chapter vii woods at night the little star melody wailed on, rippled characteristically and died. even then nigel did not move, he sat with his hands dropped between his knees, still holding janey's telegram. he seemed to be sitting alone, in a black corner of space, stricken, blank, forsaken. then suddenly he recovered himself. "come at once." he must go at once. he sprang to his feet, pushed his way past one or two meaningless shadows who called after him meaningless words, and the next minute found himself in the passage behind the stage. seizing his hat and overcoat from the wall, he hurried to the stage-door. the street outside was quiet, at either end were lights and commotion, but the street itself was plunged in echoing peace. a strange fear assaulted nigel--he hurried into oxford street and hailed a taxi. then he knew what he was afraid of--the opportunity to sit and think. he tried not to think--he tried to find refuge from thought even in the words that had smitten him. "come at once. leonard is ill."--he repeated them over and over, striving for mere mechanical processes. the taxi threaded swiftly through the traffic, the lights swung past with the roar and the whistles. luckily the streets were not much crowded at that hour--it was just before the closing of the theatres and the consequent rush.... he was at victoria, and a porter had told him that the next train for east grinstead did not start for half-an-hour. he paced miserably up and down, cursing the blank time, gnawed by conjectures. "leonard is ill." len was hardly ever ill, and it must be something serious, or janey would not have said "come at once." it must have been sudden too, for the two telegrams had been handed to him together. perhaps there had been an accident. perhaps len was dead. ice seemed to form suddenly on nigel's heart--janey might be trying to break the news gently by saying his brother was ill. no doubt len was dead---- oh, lenny, lenny! a strange thing had happened. the dream in which he had lived and worked and slept and eaten for the last six months had suddenly fallen back from him, leaving him utterly alone with his brother and sister. his life in london, with all its struggle and ambition, was as something far off, unreal; no part of his life seemed real, except what he had spent with len and janey. after all did anything really matter as much as they? they had been with him always, and his dream had sustained him only a few months. he thought of their childhood together in the old sussex house, of their adventures and scrapes and hide-and-seeks; he thought of their growing-up, of the wonderful discoveries they had made about themselves, and shared; he thought of their arrival at sparrow hall, full of pluck and plans, of the difficulties that had damped the one and dashed the other--of the awful disgrace that had separated the three furlongers for damnable years. len and janey had been his pals, his comrades, his comforters before he had so much as heard of tony. she was not dethroned, his dream was not dead, but the past which he had half impatiently thrust behind him was coming back to show that it, as well as the future, held treasures and the immortality of love. the half-hour was nearly over, and the platform was dotted with men and women in evening dress, who had come up from the country to the theatres, and now were going home by the last train. nigel shut himself into a third-class carriage. the train was not very crowded, and no one disturbed him. almost mechanically he lighted a cigarette, then leaned back, closing his eyes. the train began to move--it pulled itself together with a shudder, then slid slowly out of the station. signal lights swept past, whistles wailed up out of the darkness and died away--suburban stations gleamed--then the train swung out into the night. both the windows were wide open, and the wind blew in on nigel, but he did not notice it. his cigarette had gone out, but he still sucked and bit the end, filling his mouth with strings of tobacco, which he did not notice either, though every now and then he mechanically spat them out. all he was conscious of was the pungent smell of night, which invaded even the rushing train. he knew that the trees were heavy and the hedges tangled with their green--he tried to fling his imagination into some sheltered hollow by a wood, and find rest there. he tried to think of sheep and grass and flowers and watching stars. but it was no use--the night was full of the restlessness of the pulsing train, he could not escape from the train, which throbbed like his heart, and by its throbbing seemed to hold his heart a prisoner in it, as if some mysterious astral link connected the two pulses. the train was the heart of the night and darkness, pulsing in ceaseless despair, and he was the heart of the train, pulsing despairingly too, the very centre of sorrow. it was a definite strain for him to realise this, and yet somehow the sensation would not relax--it was infinite relief when at last the great, noisy heart, the heart of the train, stopped beating, though its silence brought with it a sudden wrench and shock, like death. nigel stumbled out on the east grinstead platform, his limbs cramped, his head swimming. he thought of taking a cab, but by the time he had roused up the local livery stables and set off in one of their concerns he could almost have reached sparrow hall by the fields. a walk would do him good. the night was fine, though it smelled of rain. he had soon left the town behind him, and struck across the fields by st. margaret's convent. there was no moon, but the stars were unusually lustrous, and the distance was clear, oxted chalk quarry showing a pale scar on the northern hills. now and then dark sweeps of cloud passed swiftly overhead, and the wind came in sudden gusts, whistling over the fields, and throbbing through the woods with a great swish of leaves. nigel had not seen the three counties since easter, which had been early and bleak. the london months since then had to a certain extent denaturalised him, and he was conscious of a vague strangeness in the fields. it was, moreover, four years since he had seen them in their june lushness--the scent of grass was brought him pungently now and then, the scent of leaves, the scent of water. he crossed from sussex into surrey at hackenden, then plunged through ashplats wood into the wilderwick road. his footsteps were like shadows on the awful silence that filled the night. the stars were flashing from a coal-black sky--between the high hedges only a wisp of the great waste was visible with its dazzle of constellations. nigel saw cancer burning his lamps in the west, while straight above him hung the sign of libra, brilliant, cold, unearthly. surely the stars were larger and brighter to-night than was normal, than was good. he wished he was at sparrow hall. it could not be that he was frightened of the stars, and yet somehow they seemed part of an evil dream. perhaps he would wake to find himself in his notting hill lodgings--perhaps his dream would go on for ever, eternal, malevolent, but still a dream--he would lie on in his bed at notting hill, and people would shake him and try to wake him, and, when they could not wake him, take him and bury him--and he would lie in the earth, deep, with a stone over him--but still with his awful dream of night and high hedges, terror and stars.... he had come to sparrow hall. he saw the tall, black chimney against a mass of stars--it seemed to be canting a little, perhaps that was part of the dream. there was a light in len's room, and the next moment some one moved between it and the window. "janey ..." called nigel softly. his voice rose with the scents of the garden, in the hush of the night. the next minute there were footsteps on the stairs, then the door flew open, and janey was in nigel's arms. they clung together for several moments. the door had slammed in the draught, and the darkness crept softly round them like an embrace. the dream slipped from nigel--his silly and hideous nightmare of stars. this quivering, tear-stained woman in his arms had brought him into the reality of sorrow. "where is he?--what's happened?" he asked, still holding janey. "he's upstairs in bed--he's very ill, nigel." "but he's not dead?" "not yet." "is there any hope?" "not much--he's got pneumonia. it's dreadful." "has the doctor seen him?" "yes--he's been gone only an hour. he said you were to be sent for at once. oh, nigel, nigel, it's my fault!" "what d'you mean?" "i was wretched and selfish--he'd been queer all the afternoon, and i didn't notice it. i thought only of myself. then he went out while i was asleep, and when he came back.... oh, nigel!... the doctor says he practically did for himself by going out then." nigel did not understand, but his mind made no effort to grasp at details. "i'd better go at once," he said; "is he conscious?" "yes--but he says funny things sometimes." she led the way upstairs, and the next minute they were in leonard's room. it was a queer little room, extremely low, with bulging walls, sagging beams and an uneven floor. len lay propped very high with pillows. his face was drawn and feverish--he was literally fighting for his breath, and his lips were blue. he smiled when he saw nigel. "hullo, old man!... good of you to come.... lord!"--as he saw his clothes--"put me among the nuts." "don't talk," said his brother sharply. "your hair ..." panted len. "shut up!" len pointed to a glass of water by the bed. janey gave him a drink. he began to cough violently, and his face became purple. nigel felt sick. "i--i'm better," gasped leonard. "i--i had ... a beastly stitch ... but it's gone." "when's the doctor coming again?" nigel asked janet. "the first thing to-morrow." "he ought to have a nurse." "oh, no!" cried len; "you and janey can manage me ... between you ... i'll soon be all right ... i don't want any little tottie coughdrop fussing round." "he's dreadful," said janey, "he will talk." "how long has he been like this?" "as i tell you, he'd been feeling queer all the afternoon. then i crocked up for some silly reason, and instead of being properly attended to, he had to look after me"--a sob broke into her voice, and she pulled nigel aside. "the doctor says it's a frightfully acute case," she whispered. "but ... but" interrupted len, "nigel hasn't told us ... about the concert ... where's the laurel crown?... left it in the train?" "oh, do shut up! i'll tell you anything you like if you'll hold your tongue." "tell him while i'm giving him his milk," said janey; "the doctor ordered him milk every two hours, but he simply won't take it." "i'll make him," said his brother grimly. "i'll go and fetch it--you stay with him, nigel." she left the room, and len lay silent a moment, looking out at the stars. "old man," he whispered suddenly, "while janey's away ... i want to tell you something." "what is it?--can't it wait till you're better?" "no.... it's this.... she ... she's in ... infernal trouble." nigel quailed. "what is it, len?" "she'd rather tell you herself ... she's going to ... all i want to say is ... when you hear, just remember that ... she's our janey." chapter viii vigil the doctor called early the next morning, and looked serious. leonard had had a restless night, and his symptoms were becoming very grave. he still kept up his efforts at conversation, though they were more painful than ever. "i--i'm not going to die, doc," he panted. "well, keep quiet, and we'll see about it," said the doctor. "but have you heard about my brother?... the one who fills the albert hall?... oh, 'ninety-nine,' since you insist." nigel had been sent over to dormans the first thing in the morning, to buy up all the papers he could. several of them had a report of von gleichroeder's concert, and most of these mentioned nigel's performance favourably. "mr. furlonger has undoubtedly a great deal to learn on the mechanical side of his art, but he has a wonderful force of temperament, which last night compensated in many ways for faulty technique. he even managed to work some emotional beauty into scriabin's bundle of tricks, and one can imagine that in music which depended on the beautiful instead of on the bizarre for its appeal, he would have the chance, which was denied him last night, of a really fine performance. we do not say that mr. furlonger will ever be a master, but if he will avoid fashionable gymnastics and not despise such out-of-date considerations as beauty and harmony, he may become a temperamental violinist of the first order." all the critics, more or less, had a hit at the "advanced" type of music, and nigel imagined von gleichroeder's wrath. len insisted on having all the criticisms read to him, and a thrill of pride went through even janey's numb breast. she had never tried to speak to nigel alone, and he gave her no hint that he knew she was in trouble. but when his heart was not bursting with anxiety for len, it brimmed with compassion for janey. she might have been nursing her brother for weeks instead of hours to judge by her haggard face, white lips, and faded eyes. her movements were listless, and her figure in rest had the droop of utter exhaustion. she and nigel divided the nursing between them. len was never left alone. he had to be fed every two hours, and it generally took both of them to do it, as he was very perverse in the matter of meals, saying that the food choked him. in the afternoon he became a little delirious. he seemed to be trying to ask for things, and yet to be unable to say what he really meant, often saying something quite different. he was intensely pathetic in his weakness. this dulling, or rather disturbance, of his faculties seemed to distress him far more than his difficult breathing or the pain in his side. now and then he would hold out his hands piteously to nigel and janey, and would lie for some time holding the hand of each, his brown eyes staring at them imploringly, as if they were fighting for the powers of speech which the tongue had lost--in the way that the eyes of animals often fight. they tried to make him go to sleep, but he was always restless and awake. they read to him, talked to him and to each other, with no success. outside, the day was dull, yet warm and steamy. every now and then a shower would rustle noisily on the leaves, and after it passed there would be many drippings. nigel went out for an hour or two's work on the farm when evening fell. it seemed extraordinary that only some eighteen hours lay between him and the concert at the bechstein hall. that part of his life had been put aside--not for ever, perhaps, but none the less temporarily banished by a usurping present. some day, no doubt, he would put on the last six months again, just as he would put on the dress clothes he had folded away, but now he wore corduroys and the last eighteen hours. at six the doctor called again. he shook his head at the sight of leonard. "he must have a nurse," he said. "oh, no ... for heaven's sake!" groaned len. "nigel and i can nurse him," said janey. "my dear young lady, have you seen your own face in the glass?" len raised himself with difficulty on his pillows. "lord, janey!--you look quite cooked up.... i say, old girl, i won't have it.... doctor, i surrender." "i don't know whether i can send any one in to-night--but i'll try. anyhow, to-morrow morning--now 'ninety-nine,' please." nigel went over to east grinstead for ice and fruit. len was dreadfully thirsty all the evening. they put bags of ice on his forehead and sides, but it did not seem to cool him much. the doctor had left a sleeping-draught, to be administered the last thing at night. "if i take it," said len, "will you two go to bed?" "janey will," said nigel. "i'll have a shake-down in here." "well, it'll keep me quiet, i suppose ... so i'll take the beastly thing.... i want to sleep ... but i don't want to die.... i won't die, in fact." "don't talk of it, old man." he lifted len in his strong arms, and settled him more comfortably in the bedclothes. then he gave him the sleeping-draught. the window was wide open, and one could hear the rain pattering on the lilac bushes. the wind, sweet-smelling with damp and hay, puffed the curtains into the room, then sucked them back. a fire was burning low on the hearth. janey went and sat beside it. nigel sat by the bed, for between sleeping and waking his brother suffered from strange fears. at last, after a few sighs and struggles, len fell asleep, still high on his pillows, the lines of his face very tired and grim. there was a little light in the room, or rather the mingled lights of a dying fire and a fighting moon. nigel rose softly, and went over to janet. "you must go to bed." "no--i'd rather stay here." "you must have some sleep, or you'll be worn out." "i couldn't sleep." the words broke from her in a strangling sigh, and the next minute his arm crept round her, for he remembered leonard's words. "dear janey ..." he whispered. she began to cry. for a moment or two he held her to him, helping her to choke her sobs against his breast. "won't you tell me what it is?" "how do you know there's anything more than that?" and she pointed towards the bed. "len told me." "about quentin?..." "quentin!" "yes--i thought you said he'd told you." "he told me you were wretched about something. but who's quentin?--not quentin lowe?" they were the very words len had used, and janey shuddered. "yes ..." she said faintly, "quentin lowe." "but----" "you'll never understand.... i hid it from you for three years." "hid what, janey?" "my--my love." nigel's arm dropped from her waist, but hers was round his neck, and she clung to him feverishly. "yes, i loved him. i loved him and i pitied him ... and i wanted, i tried, to help him--and--and i've been his ruin--and another woman has saved him." nigel was speechless. what astonished him, the man of secrets, most, was that janey should have had a secret from him for three years. "don't tremble so, darling--but tell me about it. i won't be hard on you." "you will--when you know all." "does len know all?" "yes." he glanced over to the sleeping man, then put back his arm round janey's waist. "now tell me--all." janey told him--all. for some moments there was silence. the rain was still beating on the leaves, but the moon had torn through the clouds, and flung a white patch over leonard's feet. the fire was just a red lump, and janey and nigel, sitting outside the moonrays, were lost in darkness. janey wondered when her brother would speak. she could see the outline of his face, blurred in the shadows. he held his head high, and he had not dropped his arm from her waist, but his free hand was clenched--then she felt the other clench against her side. sickening fears assailed her. why did he not speak? only that arm round her gave her hope.... then suddenly he took it away, and put both his hands over his face. she saw his shoulders quiver, just for a moment, then for what seemed long moments he did not move. a paralysis of horror was creeping towards her heart. he was taking things even worse than she had expected, but they did not seem to fill him with anger so much as with grief. his body was crumpled as if under a load, and when he suddenly dropped his hands and looked up at her, she drew back shuddering from what she saw in his eyes. "my poor boy!--i wish i hadn't told you." "oh, god!--oh, god!" something in his cowering, hopeless attitude woke all the divine motherhood in janey. she forgot her fear of unforgiveness, her danger of a rebuff, and put her arms round him, drawing his head to her breast. "my poor nigel ... my poor, poor lad!"--so she comforted him for the shame he felt for her. after a time, when thought was not quite swallowed up in tenderness, she began to wonder why he let her hold him so. then suddenly he rose, and began to pace up and down the room--up and down, up and down, swinging round sharply at the corners, but always, she noticed with a gulp, treading softly for fear of waking len. she watched him in numb despair. the minutes dragged on. now and then he put his hand over his brow, as if he fought either for or against some memory, now and then he bent his head so low that she could not see his face. she wondered how much longer she would be able to endure it. "nigel----" she whispered at last. he stopped and turned towards her. "nigel ..." "what is it?" "for heaven's sake ... don't keep me in suspense." "suspense about what?" "your forgiveness." in a moment he was at her side. "janey--if i thought you could be doubting that----" he put his arms round her, and the relief was so sudden that she burst into tears. "what a selfish hound i am!--wrapped up in my own beastly feelings, and forgetting yours. but i never imagined you could think----" "i thought ... perhaps you couldn't." "janey, how dare you!" "when you got up and walked about ..." "i know--i know. but that wasn't anger against you--my poor, outraged, suffering darling," and he covered her face with kisses. she clung to him in a passion of love and relief. "oh, you're good--you and len!" "nonsense, janey. you mustn't talk like that. we're not worthy to tie your shoes--we never shall be. how could you think we'd turn against you? it's him, that little, loathly cad, that----" "oh, hush, dear--i can't bear it." his rage was stronger and fiercer than len's, his whole body quivered in the passion of it. then suddenly it changed unaccountably to grief, and his head fell back against her shoulder, the eyes dull, the mouth old and drawn. she thought it was for her, and he hugged his poor, dead secret too tight to grant her the mercy of disillusion. the night wore on, and they clung together on the hearthstone, where cinders fell and glowed, making the only sound, the only light, in the room. two lost children, they huddled together in the only warm place they had left--each other's arms. there was a feeble sigh, a feeble stirring in the bed--just as the first of the morning came between the curtains, and pointed like a finger into the gloom. "lenny...." janet and nigel rose, wearily dropping their stiff arms from each other, and went over to the bed. "how long have you been awake?" "only just woke up ... would you draw back the curtains?" nigel pulled them back, and a white dawn shuddered into the room. "what time is it?" "about three--can't you go to sleep again?" "no--i've wakened for good ... i mean ... i mean ..." "what, old man?" "i think i am going to die after all." "no, lenny, no...." "it's rather a come down ... after saying i wouldn't ... but i feel so tired." his face was spread over with a ghastly pallor, and something which nigel and janey could not exactly define, which indeed they hardly saw with their bodily sight, but which impressed them vaguely as a kind of film. "i'm going to die," he repeated, plucking with cold fingers at the sheet. "i'll go and fetch the doctor," cried nigel. "no ... i don't want you to leave me." "but we must do something." "there's nothing to do ... only talk to me ... and don't let me get funky." "you might look out of the window, nigel, and see if any one's passing," said janey. there was not likely to be any one at that hour, but he thrust his head out and eagerly scanned the lane. the rain had stopped, though the sky was shagged over with masses of cloud. one or two stars glimmered wanly above the woods. it was the constellation of orion, setting. "there's no one," said nigel, "nor likely to be--i must go, len." "oh, no ... don't ... don't leave me ... the doctor couldn't do anything.... perhaps i won't die ... only i hate the dark." a strangling pity seized nigel. he went over to his brother, and sat down beside the bed, taking his hand. "there, there, old boy, don't worry. we'll both stay with you. i'll hold this hand, and janey 'ull hold the other, and you'll soon get over it." len lay shivering and gasping. nigel and janey looked into each other's eyes across him, and swallowed their grief. "i--i expect it's nothing," panted leonard. "one often feels low at this time of night." they leaned upon the bed each side of him, and suddenly janey thrust out her hand and grasped nigel's across him. "now we're all three holding hands," she said. the minutes flew by. a clock was ticking--measuring them out. "kiss me ..." moaned leonard suddenly. they both stooped and kissed him. he shut his eyes, then opened them, and a strange, piteous resignation was in their glazing depths. "i'm sorry ... i must die.... i'm so tired." "you will go to sleep, len." "no ... i'm too tired ... it wouldn't be enough." janey's tears fell on his face. "don't cry, janey ... it's--it's all right.... remember me to the doctor ... and say my last words were 'ninety-nine' ... laugh, janey ... it's a joke." "lenny, lenny...." there was another silence, and a faint flush tinted the watery sky. a bird chirrupped in the eaves of sparrow hall. "hold my hands tighter," gasped len. they both gripped tighter. "and give my love to tottie coughdrop ... and say i'm sorry to have missed her.... tighter ... oh!... tighter." his breath came in a fierce, whistling rush, and he sat bolt upright, gripping their hands and struggling. "nigel, fetch the doctor!" shrieked janey. but len had his brother's hand in the agonised grip of dying. "tighter ... oh, tighter...." there was another whistling rush of breath, but this time no struggle--only a sigh. len fell back on the pillow, and the terror passed suddenly from his face. chapter ix and you also said ... during the week that followed leonard's death, there was a succession of heavy storms. chill sodden winds drove june from the fields, and substituted a bleak mock-autumn. sparrow hall was full of the moaning winds--they sped down the passages, and throbbed against the doors, they whistled through cracks and chinks, and rumbled in the chimneys. janey was in bed for the first few days; she had collapsed utterly. the two blows which had fallen on her almost together had smitten her into a kind of numbness, in which she lay, white and stiff and tearless, through the windy hours. nigel scarcely ever left her, and he scarcely ever spoke to her--they just crouched together, she on the bed, he on a chair beside it, their fingers twined, both dumbly busy with the problems of death and anguish that had assaulted their lives. meantime the routine of the house and farm remained unbroken. the "man" looked after the latter, and through the former moved a figure that seemed strangely out of place. when "tottie coughdrop" arrived the morning after len's death, she proved to be no more or less than a novice from st. margaret's convent, and finding her ministrations as truly needed as if her patient had been alive, she did not leave on finding him dead. she nursed janey--at least she did for her the little that nigel could not do; she dusted and cooked; she made furlonger eat, the stiffest duty of all. it used to hurt nigel when he thought how len would have enjoyed seeing him sit down to supper every night with a nun. novice unity agnes also undertook all the arrangements for the funeral--which had always been a nightmare to nigel and janey. moreover, the day before, she went to east grinstead and bought a black skirt and blouse and hat for janey, who but for her would never have thought of going into mourning at all; and though her charity was not able to overcome her diffidence and buy a mourning suit for nigel, she sewed black bands on all his coats. that was how it happened that the funeral of leonard furlonger was such a surprise to the inhabitants of the three counties. the coffin was met at the church door by the choir headed by a crucifix, and the service was read by a priest in a black cope. there were hymns too--novice unity agnes's favourites, all about as appropriate as "how doth the little busy bee"--and incense, and a little collection of nuns, persuaded by the kind-hearted novice to swell the scanty number of mourners. in fact, as nigel remarked bitterly, the whole thing was a joke, and it was a shame len had missed it. he and janey walked home alone, arm in arm, through the wet lanes. as usual, they did not speak, but they strained close together as the solitude of the fields crept round them. the rain had cleared, but the wind was still romping in the hedges--little tearful spreads of sky showed among the clouds, very pale and rain-washed, soon swallowed up by moving shapes of storm. janet went to bed early. she had suddenly found that she could sleep, and her appetite for sleep became abnormal. she woke each morning greedily counting the hours till night. in the old careless days she had never set such store on sleep, because it had meant merely strengthening and resting and refreshing; now it meant what was more to her than anything else in life--forgetting. nigel could not sleep. in his heart the lights were not yet all put out. there were flashes of terror and sparks of desire, and dull flares of conjecture. he had sometimes hesitated whether he should tell janey his secret, but had drawn back on each occasion, urged partly by the thought of adding to her burden, but principally by a feeling of shame. his wonderful dream, which had sustained him so triumphantly during six months of work and sacrifice, had now shrivelled into a poor little secret, such as school-girls nurture--a love which must always be hidden and silent and unconsummated. his brain ached with regrets and revisualisations, quaked with apprehension and the knowledge of his own utter helplessness in the face of circumstances. the thought of lowe's perfidy to janet would rouse in him a sweat of rage from his poor attempts at sleep. janey stood to nigel for all that was noble, meek and understanding, and that she should be treated heartlessly and lightly by a scoundrel not worthy to black her boots, was a thought that drove him nearly rabid with hate. what was he to do to save tony from this swine? he knew perfectly well how she would look upon him if she heard his story. he remembered the hard, stiff little figure in the garden of shovelstrode--"you won my friendship under false pretences." what would she say to the cad who had won by false pretences not only her friendship but her body, her heart and her soul? yet he could never tell her the truth. he would not betray janet even to this girl he loved, and a vague accusation could easily be denied by lowe, and was not likely to be believed by tony. often he envied len--lost in cool sleep, free from responsibilities and problems, eased for ever from the soul-chafing burdens of hate and love. it was the beginning of july. sunshine baked on the fields, and drank the green out of the grass, so that the fields were brown, with splashes of yellow where the buttercups still grew. in the hedges the wild elder-rose sent out its sickening sweetness, while from the ditches came the even more cloying fragrance of the meadowsweet. the haze of a great heat veiled the distance from nigel, as he tramped over the parched grass into kent. he saw the roofs of scarlets and redpale shimmering in the valley of the hammer ponds, but beyond them was a fiery, thundering dusk, which swallowed up the hills of cowden in the east. he walked with bent head and arms slack. he often took these lonely walks, undaunted by either storm or swelter. he knew that janey missed him, but he could not keep his body still while his mind ran to and fro so desperately. his walks were full of dark and furious planning of schemes that came to nothing. he roamed aimlessly through the country, without noticing where he went--except that he half unconsciously avoided the roads and wider lanes. he was desperate because his brain worked so slowly, a cloud seemed to lie on it, and he had a tendency to lose the thread of his ideas after he had followed them a little way. this afternoon he was wandering towards the valley of the hammer ponds. it was nearly seven when he came to furnace wood. the sun was swimming to the west through whorls of heat. a sullen glow crawled over the sky, nearly brown in the west. the air hung heavy in the wood, laden with the pungency of midsummer flowers and grasses--scarcely a leaf stirred, though now and then an unaccountable rustling shudder passed through the thickets. weariness dropped on nigel like a cloak--he was used to it. it was not really physical, only the deadly striving of his soul reaching out to his body and exhausting it. he flung himself down in a clump of bracken and tansy, sinking down in it, till everything was shut out by the tall, earth-smelling stalks. this was what he often found himself longing for with a desperate physical desire--a little corner, cool and quiet and green, shut off from life, where he could drowse--and forget. this evening only the first part of his desire was satisfied. he had his corner, but he could not drowse in it. his limbs lay inert, but his thoughts kicked painfully. his brain hammered with old impressions, which, instead of wearing away with time, each day bored and jarred with renewed power. he was the victim of an abnormally acute mentality--just as to a swollen limb the lightest touch is painful, so to nigel's brain inflamed with grief and struggle, every impression was like a blow, an enduring source of agony. he heard footsteps on the path. no one could see him--it was still quite light in the fields, but in the wood was dusk and a blurring of outlines; besides, he was deeply buried in the tall stalks. however, though he could not be seen, he could see, for on the path stood a golden pillar of sunshine into which the footsteps must pass. nigel wondered if it could be lowe, returning early for some reason from shovelstrode. but the steps did not sound heavy enough, and the next minute he saw the white of a woman's dress through the trees. in an instant his limbs had shrunk together, for another of those sickening blows had smitten his brain. the figure had passed out of the pillar of sunset, but he had seen tony strife as she went by. she was dressed in white, and wore no hat, only a muslin scarf over her hair. she carried a cloak on her arm, and furlonger realised that she must be going to dine at redpale. the sight of tony--he had not seen her since he lost her, or rather his dream of her--threw him into a fit of torment. he flung himself back among the stalks, and rolled there, biting them, suddenly mad with pain. the next moment he started up. a thud and a low cry came from a few yards further on. nigel sprang to his feet. he remembered that not far off the path ran by the mouth of a disused chalk quarry, from which it was divided only by a very rickety fence. suppose.... he crashed through the bushes to the path, and dashed along it to the chalk-pit. something white lay only a few feet from the dreadful brink. just here the path was in darkness--hazel bushes and a dense thicket of alder shut out the sun. for a moment he could not make out clearly what had happened, but was immediately reassured by seeing tony sit up, and try to struggle to her feet. "what is it?" she cried, hearing his steps behind her. "who's there?" "are you hurt?" "oh, mr. furlonger...." she made another struggle to rise, but could not without his hand. "are you hurt?" he repeated. "no-o-o." "i think you are a little." he was trembling all over, and hoped she did not notice it. "i fell over some wire, just here, where the path is so dark. i might have gone over the edge," she added with a shudder. "you had a lucky escape--but i'm afraid you're hurt." "it isn't much. i may have twisted my ankle a bit, that's all." she stood there in the shadows, her white dress gleaming like a moth, her face mysterious in the disarray of her wrap. nigel's eyes devoured her, while his heart filled itself with inexpressible pain. "take my arm," he said huskily, "and i'll help you back to shovelstrode." "oh, no!--i'll go on to redpale. it's much nearer--if you'll be so kind as to help me." "but how about getting home?" "my fiancé, mr. lowe, will drive me home. he was to have fetched me too, but at the last moment he had to go up to town, and couldn't be back in time." "are you sure you're well enough to go out to dinner?" he hated the idea of taking her to redpale. "oh, quite--this is nothing. besides, dining at redpale is just like dining at home--i don't call it going 'out' to dinner." furlonger winced, and gave her his arm, hoping she would not notice how it shook. they walked slowly out of furnace wood, towards the leaden east. tony limped slightly, and nigel wanted to carry her, but he dared not risk his patched self-control too far. "you should never have come all this way alone," he said gruffly, "these woods by the quarries are dangerous." "i expect my father will be furious when he finds out what i've done. but i hoped that if i walked across the fields, instead of driving round by the road, i--i might meet my fiancé on his way home from the station." a tremulous archness crept into her voice. nigel shuddered. "i'm pleased i met you," she said gently, after a pause, "because i wanted to tell you how dreadfully sorry i am about your brother." "thank you." "and i want to tell you that i'm so glad about your success in london. i saw in the papers how you distinguished yourself at herr von gleichroeder's concert." nigel did not speak. "i suppose you'll soon be going back to town?" she went on timidly. "i don't know. i can't leave my sister." "but you can take her with you. it would be a pity to throw up your career just when everything looks so promising." they were not far from redpale now. the sunset was creeping over the sky--only the east before them was dark, banked high with thundery vapour. nigel could still hear tony speaking, as if in a kind of dream. his thoughts were busy elsewhere. "won't you?" repeated tony for the second time. "won't i what?" "go back to london, and make yourself famous." "i don't see much chance of that." "but i do--and so will you when you're not so unhappy. now, to please me, won't you promise to go back to london and make yourself a great career? you and i used to be friends once--i hope we're friends still--and i shall always be interested in everything you do. i expect to see your name in a very high place some day. now, for my sake, promise to go back." "for your sake...." "yes--since you won't go for your own." they had stopped a moment to rest her foot. nigel lifted his eyes from the grass and looked into hers--wondering. was it true, was it even possible, that she had never seen his love? she could not, or she would not speak like this--"for my sake." after all, she would never expect him to dare ... that would blind her to much that might have betrayed him had he been worthier. no, she had not seen his love, and she had never loved him. she had never loved any man but quentin lowe--he was her first love, he had lit the first flame in her heart, and that heart was his, in all its purity and burning. standing there beside her in the sunset, her weight resting deliciously on him as she raised her injured foot from the ground, he realised the change that had come to tony. her manner was as entirely different from her manner of six months ago at shovelstrode as that had been different from the manner of those still earlier days at lingfield or brambletye. in those days, during their playtime, tony had been a school-girl, a delightful hoyden, the best pal and fellow-adventurer a man could have. in december, in the garden at shovelstrode, she had lost that valiant girlhood, and at the same time her womanhood was unripe--she had been a crude mixture of girl and woman, sometimes provokingly both, sometimes repellingly neither. but to-day she was woman complete. both her mind and her body seemed to have stepped out of their green adolescence. there was a certain dignity of curve about the tall figure resting against him, which nigel had not seen in the forest or in the garden; there was a clear and confident look in the eyes which in earlier days had been either wistful or timid; there was a heightened colour on the cheeks. her manner was full of gentle assurance, her speech easy and sympathetic--as utterly different from the crude tactlessness of christmastide as from the school-girl rattle of november. yes, tony was a woman come into her kingdom, proud, sweet, compassionate and strong. quentin lowe had made her this in the short weeks of his love. unworthy little cad as he was, he had yet been able to raise her from girlhood to womanhood, to crown her with the diadem of her heritage.... "tony," cried nigel, caught in a sudden storm of impulse, "do you love quentin lowe?" "love him!--why, of course.... let's move on." "you're not angry with me?--i have my reason for asking." "no, i'm not angry. but what reason can you have?" "i remember," said nigel desperately, "what you told me six months ago. you said you couldn't forgive...." the colour rushed to his face, but he fought on. "there is something which i think you ought to know about him." "what do you mean?" she spoke sharply, but not quite so sharply as he had expected. "miss strife--it's very difficult for me ... but i think i ought----" "i suppose," she said, her voice faltering a little, "you're trying to tell me--you think you ought to tell me--that quentin hasn't always been quite--quite worthy of himself. i know." "you know!" "yes." there was silence, broken only by the swish of their footsteps through the grass. "how did you know?--who told you?" cried furlonger suddenly. "i might ask--how do _you_ know?" "the girl--was a friend of mine...." "oh, i'm sorry." "don't mistake me. i--i didn't love her--not in that way, i mean. but, tony--who told you?" "quentin." "my god!" "why are you so surprised? it was right that he should tell me." "of course. but i--i didn't think he would." tony hesitated a moment--it struck nigel that she was considering how far she ought to take him into her confidence. the thought humiliated him. "he did tell me," she said after a pause, "he told me everything, one night, nearly three weeks ago, just before your brother died. he suddenly came to shovelstrode--very late, after we had all gone upstairs. he wanted to see me--and i came down ... oh, i shall never forget it! he was standing there, all white and tired--and very wet, as if he'd been lying in the grass. he tried to speak, but he couldn't--and i was frightened, like a silly ass, and i cried ... and then he told me all about himself--and this girl." "and you?..." she shuddered. "i--i told him he must go." "you told him to go!"--his voice had a hungry catch in it. "yes--i was a beast." anxiety and scorn strove together in him. "but you changed your mind." she nodded. "tony!" "well, why not?" "because it's paltry and weak of you--he doesn't deserve your forgiveness--and you've no right to forgive him for what he did to another woman." "do you think i haven't considered that other woman?" "you must have. but--egad!--you're so calm about it. don't you realise what all this means--to her?" "you think i ought to make him marry her?" "of course not--she wouldn't have him if she was paid. but--but how can _you_ marry him, tony?" she bit her lip. "i'm sorry i put things so bluntly, but i'm always a blundering ass when i'm excited. tony, you're not to marry this man." by her mounting colour he saw that he had said too much. "i beg your pardon--i know all this sounds like impertinent interference. but it isn't. i've been worrying about it a lot--about your marrying him. i felt you ought to know...." "well, i do know--and i've forgiven him." "i'm not sure that isn't even worse than your not knowing." she stared at him in anger and surprise. "you say that!--you!--the man but for whom perhaps i never should have forgiven him." nigel gasped. "what do you mean?" "well, at first, as i told you, i felt i couldn't forgive him. but afterwards i remembered all you said." "_i_ said!" "yes." "what?--when?" "don't you remember that day you came over to shovelstrode and said, 'you will have to forgive me a great many things because i am so very hungry'?" they had stopped again; the fields swelled round them, ghostly in the lemon twilight, and a wistful radiance glowed on tony's face. he searched her eyes despairingly--he scarcely knew what for. the anger in them had died, and in its place was a beautiful serenity and kindliness. but that was not what he was looking for. his heart was full of hunger and tears, yet he did not hunger or cry for the woman who stood before him, but for the little girl he had known long months ago. "quentin used almost the same words as you did," she said, breaking the silence, "he told me how all his life he had been hungry, always craving for something good and pure and satisfying, never able to reach it. then he met this girl, and he thought that he'd find in her all he was seeking. but he found only sorrow--sorrow for them both. he was in despair, in hell--and he believed i could help him out and make him a good man again. don't you remember how you said that a man's only chance of rising out of the mud was for some woman to give him a hand and help him up?" nigel could not find words. a thick, misty horror was settling on him. had those poor pleadings of his dying self then turned against him in his hour of need? "there was quentin asking for my help," continued tony. "oh, i know i'm no better than other girls, than the girl he used to love, but somehow i can't help feeling i'm the girl sent to help quentin. when i told him he must go, he nearly went crazy ... his father said he was afraid he would kill himself ... and i--i was nearly mad too, for i--oh, god! i loved him." a sounding contralto note swept into her voice; it seemed to swell up from her heart, from her heaving woman's breast on which her hands were folded. "so i forgave him." "tony!..." cried nigel faintly. "yes--i'm grateful to you. i'm afraid that when i saw you at shovelstrode i was very stupid and stiff--i was a horrid little beast, and i couldn't forgive you for what was after all an honour you had done me. now i see how much your friendship meant to me. but for you, quentin and i might have been parted for ever." a stupid rage was tearing furlonger, and there was a mockery of laughter in it. he saw that his tragedy was after all only a farce--he was the time-honoured lover of farce, who with infinite pains makes a ladder to his lady's chamber, and then sees his rival swarm up it. there he stood, forlorn, discomfited, frustrated--but also intensely comic. perhaps the student was right about offenbach.... "i'm surprised that you should be so disgusted with me," said tony. the ghostly laughter pealed again, and at the same time he remembered that "if the man's a sport, he laughs too." he threw back his head, and startled her with a hearty laugh. "mr. furlonger!" "i'm sorry--but things struck me suddenly as rather funny." "how?" "oh, i don't suppose they'd strike you the same way. but it seems funny you should care whether i'm disgusted or not." "i do--of course i do; and i can't see why you are disgusted. after all you said...." "damn all i said!--i'm sorry, but i never thought of a case like this." he blushed, remembering the case he had thought of. they walked down the hill--they could see redpale now, huddling beneath them in its orchards. the colours of the sunset had grown fainter, and pale, trembling lights burned on the barn-roofs and the pond. their feet beat swiftly on the rustling grass. furlonger's time was short. "i'm going to try to be a big woman," said tony softly, "a strong, brave woman; and i don't want to think sentimental rot about a perfect knight and a spotless hero and all that. i want to be a man's fighting comrade--i want to feel he can't do without me. it was you who first told me that i must take men as i find them--but not leave them so." "tony, if only i thought there was any good in him----" "i tell you there's a mine of good in him. but he's never had a chance till now. our engagement is to be a very long one, and already i can see a difference in him. it's not i that have done it--it's his love for me. and all the sorrow he went through, when he thought he'd lost me, seems to have made him gentler and humbler somehow. quentin has suffered dreadfully"--there was a little click in her throat--"and he wants so much to be good and pure and true. and i've promised to help him, by believing that he can and will do better." his own words were being mercilessly fired back at him. he remembered how he had first breathed them to her, full of hope and entreaty. in the face of such artillery his rout was complete. "forgive him, tony!" he cried. "forgive him! but oh, forgive me, too!" they had reached the gate of redpale farm. he stopped--he would go no further. "tony--forgive me too." the words broke from his lips in an exceeding bitter cry. "forgive you!--what for?" "for a great deal--for all you know of, and for the more you don't know." "of course i forgive you--but i thank you most." "no, you must forgive me most--are you sure that you forgive me for what you don't know as well as for what you know?" "quite sure"--her voice trembled a little, for he was beginning to frighten her. "then good-bye." "good-bye. i--i hope i haven't brought you very far out of your way." he muttered something unintelligible, pulled off his cap, and left her. he walked quickly, pricked on by a discovery which was also a triumph. quentin lowe had not taken tony from him after all. the tony he loved had never known quentin lowe, she had been no man's friend but nigel furlonger's--and so much his friend that when he had been taken from her she would not stay without him, but herself had gone away. quentin lowe loved a beautiful woman--proud and sweet and assured, with just a dash of the prig about her. nigel had never loved this woman, he had loved a little girl--and the little girl who had been his comrade in the kentish lanes and the ruins of brambletye, would never be any man's but his. he plunged recklessly through the fields, and recklessly into furnace wood. lowe could not be far off. he must have missed the fast train from victoria, but the next one arrived only an hour or so later. nigel hurried through the wood, now coal dark, and full of a strange dread for him--though he did not know of the ghosts which haunted it. as he caught his first glimpse of the faintly crimsoned west, he saw a figure outlined against it. some one was coming down the slope of furnace field. it must be lowe. the two men met on the rim of the wood. it was a moment of blackness for quentin when he saw the blazing eyes and bitten lips of furlonger. strange words broke from his tongue-- "hast thou found me, o mine enemy!" nigel's great body towered over him. his lips had shrunk back from his teeth, which gleamed in the dying ugly light. lowe remembered the other furlonger who was dead. in furnace wood fate would not tamper with vengeance as at cowsanish. suddenly nigel spoke. "two good women have forgiven you--so i've nothing to say--or do. pass----" he moved out of the path, and waved his hand towards the wood. "pass----" he said. quentin hesitated a moment. "won't--won't you shake hands?" "no. pass--and for god's sake, pass quickly." chapter x a toast a few faint stars were in the west as nigel tramped towards it. they seemed to swim up out of the eddies of crimson fog that floated there--they seemed to be showing little candles of hope to the man who turned his back on the east. the castle of the dayspring lay behind him, swallowed in thundery murk, but before him were the lights of a broader palace where dead hopes and dead hatreds keep state together. the west glowed and trembled and purpled--fiery rays rested on the woods, and reached over the sky to the moon. then against the purple showed a tall chimney, rising from a high-roofed cottage that squatted in the fields of wilderwick. as nigel walked down the hill towards sparrow hall, a great quickening realisation struck his exhausted heart. he knew that his dream was not dead. tony, the light in which he had seen it, was gone for ever, but the dream itself was still there in the dark. for six months he had tried to lead a good and honourable life, and now, though the motive was gone, the old desire remained as strong and white as ever. he could never be as he had been before he met tony. he knew now that it was not she that had called him--she had merely opened his ears to a voice that had been calling him all through his life, through struggle, lust and pain, failure and hate--and was calling him still, through the utter darkness. the child in him, which had desperately sought congenial comradeship in a little girl, rose out of the wreck, and heard as in a dream the voices of boys and girls in london, laughing, fooling and ragging together, calling to all in him that was gay and young and outrageous. he wanted to go back to london, he wanted to play and to work, and to win for himself what he had once yearned to win for tony. his music, that one touch of the poetic and supernatural in his sordid, materialistic life, would raise him up in this his last day, and give him his heart's desire--his desire for a clean life and an honourable name. he stood for a moment in the great lonely field--the last of the sun and the first of the moon upon him, around him the dawning eternity of the stars. two hours ago he had been festering, sick, with his schemes, the comrade of a hundred repulsive ideas. now he was alone--utterly alone with his one great ambition, stripped of the last rag of personal motive that had clung to it--his ambition to be honest and pure and true. tony had pointed him out the way, and directly he had taken it, she had gone--to show it to another man, and walk in it with him. nigel suddenly pictured that man. he was at redpale farm ... he kneeled in the dust at tony's feet ... her hands were upon his head. in her he found redemption, love and blessing--and dared he, furlonger, grudge redemption, love and blessing to any man? he did not grudge them--let quentin lowe take them, walk in white with tony, and be worthy of her. furlonger, too, would walk in white and be worthy--but he would walk alone. no, not quite alone. he trod softly up the path to sparrow hall, between the ranks of the folded flowers. the evening primroses and night-scented stock sent their fragrance in with him at the door. the house was in darkness, and he groped his way to the kitchen, where he found janey. she was half asleep in the armchair by the fire--she had laid the supper, that dreary little supper for two, and now lay huddled by the dying embers, cold, in spite of the thick heat of the night. "janey," whispered nigel, as he kissed her. she started. "oh, you're back at last!--what a time you've been!" "i'm sorry, dear. come now, i'll light the lamp, and we'll have supper." she rose listlessly, and sat down opposite him. "it's a rotten supper--i don't cook so well as novice unity agnes." "nonsense! you cook quite well enough for me. janey--will you come and cook for me in london?" "in london?"--she stared at him blankly. "yes, i must go back to my work--and i can't leave you here." "but--but--i don't understand--and what shall we do about the farm?" "we can sell it, and the money will keep us--just the two of us in a workman's flat--till my training is over, and i'm earning money on my own. oh, janey, i don't suppose i'll ever be rich or famous or that i'll fill the albert hall--but i--i shall be more worthy of you, dear." "of me!"--she laughed. "yes. don't you understand? i've got my dream back again--but there's an empty place in it.... will you fill it, janey?" she looked questioningly at him with her great haggard eyes. "who left it empty?" "tony strife," he said in a low voice. "nigel!..." she rose to her feet and came to him. "my poor, poor boy." her pity, the first he had received, had an unexpected effect on him. it nearly unmanned him--he put up his hands to her neck, and drew down her face to him, while his body shuddered. "nigel ... did she know?" "no, never--thank god!" she stroked his hair, and held his head against her breast. "it was a hopeless dream, janey." she could not contradict him. "but it helped me." "then it was a good dream." he gently slipped himself free. "and now we'll say no more about it." after supper janey asked nigel to play to her. he often used to play to her in the evenings, to relieve the aching weight of agony that gathered on her with the dusk. she lay back in the armchair, her eyes closed, wondering why nigel's music, which she had used sometimes to hate, soothed her so inexpressibly now. she always asked him to play when she felt her heart was becoming hard--music seemed to melt down that stony sense of outrage which sometimes grew like a cancer into her thoughts. she would not, dared not, have a hard heart, and music was the only thing at present that could keep it soft. she thought with gathering tears of the confession her brother had just made her, but she would not let her mind dwell on it--somehow she felt he would not like it. the episode did not belong to the surface of things, it belonged to the hidden life of a secret man, a holy, hopeless thing, to be guarded from the prying even of reverent thoughts. she knew that though she and nigel might often talk together of her sorrow, they would never talk of his. he was playing a strange tune that pattered on the silence like rain. it was the song of the man who has dreamed of love, who has wakened at last to find it only a dream, and that he lies with empty arms on a hard bed--and then suddenly realises that he has before him that which is sweeter than sleep and dreams--the joy of the day's work. he played the prelude of the day's work, through which would trill the magic memory of love--love, which is so much sweeter in memory and in dream than in realisation. at last he put aside his violin, and going over to janey, he knelt down by her and kissed her tired face. "oh, nigel ... nigel!" "you'll come with me to london, and help me in my new life?" "i want a new life too." "we'll start one together." "and--and you'll play the devil out of me when he comes?" "always--and we won't have any secrets from each other, janey." she smiled faintly. her brother always amused her when he spoke of secrets. there was silence for some minutes. the moon was leaving the window, climbing high among the stars. a little wind began to flutter round sparrow hall, whispering and throbbing. "i'm tired," said janey. "you must go to bed." "yes." "and you'll dream of the life you and i are going to live together--of success for me, and happiness for you." she rose and put her hands on his shoulders. "good-night, lad." "good-night. i think i'm going to bed too. i think i can sleep to-night. but before we go we must drink a toast, janey." "a toast!--to whom?" "to--to two people who we thought were going to make you and me happy--but are going to make each other happy instead." she did not answer for a moment. she and her brother stood facing each other in the strange freak of lamplight and moonlight. then she said-- "yes. we must _want_ them to be happy, nigel." he turned to the uncleared supper-table and poured out some of the red wine that janey drank in these days of her weakness. "we'll drink to their happiness, old sister. we won't go whining and grudging because it isn't ours. besides, we're going to have it some day--we'll make a new lot of our own." "yes, nigel"--janey's eyes had kindled--"we're not going to grudge them what they've got, or be envious and mean." they faced each other across the table. the wind gave a sudden little sigh round sparrow hall--blustered--and was still. "a toast!" cried nigel, lifting his glass, "a toast!--to those who've got what we have lost." the end proofreading team at https://www.pgdp.net the peacock feather a romance by leslie moore author of "aunt olive in bohemia" and "the notch in the stick" g. p. putnam's sons new york and london the knickerbocker press copyright, by alston rivers, ltd. second printing the knickerbocker press, new york to mrs. g. herbert thring with the author's love and gratitude _september , _ contents page prologue chapter i. the piper ii. the first-born iii. the deserted cottage iv. peter takes a residence v. the soul of a woman vi. an old general vii. a wonderful offer viii. chÂteaux en espagne ix. a request x. the lady anne xi. a concert--and after xii. a disclosure xiii. a moonlight piping xiv. le beau monde xv. confidences xvi. letters xvii. a thunderstorm xviii. the everlasting why xix. piper and author xx. farewell xxi. a wounded skylark xxii. candles and masses xxiii. dum spiro, spero xxiv. democritus xxv. at a fair xxvi. on the cloud xxvii. a miracle xxviii. the fine way xxix. found xxx. the return xxxi. democritus arrives to stay xxxii. per aspera ad astra the peacock feather prologue it was sunset. the sea, which all day long had lain blue and sparkling, was changing slowly to a warm grey shot with moving purple and gold. the sky flamed with crimson and amber. but gradually the vivid warmth sank and faded; day slowly withdrew into the soft embrace of night, and a blue-grey mantle covered sea and sky and land. one by one the stars shone forth till overhead the mantle was thickly powdered with their twinkling eyes. away across the water the gleam from the lantern of a lightship appeared at intervals, while every now and then a stronger flash from a distant lighthouse lit up the darkness. it flung its rays broadcast, across the water, across the land, bringing momentarily into startling prominence a great mass of building standing on the top of the cliffs. in the building a man was clinging with both hands to a couple of iron bars that guarded the narrow opening of his cell window. he could see across the water and up to the star-embroidered mantle of the sky. night after night for three years he had looked at that moving water. he had seen it lying calm and peaceful as it lay to-night; he had seen it rearing angry foam-crested waves from inky blackness. he had heard its soft, sighing music; he had heard its sullen roar. three years! more than a thousand nights he had looked from that narrow slit of a window, his hands fast clutching the bars, his feet finding slight and precarious foothold in the uneven surface of the wall! and to-night he looked for the last time. to-morrow he would be free, free as the sea-gulls which circled and dipped in the water along the rocky coast or rose screaming and battling against the tearing wind. he slipped down from the window and crossed to his pallet bed. free! until to-night he had never dared even to whisper that word to his inmost soul. throughout the long three years he had refused to let himself think for more than the day, the moment. he had held his mind in close confinement, a confinement even more stringent than that to which his body was subjected. now in that little cell he opened the windows of his soul and let his mind go forth. radiant, exuberant, it escaped from its cage. it came forth singing a te deum. only a few more hours and dawn would break. his body would know the liberty he had already given to his mind. he was too happy to sleep. he lay wakeful and very still on his bed, the silence only occasionally broken by the footfall of a warder in the passage outside. the night wore on. gradually the stars dropped back one by one into the sky, and away in the east a streak of saffron light appeared. it was day at last. * * * * * six hours later a man was walking along a country road. his step was light and his face held up to meet the fresh march wind that was blowing across the fields and hedges. daffodils nodded their golden heads at him from the banks as he passed, and tiny green buds on the brown branches were pushing forward to the light. the whole world was vital, radiant, teeming with growth. the man held one hand in the pocket of his grey flannel coat, his fingers pressing on two envelopes which lay there. they had been handed to him just before he left the great grey prison. he had not yet opened them. for one thing, he wanted to put a certain distance between his present self and the past three years before he broke the seals. for another thing, he was denying himself, prolonging the pleasure of anticipation. now he saw a stile before him, set in the hedge a little way back from the road, and with a patch of grass before it. in the grass gleamed a few pink-tipped daisies. the man went across the grass and sat down on the stile. he pulled the two letters from his pocket and looked at them. one was addressed in a masculine handwriting, small, square, and very firm. the other writing was delicate but larger. it was evidently that of a woman. he opened the firmly addressed envelope first, and pulled out its contents. a strip of pink paper fluttered to the ground, falling among the daisies. he picked it up without looking at it while he read the contents of the letter. "i have no desire that you should starve, and therefore send you the enclosed. kindly understand, however, that i do not wish to see you for the present. when you have partially blotted out the past by obtaining decent work and proving your repentance, i will reconsider this decision. "richard carden." the cheque was for two hundred pounds. the man laughed, but the sound of his laugh was not very pleasant. he broke the seal of the second letter. "i did not write before," the letter ran, "because i did not want you to brood over what i have to say, though you must have known that my saying it was inevitable. of course you have known from the first that you have by your own conduct put an end to our engagement. i did not write at once and tell you so myself, for fear of adding to your pain. but you must have understood. you will not attempt to see me, or write to me. it would be quite useless. i am going to be married in three weeks' time. i am very sorry for you and i would have helped you if i could, but you must see for yourself it is impossible. there is nothing now to say but good-bye. "m." when the man had finished reading he sat very still, so still that a robin hopped down near him and began investigating the toe of his boot. finding nothing in a piece of black leather of interest, it flew up to the hedge, and regarded the motionless figure with round beady eyes. at last the figure moved. the robin flew a couple of yards farther away, then perched again to watch. it saw the man tearing white and pink paper into very small pieces. then it saw him bend down and dig a hole in the earth with a clasp-knife. it saw him place the pieces of torn paper in the hole and replace the earth, which he pressed firmly down. then it heard the man speak. "at least i will give the past decent burial." the robin did not understand the words. what has a gay little redbreast to do with either the past or the future? the moment is quite enough. then the man stood up, and the robin saw his face. it had grown much older in the last twenty minutes. "and now," said the man jauntily, though his eyes belied the carelessness of the words, "for the open road." perhaps the robin understood that speech. at any rate it sang a sweet sturdy song of amen. chapter i the piper peter was sitting under a hedge, playing on a penny whistle. behind him was a bush, snowy with the white flowers of the hawthorn. in front of him was a field, warm with the gold of buttercups. away in a distant valley were the roofs of cottages and a farmhouse. the smoke from one of its chimneys rose thin and blue in the still air. it was all very peaceful, ideally english. peter was an artist. it seemed almost incredible that a tin instrument which could be purchased for a penny could be made to produce such sounds. he was playing a joyous lilt. you could hear the song of birds and feel the soft west wind blowing from distant places; and through it was a measured beat as of feet walking along the open road. yet under all the gaiety and light-heartedness lay a strange minor note, a note that somehow found reflection in peter's blue eyes. peter finished his tune and put the whistle-pipe in his pocket. from a wallet beside him he pulled out a hunch of bread and cheese and a very red and shiny apple. he opened a large clasp-knife, cut the hunch of bread in two, and fell to eating slowly. his hands were long-fingered, flexible, and very brown. there was a lean, muscular look about peter altogether. his clothes were distinctly shabby. they consisted of a pair of grey trousers, very frayed at the edges, and with a patch of some darker material on one knee; a soft white shirt, spotlessly clean; and a loose jacket, grey flannel like the trousers. a felt hat lay on the ground near him. in it was fantastically stuck a peacock feather. beside the hat was a small bundle rolled up in a bit of sacking. peter finished the bread and cheese and the apple, and put the clasp-knife back into his pocket. from another pocket he pulled out a small book, the cover rather limp and worn. he tucked the bundle behind his back and opened the book. its contents did not long engross him. the warm may sun and the fact that he had tramped a considerable number of miles since sunrise had a soporific effect on peter. his fingers gradually relaxed their hold, the book fell to the ground, and peter slept. his slumber was so deep that he did not hear the footfall of a man on the soft grass, nor did he stir when the man came near and stood looking down upon him. he was a man of medium height and build, with brown hair, small moustache, and rather light eyes. there was about him an air of finish, yet he quite escaped the epithet of dapper. for a moment or so he stood looking down upon the recumbent figure. he took in every detail, from the frayed trousers and the spotless shirt to the fantastic feather in the hat. he saw that the sleeper's face was clean-shaven, bronzed, and with rather high cheek-bones. the hair was dark. there was in the sleeping face a look of quiet weariness. to the man watching him it was the face of one who was lonely. then his eye fell upon the book. he stooped down and gently picked it up. the book was open at the following lines: "sin i fro love escaped am so fat, i never thenk to ben in his prison lene; sin i am free, i counte him not a bene. he may answere, and say this or that; i do no fors, i speke right as i mene. sin i fro love escaped am so fat, i never thenk to ben in his prison lene. "love hath my name y-strike out of his sclat, and he is strike out of my bokes clene for ever-mo; ther is non other mene. sin i fro love escaped am so fat, i never thenk to ben in his prison lene; sin i am free, i counte him not a bene." ten minutes later peter stirred and yawned. he sat up and began to stretch himself. but in the very act thereof he stopped, and a gleam of humorous amazement shot into his blue eyes, for on the grass beside him a man was sitting, calmly reading from his own rather shabby book. the man looked up. "don't let me interrupt you," said peter, with a brilliant smile. the man laughed. "i ought to apologize," he said. "the fact is, when i first saw you lying there asleep i took you for a tramp. then i came nearer and saw my mistake. i also saw the book. the temptation to talk to a man who obviously loved the open air and read chaucer was too much for me. i sat down to wait till you should awake." "very good of you," replied peter. "but you didn't make a mistake, i am a tramp." "so am i," responded the other, "on a walking tour." peter sat up very deliberately now. he broke off a piece of grass, which he began to nibble. through the nibbling he spoke: "but i presume that your walking tour is of fairly brief duration; mine has lasted rather more than two years." the other man looked at him curiously. "you love the open as much as that?" "oh, i love the open well enough," replied peter airily; "but that's not the whole reason. i can't afford a roof." now, the very obvious reply to this would have been that peter, a young man and, moreover, clearly one of education, might very well work for a roof. but it being so extremely obvious that this was what peter might do, it was also obvious that there was some excellent reason why he did not do it. the man was silent. peter appreciated his silence. "the fact is," said peter deliberately, "that prior to my starting this 'walking tour,' as you so kindly term it, i had spent three years in prison for forgery and embezzling a considerable sum of money." "ah!" said the man quietly, watching him. "there are always the colonies," went on peter carelessly. "but somehow i've a predilection for england. of course, in england there is the disadvantage that you're bound to produce references if you want work--i mean the kind of work that would appeal to me. i dare say i might get taken on as a day labourer on a farm, but even there my speech is against me; it makes people suspicious." "but how do you manage?" asked the other curiously. peter laughed. he pulled his whistle-pipe from his pocket. "i pipe for my bread," he said. "they call me peter the piper." the other man nodded. "good," he said; "i like that. there's a flavour of romance about it that appeals to me. my name's neil macdonald." peter looked at him. "then you don't mind introducing yourself to a jail-bird?" he asked jauntily; but there was an underhint of wistfulness in the words. "my dear fellow," responded neil, "i have some intuition. it's so absolutely apparent that you must have been shielding some one else, that----" peter interrupted him. the pupils of his blue eyes had contracted till they looked like two pinpricks. "i beg your pardon," he said slowly; "i said that _i_ spent three years in prison for forgery and embezzlement." he looked neil full in the face. neil held out his hand. "i apologize," he said; "it was extremely clumsy of me." peter took his hand with a light laugh. "it was rather decent of you, all the same," he said, "though, of course, utterly absurd. you're the first man, though, that's committed the absurdity. you happen, too, to be the first man with whom i've shaken hands since i freed myself from the clasp of a salvation army brother who met me outside the prison gates and talked about my soul. i hadn't the smallest interest in my soul at the moment. i wanted a cigarette and a drink more than anything in heaven or earth. he was a good-meaning fellow, of course, but--well, just a little wanting in tact. of course, there were others ready to hold out the hand of pity if i'd asked for it. but there'd have been something slippery about the touch. the oil of charity doesn't appeal to me." there was a pause. somewhere in the blueness a lark was singing, an exuberant feathered morsel, pouring forth his very soul in song. neil broke the silence. "pipe to me," he said. peter laughed. he pulled the whistle from his pocket, and his fingers held it very lovingly. he put it to his lips. first there came a couple of clear notes, like a bird-call; they repeated themselves in the distance and were answered. then the air became alive with the joyous warbling of feathered choristers, and through the warbling came the sound of little rills chasing each other over brown stones, where fish darted in the sunlight and dragonflies skimmed. next, across a meadow--one knew it was a meadow--came the sound of little feet and children's laughter. and the sound of the laughter and the babbling of the water and the song of the birds were all mingled in one delicious bubbling melody drawn from the very heart of nature. it came to a pause. you felt the children, the birds, and the brooks hold their breath to listen. and then from the branches of some tree a hidden nightingale sang alone. peter stopped, wiped the pipe on his sleeve, and put it back in his pocket. "marvellous!" breathed neil softly. again there was a pause, and again it was broken by neil. "i say, will you come back and have lunch with me?" there was a frank spontaneity about the question. again the wistful look crept into peter's blue eyes. the suggestion coming suddenly was evidently somewhat of a temptation. "i believe i'd like to," he said lightly, "but----" "well?" asked neil. peter shook his head. "i think not," he said. "there are quite nine hundred and ninety-nine reasons against it, and only one for it." "and isn't the one reason good enough to counteract the others?" peter laughed. "i fancy not. the high-road has claimed me, the hedge-side is my dining-place, the sky my roof. when it is too unkind to me, i seek shelter in a barn. i've struck up a kind of silent intimacy with cows, sheep, and horses. i've found them, indeed, quite pleased to welcome me." "it must be horribly lonely," said neil impulsively. peter looked away across the valley. "i wonder," he said. "perhaps it only appears so. formerly i walked the earth in company, and when i got near enough to a fellow-creature to believe that i had the right to call him comrade, i suddenly realized that i was looking into the face of a complete stranger. somehow the loneliness struck deeper home at those moments. now--well, one just expects nothing." neil glanced down at the book he was still holding in his hand. peter smiled. "love hath my name y-strike out of his sclat, and he is strike out of my bokes clene for ever-mo ... sin i am free i counte him not a bene," he quoted. "there's a freedom about that, a kind of clean-washedness which is very wholesome; the fresh rain upon one's face in high places after a room full of hot-house flowers." he stopped. "heaven knows why i am talking to you like this," he said whimsically. "i don't fancy," said neil calmly, "that you've ever been really in love." "no?" smiled peter. "of course, you think you have," went on neil. "indeed?" smiled peter again. "oh, i'm not going to argue with you," said the other good-humouredly, "only when the time comes that you do love, just do me the favour to remember what i've said." "'he is strike out of my bokes clene,'" quoted peter again, looking at neil lazily. "there is," said neil, "such a thing as invisible ink. there are certain words written with it on the pages of our lives. the pages look uncommonly blank, but should they chance to catch certain heat-rays, the words written upon them will stand out very black and clear." "humph!" said peter. "wait and see," said neil. "all right," said peter. and then he got to his feet. he picked up his wallet, bundle, and the hat with the peacock feather. he put it jauntily on his head. "i must be moving on," he said. neil, too, had risen. he held out the limp book. peter took it and put it in his pocket. "chaucer or you," he said, "which am i to believe?" "believe which you like," retorted neil. "time will bring the proof. i'm glad i met you." he held out his hand. peter took it. "common politeness," he said, "should make me echo that sentiment. truth obliges me to hesitate. yet frankly i like you. perhaps you have sufficient acumen to guess at the reason for my hesitation. well, good-bye." peter vaulted over a stile that led into the high-road. he turned and waved his hat in the direction of the man looking after him, then started off at a swinging pace. ten minutes took him into the valley, then he began to ascend. part way up the hill he turned and looked at the now distant field. "oh, damn!" he said half ruefully. "why the devil did i meet him!" chapter ii the first-born it was about five o'clock in the afternoon that peter entered a small market-town. there were a good many people in the streets, for it was market-day, and there was an air of leisurely business about the place; completed business chiefly, for already stalls were being dismantled, and unsold butter, eggs, and chickens were being repacked in big baskets. small groups of men stood about together discussing the weather and the prospect of the various crops. carts drove slowly down the steep high street, returning to outlying farms. peter walked up the hill. one or two people turned to look at him. something about him--probably the peacock feather in his hat--attracted attention. half-way up the street stood a big red-brick post-office. it was an imposing edifice, and seemed to dominate the other buildings with an air of government importance. as peter approached it he felt his heart beating quickly. on the steps he paused for a moment. a girl with a small yorkshire terrier tucked under her arm was just coming out. she saw peter on the steps, and kept her hand on the swinging door in order that he might enter. there was nothing for it but to go forward quickly and catch the door from her with a murmured word of thanks. peter was inside the post-office. he approached the counter. "are there any letters for the name of carden?" he asked. and he could hear his heart going klip-klop. the young woman behind the counter glanced at him. her look was rather disdainful, and she turned in a nonchalant fashion to the pigeon-holes behind her. she did not think it likely there would be letters. the young man was--a, b, c. she took a parcel and several letters from the pigeon-hole marked c and ran carelessly through them. peter saw her stop. she put back several documents and came towards him. there was a letter and a parcel in her hand. the girl looked at him. she was a little puzzled. perhaps her first instinct had been at fault. in spite of the shabby coat and hat and the extremely fantastic feather, he did not look altogether a tramp. she handed the things across the counter. "thanks," said peter. he tried hard to keep a note of excited pleasure out of his voice. he put the letter into his pocket, but kept the parcel in his hand. he came out of the post-office and turned up the hill, walking rather quickly. he passed shops and some old-fashioned houses in a row. at the top of the street was a big house wall-enclosed. he left it on his right, and passed more houses of the villa order, evidently recently built. presently they gave place to cottages. peter quickened his pace, and all the time he was fingering that brown-paper parcel. at last the cottages, too, were left behind, and there was nothing but hedges and fields before him. peter turned into one of the fields and sat down on the grass. he took out his clasp-knife and cut the string that held the parcel, pulling forth the contents. a book, green-covered, with the title in gold lettering, was in his hand. "_under the span of the rainbow_, by robin adair," so the lettering ran. the last was, of course, a pseudonym. peter looked at it; then slowly, shyly, he opened the cover. with almost just such reverence might a mother look on her new-born babe, marvelling at her own creation, and quite regardless of the fact that the same great miracle has been performed times out of number in the world, and will be performed again as frequently. this was peter's child, his first-born. through months of slow travail it had been created and brought forth. under hedges in the open air, in barns by the light of a single candle, he had worked while dumb beasts had looked at him with mild, wondering eyes. in sunshine and in cloud it had been with him; soft winds had rustled its pages, cold blasts had crept under doors and chilled his fingers while he wrote. and now at last, fair and in dainty garb, it came forth to the world, breathing the clean freshness of open spaces, of sun and wind and rain; tender with the magic of nights, buoyant with the vitality of sunrise. and yet through it all, as through his piping, lay the strange minor note, the underhint of longing. peter looked up. his blue eyes were dancing with happiness. "ouf!" he said with a sigh of supreme content, stretching his long lean limbs; "it's good to have done it." then he opened the letter. it was merely a typewritten communication from the publishers, informing him that they were sending him one copy only of his book, according to his wish, and were addressing both it and the letter to the post-office he had mentioned. it ended by hoping that the book would be successful, to their mutual advantage. the businesslike tone of the letter brought peter down to earth again. he had been temporarily in heaven. the descent, however, was not a jarring one. he replaced the book in the brown paper, put it carefully in his wallet, and started off across the fields. chapter iii the deserted cottage for some time there was nothing but open country around him, though in the far distance he saw an occasional farmhouse. at last, however, he saw the roofs of cottages, and realized that he was approaching a village. the square tower of a church, and a big house half-hidden by trees on higher ground beyond the cottages, made it probable that it was more than merely a hamlet. just before he reached it a sharp turn in the lane brought him upon a very minute copse set a pace or so back from the road, and in the copse was a small cottage or hut. there was a forlorn look about it, and the windows were broken. peter peered through the trees. there was no sign of life whatever. the place was apparently deserted. a couple of yards farther on a small and broken gate led into the copse. the gate was hanging on one hinge in a dejected and melancholy fashion. peter propped it up with a little pat of encouragement before he passed through it and up among the trees to the cottage door. it was unfastened, and peter went in. he found himself in a small square room. to his amazement it was not empty, as he had imagined to find it. on the contrary, it was quite moderately furnished. a low bed stood at one side of the room; it was covered with a faded blue quilt. a cupboard with a few tea-things on it stood against one wall. a table, old and worm-eaten, was in the centre of the room. there were two wooden chairs, and a wooden armchair with a dilapidated rush seat. there was a big open fireplace with an iron staple in the wall; from this staple was suspended an iron hook. both were thickly covered with rust. on the shelf above the fireplace was a clock; it was flanked by a couple of copper candlesticks covered with verdigris. ragged yellow curtains hung before the broken window. and everywhere there was dust. it lay thickly on the table and the chairs; the tea-things on the cupboard were covered with it. it lay upon the floor in a soft grey carpet, thicker at the far side of the room, where the wind through the broken window had swept it in a little drift against the wall. peter looked around in bewilderment. during how many years had this dust accumulated? what memories, what secrets, lay buried beneath it? he looked towards the fireplace. charred embers were within it. by the hearth lay an old newspaper. peter picked it up. it tore as he touched it. it bore the date may the nineteenth, eighteen hundred and sixty-six. forty-five years ago! had this cottage lain uninhabited for forty-five years?--thirteen years before he was even born! he glanced up at the clock. it had stopped at twelve o'clock--midnight or noon, who was to say? peter turned and again looked round the place. at the foot of the bed was another door. he opened it, and found himself in a minute room or scullery. it contained a copper, a row of shelves, a pump, and an iron bucket. the window here, too, was broken, the place as thickly shrouded in dust. peter returned to the dwelling-room. "apparently i have it all to myself," he said; "and for to-night at least i intend to quarter here, for if i'm not much mistaken there's a storm coming up from the west." peter put his wallet and bundle down on the table and went out into the copse. he began collecting bits of dead wood from under the trees, and there was abundance strewn on the ground, also fir-cones, for the trees were scotch firs. it was already drawing on to dusk, and clouds were being blown across the sky by a soft wet wind from the west. as peter had just collected his second armful of sticks, he heard steps coming along the road. he paused before entering the cottage to see who it might be. they were light steps, probably those of children. in a moment they came in sight--two little girls, chattering eagerly, and walking quickly, for the sky looked threatening. as they neared the copse one of the children looked up. she clutched her companion's arm. "look there!" she said. there was terror in her voice. the other child looked, screamed, and they both set off running frantically down the road. "great scot!" ejaculated peter; "did they take me for a ghost, or do they think i'm a poacher, and have gone to inform the neighbourhood? trust they won't disturb me; i've no mind to turn out into the deluge that's coming." a couple of large drops of rain splashed down on his hand as he spoke, and he re-entered the cottage. he placed his second armful of sticks beside the fireplace. first he cleared away the charred embers in the hearth, then began arranging the newly collected sticks with the skill born of long practice in the art of fire-making. this done, he went into the inner room and took up the bucket. the pump was stiff with rust and disuse, but peter's vigorous arm soon triumphed over the stiffness, and, filling the bucket with water, he returned to the living-room. here, with the aid of a couple of ragged cloths, he made a partial onslaught against the dust. the room became at least habitable to one not over-fastidious. moth, by some miracle, seemed to have left the place untouched, though the bedclothes were damp with mildew. the cleansing process at least partially achieved, peter undid his wallet and bundles. from them he took a pot, a tin cup, a couple of eggs, a hunch of bread, and small piece of butter wrapped in a cloth. he filled the pot with water, put the two eggs in it, and hung it on the hook in the fireplace. then he struck a match and held it under the pile of sticks. the little orange flame twined itself gently round one twig. it twisted upward to another and yet another. there was the sound of soft crackling gradually increasing to a perfect fairy fusillade. the flames multiplied, leapt from stick to stick, while among their orange and blue light poured a pearly-grey smoke. "achieved," said peter with a sigh, and he seated himself in the armchair watching the dancing flames, and every now and then flinging on an extra stick. outside the rain was beating on the roof and splashing through the broken window, while the wind, which had begun to rise, moaned gently through the fir-trees, creaking their branches. "thanks be to the patron saint of all wayfarers," said peter, "that i found this shelter. and if i knew his name i'd indite a poem to his memory." and then he fell to thinking of the young man who, earlier in the day, had intruded on his slumbers and read poems from his chaucer. that he was a pleasant young man peter had already conceded. that he had combined an extraordinary mixture of intuition with a certain lack of reticence almost amounting to want of tact, peter also conceded. that there was nothing about him of very deep psychological interest, peter knew. but--well, he was a man of gentle birth, and he had treated peter--the wayfaring peter with frayed trousers and a patch on one knee--as an equal. it had left a very decided sensation of pleasure. peter acknowledged to himself that he would have liked to accept the young man's invitation; and yet if he had--well, he would probably have drivelled more than he had done, and he had drivelled quite enough. that was the worst of unaccustomed and genuine interest from one of your fellow-men. it was like wine to one not used to it--it mounted to your brain, you became garrulous. to those who are used to wine, one glass, two glasses, nay, even three glasses, means nothing. to those who have not tasted the liquor for years, half a glass may prove unsteadying. it was not even as if it would be offered to him with sufficient frequency for him to become accustomed to it. no; most assuredly the wine of sympathy was not for him. and then he stopped suddenly in his meditations, for the water in the pot was boiling. when peter had finished his meal he pulled a brier-wood pipe from his pocket, filled it with tobacco, and lit it. he also lit a candle, which he set in one of the copper candlesticks and placed upon the table. then once more he drew his book from the brown-paper covering. for a time he sat very still, only moving a hand to turn the pages. the candle-light threw his shadow large and grotesque on the dingy wall behind him. occasionally the shadow wavered as the candle flickered in the draught from the broken window. the fire had died down to a few glowing spots set in a bed of grey ashes. outside the rain fell steadily, and the wind still creaked the branches of the fir-trees. at last peter closed the book. he rolled his piece of sacking into a bundle to form a pillow, and stretched himself on the stone floor before the hearth. it was preferable, he considered, to the mildewy bed. "i wonder," he mused, "who were the former owners of this place. no doubt they are long since dead. well, if so, on their souls, and on all christian souls, sweet jesu, have mercy!" he made the sign of the cross. in ten minutes peter was asleep. he slept well, but he dreamt, and once or twice through his dreams he heard the sound of sobbing. it was a pitiful little sobbing, as of a woman in grief, and mingled with it seemed to be faint half-articulate words. once peter half-awakened, and for a moment he fancied the sobbing was real, but reason, which was working fitfully, told him it was only the wind in the trees without. he shifted his position and fell asleep again. chapter iv peter takes a residence peter came out from the cottage door in the early morning. the rain of the previous night had ceased, only the trees, bushes, and grass were hung with myriads of drops sparkling silver and diamond in the morning sunshine. he smelt the good smell of the wet earth, and filled his lungs with the cool fresh air. by rights peter should by now have been well on his way, for, though his way led generally to no particular goal, he was always a-foot by sunrise. but something--peter did not know what--held him to that cottage. it was almost as if the desolate place cried to him: "stay with me; i, too, am lonely." certainly something indefinable but insistent was drawing him to remain. "and why not?" said peter half aloud. and then he heard the creaking of a cart, and the gruff voice of a carter encouraging his horse. in a moment it came in sight. the cart was empty, and the man was sitting on the side as he drove. "good morning," said peter pleasantly, as the cart and man came abreast of him. the carter started, pulled up suddenly, and the horse came to a standstill. "well now," he said in amazement, "whatever do-ee be doin' there?" "i sheltered here last night," said peter. "can you tell me to whom this cottage belongs?" the man shook his head. "it don't belong to no one, and that's certain sure." "but," argued peter, "a cottage which is obviously built by human agency must have an owner." again the man shook his head. "it don't belong to no one," he reiterated. peter raised his eyebrows incredulously. "but why not?" he demanded. "'tis evil," said the man in a solemn whisper. "evil!" echoed peter. and the word seemed as out of place in the morning sunshine as a cynic would seem in fairyland. the man nodded. "'tis evil, for sure. 'tis haunted." "and by what is it haunted?" demanded peter, curious. "a bad woman," said the man. "her comes there o'nights, and her moans for that her soul's to hell." again the word fell like a discord in the harmony of sunshine and singing birds. peter frowned. "then," he asked, "as the cottage possesses no owner i suppose i can live here if i choose?" the man scratched his head. "no one can't live there what bain't in league with t'devil," he announced. peter smiled brilliantly. "oh," he said with fine assurance, "but i am." and he made the carter a low bow, sweeping upward his hat, which he had hitherto held in his hand. the fantastic peacock feather came into view, also peter concluded the bow with a very diabolical grin. the man whipped up his horse, casting a terrified glance over his shoulder as he drove off. peter waved his hat with a mocking laugh. "and now," he said, as the sound of the wheels receded in the distance, "it is possible that my averred friendship with his satanic majesty may gain me uninterrupted possession of this place. and--nonsense or not--it is asking me to stay." suddenly, however, it struck peter that it might be as well for him to lay in a small store of provisions--if such were obtainable in the village--before the statement of his friendship with the powers of evil had been spread by the too credulous carter. peter was well aware of the superstitions of village folk. therefore he set off at once down the road. the village stood for the most part around an open green, to the left of which was the grey church whose square tower he had noticed the previous day. in front of him and on higher ground, half-hidden among the trees, was a white house. it looked of some importance. on the right of the green was the post-office, and next to it a general provision shop. peter went into the post-office, where he asked for a penny stamp. the woman who kept the place was a buxom dame, rosy-cheeked and brown-eyed. peter thought she might be possessed of conversational powers. he was right. a small remark of his received a voluble response. he ventured another. it also was received in good part and the dame's tongue proved nimble. for full half an hour peter leant upon the counter, speaking but a word or two at intervals, but finding that they quite sufficed to direct the voluble flow of speech into the channels he desired. the sound of the bell above the shop door alone brought the discourse to a conclusion, as a woman, with a baby in her arms and two children dragging at her skirts, entered. she looked at peter curiously, then, pulling a shabby purse from her pocket, requested the postmistress to provide her with a penny stamp. she was, so she stated, about to write to her son in south africa. peter came out into the sunlight with vastly more information than he had possessed half an hour previously. he turned into the provision shop, where he achieved a few purchases, and then made his way again in the direction of the desolate cottage. in his mind he was running through and sorting the information he had received. first and foremost it was perfectly obvious that, provided he had the temerity to remain in the cottage in which he had passed the previous night, no one would say him nay. it was held in ill-repute. no one would dream of entering the copse at any time, and after nightfall even the road past it was to be avoided. the reason for this, as far as peter could gather, was as follows. some fifty or sixty years ago a woman had lived in that cottage with her daughter, the reputed beauty of the village. the cottage had been built on a bit of unclaimed land by the woman's husband, who had died soon after building it. it appeared that the girl was a coquette, trifling with the solid affection of the village swains. that at least was the version of the postmistress. one day some young gentleman had come to stay at the inn. what brought him if it was not satan himself no one knew. at all events, before long he and the village helen were seen walking together on summer evenings. then came a day when the young man left the inn, and it was discovered that the girl was missing. good authority stated that she had gone with him. it also stated that after three months he deserted her. from then began her downfall. the mother, left in the cottage, faded slowly from grief, and after five years died. on the evening of her death a thin wan woman great with child was seen to enter the village. none, it appeared, had spoken to her. she had passed through the village and towards the cottage where the dead woman lay. the friend who was keeping watch saw the door open and a pale woman with frightened eyes approach the bed. there had been a terrifying shriek and the intruder had dropped to the ground. during the hours of the night a little life had come forth, which looked momentarily and wearily on the world. with a sigh it had gone out again into the silence, where at dawn the weary mother had followed it. but remorse, so it was said, had chained her to the spot where her own mother had died, and throughout the following nights her spirit could be heard sobbing and moaning. for more than forty years the place had been considered cursed, and had been steadfastly avoided. even the contents of the cottage had remained untouched. peter had ventured a word of pity for the desolate creature whose story he had just heard. but pity was, apparently, the last emotion roused towards her. horror of her sin and degradation, a horror enhanced by the superstition vivid around her memory, was all the buxom postmistress felt. and should any one be wickedly daring enough to enter the cottage and live there--well, the curse of evil would undoubtedly fall upon him, though assuredly no one would interfere should any one prove himself a sufficient friend of evil for such a venture. so much had peter gathered regarding the cottage and its story. he had then put another question regarding the white house on the hill. it belonged, so he was told, to a lady anne garland, who lived there with a companion. at the moment she was away from home, though she was expected to return in june. and then the other customer had entered the shop, and the flood of the good woman's discourse had been stemmed. peter had reached the copse by now and turned in at the broken gate. as he entered the cottage it seemed to him that there was an air of expectancy about the place, as if it was waiting for the answer to a question. involuntarily peter spoke aloud. "it's all right," he said. "i am going to stay till some one comes to kick me out." and then--of course it was mere fancy, but a little breeze seemed to pass through the room, like a sigh of relief or content. chapter v the soul of a woman thus peter entered upon his estate, since there was evidently no man would say him nay. he, the wayfarer, who for two years had slept by the hedge-side or in barns, found himself possessed of a castle. it might be conjectured whether he would find the change cramping, stifling. he did not. the windows, which he mended, he set wide open to the sun and wind. big fires of sticks and fir-cones aired and freed the place from the odour of damp and decay that hung about it. he took the precaution of buying a couple of blankets and a mattress. also, as he was once more to become a civilized being, at all events in his own eyes, he bought three suits of the garments called pyjamas. they pleased peter enormously. blue, pink, and green, he placed them on the table and looked at them. they told him as plainly as their flannel tongues could speak that he had returned to his birthright. he had purchased them in the market town already mentioned, which lay some eight miles distant from the cottage, and the purchase had been made with an air of swagger. piping had proved a not unremunerative occupation. there was now, however, another source of income. certainly the income would not be large at present, but it well sufficed. peter would therefore pipe no longer for pay, but merely for pleasure. he had also laid in a store of fair foolscap paper and a large bottle of ink. the joy of creation had taken possession of him. his brain was again fertile. it was partly on this account that he had been ready to take up a fixed abode, since fate had flung one in his path. he owed it to the children of his brain to give them every chance, though his first child had been brought forth amidst difficulties and hardships. the news that a stranger, wearing a peacock feather in his hat, had taken up his abode in the cottage of ill-omen spread like wild-fire through the village. women glanced at him with frightened eyes, men regarded him with suspicion. the owner of the provision shop, indeed, held a kind of neutral ground. until it should be proved that peter's shillings were accursed, he might as well have the advantage of them. the children looked at peter with awe, mingled with curiosity. there was a kind of fearful joy in watching one who was a friend of that terrible personage the devil. at night, truly, he was to be avoided, but in daylight, with his bronzed face and brilliant peacock feather, he looked not unprepossessing. moreover, he could pipe. wee rob, the miller's lame son, had first heard him, and had called to the other children. there had been a reconnoitring party down the lane. on tiptoe feet, breath suspended, eyes round with awe, they had gone. through the bushes they had seen him at the cottage door, the pipe at his lips. and the music had been full of they knew not what of magic, joy and gladness. with parted lips and eyes full of childish wonder they had listened. fear had vanished to the four winds of heaven, blown far far away by the sweet notes of the pipe. and then peter had stopped and moved. there had been the scuttling of little feet and the tapping of a crutch. but the tapping of the crutch had been reluctant in its retreat, for the magic of the piping lingered with wee rob. by day, then, peter wrote in his cottage, piped his tunes, or walked the moorland above the village. by night he slept and dreamt of the book he was writing, though often through his dreams he fancied he heard the sound of that pitiful sobbing. in his waking moments he told himself it was fancy pure and simple, yet it troubled him. what if there were indeed an imprisoned soul somewhere seeking aid, one for whom no man had said an individual prayer? peter had no very definite creed. there lingered with him certain faint memories of lessons taught him by his mother, of which the little prayer he had prayed the first night in the cottage was one. beyond that all was indefinite, vague. somewhere external to this world were unseen powers, some great force, a strength to whom men appealed under the name of god. the supernatural, however, had, or appeared to have, no very distinct individual relation towards himself. he had certainly prayed when he was in the prison. human aid being powerless to "put things right" (he formulated his ideas no more than that), he had appealed to this external power. he had found a certain comfort in it. he acknowledged its might, its capacity to do so. having prayed, he felt sure of the answer. his attitude towards the powers was friendly. there is no other word which will as well describe his attitude of mind. surely, then, he had a right to expect a friendly reply. and then the reply had come. for a time peter had been stunned. it had been so entirely unexpected. he felt almost as a man would feel who had received a blow from one from whom he had a right to expect a handshake. a curious bitterness was his first predominant sensation. this did not last, however. peter was too innately sweet-natured to harbour bitterness long, even against those vague external powers of which he knew so little. a nonchalant philosophy took its place. they had failed him, therefore he must turn elsewhere for aid; he must turn to the visible means around him, the things of nature, the sunshine, the trees, the flowers, the birds. in short, the recuperative power of his own healthy nature sustained him, since the powers to whom he had turned seemed to have failed. and yet he did not deny their existence. only it would appear that their attitude towards him individually was not what he had imagined it to be. now, however, vaguely, indefinitely, he began to wonder whether their aid could not be invoked again, not for himself, but for another, the soul of the woman whose fancied sobbing troubled his dreams. he told himself, as already stated, that the sobbing was pure fancy, the outcome of the pitiful story he had heard, his own imagination, and certain faint memories of his mother's teaching regarding souls in purgatory. solitude no doubt coloured these memories, rendered him possibly slightly morbid regarding them. yet the fancy was strong upon him that he, in that place where the soul of the woman had left her body, might in some way aid. yet how? there was the crux of the question. and then peter bethought him of a friend of his, one whose creed, though he himself had inquired little regarding it, he knew to be clear-cut, defined. perhaps, peter told himself, his own prayers were too vague, too nebulous. for himself he was content, or at least sufficiently passive now, to let things remain as they were. for himself, his prayer had failed; he would not be cowardly enough to whine, or recriminate. it was just possible that even the failure belonged to some great plan of which he did not see the outcome. he perceived in the same nebulous way that if this were the case rebellion would be not only cowardly, but futile. yet while remaining passive for himself, something within him stirred him to action for another. he had heard his friend speak of masses for souls in purgatory. it conveyed nothing very definite to peter's mind, yet he felt that if there were some method of aiding this soul his friend would know of it. accordingly peter wrote a letter. he gave no address; he merely wrote stating the facts of the case, and asking aid. after that he waited. now again he was perfectly aware that the whole thing might have been pure fancy, but one day peter became conscious of a change of atmosphere in the cottage. a repose, a peace, hitherto foreign seemed to have descended upon it. when precisely the change occurred peter did not know, he merely suddenly became conscious that the change was there. of course it might have been pure fancy, but peter did not think it was. chapter vi an old general i general carden, v.c., c.b., d.s.o., was sitting at breakfast in his house in sloane street. he was not a young man--in fact, he had just passed his seventy-seventh birthday--but there was about him an air of trim spruceness, an uprightness that many a younger man might have envied. his height in his stockinged feet was exactly six feet one. he was handsome, too, with his fine aquiline features, his snow-white hair, and his drooping moustache. his blue eyes, under shaggy eyebrows, were perhaps a trifle faded from the colour of their youth, yet they struck a very decided note in contrast to his face, which was like old ivory, and to the pallor of his hair. a little pile of letters lay on the table beside him, also a small silver paper-knife. ten minutes previously he had cut the envelopes with careful precision and glanced through the contents. apparently he had found in them little of interest, and now his attention was entirely absorbed by a couple of frizzled rolls of bacon on the plate before him. the door opened noiselessly and the butler entered. he carried a tray on which was a plate, and on the plate was a small brown egg in a silver egg-cup. general carden was somewhat particular as to the size and colour of the eggs of which he partook. the butler placed the plate on the table, then stood in an attitude suggestive of military attention. "any orders for the car, sir? alcott is here, sir." "the car at eleven," said general carden, still busy with the bacon. "and, goring, see that those library books are put in." "very good, sir. is that all, sir?" "yes; nothing else." the butler withdrew, and general carden continued his breakfast. marmalade and a second cup of coffee followed the egg. general carden made a good deal of the fact that he enjoyed his breakfast. it was to him a sign that old age was not yet encroaching. breakfast over, he crossed the hall to a small study, where he took a cigarette from a silver box and lighted it. then he sat down in a chair near the window with the morning paper. it seldom afforded him much satisfaction, however. england, in his opinion, was going to the dogs, and it only annoyed him to see the printed record of its progress towards that deplorable end. after a few moments he threw the paper from him with a faintly muttered "damn it, sir!" he had seen that in a by-election a seat had been won by one of the labour party. "going to the dogs, sir; entirely to the dogs!" he muttered. and then he looked out of the window at the people in the street, which street was bathed in may sunshine. the gardens opposite looked extraordinarily green and spring-like, and nurses with perambulators and children of various sizes were passing along the pavement by the iron railings. they and the sunshine struck a very definite note of buoyancy and youth, and for a moment general carden felt not entirely as young as he could wish. the room seemed a little lonely, and the house rather large for one occupant--servants, naturally, did not count. general carden did not exactly express this thought to his mind in words. he was not a man given to sentimentality either in thought or speech. it was merely represented by a little indefinite and not very pleasant impression. he wheeled his chair round to his writing-desk, which he unlocked, and began looking through various letters with a show of businesslike energy. * * * * * some half-hour or so later he appeared in the hall. the butler was there already with an overcoat, a silk hat, and an air of reserved dignity. he put general carden into the overcoat and handed him the hat. "have you put the books in the car?" asked general carden. "yes, sir," replied goring. there was the faintest suspicion of reproof in the reply. "ah! yes, of course, of course; i mentioned it at breakfast." general carden took up his gloves and passed into the sunshine down the steps, an upright figure in grey overcoat, white spats, and hat shining glossily in the light. "good morning, alcott; the car running well?" "first rate, sir." "that's right; that's right. you can take a turn in the park and afterwards go to mudie's." "very good, sir." general carden got in, and the car purred gently up the street. he settled himself comfortably into a corner, and glanced at the books on the seat opposite to him. he had a subscription at mudie's, and kept himself thoroughly up in the present-day novel. he did not care to hear a new book mentioned and have to allow that he had not read it. of course, the present-day literature could not compare with that of the older novelists--that was hardly to be expected. scott, dickens, thackeray--he ran through them in his mind--where was the writer of the moment who could compare with them? who could touch the romance of scott, the humour of dickens, the courtliness of thackeray? where was there a man in present fiction able to stand beside the fine old figure of general newcome? no; romance, humour, courtliness, had vanished, and in their place were divorce accounts, ragging--an appalling word,--and suffragettes. the world was not what it had been in his young days. he did not, however, express this opinion blatantly; to do so would have savoured of old-fogyism. oh, no; he flattered himself he kept abreast of the times, and only deplored certain modern innovations, as they were deplored by all those who still held to the fragments of refinement and courtliness that remained in the world. as the car turned into the park, general carden sat rather more upright. he watched the carriages and their occupants with attention, his old eyes keen to observe and note any of them he knew. and when he did, off came that glossy silk hat with a bow and a gesture worthy of a courtier. however much abreast of the times he might choose to consider himself, in his heart he knew he was of the old school, and one even older than that of his own youth. he belonged, this courtly old man, to the delightful old school where men treated women with chivalry and protection, and where women in their turn accepted these things with delicate grace and charm; where conversation had meant a pretty display of wit, a keen fencing of words, where brusquerie was a thing unknown; and where a fine and subtle irony had stood in the place of a certain curt rudeness noticeable in the present day. yet all that was of the past. it would be as out of place now as would be one of those dainty ladies of old years, in powder and brocade, among the tight-skirted women in bond street. but very deep down in his heart general carden knew it was the school which he loved, and of which he allowed himself occasionally to dream. those dreams were dreamt mainly on winter evenings in a chair before the study fire. and then, very surreptitiously, general carden would bring a tiny gold box from his pocket--a dainty octagon box with an exquisite bit of old enamel, blue as a sapphire, let into the lid--and, opening it, he would take an infinitesimal pinch of brown powder between his first finger and thumb. he was always most extremely careful that no single grain of it should fall on his white shirt-front. goring's eyes were at times unaccountably sharp. he was not going to be caught snuff-taking by a man who might look upon it as a sign of old age advancing. the little gold box, when not on his own person, was kept locked in a small antique cabinet in his dressing-room. apparently there were many people in the park that morning whom general carden knew. a big car hummed past with a small woman in it, a woman who looked almost tiny in the car's capacious depths. she had a pointed little face and masses of fair hair. off came general carden's hat. this was muriel lancing. he had known her as muriel grey, when she was a small girl in short skirts. she had married a certain tommy lancing a refreshing young man with red hair and freckles and a comfortable private income. general carden's eyes smiled at the girl. in spite of a certain airy up-to-dateness, he liked her. she was so dainty, so piquante, and such an inscrutable mixture of child, woman of the world, and elfin. one never knew which of the three might not appear on the surface. also he liked tommy, who always contrived to put a certain air of deference into his manner towards the general, which secretly pleased that critical white-haired, old veteran immensely. after a few moments he saw another of his friends, and again the hat came off, this time with perhaps even something more of courtliness. the woman in the victoria was very nearly a contemporary his. quite a contemporary, general carden reflected--ignoring the fifteen years which lay between them, and which were, it must be stated, to the advantage of mrs. cresswell. she was a woman with white hair rolled high, somewhat after the style of a gainsborough portrait, and a clear-cut aristocratic face. she belonged unquestionably to his school, and their conversations were an invariable delicate sword-play of words. even if she were generally the victor--and in the art of conversation he was willing to concede her the palm--yet he flattered himself he was no mean opponent, and he had a pleasurable memory of some very pretty turns of repartee on his own part. she was a friend of long standing, and one he valued. next came a much younger woman in a car, with a small boy beside her. this was millicent sheldon; the boy was her nephew. general carden's blue eyes were a little hard as he observed her, and there was just a suspicion of stiffness in his arm as he raised his hat. she responded with a slightly frigid bow, her face entirely immovable. there were reasons--most excellently good reasons--why there was a certain chilliness between these two. they need not, however, be recorded at the moment. many other carriages and cars passed whose occupants general carden knew, also a few foot-passengers, grey-haired veterans like himself, who walked upright and rather stiff, or younger men slightly insouciant of manner. as his car was turning out of the park another carriage turned in. in it was a young woman and an older one--much older; in fact, rather dried up and weather-beaten. this time general carden did not raise his hat, though he observed the two women with interest. he had frequently noticed the carriage and its occupants during his morning drives in the park. the younger woman attracted him. it was not merely the fact that she was beautiful, but there was an air of distinction about her, a well-bred distinguished air, that appealed to this old critic of women and manners. the men on the box wore cockades in their hats and plum-coloured livery. there was also a tiny coronet on the panel of the carriage door. in spite of the fact that general carden's sight was not entirely what it once had been, he noticed the coronet. he noticed, too, that the woman's hair was black with blue lights in it, that her skin was a pale cream, and her mouth a delicious and quite natural scarlet; also that her small well-bred head was exquisitely set on a slender but young and rounded throat, and that it, in its turn, was set quite delightfully between her shoulders. there is no gainsaying the fact that general carden was a very distinct connoisseur in matters feminine. he wondered who she was, and even after the carriage had passed he thought of her very finished appearance with pleasure. and it was by no means the first time that he had wondered, nor the first that he had experienced the feeling of pleasure at the sight of her. in two or three minutes, so swift are the ways of cars, he was stopping opposite mudie's in kensington high street. a carriage with a pair of bay horses was waiting beyond the broad pavement outside the shop. general carden recognized it as belonging to mrs. cresswell. evidently she had left the park before him. he got out of the car and crossed the pavement to the shop. mrs. cresswell was also changing library books. she saw him approaching and gave him a smile--a smile at once brilliant, gay, and charmingly intimate, as was the privilege of an old friend. "so we meet again," she said in her crisp, pleasantly decided voice, and she held out her hand. "and how are you this fine may morning?" "in most excellent health, thank you," replied general carden, taking the hand held out to him. "there is no need for me to ask how you are. you look, as you always do, radiant." he accompanied the words with a gesture almost suggestive of a bow. "how charming of you!" sighed mrs. cresswell, a little laugh in her eyes. "i always feel at least ten years younger when i meet you. and you are on the same errand bent as i. well, here is one book i can certainly recommend. i am just returning it myself. it is by a new author, and is quite delightful--finished, light, and with a style all its own." she held up a green-covered book as she spoke, and general carden read the gold-lettered title, _under the span of the rainbow_. now, to be perfectly candid, the title did not appeal to him who read it. in general carden's mind it suggested fairy-tales--light, airy, soap-bubbly things, iridescent and pretty enough for the moment, but quite unable to withstand the finger of criticism he would inevitably lay upon them. yet the book was recommended by a woman, and that woman mrs. cresswell. "any recommendation of yours!" said general carden gallantly. and he put the book aside while he looked for a second one. a young shopman made various deferential suggestions, and presently mrs. cresswell and general carden were out again in the sunshine, general carden bearing four library books. "i shall expect to hear what you think of my recommendation," said mrs. cresswell, as he handed her to her carriage and placed two of the books on the seat beside her. her voice held perhaps the faintest intonation of significance. "come and see me next tuesday; i am at home, you know." "with all the pleasure in the world," replied general carden. and then she gave him another of her gracious smiles as the bays moved off down the sunny street. ii it was not till after dinner that night that general carden opened the book. he was then sitting in a large and comfortable armchair in his study. a shaded electric lamp stood on a table at his elbow, and he was experiencing the sense of well-being of a man who has just partaken of a most excellently cooked dinner. he fixed his gold-rimmed glasses on his finely chiselled nose and opened the book, though with but faint anticipation of interest. after a page or two, however, he became absorbed, almost fascinated. the writing appealed to him; it was pleasant, cultured. there were here and there some very neatly turned phrases. and then, quite suddenly, one paragraph arrested his attention. it was in itself a quite insignificant little paragraph and merely descriptive. here it is, however: "near one corner of the house, grey-walled, weather-beaten, stood a great pear-tree, its branches almost touching the diamond-shaped panes of the narrow window--the window of the octagon room which held for him so many memories. in spring-time the tree was a mass of snowy blossoms, and among their delicate fragrance a blackbird sang his daily matins. later in the year the tree would be full of fruit, many of which fell to the ground, and, bruising in the fall, would fill the air with a sweet and almost sickly scent. in the trunk of the tree was a small shield-shaped patch, where the bark had been torn away, and the initials r. and j. cut in the smooth underwood. they belonged, so the boy had been told, to the twin brothers, whose gallant history had fascinated him from childhood." general carden paused. there was a look of dim pain in his blue eyes. after a moment he re-read the passage carefully, and with infinitely more attention than the few sentences would appear to merit. then he turned to the title-page and read the name of the author. apparently it told him nothing he desired to know, and he continued his reading. much farther on he came to another paragraph at which he again paused abruptly. "'cricket,' said the young man airily, 'is a universal game, and means, speaking in general terms, the avoidance of anything which--well, hints of meanness or unfair play to our neighbours.' they were his father's exact words, and he knew it. at the moment, however, he chose to make them his own." general carden put down the book. his hands were shaking slightly. he told himself he was an old fool. hundreds of fathers had used those words to their sons. they represented the first principle learnt by an englishman. but then, there was the pear-tree, the shield-shaped wound in its bark, the initials, the old weather-beaten house. memory began to exert her sway. he was sitting in a study window watching a tall, slim woman as she laughed at a thin slip of a boy climbing, monkey-like, among the branches of the old tree. he could hear the very sound of her laugh and the exultant ring of the boy's voice. he pulled himself together. that house--the old place down in the country--was in the hands of caretakers. it did not do to think about the past at his time of life. he was certainly perturbed to use that phrase. he turned to the address of the publishers, then glanced at the telephone on his writing-desk and from it to the clock. the hands pointed to ten minutes to ten. of course, it was too late to ring up a business house, much too late. besides, pseudonyms were sacred to publishers, or should be. quite possibly, too, it was not a pseudonym. it was absurd that he should suppose that it was. it was a good book, however, a very good book. he should like to see what the reviews had to say about it. it was always interesting to hear public opinion on a good book; and, to a certain extent, reviewers constituted the public. there were places--he had heard of them--where reviews were collected. he must find out the name of one of them. yes; he would like to see whether the reviewers did not endorse his own opinion. he would tell mrs. cresswell he had appreciated her recommendation. possibly he would write a note to-morrow and tell her. it would please her to hear that he had liked the book she had advised him to read. and then another thought struck him, and he sat suddenly upright. had not she once seen that pear-tree--once, long ago? surely she, too, did not think--did not guess---- he would not write to her after all. tuesday would be time enough to tell her that he thought the book--yes, quite fairly promising for a new author. fairly promising, that was the expression. chapter vii a wonderful offer late one afternoon peter set off to walk to the market-town. he was expecting a letter from his publishers. he had given them the market-town post-office as his permanent address. it was a glorious day, and the sunlight lay warmly on the fields. during the day he had been writing, but his work had not gone well. that which in brain-imagery had seemed original and lifelike, in articulation appeared to him commonplace and dull. who would care to read the drivel he was committing to paper? his thoughts, his fancies, of what interest would they be to the multitude? of what value even to two or three? peter was in a mood dangerous for his own creation. his first book had come directly from his inner being, written for the pure love of inscribing in lucid words the thoughts which filled his brain. the same reason had urged him to write again. then suddenly before him like a menace rose up an image--the public. his work would go out to it, had already gone out to it. how would it be received? and if with smiles the first moment, who could tell whether the smiles might not the next be changed to frowns? he felt like a man whose chance witticism has won him the post of jester. what anxiety must precede each lightly spoken word that follows; the knowledge that the wings of spontaneity had been clipped, though the knowledge perchance was his alone; the inward wince at a rebuff, the joy at applause! jester to the many-faced public! was this to be his rôle? truly, if a little knowledge be a dangerous thing, a little success appeared quite as dangerous. had he the strength to forget his audience; to speak only as and when inspiration bade him; to keep silence when her voice was still? if indeed he had to play the part of jester, could he be a daring one, heedless alike of frowns and smiles? could he risk the cap and bells being taken from him? could he bear hooting and derision? "i will," cried peter to his soul. "i will jest how and as i please. servant will i be to inspiration alone, and slave to none. away with cowardice, peter, my son, and dismiss the many-headed public from your mind." it was therefore in an extremely healthy frame of mind that peter approached the market-town. the letter he had expected was awaiting him. he put it in his pocket unopened, for he knew it to be merely a business communication of no particular importance, and set off once more for home. it was not till after his supper that he again thought of it, and he pulled it carelessly from his pocket. within the envelope was the typewritten communication he had expected, and also a letter. it was addressed to robin adair, esq., care of the publishers. peter turned the letter over curiously. the post-mark was london, the writing educated, delicately firm. he broke the seal and drew the letter from the envelope. here is what he read: "london, "_may th_. "this letter can have no formal beginning, inasmuch as it is not written to a man, but to a personality--the personality that breathes through the book signed by robin adair. nor, in spite of appearances, is it a letter from a woman, but from a personality as impersonal--if the contradiction may pass--as that to which it is addressed. "and in the first place i am trusting that you--for impersonal as one may wish to be, one cannot dispense with pronouns--that you are possessed of sufficient intuition to discover that i am neither an autograph-hunter nor one desirous of snatching a sensation by stolen intercourse with a celebrity. i am not greatly flattering your intuitive powers therein; for nowhere is true personality so intimately revealed as in an intimate letter. art can almost invariably be detected, and there is no fleshly mask to dazzle the perceptions and obscure the soul. an intelligent abstraction from a letter would probably give the truest image of the subjective side of any nature, which after all is the side with which as an individual one is concerned. if, therefore, after reading thus far, you are disposed to regard this letter as an impertinence, then it is one which is entirely without excuse, and i should desire you to tear it up forthwith. "if, on the other hand, you have preserved an open mind so far, then i shall not attempt excuse, but furnish you with reasons. in fancy or in reality i have detected in your book, running through its sweetness and underlying all its strength, a great heart-cry for sympathy, the cry of a lonely soul. what it is that has wounded you i cannot tell, but i feel in every fibre that the wound is there. "now, i make you an offer--one of intimate comradeship with one of another sex, under conditions of such stringency as plato's self might have approved. i am a woman whom you have never seen, whom you will never see, of gentle birth, with a share at least of education and refinement, and, moreover, one who has been so profoundly moved and influenced by your writing that she feels with an extraordinary degree of confidence the existence of a mind-_rapport_ between herself and you. "for the moment that is enough. should you wish to accept my offer, write to me at an address i shall subjoin, whence the letter will be forwarded to me. on your side the compact must be marked by one condition: you must pledge me your word never to make any attempt to discover my identity. "as i dislike pseudonyms, i leave this letter unsigned." peter laid the letter upon the table and stared at it. "amazing!" he ejaculated. then he took it up again. it was written on bluish paper, and held the faintest--just the very faintest--hint of perfume, lavender delicately fragrant. "and a woman," said peter, "has written this letter to me--to me!" his brain whirled slightly. there is no other description for its state at that moment. gradually it steadied itself. he began to realize the reality of what had happened. he was not dreaming: the letter was actually in his hand, the words traced in a clear and fine writing. impersonal, indeed! she--this unknown woman--might call it so if she pleased. to peter it breathed personality, a personality vivid and rare. its intimate aloofness--again a contradiction--was full of charm. an autograph-hunter! bah! had the merest suspicion of such a thought crossed his mind he would indeed have been unworthy so much as to lay a finger upon the epistle. to say that peter was touched would be a poor way of expressing the emotions that filled him. for years, remember, he had lived in mind-isolation from his fellow-men, and here out of the invisible came the offer of a soul-intimacy, delicately, graciously made, and made by a woman. that she was _grande dame_ and beautiful his every instinct told him. there was an undernote of assurance about the letter that made the fact convincing. it needed not her statement that she was of gentle birth. very assuredly she was one accustomed to deference and homage. and she had written thus to him. wonderful! peter got up from his chair, his eyes alight with pleasure. he went to a cupboard and took out a bottle of port and a wine glass. these--like the pyjamas--constituted part of the hall-mark of civilization. he had bought the wine with the intention of drinking to the health of his published book, but the inclination had passed. there is something unsatisfactory about toasts drunk in solitude. but now peter knocked the red seal from the cork and drew it from the bottle. he reseated himself at the table and poured the wine into the glass. he lifted it in his right hand, holding the letter in his left. he approached the glass to the letter, then raised it to his lips. "to my unknown lady!" he said. ten minutes later peter pulled pen, ink, and paper towards him. oh, the joy of answering this letter, the luxury of it! and then he began to write, very simply and directly, attempting no well-turned thought or phrase, but writing as he would have spoken, from his heart. "_may th._ "can you, i wonder, have the smallest conception of what your letter means to me? if you have, then perhaps you will realize that my 'thank you' holds in the fullest sense all that those two words can express. yet please believe that the cry you have detected in my writing escaped from me unawares. consciously to have made such a plaint would to my mind have savoured of cowardice. may the gods guard me from it! "does not emerson say, 'it is vain to attempt to keep a secret from one who has a right to know it; it will tell itself'? dare i believe that you possess that right, that the same spiritual law which has made you conscious of a mind-_rapport_ between us has given you the key to it? i accept your offer from my heart. the condition shall be strictly observed. "truly you do not greatly flatter my power of intuition when you imagine me possessed of sufficient intelligence to discover that you are neither an autograph-hunter nor anything akin to it. i should be a base dullard had such a thought crossed my mind. "that my book pleases you affords me intense pleasure. fresh life will be instilled into my future work by the hope that one day you will read it. "my pen is halting. i write as i should speak, and my tongue is unaccustomed to speech with a woman of gentle birth. fate has made of me a recluse--a hermit. i do not revile her. she gives me compensations of which your letter and offer are not the least. will you write again? "robin adair. "p.s.--i am sorry you dislike pseudonyms. this is one." peter re-read the letter carefully. he put it in an envelope which he addressed "to my unknown critic." he enclosed this in a second envelope, on which he wrote the address he had been given. this again he enclosed with a brief letter to his publishers, asking them to post the enclosure in london. the next day he would take it in to the market-town. peter leant back in his chair. then he poured himself out a second glass of wine, which he drank slowly. this was a gala night. finally he set down his glass and spoke aloud. "though the expense is entirely unjustifiable, i shall buy a dress suit." chapter viii chÂteaux en espagne henceforth peter walked daily to the post-office in the market-town. and never perhaps has author so eagerly awaited the sight of a letter from his publishers. for ten days, however, the journeys made by him were fruitless, and he began to cast about despairingly in his mind for the memory of anything in his own letter that could have offended. but he found nothing. his writing, during these days, did not progress. he was too restless, too anxious, to work quietly. sometimes he sat at his cottage door and piped. occasionally a small crowd of children would gather outside the hedge, drawn by the magic of the music. the ceasing of the pipe, or any movement on his part, however, was the signal for them to scatter like a flock of frightened sparrows, and he would find the lane deserted. at last, one evening, his journey to the market-town proved fruitful. a letter awaited him there, also a box bearing the name of a london tailor. peter returned across the fields at a fine pace, the letter in his breast pocket, the box under his arm. arriving at his cottage, he unknotted the string that tied it. some twenty minutes later, peter, in well-cut evening clothes and with a gleaming expanse of white shirt-front, broke the seal of the letter. you perceive he was a host, receiving in spirit the woman who had deigned to consider him worthy of notice. and now he held the letter in his hand and saw once more the delicate, firm writing. "london, "_may th._ "first i must thank you that you have not misunderstood me. and now that the understanding between us is complete, i can write more freely, more fully. "so you are a recluse. perhaps you are to be envied. i have been, and am, in the midst of that mumming-show society, where we all wear gaily-coloured masks and jest with those around us. we speak little as we feel, but largely as we are expected to speak. is it part of your compensation that you need not speak at all? for me, i am somewhat weary of the show. it is very gaudy, and the music, i think, too loud. you may ask why i attend it, and to that i have no answer, except that custom demands it of me as a right. how many people, i wonder, act not according to their own individuality, but rather as usage and those around them expect them to act? "is it possible, i wonder, to free oneself from tradition, that closely fitting garment placed upon us by our ancestors at birth, which becomes, to the majority, as much part and parcel of ourselves as our skin? clothed in it, i attend dances, dinners, bridge parties, and theatres, from which i am at the moment recoiling with a kind of mental nausea. should i strip myself of the garment, shall i not feel cold and shivery--in short, to use a common phrase, feel 'out of things'? and once the garment is definitely discarded it may not be so easily donned again; at all events, it might not fit so well. you, a writer, who in your solitude think many thoughts, give me your opinion. "mercifully, custom has at least decreed that i should spend some months in the country. in a few days' time i go down to it. there my individuality resumes what i believe to be its rightful sway. i have a garden. it is, as the poet sings, a thing of beauty, and is to me a joy for ever. "a summer evening in a flower-scented garden! can you--you writer of poetic prose--conceive anything more full of charm and delight? i have a bed of night-stocks--poor, dilapidated, withered things in the daytime, and the despair of my gardener. but in the evening on the terrace the odour is entrancing--divine. my thoughts are 'carried on the wings of perfume into high places.' you see, i can quote from your book and from memory. "no; the cry beneath its strength and sunshine was faint, barely discernible. i confess that at the first reading, which i took at a draught, i did not observe it. it was when i returned, as i did, to sip the wine of its poetic fancy that i detected the slightly bitter taste. yet bitter is not a fair word to use. bittersweet would be better, though that barely fits the flavour. the exact word--if one exists--has escaped me. "you quote from emerson, and also speak of compensation. of course, you know this: "'we cannot part with our friends. we cannot let our angels go. we do not see that they go out only that archangels may come in.... the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time.... it permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances and the reception of new influences, that prove of the first importance to the next years; and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny garden-flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide neighbourhoods of men.' "your quotation made me look up my emerson. i found your sentence, and went on to read 'compensation,' whence i have copied the above. "would your writing have been as human were it not for the hidden wound you bear? is it some compensation to know that to one soul at least your words have brought refreshment? what are you writing now? "i like your pseudonym." peter read the letter through twice then put it on the table while he prepared his supper. he laid two places to-night, laughing at himself for the fancy. his unknown lady was very present with him, you perceive. he pretended--and loved the pretence--that she was dining with him. he let himself imagine that a woman, clad in chiffon and lace, and fragrant with that delicate scent of lavender, sat in the chair opposite to him; that the candle-light was playing on her warm hair, finding reflection in her luminous eyes. no palace contained a more courteous host that night than did that little cottage; no royal guest received a greater welcome than did peter's dream lady. it was a strange, fantastic little scene. had any one peered through the cottage window, they would have seen a barely furnished room, a meagre supper-table lit by a couple of candles, and, seated at the table, a man in well-cut evening clothes--a man groomed with the fresh cleanness of a well-bred englishman. they would have seen a second place laid at the table, and in the second place, between the knife and fork, a bluish letter lying. they would have seen both glasses filled with red wine. mad? not a bit of it! peter was entirely sane, and very refreshingly healthy. but--and herein lay the difference between him and many of his countrymen--he was possessed of a fine imagination. and when peter had drunk the health of his dream lady, he began to talk to her; and for this purpose pen, ink, and paper came once more into requisition. _"may th._ "your first letter was welcome; your second is ten thousand times more so. the first was the mere fluttering of a signal, waved at a distance. this evening you are near, and i can speak more easily. "as for the garment of tradition, i fancy it may at times be discarded by ourselves and gently, and again donned without fear of it fitting less well. in fact, may it not gain greater value in our own eyes and in the eyes of others by its temporary disuse? it is when fate strips it from us, tearing it to ribbons in the process, that it cannot again be worn, or worn merely as a sorry, ragged semblance of what it once has been. it is then, to use your own parlance, that one feels 'out of things.' i, who write to you, speak from experience. fate tore my garment from me, and in so doing made the wound you have detected. but enough of that. the touch of your hand upon it has eased its smart, though possibly--nay probably--the scar will remain throughout my life. "thank you for your quotation. yes; i know it. i am glad the shade of my banian-tree--a very small one--has reached you, and its fruit brought you refreshment. the 'ever-onward' note of emerson is exhilarating. there is no repining, no sitting down with folded hands under grief, but an ever pushing forward to the light, as a green shoot pushes aside earth and stones in its journey upward through the soil to the sun. "yes, i am writing again; but the last few days i have done little. i could not tear myself away from the thought of the next letter i should receive from you. sometimes i feared that none would come, that you might have regretted your offer. it was an unworthy thought; forgive me. now, i shall write again quietly. "you ask what it is that i am writing. it is the story of a man, a wayfarer. i do not think there is much plot in the story. probably all the plot lies in the past which he has thrown behind him. fate has made of him a wanderer, as she has made a recluse of me. during his wanderings he thinks much. i am endeavouring to record those thoughts as he traverses the fields and lanes. if the gods are good to me, perhaps one day the thoughts may reach you in book form. then you will give me your opinion on them. "soon you will be among your night-stocks in your garden. their perfume will be more fragrant than the scent of ballrooms and theatres. "good-night. "robin adair. "have i thanked you for your letter? i do thank you from my heart." chapter ix a request some evenings later peter was again a host holding sweet converse with his lady. here, first, are her words to him. "london, "_june rd_. "the day after to-morrow i shall be in my garden, revelling in its beauty and in the perfume of my night-stocks. the scent of ballrooms and theatres will be left behind in this big noisy london. it has its fascination, though. this morning the streets were bathed in sunlight, and crowded with women in gay dresses till they looked like a great restless nosegay. we talk of 'spring in the country,' but here its note is just as insistent. in february the parks were brilliant with crocuses, their hardy little yellow, white, and purple flowers spreading far under the trees. they were followed by daffodils and tulips, masses of glorious colour. and for sheer beauty give me a sunset across the parks, or the blue mists veiling the great masses of building. or, again, the river between sunset and night. have you ever walked along the embankment in the evening? i walked there yesterday. westward the river and sky flamed purple, crimson, and gold; eastward a silver haze covered land and water, with pale lights shining through and reflected in the river. a small boy walking with his mother exclaimed in rapture, 'oh, mother, look at the lights!' 'what about them, dear?' came the reply. the matter-of-fact tone of the words was indescribable. thus is the early glimmering of poetry effaced from the infant mind. i write of it lightly. at the moment indignation and tears struggled for the mastery. "i read the following advertisement in a paper the other day: "'wanted, a bright sympathetic woman, not necessarily under , as companion-help in a family of three. no children, no washing, but the ordinary work of the house to be done. must be educated, as she is wanted to be one of the family and help in philanthropic work. will be needed to do plain cooking, and a "sense of humour" will be appreciated. salary a matter of arrangement. protestant.' "then followed the address. doesn't it strike you as rather funny? can you imagine any one sitting down solemnly to answer it? testimonials re a sense of humour! "'dear madam, in my former situations my sense of humour proved a great attraction. i enclose extracts from references. "jane smith is the soul of wit." "our companion-help kept us through meal-time in one perpetual roar of laughter." "laughter is the best digestive sauce. jane smith's humour provides that sauce!"' "i am glad you think i may at times discard my garment of tradition. now i come to think of it, i believe i did discard it when i first wrote to you. i do not think at that moment the ancestral garment can have been upon me. talking of that first letter, will you do me a favour? i want you to burn it. it was too solemn, too serious, written with altogether too heavy a pen. something made me write it, and i am glad of it; but i was so anxious to place myself above the possibility of a snub that my sense of humour was for the moment obliterated. i took myself and my own importance too seriously. therefore please destroy it, though it is quite possible that you have already done so. "i want to read the thoughts of your wanderer. they should be untrammelled thoughts, wide as the open spaces he is traversing. _when_ the gods are good to you i shall look for a copy of the book. i prefer my word to your 'if.' "my next letter shall be written from my terrace if the sunshine continues in this glory. good-night." the letter read, peter repeated the little ceremony of dining with, and toasting, his lady. he then proceeded to write to her. "_june th._ "dear lady,--thank you for your letter. doubtless the muses join with you in your tears and indignation when they see their children stifled at birth. i wonder what 'mrs. be-done-by-as-you-did' will have in store for those parents. yet their intentions are probably of the very best. "i should like to see the answers that advertisement will receive. protestant and philanthropic work, when advertised as such, seem inconsistent with a sense of humour. the person who answers the advertisement will either be devoid of it, or possess it in a very marked degree. "why should the first favour you ask of me be one i have not the heart to grant! i cannot burn that letter. i should watch it shrivel and twist in the flames like some protesting living thing. it would be like burning the photograph of a friend. call me superstitious, idiotic, any name you choose, but i can't do it. i will, however, return it to you, though with great reluctance, and you can do with it as you will. send me in exchange one of your night-stocks. it will be less shrivelled than your letter had i done as you ask. "dear unknown lady, when my next book is published--you see, i accept your correction--have i your permission to dedicate it to you? with the exception of the first two chapters, which were written before i knew you, it is written to you and for you alone. my wanderer speaks his thoughts directly to you, believing that they will find favour in your sight. "though i have churlishly refused the favour you asked of me, will you grant me this one? "robin adair." peter put the letter into an envelope and addressed it. after a few minutes he came out of the cottage into the little copse. the june night was very still. the after-glow from the sunset still lingered in the west; the darkness would be of short duration. suddenly the sound of wheels struck on peter's ear, and the quick clear tang of horses' hoofs on the dry road. a few moments later a carriage came into sight, and drove past him towards the village. in spite of the dusk peter saw that the men on the box wore livery, and a lamp inside the carriage gave him a glimpse of two women's forms. a couple of boxes were strapped at the back of the carriage. "without doubt," said peter to himself, "it is lady anne returning." chapter x the lady anne lady anne garland was sitting by a rosewood writing-desk in her morning-room. she had finished her letters, and was now sitting idle, gazing through the window on to the terrace, and away to the distant woods and hills, which lay serenely blue in the sunlight. she was dreaming rather than thinking, and a pleasant little dream it would seem, by the half smile in her grey eyes. the sunshine lay along the floor in a broad, vivid patch. it fell across her white dress and on her dark hair, which held the blue-black sheen of a rook's plumage. her skin was creamy-white, and her mouth, modelled like the mouth of a greek statue, was of geranium red. in fine, lady anne was beautiful. the sound of the door opening made her turn her head. a small thin woman entered. she was dressed in a tailor-made dress of some pepper-and-salt material, and wore a black straw hat, rather floppy, and distinctly out of keeping with her otherwise tailor-made appearance. her hair was grey, and her skin somewhat like parchment, but her eyes and mouth were kindly. "finished your letters?" she asked. "yes," said anne, getting up from her desk. "come into the garden. it is too lovely a day to waste indoors." she led the way through the french window on to the terrace, and sat down on one of two deck-chairs. miss haldane followed her example. "you should have a hat," she said abruptly. "no," replied anne lazily, "i like the sun. i think my skin is too thick to burn. look at the blueness on those woods and hills; isn't it glorious?" miss haldane put up her eyeglasses and looked at the landscape. "very nice, my dear. jabez said the hay harvest was unusually good this year." jabez was the head gardener. anne laughed softly. "you are so delightfully practical, matty dear. if the sun shines you think of the crops, if the rain falls you think of the crops, if the wind blows you still think of the crops. you missed your vocation when you took up the post of companion to a sentimental dreamer; you should have been a farmer." "had the good lord made me a man, i should have been one," replied miss haldane instantly. "as it is, i take an interest in the farming of your tenants. and you must allow that weather is of the first importance to them." she dropped her eyeglasses and looked at anne. "i know," owned anne; "but turnips do not appeal to me. i love my flowers to have their needs supplied, however; and that shows that i am selfish enough to be merely interested in what interests me." there was a pause. "the cottage in the copse has found an inhabitant," said miss haldane suddenly and abruptly. "i can't call him a tenant because the man pays no rent. i suppose no one knows to whom the rent would be due." "really!" exclaimed anne, replying to the first part of miss haldane's speech. "who has been bold enough to venture there?" "a vagabond of sorts, i believe," said miss haldane. "of course, the villagers are looking upon him with suspicion and distrust. he wears a peacock feather in his hat and plays the penny whistle." "how pleasant!" said anne. miss haldane snorted. "can't you have him turned out?" she demanded. "i don't think it is a good plan to have a vagabond settling in the village." "the cottage is not mine," replied anne; "as far as i know, it is no man's property. besides, does he do any harm--poach, or anything like that?" "not that i know of," returned miss haldane. "in fact, they say he buys, and pays for, certain provisions at the village shop." "then," said anne lazily, "he is not a vagabond. a vagabond is one without visible means of subsistence; this man evidently has visible means. i wonder what he is like. i fancied no man would have braved that cottage after nightfall even if he had ventured within at daylight. at all events, superstition has been very rife around it." "they say he plays the penny whistle beautifully," remarked miss haldane. anne's eyes twinkled. "you have culled much information since our arrival last night, matty dear. the man shall come and give us a concert." "my dear!" "why not?" asked anne carelessly. "an unstudied simple concert on the penny whistle would, i am sure, be full of charm. burton shall go down to-morrow and request him from me to come up to the terrace." miss haldane was shocked, perturbed. in a word, she fluttered in a manner not unlike an elderly hen with a duckling chick. "you cannot do it, anne. you cannot send a footman to the cottage and ask the man to come up here. in the first place, he is probably a socialist, and wouldn't come. in the second place--well, it isn't nice." anne laughed outright. "dear matty, your favourite adjective! with the negative prefix it applies equally to a burnt pudding, or to a woman who leaves her husband in order to run away with another man. but you're a dear, and i won't laugh at you; and you shan't be present at the concert if you'd rather not." miss haldane spoke a little stiffly. "if you will be foolish, anne, i must be present at your folly. it is the only way in which i can merit the liberal salary you give me." "dear matty, what nonsense!" said anne. again there was silence, and it lasted some time. butterflies flitted in the still air, bees droned lazily in a lime-tree to the west of the terrace, and once or twice a dragonfly skimmed past with a flash of iridescent wings. miss haldane looked at anne lying back in the deck-chair, which was placed at its lowest angle. her own was as upright as was consistent with its nature. she had a piece of crochet in her hands, and was working industriously. matilda haldane was never idle, and she never lolled. from her earliest years she had been told to "get something useful to do," if there happened to be a single spare moment in the ordinary routine of walks, meals, and lessons. later she was obliged, on her own account, to get something useful to do, and to keep doing it, if she was to live in the smallest degree as she imagined a lady should live. there had been nothing extravagant about miss haldane's ideas, either, but they had included a seat in a church where sittings were rented and threepence to be placed sunday morning and evening in the offertory-bag. the useful occupation which provided her with a means of livelihood had been monotonous--how monotonous only miss haldane knew. then suddenly, and by some intervention of providence, lady anne garland came across her path, and at a moment when lady anne was--to use her own parlance--tired of companions who were either entirely opinionated or entirely deprecating, or, worse still, who dissolved into floods of injured tears if told that anne wished to receive a guest alone. something about the little dried-up woman--probably her quiet and indomitable pluck under adverse conditions--appealed to anne. a month after their first meeting, miss haldane found herself transplanted to anne's london house, with a salary that far exceeded her wildest dreams. the only fly in her ointment was the thought that she did nothing to merit it. merely to live in a house, to be waited upon by servants, to eat dainty food, and to drive with anne in the parks, seemed to her an utterly inadequate return for the money she received. it was, however, all that lady anne wished her to do. after a time she grew accustomed to the fact that this was all that was expected of her. her own innate dignity and anne's charming and frank manner prevented her from feeling herself a dependent, and an odd but very sincere friendship was the result. this was now the third summer that she had sat on the terrace and watched anne lazing in the sunlight. her beauty, her youthful vigour, in spite of her present indolent pose, struck miss haldane anew. suddenly miss haldane spoke. "anne," she said, "i wonder you have never married." the sound of the luncheon gong followed on the speech. anne rose from her chair with panther-like grace. "so do i, matty dear--sometimes." "but why don't you?" asked miss haldane. anne walked to the window. at the window she turned. "because," she said, mock-solemnity in her voice, "though few people realize it, i have a soul." "of course you have," replied miss haldane seriously; "but what has that got to do with marriage?" anne laughed. "nothing, of course," she replied; "and all the men i happen to know would agree with you. don't look puzzled, matty dear, but come and have lunch." chapter xi a concert--and after i peter was partaking of a noonday meal of bread and cheese and beer when a knock came on his cottage door. for a moment or two he thought his ears must have deceived him, and he did not move. but the knock was repeated. peter got up and opened the door. a man in footman's garb was standing outside. he looked peter up and down with a slightly supercilious expression. "well?" demanded peter. "the lady anne garland wishes you to bring your penny whistle-pipe to the terrace at four o'clock this afternoon, and be punctual," he announced. it was not precisely the formula in which lady anne had worded the message, but burton considered it an exact enough paraphrase to be delivered to a mere vagabond. it was in his eyes an even over-courteous method of delivering the message. "indeed!" said peter. "four punctual," repeated the man with a slightly insolent air. and he turned from the door. had he lingered a moment longer peter would quite probably have kicked him. astonishment on peter's part and a swift retreat on his alone saved him. "upon my word!" ejaculated peter, looking after the retreating figure. then he went into the cottage and shut the door. "insolence or fame," remarked peter to his glass of beer, "in which light shall i regard it?" and then suddenly he laughed. after all it smacked finely of medieval days, this command from the lady of the manor to appear before her. annoyance began to vanish; even the insolence of the flunkey was in the picture. it was fame, there was no question about it. "and, robin adair, you writer of tales, here's a subject made to your hand," he quoted. oh, he'd act the part well! a hint more disarray than usual about his costume, his oldest coat and trousers--he had two day suits now, this possessor of a cottage--must certainly be worn, with the peacock feather at its jauntiest angle. he must also allow himself a slight air of swagger, as of one conferring a favour; in appearance the vagabond they regarded him, in manner a kubelik stepping with assurance before his audience. peter began to be pleased; to look forward to the appointed hour with interest. it was the writer in him, the man who sees, in any novel situation in which he may find himself, new material for his pen. "fate," quoth peter to himself, "is thrusting another rôle upon me." and then as children--and grown-ups for the matter of that--count cherry stones, he ticked them off on his fingers. "gentleman, scamp, jail-bird, tramp, author, writer of letters to an unknown fair one, and piper to the lady of the manor. peter, my son, what else have the fates in store for you?" and then he gave a little involuntary sigh, for after all, was not the chief rôle assigned to him--the one which superseded all others--that of a lonely man? "fool!" cried peter to his heart. "does not the sun shine for you, the wind blow for you, and the birds sing for you? have you not free and untrammelled communion with nature in all her varying moods?" but all the same the very enumeration of the many rôles seemed to have emphasized the one more strongly. * * * * * at a quarter to four peter, in his oldest and shabbiest garments, with the peacock feather extremely jaunty in his shabby felt hat and his whistle-pipe in his pocket, set off for the white house on the hill. it was a still sunny day, like many of its predecessors that summer. june had taken the earth into a warm, peaceful grasp. there was a restfulness about the atmosphere, a quiet assurance of continued heat and sunshine. a faint breeze came softly from the west, barely stirring the leaves on the hedges. to the east were great masses of luminous cloud, piled like snow-mountains, motionless and still. the dust lay thick and powdery in the lane, whitening peter's boots; the grass, too, was powdered, but slightly, for there was little traffic this way. peter, to whom the passing of a vehicle was somewhat of an event, barely ever counted more than two or three in the day. he left the lane behind him and came out on to the village green. as he passed across it men looked at him suspiciously, and a woman carrying a basket stepped hastily to one side as if she feared contact with him. peter smiled brilliantly, and raised his hat with an air of almost exaggerated courtliness. one man spat on the ground and muttered something that sounded like a curse, but peter went on his way apparently unheeding. he passed the lodge gates and went up the drive, under beeches green, copper, and purple, their trunks emerald and silver in the sunlight. on the terrace to the right of the house he saw two figures, one in white and one in some neutral colour. as he drew near the white-robed figure raised her hand, beckoning him to approach. peter came up to the terrace, standing just below on the gravel path. he swept off his hat and stood bareheaded. then he looked up and saw lady anne garland watching him. peter's heart gave a jump, and for no reason in the world that he could ascribe, beyond the fact that she was beautiful, oh! but undeniably beautiful. she was a young woman, tall and slender, in a white dress, and a crimson rose tucked in her waist-belt. she wore no hat. her hair shone blue-black, warm and lustrous in the sun. of the other woman peter took little note, beyond observing that she was elderly and looked at him with evident disapproval. "so you are peter the piper?" said lady anne in her low, distinguished voice. "at your service," said peter. lady anne looked at him curiously. he was altogether different from what she had expected, this man in the shabby clothes, with the brilliant peacock feather, and with the bronzed clear-cut face and sad eyes. "we have heard," said anne, and there was an air of royal graciousness in the words, "that you are a marvellous piper. are you willing to pipe for us?" she smiled at him as she spoke. and again peter's heart jumped, and began to beat at a fine rate. "with all the pleasure in the world," he replied, and he drew the pipe from his pocket. anne watched him as he laid his fingers lovingly around it. for a moment or so he stood motionless. and then he began to play. first anne heard an ordinary little march, quite conventional, but sufficiently gay and lively. then it broke into curious discords played in rapid succession. next followed a minor passage, tense, constrained, as if the strange little air running through it were struggling for greater liberty of expression. suddenly it found it, blending into a te deum, grand and glorious. all at once it stopped, breaking again into a succession of strange discords which hurt anne to hear. there was an instant's pause, as if the first half of his theme were finished. then, played in the minor key, came a gay song with an under note of marching feet, and through it a wistful yearning as for something lost. the air changed to the major, and was repeated. then came a little melody played quite separately and on its own account, a little rocking melody, not unlike a cradle song. it ceased, and a new theme began quite unlike anything that had preceded it. anne listened with suspended breath. she made no attempt to classify it as she had classified his previous themes. but above and beyond all the others it spoke directly to her heart. suddenly she was aware that the music had stopped, and that peter was looking at her like a man who has just come out of a trance. anne's eyes were full of tears. "thank you," she said, and she held out her hand. peter came forward and took it. then--it seemed that the action was almost involuntary--he raised it to his lips. miss haldane fairly gasped, sitting upright and grasping the supports of the deck-chair with both hands. the effrontery! the audacity! the--the--she had no further word in her vocabulary with which to express her indignation. yet if lady anne were displeased she did not show it. she looked at peter long and curiously, as if seeking for something she might find, something that escaped, eluded her. "you will come and play to me again?" she asked. "perhaps," said peter thoughtfully. he seemed not yet fully recovered from what had appeared like a trance. miss haldane made an inarticulate sound in her throat. this assuredly surpassed everything. she had been right, quite right, when she had considered he might be a socialist. "it must of course," said anne courteously, "be exactly as you wish." peter bowed, and the next moment moved away, walking down the avenue of beeches. anne looked after his retreating figure thoughtfully, wonderingly. "impudence!" gasped miss haldane. she felt that her goddess, her divinity, had been insulted. "no, matty dear," said anne, "the man is an artist." "an artist!" said miss haldane. she was unwilling to allow that the music had appealed to her. "yes," replied anne, musing, "an artist! heaven knows how many faults of construction there may not have been in his theme. possibly had i been educated in the technical knowledge of music i should have found it positively bristling with them. i am glad i know nothing of the technique of music. i could listen and appreciate. don't you understand, matty dear, how wonderful it was! the man's a genius!" "well!" ejaculated miss haldane. she got up and moved towards the french window. before entering she turned suddenly. "my dear," she exclaimed, "you never paid him!" "i know," said lady anne quietly. ii peter walked back to his cottage with his mind in a turmoil. it had been utterly, entirely different from the scene he had pictured to himself. he had not swaggered, he had not stepped on to his platform with an air of assurance. something had gripped him, something indefinable and powerful, and he--peter--had lost the strength to assert his own personality. it had been there, sure enough, but swayed, dominated, by something outside, beyond him. it had come out from himself, forced out it would seem, into the music of his piping. he had played himself, his own story, to this woman on whom he had never before set eyes. yet did he not know her? had he never before seen her? peter searched the recesses of his memory, penetrating to its remotest corners, but with no avail. no; in spite of all searching memory remained a blank. instinct, intuition--call it what you will--said, "you know this woman." reason said as firmly, "you do not." he had reached his cottage by now. he went in and shut the door. he would work. he wanted to soothe his mind. he would throw himself into the quiet calm thoughts of his wanderer. he pulled paper, pen, and ink towards him and turned resolutely to his manuscript. for over an hour he sat with it before him, then suddenly realized that he had written no single word. it was useless to attempt to write in this mood. a vague unrest was upon him. peter pushed the papers aside, and leaving the cottage, set off to walk across the moorland. chapter xii a disclosure _the unknown critic to robin adair_ "the terrace, "_june th_. "here, robin adair, is a night-stock from below my terrace. i enclose it while it is white and fragrant. it will reach you brown and shrivelled; but, as you say, less shrivelled than my letter would have been--in fact, as it now is. it lies on the terrace beside me, a little heap of grey powdered ashes. this flower is its resurrected form. it is slighter, subtler, more fragrant than that letter. i began to re-read it, but did not get far; it was too serious, robin adair. "i am, as the above will have told you, writing from my terrace in the cool of the evening. a lamp in the window of my morning-room affords me light. the sky is grey-blue, and away in the west, venus, who is an evening star at the moment, is shining calm and peaceful. "i had a concert on this very terrace yesterday afternoon. a so-called vagabond piped to me, wearing shabby clothes and a peacock feather in his hat...." peter laid down the letter a moment. his brain was whirling. not even on the receipt of the first letter from his lady had it whirled with such rapidity. here, then, was the explanation. of course, he had known her before. he had had glimpses of her mind, her soul, her delicate fanciful imaginings. she had embodied suddenly before him, and unconsciously his soul had recognized her, though reason had urged to the contrary. it was incredible, marvellous! in actual everyday life such things did not happen. yet here was the proof thereof, finely, clearly traced with black ink on a sheet of bluish note-paper. he picked up the letter again, and began to read further. "it was a wonderful concert. music has never before so stirred, so moved me. picture to yourself an ordinary penny whistle, from which divine music was produced. he told a life-story in his piping, yet fragmentary sentences alone reached me. it was as if i were reading a book in a language of which i knew but a few words. can you understand? "what there was in the first part of his theme, i know not; but he, that strolling player, had suffered. part of his theme beat and struggled for liberty like a caged bird, or like an imprisoned mind--a fettered expression. and when the expression, the liberty came--that was what hurt--it was smashed, broken. can you picture a caged skylark, longing, pining for liberty, then seeing the cage door open, and flying forth into the sunlight, its throat bursting with rapture, only to find itself seized by some ruthless hand, wings torn from its body? yet the bird was not dead; there was the horror. it lay still, bleeding, apparently lifeless, then lifted its head. maimed though it was, it would still sing; and its song should be no complaint, but one to encourage and cheer all other injured things. i could have wept for the pluck, the courage of the little creature. and after a time it began to grow wings--little young wings that carried it just above the earth into the open it loved. it was only a little way, but it meant such a lot to that skylark. it was here, at the end, that the music spoke most directly to my heart. the song the partially healed skylark sang seemed to be sung for me alone, and yet here the translation of the words most failed me. "the man is an artist. i wish he would play for me again. yet i dare no more ask him now than i would dare ask sarasate to come to my terrace and play. "he--this piper--is living on the outskirts of the village, in a cottage reputed to be haunted. doubtless he has charmed and soothed the restless spirits by his piping. this is a great deal to write to you regarding an unknown strolling player--though he is not strolling now--but the man himself is unusual, while his music is superb. he struck me as one of gentle birth. his speech was educated, and his whole appearance, in spite of his shabby clothes, refined. i am sure he has a story--one, robin adair, that might be worthy of your pen. "my companion--a dear, but very old-fashioned--resented his behaviour. she thought he did not treat me with sufficient respect, mainly because he did not jump at the proposal of playing to me again. i did suggest i should like to hear him; but to send for him again, to send a footman to fetch him as i did before, would be impossible. i hope burton delivered my message nicely. i worded it courteously, at all events. "how goes your wanderer, and are his thoughts progressing? that you should dedicate those thoughts to me pleases me immensely. i think it an honour that you should care to do so. "i am glad you did not burn my letter. i am glad you cared enough about it--poor dull thing though it was--to refuse to do so. i did not mean to say this to you, yet i have. "good-night." _peter (alias robin adair) to the unknown critic, whom he now knows to be the lady anne garland_ "_june th._ "dear lady,--i am in a contrary frame of mind to-night. i want to write to you, yet am in no mood to do so. "i have met your vagabond piper, and know him more intimately than you might suppose. he is an impostor, though a harmless one, i grant. his music is not bad, but i doubt his playing to you again. the fellow has a good conceit of himself. "after all, i find i cannot write to-night. thank you for the flower. "robin adair." _the unknown critic to robin adair_ "the terrace, "_june th_. "why are you so hard on my piper? i do not believe he is an impostor. and as for his music being not bad! robin adair, are you one 'who has no music in him, and is not moved by concord of sweet sounds,' or in what way has this man vexed you? the latter i believe to be the solution, robin adair, and it is not worthy of you. but i will not write more of him. i have not seen him again, and the villagers speak of him with bated breath as a friend of the evil one. if he were of my faith, i would ask father lestrange, a kindly man, to call at the cottage. but as he never hears mass he is evidently of another way of thinking, and might regard the visit as an intrusion. and for some reason he desires solitude. one dare not therefore intrude. i feel, however, that he is lonely, and have had, perhaps foolishly, a desire to lessen that loneliness. "the country is very peaceful after london, and i am revelling in my flowers, more especially my roses. they are adoring this unwavering sunshine and the warm nights. the gardeners keep their roots well watered, so they--the roses--do not suffer from thirst. "i had a letter from a friend of mine the other day, a woman with a surplus of relations all eager and willing to offer good advice and to point out various neat and narrow little paths in which she should walk and from which her soul recoils. after remarking on their latest suggestions, she writes succinctly: 'the patience of job was over-estimated. his relations died.' "why are some people so sure that their plan is the right one, and why cannot they allow others to go their own way, provided, of course, the way does not run strictly counter to the law? in that case, of course, there might be complications. "am i being very unoriginal when i lament the little originality there is in the world, or, at all events, in that portion of it which i know? and what little there is, is so frequently mere eccentricity. i believe some people would call it original to discard one's clothes and walk down bond street in war-paint and feathers, though certainly there would be a large majority who would call it merely indecent, and in that case the majority would doubtless be right. i believe i am in a discontented mood this afternoon. there is a discord somewhere in my harmonies. "are you in a better mood for recording the thoughts of your wanderer than for writing to me? i hope so. i am looking forward to reading them. i want something to soothe me. in spite of the peace that lies around me--the quiet peace of nature--i am restless. "write to me, robin adair; tell me of your wanderer." _robin adair to his one time unknown critic, or peter the piper to the lady anne garland_ "_june th._ "dear lady,--i was churlish when i last wrote. i know more of your piper than you suppose. do not write to me of him, i beg. "as for my wanderer, he has escaped me. i intended to keep him entirely to the fields and lanes, but he is off now to a hilltop. he has caught a glimpse of a star, and thinks to gain a closer vision of it from the hill. poor fool! what will the height of an ant-heap advantage him? there are millions of miles between him and the star. on the hill he will be restless and miserable that he is no nearer. why could he not keep his eyes to the attainable?--the wayside flowers, the green leaves of the hedges, all that which is common property to prince and peasant alike. "long ago in his past--i told you he had a past which he had thrown behind him--he cut himself off from communion with his fellow-men. he did not realize at the moment how complete the severance would be; yet, if he had, i believe he would have acted as he did. there seemed then nothing else that he could do; even now there appears to him nothing else. maybe he made a great mistake. if he did, he did not suffer alone, there were others who suffered too; there's the rub. he did not realize that they would suffer. his optimism in human nature was too great. now he realizes that there are only the fields and roads for him, only the companionship of birds, beasts, and flowers, to whom his past is unknown and can never be disclosed. his wings were torn from him like the wings of that skylark of which your vagabond piper piped. true, he, too, grew new wings with which he could rise just far enough above the earth to see the star. but he can never reach it, and, unlike your skylark, he cannot sing cheerfully. perhaps before he saw the star he might have done so, but now his song lacks buoyancy. "i fancy i shall have to leave him for a while gazing disconsolately at his star, and start a new book. he has endowed me with too much of his present mood, and who will care to hear the pinings of a wanderer for the unattainable? i might bring him from the hilltop, blot out the star from the sky. i have, indeed, already tried to do so, but my wanderer has moped and sulked. that is the worst of these fiction people. you feed them with your heart's blood, you give them life of your life that they may move as living creatures and not as mere puppets pulled by strings, and suddenly they escape you. the path you have carefully chosen, in which they are to tread, is refused by them. 'it is the way you have chosen,' they will cry, 'not the way we choose!' and if you protest that their path will be of little interest to the public, they sulk, insisting that, interest or no interest, it is the true path. i will leave this flesh and blood creature on the hilltop. if he bewails the distance of his star from him, i will not record his wailings. i will fashion a puppet, and merely a puppet, and from first to last chapter i will pull the strings myself. "therefore i fear that the thoughts of my wanderer will never be printed to soothe you, nor, i fear, can i be of much use in the matter. i told you he had endowed me with his thoughts. i might be the man himself. he has obsessed me. i tell myself that i will look at his star and worship it from afar, thankful for its benign rays. but his restlessness is upon me. i want to get near it, though i recognize the futility of my desire. i am a fool. "may i take your friend, with her many relations, as the puppet for my next story? i will pull the strings deftly, and she shall dance away from them or frolic on their mangled corpses. which think you she would prefer? "i find that again my mood for letter-writing is not of the most cheerful. "good-night. "robin adair." _the unknown critic to robin adair, or the lady anne garland to peter the piper_ "the terrace, "_june th_. "dear robin adair,--what is it, i wonder, that has disturbed us both? some small and unpleasant breeze has ruffled the surface of our mind's lake. yet your course seems clear. since your wanderer desires his star, let him attain it. let him build a ladder of moonbeams and climb up to it, or if he is too much flesh and blood, too material, for such a feat, let the star descend to him. are there not falling stars? "since writing last i have had a letter from a friend of mine. she is not well, and is feeling lonely. i go to town next thursday to stay with her for three weeks, till her sister-in-law can come and join her. perhaps when i return i shall have regained my old calm. at all events, the stir, the movement of london will serve to shake me out of this mood, which i cannot define, but which is foreign to my nature. "i wish the vagabond piper would give me another concert before i go, but i dare not ask him." chapter xiii a moonlight piping lady anne garland was sitting by her bedroom window. it was wide open, and the perfume of the night-stocks below the terrace rose fragrant in the still air. the atmosphere was darkly luminous, blue and purple, in which the shapes of the trees and bushes stood out softly black in the light of a half-moon. away across the park, with its scattered oaks and beeches, she could see masses of woodland lying like dark patches on the distant hills. in the valley the lights in the cottages had been extinguished. one by one they had dropped into the darkness, and now the whole village lay asleep. anne leaned her arms on the window-sill and looked out into the night. she had not yet begun to prepare for bed, and she still wore the silver-grey dress she had put on for dinner. the light from two candles on the dressing-table behind her illumined the room, glinting on silver-backed brushes and silver-topped bottles. the walls of the room were white, and above the bed hung an ebony crucifix with a silver figure. the black cross stood out in startling relief on the white wall-paper. a table beside her bed held a bowl of crimson roses, an unlighted reading-lamp, and a green-covered book, the title printed in gold letters. between the leaves was an ivory paper-cutter. the leaves, however, had long since been cut; and for the sixth--the seventh--time anne was reading _under the span of the rainbow_. suddenly anne's ear was arrested by a sound--a faint sound, but the unmistakable crunch of feet on gravel. the sound came from the drive. she drew back into the room, extinguishing one candle and moving the other so that its light did not illumine the square of open window. then from behind the curtain she watched and listened. the sound of the feet drew nearer, and a man emerged from the shadow of the trees in the drive. he walked unfalteringly. it was not the wary approach of one who fears to be seen. below the terrace he halted. anne quickly extinguished the second candle, and leant a little from her hiding-place by the curtain. the man looked up, the moonlight falling full on his face, and anne saw that it was peter the piper. her breath came quickly and she watched, herself unseen. she saw him lift his pipe to his lips, and then the still night became full of music. this time anne made no attempt to classify his theme--to read a story in the melody. probably it held none. it was music--music pure and simple, which the piper was playing for her alone. breathless, entranced, she stood and listened. surely never was such a piping since king midas of old listened to the flutes of pan. it was truly nature's music, the instrument which produced it forgotten. liquid, caressing, it rose and fell in soft cadences, yet faintly through it throbbed the undernote of pain. how long it lasted anne did not know. suddenly there was a pause. then came the nightingale's song, one short phrase of pure rapture. then silence. anne saw peter standing still in the moonlight. on a sudden impulse she moved and pulled a half-blown crimson rose from the bowl on the table near her bed. she threw it from the window and saw it fall at his feet. she saw him stoop and raise it from the ground to his lips. he looked up, and once more she saw his face. anne turned swiftly into the room. a moment later there was again the sound of feet on the gravel, a clear, crisp crunching which receded in the distance. chapter xiv le beau monde lady anne garland was sitting in mrs. cresswell's drawing-room. it was a charming room, with its domed ceiling, its panelled walls, its long windows, its curtains and brocades of dull orange and glowing brown, with its porcelains, its bronzes, and its masses of yellow and white roses in old china bowls and slender glasses. anne herself, in a dress of some gleaming material, pale primrose in colour, was sitting on an empire sofa. the warm brown of its brocade made a delightful harmony with the colour of her dress--in fact, she looked entirely in keeping with her surroundings. a white-haired man, with blue eyes and wearing faultless evening clothes, was sitting on the sofa beside her; and anne was asking herself where in the name of wonder she had seen him before. something in his manner seemed familiar, or was it, perhaps, his eyes, his keen old blue eyes under their shaggy eyebrows? he had been introduced to her early in the evening, and somehow there had seemed at once a curious and indefinable sympathy between them, one which had sprung to life with the first conventional words they had uttered. throughout the evening he had monopolized her--unquestionably monopolized her--yet entirely without appearing to do so. and over and over again anne was asking herself when and where she had seen him before. she glanced at him now as she slowly waved her fan--a delicate thing of mother-of-pearl and fine old cobwebby lace softly yellow with age. anne possessed the trick of fan-waving in its subtlest form, a trick--or art--she had inherited from an ancestor of more than a century ago, one dolores di mendova, a very noted beauty of the spanish court, from whom anne had also inherited her hair, her creamy skin, and her panther-like grace. general carden turned and saw that she was watching him. a faint rose colour tinged the ivory of anne's face. "i was wondering," she said, explanatory, "where it was that i had seen you before." general carden smiled, a gay old smile. "i can tell you where i have seen you, though whether you have deigned to notice me is quite another matter." "yes?" queried anne the fan fluttering to and fro. "i have frequently seen you driving in the park," said general carden. "you in your carriage, i in my car." "yes?" mused anne, still doubtful. "you do not remember?" asked general carden. he was frankly disappointed. "on the contrary, i remember perfectly. i confess i had forgotten the fact till you mentioned it. yet somehow it does not quite explain--" she broke off. "explain?" asked general carden. anne laughed. "explain the quite absurd notion that i have actually spoken to you before. something in your manner, your speech, seems almost familiar. i fancied i must have known you--not intimately, of course, but slightly." "i fear," he regretted, "that i have not had that pleasure. i shall hope now to be able to make up for my previous loss. you live in town?" "the greater part of the year," said anne. "i spend three or four months in the country." "which, no doubt, you like," replied general carden courteously. "being young, you are able to enjoy it. i prefer london. i only leave town during august, when i go abroad. and the whole time i wish i were in england. an unprofitable method of spending a yearly month of one's life. once i--" he broke off. "i am too old for travelling now," he ended. "isn't that rather--nonsense?" said anne, with a faint hint of a smile, and glancing at the upright figure beside her. general carden straightened his shoulders. she was candid--absolutely candid--in her remark. "very charming of you to suggest it, lady anne," he said, and he tried unavailingly to keep the pleasure out of his voice. "perhaps after all----" "yes," smiled anne, "after all, you don't find it quite as disagreeable as you pretend." "ah, well!" he said. there was a pleasant little silence. anne watched the groups of people in the room, sitting or standing in intimate conversation. there was an atmosphere of airy gaiety about the place, a lightness, an effervescence. listlessness or boredom was entirely absent. in one of the farthest groups was her friend, muriel lancing, with whom she was staying. she was an elfin-like, dainty figure in a green dress, on which shone a brilliant gleam of diamonds. muriel herself was sparkling to-night like a bit of escaped quicksilver. rather nearer was another woman, tall and massive. her figure was undoubtedly good, but her pose gave one the faintest suspicion that she was conscious of that fact. she reminded one of a statue which had become slightly animated by some accident. apparently, too, she had never forgotten the fact of having been a statue, and wished other people not to forget it either. her face was a faultless oval, and her hair worn in a madonna-like style. but beyond the oval and the hair the madonna-like impression ceased. her face was hard, there was none of the exquisite warmth, the tender humanity seen in the paintings of the virgin mother. general carden was also looking at mrs. sheldon, whom, it may be remembered, he had seen on a previous occasion in the park, a day now three or four weeks old. anne noticed the direction of his glance. "do you know her?" she asked suddenly, then added as an afterthought, "she is a friend of mine." anne did not state that it was a friendship of only two years' standing, and one which existed infinitely more on mrs. sheldon's side than on her own. "i once had the honour of knowing her fairly intimately," replied general carden. "we still exchange bows and civil speeches, but--well, i fancy i remind her of an episode she wishes to forget--a perfectly unimpeachable little episode as far as she was concerned, of course." anne glanced at him sideways. there was almost a hard note in his voice, which had not escaped her. she saw his profile clean-cut against the dark panelling of the room. and then a sudden little light of illumination sprang to her eyes. she had all at once discovered of whom it was he reminded her. there was in his fine old face a very distinct look of the vagabond piper. it was one of those indefinable likenesses which nevertheless exist, at all events in the eyes of those who chance to see it. it was faint, elusive, and to the majority it probably would not be the least apparent, but anne now knew that it was this which had puzzled her throughout the evening. and with the discovery came a sudden mental picture of a man standing in the moonlight with a crimson rose against his lips. it was a picture that had presented itself many times to her mental vision during the last few days, and as many times had been dismissed. it was apt to make her heart beat a trifle faster, to make the warm colour surge faintly to her face. being unable--or unwilling--to account for a certain picturesque, if too impetuous, impulse which had moved her that moonlight night, she wished to forget it. yet it had a disturbing way of representing itself before her mind. in banishing it now her thoughts turned into another trend, which was apt to absorb them quite a good deal, the thought of that writer of letters and books--robin adair. anne was perfectly aware that this unknown writer occupied a large amount of her mind; it swung and see-sawed between him and the vagabond piper in a way that was almost uncomfortable and altogether unaccountable. she was not accustomed to have her thoughts encroached on in this way without her will being consulted, and she could not understand it, or she told herself that she could not understand it, and that possibly came to the same thing. at all events, she was undoubtedly in a slight puzzlement of mind. it is the only word to describe her vaguely perplexed state. as now robin adair had swung uppermost, his book presented itself to her as a subject of conversation. she asked general carden if he had read it. she fancied--it was probably pure fancy--that he started slightly. he glanced, too, at mrs. cresswell, who was only a few paces away and quite possibly within earshot. "ah, yes," he replied indifferently. "mrs. cresswell recommended it to me--a fairly promising book, i thought." he was adhering faithfully to the expression. "fairly promising!" anne's voice held a note akin to indignation. "i thought it delightful; clever, cultured, quite admirably written." general carden experienced a sensation which might be described as a glow of satisfaction. "isn't that," he said, "rather high praise?" "not an atom more than the book deserves!" responded anne warmly. "and the reviews on it--i saw two or three--were excellent." "indeed!" said general carden politely. the old hypocrite had no mind to mention that every review ever penned on it was now lying safely locked in his desk, that he knew them all nearly verbatim, that he had gloated over them, exulted over them though with many a little stab of pain in the region called the heart. "of course," pursued anne thoughtfully, "it isn't merely a surface book, full of adventure, movement, and incident; and what incident there is might be termed improbable by those who don't realize that nothing is improbable, nothing impossible. it's in its style, its finish, its--its texture that the charm and beauty of it lie." "it has certainly some well-turned phrases," conceded general carden magnanimously. he liked her to talk about the book; he longed for her to continue, though for the life of him he could not give her a lead. yet his grudging admiration--all a pretence though it was, though anne could not know that--fired her to further defence of the writing, stimulated her to fresh praise. "there are delightful phrases!" she said emphatically. "it is a modern book, yet with all the delicacy, the refinement, the porcelain-air of the old school. for all that the scenes are laid mainly in the open, and are, as i said, quite modern; it breathes an old-world grace, a kind of powder-and-patches charm, which makes one feel that the writer must have imbibed the finish, the courtesy of the old school from his cradle, as if it must have come to him as a birthright, an inheritance." general carden drew himself up. his blue eyes were shining. "your praise of the book," he said, "is delightful. the author"--his eyes grew suddenly sad--"would, i am sure, be honoured if he knew your opinion." anne flushed. did he not know? had she not told him? though perhaps not in those very words. "it does surprise me," she, allowed, after a second's pause, "that you are not more enthusiastic about it. i should have fancied somehow--slightly as i know you--that it would have entirely appealed to you." general carden gave a little cough. "it does appeal to me," he said. "it appeals to me greatly--so much, in fact, that i assumed a certain disparagement in order that i might have the pleasure of hearing you refute me." he had forgotten mrs. cresswell, but the words had not escaped her, absorbed though she appeared to be in conversation, and there was the tiniest--the very tiniest--expression of triumph in her eyes. "oh!" said anne, at once puzzled and debating. and then she said, "i am longing to read his next book." "he has not published another, then?" queried general carden carelessly. double-faced that he was, he knew perfectly well that no second book had appeared as yet. had he not advised mudie's--naturally not in mrs. cresswell's presence--to supply him with a copy the moment one appeared? "no," replied anne. and she stopped. had not robin adair himself told her that his wanderer had escaped him, and heaven knew whether he would ever again be caught, chained, fettered, and imprisoned in the pages and between the covers of a book? later in the evening general carden, taking his departure, said to anne, "i should like to have the honour of calling on you, if you will allow me to do so." and anne replied: "i should be quite delighted. i am staying now with mrs. lancing, and go down to the country in a few days, but i shall return to town to my own house in the autumn." "in the autumn, then," said general carden, bowing over her hand. chapter xv confidences muriel lancing, having partaken of breakfast in her own room, was now lying in luxurious and dainty _négligé_ among a pile of extremely snowy pillows. anne, who had breakfasted in the dining-room some half hour previously, was sitting by the open window talking to her. "anne," said muriel suddenly, glancing at her from beneath lowered eyelashes, "i believe i owe you a confession and an apology." "yes?" queried anne, smiling. "and for what?" "i wasn't," confessed muriel, "one bit ill when i wrote to you. i was only mentally sick because i wanted tommy, and he had to go away on horrid business where i couldn't accompany him--at least, he said i couldn't; and that comes to the same thing--with tommy." muriel heaved a prodigious sigh. "darling!" laughed anne. muriel wrinkled her porcelain-like brows. "oh, anne, life is heavenly! there's only just one long big beautiful moment with me and love and tommy. but there are ten million years of purgatory to get through when he is away from me, and then i'm soul-sick. and i tell myself i'm a sentimental little fool, but it doesn't do one bit of good. so i wrote to you to come to me till patricia, who is a cheerful soul, can join me. and i didn't want to tell you it was sheer silly loneliness, so i told you a little white lie," she ended tragically. "of course," said anne serenely. "i knew." "did you?" muriel was half incredulous. "yes; your letter just breathed 'i want tommy' all through it. and as a kind of postscript it added, 'but you're better than nothing to this poor moping person, so for heaven's sake come.'" "and i," murmured muriel pathetically, "thought my letter the height of diplomatic lying." "on the contrary," anne assured her, "it was as transparent as a crystal bowl." for a few moments there was a silence. the warm sun was pouring through the open window, falling across the bed and the slightly tumbled bedclothes, and glinting on the fair hair of the woman who lay among the pillows. strictly speaking, muriel lancing was not beautiful, she was not even pretty. but there was an odd charm about her thin little face, her great grey-green eyes, and her wide mouth. she had a curious, almost elfin-like appearance. she was not at all unlike arthur rackham's pictures of undine as she lay there in some flimsy and diaphanous garment suggestive of sea-foam. herself--her whole surroundings--held a suggestion of elusiveness, a kind of cobwebby grace and charm. tommy--adored of muriel--once said that the house was like an oyster-shell, rough and ugly on the outside, but inside all soft and shimmery with a pearl in it. it was his most brilliantly poetical effusion, and never likely to be surpassed by him. the only single thing in the room that struck an incongruous note was a large--a very large--photograph frame on a table by muriel's bed. it was a rough wooden frame, distinctly crooked, and with the glue showing somewhat in the corners. it held a full-length photograph of an ugly, snub-nosed, but quite delightful-faced young man with a wide mouth and an appearance that rightly suggested red hair and freckles. this was the adored tommy, and the frame was his own manufacture. next to the man himself they were muriel's most treasured possessions. anne looked across at it. she had often seen it before, but finding it difficult to discover the most tactful observation to make regarding it, had refrained from making any. this time, however, muriel seemed to notice the direction of anne's eyes. "tommy made it himself," she said, stretching out one white arm, from which a flimsy covering of lace and gauze-like material fell away, disclosing its slender roundness. she moved the frame to an angle better calculated to show off its superior qualities. "really!" said anne, politely incredulous, but understanding. it explained what had hitherto been a cause for wonderment, namely, why muriel should choose to disfigure her room with such a piece of furniture. its size almost calls for the designation. "yes," said muriel proudly, "himself. i think," she continued, contemplating the picture with her head at as one-sided an angle as her recumbent position would allow, "that it is a beautiful frame." there was the faintest suspicion of a challenge in her voice. "i am quite sure," said anne in a perfectly grave voice, "that you could not possibly have a frame which you would value more. i know i couldn't if i happened to be you." muriel laughed like a contented child. "anne, you're several kinds of angels, and you have the heavenliest way of saying the right thing and yet speaking the truth. of course i know that its sides are crooked, and that there are little mountains of glue in the corners. but you should have seen tommy's face when he brought it to me. the darling was so afraid it was not of quite the most finished workmanship. oh, anne, between the comicality of his face and the lop-sided expression of the sticky frame--the glue wasn't quite dry--and the little lump in my own throat for the darlingness of the thought, i very nearly had hysterics. but i hid them on tommy's waistcoat, and i adore the frame." "of course," said anne, smiling. again there was a little pause. then muriel spoke suddenly. "what do you think of general carden? he monopolized you in the most disgraceful way last night." "i liked him," returned anne, calmly ignoring the question of monopoly. "it is delightfully refreshing to meet a man so entirely of the old school of thought and manners." "i think he's quite a dear," returned muriel comfortably. "i've known him since i was in short frocks and a pigtail. he was a friend of my father's. they were at harrow together and afterwards in the same regiment in india. he thinks me--well, just a little flighty, but he doesn't altogether hate me; and he's quite paternally fond of tommy," she ended with a gay little laugh. "by the way," asked anne, curious, "why does he so dislike millicent sheldon? it is quite obvious he does dislike her." muriel gave a little start. then she looked at anne, doubtful, hesitating. "oh, my dear anne, don't you know? somehow i fancied that every one--" she stopped. "know what?" queried anne idly, but interested. "it's really gossip--if true things are gossip," said muriel half apologetically; "still, some one is sure to tell you sooner or later since you've met general carden." again she stopped. "but tell me what!" demanded anne. "since you've said so much, had you not better give me the rest? besides, since you say some one is sure to tell me, why not let me hear the story from you? you can sweeten it, add sugar and cream, if you will, or vinegar and spice, if those ingredients will flavour it better." muriel laughed. "i'll omit the garnishings; you shall have the facts plain and simple. millicent was once upon a time engaged to general carden's son. then--for certain reasons--she threw him over, and married the highly respectable and bald-headed theobald horatio sheldon, whose money--of which he has a very considerable quantity--was made by inventing those little brush things that are fixed on behind carts and sweep up the dirt in the roads." "i see," mused anne, comprehending. "but of course, as i had never met general carden before, i naturally did not know that he possessed a son. he did not, either, happen to mention him to me." "but of course not," said muriel tragically. "that's exactly where the reasons and the real gossip come in. he spent three years in portland prison for forgery, or embezzlement, or something of the kind. he's out now, but he was in." "oh!" said anne seriously. "and," ended muriel, still more tragically, "general carden has never seen his son again nor forgiven millicent for throwing him over. it's rather contradictory, isn't it?" anne looked down into the street where a flower-girl was standing on the pavement with a basket full of great white lilies. she contemplated her for a few moments in silence, and seemingly drew conclusions from the flowers. she looked round again at muriel. "i think i understand," she said quietly. muriel looked at her curiously. "then it's quite remarkably intelligent of you." "no," said anne calmly. "he loves his son and has never forgotten him. she has forgotten him and probably never loved him. that's why he can't forgive her." "oh!" said muriel. "i'm sure you're right that he has not forgotten. he's eating his heart out for him, or i'm much mistaken, and he's too proud to own it by the quiver of an eyelash. we women have the easier time. it's our rôle to keep our arms and hearts open to sinners, and thank heaven for it." anne was again looking at the flowers. she had said she understood, but in reality it was only partly. she did understand general carden, but millicent with her serious speeches on nobility and bigness of character was another matter. she voiced her perplexity to muriel. "oh, but millicent!" said muriel in a tone that quite disposed of the question. "yet," said anne, "millicent has always talked as if she would help any one re-make his life, as if it were the one thing she would do, and--" she broke off. muriel gurgled. "oh, anne darling, you're so big-minded and truthful--in spite of your occasional woman-of-the-world airs, which are only a veneer--that you accept people at their own valuation. the things that people say they will do are the very things that at a crucial moment they do not do. i think crucial moments are a kind of revolution which turns the other side of the person completely to the fore." and then her tone changed to one of solemn warning. "you, anne, doubtless consider yourself a luxury-loving woman, to whom the bare prospect of coarse underclothes, cold rooms, ill-cooked food, and commonplace surroundings would be appalling. yet i firmly believe that if the crucial moment came you would tramp the roads with your man." "mmm!" said anne. and that rose colour stole into the ivory of her face, a colour not unnoticed by the watchful eyes of muriel. "perhaps, the roads; but do you think it would carry me to a suburban house with a glass fanlight over the front door? it would be the bigger test. but, and there i think you've omitted a point, how about the second moment, the moment when the crucial moment is passed?" muriel raised herself on one arm and spoke firmly. "love--real love--is one long crucial moment. i speak from experience because i love tommy." she tumbled flat again among her pillows, and looked across at anne to challenge her experience if she dared. anne, being of course an unmarried woman with no experience of the kind, merely smiled, a tiny smile which ended in a half sigh. chapter xvi letters _the unknown critic to robin adair, or the lady anne garland to peter the piper_ london, _july th_. dear robin adair,--i have met another admirer of your book, a delightful old man of courtly manners of the style of the eighteenth century. at first he assumed disparagement of it, or at the best a faint half-hearted kind of praise, which would, i believe, in any case have roused a spirit of contradiction in me. with your book as the subject i waxed eloquent. i took up the cudgels of defence, and i flatter myself wielded them with dexterity. when at last the flow of my discourse ceased--and i trust i was not too didactic in my observations--he confessed calmly that he had merely assumed disparagement in order that he might have the pleasure of hearing me refute him! it knocked the wind completely out of my sails. i was left helpless, stranded, entirely at a loss for a suitable reply. i hope i carried off the situation with at least a passable degree of _savoir-faire_, but i have my doubts. i so frequently find myself addressing really witty and brilliant remarks to my bedpost fully an hour or so after the opportunity of making them has passed, when the witticism, the brilliance, might have been delivered in the presence of another, and have covered me with a dazzling glory. it is humiliating to contrast what one has said with what one might have remarked. you writers have the better time. in silence and solitude you can consider your epigrams, and then place them in the mouths of your fictional people at the psychological moment, and the world is left to marvel at your brilliance. but to return to my old courtier. he has a sad history, which he hides under a mask of urbane and suave courtliness. he has a son, who--so the story runs--has disgraced their name. the old man being too proud to overlook the disgrace--too proud, perhaps, to stoop and delve for extenuating circumstances--has cut the son out of his life; but fortunately, or unfortunately, he cannot cut him out of his heart, which is aching, pining, for the lack of him. why can he not put pride in his pocket and ease his heartache? it's a pitiful little story, and one which has caused my own heart to ache, though quite possibly i should have dismissed it without a second thought if i had not met the old courtier. the friend with whom i am staying has soothed the spirit of discontent which was awake in me when i last wrote. her method is entirely unobvious. i think it lies in her own incurably good spirits, and her optimism, both of which are infectious. there is an "everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds" air about her which is exhilarating. i have, though, been disappointed in another friend, if i may use the word. personally i feel there should be another to use. an acquaintance signifies one of whom we have but a passing and superficial knowledge, and a friend some one much closer--very close--the word in its real sense. am i drawing too fine a point? perhaps one might use the terms i have heard children use, "friends," and "truly friends." so, to use the first term in application to this woman, i have been disappointed in a friend. she is not what i believed her to be, what i believe she wished me to believe her. it has spoilt, as far as i am concerned the intimacy between us. i cannot re-adjust myself towards her, and i feel myself acting the part of a hypocrite. i have picked up her broken pieces as best i may, and mended them, but i am conscious of the cracks. my mending has not been as neat a job as i could wish. is it any use trying to mend? tell me what you think, o man! the worst of it is that before she broke i asked her to spend a few days with me in august. during those days i shall be terribly, hideously conscious of the cracks. i shall find myself staring at them with a kind of awful fascination. pray heaven she'll not observe it, for if she did i--in the rôle of hostess--would be forever disgraced in my own eyes. i do not know why i should write all this to you; why i should trouble you with what, i am fully aware, are mere absurdities which any sane and reasonable person would assuredly dismiss without a second thought. may i plead in excuse that somehow you have taken the position of a "truly friend," one to whom trivialities--which after all make up the greater part of one's life--may be mentioned without fear of a laugh or a snub? i went to a beethoven concert the other day. to me he stands head and shoulders above every other composer, living or dead. does music give you the sensation of colour and form? it does me. that was a purple concert, sphere-shaped. mozart's music is sapphire blue and shaped like a star. bach's is dark green and square. grieg's is pale green with a hint of pink and a slim oval, wagner's is crimson and purple and shaped like a massive crown. i might go on enumerating, if i did not fear to bore you. have you read conard's life of beethoven? do you know beethoven's own words: "oh hommes, si vous lisez un jour ceci, pensez que vous avez été injustes pour moi; et que le malheureux se console, en trouvant un malheureux comme lui, qui, malgré tous les obstacles de la nature, a cependant fait tout ce qui était en son pouvoir, pour être admis au rang des artistes et des hommes d'élites?" grand, glorious beethoven! the struggle over all infirmity, the victory, and his lonely yet dramatic death! "il mourut pendant un orage--une tempête de neige--dans un éclat de tonnerre. une main étrangère lui fermer les yeux." if i am a hero-worshipper, and it would seem that i am, beethoven stands in the front rank of my heroes. read his life--by conard--if you have not already done so. it is one which every artist, of whatever branch his art, should know. how goes it with your wanderer? is he reconciled to his distance from his star? or have you let the star fall to his hilltop? good-night. _robin adair to the unknown critic, or peter the piper to the lady anne garland_ _july th._ dear lady,--i have re-read your letter more than once. it is--dare i say?--somewhat illogical, and therein most delightfully feminine. you suggest that your old courtier should ease his heartache. do you not see that in so attempting he could only bring into his life a thing which is in his eyes broken? and, however carefully he might mend it, would he not be--as you are--painfully and terribly aware of the cracks? men, i fancy, choose the wiser way; they throw aside the broken pieces into a neat little dustbin, making no attempt to mend. for, after all, is not the glue which holds the thing together a certain sophism which is always apparent to the repairer, and which is, frequently, not very adhesive? once broken--in spite of the glue--it is apt to fall to pieces on the slightest handling. no, the dustbin, in my opinion, is the better solution. you, as a woman, doubtless will not agree with me. women invariably mend, and the majority--less critical than you--fancy they make of the mending a neat job. let me offer you one piece of advice. do not let your heart ache for the story you have heard. it was, no doubt, related to you by another than your courtier, and was soothed, softened, rendered pathetic in the telling. you, in your tenderness, have imagined your courtier as hankering after the broken pieces of his image in the dustbin. your tender imagination removed, the glamour of pathos round the story would be removed also, and you would find heartaches and such-like non-existent. i do not believe that the wind is ever so completely knocked out of your sails--as you say--that you are unable to find some appropriate reply. that is merely your modesty. i picture you as talking with charm, with ease, with brilliance. witticisms i leave outside the category. they belong to older men and women, and are apt to have a poignant edge foreign to my idea of your words. i like to think that you count me, as the children say, a "truly friend." your friendship--disembodied though it is--has brought me refreshment, happiness. though for a time my wanderer had obsessed me with his mood, the obsession is passed. it has passed with him also. he does not desire that the star should fall to him. its very charm lies in its altitude. perhaps one day, when he has cast off the mantle of his flesh, he will build himself that ladder of moonbeams, and mount to it. as it is--his mood of discontent passed--he is worshipping, grateful that it shines in his otherwise empty firmament. from the little hilltop--which he found was but an ant-heap--from the lanes, from the fields, he looks up to it, and addresses to it his thoughts, his fancies. he is once more a cheerful soul, appreciating the earth, the wind, and the flowers. his love and worship he keeps for his star. i have not read conard's life of beethoven, nor, i confess, any writer's life of him. i will make up for the omission without delay. his music i know and love. your little discourse on colour and shapes in music interests me. i should like to hear more about them. unknowingly i believe i have had the same thoughts, and i agree with the colours and shapes you assign, with, perhaps, the exception of grieg's shape. his colour--yes; but i have a fancy that his form is less simple, more a variety of curves. i think i should give the oval--slightly broadened--to schumann, and in its slim form to heller. schumann, by the way, is blue--darker than mozart, and, though soft in colour, less transparent. heller is pale yellow. do you agree? write again soon, and tell me everything you will about yourself. good-night. robin adair. _the unknown critic to robin adair, or the lady anne garland to peter the piper_ the terrace, _july th_. dear robin adair,--here i am once more on my terrace, looking across the garden and the park land towards a small village--whose name i will not disclose--lying half-hidden among the trees in the valley. occasionally, when i am in a ruminative mood, i wonder at the lives of the inhabitants thereof--the routine of them, with no greater excitement than a visit to the market-town some eight miles distant. true, there is the yearly fair at that place, which is an event of the greatest importance. every man, woman, and child, except the extremely old and the extremely young, flocks to the town on that day. every available vehicle is requisitioned and packed with a mass of humanity to the fullest extent of its capacities, and those unable to find conveyance in them, and more stalwart, walk. there are at the fair, so i am told, booths, coco-nut shies, merry-go-rounds, and peep-shows of a fat woman whose age is unknown, but who apparently must be akin to methuselah, since she has been regarded, it would seem, by the fathers, the grandfathers, and the great-grandfathers of the present generation. but with the exception of the fair there is absolutely nothing to break the monotony of their lives but the weather and a wedding or a funeral. it's rather appalling to contemplate, isn't it? but they seem content and happy, and that after all is the main thing. do you believe in fortune-tellers? i went to one before i left town. i do not think it was great credulity in the art that urged me to consult the sibyl, but merely the fact that the friend with whom i was staying persuaded me into the consultation. i had what is termed a "full reading." the palm of my hand was conned, the cards spread out, and the crystal gazed into. i confess that the affair was, to a certain degree, uncanny. her description of my house--this one--was extraordinary. it might have been before her as she spoke, and she actually saw me listening to a concert by the vagabond piper--and not only the concert of which i have told you, but another concert, one he gave me the night before i went up to town, and of which i believe no one was aware but he and i. he came to the terrace and played below my window. it was quite medieval, and entirely delightful. she saw, too, letters which i was receiving and which were a source of great pleasure to me, and therein she was very assuredly right. but--and i hope you will not be offended--after that she began to mix the piper and the writer of letters, speaking of them with confidence as one and the same person. i did not enlighten her as to her mistake, as with these sibyls it is better to let them say what they see without interruption, otherwise they are apt to try and tell you what they think you wish to know, what they think you desire to have said. it was curious. and here i will make a confession. i myself have occasionally, and in quite an absurd fashion, confounded the two in my thoughts. do not be vexed, robin adair, for you dislike--or pretend to dislike--the piper. but it seems to me that the sibyl must have been extraordinary telepathic, and have somehow read my thoughts, and their occasional confusion, in a remarkable degree. she told me a good deal more, no doubt the usual fortune-telling jargon, which would be, i am sure, of little interest to you. certainly it is not worth repetition. but what i have told you struck me as distinctly queer. i am rejoiced to hear that your wanderer--and consequently you--are once more soothed and peaceful. and now that he is so, let him continue to recount his thoughts by the hand of robin adair, that i may shortly have the benefit of them. one day--not to-day--i will write you all my fancies on colour, and i have a good many. perhaps you are right as to grieg's form. it is probably more intricate than the oval. possibly it is a design of many curves. as regards schumann and heller, i agree. i fancy you are wrong about my courtier. he has, no doubt, acted on your dustbin principle, but, all the same, i believe he regrets the action. of course, i see the justice of your accusation that my letter was illogical, but i cannot begin an argument and a defence now. the day is too warm and lazy for such exertion. the heat-shimmer is bathing the gardens, and the top of my silver ink-bottle is almost too hot to touch. the sun has slanted round, and is frizzling me in a diabolical fashion. hitherto i've been too indolent to move, but now, if i don't intend to be entirely melted, i must get up and pull my chair into the shade. of course fortune-telling is absurd really, at least as far as regards the future. though i grant that this woman's reading of my thoughts was clever. good-bye for the present. the bees are droning a lullaby, and i believe i shall sleep. _robin adair to the unknown critic, or peter the piper to the lady anne garland_ _july th._ dear lady,--i have no theories as to fortune-tellers beyond a, no doubt absurd, dislike to them. i do not care to think of you consulting them. forgive me for saying so. i am perfectly well aware that i have no smallest right to express an opinion, but--it will out--i wish you wouldn't, and long to beg you not to do it again. when you are in a less melted mood write me a letter of argument and defence. you will not be able to explain away your illogical statements, but i should much enjoy hearing you try to do so. i must certainly contradict flatly about your courtier. i am sure you are wrong. and as i shall cry "knife" every time you cry "scissors," let us abandon him as a topic of discussion. write to me of colours instead. this is a rude letter, and i know it. but a little incident has rubbed my mental fur the wrong way, and i am--well, cross with myself i believe. perhaps it would be wiser not to write at all, but not to do so would be to discontinue a little ceremony which i have put in practice since the first day i heard from you. will you laugh at me, i wonder, if i tell you that every evening your letter arrives i become a host, and toast an invisible lady who has condescended to dine with me, and after dinner we talk together--through the medium of pen, ink, and paper. sometimes i like to imagine that the medium is less material, and that my thoughts are carried straight on the wings of fancy to the lady's terrace. but if they go, can she perceive them? are they not too clumsy, too material, to find response in her thought-cells? after all, it is but a fancy, and you may quite well smile at both it and my dream dinner-party. to-night i have not been a good host. i apologize to the lady. being the sole guest i ever receive, i might have treated her with greater courtesy. robin adair. _the unknown critic to robin adair, or the lady anne garland to peter the piper_ the terrace, _july th_. dear robin adair,--i did not smile--at any rate not ironically. if there was a little smile it was verging close on tears. are you really so lonely? somehow i had fancied that when you spoke of yourself as a recluse it was a mere figure of speech. have you no friends who dine with you, who visit you--no material friends? the little mental picture your letter called up was pathetic. i wish--well, never mind what i wish. probably it would be no atom of good. i believe--i am sure--your thoughts do reach me. send them to me, and i will send mine to you. _robin adair to the unknown critic, or peter the piper to the lady anne garland_ _july nd._ dear lady,--forget my letter. i did not mean to drivel. i did not mean to cause you the faintest suspicion of tears. i am not, i believe, a sociable person. my disembodied lady is more to me than hundreds of material friends. i am utterly and entirely grateful for her invisible presence--and the thoughts she sends me. whatever you wish must be of benefit. whatever that unexpressed wish was, i endorse it. thank you for your letter. robin adair. chapter xvii a thunderstorm "there is a lady sweet and kind, was never face so pleased my mind, i did but see her passing by, and yet i love her till i die," sang peter, in a pleasant tenor voice. he was sitting by the window of his cottage, engaged--truth will out--in darning a pair of green socks. occasionally he lifted his head from his work and gazed through the window. it was intensely still outside; not a leaf, not a blade of grass was stirring. it was almost overpoweringly close and sultry. peter had set both door and window open in invitation to a non-existent breeze to enter. from the north, where a great bank of ominous black clouds was piled, came a low, sinister rumble. "it's coming," said peter aloud, looking through the window. "the storm, the tempest, the whole wrath of the furious elements will shortly be loosed upon us. the clouds are coming up with extraordinary rapidity, considering there's no wind at all down here. up there it must be blowing half a gale. we'll get rain soon." he returned to his darning. "her gesture, motion, and her smiles, her wit, her voice, my heart beguiles, beguiles my heart, i know not why, and yet i love her till i die," he sang, sticking his needle carefully in and out of the heel of the sock. "and the green of the wool doesn't match the green of the sock one little bit!" he said ruefully. "but, after all, no one looks at me; and i certainly can't look at my own heels--at least, not without a certain amount of effort, so _n'importe_, as they say in france." "cupid is wingèd and doth range her country, so my love doth change; but change she earth, or change she sky, yet will i love her till i die." peter cut the wool with his pocket-knife, and contemplated the sock with his head on one side. then he threw it on to the table. there was a little laugh in his eyes, not caused by the contemplation of the sock. "i believe," he said whimsically, "that that fellow--what was his name?--neil macdonald, was right after all, and that chaucer is--well, an old fraud. yet," and a wistful look crept into his blue eyes, "i might have done much better if i'd gone on believing in him. yet, i don't know. after all, peter, my son, isn't the joy worth a bit of heartache!" he got up from his chair and went towards the door. he could look over the hedge and up and down the lane from his position. a couple of big drops, large as half-crowns, had just fallen on his spotlessly white doorstep--peter was proud of his doorstep. they were followed by another and another. there was a flash, a terrific peal, and then with a sudden hiss came the deluge. straight down it fell, as if poured from buckets, and the lightning played across the sky and the thunder pealed. "ouf!" said peter, drawing in a huge breath as the refreshing scent of the grateful earth came to his nostrils. "that's really quite the very best smell there is, and worth all your eau-de-colognes, and your phulnanas, and--and your whatever you call 'em put together. it really is--" and then he broke off, for down the lane came running a woman, her head bent, the rain beating, drenching down upon her. peter was at the gate in a moment. "come in here!" he called. she paused, hesitated. peter saw her face. his heart jumped, and then started off klip-klopping at a terrible rate. "i--" she began. a blinding flash of lightning, followed by a terrific peal right overhead, stopped the words. "come at once!" said peter imperatively, sharply almost. "it's not safe." she ran up the path, he following. in the shelter of the cottage she turned and faced him. the colour in her face was not, perhaps, quite to be accounted for by the rain and her own haste. "you're drenched," said peter abruptly. "you can't stay in those wet things a moment longer than absolutely necessary. with your permission, i shall go to your house and order your carriage to be sent immediately. but first--" he had put her a chair by the fireplace; he was on his knees applying a match to the pile of sticks and fir-cones already laid therein. "but," protested lady anne, "i cannot give my permission. you will yourself be soaked--drenched--if you venture out in this downpour." peter laughed lightly. "it will not be the first time, nor, i dare to say, the last. rain has but little effect on me." he rose from his knees. the flames were twining and twisting from stick to stick in long tongues of orange and yellow and blue. there was a merry crackling, there were flying sparks. peter crossed to the cupboard. from it he brought a black bottle and a wineglass. "i have, alas! no brandy to offer you, but port wine will, i hope, prove as efficacious against a chill." without paying the smallest heed to her protestations he poured her out a glass, which he held towards her. "drink it," he said, in somewhat the tone one orders a refractory child to take a glass of medicine. anne took the glass, meekly, obediently, with the faintest gurgle of laughter. "to your health!" she said as she sipped the wine. peter's heart beat hotly, madly. here was she, actually she in the flesh, toasting him in his own room. he poured out another glass. "to you," he said, and under his breath he added, "my lady, my star, my altogether divinity!" then he moved firmly to the door. "i cannot allow you to go," said anne quickly. "alas!" said peter, smiling, "then i must forego your permission. in less than half an hour, in twenty minutes perhaps, your carriage will be here." and he vanished into the sluice without. "and now," he said, as he set off at a half-canter down the lane, "if she does glance round the room and find it sleeping-apartment as well as sitting-room, she will, i trust, be less embarrassed. for heaven knows whether in some particulars she may not bow to old dame grundy's decrees. bless her!" and it is to be conjectured that it was not on mrs. grundy's head that peter's blessing was invoked. anne, left to solitude, a blazing fire, and a glass of port, sat for a moment or so deep in thought. who was this man, with his little imperative ways, his abrupt speech, hiding, she was well aware, a certain embarrassment? he was well-born, there was no doubt about that fact. his voice, in spite of its abruptness, had the pleasant modulation of breeding. his hands--she had noticed his hands--were long-fingered, flexible, and brown. they were also well kept. who was he? but _who_ was he? the fire offering her no solution, she finished her glass of port, and, kneeling down by the hearth, let the warmth of the flames play upon her wet blouse. she unpinned her hat and shook the rain from it. the drops sizzled as they fell among the flames and glowing sticks. she put her hat on the ground beside her and turned towards the room. she scrutinized it with interest. it was barely furnished but spotlessly clean. against the farther wall she saw a truckle-bed covered with a blanket of cheerful red and blue stripes; she saw a cupboard on which were tea-things; a table; two chairs; and the chair on which she had been sitting. and that was all. then on the table she saw lying a pair of green socks; softly green they were, and somewhat faded, and beside them was a card of green--virulently green--mending wool. "o-oh!" said anne, with a little shudder. but after a moment she rose from her knees in order to examine them closer. one sock had a patch of virulent green in the heel, a neat darn enough. "long practice," said anne, with a little shake of the head. in the other was a hole--quite a good-sized hole. for a moment anne hesitated, then, with a little smile, took up the card of excruciatingly green wool and broke off a strand. she threaded the needle she found stuck into the wool, and fitted the sock on her hand. "i owe him," said anne, "some small payment for the shelter." and she laughed, seating herself again in the armchair. neatly, deftly, she drew the wool in and out across the hole, her ears alert to catch the sound of returning steps, or of carriage-wheels. the needle moved swiftly and with dexterity. what is one to make of her? lady anne garland--the proud, the much-courted, the to the world always aloof and sometimes disdainful lady anne garland--sitting in a meagrely furnished little room by a fire of sticks and fir-cones, darning the green sock of a vagabond piper! and infinitely more incomprehensible is the fact that he--this man on whom she had only twice before set eyes--was causing her to think of him in a manner not at all good for the peace of her own soul; especially as--and here a distinct confession must be made--she was already quite more than half in love with a man she had never even seen--the writer of books and letters, robin adair. human nature is a complex and curious thing, though by those who, having read thus far, hold the key to the riddle her nature may perhaps be understood. ten minutes later and a neat darn had replaced the gaping hole. finding no implement handy with which to cut the wool she broke it, then placed the sock, the wool, and the needle again upon the table in much the same position they had previously occupied. she got up from her chair and crossed to the window. the rain was still coming down in torrents, and the lightning was still frequent, but the thunder was muttering now at a distance. once more she looked back into the room. what a queer little room it was, and how entirely peaceful! why did the villagers imagine it to be haunted? could anything be more restful, more reposeful? and how very homely it looked in spite of its somewhat bare appearance! and then she stopped in her reflections, for the sound of wheels had struck upon her ear. a moment later the carriage came in sight down the lane. on the box, mackintoshed and stately, were both coachman and footman. anne laughed. "it really was unnecessary for them both to come," she said to herself. and then peter was out of the carriage and up the path to the door. "it is here," he said. anne came forward. "i am more than grateful," she said. "and you must be terribly wet." "oh, i shall dry again," he said carelessly. "it was very good of you," said anne. "it was a pleasure," said peter, "to drive in a carriage." "oh!" said anne demurely. "and--" he continued, and stopped. but in his heart he added, "to do any mortal thing for you, dear lady!" but these speeches had a way of remaining in his heart without reaching his lips. he unfurled an umbrella which he had purloined up at the house. "the rain is not quite so furious now," he said as he opened it. "oh, my hat!" said anne. she was at the hearth and back beside him in an instant. but in the transit she had glanced for a moment at the green socks on the table. peter, holding the umbrella carefully over her, conducted her down the path. the footman was standing by the carriage door. anne held out her hand. "a thousand thanks!" she said. peter gripped her hand hard. "i was delighted to be of the smallest service," he assured her. the footman shut the door; peter handed him the umbrella and he mounted with it to the box. the carriage, which had already turned, drove up in the direction of the white house on the hill. peter stood looking after it till it was out of sight, then went back into the cottage. he divested himself of his extremely wet coat and hung it on the back of a chair by the fire. not the armchair; that he gazed at almost reverently, for had not she sat in it! then he went to the table and took up the socks. arrested suddenly by something he saw, he examined them both carefully. "i am sure," said peter aloud, "that i only mended one sock, and now both--" he looked at a darn carefully. "oh, oh!" said peter, a light of illumination in his eyes. it was, however, almost incredible; he could hardly believe his senses. he lifted the sock nearer his face. a faint hint of lavender came to him. "oh!" said he again; "the darling, the adorable darling!" peter crossed to his cupboard; he placed the sock carefully inside a sheet of clean manuscript paper and put it on a shelf. then he sat down in the armchair by the fire, filled and lit his pipe, and fell into an abstracted reverie, which lasted fully half an hour. chapter xviii the everlasting why and here it is necessary to introduce another character to the reader, one of whom there has already been a momentary glimpse, but who now comes forward to play his speaking part. he is indeed a small character, a young character, and might, at first appearance, seem insignificant, yet the part he has to play in peter's drama is fraught with much consequence. a very small pebble dropped into a pool can send out wide circles, so this small figure dropped into peter's life was to play a far-reaching and important part. the little figure first made its appearance by peeping through the hedge in front of peter's cottage. it was a boy-child, aged perhaps some seven summers, and was clad in short blue serge knickerbockers and a blue jersey. peter himself was sitting by the door piping. the small figure thought his presence unobserved, but peter's blue eyes were watching him keenly. he sat very still as he piped, and the music was calling the child to him. it was a friendly, seductive little tune that he was playing, and peter saw the child move towards the gate. he did not look at him now, fearing by the slightest sign or movement to startle him. suddenly peter felt a light touch on his knee, gentle as the touch of a small bird's wing. the child had stolen up the path and was beside him. peter's heart leapt with pleasure. it was as if he had drawn a little wild woodland creature near him. he still did not move, but he let the music die away. "i like that," said the small boy, gazing at him with solemn eyes, "and i like you." peter's eyes wrinkled at the comers in sheer delight. it was a good many years since a child's voice had spoken to him, since a child's hand had been laid upon his knee. "oh," said peter, smiling with pretended laziness, "do you? well, i fancy the appreciation is reciprocated. what's your name?" "dickie gordon," responded the small boy. "i'm staying with my aunt and lady anne at the white house. i like lady anne." peter laughed. "your judgment and intuition are faultless, my son. the lady anne is the divinest woman the good lord ever created." "then you like her too?" queried dickie. "i might go farther than that," said peter reflectively; "adoration, worship, might be nearer my sentiments. but how, may i ask, did you find your way down here?" dickie smiled, an elfin smile of pure wickedness. "i ran away from nurse. she's got the baby in the perambulator. it's a very young baby, and perambulators are dull things--they can't get over stiles, or go across fields or even the tiniest kind of streams, not even streams with a plank across: the wheels are always too wide. and nurse doesn't understand anything, not why fields are nicer than roads, and why it's pleasant to stand still in a wood and listen, and why some walks are nice ways and some walks dull and horrid. she thinks everything's just all the same. and i can't explain things to her, things i know in my inside. so i just ran away and came to see you." "you did, did you?" responded peter. and back his mind swung to the memory of another small boy, one of whom the lady anne had written to him, and of another non-understanding grown-up. oh, those olympians who, from their heights of common sense, cannot stoop to the level of childhood!--for stooping they assuredly would term it, though peter took another view of the respective levels. yet, whatever the levels, the fact undoubtedly remained the same: their utter and entire incapacity of seeing eye to eye, of hearing ear to ear, of feeling heart to heart with a child. and, mused peter, it was unquestionable whose was the greater loss. and then he roused himself. "but how about my duty?" he demanded. "oughtn't i to bind you, fetter you, and carry you back a prisoner to that perambulator, that very young baby, and that non-comprehending nurse?" dickie looked at him. "you won't," he said comfortably; "besides, i want to talk." "humph!" said peter, again smiling lazily; "well, talk. i shall doubtless make a good audience, since the hearing of speech is now something of a novelty to me." dickie looked at him again. the speech was not entirely clear, but the encouragement to talk was. with a deep breath he began: "nurse says this cottage is a bad place, and you're friends with the devil. is he really an unpleasant person? you don't look's if you'd be friends with him if he were." "hmm," said peter, dubious, his eyes nevertheless twinkling; "i cannot say that i have honestly a very close acquaintanceship with him--at least, i hope not. but i have never fancied him a pleasant person. he has"--peter sought wildly in his mind for the best reason for the averred unpleasantness--"so little idea of playing the game." "yes?" it was dickie's turn to be dubious now. "oh," thought peter distractedly, "i have not only to make statements, but i have to substantiate them!" aloud he spoke, firmly, and with an air of conviction: "he does not play the game, because he pretends to be friendly when he isn't, and he tells us things are nice when they aren't." this, at all events, was good and orthodox teaching. peter patted himself on the back, so to speak. "like the apple what adam and eve ate," said dickie solemnly; "they thought it was going to taste so nice, and make them very wise, but it was a sour apple, and they had to go away out of the garden 'cause they ate it." "exactly!" said peter, much relieved that dickie should be taking the initiative as chronicler of biblical events, feeling, be it stated, somewhat hazy on these subjects himself. there was a pause. then, with a deep sigh, dickie spoke again. "i wish i knew things." "what things?" asked peter, amused. "lots of things," said dickie. there was a world of unconscious yearning in the child's voice. "i want to know lots of things. what made god think the world? did he think me from the beginning, 'cause he knew everything? why did he wait till now to make me? i'd so lots sooner have been a viking. why doesn't he let us choose what we are to be? why are some days nice and other days horrid, though everything looks just 'xactly the same and just as sunny? why don't i know the whys of things?" "oh!" said peter with a long-drawn breath, and a silence fell, while suddenly, and perhaps for almost the first time in his life, peter faced the great eternal question--the everlasting why of the universe. and because he had no answer to give, because he had not as yet the faintest inkling of the answer, he was silent, though, all unconsciously, the child had put before him the problem his soul was inarticulately striving to solve. "why?" said dickie again, gazing at him. and then peter replied. "you had better ask lady anne," he responded, basely shifting the responsibility. yet though he half acknowledged the baseness, he knew confidently that she must be better able to deal with the question than he, for surely she, enshrined where she was in his thoughts, would have some knowledge, some answer to give, something to which he might listen with as great confidence as the child beside him would listen. and then suddenly down the lane came a shrill voice, causing dickie to start and peter to look up quickly. "master dickie, master _dickie_!" the tones were unquestionably somewhat strident. "that's nurse," whispered dickie. "so i concluded," said peter dryly. "what's to be done?" "s'pose i must go," announced dickie ruefully. "master _dickie_!" the voice was close now, and the next moment a heated woman in nurse's garb and wheeling a perambulator came into view. peter got up and went down to the gate, holding dickie's small brown hand close in his big one. "i believe," said peter courteously, "that you are looking for master dickie; here he is." the woman paused, flabbergasted. "with you!" she ejaculated. "with me," said peter, smiling. "and after all he has heard about me," he continued seriously, "it's a wonder that he ventured near this cottage." the nurse looked at peter. there was something in his manner that checked the outburst of indignation that was perilously near the surface. "i've been that worried!" she said, and she stopped to wipe her face with a large white handkerchief. peter appreciated her concern. it is unquestionably trying to lose a small boy entrusted to your care, especially on an exceedingly warm summer day, and have no notion what has become of him. peter felt a bit of a culprit. "i'm very sorry you've been bothered," he said contritely. "he--" and peter paused; he could not give dickie away. "i came to see him," announced dickie calmly, "because i wanted to find out what he was like. now if you want me i'll come home. good-bye, mr. piper." he held out his hand, which peter shook gravely. "you're a bad boy," said the nurse, virtuous indignation in her voice. dickie scorned a reply. "he really hasn't come to any harm," said peter apologetically. "that's as may be," said the nurse with majestic significance, divided between her previous conception of peter and the now very obvious fact that he was of gentle birth; "that's as may be. but his aunt won't care to hear of his goings-on, nor my lady either, for that matter." "lady anne will understand," protested dickie, voicing peter's own opinion. "she may and she mayn't," was the tart reply. "now you'll please to come home; we're half an hour late as it is." "i said i was ready before," remarked dickie calmly. the nurse jerked the perambulator round in a manner that caused the very young baby within to open its eyes in a kind of mild protest. "i'll come and see you again," said dickie confidently to peter. the nurse pulled him by the arm. "you'll do nothing of the kind, master dickie." "huh!" said dickie, "you don't know. i shall ask lady anne." and then the three disappeared down the lane. "the lady anne," remarked peter to himself, "is evidently a divinity to another and much smaller person than i. i don't exactly love that nurse," he continued reflectively, "but i fancy she has her hands full." and whistling airily, peter passed up the little path to the cottage. chapter xix piper and author up at the white house lady anne garland was entertaining millicent sheldon. the entertainment to lady anne proved somewhat weighty. the carefully mended millicent was a different person from the one she had previously known. her whole aspect was altered in anne's eyes. she no longer saw her, as millicent no doubt saw herself, a calm gracious madonna, stretching out healing hands to a weary humanity. to anne she was simply a very ordinary woman who had failed the man she had once loved--or professed to love--in his need. and anne suddenly realized that for all millicent's grand and noble statements she had no use for failures. let a man have his foot firmly planted on the ladder of success, albeit on the lowest rung, millicent spoke of him with gracious condescension, held out the hand of friendship to him. those who had fallen from the ladder, or who were struggling towards it with little chance of reaching it, were not in her eyes worth a moment's consideration. truly the cracks were horribly, terribly conspicuous, and anne had much ado to prevent millicent from recognizing that she perceived them. she looked forward to the day of millicent's departure with a guilty hopefulness, a secret longing which she felt was almost indecent in a hostess. and then something happened to delay that day. dickie, the solemn-eyed dickie, fell ill. it was one of those sudden swift illnesses of childhood that grip the hearts of parents with a terrible fear, and anne and millicent, who loved the small boy as if he were their own, watched the little fever-stricken body with grave anxiety, and dreaded to think what news the next mail to india might not carry. the villagers came daily to inquire. voices were hushed when the child's name was mentioned. peter alone, to whom no one ever spoke, did not know of the illness. he only wondered why dickie, who had escaped his vigilant nurse more than once, did not come to the cottage. and then one day, when the fever was running high, dickie began a plaint, a piteous little moaning for the piper. backwards and forwards on the pillow tossed the small fevered head; the dry lips called ceaselessly to the piper to come and pipe to him. in some vague way dickie had confounded him with the pied piper of hamelin, and wanted peter to take him through the mountain and show him sparrows brighter than peacocks and horses with eagles' wings. peter had told dickie many a tale of fancy during his visit to the cottage. "who is it he wants?" asked the doctor sharply, watching the child. "can no one fetch him?" anne, who was near the bed, stood up. "i know," she said. "i will write a note and send----" the doctor, a little man with a crusty manner and a heart as tender as a woman's, interrupted her testily. "can't you go yourself?" he snapped. "i know what servants are when they're sent on messages. the child is--i'm anxious, and as cross as an old bear," he concluded. anne was already at the door. "i'll not be long," she said. "miss haldane will be here if you need her. i'll send her to you. nurse is with the baby and mrs. sheldon is lying down. she was up most of last night." * * * * * a few moments later anne was walking down the drive. it was a grey afternoon, lapped in soft clouds, and with a little sad wind in the trees suggestive of autumn, though it was only august. anne felt a sensation of depression, a faint foreboding as of impending ill. she told herself that it was merely fatigue. dickie would get well--she knew he would get well. and yet she did not really think that anxiety regarding dickie was causing this depression. it was something more remote, something intangible and vague. she determined not to think about it--to throw aside the slight uneasiness. yet again and again it crept over her in insidious little waves, despite all her efforts to the contrary. * * * * * peter was busy writing when the knock came on his door. now, whether it was telepathy or clairvoyance is not known, but his heart jumped at the knock, and he got up quickly, opening wide the door. "what is wrong?" he queried anxiously as he saw anne's face. he almost forgot to be surprised at her presence there. "it's dickie," said anne. "he's ill, very ill. the child has got some queer ideas into his head. he has mixed you up in an odd way with the pied piper of hamelin. he has been talking about you a great deal--half in delirium, you understand. he wants you to pipe to him." she stopped. "oh!" ejaculated peter, his voice full of sympathy. "the pathetic little mite! i'll come at once." and then he, too, stopped, hesitated. "if you will go on," he said, "i'll follow you." "can't you," asked anne, "come back with me now at once? i fancy--i may be wrong--that the doctor thinks every minute is of importance." peter flushed. "of course," he said, "i'll come now. it was only--" again he stopped, and anne waited, wondering. "only," said peter desperately, "that i thought perhaps you would rather not walk with me. i--the villagers, you know, look upon me with disfavour." anne raised her chin. there was a little regal air in the gesture. "but really," she assured him, "i am not accustomed to consider the opinion of the villagers." "oh, you idiot," groaned peter inwardly, "you idiot, you double-dyed dolt! now you've offended her, though i protest your intentions were good." aloud he said meekly, "i'll come with you at once." he turned and picked up his hat from a chair. as the long peacock feather caught his eye, again he groaned inwardly. he was for flinging the hat aside, but lady anne was watching him. he put it on his head desperately, and came out on to the path beside her, feeling for all the world a mountebank, a popinjay, a fool. why, oh why! had he maliciously defied the fates? why, oh why! had this peacock feather lain in his path once long ago? and still further, why had he been idiot enough to pick it up and wear it merely in a spirit of contradiction, because once upon a time a woman had announced her belief in a superstition regarding peacock feathers. he attempted to appear unconcerned, at his ease, but he was aware that the attempt was a poor one. nor did the amazed glances of the villagers, as they crossed the green, tend to reassure him. yet here was lady anne walking calmly, quietly, entirely at her ease, entirely dignified. why was he ass enough to care for the glances of these yokels! yet he knew it was not for himself that he cared, but for his lady, his divinity, who had deigned herself to visit his cottage, to ask him with her own lips to perform a service for her. he longed for a flow of words to come to him, yet none but the most banal remark presented itself to his mind, therefore he walked beside her in silence. at the entrance to the drive peter suddenly shivered, why, he did not know, for the day, though grey, was hot. it was as if some slight indefinable feeling of apprehension had struck him. anne glanced at him. "cold?" she queried, smiling. "no," responded peter, smiling in response. "i fancy it was--according to the old adage--a goose walking over my grave." "oh!" said anne. and the slight feeling of uneasiness, which had temporarily departed, returned. "which, so say the superstitious folk," continued peter lightly, "denotes misfortune to the owner of the grave. personally--" he broke off with a slight shrug of the shoulders. "you are not a believer in omens and superstitions," suggested anne in conclusion. "so i might suppose. your--your hat decoration is generally regarded as provocative of ill-luck," she smiled. peter flushed. "it's a fool thing to wear," he said lamely, "but----" "on the contrary," said anne demurely, "it fits in with your rôle. i believe it was the rumour of the peacock feather that first gave me the courage to ask you to play to me. it sounded fantastic, unusual. i dared to think that you might respond to an unusual invitation. the feather, i repeat, gave me courage." "then," said peter gallantly, "i wear it with a good will as an omen of fortune's favours. you did not, however, ask me a second time." anne drew a quick breath. "no," she responded. "yet--you came." "yes," said peter quietly, "i came." anne might have spoken again, but they were at the door by now, and they passed into the hall together and up the wide shallow stairs. * * * * * the sick-room was in half light, for the curtains were partly drawn. the doctor was sitting by the bed, his eyes watching, grave. miss haldane was at a little distance. they both looked up as the two entered. anne crossed to the bedside, peter following. "dickie," said anne, softly and distinctly, "i have brought the piper to you." she sat down and took one of the small hot hands in hers. peter came to the foot of the bed. he drew his pipe from his pocket. as the first sweet notes of the pipe filled the room dickie lay still. it was the friendly, seductive little tune peter had first played to the child. no one stirred and the magic piping breathed through the air. "more," said dickie, as peter stopped. and the request was quiet, conscious. peter came a little nearer. "this, dickie, is the sleepy song the pied piper played the children when he carried them away to the wonderful land. so shut your eyes and listen, and you will sleep and dream of running streams, and flowers, and of cool green grass, and beautiful birds, and horses with eagles' wings, that will carry you away gently on their backs to the place where children get well." peter's voice dropped to a murmur. and then once more came the music, a low crooning lullaby, full of adorable restful tenderness. dickie's eyes closed drowsily. the music crooned on, rocking softly, soothingly. then dickie gave a little gentle sigh, his fingers relaxed their hold on anne's, his small hand fell open on the counterpane, and dickie slept. "thank god!" breathed the old doctor. and he took off his spectacles and wiped them. peter looked at anne. she nodded, and rose from her chair. they stole softly from the room together. they passed down the corridor. then anne turned and spoke. "i can't say anything but 'thank you.'" she smiled, a little wavering smile, and her eyes were misty. "oh," said peter with a huge sigh, "i'm glad. he's--he's such a jolly little chap." and then he looked up, for a woman was coming towards them. "it is mrs. sheldon, dickie's aunt," said anne, explanatory. "she--" and she broke off, amazed at the sudden rigidity of peter's face. "oh!" said millicent as she saw the two. and she stopped dead. "what is it?" queried anne, astonished. "do you two know each other?" "i once had the pleasure of mr. carden's acquaintance," said millicent stiffly, "but now----" "mr. carden!" ejaculated anne. and a light dawned upon her, a light of painful significance. "i was not aware he was in the house," said millicent coldly. "i was not aware that you knew him." then peter spoke. "as peter carden lady anne does not know me," he said steadily, though his face was white. "she knows me only as peter the vagabond piper." "an alias," said millicent scornfully. "one, no doubt, of several." anne was waiting, silent. peter had a sudden thought that she was waiting for him to speak, to deny the accusation if he could. he felt utterly and entirely weary. "oh no!" he said bitterly; "only one other--robin adair." "oh!" said anne, shrinking as if the name had been a blow. "it really does not signify what you choose to call yourself," said millicent. "but i do not care that my friends should be deceived." peter drew in his breath sharply. he looked straight at her, and in her eyes he could read the true cause for her anger. "you are right," he said quietly. "and i have deceived her." he turned to anne. her head was erect, her face white, motionless. indignation, anger, contempt, he saw all three in her eyes. he turned without a word and passed down the stairs, across the hall, and through the hall door, which he closed softly behind him as he went. chapter xx farewell the night was far spent. for hours peter had sat by his table with writing materials before him, and at length his letter was written, ended. "it is the last time i shall write to you, but i ask you to condone my conduct--at least, sufficiently to read what i have written. i know i have no excuse to make. to say that my deception arose from the knowledge that if you once knew peter the piper and robin adair as one and the same i should lose your letters is of course none. i deceived you deliberately, and broke the compact that our identities should remain unknown to each other. though i did not first break it, nor was it broken of my will. being broken by fate, however, i should have told you. "and by now you will have realized that you extended the hand of friendship to one who had entirely forfeited the right to it. is it, perhaps, any compensation to you to know that your letters, your kindness, have at least been received with humble gratitude, with the most intense and overwhelming pleasure by one however unworthy to receive them? "i shall leave this cottage at daylight. my presence here longer would, i know, be distasteful to you. i have no right to ask your forgiveness, yet if one day you could extend it to me, and think less hardly of me, i should be glad. the one thing i can do, and believe you would wish me to do, is to destroy your letters. i cannot destroy the memory of them--that is impossible, and i dare to hope that in your generosity you will not grudge it to me. "presently i shall try to write again, and if ever fate should throw my work in your path, and you deign to read it, then know that whatever in it is of worth, whatever is in the smallest degree of good, has been inspired by the thought of you. "for all your blessed kindness, for the fact that you are you and are in the world, i shall throughout my life be grateful. "perhaps one day i may get the chance to atone. "peter carden." the letter written, peter got up from his chair and crossed to the fireplace. in a few moments a flame sprang up, and some bluish papers twisted and shrivelled in its heat. presently nothing was left but a small heap of grey ashes. peter sat very still. there was a lump in his throat, and he swallowed hard once or twice, but his eyes were dry. a bird chirped in the bushes outside the cottage; it was answered by another and another. the air became full of a chorus of twitterings and chirpings. peter roused himself. he picked up his hat and a bundle from the table and went to the cottage door. in the east the sky was flushing to rose and lavender. peter went down the path. he opened the little gate. a moment later it had swung to behind him, and he was walking down the dusty road. chapter xxi a wounded skylark miss haldane was worried, perturbed. her usually cheerful old face was wrinkled into lines of perplexity, her eyes were anxious. something was wrong at the white house. dickie had slept peacefully throughout the night, and with the extraordinary recuperation of children, had demanded bread and milk on awaking. it was perfectly natural to suppose that an air of jubilation should prevail. yet lady anne was pale, silent, aloof; millicent sheldon slightly cold and frigid. what in the name of wonder did it signify? vaguely miss haldane connected the extraordinary atmosphere with the piper. it was true that he had been accountable, under providence, for dickie's marvellous recovery, yet miss haldane distinctly regarded him as a bird of ill-omen, and in her heart bitterly regretted that necessity had called him to the house. throughout the day she fidgeted and fluttered interiorly, keeping sharp and anxious watch on anne's pale and almost stern face, without, however, in the least appearing to do so. at tea-time she found herself alone in the drawing-room with millicent, anne being in dickie's room. then miss haldane could contain her anxiety no longer. she disliked millicent sheldon, but it was a case of any port in a storm. having poured out tea and handed millicent a cup, she prefaced her first remark by a slight and nervous cough. "anne looks very pale," she said tentatively. "i hoped to see her looking better now our anxiety is practically at an end." "yes," said millicent, taking a sip of tea. this was unsatisfactory. miss haldane returned to the charge more openly. "i hope," she said, "that nothing has worried her?" millicent put down her teacup. "it is distinctly unfortunate," she said, "that that man who called himself peter the piper should have come into this neighbourhood." she made the remark with a calm majesty of manner. "oh?" queried miss haldane, pricking up her ears and looking for all the world like a terrier on the scent of a rat; "do you know anything about him?" "only that he has spent three years in prison for forgery," said millicent gravely. "anne has got unaccountably familiar with him in some way, and is naturally vexed to find her friendship misplaced." she puckered her smooth white brow with an air of grave, gracious anxiety, but there was a hard expression in her eyes. miss haldane ruffled like a small angry bird, the terrier expression forgotten. "lady anne," she said with dignity, "is certainly not familiar with him. you must have been misinformed." "really!" millicent lifted her eyebrows coolly. "from anne's own showing yesterday, she knew considerably more about him than probably you or i had the smallest idea of. she has not seen fit to confide in me, but it was entirely apparent." miss haldane sat very upright. "if anne did know more of him than we imagine," she remarked firmly, "it shows that he was a more desirable person to know than i had supposed." millicent controlled her temper admirably. of course, it was entirely absurd, but the old thing was, unquestionably, trying to snub her. "a man who has been in prison!" she remarked, with an air of quiet finality and an exasperating little laugh. miss haldane's usually dim old eyes blazed. "under god we owe dickie's recovery to him," she said with quiet dignity. "might not that make us a little charitable towards him?" and millicent, for her outward imperturbability of manner, was annoyedly conscious that miss haldane had scored. and then anne walked in. "am i interrupting confidences?" she asked, with an attempt at her usual lightness of manner. "dickie is a fraud; he is demanding bread and jam, or at least toast and honey. i consider he has basely deceived us all." and then she saw that the atmosphere was really strained, tense. she pretended blindness, however, and, sitting down, asked for some tea. while drinking it she made a few airy remarks, to which miss haldane responded absent-mindedly, and millicent with a pained and almost holy silence. then millicent got up. "i am going to see dickie," she said. as the door closed behind her, miss haldane gave a sigh of relief. "how i dislike that woman!" she said. "i saw she had ruffled you," said anne soothingly. "she was impertinent," remarked miss haldane with dignity. "millicent! impertinent!" anne's eyes were big with amazement. "my dear matty!" she might be many things, but impertinent seemed the last word to connect with the large statuesque millicent. "impertinent," said miss haldane firmly. "it is only her size that makes it not usually apparent. if she were a small woman, it would be obvious to the meanest intelligence. and she is distinctly ungrateful. whatever that man has done, whatever he is, we owe him a debt of gratitude." "oh!" said anne, her eyes clouding; "she was talking about him?" "yes. my dear, have you considered that even if he did wrong in the past he may have repented? and he did help dickie." "yes," said anne slowly; "he helped dickie." "even if," continued miss haldane earnestly, "he has once been in prison, he cannot be altogether bad at heart, or a child--" she stopped. to her own surprise, the contradictory old thing was defending the piper. "oh, prison!" said anne vaguely. "yes; didn't you know? was not that why you were vexed--angry?" anne gave an odd little laugh. "no, matty, dear. to be candid, it was not that at all. somehow--it's queer, isn't it?--i never thought of that." "then why--?" began miss haldane, perplexed, vague. "oh, it's a complicated situation," said anne dryly; "but--well, every atom of pride i ever possessed has been dragged in the mud, humbled, abased. now you have the truth; and for heaven's sake don't ask me any more!" again the hard look crept into her face. she got up and moved to the window. miss haldane watched her. had there been any truth in millicent's words? had she seen more of this man than miss haldane had supposed? clandestine meetings, secret letters, fluttered rapidly before miss haldane's mind. then she looked at anne again. it was impossible. whatever had happened, it was certain that it was nothing of which anne need really be ashamed. and anne, silent at the window, had bitterness in her heart; she felt her pride, as she had said, humbled, dragged in the dust. this man to whom she had written had amused himself at her expense. as one person he had received her intimate letters, as another he had been the recipient of gracious favours on which he had doubtless put a totally wrong construction. posing as two men, yet in reality one, he could compare the favours she had accorded both. the rose, the green sock--her face burnt at the thought of them. the one man, robin adair, smiling at her gracious letters, and smiling still more at her gracious treatment of the vagabond piper. it was monstrous, preposterous! how he must have laughed in his sleeve when she told him of her inclination to confound the two men. anger and indignation were in anne's heart at the thought, yet deeper still was an odd little ache, and the fact that it existed, and she was conscious of it, curiously enough increased her indignation against peter. the door opened softly, and the footman entered with a letter on a tray. he crossed to the window where anne was standing. as she saw the letter lying there, a hot flush mounted in her face. she took it, holding it irresolutely in her hand. when the door had closed again, she broke the seal. there was a long silence. at last miss haldane looked round. anne's face was quivering. "what is it?" asked miss haldane, her voice full of perplexed anxiety. "only," said anne, with a half sob, "that i have torn the little young wings from a skylark." chapter xxii candles and masses i if at the beginning of the last chapter miss haldane was perturbed, worried, perplexed, so, rather more than two months later, muriel lancing was perturbed, worried, perplexed, also; and for the same cause, namely, the strange demeanour of the lady anne garland, who had returned to town at the beginning of november. she was changed, she was totally different, so sighed muriel, reflective, meditative. where was her former charm? her former sweet kindliness? her faith, her trust, her buoyancy--in short, her everything that went to make up the anne muriel knew and loved? an obsession seemed to have come upon her. she was cynical, hard, the speaker of little bitter phrases, deliberately calculated to wound and hurt. she was not, as muriel reflected, anne at all, but a mask, a shell of a woman, in which deep down the real anne was imprisoned, buried. "if only she would speak," sighed muriel to herself. "if only the mask could be removed for a moment the real anne would be liberated. confession, so says dear old father o'sullivan, is good for the soul. it would be incalculably good for anne's. but she won't make one. and short of asking her straight out to do so, which would inevitably fix the mask on tighter still, i can do nothing." but, all the same, muriel went off to the oratory and set up a candle to st. joseph, telling him pretty lucidly the whole state of affairs and requesting him to do something. now whether it was the intervention of st. joseph, or whether it was that the real imprisoned anne could bear her solitary confinement no longer, must be a matter for pure conjecture: but on the next occasion that muriel visited anne's house in cheyne walk she was distinctly conscious that though the mask was on there was a tiny crack in it, and through the crack the real anne was looking with a kind of dumb pleading. in a twinkling muriel's finger was towards it, in, of course, the most insidious and hidden way imaginable. it is useless to attempt to describe her methods; they were purely feminine, entirely delicate. at length the shell, the mask, fell asunder, and the real anne, being liberated, spoke. it was an enormous relief to her, and from the very beginning up to millicent's disclosure she confided the whole story to muriel, who watched her with her greeny-grey eyes full of sympathy. "oh, but," cried muriel as she stopped, "i quite understand your anger. of course, it's very difficult to put into exact words why you are angry, the whole situation is so extraordinarily complicated. but," she concluded, "any woman with the smallest modicum of sense must see why. and the fact that millicent was the person there at the time can't have made things a bit nicer." "it didn't," said anne quietly. "but i haven't finished yet. he wrote to me." "yes?" queried muriel. "it--his letter swept away all my anger. i--i understood." "of course," muriel nodded, "there is his point of view." "i saw it," said anne. "i realized--or thought i realized--the utter loneliness that made him act as he had done. i--i wrote to him." "yes?" queried muriel again, and very gently. "i said--oh, i said a good deal," confessed anne. "and--and he has never replied. oh, don't you see it's that that hurts? i said things i would never have said if i hadn't believed he was longing for me to say them, if i hadn't"--anne's face was crimson--"wanted to say them. i was so sure i'd hear from him again. and--and there was only a cruel silence. i'd give anything never to have written that letter." shamed, broken, she looked piteously at muriel. anne was proud, and she was young. she did not yet know that there is no shame in giving love, offering it purely, finely, as she had done. is not god himself daily making the offering, an offering from which too many of us turn away? "but, darling anne," cried muriel, "perhaps--surely he could not have received it." anne shook her head. "it's what i'd like to believe," she said with a little bitter laugh, "what we'd both like to believe. but it's no good. i sent it to his publishers, the same address as that to which i'd sent the others. oh, no! that kind of letters don't miscarry. i have misunderstood all through." "darling!" said muriel softly. there was a long silence, broken only by an occasional little sputtering of the coal in the fire, and the rumble of wheels and clack of horses' hoofs without. and in the silence muriel was giving very deep thanks to st. joseph that anne--her beloved anne--was once more restored to her. also she was cogitating in her own mind still further benefits to be asked of him. presently anne broke the silence. "muriel, i'd rather you should forget--that we should never speak again--about what i've told you this afternoon." muriel took up an illustrated paper from a side table. "hats," she announced sententiously, "will be worn small this winter, and skirts mercifully not quite so tight. have you noticed mrs. clinton? she's positively indecent. i blush scarlet if i'm with a man when i meet her." anne laughed, though there were tears in her eyes. "muriel," she said, "you're the silliest and dearest little elf in christendom." ii muriel made more than one further journey to the oratory to explain matters to st. joseph, on each occasion presenting that delightful saint with a candle. the first time--subsequent to anne's confession--that she went to the oratory she gave him two, one being for thanksgiving. also she invited father o'sullivan to tea on an occasion when tommy, by muriel's suggestion, had taken anne to skate at prince's. father o'sullivan was a short, stoutish man, with grizzled hair, small twinkling eyes, and a mouth that had the kindliest twist of a smile imaginable. to know father o'sullivan for an hour was to love him. to know him for longer was to love him better. muriel had known him from her babyhood. this afternoon, having invited him to tea, she plied him with cakes and quince sandwiches, which latter his soul adored, and talked in a gay and inconsequent fashion of airy nothings, to which father o'sullivan responded after the manner of irishmen, be they priests or laymen. but on the conclusion of the meal she dropped into a pensive mood, and sat with her elbow on the arm of her chair, and her pointed chin resting in her cupped hand, gazing into space with great dreamy eyes. and then all at once she roused herself and looked across at father o'sullivan. "father," she said seriously, "i want you to say a mass for me." "you do, do you?" said father o'sullivan, stroking his chin. "and with what intention?" "well," said muriel, reflective, "it's not quite easy to explain. i think i'd better tell you the story." and she launched forth, omitting names at the moment, though at a future date she happened inadvertently to mention peter's. "well, now," said father o'sullivan as she ended, and his eyes were twinkling, "is it just a little small story like that you'd have me be repeating at mass, for i'm thinking it will take just no time at all." "oh, don't laugh at me!" begged muriel. "don't you see how difficult it is to put into words what i want!" she dropped her hands in her lap and gazed at him tragically. "well, but have a try," urged father o'sullivan. "perhaps i can be helping you out." "first, then," said muriel, "i want her to be happy again, and i don't see how that can be unless she hears from him, and even that alone would be no good, because i'm sure to be really happy she'd have to marry him, and you see he has committed forgery. if only that could be untrue--but it's impossible, and i don't see how anything can come right," she ended despairingly. father o'sullivan rubbed his hair up the wrong way. "and it's a mass with the intention of things coming right you want me to say, when all the time you're feeling sure they can't," he remarked severely. "and if i'm going to say it that way myself, what kind of faith do you think i'm going to have in it?" muriel looked at him contritely. "but don't you see--" she began. "oh, i see fast enough," he responded. "let's get at what you want the other way round. to begin with, you want the young man never to have committed the forgery, and then you want to run through the whole gamut till they live happily ever after. and all the time you're wishing it, and wanting me to pray for it, you're telling yourself it can't be. isn't that so?" his twinkling old eyes belied the half-severity of his words. "oh, but," said muriel, "it's--it's such a lot to ask." father o'sullivan leaned forward and tapped the forefinger of his right hand in the palm of his left. "faith, my child, is not asking god for bushels and setting out a pint measure to catch them in. it's a good old saying, but not my own, more's the pity of it. now, do you want me to say this mass for you with the intention we've arranged?" "yes," said muriel firmly. "and you'll come to it, and believe that it will be answered, whether in your way or god's you leave to him?" he asked gravely. "yes," said muriel again. father o'sullivan nodded his head approvingly. "to-morrow morning at eight o'clock i'll be saying it then," he said, "and you'll be praying too." he leaned back in his chair. "of course," ventured muriel, "it's rather a complicated thing to put into words." father o'sullivan smiled, a merry, twinkling humorous old smile. "faith, i'll be getting it into some kind of shape," he promised. "and if we could hear all the prayers sent up to heaven i'm thinking we'd find many a muddled phrase down here straightened out by the holy saints as they carry them up to god's throne. and no matter what the muddles are, the answer's clear enough when it comes." and then the door opened and anne, tommy, and general carden walked in. muriel gave a little gasp. "i thought you were having tea at prince's," she said. and father o'sullivan, as he watched her face with wicked pleasure, realized--and it did not take a vast amount of sagacity to do so--that one at least of the three was concerned with the story she had just confided to his ears. and as it obviously was not tommy, and he concluded he might rule out the white-haired military-looking man, it left only the tall, graceful woman who crossed to a chair by muriel and began pulling off her gloves. "we got bored," said tommy; "at least anne did, and we decided to come home to tea. and we met general carden on the doorstep, and here we all are. and if you're too flustered for some reason to introduce everybody nicely, i will." "don't be silly, tommy," said muriel, laughing and recovering her equanimity. "ring the bell, and we'll have fresh tea made." "no need," said tommy. "i saw morris in the hall and told him." and he sat down by father o'sullivan. general carden took a chair near anne. "i was sorry not to find you at home when i called last thursday," he said. "your servant told me you were at home on tuesdays." "yes," said anne. she hesitated, half doubtful. then she added: "but perhaps you'll come another afternoon? at-home days are not very satisfactory. shall we say wednesday?" "i shall be delighted," returned general carden. "we had, if i remember rightly, a long argument the last time we met, about a book. let me see, what was the author's name?" he wrinkled his brows, reflective, thoughtful. anne turned to put her gloves on the table beside her. "robin adair, wasn't it?" she asked quietly. "ah, yes, of course!" replied the old hypocrite. muriel glanced at anne. "i wish," she reflected with admiration, "that i could act as well. i nearly gave myself away just now, when they all descended on me like an avalanche. and i'd bet my bottom dollar father o'sullivan guessed something." which bet, if there had been any one to take her on, muriel would certainly have won. anne, as she drove towards chelsea half an hour later, wondered vaguely why she had asked general carden to tea with her. finally she decided that it was for the obvious reason that he wanted to come, and she would have been rude if she had not done so. and father o'sullivan, as he walked home, ruminated on the tangled story muriel had told him. it was only one of the many tangles in the world, and he knew it, but it had been brought directly to his notice, and he had a very simple and perfect faith that the good god would unravel the knots in his own way and at his own time. chapter xxiii dum spiro, spero you know how there are times in our lives when the days hang heavily, each moment dragging on leaden feet, weighted all the more grievously because we are ready to protest to our fellow-men, to ourselves perhaps, that the days are not grey, but each one as full of light as we would have it be. and if you do not know you are lucky. or are you lucky? are not the heavy clouds, which temporarily hide the golden sunshine, better than a dull monochrome of a life, in which neither cloud nor sunshine is existent? for is it not by the very brightness of the sun which has been, that we recognize the clouds which now obscure it? it is when the sun has never shone in its fullest splendour for us that we do not recognize the existence of the clouds, for to say that any life is passed in one unbroken dream of golden glory is to make a statement which one will dare to denounce as untrue. if there be the gold of joy, so there will come the clouds of sorrow, and a life without clouds is of necessity one without sun, a monochrome of a life, peaceful perhaps, but lacking in intensity. the days passed slowly for anne. they no longer went by with the gay carelessness of a year, six months, nay, only three months ago. take an interest out of your life, however chary you may have been of admitting the existence of that interest to your secret heart, and then fill your days with gaiety, friends, books, anything and everything but the one thing you want, and you will find it a method of subtraction and addition which is apt to result in a distinctly unsatisfactory sum total. it is not to be supposed, however, that anne wore her heart upon her sleeve for society daws to peck at. she hid it and its little ache deep under a charming courtliness which was, if anything, more charming than usual. and if she smiled a little more frequently, if a _bon mot_ came more readily to her lips, after all they were but attempts to bury the heartache a bit deeper, and it was at least the real anne who once more walked the earth. she saw millicent occasionally, but only occasionally. there was now between them a civil exchange of courtesies; an assumption, but merely an assumption, of the old friendly footing. on a certain afternoon in the white house millicent had attempted to give a version of a particular story to anne. to which anne had responded that she already knew it. millicent, however, had attempted to explain, and in explaining had told anne one or two things anne had not before known, which things had caused those aforementioned cracks in millicent to gape with such ominous wideness that millicent herself suddenly perceived them, and, worse still, saw that anne perceived them. anne had quietly announced that she preferred not to talk of the matter further: the part of it that concerned millicent was her own affair, the part of it that concerned herself was hers. and so it had concluded, outwardly at all events. but it did not require a vast amount of acumen to perceive that their former friendly relationship was of necessity a trifle strained. it is not to be inferred from this, however, that anne and millicent were anywhere near warfare with each other. anne was far too much _grande_ _dame_ for such a proceeding. also her sentiments towards millicent were now those of pure indifference. millicent had never counted a great deal in her life, she now merely counted less. of millicent one cannot be so sure. she had seen anne's face on that historic afternoon; she had seen peter's face. she had therefrom drawn her own conclusions--conclusions to which anne's subsequent refusal to discuss the matter had given further weight. millicent would have liked to think of peter as pining in quiet grief for her, leading a kind of _piano_ life of minor passages in which she stood for the keynote. she had--to be candid--pictured peter in her mind as a prematurely grey-haired man, slightly bowed at the shoulders (from remorse), gazing fervently at a photograph of a madonna-like woman with a child in her arms (millicent's latest by lafayette), sorrowfully considering the fact that the child was not his, and announcing to heaven that the thought of her should guide him at last to its gates. it must be allowed that it was a distinct jar to find him not at all grey-haired, not at all bowed at the shoulders, but jaunty, debonair, carrying a ridiculous hat with a peacock feather in his hand, and talking intimately to one of her own friends, one, too, who had kept her acquaintanceship with him a dead secret. millicent's feelings towards both him and anne verged on something like hatred, though this primeval instinct was so hidden beneath a mask of culture that no one, anne least of all, perceived it. of general carden anne now saw a good deal. having come once to her house he came again, and came frequently. and every time, by some subtle method of his own device, he contrived to mention a certain green-covered book, and also to speak of the author. and, queerly enough, anne responded. perhaps by some feminine intuition she guessed general carden's secret, namely, that he had a pretty shrewd inkling of the identity of the author, and perhaps underneath the courtly worldly demeanour of the old man she saw the heart which longed for some word, some sign, from him. and perhaps knowing this, seeing this, the heart of the now liberated anne went out to the old general, having in a way a common cause of unhappiness. and so the two smiled and chatted, and skimmed the surface of their sorrow, finding in so doing a curious consolation, so queer and unaccountable is human nature. and then one day, a few weeks after her conversation with muriel, she became conscious of a tiny hope in her heart. she could no more say at which precise moment it had first been born than one can say at which precise moment the tiny green leaves of a spring flower first push above the brown earth. for weeks there is nothing to be seen, and then one morning we come down to our garden and the tiny shoot is there in the sunshine, smiling shyly at us. and so one morning, all unsuspected in its hidden growth, a tiny green shoot of hope sprang up in anne's heart, a hope that after all her pride had not been abased as she had feared, but that somewhere, somehow, love was lifting it from the earth. it is not easy to put into exact words precisely what she hoped, but assuredly trust had been renewed. and with an old priest praying at an altar, and a woman kneeling to st. joseph, and somewhere, far away, a man's heart worshipping and adoring, it is hardly surprising that it was so. chapter xxiv democritus and now if this history be inclined to jump from one place to another in a somewhat inconsequent fashion, perhaps it will be forgiven, for with its hero wandering away by himself and the rest of the characters more or less congregated together, it takes some mental skipping to record their story. yet peter was now not entirely lonely. he had picked up a chum, a pal, in the shape of a small and extremely mongrel puppy of a breed unknown, but it is to be supposed that wire-haired terrier predominated. and here is the manner of their first meeting. when peter left the cottage in the early morning he walked first to the market-town, where he posted two letters--one to the lady anne garland and one to his publishers, telling them that at present he had no settled address, but that if he wished to correspond with them later he would let them know. the consequence of this being that when a certain blue letter, addressed to him, arrived at their office it remained there, while they waited with what patience they might for word or sign from peter. if he were a bit of a genius, and they were inclined to consider him so, his methods were also somewhat erratic. leaving the town, he turned his steps northward, and for no particular reason beyond the fact that he liked the look of the road. but perhaps it was really a certain unseen guidance which led his steps in that direction and made him of benefit to a small bundle of life embodied in a miserable little roll of dirty white hair, a stump of a baby tail, two short ears, four lanky little legs, a wet black nose, and a pair of really beautiful brown eyes. often we see these beautiful eyes in an otherwise entirely ugly face. perhaps it is not surprising, for after all they are the windows of the soul, and even a little doggy soul may be beautiful. but to proceed. peter walked along a dusty high-road till about noonday. it was an august day, as may be remembered, and breathless with the quiet heat of that month when it happens to be really hot. peter had not noticed the heat at first; external matters were at the moment outside his consideration. he had been tramping doggedly, mentally weary, the sun of the last few weeks blotted out, his horizon now veiled in grey clouds of dreariness. and then at last his body began to protest. "if you will indulge in lovesick thoughts," it cried, "if your soul intends to give itself up to heartache and mental torment, at all events don't drag me into it. and it's very sure that if you will treat me with a bit more consideration you will be befriending your soul likewise." and peter, seeing the force of the argument, laughed. it was against all philosophy except that of the monks of old time to punish your body because your soul was sick. body and soul were--at all events in his case, he argued--too closely allied. perhaps those old monks who had found a key to spiritual things--a key on which peter did not pretend to have laid a hand--might have had such a way of separating the two that the one did not suffer for the infirmities of the other. but peter was one of us ordinary mortals to whom prayer and such-like on an empty stomach--or an over-full one for that matter--would be a thing impossible. for his soul to be at ease his body must be comfortable, and most assuredly he was at the present moment increasing the discomfort of his soul by unduly fatiguing his body. it was an illogical proceeding, as he suddenly perceived. a wood lay to the right of the road--a place of cool shadows and small dancing spots of gold, a silent place, still as the peace of some old cathedral. peter turned into it. he walked a little way across the green moss, till the leafy barrier of branches shut the high-road from his sight, and then sat down, his back against the purple and silver flecked trunk of a beech-tree. he unstrapped his wallet and laid it on the ground beside him. then suddenly his ear caught a sound, a faint yelping cry of pain. it was as if some creature had for hours been imploring aid which did not come, as if it had sunk into a despairing silence, and then some tiny sound, some movement, had again awakened hope sufficient to make one last appeal. peter jumped to his feet. "now which way was it?" he queried. "from over there, if i'm not mistaken." and he set off farther into the wood. "it's an animal in a trap," he said, "a beastly trap. curse the things!" many a time in his wanderings peter had put a dumb creature out of its misery. and if you have ever heard a hare cry, and seen its soft eyes gazing at you till you'd vow it was an imprisoned human soul looking through its windows, you'd know the fury of rage against some of mankind that had possessed peter more than once, and which possessed him now. he peered right and left among the undergrowth, his eyes and ears alert, yet seeing nothing, hearing nothing. he stopped and whistled softly. "where are you, you poor little atom of life?" he cried. and then, not a yard ahead of him, from a great bramble clump, came the tiniest, most pitiful cry, but with a little note of hope in it. "oh!" cried peter, and the next instant he was on his knees, the steel jaws were pulled asunder, and a baby mongrel of a puppy was dragging itself feebly towards him, trying to lick his hand. "oh, you poor little beggar!" said peter, as he wrenched the trap from the ground and flung it into the middle of the bramble-bush. then he lifted the small bundle of rough, dirty white hair tenderly and carried it back to the beech-tree. there he sat himself down and began to examine the wounded leg; it was terribly torn but mercifully not broken. peter washed the wound with some water from his flask, and bound the leg with some strips he tore from his handkerchief, the small creature ecstatically licking his hand the while. "you know," remonstrated peter, "a thing of your size should not be wandering about alone. it's not correct. you might have known you'd get into difficulties." the puppy paused in its licking to look into his face with brown speaking eyes. they might have told peter a good deal--a sad little story of being hunted, hounded from place to place on account of his ugly little body, of a last frantic, terrified rush from a distant village, of presently trotting along a dusty road, of a turning into a wood which smelled pleasantly of rabbits and other things dear to a doggy nose, and of a final excruciating imprisonment, which had lasted through heaven knows how long of torment, till a big human being in the shape of peter had come to his rescue. all this those eyes might have said. at all events, peter read a bit of the story. "i suppose, you poor atom," he said whimsically, "that no one wanted you, so you set out to forage on your own account. well, we're both in the same boat. shall we pull it together?" it is not to be supposed that the puppy understood the precise words, but it unquestionably understood the tone, and it again fell to licking peter's hand. peter ferreted in his wallet. he found bread and meat, and together they shared a meal. water peter poured into his palm, and the small creature lapped greedily. finally it curled itself up beside him, and, despite a sore and wounded leg, dropped into a blissful and contented slumber. after a moment or so peter followed its example. he had not, it will be guessed, slept the previous night, and he had been tramping since daybreak. so now here were two wayfarers forgetting their woes in slumber, though the puppy, it may be safely averred, was confident that his woes were over. * * * * * the sun was slanting low through the wood when peter awakened. he opened his eyes and looked around without moving. the puppy--the laziness of it!--had not stirred. but, then, who knows how many hours of puppy sleepiness it had not to make up. "ouf!" said peter, stretching himself hugely. the puppy woke, started, cringed, felt the wound in its leg, and yelped. peter picked it up with firm hands. "now look here," he said solemnly, "we don't want any more fear. you've got to forget that. do you understand? we're going to be comrades, pals, you and i; and we're both of us going to keep up brave hearts and cheer each other. you've got a wound in your leg, and i've got one in the region which i suppose is called the heart. you--you puppy thing! have the advantage over me, because with a bit of luck yours will mend in a few days. but anyhow, neither of us is going to whine. you're going to bark cheerfully and wag your tail, and i'm going to write--presently, and grin as well as i know how. the world would be quite a decent place if people would let it be so, and we're not going to add dulness to its poor old shoulders. it's borne quite enough in its time. have you understood?" a small red tongue trying to reach peter's face testified to entire comprehension. "very well, then. now come along, and as i presume you'd prefer not to walk on three legs i'll carry you. you're not much of a size, and only skin and bone at that." peter picked up his wallet and hitched his bundle to his back, which bundle was heavier than when we first met him. it now contained, further, a packet of manuscript, a writing-tablet, and--the foolishness of the vagabond!--a dress suit. the bundle adjusted to exactly that position which made its weight of the least concern, he tucked the small animal under his arm, with careful consideration for its wounded leg, and set off to the edge of the wood and once more down the dusty road. with some shrewdness, at the first two villages he passed, he hid the puppy under his coat with a whispered injunction to lie still, an injunction which was scrupulously observed. only by the tiniest quivering of the body and the quick beat of the heart against peter's arm was the smallest sign of movement and life betrayed. villages, you perceive, were anathema to him, holding terror, pain, and everything that was most unholy and unpleasant. they slept in a barn that night. before he slept peter took out and examined his manuscript by the light of a candle. then his face quivered. "not to-night," he said. "i can't. i will to-morrow." he promised it like a child who cries "honest injun!" at the end of its speech. "what would you do," asked peter, addressing himself to the puppy, "if you felt uncommonly miserable and had made a promise to yourself and a puppy to be cheerful?" the puppy looked at him, head on one side. then it yawned, a large wide yawn that began and ended in something remarkably like a grin. finally it crept to peter and curled down beside him in slumber. "grin and bear it and sleep, i suppose," said peter. "puppy, you're a philosopher, and i think your name is democritus." chapter xxv at a fair and so these two entered into partnership--a partnership that, on the side of democritus, was marked by an entire adoration, the full and overwhelming love and trust of a dog's soul, and on peter's by affection and a real sense of comfort in the small animal's companionship. the days that passed were days of unbroken sunshine; england was revelling, as she rarely does, in long-continued sun and warmth. peter spent the mornings and a good part of the afternoon in the shade of some coppice or in the shadow of some old quarry or haystack, engrossed in his writing, while democritus at first lay curled beside him, and later, as the ugly wound healed, set off on rabbiting expeditions of his own, to return at noon and share peter's midday meal. after having worked for some weeks under a roof, peter at first did not find it so easy to write in the open. there were countless things to prove of distraction--the sunlight spots that danced on the ground beside him, the glint of a dragon-fly's wing, the butterflies that flitted in the sunshine, the bleating of sheep, the lowing of cows, the cry of the curlew, the plaintive pipe of the plover, all served to carry his thoughts into dreamy realms of fancy away from the work of the moment. and in these realms there were three or four pictures that kept recurring to his mind. there was a woman sitting in the sunshine on a terrace, her hair warm and lustrous in the light. peter would see again the indescribable note of race and breeding that predominated in her; see her eyes grey and shining; the warm ivory of her skin; her white hands long-fingered and slender, rose-tipped, with almond-shaped nails; the lines of her graceful figure; the whole fragrance, the warm vitality of her; and hear her low, round voice. there was a moonlight picture, elusive, full of a rare charm. there was a picture half-hidden in driving rain, and then a woman by his hearth, lifting a glass of red wine to her lips. and, lastly, a picture of a woman, looking at him, white, silent, her eyes holding depths of contempt. and here peter would catch his underlip with his teeth and turn again fiercely to his writing. it was gay writing, witty writing. his wanderer wore his cap and bells finely, jesting right royally, and it would have needed a penetrating insight to recognize the sigh beneath the smile. the world, as peter had told democritus, has borne much in her time. through countless ages she has seen the sin, the sorrow, the pain of mankind; but she knows, if they could but realize it, that all this is as transitory as the barren days of winter that cover her, and that life and hope are never dead, but only sleeping, and will awake again with the spring. she tells us this times out of number. every year she silently speaks her allegory, but it falls for the most part on unheeding ears. in the barren winter of our lives it is not easy to believe that spring will once more wake for us, that however long and dreary the grey months, somewhere and at some time the spring will dawn. peter was facing his winter bravely, but he could not yet believe that one day the sun would shine again for him, the birds sing, the flowers bloom. for all his outward gaiety, the present physical warmth and sunshine only served to emphasize his mental winter. but nature knew and did her best to cheer him, and to tell him that our interior spring and summer, though their advent is sure, do not always accord with hers. * * * * * one day, somewhere about the middle of september, peter reached a small town. he was progressing slowly northward, but as he spent a considerable part of his time in writing his progress was by no means hurried. in this town a fair was in full swing, and peter was reminded of a letter he had once received, which talked of another fair--one in the south of england. it was a gay scene enough, and peter, with democritus, at his heels, paused a while to watch it. there were crowds of people in holiday attire; there were endless couples--girl and swain. there were coco-nut shies; there were merry-go-rounds of horses and boat-cars, which revolved to some excruciating music (so-called), set in motion by the machinery which worked the highly coloured wooden horses and cars. there were stalls covered with miscellaneous articles of marvellous manufacture--glass vases with undulated edges, beginning white at the base and slowly increasing in colour from pale pink to a violent ruby; china mugs and cups covered with floreate designs or flags, between two of which king george and queen mary stared forth with painted pained surprise. there were gilt clocks, boxes of sweets, tin butter-dishes politely called silver, and all the rest of the articles which usually adorn the stalls at a fair. a number of these articles were displayed on a circular table covered with red twill and surrounded by a barricade, beside which stood a man with a number of small hoops in his hand. in a loud voice he was urging the onlookers to try their luck. the hoops, it appeared, were to be loaned to them at the rate of three a penny; they were then to be flung quoit-like over any article on the table. provided they fell surrounding the article without touching it, it became the property of the thrower. if you had ill-luck you had disbursed your money with no result; moderate luck would bring you a packet of sweets or a china dog or cat, and by surprising good luck you might become the possessor of a certain largish gilt clock or a ruby vase, and all for a sum which might be the fraction of a penny. it sounded seductive, and the throwers of the hoops were fairly numerous, though the acquirers of prizes were few. the wooden hoop had an unpleasant way of falling against the article required and propping itself up by it as though too tired for further exertion. but the throwers, with the hearts of born gamblers, continued to throw and hope for better things, till diminishing coppers or entirely empty pockets sent them sadly away. naturally there was an occasional piece of luck, which fired the assembly to fresh enthusiasm. peter stood still to watch, amused by the wild vagaries of the wooden hoops. suddenly a small voice at his elbow spoke. "it ain't easy, is it? i've thrown a shilling on that there table and not got so much as a penny packet o' sweets. it's dis'eartening!" peter looked round. at his elbow was a small and ugly girl, possibly the ugliest girl on which it had ever been his fortune to set eyes. her pale, square face was covered with freckles, her eyes, small and green, were like little slits, her nose--a mere apology for that feature--was a dab in the middle of her face, her mouth wide and formless. "apparently it is not easy," said peter politely. and then he removed his eyes from her face, fearing that his astonishment at her plainness might be perceived by her. she sighed. "i wish i 'adn't thrown my shilling on that there table. it's the third year now as i've made a fool of myself, and not a penny left for the 'orses nor nothin'. 'tisn't as if i were one o' the girls wot folks treat. 'oo could, with a face like mine?" there was no complaint in the remark. it was not even a hint to peter; it was merely the grave statement of a fact, with the explanation of the reason for it. "why," asked peter solemnly, "did you throw your money on that table?" she came a trifle nearer to him, and spoke in a whisper. "it's them two things," she said. "that there vase--the crimson one with the white snake a-curling round it, and the gold clock. i've watched 'em now for three years, and me 'eart's in me mouth lest some one should get the 'oops over. i can't get away from 'ere, nor enjoy the fair no 'ow for watchin', so the 'orses and boats wouldn't be much good even if i 'adn't throwed that shilling away." it was poured forth in a rapid undertone, as if the mere mention of her longing might lead a hoop to encircle either of the two coveted treasures. peter eyed them gravely. of course they were unutterably hideous, that went without saying; but there they were, representing the goal--unattainable--of three years' ambition. "i wonder--" said peter, and stopped. he had once had some skill as a player of quoits. he drew a copper from his pocket. "i'll have three of those hoops," he said to the man in charge of the stall. the ugly little girl watched him, anxiety in her eyes. democritus, at his master's heels, was regarding the proceedings unperturbed. peter flung one hoop; it fell on the table and rested in its usual melancholy fashion against a china figure. the ugly little girl heaved a sigh of relief; she felt that her confidence had been misplaced. peter threw again. the hoop fell fairly over the gilt clock. "good!" said the owner of the stall, with an attempt at cheerfulness. and he picked up the hoop, handing peter the clock. amazed, wrathful, fighting with her tears, the ugly little girl watched peter. he threw a third time. the ruby vase with the white snake climbing up it was neatly encircled. the man handed it to peter in a melancholy fashion. "more 'oops?" he asked dejectedly. "not at the moment," returned peter jauntily, and he moved away. the ugly little girl was no longer at his elbow. peter worked his way through the group of envious admirers round the stall, and at a little distance he saw her. he walked in her direction, democritus at his heels. "permit me," quoth peter as he approached. she turned round; her eyes were full of tears, her mouth distorted in a grimace of woe. "now, by all the gods," exclaimed peter, amazed, "what's the matter with the child?" "might 'ave known you'd 'ave got them. might 'ave known the luck was all agin me." "ye gods and little fishes!" cried peter, raising his eyes to the sky. "and how was i to know you wanted the honour of throwing the blessed little wooden hoops yourself? i fancied it was the mere possession of the gorgeous articles that you coveted." "what d'you mean?" she queried. "i acquired these treasures," returned peter, "with the sole intention of presenting them to you. if, however, i have been mistaken----" "for me!" it had never dawned upon her that any one would willingly part with such treasures, once acquired. "of course," said peter patiently, "for you. may i ask what else you imagined i was going to do with them?" he held the gilt clock and the ruby vase towards her. her ugly face was all a-quiver with rapture. "oh!" she breathed, and she looked at peter with adoring eyes. "here, take them!" laughed peter. she took them tenderly, still half-unbelieving in her good fortune. "i never thought," she whispered, "that no one would 'ave thrown 'oops for me. oh, i say!" peter looked at her, and then some spirit took possession of him. perhaps it was one of enterprise, perhaps it was one of mischief, perhaps it was one of kindliness, or perhaps--and this is more probable--it was a mixture of all three. "shall we do the fair together?" he asked. it was her turn now to look at him. incredulity, joy, and something akin to tears struggled for the mastery. the last are apt to come to the surface at a kindness to one not used to it. "i--i--d'you mean it?" she asked, ecstatic. "with all the faith in the world," replied peter. "come along." they were an odd trio--the tall, lean man in his shabby coat and trousers and the fantastic peacock feather in his hat, the small ugly girl in her tawdry finery, the mongrel puppy which trotted solemnly at peter's heels. to the ugly little girl it was a never-to-be-forgotten afternoon. she had a man all of her own, and one, too, who flung shillings abroad with never so much as a hint at his reckless expenditure. never again was she to care for the pitying looks cast upon her lonely self by the other girls who walked abroad with their swains. never again was she lonely. her life was to hold a dream-knight, a man with sad eyes and a whimsical smile, who had fêted her throughout one glorious september day. and her dream was infinitely more beautiful than any other girl's reality, for in it her man was ever courtly, ever considerate, laughing, gay, with odd little speeches that somehow tugged at her heart-strings and brought the happy tears to her eyes. there was never a blow, never a harsh word, such as fell too often to the lot of the others. thrice happy ugly little girl, with her one day of innocent joy and her dream throughout her life! as for peter, having undertaken the rôle of swain, you may be sure he played his part royally. he whirled on wooden horses till his brain was dizzy, while democritus, from the safety of the solid earth, watched his antics in dumb amazement, marvelling at his undignified proceedings. he bought and ate waffles made by a stout woman with a motherly face, who blessed the two in a way that caused the ugly little girl to blush scarlet and convulsed peter with inward laughter; he bought sticks of sugar-candy and huge peppermints called "humbugs"; and finally he watched a hunchbacked harlequin, in green and gold spangles, turn somersaults and jest for the motley herd around him. the ugly little girl gazed in awestruck wonder, laughing every now and then in a spasm of merriment. suddenly she looked up and saw peter's face. "don't it make you laugh?" she queried. "ain't it funny?" "for the crowd, perhaps," answered peter. "but for the harlequin--" he shrugged his shoulders, and the ugly little girl somehow understood and ceased to smile. later they saw him outside a tent; he was jesting no longer. morose, silent, he was gazing on the ground. peter said a word or two, insignificant but friendly. "ah!" said the fellow, looking up; "you can see the man beneath the fool." "many of us wear the cap and bells," said peter. "it's better to raise a laugh than be an object of pity to a non-understanding multitude." "you, too!" said the man. "another in the world with a laugh on his lips and an ache at his heart!" "sighing won't ease the ache," said peter; "and a laugh is often more dignified than a groan." "you're right there," was the answer. "and a laughing fool is better than a moping wise man." "well said!" quoth peter. and then there was a call from within the tent, and the harlequin vanished with a nod. "i understand," said the ugly little girl slowly. "it ain't nice to be laughed at because you 'ave an ugly body, but it's better to let folk laugh at you and laugh with them than go around with a long face. it's comfortin' to think that god don't take no account of your body. they say as 'ow 'e made it, but i'm thinking as it's your father and mother 'as a good 'and in it, and it ain't fair to lay all the blame on god." "oh no," said peter airily but vaguely, and completely at a loss for a suitable reply. and then he bethought him of the coco-nut shies, and led the way in that direction. "ain't you givin' me a time!" said the ugly little girl gleefully. much later, in the gathering dusk, there was dancing; and, as is the way with fairs, a certain roughness and rowdyism began to prevail. peter had his own ideas as to the propriety of certain places for women, of whatever class. "it is time you left," he remarked coolly. she glanced up, surprised. "it is," said peter authoritatively, "too rough here now for a woman." she blushed with pleasure. the other swains would keep their girls there till heaven knows what o'clock. "where do you live?" demanded peter. "in watermill street," she replied, meek, delighted. and then, with a sudden burst of honesty, "i'm--i'm only a maid-of-all-work." "jack-of-all-trades," smiled peter. "i'll give myself the pleasure of escorting you to your door." they walked through the deserted streets. every man abroad was at the fair. democritus followed. it had been a day of perplexity to him. the ugly little girl was fumbling with one hand at her neck; in the other arm she held the precious clock and vase. "what," asked peter politely, "is the trouble? can i assist you?" "'ere, 'old them a minute, will you?" she thrust the clock and vase towards him. peter took them. she fumbled now with both hands, and in a moment brought them away, holding in them a small medal, one of the immaculate conception. it was attached to a thick boot-lace. peter gazed at her. "i 'aven't nothin' else worth 'avin'," she said hurriedly. "father mordaunt 'e blessed it for me. i'd--i'd like you to take it." peter looked from the medal and boot-lace to the ugly, imploring face. "oh, but--" he said, and he hesitated. it was obviously a great possession. "father mordaunt 'e'd never mind," she said earnestly; "and--and our lady'll understand, seein' as 'ow it's the only thing i've got to give you, and you've made me so 'appy." she still tendered it, wistful, anxious. peter took it, and dropped it, boot-lace and all, into his pocket. "thank you," he said quietly, with no trace of whimsical nonsense now in his tone. then she took the clock and vase again from him, and they turned into watermill street. at a door she paused. "i ain't goin' to try and say thank you," she whispered, "because i can't. i know you're a real gentleman--not only by your speech, but by the way you've treated me so considerate and good. i'll pray to our lady for you as long as ever i live, and ask 'er to give you whatever you wants most. and i'll begin this very night." "oh," smiled peter, "you queer, dear little girl!" but though he smiled his eyes were a trifle misty. it had been, after all, a mere freak of fancy on his part to play the squire of dames to a small maid-of-all-work that afternoon. he felt himself to be a bit of a fraud, undeserving of this wealth of gratitude. he crushed the small work-worn fingers hard in his. and so the two parted. it had been a trifling incident; but, after all, it is rather pleasant to think of, as somehow characteristic of peter. chapter xxvi on the cloud it was about the third week in january that peter reached a certain town named congleton, and leaving it behind him, walked towards a mountain named the cloud. the weather was now inclement; cold winds blew, driving showers of sleet and rain assailed him, making the progress of the vagabond peter far from pleasant. bundle on back, his hands deep in the pockets of a rough frieze overcoat he had purchased some three months previously, he tramped along the road, democritus at his heels. it might well be wondered why peter did not seek some lodging during these inclement months, and in answer there is nothing to say beyond the fact that a certain odd strain in him led him to continue his present mode of living. he preferred inclemency of weather, entire isolation, to life under a roof, with the chance of meeting his fellow-men. perhaps it was strange, but after all had he not already spent more than two years on the roads, so may not the love of the open have taken possession of him? at all events it is not what he might have done, but what he actually did, with which this history has to deal. somewhere up on the top of the cloud, with its back to a small wood of pines and with a strip of moorland and then the road in front of it, stands a small deserted hut. it is no more than a hovel of one tiny room, and perhaps at one time it was used as a shepherd's shelter. it was drawing on to the wintry dusk when peter saw it in the gloom, lying to the left of him from the road. he crossed the strip of moorland and went towards it. he found it, as he had fancied he might, entirely empty. there was a hole in the roof through which the rain was driving and the broken door rattled on its hinges. it was very different from a cottage he had discovered some months previously, but it was at all events some kind of shelter, and the cold without was bitter. "we'll take possession," said peter to democritus. "it cannot be styled a princely habitation--in fact, it's uncommonly wretched. but i fancy it will be more desirable than the road to-night." he unfastened his bundle and set it on the earth floor. outside the wind howled in fury; mist, rain, and gathering dusk blotted out the landscape beyond the road. "ugh!" said peter with a shudder, "it's remarkably unpleasant." he unpacked his bundle. there was half a loaf of bread, a tin of sardines, a bottle of water, a small flask of whisky, and a bone with some meat on it for democritus. they finished their meal together, and then peter still sat with his back to the wall, as far away from the broken door as possible, watching the rain that fell through the hole in the roof. for nearly the first time since he had begun his wanderings he was physically wretched. fate had for a short time lifted his mental loneliness from him, only to plunge him deeper into it. mental loneliness, however, he had done his best to accept with what philosophy he might, but now physical loneliness, entire discomfort, and bodily depression were weighing hard upon him. he felt he had lost the grit to fight further. a quixotic action of long ago suddenly presented itself to him as an entirely idiotic proceeding on his part. why on earth had he ruined his own life, cut himself off from communion with his fellow-men, for a mere romantic notion? "i'm beaten," said peter to himself, "done! i fancied i was doing a fine thing. i thought myself, no doubt, a bit of a hero; and now i'm a coward, a turncoat, who'd give a very great deal to undo the past." he was wretched, entirely wretched, and even the soft warm tongue of democritus against his hand was of no smallest comfort to him. he looked at the bundle on the ground beside him. it contained his manuscript, fair, complete but for the title and signature and the dedication should he choose to give it one. it brought him no atom of pleasure; it appeared to him worthless, a thing of false sentiment, talking of high courage, of nobility of thought, which in reality vanished like a pricked air-bubble the moment the finger of fact was laid upon it. how in the name of fortune had he kept his spirits buoyed up all these years? and why in heaven's name had the buoyancy suddenly deserted him? peter turned about in his mind for a solution of the problem. presently he found it. it came with something like a shock. he was older, that was the reason. close on six years had rolled over his head since the day he had surrendered all for an extravagant notion. it is the young, peter reflected sagely, who take their all and throw it with both hands on the altar of sacrifice. they do not realize--how should they in their youthful optimism?--what they are giving up. they have never known monotony, the grey years that roll by with nothing in heaven or earth to break their dulness. "something will happen to make up to us," they cry. but--so peter reflected from the wisdom of his present vast age (he was two-and-thirty be it stated)--nothing does happen. we burn our all heroically, and then are surprised to find that there is no life in the grey ashes left to us. his optimism had gone, vanished, and nothing but a deep pessimism remained to him. "it's no use, democritus," he said, as with tongue and wagging tail the small creature tried to cheer this terrible mood that had fallen upon his master, "it's no use. i've made a mull of things, and perhaps it's just as well to know when i am beaten. and yet if----" unpleasant little word, which so often prefaces all the joys that might have been and are not. bear with peter in his present mood. the marvel is it had never fallen upon him before, and that it had not must be accounted for by the fact that youth, health, and what had appeared as indomitable good spirits were all in his favour. it is useless, however, to dwell on his misery. picture him, if you will, as wretched as man well could be. he was, after all, only human, and up till now he had fought his fight bravely. he slept little throughout the night. about midnight the wind dropped suddenly, and by the light of a candle he saw snowflakes falling through the hole in the roof. he was trying to console himself with conard's life of beethoven, which he had purchased; but with the remembrance of the woman who had recommended him to read it before his mind, the consolation was not overgreat. towards morning he fell into a fitful slumber which lasted till dawn. then he awakened, roused himself, yawned and stretched. the memory of his mood of the previous night recurred to his mind. he felt suddenly ashamed, though there had been none but his own soul and democritus to witness it. courage, high-handed, sprang again within him. he flung last night's mood behind him, and brave-eyed faced the future. and with what is to follow it is good to think that he did so. he got up, and went to the cottage door. the earth lay snow-covered and very still. since midnight the air had been thick with feathery flakes falling gently, silently. just before dawn they had ceased, and now the world lay under the soft mantle. white and spectre-like the trees reared their branches against the cold grey sky. only here and there the berries of the holly and the rowan-tree gleamed scarlet against the snow. a little stream that in summer made faint music as it wended its way to the right of the hut, finally losing itself in the shadow of the pinewood, was now frost-bound and silent. over everything lay an intense stillness, an unearthly purity. the ground before the hut was covered with curious little star-like lines imprinted in the snow, the impress of the feet of feathered wayfarers seeking for food which was not to be found. and then through the silent frosty air came clear sounds--the barking of a sheepdog, the clarion note of a cock in an outlying farmyard, and, very distant, the sound of a church clock chiming the hour. the eastern sky began to flush with colour. an amber light stole upward through the grey, turning to rose and then to deeper crimson. the white earth pulsated, breathed, awakened. softly it reflected the crimson of the sky, and then slowly, majestically, the sun, a glowing ball of fire, came up over the horizon. peter stood gazing at the fairy magic of the scene. it was a pure transformation after the bleak dreariness of the previous night. and then suddenly he saw a man coming along the road--a man tall, broad-shouldered, of a build akin to his own. a thick coat covered him, its fur collar well pulled up to his ears; a cloth cap was on his head. "hullo," said peter to himself, "he's early a-foot!" the man paused, looked in the direction of the hut, then turned and tramped quickly across the snow towards him. as he came nearer peter saw a pleasant freckled face, brown eyes like a dog's, a firm short chin, and a small reddish moustache. within three or four yards of him the stranger halted and spoke. "is your name, by good luck, peter carden?" "it is," said peter, surprised, wondering. "thank heaven!" murmured he of the freckles piously. "i've found you at last! come along back to the hotel with me and we'll talk as we go. i'm famishing for breakfast." chapter xxvii a miracle and here it is necessary to record certain things which led up to this--to peter--most extraordinary of meetings: things which those who do not believe in the miracles wrought by love and prayer might regard as almost incredible coincidences. one afternoon, it was in the week between christmas and the new year, father o'sullivan was in the westminster hospital. he had been with a sick man for the last half-hour or so, cheering him on his high-road to recovery. he had only just left him--he was, in fact, in the corridor--when a nursing sister, a catholic, came up to him. "father," she said, "there's a man--a gentleman--who would like to see you; he's a catholic and dying. i asked him to let me send for a priest yesterday, and again to-day, but he refused. a few moments ago, however, i happened to mention your name and say that you were in the hospital. he asked me then to fetch you." "ah!" said father o'sullivan, smoothing his chin, as was the way with him--if he had worn a beard he would have been stroking it; "where is he?" "in here, father." and she led the way through a ward, and into a small room that opened out of it. father o'sullivan looked at the man lying on the bed. his eyes were closed, and his face almost deathly pale against the red coverlet which was pulled up to his chin. father o'sullivan sat down by the bedside. the man opened his eyes and looked at him. "well, father," he said, with a faint attempt at a smile. and then, in spite of the pallor, the thinness, father o'sullivan recognized him. he saw in him a man he had known from boyhood, one who had attended his confessional, though for about six years he had entirely lost sight of him. "hugh ellerslie!" exclaimed he. "you remember me?" said hugh. "of course, of course," replied father o'sullivan, "though it's six years or thereabouts since i saw you." "i know," said hugh wearily. "i want to talk to you, father. they tell me i'm dying." "well, now," said the old priest compassionately, "and if that's so, isn't it a good thing i'm here to help you make your peace, to have you tell me what it is is troubling you?" for a moment hugh was silent. "i've a confession to make, father," he said presently. the sister moved towards the door. "no," said hugh, "don't go. how long have i got to live?" "some hours at least," said the sister gently. hugh smiled. "well, you'd better both hear what i've got to say. it won't take long, but i can think of nothing else till i've said it. perhaps you, sister, will write down what is necessary. i can sign it presently, and, at all events, there will be two witnesses." at a sign from father o'sullivan the nurse crossed to the other side of the bed. "now, my son," said father o'sullivan quietly, tenderly. "i have let another man suffer instead of me," said hugh steadily. "his name--please get that down clearly, sister--is peter carden." father o'sullivan did not move, but he drew a long breath. and there are some people who say that the age of miracles is past! "there's no need to enter into all particulars," went on hugh; "it would mean rather complicated business details that really don't signify. but get this down clearly. about five or six years ago, peter carden was accused of forgery and embezzlement. he was put on his trial and pleaded guilty. he got three years in portland gaol. he was innocent; he was shielding me. everything of which he was accused, and to which he pleaded guilty, was done by me. is that clear, father?" "perfectly clear, my son." "we were friends," went on hugh, "school friends, college friends. peter always hauled me out of scrapes. he stuck to me through thick and thin. i believe this last time it was as much for my old mother's sake as mine that he stood by me. she was very fond of peter. i said," a slow colour mounted in the white face, "that it was for her sake that i let him do it; it wasn't--at least, not only that. i was a coward. she died about a year after peter had been in prison. i might have come forward then. i didn't; i went abroad. i came back to england only about six months ago." he stopped. "anything else?" asked father o'sullivan gravely and tenderly. "that's all," said hugh wearily, "at least, with regard to that. i'd like peter to know that, cur though i've been to him, i've always been fond of him. tell him, if you can, father, that i've tried to run straight since, because of him and what he did. i wasn't getting on badly, but now----" "he shall be told," said father o'sullivan. "do you know where he is?" asked hugh, "you speak as if you knew him." "i've heard of him," replied father o'sullivan, "and though i don't know where he is now, he shall be found." again hugh was silent. after a moment he spoke. "if you've got all that down, sister, i'll sign it. you're sure it will be all right, father; that it will let every one know, and clear him entirely?" "perfectly sure." the sister put the paper by hugh's hand, and he signed a straggling, wavering signature. he let the pen fall. then he looked up at the sister. "now," he said, "there are other things. will you----?" and the sister left the room, closing the door noiselessly behind her. * * * * * it was after seven o'clock before father o'sullivan finally left the hospital. he had left it once to fetch the sacraments for which hugh had asked. and then, when the full peace of forgiveness and union had fallen upon him, he had lain very still. once when father o'sullivan had moved he had spoken wistfully. "must you go, father?" "not at all, as long as you're caring for me to be with you." hugh turned his face on the pillow. "if it hadn't been you this afternoon, father!" he said. "the good god understood that," said father o'sullivan calmly, "and just sent me along to see tim donoghue, who's the very saint of a fellow when he's sick, and would have me be reading to him and praying for him by the hour, and me with other jobs to be looking after." "we're all like that, perhaps," said hugh, smiling. "faith, and it's a good thing too," was the reply. "and to whom but your mother should you be going when you're sick, and in whose arms but hers should you be dying?" and then there was a silence, broken occasionally by little remarks from hugh, who, coward though he might have been once, and more than once, was no coward now that he was dying. and father o'sullivan had responded with little tender speeches, such as a mother indeed might make to a child. and now he was walking towards muriel's house in cadogan place, and thanking god in his kind, big old heart for a soul which had passed peacefully away. chapter xxviii the fine way i "and so," said father o'sullivan, blowing his nose, "i came right along to tell you, and ask you what is the next step to take." "poor chap!" ejaculated tommy, delivering himself of a huge sigh. he was standing on the hearthrug, immaculately attired in dinner jacket, white shirt-front, and all the rest of the paraphernalia. muriel gave a little choke. she was sitting near him in a dress of her favourite pale green. father o'sullivan had descended on them both as they were waiting in the drawing-room for the announcement of dinner. it had, be it stated, already been made, but little heed had been paid thereto, and the butler in wrathful terms was now ordering the soup to be taken below again. "and what are you both looking so glum about?" demanded father o'sullivan fiercely. "faith, and weren't you having me say masses, and yourself setting up candles to st. joseph, that that young quixote--what's-his-name--might hold up his head again? and now that the good lord has answered our prayers and cleared him, and let that poor boy make a good confession and pass peacefully away, you're looking as mournful as a mute at a funeral. was it perhaps some other way you'd have been having god arrange things and not his way at all?" he stuffed his handkerchief back vigorously in his pocket as he spoke. "but," quoth tommy in a slightly haughty fashion, feeling this speech somewhat of an aspersion on his wife's wet eyes, "you will not, i imagine, deny that it was sad?" "sad! of course it was sad, what happened first. but can't you see the fine way, the beautiful way, god has taken away the sadness? you're all for saying paradise must be a grand place, but directly a soul gets a bit nearer to it you're for weeping and wailing and crying 'poor fellow!'" muriel choked back her tears. smiling at the old priest and the half-wrathful tommy, she spoke. "and you're just as near crying yourself as i am, father," she protested. "and it's that is making you so abominably rude and cross to us both." "huh!" said father o'sullivan, and he coughed, putting up his hand to his mouth. and both cough and gesture hid that his lips were trembling. "and now," he requested after a moment, his voice steady and a trifle dry, "what's to be done next?" "find mr. carden, of course," announced muriel with airy decision, as who should say that was a fact apparent to the most infantine intelligence. "and it's all very well to say 'find him,'" remarked father o'sullivan dryly, "but have you the faintest suspicion of a notion where he is at all?" "not the least," quoth muriel cheerfully; "that is exactly what we have to discover." "and how will you be doing that may i ask?" muriel leant forward, finger-tips pressed together, speaking with the decision of one who has thoroughly weighed the whole problem. "first we must tell general carden, and see if he knows where he is. i don't think he does, but we must find out for certain. then there are his publishers--oh, yes," in answer to tommy's elevated eyebrows--"he has written a book, a very good book indeed, and thereby hangs more of a tale than is enclosed within _its_ covers. failing both those plans," she concluded firmly, "tommy must find him." "faith," said father o'sullivan admiringly, "it's a fine thing to be a husband!" and then a second time the drawing-room door opened, and a second time a voice announced, this time in accents of deep reproach, that dinner was on the table. muriel looked at both the men. "oh," she cried, "didn't he tell us that before? i feel apologetic. he's such a treasure, and so is the cook--both artists in their way, and we're spoiling their artistic efforts. come, both of you. we'll talk more at dinner." a whirl of chiffons and daintiness, she led the way downstairs. in the intervals of the servant's absence from the room, she promulgated plans, like any old veteran at the beginning of a campaign. if they sounded somewhat fantastic plans it is certain that neither man had any better to offer. and what, in her opinion, was more feasible, more practicable, than that tommy should take the car to abbotsleigh, where peter was last seen by anne, and from there scour the country for a man with a peacock feather in his hat? it was, she assured them both, the simplest of proceedings. by the end of dinner they had warmed to her ideas, confessing at least that no better solution of the difficulty presented itself to them. further, she told them, and on this point she was firm, that they must both go that very evening and tell general carden the present state of affairs. for herself, she thought anne was expecting her. yes; she was convinced anne was expecting her, but she would telephone through and make sure while they were finishing their cigars. thus she departed from the room. anne's voice at the other end of the telephone presently answered her. yes, she would be at home that evening, and delighted to see muriel. but what was the matter of importance of which muriel had to speak? too long to communicate at the moment? oh, well, anne must possess her soul in patience till muriel arrived. and then muriel hung up the receiver, and rang for the footman, on whose appearance she ordered him to tell her maid to bring a cloak immediately, and stated also that she would require a taxi in ten minutes. then, as one who has put great things in train, she sank back in a chair with a sigh of relief and content. ii general carden was in his smoking-room when the opening of the door by goring heralded the entrance of tommy lancing and a stout, elderly priest. somewhat perplexed, general carden put down the book he had been reading, and rose from his chair to greet them. true, tommy occasionally favoured him with his presence at this hour, but why should he drag along with him a man whom he had only once met, and that man, moreover, a priest? he appeared, too, somewhat embarrassed. it was the elder man who was at his ease. "we came to see you, general," said tommy, shaking hands and introducing father o'sullivan, "because we thought--that is, muriel--well, something unusual has happened." neither speech nor introduction was made after tommy's customary suave fashion. "ah!" said general carden, eyeing them both keenly, while his heart gave a little anxious throb. unusual news can easily portend bad news. also tommy's manner was a trifle disconcerting. "it is," said tommy, "about your son." "ah!" said general carden again, this time with a quick intake of his breath. he put his hand up to the mantelpiece. the floor seemed not quite so solid as he would desire it to be. "he," blurted out tommy quickly, "was--was not guilty. father o'sullivan will tell you." thus in the simplest, most commonplace of language can momentous announcements be made. it would seem as though there should be a grander language, a finer flow of words, for these statements and yet in such bald fashion are they invariably announced. there was no question now but that the room was certainly revolving. presently it steadied itself, and general carden knew that he was sitting by the fire, the two men opposite to him, and that the old priest was talking. gradually his mind adjusted itself to facts: he heard and understood the words that were being spoken. when they stopped there was a silence. there is so astonishingly little to be said at such times, though the tittle-tattle of small events will supply us with endless talk. "thank you for coming to tell me," said general carden gravely, and he pushed a box of cigars towards the two men. again silence. presently tommy began to talk, quietly, easily, now. he put forward muriel's suggestions, her advice, her plans. he explained minutely the scheme she had proposed. general carden listened intent. "it is like her kind-heartedness to suggest it," he said, as tommy paused, "and yours to follow it up. i have no notion where he is, nor--nor have his publishers. i happened to ask them the other day." he made the statement with an airy carelessness of manner. "then," said tommy with a firmness which muriel would distinctly have approved, "i start to-morrow." thus definitely was the decision given. the two stayed a while longer, tommy supplying most of the remarks made--conversation it can not be termed. general carden kept falling into abstracted silences, in which his eyes sought the fire and his hand pulled gently at his white moustache. father o'sullivan watched him from under his shaggy eyebrows. he was not a priest for nothing. he knew well enough how to read the vast unsaid between the little said, and the workings of the reserved old mind were as clear as daylight to him. presently they rose to depart. in the hall general carden spoke. "if," he said, addressing himself to father o'sullivan, "you would let me know the day and hour of young ellerslie's funeral i should be obliged. he was a friend of my son's." and in those words the old man blotted out, forgave, the wrong hugh had done, as peter himself would have wished. an hour later goring came in with a tray on which were a tumbler and a jug of hot water. general carden looked up. "which wine did i drink to-night?" he demanded. "the ' port, sir," replied goring respectfully. "hmm!" general carden beat a faint, delicate tattoo with his fingers on the table. "i thought so. how much more is there?" "about eight bottles, sir. seven or eight i should say." general carden coughed. "you need not use any more of it at present, not till"--he coughed again--"mr. peter comes home." the most perfectly trained of butlers might, perhaps, be excused a slight start at such a statement, taking into consideration, of course, previous circumstances. goring unquestionably started. then the mask was on again, impassive, impenetrable. general carden still kept up that light tattoo. he had a statement to make. in all fairness to peter it had to be made. it was, however, peculiarly difficult to put into words. he cleared his throat. "there was," he said, gazing hard at his fingers, "a mistake. mr. peter was shielding some one else." the tattoo stopped. the words were out. and then the man broke through the butler. the mask of impassivity vanished. "lord, sir!" his voice was triumphant, "and mightn't we 'ave known it, if only we 'adn't been such a couple of blithering old fools." general carden stared. "ahem! goring--really, goring, i--" he was for a moment dumbfounded, helpless in his amazement. then suddenly the amazement gave way before a humorous smile, his old eyes twinkled, and he brought his hand down on the table with a thump. "by god!" he cried; "you're right." and goring left the room choking with varied emotions, but pulling down his waistcoat with dignified pleasure the while. chapter xxix found here, now, are the present employment and emotions of five of our characters--tommy, with car and chauffeur, off to devonshire, which was to be the starting-point of his search for a man with a peacock feather in his hat; general carden watching hourly (though it was far too soon to begin to watch) for a telegram which should acquaint him of the success of the search; anne alternating between waves of pride and despair and delicious secret joy; and muriel spending hours with st. joseph, imploring the dear saint to hurry up with the job he had so successfully begun. the intervals between these visits she spent mainly with anne, rejoicing with her in her happier moods, encouraging, chiding, sympathizing when the waves of despair rolled high. muriel alone knew to the full the heart of this woman friend of hers, saw the proud spirit a captive between the hands of love, realized what the captivity meant to her. as for our fifth character, millicent sheldon, a pretty truthful rumour of tommy's expedition having reached her, her feelings were at first distinctly mixed, though it is certain that presently she found a method of adjusting them to her own satisfaction. after all, it was unquestionably the hand of providence which had removed the somewhat impecunious peter from her life and given her in exchange the solid theobald horatio, with his equally solid income acquired from the patent of the little brushes which, being fixed behind carts, kept the london streets in a cleanly condition. it is not to be supposed that she dwelt upon these brushes; those articles had long ago been firmly obliterated from her mind. it was in the solid income alone that she saw the hand of providence and realized that all had undoubtedly been for the best. had peter's innocence been apparent from the outset, there would have been no excuse for the letter she had penned him at the time of his release from jail. of a former letter, written on the first hearing of his accusation and conviction, she did not care to think. if she thought of it at all at this juncture it was to tell herself the letter had been prompted by an impulse of pity, the folly of which was shown her later by calm reason. that reason had been aided by the advent of theobald horatio sheldon on her horizon, she naturally did not care to allow. it was, however, her inadvertent mention of this first letter and the subsequent events to anne which had caused her to break a second time in anne's eyes. but why dwell on her further? let her remain satisfied, as she protests she is, in the possession of her theobald, her little theobalda, and her theobald's solid income. her influence on these pages has ceased; our acquaintance with her may well cease also. tommy's expedition was certainly not all joy. the month of january is hardly one to be willingly chosen for a motor tour through england, and the weather was distinctly unkind. to attempt to recount his adventures would be to fill a volume with a description of bad roads, hailstorms, punctures, and repeated disappointments. nevertheless he eventually got on the track of that peacock feather, and followed it up as surely as a bloodhound on the scent of his prey, though more than once he had to return on his own trail. how tommy kept on the scent at all was a marvel. it was by sheer perseverance, by following up every smallest clue, by letting no possible chance go untried. he was indefatigable, undoubting, and his chauffeur, hearing the story from tommy's enthusiastic lips, warmed to the work, and played his part with a zest equal only to tommy's own. it was the third week of the search that they entered congleton, which was, as we know, to cry "hot!" as the children cry it in the game of hunt the thimble. but tommy did not know it; and here, in spite of all inquiries, the clue appeared lost, vanished. the wind was blowing, a deluge half of rain, half of sleet, descending. it being then seven o'clock or thereabouts, they decided after some parley to drive to a hotel, put up for the night, and renew the search in the morning. some slight disarrangement in the internal organs of the car further decided them in the plan, though the chauffeur averred that ten o'clock the following morning should see them again _en route_. slightly depressed, however, tommy retired to bed. he was up betimes. in the night the weather had changed, and snow some inches deep lay upon the ground. before daylight he was downstairs and in the street. there he met a sleepy milk-boy delivering milk. tommy entered into casual conversation with him, questioning carelessly, unconcernedly, as his method was. and then suddenly the clue was once more in his hand. of course the boy had seen him--a man with a peacock feather in his hat and a dog at his heels--a queer dog, a bit of a mongrel, so the youngster announced. now a dog of no kind had been in the category, but the peacock feather was assuredly unmistakable. where, then, had the boy seen him? the previous evening, it appeared, walking towards the cloud. tommy consulted his watch. it was now, so he discovered, about a quarter after seven. the car by arrangement did not make its appearance till ten. tommy demurred within his soul, cogitated as to possibilities. then with the thought of further clues in his mind he started off a-foot towards the mountain. presently the town lay well behind him, a wide road before him. the crisp frosty air was exhilarating, the chance of success spurred him on. he passed a few houses. at the door of one a woman was emptying a pail of dirty water. tommy stopped a moment to inquire. luck, good fortune, was in his favour. a man such as he had described had passed up the road the previous evening, so the woman confidently averred. hope beat high in tommy's heart. never before had he been so close on the track. it had been always three or four days old at the least. now the road became desolate of houses, a smooth expanse of unbroken snow lying between stone walls. after a while the road turned a bit to the left, and here there was a largish house--a farmhouse, he judged--lying among trees. he passed it, the road still bearing to the left. tommy plodded on. the sun was coming up in the east, a glowing ball of fire. and then suddenly he saw a hut lying back from the road across a bit of moorland. in the doorway a tall man was standing, a peacock feather in his hat, a white mongrel dog beside him. tommy's heart gave a sudden exultant leap. he turned sharply towards the hut. chapter xxx the return "how on earth did you find me?" demanded peter, as the two descended the cloud together, democritus following in the rear. "by the guidance of providence," announced tommy. "it's been the oddest search imaginable, and if it hadn't been for that blessed peacock feather i'll dare swear it had been fruitless. it was a kind of landmark, the one characteristic by which you had been noticed." peter laughed. he was at the moment extraordinarily, exuberantly happy. so can fate play shuttlecock with our lives. at the hut door tommy had given him the barest outline of the story, sufficient only to persuade peter that he was indeed justified in accompanying the famished tommy down the mountain-side. now he elaborated those details, entered fully into the most miraculous history of the last three weeks. and the story of hugh's confession filled peter with a curious exultation. he saw, as father o'sullivan had seen, the fine way, the grand way, in which the past had been blotted out and his friend given back to him in spirit. tommy strode down the mountain joyous of heart, his honest freckled face fairly shining with pleasure. his whole further programme was already arranged--the wires to be sent, the breakfast to be eaten, the train to be caught that was to convey them swiftly back to town. the car and chauffeur could follow at their leisure. here, however, peter demurred. it was all very well to tramp the road in this ridiculous garb, but return to civilisation attired as a mountebank--never! there were some things at which peter drew the line, and he drew one here, and firmly. tommy was prepared for him; he met and overruled each and every objection. had peter no other garments in that bundle he was carrying? what! only a dress suit? tommy opened eyes of wonder. what on earth was the use of a dress suit to a wayfarer? oh, of course, it was peter's own business if he _liked_ to carry one around the country in a bundle on his back for the mere pleasure of boasting to his soul that he possessed one. no, of course he couldn't wear it up to town. tommy didn't propose that he should. but he--tommy--had another suit at the hotel. peter was much of his build; he'd take him to his room to change. during the process he'd dispatch telegrams. then, tommy presumed, he'd be allowed to have his breakfast, after which the train. he was obdurate on that point. yes, peter could have a bath if he liked--fifty baths, as long as he agreed to take the train at noon. thus planning, arranging, the hotel was reached. tommy escorted peter to his room, indicated a change of raiment and the bathroom opposite, then, bursting with excitement, proceeded to find the chauffeur and dispatch telegrams. within ten minutes--such was his celerity of action--he was in the dining-room, had ordered a substantial breakfast, and was waiting with what patience he might for the appearance of peter. peter, in the bathroom, was luxuriating in a sea of gloriously hot water, while democritus kept guard without. occasionally a wet black nose was lowered to the crack beneath the door to sniff and wonder perplexedly at this new freak on the part of his master. "it is certain," remarked peter, full length in the bath, and addressing himself to the ceiling, "that if i'd once indulged in the luxury of a good hot soapy bath in a private bathroom after leaving the jail, wild horses would never have dragged me to the roads. i'd forgotten--completely forgotten--the joy of it!" but at last, with a mental picture of the famished tommy before his mind, he reluctantly proceeded to dry himself and don decent habiliments. tommy greeted the entrance of peter and democritus with fervent enthusiasm, and without more ado they proceeded to make good headway with the substantial, steaming breakfast which forthwith made its appearance. "heavens!" cried peter presently, pausing in the consuming of eggs and bacon, toast, marmalade, and coffee, "was there ever such a breakfast before? and have i once tendered you my thanks for coming in pursuit of me? the whole miraculous business, the entire blessed kaboodle, seems to have upset my mental equilibrium and clouded my manners." "bless the man!" cried tommy, "don't i understand?" some couple of hours later the two, with democritus, were in the train, sitting in a first-class carriage, which tommy had bribed the guard to reserve to their sole use. neither man desired the company of strangers at the moment. under all their chaff and light-heartedness there was a sense of bigness, a feeling of something great accomplished. peter gazed through the carriage window at the snow-covered landscape, his mind a whirl of varied emotions. it is useless to attempt to say which was uppermost. kaleidoscopic they revolved in his brain, a jumble of pleasure, relief, half-forgotten fatigue, expectation, though now through them all ran a thought of regret, of sadness--the thought of anne. is ever the perfection of joy allowed to us mortals? it would appear not, mused peter. here was everything to his hand that his soul could desire, save the one thing after which it really hankered; and with that to his debit, the balance--in spite of its appearance--was distinctly inadequate. tommy, gazing at him furtively from behind the morning paper, marvelled at the sudden melancholy of the man. cogitating in his mind for the reason, and having heard from muriel of peter's previous engagement, he thought to have found it. if only, so meditated tommy--no lover of millicent--he could realize the escape he had had. and so the train bore them onward, out of the snow-covered land, past bare brown fields and skeleton trees, past smoky towns and small villages lying in pale sunlight, on to the suburbs past whose platforms the train roared and rushed, on and ever onward, till london itself was reached. chapter xxxi democritus arrives to stay general carden in his smoking-room was listening, waiting. fifty times already in the last half-hour he had looked over the curtain that veiled the lower half of the window. fifty times he had looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and compared it with his watch. an orange envelope lay on the table beside him, and with it a strip of pink paper. he knew the words thereon verbatim; certainly they were few in number: "found. arrive euston four o'clock to-day.--lancing." on the receipt of this brief missive general carden's heart had thumped violently. he had found voice to pass the good news on to the devoted goring, but it was well on half an hour before voice and heart were under his normal control. muriel had descended on him radiant, triumphant, a-bubble with joy and glee, showering her congratulations. "come to mrs. cresswell's dance to-morrow night," she implored, "and bring him with you. i want to shake hands with don quixote. i have never before met him in the flesh." but behind this desire, and stronger than it, was the knowledge that anne would be there, and, woman-like, she longed for an immediate meeting of the two. "we'll see," promised general carden, smiling indulgently as at a pleading child. in his heart he longed to parade london with his son and let the whole world be witness to his return, to their reunion. again he glanced at the clock. any moment now! he tried to quell the tumult of expectation within him. dare one penetrate a little way into the mind of the reserved old man, guess at the tide of memory he had at last allowed to flow back to his heart? for years he had kept it relentlessly at its ebb, a long barren shore between him and its waters. he had feared to be submerged in its flood; he had feared that, should it approach him, it would come swiftly, remorselessly, drowning him in its depths, choking the life out of him with a deadly, icy cold. now, and now only, he realized the sweetness of its waters, realized that their approach would be not to submerge but to lift him on buoyant waves--waves warm, exuberant, joyous. oh, it might come now, come in all its strength, come bearing life in its flow! no longer a barren, desolate shore between him and those waters. throughout the day the wavelets had lapped ever softly, gently nearer. now calmly, joyously, they lifted him on their surface. there was the old house down in the country, with the pear-tree whose branches reached the window of that octagon-room. it should be restored, re-inhabited. there was the river that ran below its grounds, wherein speckled trout and silver salmon abounded. many were the fish he had caught there, many the fish peter had caught. what was to prevent them from catching more? already in thought the speckled trout lay gasping on the bank, the silver salmon were giving play in the long reaches of water between the meadows. there was the shooting, too--the pheasants, the partridges, the snipe in the swampy ground beyond the old mill, the wild duck where some seven miles distant the arm of the sea ran up to meet the river. the old days again! memory carried him on her tide towards the future. and then into the midst of his thoughts came a sound that brought his old heart fluttering to his throat--the sound of the front-door bell. he held on to the arms of his chair, his eyes upon the door. it opened. "mr. peter!" goring's voice was on a note of exultation. and into the room came a tall, lean man, a mongrel dog at his heels. "hullo, father!" "well, my boy!" there was a grip of hands. then the old man was sitting again by the fire, peter opposite to him. there was a little silence. democritus, sniffing at the black, hairy hearthrug, was completely engrossed with his own occupation. in the silence the two men watched him. presently he curled down with a thump. a quivering sigh of satisfaction passed through his body. "it is evident," said peter with a little laugh, "that democritus has come to stay." chapter xxxii per aspera ad astra "and so," quoth peter, "when the two met again, he had a story to tell her." "oh!" queried anne, toying with her fan, the flimsy thing of mother-of-pearl and cobwebby old lace. "a long story?" "that," ventured peter with temerity, "depended largely--i might say altogether--on his listener." they were sitting, these two, in a wide window-seat at the end of a passage. they had the full length of it before them. it was a post of vantage. with what generalship peter had marked it out, with what fine diplomacy he had found lady anne and escorted her hither, is no doubt better imagined than recorded. it suffices to chronicle that here they were, in an alcove of soft draperies and shaded lights, listening--if they chose--to the strains of music, watching--if they chose--the brilliant kaleidoscopic effect of colour through the open door of the great ballroom. "my story," continued peter, "is of a wanderer, one whom fate in one of her freakish moods had wedded to the roads, the highways and hedges, the fields and woods." "had he," queried anne, "nothing to solace him in his wanderings--no thoughts, no memories?" "none," said peter steadily. "once long ago cupid had touched him with his wing--the merest flick of a feather. the man--poor fool!--fancied himself wounded, thought to bear a scar. later, when he looked for it, he found there was none. it had been the most entire illusion on his part. and so he wandered the roads, regretting perhaps that he was scathless. but that is beside the mark." he paused, glancing at the hands which held the flimsy cobwebby fan. "one day," continued peter, "into his lonely wanderings came a letter, a mere scrap of bluish paper with tracings thereon of black ink. a flimsy fragile thing you might say, but to him it meant--well, everything. i fancy he had never realized his entire loneliness till that delicate herald of joy appeared. and--here was the wonder of it--it was written by a woman." "oh!" said lady anne, the little pulses fluttering in her throat. "it was," went on peter, "a gracious letter, a charming letter, written by one who had guessed at his loneliness of spirit, and thought to cheer that loneliness, to heal the wound she fancied him to bear. to him it came as a draught of water to one in a waterless desert. it brought him help, refreshment. he began to dream a dream of the writer, to imagine her near him. he spent hours in the company of his dream lady. he was no longer lonely, no longer desolate. in spirit--in fancy, if you will--she was ever with him. oh, he knew well enough that he could never meet her in the flesh, that was part of the compact. but disembodied though she was, she meant more to him than all the material friendships in creation." again he stopped, his heart was beating fast. "and then?" questioned lady anne. he drew a deep breath. "and then fate played a trick--a curious, almost incredible trick, fate threw the woman in his path. their meeting was strange, picturesque--i might almost call it unique. at the moment reason did not tell him the woman was the writer of the letters, but his soul, i believe, guessed. and presently he knew without a doubt his soul was right." "ah!" breathed lady anne. "he knew the writer of the letters to him, but she did not know who answered them." "she did not," echoed peter. there was a little pause. "then," she asked, her eyes still upon her fan, "i suppose he told her what he knew?" "no," said peter in a low voice, "he did not. there is no excuse for him. i myself make none. but--he feared to lose her letters. there's the whole matter in a nutshell. he did not tell her, and he continued to write." "oh!" said lady anne. again there was a pause. "of course," continued peter, "it was inexcusable of him. but fate had his punishment in store." "yes?" she queried. "fate disclosed his trickery to the woman. he read his punishment in the contempt in her eyes. he deserved it, every bit of it. but it hurt none the less." "and--and then what happened?" she asked, trembling. "he went away," said peter. "first he made a sacrifice--a small funeral pyre on which he burnt her letters, and i fancy his heart." "did he do nothing else?" she demanded. "oh, yes," confessed peter. "he wrote to her. it was the least he could do. he prayed her forgiveness." "and--?" she queried. again peter drew a deep breath. "after that there were months of a greater loneliness. i fancy he tried to be brave, to be worthy of her memory. she was, you see, his star." "did--did he not condemn her for her harshness?" asked lady anne. "never," cried peter hotly. "she was to him his goddess, his divinity." he stopped. "is that all?" she asked. "no," said peter. "fate had another surprise in store. she brought him from his loneliness, set him again in the midst of his fellow-men. but that was not all--it was the least. he found"--peter's heart beat to suffocation--"a letter--one that should have reached him long ago but for his own folly. from it he dared to believe, to hope, that his lady had condoned his offence, had forgiven." lady anne did not reply. peter looked at her. "had she forgiven?" he pleaded. for a second--the merest fraction of a second--she raised her eyes to his. "i--i think so," she said. and a tiny adorable smile curved her mouth. "is that all the story?" she questioned in a low voice after a little silence. "oh no," said peter. "no?" she asked, surprised. "i fancied it was the end." "it is," said peter boldly, "only the beginning." "oh!" she asked with delicately raised eyebrows; "and--and is the rest of the story long?" "it is," said peter, "as long as a lifetime, and longer. it stretches away into eternity. it is a story of his love for his lady, his queen. she is immeasurably more to him than all in earth and heaven. with every fibre of his being, with his body, his soul, his spirit, he loves, worships, and adores. it is a story that will take a lifetime in the telling. dare he tell it? is she, think you, willing to listen?" lady anne again raised her eyes to his. "you're sure," she queried, "that he wants her to listen?" "absolutely sure," said peter, his blue eyes holding hers. "then," breathed lady anne softly, "tell her." the end _a selection from the catalogue of_ g. p. putnam's sons complete catalogue sent on application =a new book by e. m. dell= author of "the way of an eagle" "the knave of diamonds" the rocks of valpré _with frontispiece in color. $ . net_ _by mail, $ . _ in this new novel the author justifies the opinion already held by the countless readers of her other books. here is all the power, the vivid description, the intensely dramatic episode, and the action that made "the way of an eagle" a great story. g. p. putnam's sons new york london horace blake by mrs. wilfrid ward author of "great possessions" _$ . net. by mail, $ . _ "mrs. ward has done much excellent work in the past, but she has done nothing to come within measurable distance of this remarkably fine book--a book quite off the ordinary lines, interesting from the first page to the last, founded upon a psychological study of exceptionable power. it is a very common thing in fiction to find ourselves presented to a 'great character,' but as a rule we are obliged to accept the creator's word for his greatness. mrs. ward has contrived to make horace blake really and indeed great--great in intellect, great in evil, and great, finally, in good. he holds the reader captive just as he is described as holding his world captive." _the world_, london. g. p. putnam's sons new york london the marriage of cecilia by maude leeson _with frontispiece in color. $ . net_ _by mail, $ . _ a story based on a marriage which is entered into as a mere form, the parties to which separate immediately after the ceremony in the firm belief that their paths will never again cross. eventually they not only do cross, but run together. the book is full of romantic charm, and is written with a sureness of touch equalled only by the author's vigor and freshness and fine sense of the dramatic. g. p. putnam's sons new york london =by the author of "the rosary"= the broken halo by florence l. barclay frontispiece in color. _$ . net_ _by mail, $ . _ a love story full of those fine qualities of the soul, that sustained idealism, and transforming beauty of thought which make mrs. barclay's characters the most lovable in present-day fiction and that have endeared her to hundreds of thousands of readers. =_over one million copies of mrs. barclay's novels sold_= g. p. putnam's sons new york london transcriber's notes: minor changes have been made to correct printer's errors and to regularize hyphenation. words and phrases that were italicized in the original book have been noted with an underscore (_) at beginning and end. words and phrases that were underlined in the original book have been noted with an equal (=) at beginning and end. in chapter xvi, letters, no opening or closing quotes were used to denote the beginning and ending of letters. the transcriber has chosen not to regularize the punctuation in this case.