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}Bp (ºlisabeth Štuart 1]belpg
(MRs. H. D. WARD)
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THOUGH Li FE DO US PART
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
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COME I CAN'T HAVE YOU STANDING HERE





THOUGH LIFE
US DO PART
BY
ELIZABETH STUART PHELPs ºr
- WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY
CLARENCE F. UNDERWOOD
Boston AND NEW YORK
HOUGHT ON MIFF LIN COMPANY
@Ibe ſiiuergite pregg Tambridge
1908
~!|

CopyRIGHT, Igo'ſ AND 1908, BY THE CROWELL PUBLISHING COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY ELIZABETH STUART PHELPs wāRD
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published September 1908
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
CHAPTER I
As the dog-cart rolled slowly by, a cloud of dust
arose like a dry fog, and smothered the porch
and the ell where the sign hung. It was a squash-
colored house, with chocolate trimmings. It was
known among the Summer people as the choco-
late éclair.
“It stands tew near the road,” said Solomon
Hops. “It had n't orter, an’ it did n't useter. It's
them dudes done it. They ride onreasonable. If
they was to go of an errand to the store, or meet
the men folks to the deepot, or take the fambly to
meetin' like decent neighbors orter had—but here
they be at it constant an' continual, same as per-
formin' monkeys at a circus. It's like as they'd
got to keep a-goin' or lose their job. 'Tain't
natur’,” added Solomon Hops, severely. “An’
when, you've said a thing ain't natur', you've
done with the subjec'. Blank them dudes 1’’
Solomon Hops was a “native.” He was a lucky
native, – past and present owner of shore acres
Sold, and shore acres unsold, on a scale so colos-
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
sal as to make him a magnate in Balsam Groves.
No real-estate owner on the Cape could compete
with his record. His price per foot was something
spoken of with bated breath by guests from New-
port entertained in palace “Cottages” on the water
front. He had realized the chimerical for back
lots, and clutched the impossible for cranberry
swamps. In his hands extortion had become as
subtle as a Borgian poison. He had made a for-
tune out of the summer people, and was clearly
ordained to make several more before he was done
with them. But he said “Blank them dudes l’”
with a fervor which one could call nothing less
than religious. He spoke of them scornfully, hated
them secretly, received them with cold indiffer-
ence when they came in May, and missed them
candidly when they had left in November. He
felt towards them the mingled emotions of a man
who has his social superiors at a disadvantage.
In his heart he was consumed with a curiosity
about them which he never admitted to his own
subconsciousness. He would rather have come
down a thousand on his best lot.
“Nannie I" called Solomon Hops, “run an' see
who was in that yaller tip-cart before it gits clean
Out O' sight. I kinder thought it was that one on
'em I don't disfavor so much, – the little gentle
one. Looked like our doctor along of her; he’s
2 f
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
been out the office quite a spell. But I could n’t
see through the passel o' dust they kicked up.”
Nannie ran out obediently. She was a pretty
village girl, with her father's profile (Solomon's
features were quite regular) and her mother's eyes.
Her mother was dead. Nannie was very well
dressed; her white blouse was of a fine material,
and her gray cloth skirt fashionably cut and hung.
Her figure was light and lithe, and swayed like a
sapling as she stood with hand lifted to her eyes
to watch the slowly moving but now vanishing
dog-cart.
“Yes, father,” said Nannie, “that's her. It's
Miss Sterling. She has n’t got the coachman. Dr.
Dane's driving. They're going to the Country
Club. They don't seem to be in any particular
hurry. I'm afraid he won't get back to supper.
That dog with the white shirt front is running
after her. She's got a new parasol. It’s white,
trimmed with plain chiffon — not any lace. She's
got on her white organdie. Kathleen told one of
the girls she had seven white dresses, and not a
piqué among them.”
Heavy wheels rolling rapidly thundered up on
the State Road and came to an abrupt lurch in
front of Solomon Hops's house.
A handsome young fellow, with an irresponsible
face, drove the caterer's cart, which was piled with
3
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
ices and boxes of the decorated cakes whose famil-
iar countenances have such a friendly air at after-
noon teaS.
“That George P” asked Solomon, amiably; he
did not complain of George's dust, but sat on the
porch and choked in it, with malice to none.
George was not a dude. He owned his business,
which, however experimental, was an importation
from town for the Summer months, and acquired a
glamour from this fact. George had men enough,
but he was apt to do his own driving when his or-
ders led him past Solomon Hops's house. Nannie,
blushing prettily, retreated towards her father. But
the imported caterer called her back.
“I say, Nan " George shook his whip at her
with a masculine imperiousness, which, it seemed,
the girl did not resent. Some of the sweetest
women are made that way.
“Oh, go along an' talk with George if he wants
ye,” said Solomon Hops. And Nannie went. Her
father tipped his chair back, and watched her, with
a gentle expression touched by an almost child-
like trust. Nannie was the belle and heiress of the
winter people. Solomon looked at her with a pride
which ran its roots deeper than the grip of the
oldest oak that struck below the biggest boulder
on his most extortionate piece of woodland. He
who would have euchred the British Ambassador
4.
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
out of a fifty-thousand-dollar check for a five-hun-
dred-dollar lot was a lamb and a rustic in the pre-
sence of this girl. Solomon had pronounced views
of human society; these had been acquired in Bal-
sam Groves. On divine topics he was vague, not
feeling sufficiently familiar with the evidence. But
Nannie he understood. He had all the confidence
in Nannie that he had lost in himself and his race.
His consciousness that he was not intimate with
his Creator, and not received at the British Am-
bassador's, gave him no concern whatever. He had
Nannie.
“Nannie is natur’,” thought Solomon Hops;
“an' when you've said a thing 's natur', you've
opened a great subjec’.”
“Say! Mr. Hops l’ the caterer called from the
cart. “The trolley road from Balsam 's goin'
through. Next season it’ll be buzzin’ all over the
Cape in spite of 'em.” -
This was a tremendous piece of local news, –
the outcome of several years' conflict between the
village and the visitors; and the two men, who
made their living out of the summer people, ex-
ulted instinctively in the disappointment of their
customers. Solomon Hops sprang to his feet.
“Blank them dudes l’ he cried. “I’m goll-
darned glad they’re beat!”
George leaned out of his wagon. His black eyes
5
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
wandered over Nannie's blushing face. “Folks
say it's goin' to connect as far's Sandasket. You
'n' me we’ll take a trip around country some
day.”
“I’m goll-darned glad
Hops.
}}
!
repeated Solomon
On the piazzas of the Country Club it was quite
cool, and invited the hot and tired golfers as they
came up from the links. The ocean could not be
seen from the clubhouse, but his breath was salt
on the cheek, and the rhythm of his mighty respir-
ation was distinct to the ear. A generous stretch
of fair meadows, redeemed to the brassie, and care-
fully pruned of natural hazards, appealed softly to
the eye. On the meadows the June afternoon was
beginning to kneel. The light slanted low. The
closely cut grass had taken on the hues belonging
only to the month and to the hour; and the leaves
of such trees as the axe of the green-keeper had
spared quivered under lances of red-gold from
what promised to be a gorgeous west. The advan-
cing sunset prepared itself to come richly capari-
soned, like an Oriental army.
On the eastern piazza a lady, not young and
not a golfer, sat chatting with that kind of smart-
neSS which passes for conversation among those in-
6
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
capable of or unaccustomed to it. Her face, which
still retained the consciousness of beauty, was
crossed with inscrutable purposes, – it was that
of a Caucasian sphinx. In a group of people, all of
them persons of ease, and many of them people of
fortune, she carried the unmistakable indications
of great wealth. Many young men and a few young
girls surrounded her. She possessed a husband,
but he might be said to belong to the choir invisi-
ble, being useful chiefly as chancellor of the ex-
chequer and as a figure-head at entertainments —
never inconvenient or obtrusive. She was on ex-
cellent terms with him, and he was said to admire
her. Her name was Marriot, Mrs. Douce Marriot.
She was usually called by her own, not her hus-
band's name, and was spoken of in a certain class
of clubs as The Deuce. -
A man not over thirty-six, but looking much
older, plainly not a dilettante, and seeming some-
thing foreign to the group, made one of Mrs. Mar-
riot's Court on the eastern piazza. He was in a
golfing costume, and lounged on the piazza rail
gracefully; he twirled a cocktail glass between his
fingers as he talked; the glass was but half emp-
tied. Mrs. Marriot, in her sprightly moments,
called him The Inquisitor. She was not afraid to
call anybody anything. His name was Frost; he
was a rising young physiologist, much respected
7
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
in his university. He had a face which would have
puzzled any physiognomist not familiar with the
profession which has, so far as is known, created the
type. It was heavily and mysteriously marked,—
lined like the countenance of a very old man.
Deep furrows contracted the flesh of his forehead
and cheeks; and the outlines of his lips and nos-
trils ran into unexpected depressions, like defeated
soldiers entrapped in a sunken road. One would
have found it impossible to say what this man had
been meant to be, but there could be no mistake
about the thing he had become.
“It is a great sacrifice to make for science,”
Mrs. Marriot was saying softly. Douce Marriot
was never known to disagree with a man upon his
convictions or ambitions. To taunt him to exas-
peration for a trifle, madden him deftly for a whim,
defy him dangerously for an experiment, of course
was legitimate and usually successful warfare. But
there is a line where men must not be differed
from by a woman on peril of her charms, and Mrs.
Marriot never crossed that line.
“I was going to say,” added the lady, holding
out her glass to be refilled, “that it is a great sacri-
fice to make for a little science. Does n’t it ever
strike you as disproportionate? Not that I would
even seem to question the sacredness of your
motives.”
8
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
“Oh, my dear Mrs. Marriot, when you consider
the X value of human life, - the immense results
of our experiments, – the tremendous possibilities
of the future, — the – the –”
The vivisector had flashed at the spark in her
retort, struck just in time to save his attention, for
his concentration on her personality had begun to
waver; he was now started on an animated pre-
sentation of the subject of antitoxin, when his eye
caught the glint of a girl's white dress showing
through the leaves of the thickly wooded avenue,
yet a quarter of a mile away. The girl was in a
dog-cart, and advanced but slowly towards the club-
house. A figure not very familiar to the Country
Club sat beside her and held the reins.
Dr. Frost did not finish what he was saying.
He got to his feet, and remained silent, with the
glass in his fingers, so standing absently before
Mrs. Marriot, whom he could not decently desert
for no visible reason. He looked suddenly fagged
and annoyed, and turned his old-young face to-
wards the west, whose strengthening color struck
it sharply.
“Good heavens !” cried Douce Marriot, with a .
little movement of dismay. “What a sky! Your
face is —” She broke her sentence. The young
surgeon, in the strange color of a sky piled with
heavy clouds, from under which the light smote
9 e
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
powerfully, stood painted blood-red as a butcher,
from brow to chin.
“How becoming these strange atmospheric
effects are to a meazz / " said Mrs. Marriot, caress-
ingly, just in time to save herself.
Spots of green, of gray, of white, of Scarlet, mov-
ing on the map of the links, the players came up.
Number nine was at its apotheosis. Talk of
strokes and brassies, putting and foozling, driving
and topping, could be heard from a long distance,
— the aggressive tones of the young women out-
ranging the voices of the men. By twos and threes,
by quartettes and clusters, the golfers began to
close in upon the piazzas; tired and healthy, noisy
and happy, - the fortunate youth of a fortunate
class and a fortunate shore. The athletic girl was
so much in the foreground that she smote the
athletic man into a dim perspective. Golf, like
death or hunger, is a leveler; and people who did
not meet in the same drawing-room might tee
off into the same bunker. Socially ranked, these
women were all ladies, for the Balsam Country
Club belonged to those organizations which, with-
Out an apparent consciousness of barriers, the more
adroitly preserve them; like the barbed-wire fences
Set within a foot of boundary lines in deference
to the law. But, for whatever reason, these milder
IO
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
figures were elbowed out of the picture by the
true golf girl. -
A/er elbows were bare. Her sleeves were rolled
to her shoulder. Her blouse, open at the throat
and below it, was finished by a man's four-in-hand
necktie, with its knot slipped far down. She wore
no hat. Her hair, thoroughly tousled, blew into
her eyes and strayed in her neck. Her arms were
more masculine than those of most of the men of
her own class, and as brown as a gardener's. Her
face had the hue of a Grand-banker's in the fore-
castle at the end of a summer's voyage. Her voice
and laughter matched her face and arms. Her
movements and gestures were masculine; and she
had the air of studying to make them more so.
She might have been taken for rather a small man
in petticoats — and short petticoats at that. As
the girls tramped noisily up the piazza steps, Mrs.
Marriot surveyed them with a curious smile.
“It spoils the figure,” she observed in an under-
tone. “I don't regret it.” She was too old to play
golf; not too old (the more was the marvel) for
other less wholesome, less innocent games. She
and the golf girls took hold of the ancient and
royal sport called life at two extremes.
“Come here, Mab Miller l’ cried Mrs. Marriot.
Mab Miller came. She was the champion golf girl,
and looked it, every masculine inch of her, from
I I
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
her bare head to her broad foot. Striding across
the piazza, she sat down on the rail; one hand
rested on her hip, and her bare elbow protruded
at a sharp angle.
“I want to present you—” began Mrs. Marriot.
She looked about for Dr. Frost just in time to
recall him from an obvious retreat. The young
man suffered the introduction without enthusiasm,
yet not without a certain interest which might be
called scientific curiosity.
Mab Miller spoke in a contralto verging on the
bass, and held her hand straight out like a man.
The surgeon's eye traveled leisurely up and down
the golf girl's brown arm.
“Fine deltoid,” he thought. “How beautifully
it would demonstrate l’’
“I want a gin fizz,” observed Miss Miller. Dr.
Frost bowed, and without comment ordered the
nectar required by this modern Hebe. But the
champion did not call for more than one gin fizz.
She was quite temperate. She was as careful as a
prize-fighter in training.
As much could not be said of one very pretty
blonde girl, exquisitely dressed, and formed in
every movement and accent on the standards of
social life which we call fashionable for lack of a
more definite term, and Mrs. Marriot turned upon
her.
I 2
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
y
“Tracie Benton, come here ! Sit down by me,’
whispered Douce Marriot, with a curl of her full
lip. Mrs. Marriot knew quite well when to check
her own convivial instincts. She knew where to
stop in everything; which, perhaps, was the worst
of it.
By a single, subtle motion of her lace parasol she
made a prisoner of the blonde girl in a piazza chair
beside herself—an impulse of good feeling with
which Douce Marriot was not unendowed. “One
must atone, at times,” she thoughtguizzically. “I’ve
matched a vivisector and a golf champion. That's
sin enough on my soul for one day. Now I'll see
Tracie Benton home to her mother.”
At this moment a remarkably beautiful dog
bounded up the piazza steps, and stopped, look-
ing to see why the people whom he owned were
so slow to follow. He was a collie, of a pure breed,
finely marked; black, with tan paws and cheeks,
and white breast, where the waving hair, which
Nannie had called a shirt front, stood straight out
like a frill on an old-fashioned gentleman. A scar,
high on the forehead, was noticeable, but did
not disfigure him. His eyes were fine and full
of dignity; his whole mien and expression were
noble.
“Look here, Clydel” A man's voice (a merry
one) spoke from the dog-cart which had just driven
I 3
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
up. “You’re too well born and well bred to pre-
cede a lady.” -
“Clyde shall do just as he wants to,” replied a
laughing girl. “He always does. He's born that
way. He never would follow.” She had a lovely,
one might say a lovable laugh; and her voice had
the charm of a lost art. One hardly knew how to
define it, beyond saying that it charmed, until one
had seen the speaker. Then you perceived that she
could have had no other voice and existed. Many
voices are adaptable, like clothes, and may come
off or on the individual at the command of the
type. This girl's tone and accent were inalienable.
She ran up the steps with the ease of perfect health
and bubbling happiness, and stood a moment as if
a little uncertain of her next movement, her profile
turned towards her companion, who was delayed
in giving the trap to the club groom.
The collie, without deigning a glance at the
people on the piazza, had leaped down the steps
and gone back to the trap.
“You honor us, Miss Sterling,” said Douce Mar-
riot, turning her head with a singular expression.
The slight phrase, with a half-concealed scoff
in it, seemed somehow to carry more weight than
it was meant to hold, and bent beneath it, like an
overladen tree.
There were vines on the club piazza
wood-
I4
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
–4°
bine, clematis, and the usual things; by some-
body's graceful fancy they had been allowed to
hang abundantly at the eastern entrance, and fell
from the arch uncut, like a green portière. Cara
Sterling put this aside with her hands, as if it had
been lace. She stood against the swaying curtain
of the vines, holding it back a little, daintily, that
she might not bruise a tendril or hurt the feelings
of a bud. There was something quaint and old-
fashioned about her figure, in her high-throated
organdie, with her white gloves and plain shade
hat wound by white silk, and the filmy sunshade
in her hand. Only an eminent modiste could have
fitted that gown, but Miss Sterling did not wear it
like a fashionable woman; she wore it like a lovely
girl. The first impression that she made was one
of whiteness and fineness; the sense of her beauty
came afterwards. - - -
Her gray eyes swept the piazza group with a
clear glance; included Douce Marriot, to whose
salutation she replied more courteously than cor-
dially, touched the champion, the surgeon, and
the Benton girl, and, slightly darkening, assumed
a perplexed depth and brilliance, which, although
it lived no longer than a ray from a moving mir-
ror, had something memorable in it. She looked
the very blossom and promise of essential woman-
hood; gently modulated, with a candid modesty
I 5 -
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
of demeanor characteristic of a past rather than
of the present time. She seemed, in very truth, to
“honor” the Country Club; as if a fixed and peace-
ful ideal had been confronted with a mass of stormy,
struggling facts.
“Gee whiz l’” said the champion under her
breath. “Great Scott!” She stopped swinging
her feet, and got down from the piazza rail. Dr.
Frost stood gloomily, with averted face; his color
had changed, and all the lines in his forehead and
cheeks were expressed in gray.
“Ah,” observed Mrs. Marriot, softly, “it seems
we are to have the village doctor.”
The gentleman who came up the piazza steps
and joined Miss Sterling with an apology—some-
thing about the groom — was a restless, attractive
young man, undeniably handsome, and possibly a
person of force. He lacked the ſe me sais guoz
which is the complexion of inherited wealth and
ease, and he was not very well dressed; but he car-
ried himself with a debonair manner and a sturdy
respect for his own individuality, which it was im-
possible to set aside. He was very dark in coloring,
and his nervous mouth was well cut; better, in-
deed, than his chin, about which there was some-
thing not clearly defined (for it was not an ugly
chin), which led one to wonder why he did not
wear a beard. He had a strong, direct, dark eye
I6
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
and a joyous voice. On the top of his head the
black hair showed one gray lock.
His relation to Miss Sterling, which he carried
in his atmosphere by a kind of proud and forced
obtrusion of the fact, was clearly that of her fa-
ther's physician, invited to luncheon and driven
over to the Country Club, the guest of an hour.
He looked about him alertly, recognizing a
patient here and there with the professional eyes,
and a few acquaintances with the personal Ones.
He had not the exasperating air common to his
kind, of being so pressed for time that one is of
no visible account unless one can proffer a Sore
throat or an exalted temperature; but wore, rather,
the manner of an educated young man who had
not too much to do, or who did not care whether
he did it or not. This temperamental nonchalance
seemed subtly to adapt Chanceford Dane for the
leisure class, to which he did not by birth or train-
ing belong.
The surgeon stepped up and greeted him
warmly, if this adverb could be used of any act of
Dr. Frost's. In fact, there was, if you chose to
think so, a forced cordiality in his welcome, which
the village doctor buoyantly ignored.
“Ah, Frost!” he said airily. “This is well met.
Did you sail over? How long shall you be around
these reefs 2 ”
17
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
The two university men fell together for a mo-
ment, while the champion (with her sleeves rolled
down) intercepted Miss Sterling, on whom her
roving eyes rested with a fascinated attention, as
if she had been a man.
“I made such a beastly stroke to-day,” com-
plained the golf girl. “It was such a rotten lie!
If I hadn't made a beggarly swat at the fourth
hole I'd have made the course in forty-eight. But
I don't suppose you 'd care.”
“Why, frankly, no–not so very much,” said
Cara Sterling in a half-troubled voice, as if she
were sorry for the champion, or sorry, indeed, for
any being in the world beautiful to whom her sym-
pathy did not outflow that June day. “I am no
sort of a player. Not that I don't try; but I can't
seem to care enough. And as for Dr. Dane—” she
included him in a smile which went to his head
like wine.
“I don't know a brassie from a putting green,”
said Dr. Dane.
As the two turned the champion stepped back,
and the physiologist and the young lady were
brought face to face. Dr. Frost made a slight
motion as if to extend his hand. Miss Sterling did
not see it, and it dropped at his side. But she met
him with her sweet geniality—she seldom denied
this to any person; she had a charming manner,
I8
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
not untouched with dignity, but abounding with
good humor and good-will.
“So you two were classmates,” she said com-
fortably. At this moment the young lady was
seized forcibly by the skirt of her muslin dress and
unceremoniously and persistently shaken from
behind. Two big brown paws clasped her neck,
and then dropped to her waist and knee. The
best Country Club gravel and too well-sprinkled
lawn offered an excellent medium of impression,
and the footprints of the dog etched the white
organdie wherever they touched it. Before the girl
could protest or rebuke, the collie kissed her deli-
cately behind her pretty ear.
“Oh, CA;de /* cried Cara, laughing like a bell,
“what a dear you are l’ Stooping, she put her
arms about the dog's neck, and laid her cheek
upon his head.
“There never was anybody like Clyde,” she
said.
“I should hope not,” observed Dr. Frost, indis-
creetly. He returned to the waiter, as he spoke,
the tall glass which he had offered Dr. Dane; it
had been filled with Scotch and soda, and the vil-
age doctor had drained it like a man who did not
see good liquor every day. “I should hope not,”
repeated Dr. Frost.
At the sound of these words the collie raised
I9
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
his noble head. His serious gaze challenged the
bright company confidingly, one by one, until it
reached the figure of the experimenter. Then a
curious change passed over the dog. His upper
lip wrinkled wickedly; a sinister expression crossed
his face; it was swiftly smitten and replaced by one
of inexplicable terror.
CHAPTER II
THE collie, who had advanced a step or two,
retreated. He planted his four feet firmly on
the piazza, and with set jaws regarded the physi-
ologist, at whom he gazed with an abhorrence so
intelligent as to be startling. This expression was,
as we said, overtaken by one of bleak terror. The
dog's ears fell, his tail dropped, his head drooped,
his whole proud and fearless body cringed; he
backed away, crouching, step by step, velvet-footed
as a cat, until he reached the edge of the piazza
steps. Here he paused, and seemed to consider
his next move with seriousness. -
“Why, Clyde l’’ said Miss Sterling, with some
severity, “what in the world—I never saw him act
that way ! There is n’t a cowardly hair on him.
He fights every cur in Massachusetts. He never
runs from any of them.” Happily unconscious of
a certain ambiguity in her last words (at which the
surgeon flushed slightly), the young lady spoke
sharply to the dog, who paid no more attention to
her than if he did not have the pleasure of her
acquaintance.
“Let him alone,” suggested Douce Marriot,
2 I
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
sweetly. “This is a ſin-de-siècle drama. Let's see
it played out.”
A group gathered, and stopped talking. The
dog and the physiologist occupied the foreground.
It grew rather still. The clink of a glass in the
club dining-room could be heard plainly. Tracie
Benton said something, and Mrs. Marriot hushed
her sharply.
The collie had by this time regained himself.
Abject horror faded from his eyes, the cringe stiff-
ened out of his body, his expression of terror gave
way to one of composure and of dignity; this grew
into a sense of personal injury, and passed slowly
into a look of conscious wrong and of Outrage SO
profound that it might have represented a race or
arraigned one. The dog's eyes were deep enough,
and the intellect behind them clear enough, to sus-
tain more emotion than many human faces can.
After a few moments’ reflection the creature
stood erect again; his head rose high, and his ears
higher. His tail reassumed the curve of self-respect,
his whole fine body straightened and became rigid;
his handsome face took on the mould of elemental
rage. His upper lip Curled, and wrinkled again,
revealing a white fang. The scar on his forehead
throbbed. He began to pant painfully. Then,
clenching his teeth, he uttered a formidable growl.
“Come here, Clyde Good fellow, sir!” ventured
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
the physiologist, politely. He put out his veined,
white hand. It could be seen that he deprecated
the dog. “Come and speak to me, Clyde, old boy.
Don't you know me? I've been at your house a
good deal. Come here, sir!”
A roar from the dog replied. The man and the
animal eyed each other. The man was a little pale.
The dog seemed as conscious of this circumstance
as any other observer. He hesitated, and crouched,
still growling, and working himself by the sound
of his own snarls into an indignation which was
not without something of solemnity.
“Better be a little careful,” said Clyde's mistress,
uneasily. “This has gone about far enough.” She
started to interfere.
“Ss —ss — st—boy!” cried the golf champion
at this moment.
Then the dog sprang. He cleared the distance
between himself and the surgeon by a bound, and
closed upon the man. Dr. Frost defended him-
self as well as he could, but every motion that he
made clearly increased his danger. Clyde was a
formidable fighter, and of great personal reputa-
tion among the collies, setters, and terriers of Bal-
sam. He had this man at his mercy now; and he
kept him there.
The golf girl shrieked like a mere woman who
Gould not wield a brassie, and little cries came up
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
from the group on the piazza, which thickened
quickly. Cara Sterling now had Clyde by the
collar, but he shook her off as if she had been a
stranger on the street. Dr. Dane, with an exclama-
tion, came forward, and seized the dog.
“Look out !” cried Cara in a low tone. “He’ll
turn on you !”
The young lady and the surgeon were equally
white by this time. Frost was thoroughly fright-
ened, and almost the only conscious thought he
had was his determination that this girl should
not know it.
The collie, who had sprung first at the man's
throat, for some reason abandoned his base of
attack, and (not being a bulldog) did not feel it
a point of honor to hold on where he had taken
grip. He seemed rather intent on investigating
the body of his victim more deliberately, and occu-
pied by turning over in his mind the best methods
of annihilation, meanwhile running his white teeth
up and down the surgeon's shoulder and arm
speculatively and, as yet, but lightly. At the
slightest offer of human interference he tightened
his teeth in the coat or the flesh, wherever they
happened to be set at the moment. *
“Oh, Clyde!” cried Cara in unbearable distress,
“let go that gentleman Let go He is a friend
of mine, I tell you, sir! Clyde, how dare you bite
24.
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
my friends ! If you don't let go I shall — I shall
scold you, sir!” Clyde's teeth slid down the sur-
geon's arm, and rested on his wrist and hand.
“Clyde, if you don't let go, I shall — have to —
zwhº you, sir!”
For the first and only time in his life Clyde re-
plied to his mistress with an ominous growl. His
teeth closed on the man's wrist, just around the
artery.
It was Dr. Frost's right hand, - the hand that
had torn a hundred veins and nerves from living
dogs bound and helpless, but conscious of their
torments. It was the experimenter's expert right
hand, whose merciless dexterity had created his
professional success. It occurred to Dr. Dane
what the loss of this hand, or even its partial dis-
ability, would mean to the vivisector. - ...
“Surely I can strangle the creature off l’ he
cried. He caught the collie by the throat. But
Miss Sterling pulled him back.
“He will tear him to pieces if you do that!”
She had got to her knees now, by the side of her
dog, and began to entreat him.
“Clydel Come, Clyde. This is a mistake, Clyde.
Let him alone. You've got the wrong man.”
At these words a hoarse guttural went up from
the dog. It sounded like a laugh.
“See, Clydel You've made a blunder — Stop,
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
dear, and listen to me. Clyde, you must listen to
me!” She put her arms around the dog's neck,
and laid her cheek against the scar upon his fore-
head. She could feel it throbbing violently be-
neath her touch.
“Look out !” cried Dr. Dane, anxiously. “The
creature might hurt you. Can't any of you suggest
anything?” he asked, whirling.
A gentleman standing by called a caddie. “Go
to the green-keeper, and tell him to bring his pis-
tol. Tell him to 72/73 /*
Cara Sterling's soft hand stole down over the
collie's cheek and jaw.
“Do not— take any risks — for me,” gasped
Frost. “Please move away, Miss Sterling. There's
no harm done yet. I don't think there will be.
Really I don't, I — ”
“Hush l’’ said Cara Sterling. “Please be still,
everybody. I can manage my own dog — yet.
Keep perfectly quiet, Dr. Frost.”
Very slowly, very delicately and quietly, talk-
ing all the while in an undertone to the frenzied
but, it could be seen, now attentive dog, the girl's
white fingers slid past his jaws and gently urged
themselves between his teeth.
A cry came from somewhere on the piazza; but
Cara held up her other hand to enforce silence.
Before the quickest perception could grasp her
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
full intention, she had managed to insert her hand,
finger by finger, between the animal's teeth, flat
upon the physiologist's wrist. “There, Clyde l’’
she said softly. “You know you would n't hurt
2/263.
The collie's jaws relaxed but did not open. He
lifted his fine eyes, and regarded his mistress with
a puzzled and wounded reproach.
“Dear Clyde l’’ said Cara. After a moment's
hesitation he loosened his grip; the man's wrist
fell free; the dog kissed the girl's hand — half
piteously, it seemed — and laid his panting face
upon her knee.
The piazza was now packed and the clubhouse
full. Somebody cheered, and then such a hurrah
arose that the girl felt her head swim. Frost went
very white; he did not speak. Cara still knelt by
the dog. Her head fell over on his forehead.
The Balsam Groves doctor bent to ask her if she
felt faint. But Mab Miller offered her whiskey
gallantly.
“God have mercy on our souls l’ cried Douce
Marriot, suddenly. “Here is Sterling Hart!”
Every eye in the Country Club turned at the
name. The dog and the physiologist became in-
stantly a past sensation, and Cara was quite for-
gotten. Dr. Dane helped her to her feet, and she
got to a piazza chair with her trembling fingers
27
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
locked on Clyde's collar. Frost took himself away,
and passed the portière of clematis and wood-
bine, which he brushed and bruised as he went
through.
A man, head and shoulders above any other in
the Company, stood gazing perplexedly at the
Scene. He was of imposing physique, well pro-
portioned, and cast in every respect on a larger
mould than ordinary men. He wore no beard or
mustache, and there was something Roman in his
features and in the shape of his head. His eyes
were dark and strikingly fearless, his mouth stren-
uous and grave, although it melted into a beautiful
and sometimes a peculiarly happy Smile. He had a
commanding mien, and something of the peculiar
self-possession of one accustomed to appear before
masses of people. He was not a very young man,
seeming something past forty, and his hair was
slightly strewn with gray.
“Why, Cousin Carolyn !” he said, in an authori-
tative tone. “What does this mean?”
“Oh, Cousin Sterling!” cried the girl. “I can't
have you scolding Clyde. He is n’t in your dio-
cese.”
CHAPTER III
THE two in the dog-cart drove home more rap-
idly than they came. The dog with the shirt frill
was not allowed to follow this time. Clyde sat at
their feet, his head on the girl's knee, and her
hand on his collar. Miss Sterling seemed very
tired. Dr. Dane watched her with a professional
eye, not always so alert to the occasion. He was
not a particularly observant physician; he dis-
liked his profession, and objected to himself for
being in it, but tried to make the best of his blun-
der, as thousands of young men do in the accep-
tance of mistaken careers.
They had got away from the Country Club as
quickly and as quietly as possible. Cara had said,
“Come here, Cousin Sterling, and I'll confess all
about it.” And that eminent clergyman, in whose
big arm she had linked her own while she whis-
pered a few words in his bending ear, had pro-
tected her departure and the offending collie's.
Sterling Hart's wide shoulders towered over Mrs.
Marriot, the champion, Tracie Benton, and the
rest, while the excited and exhausted girl slipped
away. As he stood on the outer edge of the
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
portière of vines watching her off, with lifted hat,
the Reverend Sterling Hart had so grave an ex-
pression that his cousin would have noticed it if
she had been less absorbed; for his warm smile
was always hers without asking, and outside of his
pulpit he was counted the best of good company.
Socially he never preached or prayed.
The physiologist had not reappeared; he was
reported by the gentleman who sent for pistols to
be in the dressing-room bathing bruises, consoling
scratches, pinning tatters, and generally occupied
in the line of repairs. The Reverend Mr. Hart
made an inquiry for him when he returned to the
club piazza; and the popular version of the recent
scene was promptly offered him.
“I have n’t seen anything better since I was in
the Théâtre Français last January,” observed Mrs.
Marriot, critically. “It was legitimate drama, Mr.
Hart; suitable even for the clergy. Pity you
missed it !”
Sterling Hart regarded Douce Marriot without
reply. She felt that she hated him when he looked
at her like that. His eyes passed from her to the
talkative girl at her side; to the champion, swing-
ing her feet from the rail; to the young ladies and
gentlemen in the dining-room, with the tall tum-
blers in their hands. Most of these people knew
him well, many of them were his parishioners in
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
town, and had long since learned when to let him
alone. It was quite plain now that he had one of
his attacks when he would not talk. He turned
away thoughtfully, and went to his locker for the
broken lofter whose surgical needs he had come
to attend.
The young people in the dog-cart were almost
as silent as he. They had ridden as far as Solomon
Hops's house before either spoke. When they
came in sight of the chocolate éclair, the doctor
looked the other way; he was afraid that some
patients would waylay him (it being, in fact, his
office hours), and he had no visible intention of
blotting out this shining moment for any of the
physical woes of his limited clientele. The young
lady spoke now, not with any obvious interest in
what she said: —
“How did you manage it? I should as soon have
thought of asking them to take me to board at
Westminster, or proposing to our late Minister to
England to have me for a ‘mealer.’ Solomon would
see the whole summer population starve before he
would take in any of us.”
“Oh, rheumatism was my friend at court,” re-
plied Dane, lightly. “He has developed a species
that he holds at a high figure, like his marsh lots.
He told me that he thought it might be handy to
3 I
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
have me around, in case he had spells. I believe
the old Balsam doctor got tired of the case. I real-
ize that I am in luck, - while it lasts. He may
turn me into the street, you know, any day, if I
don’t cure him.”
“Nannie is such a pretty girl, don't you think
so?” asked Miss Sterling, abruptly enough.
“Who? Oh, she Yes, quite pretty,” replied
Dr. Dane, without enthusiasm.
“She is studying art,” pursued Miss Sterling,
with a little smile. “A good many of them do,
you know; I can't see why, can you ? She comes
up to see my portfolios. I felt as if I’d conquered
a battalion the first day she did it. Most of the
village girls hate us so. I can't help wondering
why.”
“It would be wonderful,” bungled the young
man, “if they hated you.” The trite and fatuous
words were not off his lips before he crimsoned
with mortification at their escape. Miss Sterling
had given him a swift, and, for so gentle a lady,
somewhat imperious glance; but when she per-
ceived his embarrassment she laughed outright.
“Oh, it will do!” she cried. “Anything will do,
after what we have been through this afternoon.”
Now, again, as once over there in the clubhouse,
he felt his head grow light. But he answered stead-
ily enough: —
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
“I am glad you are able to speak of it. I thought
I’d wait till you could. It was a tremendous scene.
You went through it like —” He broke off.
“I can't understand why Clyde has taken such
a dislike to Dr. Frost,” she proceeded, speaking
slowly and with some difficulty. “He never liked
him — never. But the last few months I’ve had to
keep the two apart whenever he has called. And
he and his family are old friends of ours. Father
thinks a great deal of him.”
She said “Keep the two apart" precisely as if
she referred to two gladiators, or other picked
specimens of the human race distinguished for
their belligerent qualities. It seldom occurred to
Cara that her dog was classified among the infe-
rior species. An eminent scientist at dinner one
day had quite hurt her feelings by speaking of
Clyde as a beautiful and Sagacious animal.
“If it had been that golf girl,” suggested Dr.
Dane, with a brush of non-athletic scorn, “she
could have stood it. Their sensibilities must be
developed like their arms, I fancy, — all biceps and
deltoid. But you —” he ventured again.
He was young, and his fancy set an aureola
about this girl, - modest, finely finished, very
woman of very woman, a beautiful anachronism,
he thought, a fair, illuminated window which let
in the light of another and a less rude day than
33
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
ours. His profession, which (if we may be per-
mitted the word) deidealizes women earlier in life
and more roughly than any other, had not spoiled
for the Balsam Groves doctor the glamour natural
to his sex and his years, perhaps because he expe-
rienced so little interest in the profession. He
thought of Carolyn Sterling in poetic phrases and
in aesthetic phases; as violets breathe, as white
roses bud, as blush clouds float, as fawns flee, as
all shy and lovely things exist. He thought of her
as a being to be sheltered all her life from the
prick of a thorn or the approach of a draft; a girl
not to be caused a tear nor to endure a pang; a
girl never to hear bad news or a sharp word. He
had been thinking of her in this way, and for some
time; ever since her father's case fell into his hands
in April. This unexpected drive was “a vision and
a glory in the earth” to Chanceford Dane.
He had dwelt upon what he should say in taking
her home, and how she would look, and act, and
to what sacred economy he could best put that
precious span of time. A rainbow like this, –
which might never arch his life again, – by what
fine color laws could its splendid hues be detached
from the prism, hanging heaven high and held to
light his heart?
Now the ride was almost over, and they had
Scarcely exchanged twenty words; these of the
34
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
most indifferent and evasive sort. A dog and a
physiologist (confusion be on Thomas Frost!) had
smitten the rainbow out of the sky. The village
doctor drove like a man under a blackening cloud,
hurrying to get to her father's house; cutting short
his own prismatic moment, and driving the faster
because he perceived that Miss Sterling was more
exhausted than she knew. She was such a healthy
girl — more well than strong, as women free from
every disorder but that of their own sensitive-
ness are—that it did not occur to Cara that she
had experienced anything which would justify the
sensations of collapse so new to her that they
seemed nothing less than abnormal. Her words
came with more and more difficulty; and she
leaned back weakly against the tan leather cush-
ions of the dog-cart.
Clyde, with his face on her knee, whined, stirred,
and watched her as anxiously as the physician did.
The dog perfectly understood that he was in dis-
grace; but, for his own private reasons, could not
understand why. The ethics of the universe were
overturned that day for Clyde. Justice was a blas-
phemy, and the human race a darkened riddle, of
which his own adored and adorable mistress was
the chief element of perplexity in a problem that
was too much for collies.
“I feel—very strangely,” said Cara, putting her
35
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
hand to her head. Her white sunshade drooped,
and fell. Dr. Dane caught it, slipped the reins
into his right hand, and quietly laid his left arm
across the back of the seat. He did not touch her,
but, if she swayed, he could catch her at an in-
stant's width.
“Lean towards me,” he commanded, in his pro-
fessional tone, “not the other way, not towards
the edge. We are almost home.”
“I never faint l” gasped Cara, defiantly.
“No,” he returned, “you are not going to faint.
I shall not let you. We are almost home,” he re.
peated in a matter-of-fact tone, as if it had been
an every-day affair for them to be driving together,
or even as if— But he drove fast; and the dog-
cart whirled up the long avenue, to her father's
door, at a spinning pace. He tried to divert her
thoughts from her sensations, as the merest ap-
prentice in his profession seeks to divert a patient.
“I wish I had one of those long drinks for you!”
he began.
Cara, looking at him blindly, through the purple
mist that had settled across her eyes, thought:
“Why, he has a charming smile !”
But she did not think anything more. She had
been sitting up very straight and stiff, when she
gave way altogether, and suddenly, like a broken
shaft, toppled toward him.
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
Mr. Rollinstall Sterling was sitting in his large,
cool drawing-room, - a plainly furnished room,
with that sumptuous touch of indifference to other
people's parlors which one sees only in the homes
of the well-born rich. The absence of bric-à-brac
and upholstery in this house was as marked and
as severe as the figure of its master; a gray and
stately gentleman, of a presence whose dignity
was reduced a little by an invalid air. At the sound
of the dog-cart, racing up the avenue faster than
he thought necessary, he came out to the piazza,
and sheltered himself in his wind chair. He had
no sooner done this than he uttered a sharp though
decorous exclamation, and got himself down the
steps more quickly than the sick man had moved
for many a day. He had never seen his daugh-
ter in a young man's arms, and his fancy flew
to meet an unknown disaster, which took the
form of a cross between an accident and an elope-
ment. -
“Get me some brandy ” called the village
doctor, imperiously. Then, more gently: “She is
not hurt, Mr. Sterling. I don't think she has even
fainted — exactly. Let her alone, Clyde, –let her
alone. Here, Tibbs, help me lift her out — No —
so. She has been through a trying scene, that's
all.”
He put his arms powerfully about the girl, who,
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
though quite conscious, found herself too weak to
protest. In fact, it struck him that it was all one
to her—whether the coachman or the doctor, it
did not matter. Between them the two men car-
ried her into the drawing-room and laid her on a
broad sofa, by a window. The wind blew in salt
from the sea, and dashed against her face. It was
painfully white. The sparkling decanter shook in
her father's hands, and the little Irish maid, Kath-
leen, began to cry. The young physician himself
put the stimulant to her lips, though somewhat
sparingly or cautiously. His fingers remained on
her pulse. Once he put his ear to her heart. He
made no comment, except to say, “You need not
have a particle of anxiety, Mr. Sterling.” Indeed,
his chief concern seemed to be for his chronic
patient.
“I never faint,” repeated Cara, distinctly. “I
can't—seem to see what ails me?” she complained.
She tried to lift her head, which fell back heavily
on the pink and white roses of the cretonne-cov-
ered sofa.
“Miss Sterling,” said Dane, bringing his lips to-
gether, “you have had a shock. This is nothing
but the reaction. You will be all right in a little
while. You are not seriously ill. But you are worse
because you are not used to being ill at all, and
you don't know what it means.”
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
“Then I am ashamed of myself!” she tried to
say. But the words came like wraiths of words,
and an expression of distress and mortification
passed over her blanched face.
“Everybody else is proud of you!” cried the
doctor, fervently. “Trust me,” he added, “if you
can. I am telling you the truth in every respect.”
She had always been so well, and so proud of
her good health and superb young vigor, it seemed
to her as if a moral blight had suddenly fallen upon
her. She disliked Dane just then for being witness
to this humiliation. And she made him no answer
at all.
He got himself away from her as soon as he
conscientiously could. He was not accustomed to
young ladies who desired his professional visits
shortened.
Mr. Rollinstall Sterling followed the doctor to
the piazza, and laid a trembling hand upon his
2.TIſ).
“Is it possible,” he asked unsteadily, “that my
daughter has inherited my difficulties 2 Is there
— do you see — any signs of an affection of the
heart?”
“The organ is as sound as mine,” returned the
young physician, with some unnecessary sharp-
ness. “I tell you, sir, this is nothing but shock.
Some men would call it a nervous sinking turn. I
39
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
prefer the term shock. It covers the case. If she
Aad a disease of the heart, Mr. Sterling, your
daughter might have dropped, under what she has
been through. It is an unusual physique — highly
organized, sensitive to timidity, yet she has pluck
enough and nerve enough to — I never saw any-
thing like it, that's all!” concluded Chanceford
Dane. With brilliant eyes he told the old man the
story.
Before Dane had finished his late supper, which
Nannie (it being her Cook's day out) was some-
what slow in serving, his telephone called imperi-
ously, and he was summoned back to Rollinstall
Sterling's house; but the call came from the
chronic patient. Mr. Sterling was suffering one
of the habitual miseries known as his attacks;
and his daughter, pale as a pear blossom, and
slender, in a loose, misty gown, was in close
attendance upon her father. The door into her
own room was opened from his (she had not al-
lowed herself, as the doctor knew, to sleep out of
reach of the sick man's call for many months)
and once or twice she passed in and out on some
errand.
It was an arched door, and gave something of
the effect of a vista to a dim perspective in which
everything seemed to be white, with a possible
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
blush as faint as the beginnings of dawn upon
the walls. The girl stood on the threshold, aus-
tere and sweet; her dress looked vague, like the
pearl-white fog that was sweeping in with the
easterly from the open sea. The young man
dared not raise his eyes to her. The physician
busied himself assiduously with her father. He
and Cara Sterling did not talk. Once he had
said, “Where is Clyde P” and Cara had replied,
“Shut up in the sewing-room. I told him,” she
added very sadly, “that I should have to punish
him.” º
Dr. Dane did not ask the young lady how she
felt this evening. It occurred to him that she
was not without gratitude for the omission. She
had never been his patient. It also occurred to
him that she never meant to be.
When he came out through the dim drawing-
room a powerful figure rose from one of the
wicker chairs beside the cretonne sofa. It was the
Reverend Sterling Hart, who had come to inquire
for his cousin.
“After such a shock,” he said, “I thought she
must feel it. When I learned that you were in the
house, I stayed to ask you.”
There was a slight constraint in the clergyman's
manner. Dane was somehow reminded that he was
the village doctor. He replied with some dignity
4 I
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
in his own demeanor, under which the attitude of
the other became more cordial.
“Can I do anything, do you think, if I remain?”
asked Hart, with a boy-like timidity which was at
times characteristic of the man.
“They are both quite comfortable now,” replied
Dane. “Miss Sterling meant to retire, I think.
She ought not to have been up and about at all.”
He passed out without further words. His feet rang
on the gravel, and he held his handsome head well
up. In spite of himself his heart sang in an under-
tone. It was full moonlight, and the world seemed
to be listening for something. At the end of the
long, wooded avenue he met the surgeon, walking
eagerly in the warm light.
“You, too, Thomas?” said Chanceford Dane,
stopping short.
“Fá áu Brute?” replied Frost, smiling stead-
ily.
“You won't see her,” added the physician over
his shoulder. “She isn't fit for it—to-night.”
He could not quite keep the note of privilege
out of his voice. He hurried on, and out into
the road; it ran like a river of light through the
wide Country. The fog had shifted, and was veer-
ing out. The sea called loudly, like something
thwarted in a purpose. No carriages were at the
moment passing, and the bright road was still.
42
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
Some people on the hotel cliffs were singing, —
such songs as everybody knew, - and the mel-
ody swung towards him, muffled by distance and
foliage:–
“Oh, promise me that some day you and I
Will take our love together to some sky 1’
The thick trees, black-green, and with leaves
looking solid as metal, intervened like an em-
bossed shield between himself and the house that
he had left. As he stood gazing and dreaming,
these changed their form to his stimulated fancy,
and grew large and formidable, like the bastions
of a garrison armed to guard something precious
and of high degree.
He lifted his hat, and stood uncovered in the
moonlight.
Dr. Dane's telephone hung in his office, and
his bedroom adjoined the office. He slept with his
door open. At a little past midnight the call bell
rang loudly. He sprang to the receiver. A woman's
voice, — a lady's voice, — agitated, and rapid, but
quite low, said:—
“Is this Dr. Dane P”
“Yes, Miss Sterling.”
“Can you come at once P”
“Immediately.”
“Papa is very sick— Oh, very sick | I have
43
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
never seen him like this. I am afraid—” She
choked, and he could hear her Sob.
“I will be there in four minutes,” he said. He
flung on his clothes, pushed his bicycle out of
Solomon Hops's dim entry, and whirled away.
CHAPTER IV
STERLING HART sat alone in the dim drawing-room
for a few minutes after the doctor had left him,
with the irresolution of a man who has been ob-
structed in the fulfillment of a cherished purpose
that he is reluctant to abandon. Then he went
out on the piazza, and with commendable caution
ventured to try the hospitality of his uncle's wind
chair, which groaned under his colossal weight.
“I’m too much for it,” he thought, rising un-
comfortably, - “as I seem to be for a good many
things.”
With the freedom of a near relative and of one
intimate to the family life, he strolled about the
grounds for a while, smoking the single cigar of
the day which his clerical principles did not forbid
him. His own summer house, but a mashie stroke
away, stood in the moonlight with a solitary look;
a large place —“too large for one fellow,” as he
was accustomed to say—close to the water's brow.
Between the two estates the cliffs were cut by a
deep ravine. It was high tide, and the water was
sucking through, and dashed high with a hollow,
reverberating Sound. A narrow iron bridge, with
45
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
a strong, almost a solid, railing, spanned the chasm.
The path across the rocks (three feet wide at the
high-water mark) allowed by law and claimed by
the clamorous people came to an abrupt end at the
boiling fissure. At the right the beach, two miles
long, stretched on to Balsam. The native popula-
tion, elated by the decision which would weave
the web of the trolley across this fair remnant of
unsuspecting Nature, were building bonfires that
night in celebration of the local victory; and their
dark figures flitted to and fro across the blood-red
light, looking small and uneasy, like flies liable to
be caught in yet invisible meshes.
The “cottages” of the summer people—simply
Sumptuous or sumptuously simple within, and art-
fully artless without — commanded the water front
for miles on either hand. Mrs. Douce Marriot was
giving an elaborate dinner not a quarter of a mile
away.
The music of the violin, 'cello, and flute brought
out from town, sequestered in the garden for the
entertainment of her guests, came over the ravine
and undulated from the water with a softened and
half-mysterious fervor.
Far down the beach the winter people were
rudely singing around their bonfires the songs
that the people loved. Sterling Hart paused on
the cliff's edge to listen to them. Now and then
46
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
he could make out the strain quite clearly. Once
he caught the words: —
“Some day you and I —”
As he stood and listened, with shoulders well
thrown back and his massive head erect, the flute
in the Marriot garden, whether by accident or in
self-defense, took up the popular melody. The
'cello responded, and the violin cried, wailing —
or praying, as it seemed to him; the words came
to him imperfectly, as if they said:—
“Oh, take this love, and lift it to the sky!”
Sterling Hart threw his cigar over into the
water, where it fell hissing. He stood with bowed
head, a reverent and majestic figure. His people
were used to seeing him in this attitude at the
close of Sunday afternoon services, in the twilight
before the lights leaped out, when the organ re-
ceived the benediction from his lips, and laid it
solemnly upon their hearts and lives.
“One might not hear that again in a lifetime,”
said abruptly a strident voice behind him. The
preacher, wincing, turned.
“The two social extremes don't often hit off the
same music.” Dr. Frost came up smiling, and
looked over the cliff's edge.
“I’m not so sure of that,” replied Sterling Hart,
quickly. “The great passions or the great aspira-
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
tions will do it. Perhaps the only thing is to strike
the right key. Besides,” he added, “the great suf-
ferings do it, and the great sins.”
“Hear them now,” cried the physiologist, with
a mocking smile. The pretty love song had ceased,
and the crowds on the beach, now dancing around
their bonfires, were shouting drunkenly: —
“We’ll e-lec-tro-cute them doo-oodes on a spe-
cial trolley line.”
“You’ve spoiled it, Frost,” said the preacher,
with a gesture of repugnance, as if the other were
really to blame.
“Come over to the house with me,” he said in
a different tone; “I want to talk with you. My
uncle's lights are out,” he added, glancing at the
sick man's windows. “He must be more comfort-
able. I’ve only been waiting to make sure. It's
of no use pretending that they want us any longer.”
His cousin's windows, too, were quite dark, and
the green blinds closed. But neither of the two
gentlemen spoke of this. They walked in silence
towards the ravine, and crossed the little iron
bridge, which vibrated with the preacher's weight.
It seemed rather lonely in Mr. Hart's large,
silent house. His old housemaid came out to ask
if he wanted anything.
“Only some cigars, thank you, Jane,” he said.
He offered these to his guest, but did not smoke
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
again that night himself. He fell indeed into one
of his profound and unapproachable silences, and
sat looking at the water with eyes averted from
Thomas Frost.
“Well?” said the surgeon at last, uncomfort-
ably.
“It is the breach of hospitality,” replied Sterling
Hart, “that troubles me. I have some things to
say that a host does n't usually say to a guest. I
don't know that I’m going to be able to say them
on my own piazza. Would you mind coming to
walk — somewhere — after all P’’
“We might row out to the three-mile limit, on
neutral international territory,” answered Frost,
with a sardonic twitch of his mustache. “That
would do, I suppose. Come, Mr. Hart, out with it,
please ! Don't stand on ceremony—in my case.
I’m not sensitive.”
“If you had been,” returned the preacher,
quickly, “I should not have been in the position
I am — or you, either. We might have omitted
the subject upon which I feel forced — I may be
wrong, but I do feel so — to speak with you.”
“To pursue the imagery of our friends yonder
on the beach, don’t electrocute me too slowly, Mr.
Hart. It ought to be instantaneous — a thousand
volts, and done with it. You keep me dangling in
slow torture on ‘a special trolley line.’”
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
“There is some justice in that, I grant you,”
admitted Mr. Hart. “Here it is, then | Dr. Frost,
I must request you to suspend your attentions to
my cousin, – in short, to cease your suit.”
Thomas Frost made no reply for so long that
there was something distressing in his silence.
His muscles stiffened, and from his face — never
a mobile or expressive one — every flicker of ex-
pression fled; it was as if a thousand volts of doom
had penetrated his soul and body.
“Do you speak as one having authority, or as
the scribes?” he demanded at last, in a raucous,
constrained voice.
“I venture to use the privilege of her nearest
relative — her nearest man relative — with mens
sama in corpore samo.”
“You omit the lady's father from the calcula-
tion P”
“My uncle is an invalid; a remote and dying
man; as much set apart from the world and as
ignorant of a class of facts which have bearing on
the case as a Franciscan monk.”
“And yet,” replied the physiologist, with a
shrewd look, “I have presumed so far as to fancy
that Mr. Rollinstall Sterling is not unfriendly to
me.”
“That is perfectly true. That is why I speak—
to you.”
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
“Do you mean to imply, Mr. Hart,” said Dr.
Frost, very slowly, “that this friendliness is one
which it is in your power, if you choose to exer-
cise it, to overthrow P”
“I mean to imply precisely that.”
“And that you might, under conceivable cir-
cumstances, choose to exercise the power P”
“Under conceivable circumstances—frankly—
I might.”
Dr. Frost got up and paced the piazza – not
hotly, but with a cold, deliberate rage which froze
where another man's might have melted. His
movements were like those of a mechanical toy
or steam effigy as he passed to and fro, with his
cigar gleaming between his lips, and his whole
figure as tense as metal. It was evident that his
long habit of respect for the preacher — his elder
and superior in all the values of life, both visible
and invisible — prevented the surgeon from treat-
ing this extraordinary interference on the part of
Sterling Hart as he would have treated it in any
other man. Unfortunately he could not wind up
the subject by a brief and natural “Blank you !”
or, “Go to Blank 1" or, “Do you want her your-
self?” With a chilling self-restraint he sat down
again in the piazza chair, and tossed the ashes
from his cigar.
“Have you said anything?” he asked.
5 I
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
“No. I am surprised that you put the question.
NO.”
“She did not shake hands to-day over there,”
mused the experimenter. “I don’t remember that
this has happened before. It occurred to me —
And yet, look what she did for me — afterward I"
A smothered exclamation from the preacher
startled the summer air.
“Why, man | you don't mean to say you
thought — ”
“Consider the risk she ran,” continued Frost,
excitedly, “the courage it took — the –”
“Do you mean to suggest,” blazed the clergy-
man, “that you suppose for one moment she did
that for you ? Why, it was for the dog, sir! They
had sent for pistols / She was afraid they were
going to shoot C/yde/."
“Damn that dog!” exploded the surgeon, fer-
vently.
“That is a disposal of the subject which you did
your best to effect about three months ago,” replied
Mr. Hart, gravely.
“Can't you let that alone?” came petulantly
from Dr. Frost. “You are sure you have n’t told
her?” he added fatuously.
The preacher turned his stately head, and re-
garded the other with sternness.
“I shall tell her,” he said quietly, “if you do not
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
meet the request that I began this interview by
making. Cease your suit, I say.”
The physiologist had now become quite white.
He opened his lips to answer, but no words
C2.1]]62.
“I am sorry to make myself so disagreeable to
any man,” continued the clergyman, more gently,
“but I have thought this thing well through. I
can't allow her, without full knowledge of what she
would be doing, to run so much as the thousandth
fraction of a risk of being influenced by her father's
feeling — or possibly by the glamour of having
saved you from some shocking termination of that
scene to-day — or by your own dogged and fatal
persistency — ”
“Yes,” interrupted the surgeon, setting his teeth,
“women are won by the indomitable. She wouldn't
be the first. A man often succeeds by a kind of
main force, if he understands that sort of thing.”
“Dr. Frost,” said Sterling Hart, in a tone
under which the other tingled, “you oblige me to
recall to you circumstances which have a different
place in my memory from that which they hold in
yours. Three months ago my cousin lost her dog.
You know how she feels about Clyde. I need not
dwell on that. He was missing a week. I should
be sorry to stand by again and see her undergo
what she did that week. There are people who will
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
understand and respect her feeling, but I realize,
of course, that this cannot be expected of you. I
offered my services, – there was no one else to
help her, — and everything that family affection,
time, energy, ingenuity, and money Could do to
trace the dog was done; perhaps on a larger Scale
than is usual in such cases. I did the best I could.
I’m rather fond of Clyde myself. He's been in
the family a good while. You know where and
how I found him.”
He rose impetuously, and the two men stood
facing each other in the white summer night.
“And you know,” retorted the vivisector, “that
I did not recognize the dog; they are so changed,
by the conditions — the shaving, and — the gen-
eral discomfort; and Clyde was so muddy and
disreputable — he might have passed for the veri-
est pariah. Do you suppose I would have touched
him if I had known he was hers ? I'd sooner have
experimented on one of the students l’
“When I found the dog,” continued Sterling
Hart, “he had recognized you. Before you made
your first incision, he was trying to kiss your hand
— I see it in my dreams, yet; I shall, I think, for
a while; the worst of it was that poor Clyde thought
he had found a friend.”
The preacher's two hands, which had fallen be-
fore him, were clenched together; his large fingers
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
showed in the moonlight purple from the knuckles
to the tips.
“Do you suppose if she knew,” he demanded,
“if she Énew — ”
“A mistake | A misfortune | A wretched acci-
dent!” cried the vivisector. “Why need she ever
know P’’
“Why?” replied the preacher, in a low, vibrant
tone. “To spare her from the same fate, – from
the most distant possibility of it, I mean.”
The physiologist sprang, and for the instant it
seemed as if he would have struck his pastor —
man to man. But he controlled and recovered
himself.
“You take advantage of your cloth,” he mut-
tered. “What do you expect me to do?”
“I expected you to answer just as you have,”
replied Mr. Hart, quite undisturbed. “It is un-
avoidable, perhaps. So is the cause of offense
which I have felt compelled to give you. You do
not know my cousin,” the clergyman hurried on
with evidences of deep emotion. “It is not in your
nature to understand her. She is not like other
women — not like most of them. She is — she has
a sensitiveness, a capacity for suffering that I —
that you — There are so many ways of doing it!
It is true that I am, as I am likely to remain, a
lonely man. You need not remind me of that.
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But you may not understand what confidences
men and women give their pastors. I know some-
thing what the risks of marriage are. A man may
vivisect a woman nerve by nerve, anguish by an-
guish, as truly as if he put the scalpel to the tissue.
And nobody knows it. She never cries out — ”
“Nobody knows it except her clergyman,” shot
back Frost, with a vitriolic glance.
“Or her physician,” responded Mr. Hart, plea-
santly. “We strike the confessional out of the
account.”
“Go on,” came grimly from the physiologist.
“I am going on,” firmly said the clergyman. “I
am going on to tell you, Thomas Frost, that he
must be a tenderer man than you are who shall
win a heart like hers and take her life into his
keeping.”
Dr. Frost looked out to sea with dark, averted
face; his lips twitched.
“I take it for granted that you would rather
give up — whatever chance you suppose yourself
to have with her — than to have her know P” said
Cara's cousin, quietly.
“Rather than to have her know — yes. I would
give her up.”
“I need no other justification of what I have
done than that reply,” said the preacher, distinctly.
“Forgive me or not, as you choose. I can hardly
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expect that you ever will; but that is a secondary
matter. My impressions are, however, that you will
see that I had no escape from this ; and that you,
in my place, would have done the same.”
“Perhaps I should,” said Frost, with a forced,
nervous smile. “Mr. Hart,” he added, “you strike
the villain out of the play in the first act. It doesn't
seem to me good art.”
“It’s good conscience, at all events. And good
art and good conscience are one, to my thinking,”
replied the preacher, more softly. “I could see no
other way. I have thought it all through, as I told
you.”
He spoke sadly, and seemed suddenly very tired.
The overwrought, overwearied modern look on his
sturdy, antique features seemed curiously out of
place. He had the physiognomy of a man for whom
Nature meant life to be “a Roman holiday”; one
who should have drawn his breath in joy, and
raised his prayers to beauty, and worn the civic
laurels of a happy state in ease of heart.
“And yet,” pleaded the experimenter, with an
obvious effort to turn the interview from the pain-
ful personal form which it had taken, “we are con-
scientious, too. We do not act from brutal motives.
As a university man you must know us well enough
to know that the development of Science —” He
paused.
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
“Yes,” said Sterling Hart, “I used to feel just
so. I know the point of view. There are others,
that’s all.”
“You are not going against us!” exclaimed
Frost, quickly. “You ?”
“I have not mastered the question,” replied the
preacher, thoughtfully. “I am a pretty busy man.
But I mean to, as soon as I can. It may be as im-
portant as the church calendar — who knows P”
“You trip at the personal equation,” said Dr.
Frost, bitterly.
“There are subjects which it takes the personal
equation to manage. Nothing else can,” answered
Sterling Hart. “Good-night, Frost,” he said gently,
as he went up the steps. .
“Be careful in case Clyde is about anywhere,”
he added, with genuine concern. “Sometimes he
gets out these bright nights. I should be sorry to
have you hurt. Better go home by the road.”
The physiologist ground his teeth, but took the
advice. He pulled his hat over his eyes, and got
Savagely away.
He paced the road aimlessly for a time, unable
to collect himself. The vortex into which his calm,
cold nature was plunged astonished him. He found
himself in a condition which he did not know how
to demonstrate and could not classify. In the course
of an equable and healthy life he had experienced
58
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
so little discomfort of mind or body that he was
puzzled by it. Pain was a blatant stranger, forcing
itself upon him without an apology. Instinctively
he had turned in the opposite direction from the
preacher's house, and this led him past the wooded
avenue of the Sterling place. It was a large estate,
of which the Reverend Mr. Hart's had originally
been a portion, and it extended across the road
among some soft meadow land and pretty woodlots
of a mythical value. A small cottage, white, like the
Sterling mansion, and half on fire with climbing
nasturtiums, leaned back a little from the road; it
had a homelike, cosy air, attractive to a quiet taste,
beside the stately places among which it stood
almost alone. This cottage, sometimes held open
for the convenience of relatives or friends, some.
times rented to an irreproachable summer tenant,
had by a freak of fate slipped that season into the
surprising tenancy of Miss Mab Miller and her
mother. -
As the physiologist passed it, the champion
came out and hailed him with the air of bon cama-
raderie, in which she was inevitable.
“Are n’t you going P’’ she demanded. “Put
about and come with me.”
“Certainly I am going,” replied Frost, “if you
will be so good as to tell me where.”
“Did n't Douce Marriot ask you ?” asked Miss
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
Miller. “I thought she always did. I was n’t in-
vited to dinner; I'm not often. But I’m expected
as an evening feature. Are you an evening feature,
too P”
“I'd forgotten all about it!” exclaimed Frost.
“I don't know whether I’m altogether dressed for
it. But I’ve half a mind —”
“I can lend you a four-in-hand and a shirt
waist,” suggested the champion. “Go in and ask
Mother for them if you want to. No 2 Well, come
along, then | Where's the odds?”
He fell into step with the champion's long stride.
The golf girl was demurely dressed, like other
girls; and her silk and chiffon which she wore,
hung manfully over one arm to keep her trailing
skirt from the dust, gave her an air as astonishing
as a spectacular metamorphosis in a play. She did
not talk golf, and was sparing of her slang.
The surgeon found her altogether possible, and
with no undue struggles to escape, accompanied
her to Mrs. Marriot's. The golf girl accepted his
escort without a perceptible flutter. It did not
seem to matter to her whether he went or not.
She would have been rather a pretty girl if she
had not been so red.
Douce Marriot received Dr. Frost cordially.
She had not seen him at her house for some time;
but she did not commit the mistake of reminding
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
him of the fact. He used to be one of what she
called “her young friends.” But that was when he
was a very young man. She treated him with the
discretion of a woman who knows that a man has
outgrown her, but with the art of one who per-
ceives that he has never really attained to a plane
so much above her own that she need feel any
harrowing concern about his spiritual evolution.
The hidden musicians in the garden were playing
a Strauss waltz.
“Be a jolly good fellow,” said Douce Marriot,
with that touch of the maternal which no one
knew better than she when to assume, “and have
a rousing time. I should say you needed it. What?
Well, if you are going to assume that St. Anthony
expression (it is n’t natural to your type) you'd
better go home.”
“I can't,” said Frost, with a rigid smile. “I’ve
got to wait for Miss Miller.”
CHAPTER V
WHEN Dane leaped from his bicycle at the end of
the long avenue he found the household aroused
and stirring anxiously. Kathleen conducted him
through the dark drawing-room. The patient's
room seemed almost painfully bright as he came
into it. The bed was pushed out into the draft,
and Miss Sterling sat on the edge of the mattress,
in a fixed and uncomfortable position, holding her
father to the air. When he saw how sick a man
he had to deal with, the heart of the young doctor
sank. He thought: “Here's the devil's luck. The
first patient I lose in Balsam, - and her father l’
But he said nothing, and went manfully to work.
Mr. Sterling was unconscious when the doctor
reached him.
“Telephone to his town physician,” commanded
Dane, in a sharp voice, when he had stimulated
for fifteen minutes. “Tell Dr. Strang to come out
on the milk train, or take a special if he can get
one. Tell him I think it best.”
Cara obeyed without a word. The long-distance
telephone desk stood in the library. She returned
in a short time, and said, “He will come.” She
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
put her shaking hand on Dane's arm, and lifted
her lips to his ear. They formed the words: —
“Is my father dying?” It was the first question
she had asked. Dane shook his head positively.
“Every beat of the heart is stronger. I have
nothing but hope — nothing! But you will feel
better—however it turns out—to have Dr. Strang
here. I am a young and inexperienced man.”
“I trust you the more for your saying that,” said
Cara, clearly.
“Then I thank you,” answered Dane, without
looking at her. He was now absorbed in curt, pro-
fessional orders, which he shot at her. Hand him
that nitro-glycerine. No, not the nitrate of amyll—
the other. Send Kathleen for more hot bags. Send
Tibbs— No, she’d better telephone herself. “Call
up the hospital. Tell them to send the trained
nurse who brought the Methodist minister out of
heart failure in that pneumonia case. I forget her
name, – Gray or Green, – it was something col-
ored. Have her here in half an hour.”
When Cara returned from the telephone the
second time the light leaped into her wan eyes.
“He is better!” she breathed. “I see a great
difference.”
“Do you?” said Dane, cautiously. “I see some
myself.” He worked on with the scrupulous con-
scientiousness, the ardent patience, and the undis-
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
ciplined and wilful hope which sometimes give to
a very young practitioner the advantage over a
wiser and sadder man. His patient responded to
his treatment with a slow but steady improvement,
which made the young physician's heart bound in
his body. It would have been difficult for almost
any other unknown and struggling doctor of his
rank and training to understand how small a pro-
portion of this emotion in Chanceford Dane could
be called professional fervor. In point of fact, he
was as nearly destitute of professional ambition as
a man could well be and hold the diploma of a
great school. Yet he did that night a superb piece
of work, with a brilliant force that a distinguished
colleague might have envied.
He who was accustomed to say to his own soul
that he had not a scientific cell in his brain seemed
to himself like a scientific seer suddenly lifted
among the stars, and in the ether of a sublimated
career. He breathed a rarefied atmosphere, be-
side which professional ambition was a paltry and
vulgar thing.
He was aware of every motion that she made, of
every breath that she drew. Her candid eyes dwelt
On him with a growing wonder, respect, and gen-
tleness. He could feel her trust like a chrism on
his unworthy head. Her touching gratitude rose
about him wave by wave, like the tide of a sacred
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sea. He was overwhelmed by a sense of her near-
ness, her rarity, her dearness. All that night they
stood together, shoulder to shoulder, hand to hand,
like science and tenderness — oh, dare to dream,
like son and daughter | – fighting for the old man's
life. He thought how he had been troubled because
his afternoon with her had been spoiled and cut
short. A hundred drives could not have overcome
a span of the distance between them as this half-
night's solemn privilege had done. A dozen sea-
sons in a drawing-room might have held him off
at her heart's length. He might have come in and
out, a chosen family friend, for years before her,
and yet have stood farther from her, as souls mea-
sure space, than he stood as the moonlight and
the dawn struggled together upon the sea that
night. At half-past one he said to her: —
“The danger is passing.”
At two : —
“He will live.”
At half-past two, the nurse (who had been de-
layed by some mistake) arrived.
“Has Dr. Strang been here P’’ she asked at
On Ce.
“The case is in Dr. Dane's hands,” answered
Cara, with a certain pride which she made no
effort to conceal. The nurse — she proved to be
a Miss Black — looked more surprised than she
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knew she ought to look, but received the young
physician's orders with more respect than she had
expected to feel. She got to her post with despatch
and an admirable skill; and the sick man, breath-
ing feebly but evenly, slept.
The daughter and the doctor looked at each
other with a glad gravity. Each drew a long, full
breath. Cara felt her head whirl a little, and turned
instinctively towards the low window which opened
on the piazza towards the Sea.
“Miss Sterling,” whispered the nurse, “you will
take cold.”
Then Cara, looking down, flushed faintly from
her forehead to her chin. She had forgotten how
thinly clad she was, in the hastily caught clothes
she had thrown on when her father's bell sum-
moned her two hours and a half ago. She glanced
at her bare feet in their rose-pink leather slippers.
Her tumbled hair hung in two braids down her
back, like a little girl's. Her long, white woolen
gown took heavy folds such as marble takes, and
draped her like a statue.
“I’ll give it up, then,” she said, shrinking.
“Go back and wrap yourself up, and come,”
commanded the doctor. “It is just what you need.
Air first, — then food, - then sleep.”
Cara obeyed him gratefully. She hurried into
Some stockings and wool-lined shoes, and, folded
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in a long, hooded, gray cloak, whose fluttering
white fur fringe fell from throat to foot, she stole
out. Dane put her into a steamer chair, and cov-
ered her with a blanket, which he seemed to have
brought out for the purpose.
“Get the doctor something to eat, Kathleen,”
she said, “and go straight to bed. I shall do the
same in ten minutes. And you?” she asked, turn-
ing her sweet, haggard face to the young physician.
“I shall not go farther from him than this,
until Strang comes. I must see Dr. Strang.”
Kathleen brought milk and sandwiches, and
went away. Miss Black did not move. The sick
man slept.
“So few people think to offer a doctor any
nourishment, — even in long, hard cases,” said
Dane, gratefully. “You would n't believe how
rare it is.”
Within the house and without it was so still
that it seemed an offense to speak. Dane found
himself whispering as one whispers in the pre-
sence of some great and solemn function, if one
speak at all. He had a commendable idea of
bringing the girl's mind and heart down out of
the strain where they had clung all night. But
his words seemed so trivial to him that he was
ashamed of them as soon as they were out.
It was almost three o'clock. The scent of com-
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ing dawn was on the leaves and blades of grass.
A stir of expectancy thrilled and filled the sum-
mer world. It was as if the sky spoke, and the
earth listened, and the ocean witnessed a vast
miracle as imposing and as absorbing as it was
when the evening and the morning were the first
day. It seemed to him as if he had never seen
the sun rise before. In point of fact, it was a
common experience with him. But Cara so sel-
dom saw the day break that she looked on it with
the eyes of Eve and the sensibilities of Eden.
“You have saved my father's life l’ she breathed.
Her eyes brimmed slowly. The prelude to the
dawn was on her face as she turned it, looking at
him half timidly. Her profile was cut delicately
on the rose lining of her hood. The white fur on
her throat and breast stirred with her breath. Her
gray cloak wrapped her as if it had been chain
armor of fine, woven steel.
Though he had thrown himself at her feet and
worshiped her, he felt that he could no more
have touched her than he could a lady of glamour
and romance, with armies at her call, and nations
fighting for her smile. It seemed to him as if
poets might have sung of her until they died, and
dreamers dreamed of her until they awoke, and
any man and all men contended for her, and
never won her, and loved her none the less for
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that, but held her in their hearts forever, unclasped,
unkissed, inviolate, very woman of very woman,
as he had called her in his own devout thoughts
— the eidolon of all that is human and high, ten-
der, and remote; a woman to make a man all that
he might be, and not to scorn him for what he
was. Yes, and to make and to leave him a better
man forever, though he never won her, but stood
afar off, and dared not lift up so much as his eyes
unto the heaven of her love.
In such measures and in such images the young
man dreamed. For he was a man, and young.
And she was the sweetest woman he had ever
known. So they sat together, side by side, spent
with vigil, set apart by a shared and Solemn ex-
perience. Then, while they watched the sea, not
speaking to each other, the sunburst flashed into
her face. She got to her feet like a Mussulman
at prayer, and stood with her hands outstretched.
“I was thinking,” she whispered, “that he might
never have seen any more sunshine. . . . Dear
Papa!”
He looked at her without answering. He saw
her lip tremble. She put out her hand. He took
it, and bowed his head above it.
“I don't know what to say to you,” pleaded
Cara, as if she were a child at fault. “But I feel —”
“Don’t try!” he said.
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She left her hand lying trustfully, and it ap-
peared quite contentedly, in his. His lips touched,
but did not press it. She removed it slowly.
“I must go in,” she hesitated.
“Go right to sleep,” he answered, in a resolute
tone. “Sleep until we call you. You don't realize
how much you need it.”
“And you?” She turned, in the long, low win-
dow, looking back.
“Oh, I’m used to it,” urged Dane, smiling.
“But you have n’t any diploma.”
The birds were now singing madly. Every tree
thrilled. The dipping sails, elusive and mysterious,
were cut in cloth of gold or in pale crimson tapes-
try. The June flowers in the garden, drenched in
dew, offered a wonderful perfume. The scent of
Seaweed came up, for it was half tide.
The whistle of the milk train shrilled along the
valley, between the woodlands and the village. As
the two stood listening, it panted into the station,
and stopped.
“There's Dr. Strang,” said Dane. “I’ll meet
him at the avenue. I hope Tibbs was on time
with the carriage.” He stepped in through the
piazza window after her, scrutinizing his patient,
and slipped away. The nurse sat immovable be-
side the bed. She nodded brightly at Miss Ster-
ling. Cara looked at her father longingly, but did
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not venture to approach him. He slept peacefully,
and his breathing was quite regular. She slid into
her white room, and shut the door. -
When she awoke it was late morning, for she
had heavily overslept, and no one had aroused her.
She wondered how she could have done it, throw-
ing off everything on the doctor, like a child. She
hurried out remorsefully; her father, with the
quick recuperation of his malady, was sitting up
against his pillows, happily watching for her door
to open. The nurse sat smiling. Dr. Dane was
gone. Dr. Strang had returned to town.
“And he says he could n't have done better
himself. He says you don't need to send for him
another time.” Miss Black hastened to proffer this
intelligence with a certain half-amused but wholly
deferent sense of its acceptability.
When Cara, in her fresh dimity, with her shin-
ing eyes, went out to her breakfast, she saw
through the open front door a titanic figure sit-
ting humbly on the piazza steps. Sterling Hart
rose and stood bareheaded.
“Cousin Carolyn,” he said reproachfully, “why
did n't you send Tibbs for me last night?”
“Why, Papa was so very sick — and I had n't
time to think — and I thought—and the doctor
came — and there seemed to be nothing you could
do.” She stumbled over her words. The truth was
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that it had not occurred to her. She had not
thought of her cousin, on whose massive devotion
to the family she had leaned ever since her mother
died; she had not once thought of him all night
long. Leaning becomes a matter of course; and
the solid surface behind us, whether granite wall
or porphyry pillar, whether iron bar or gate of pearl,
melts into the consciousness like the atmosphere,
and may be treated accordingly. d
Dane, on the contrary, got no sleep at all. His
eyes were brilliant and feverish, his brain ablaze.
He needed neither food nor sleep.
For he on honey dew had fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
After the consultation he went to the station
with Dr. Strang, and then took a short cut across
the fields directly to his boarding-house. All he
wanted was to be alone, and stay alone until he
could clarify his thoughts. Up to this moment it
could be scarcely said that he thought at all. His
feeling mastered him like a storm of wind.
His professional success in last night's emer-
gency — the evident impression it had made on
his eminent city colleague—absorbed the smallest
possible measure of his attention.
A girl in a long, gray, hooded cloak seemed to
float in the morning air before him. She kept a
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little way ahead all the time, like those allegorical
figures that one sees in old pictures which set
forth the battle of life or the pursuit of fortune.
The white fur fringe on her throat and breast
stirred with her gentle breath. Her eyes, gray blue
and candid, lifted themselves to him timidly. Her
hand, a marvel of perfume and velvet, lay in his.
For him, he held his young head like one of
the gods; his eyes, seeing nothing, looked straight
before him; and his lithe figure swung across the
meadow with a vibrant, beautiful buoyancy. He
trod on the morning clouds.
Seeing nothing, and coming up against the
stone wall bounding a little side road which led to
a wharf, a stable, and a boathouse, he had all but
stumbled over the prostrate figure of a man. Ut-
tering no exclamation, for he was poised in some
star where a man did not find it natural to swear,
Dane stopped and turned the figure over, so that
the day fell fully on its face.
It was Timothy George, the caterer. His men
were feeding the horses in the stable. A boy was
washing the team, from which the signs of Mrs.
Marriot's entertainment were not yet entirely re-
moved. George himself was quite drunk. Nobody
seemed to think it necessary to pay any attention
to him, and Dane, on reflection, concluded that
he was not called upon to trouble himself about
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the fellow. But he did say, “Poor Nannie l’im-
pulsively, aloud.
“Hey P” muttered George, rousing stupidly at
the word. “What the blank — Doncher tell
Nan,” he muttered, and relapsed into a comfort-
able stupor.
Dane walked away, touched with merciless dis-
gust. It seemed to him almost a profanation of
his own sublimated experience that he should
have happened upon Sovulgar and debased ascene.
He hurried as fast as possible from the caterer,
got himself into his office without seeing any one,
and locked the door upon his ecstasy.
CHAPTER VI
JUNE blossomed into July, and July blazed into Au-
gust. It was a severe summer, but Balsam Groves
knew little or nothing about that. To a shielded
class, fortunate with most of the other privileges of
life, was given the elect of luxuries, that of being
able to keep cool in hot weather. Even the re-
flected discomfort of those who couldn't was spared
one. The cooks were downstairs. And nobody
else on the East Shore looked too warm.
Life touched these pleasant people lightly; on
its surface, at all events. With the exception of one
or two stragglers, H it was remembered that Tracie
Benton had unexpectedly sailed for England, and
that Dr. Frost had engagements in Bar Harbor,
— the usual groups were quite unbroken, and
their familiar faces appeared at the usual round of
things. The Country Club fell headlong into a gulf
of golf and polo. Society in the artfully artless
water-front houses plunged into a series of enter-
tainments but recently favored in Balsam Groves,
whose earlier summers had been more simply
passed. The late dinners, the later dances, the elab-
orate ceremonies and toilettes of town, replaced the
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inadequate aspirations of years when guests, and
not too many of them, were expected to take their
hall candles by ten o'clock, when ladies found it
the correct thing to affect plain wash gowns and
broad shade hats, to cultivate the acquaintance of
one's children, to spend the evenings with one's
husband, -in extreme cases, even alone with him,
— and to contemplate life without a kitchen maid,
or a footman.
Douce Marriot did not call her villa a cottage,
and her personal amusements were cast on the
scale of an establishment luxurious even in Balsam
Groves. These diversions were as elaborate as
her decorations, and as lavish as her check book;
while she guided them within the geometry of the
respectable, her standards of decorum were her
own. She had no summer, but a “season.” Men
who knew her were divided into three kinds, –
those who shunned, those who followed, and those
who cursed. Women did not love, yet they did
not remove her; she was far from déclassée.
“Do you know her ?” asked Dane one day,
when he had driven over from a professional visit
On a picturesque neuralgia of Mrs. Marriot's to
See the chronic patient whose case had added to
the young physician's practice in Balsam Groves.
“She seems a kind-hearted, light-headed woman.”
Cara was struck with Dane's definition, and its
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tone. Both belonged to a man more accustomed
to a complicated social life than she had allowed
herself to suppose that Dane's had been.
“Oh, I know her as we all do,” said Cara, hesi-
tating. “Mamma did not like to have me go there.
And Papa does not like to have her come here.”
In truth, Miss Sterling belonged to a class of
people who did not discuss Mrs. Marriot.
“I am not to the manner born with this Northern
society,” said Dane, frankly. “It puzzles me some-
times. I was brought up anyhow,” he added almost
roughly, “not like you.”
He leaned towards her, with the unmistakable
look. Hers dropped before it.
“I am going to tell you about it—about my-
self,” he persisted. “I am going to tell you every-
thing before long.”
Cara did not answer, and his peremptory tone
melted to entreaty.
“May I?” he asked, humbly.
“I have sometimes wished you would,” said
Cara, lifting her clear eyes.
“You may not find the sketch available,” pro-
tested Dane, with a forced smile. “That is what
the editors say when they return your manu-
script.”
“Do you write ” asked Cara, with unconcealed
astonishment. Her friends did not; except her
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cousin Sterling, when he published sermons and
addresses. The idea was not without the interest
of novelty to her. If she had been a daughter of
the literary or professional ranks, she would have
thought: “Oh, here's another!”
“Sometimes,” answered Dane, lightly. “When
anybody will print, that is; it's a sort of rest to
me. I hate medicine. I always did.”
“Why?” demanded Cara, gravely.
“I don't know.” Dane shook his head. “I was
made that way.”
“And yet,” urged Cara, “you are so successful.
My father thinks – Papa says you have a brilliant
future.” .
“Does he?” asked Dane, rising restlessly. “I
happen to have helped him. That's quite a differ-
ent thing. But I think I could go on. I could peg
away at it; I could amount to something. But I
should have to choose my conditions. And it
wouldn't be because I loved what I was doing. It
would be for another reason.”
His eyes met the gentle perplexity in hers
frankly. He had known for weeks that his time
for disguise was whirling by. There was but a
mask of golden tissue now interposed between
his feeling and his fate.
That night he wrote a letter; the first that he
had ever sent her. It ran, -
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My DEAR Miss STERLING, - .
Thirty-eight years ago a South Carolina girl
ran away and married an Illinois ranchman. She
was of spotless character, gentle breeding, and
gentle birth; she was young, beautiful, and cour-
ageous. She carried herself through her mismated
marriage like a queen; never complained of her
lot, at its worst—and the worst was bad enough
—and died the sooner for her silence and disdain.
She was the mother of two children. I am the
elder of those boys, and I am thirty-six.
When my brother (his name was Clay) — when
my brother and I were little fellows we found her
one morning lying dead upon her bed. I went in
first, and tried to make her speak to me. Our
father was away; he usually was. He came home
and buried her, and left us with the cook, - this
was in Ohio, - and when he came back again
he brought us a stepmother. I think she was a
Mexican, but I did not undergo the pleasure of
her society long enough to find out. My little
brother and I ran away, -it was in the blood, you
see, -and tumbled about the state for a while,
starving on Our own responsibility. He sold news-
papers, and I blacked boots. One day I was scrub-
bing a man's shoes (I never took to the profession;
not much more than I do to medicine), and I hurt
him — he had the gout — and he boxed my ear.
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There was something so familiar about this per-
sonal attention that I looked up in his face; and
it was my father's face.
“Why, Chance, you little devil!” he said. “And
there's Clay, upon my soul! Poor — little–Clay !
Why, you poor little devils | Come along and have
some breakfast.”
He tucked us under his arms, one on each side,
and took us away with him. We never resumed
the active and honorable vocation from which we
had been snatched. My father was never a brute,
you know — to us. What he was to my mother
is her affair, and his. I don't like to think of
it. Sometimes I think he tried to make it up, —
whatever it was, - especially to little Clay. Clay
was packed off to some of Mother's relatives in
Charleston, and he had a decent time. They were
gentle people, but poor enough —like most of
their class, war ruined. But they gave the little
fellow a home, and a bed to say his prayers by,
and I’ve always been glad of it. They educated
him, too, somehow. Heaven knows how, unless
Father was behind them. I think he must have
been.
It fell to me to rough it. Father's Mexican had
left him, and as he grew older he sobered down,
and had attacks of family feeling, and a form of
gout which he called depression. At all events, he
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kept me with him. I need not try your gentle pa-
tience to tell you how we lived, or what we did;
for we lived all ways, and did most things. You
would n’t understand, if I did tell you. You
couldn't. Ranching, railroading, exploring, mining
—they were all honest enough, in their way. Father
kept where the law could n’t reach him, always
— drank some. But he got over that in middle
life, which is an uncommon thing. Then, as I say,
when he began to grow old he softened. Most
men do—unless they sour; and rough men mel-
low sooner, I’ve thought, and you notice it more.
Father kept a certain good nature, and bonhomie.
I used to think that was what deluded my mother;
he was a debonair young fellow, I’ve been told,
and as handsome as a fallen angel.
Miss Sterling, I am writing on and on because
I have not the courage to stop. Be patient with
me. The end will come soon enough.
I was never “reconciled,” as the relatives say
when patients die — I lived in a kind of rage, and
the older I grew, the more I raged, and the less I
said. So it went on, until I came to be nineteen.
One night we were mining in Colorado; he found
me looking down into the shaft, and he asked me
what I was up to. I said I was wondering how it
would feel to jump down. I could n’t write his
answer out to you. In his way, he was an artist
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
in language. But I looked him in the eye, and I
said: — -
“My mother was a lady. I don't want to be the
kind of fellow you are. I'd rather go down the
shaft.” -
“I don’t know but I'd rather you would,” he
said. And he turned away, and went to the hotel,
and shut himself up in his room. And that night
he called me to him at midnight, and said:—
“Chance, I've made my pile this year. I don't
know how long it will hold out. But so long as it
does, I'll go shares with you. I'll educate you, -
if you're worth it. If you're not, I'll throw you
over.” Two hours after that, at the dead of night,
he called me back into his cold room and began
again: “When you were born, your mother said:
‘This baby shall be a doctor, like his Uncle Clay.'
You run off and please your mother, and I’ll back
you up and see you through.” As you see, it came
just nineteen years too late. I've been ever since
trying to overtake those nineteen years. My edu-
cation has been a checker-board of West and East,
of good and bad, of wise and foolish, of rough and
Smooth. He sent me to the Chicago preparatory
schools; he put me through Princeton College;
and in my junior year he died. I’d begun to be
fond of him by that time, and I felt sorry, and I
missed him. I have shifted for myself ever since,
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and when it came to that, I was glad I knew how;
and thanked my father, on the whole, for all that
training in “the University of the world.” It was
tough at the time. But it tells now. I've chopped
wood, and 'tended furnaces, and waited at sum-
mer hotels. I have taught school, and tutored stu-
dents, and reviewed books, and written leaders,
and been a writing master, and given — God for-
give me — lessons on the violin. By dint of some
ingenuity, and a fund of excellent health, I have
put myself through the medical school of our
powerful and arrogant university; and have got
in a few years of hospital and some other work
before I quartered myself upon the helpless in-
habitants of this afflicted village. They can't ob-
ject to it more than I do. If my mother had n’t
said that pathetic thing about my Uncle Clay, I
should n’t be doing it. But I am. -
Miss Sterling, I am as poor as your coachman.
And I am likely to continue in that state into
which it has pleased Providence to call me, for
God knows how long. But there is no stain upon
my character, nor upon my life. If there were, you
know as well as I do—or I dare believe you know
—that I should not be writing this letter to you.
Miss Sterling, I am not of your class. I am not
of your condition. I am not of anything that you
have been trained to understand or to feel an in-
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terest in. I do not know whether I am even a gen-
tleman, by the standards to which you have been
taught to defer. I only know that I have that to
say to you to which I should prefer that you lis-
tened—if you were so gracious to me as to listen
at all — after, not before, I have acquainted you
with these facts. So here they are. And I dare
write myself, in spite of them,
Your faithful and devoted friend,
CHANCEFORD DANE.
Dane sent this letter off desperately, without
giving himself time to repent of or recall it; and
tried to cajole himself all day, because he had
done it; and cursed himself all night, and wished
he had n’t. -
The next day he went about his business wretch-
edly, and played truant with his office hours, and
was cross to his patients, for he had not the best
of tempers. He had a quarrel with Solomon Hops
(which Nannie made up for them) on the untimely
topic of personally conducted rheumatism, and so
got himself out of the chocolate éclair house fret-
fully, and drove about the village all the morning,
dividing the time between real and imaginary
patients, and running in to his office now and then
to see if any reply to his letter had been sent.
None had. He knew better than to expect any.
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Yet he kept on darting in to see, and driving off
again. On the last of these erratic appearances,
Nannie asked him, if he met Timothy George,
would he be so kind as to say—something; he
forgot what as soon as he had gone. But with the
mission on his conscience, towards noon he drove
down the road that ran by the wharf, the boat-
house, and the caterer's stable. It was a rude road,
hardly more than a cart path, and a sheltered
spot. George was not there, and his men were at
their dinner. While Dane sat in his buggy watch-
ing the water, as people on the shore always do
when other occupations fail, he heard a cry of dis-
tress. It was several times repeated before he
noticed, not more than forty-five feet off the beach,
an overturned boat, a keel boat, rather a slight
affair, such as is built for ladies’ and children's
use. At the same moment he perceived a human
head steadily moving towards the shore. It was
accompanied by another living object, whose na-
ture or relation to the first he could not make out.
He ran to the boathouse. It was empty. He
called for help, as one does in such a case, –
madly and aimlessly, - though he knew perfectly
well that every man belonging within earshot was
at dinner. There was nothing else to do but to
take off his coat and boots and jump in, which he
did, without hesitation. But the process had taken
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the imperceptible moments which count so much
in emergencies, and before he could overtake the
swimmers they had almost reached the beach which
lay between the wharf and the cliffs. It was a lit-
tle beach, a mouthful bitten out of the rocks, but
the surf was dashing vigorously on it. For several
days the wind had pounded from the east, and, in
fact, it was not “ladies' weather.”
Dane was a sturdy swimmer, and although he
now perceived that he would prove to be rather
a comic supernumerary than a serviceable and
enviable hero, he pushed on obstinately. He had
approached one of the figures — it seemed to be
a crimson figure — when a half-drowned growl
warned him away.
“Oh, please don't!”
A woman's voice bubbled up and strangled off.
Dane uttered a terrible exclamation. A big spurt
of strength and speed lessened, but did not anni-
hilate, the distance between himself and the object
of his chase. His eyes ached in his head from the
intensity with which they fixed upon that flicker
of crimson ahead of him. The choicest forgotten
profanities of his youth leaped to his mind when
he saw that the collie had the best of it, and
meant to keep what he had. It was a duel in
devotion between the dog and the man, and dog
—as he had the right to — won. He pulled on,
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volleying canine oaths, giving language for lan-
guage. Clyde was determined to keep his rival
off; and he carried out his determination with
the success which he knew was expected of
him.
As soon as she felt the sandy bottom beneath
her feet, the girl began to laugh. Dane saw two
crimson arms and little purple hands Come up to
dash the water out of her eyes, as she waded
heavily to the shore. He was still over his own
depth, and Swimming preposterously.
“Let go, Clyde l’ she commanded. “Let go,
dear!” Clyde's mighty grip loosened, and slipped
from her shoulder to her knees, tenderly feeling
its way until he found the hem of her boating
dress. There he closed his teeth, and with one
eye on the infuriated swimmer he held on calmly.
Cara got herself squarely on the beach and stood
up straight. Dane had by this time struck his
feet on the sand, and was wading grimly in. He
felt how he must look. The position was too much
for him, and he muttered something which was
not quite clear to the young lady, but it seemed
perfectly intelligible to the collie. With a roar,
Clyde released his mistress and dashed into the
water. Planting his four feet in the sliding sand,
rigid as an iron dog on a pedestal of steel, up to
his shoulders in the surf, he stood between the
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woman and the man. As Dane waded in, the dog
lowered his head, and his upper lip began to
wrinkle.
“Oh, why don't you come ashore ?” cried Cara,
sweetly. She did not mean to be as cruel as she
sounded, and she tried so hard not to laugh that
Dane's sense of humor deserted him, and he
exclaimed fervently: —
“Let me just get hold of that dog ' "
“He’ll just get hold of you if you don't look
out,” said the girl, without laughing. “Clyde
Clyde Oh Clyde / come right out of the water
this minute, sir! I don't know what ails him. I
can’t do a thing with him. Clyde He — he does n’t
seem to mean to — he does n’t seem to want you
to come ashore — at al/.”
“Meanwhile,” said Dane, fiercely, “you are
standing there in this east wind chilled to the
heart. I’m coming, anyhow,” he observed more
quietly. “It’s between me and the dog, Miss
Sterling. Take the consequences; and take your
choice!” He waded in, smiling but formidable.
At that moment he was capable of throttling
Clyde; and Cara felt it. She stepped back into
the water, and put her hand on the dog's Collar,
and whispered something in his ear. He followed
her out through the surf like a cosset on a clover
field. When she turned, Dane stood beside her.
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“What was it you whispered to Clyde P” he
demanded.
“Oh, don't you see?” she cried, with a pretty,
penitent gesture. “You are taking the credit of
the rescue away from Clyde. You could n’t expect
him to stand that, now, could you? He brought
me all the way in, just as you saw. He picked
me up as if I’d been a chip. He did n’t seem
to have the least confidence in my swimming.
He just held on. I should have been — I might
have — Clyde,” quavered Cara, “you're a splen-
did, precious, noble fellow, and I love you with
all my heart!” She took the collie's head in her
hands, and put her trembling lips to his wet,
scarred forehead.
“Oh, see here !” said Dane.
Cara, in her crimson boating dress, stood up,
pale and dripping. He could see how she strug-
gled for her self-possession.
“I struck a reef,” she said, “and we went over.
That's all. I am very much ashamed of it. I
never capsized before. And I tried to swim; but
my dress was heavy (it's ladies' cloth), and there
was something in the water that held me back.”
“There's a tremendous undertow to-day,” said
Dane, shuddering. “Come!” he added, for he
choked. “I can't have you standing here.” He
drew the girl along, lifted her over the rocks,
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picked her up and put her into his buggy without
a word. He did not consult her wishes or explain
his purpose; he drove off wildly towards the choc-
olate éclair house. Clyde followed, drenched and
ecstatic, in the dust. Cara spoke but once, then
she said:— -
“Do you really think it was the undertow P”
Dane made no reply. They met no one on the
way; he drove rapidly, and pulled his horse to
the haunches at Solomon's gate.
“Why don't you take me home 2" demanded
Cara, when the doctor put up his soaked arms to
take her out of the buggy.
“What do you think it would do to your fa-
ther?” he muttered savagely, “seeing you like
this Nannie will take care of you,” he added
more softly. “Come!”
Cara said no more. She obeyed him, looking
a little frightened, and the two went, dripping, up
Solomon's squash-colored steps, and crossed his
chocolate threshold. Solomon was not at home.
He was in his cranberry Swamp, happily engaged
in Swindling an unsophisticated pork-packer out
of a front price for a back acre.
But Nannie gracefully met the unexpected
freshet tossed upon her hospitality. -
Miss Sterling came meekly into the doctor's
dingy office, when he sent for her twenty minutes
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later. She had never been there before. She did
not look about the barren room; but she felt the
rudeness of the struggle which it represented, to
her last luxurious nerve. She wore one of Nannie's
white silk blouse waists and her gray cloth skirt.
Cara's wet hair hung in two long braids. Her
face had its charming, timid look. Clyde came
with her. The collie had a ceremonious and rather
a haughty air. g
“I always was convinced,” she began nervously,
“that Nannie had my dressmaker. Now there's
no doubt about it. Just see . "
Dane made no answer to this. He had risen
at her entrance, and stood looking at her quite
steadily.
“Do you know,” ventured Cara, “that when
you swam after us out there, in the water, I was
afraid you'd overtake us — I was afraid Clyde
would let me go, to snap at you. Then where
should I have been, or you, either, if he had held
your head under P”
Dane met the mischief in her eyes with an omi-
nous solemnity. He did not speak.
“Dear Clyde,” cooed the girl, “dear Clyde l’’
She lifted her embarrassed eyes; but the doctor
had no mercy on her. Clyde regarded the two
gravely, and, after a moment's consideration, placed
himself between them. He did not growl now or
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
express any displeasure, but his fine eyes had a
melancholy look.
Dane stood with his dark head thrown back,
and his square shoulders very straight.
“Have you read my letter?”
“Yes, Dr. Dane.”
“Carefully P"
“Yes, Doctor.”
“What have you to say to it?”
“Nothing,” said Cara, distinctly.
He wheeled and turned to the window. She
could hear his hard, short breathing.
“Very well,” he said. “Shall I see you to your
carriage 2 I have telephoned for Tibbs.”
“Doctor,” pleaded the girl, “do you think you
ought to make me say it?”
“I would if I could !” gasped Dane, raptu-
rously. He took two steps towards her. “If you
loved me, you would be my wife,” he said, “in
spite of all.”
She pushed the collie gently away, and stood
troubled and irresolute. Dane held out his shak-
ing arms. With a beautiful gesture, half royal,
half suppliant, she crossed the little space between
them.
“Oh, do you understand,” he cried manfully,
“what this means — what you are doing? It
would be wrong for me to let you make a mis-
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take. It's for all your life, remember. And we
may have to wait a great while. And I’m not a
very noble fellow — I’m full of faults and weak-
nesses. You don't know even what they are. I
can't even swear to make you happy — only that
I shall care for nothing else on earth except to
try. I love you . . . So much . . .”
His voice dropped.
“And I,” she tried to tell him, “I — ” She
buried her sweet face on the arm that held her
Off.
“I am in the undertow,” she breathed. “Let
me drown.” -
A long, profound sigh arose, and filled the
room, and fell. It was like the effort of an inar-
ticulate soul to say something. It came from the
collie, forgotten for the first time in his life, who
stood between the woman and the man.
CHAPTER VII
WHEN Dane took her to her carriage, a patient
intercepted him, and he was forced to go back to
his office and to let her ride home alone.
There was a certain significance in this trifling
incident which did not escape the prevision of the
girl's heart. She remembered a thing some woman
— probably it was Mrs. Strang — once said to
her: — -
“My dear, never be a doctor's wife, unless you
are willing to gather him up in twelve basketfuls
and feast on the fragments.”
Already, at the brink of joy, the inexorable claim
of her lover's strenuous calling pushed her aside.
Always she must yield to this right—she whose
fortunate young life had yielded to so little, and
had evaded the strenuous like perfumed air; she
to whom the word inexorable was written in an
unknown tongue. But nothing troubled her. Her
lips stirred. “I love him,” they said.
When he hurried to her that evening he found
her more at ease than himself. She met him on
the avenue; he thought she had been waiting for
him; the sun was just dipping through the thick
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trees; lances of light quivered about her, and
seemed to strike at him, as if to hold him off. He
stood for a moment bareheaded.
“You don't repent?” he challenged. “You are
not sorry?”
Smiling, she lifted her eyes; a beautiful mist
melted across them; he felt it would be rudeness
to look beyond it. He counted himself unworthy
to know how she loved him. When he moved to-
wards her it was as if one of the lances of light
pierced him through the heart. He felt unfit to
touch her hand. He could have stooped, and put
the hem of her dress to his lips. A singular em-
barrassment overcame him, and in his effort to
free himself from it his mind fastened upon the
first trifle that fell in its way.
“Why, you have still got on Nannie's dress!”
he said. Her head drooped a little.
“Do you mind?” she asked timidly. “I thought
you would like it. I kept it on . . . to please
you. I thought . . . I had it on this morning,
and it was the first time . . . it was the first dress
that . . .”
He crushed the unfinished words from her lips.
He drew her apart, among the trees. The sun had
now dropped. The delicate moment that is neither
sunset nor twilight enveloped them. Her face,
gently upturned, lay back upon his arm.
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“Cara!” he said, “Cara! Dear!” He felt as if
that one word held his whole soul. It was like a
cup into which his being had been poured. At that
moment there was nothing more to offer her. Her
pure, flower-like face had an expression before
which the lover's rapture stood still. It seemed to
him a profanity to kiss her. But when he had
kissed her, it seemed to him worship. And the
first seeming blended into the last, and the last
remained with him, and it held (no man can tell
us how) the ineffable essence of both seemings and
of both feelings, while yet it appeared to be but
OI) 62. -
They moved apart silently, and walked among
the heavy trees, by the footpath that led past the
chasm to the sea. The first man and the first
woman walked in the garden in the cool of the
day, and God called them. The lover was the one
to remember that they were not in Eden. The girl
was like a spirit, in a celestial swoon; she might
have gone dreaming on, forever.
“Dear,” he said, lingering on the strangeness
and preciousness of the word, “I have a good deal
to say to your father; I cannot have him think
that I do not realize the position in which I am
placing you; and perhaps the sooner it's over, the
better.”
“He is very tired,” said Cara. “He has gone to
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bed. But he will see you, if you wish. I told him
you might come.”
“Have you told your father—” began Dane,
startled.
“I have told him everything,” said Cara, quietly.
“But what will he think?” cried Dane, in real
distress. “A struggling, starving fellow like me,
keeping you waiting, — so long. Why, it may
be years!” groaned Dane. “That's the worst
of it.”
“I did n’t think,” said Cara, almost inaudibly,
“that it need be guite so long. There is . . .
enough,” she added timidly.
“But I won't take you until I can take care of
you!” quivered Dane. “I’m not that kind of fel-
low — to woo a rich man's daughter and live on
my father-in-law. I ought to have been the one to
explain to him. Oh, what must he think of me?
I'm not sunk to that. I can’t be put in that position!”
The veins on Dane's forehead stood out, and
throbbed. Cara's uncompromising candor of soul
would have made it clear to her that she had seen
him angry—for the first time—and that before
the rapture of their first kisses had died upon their
lips; but her elect and exquisite womanliness closed
its eyes before this first strain upon its vision. With
a Sweet dignity which would not permit itself to
Stoop to see the irritation on her lover's manner
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— sparing him even to himself, already – she
gently said:—
“It is not my father's money. It is my own. It
was Mother's when she was alive. There is enough
—there is a good deal. And we can . . . when-
ever you wish. It shall be as you wish. I do
not mean to — ” She broke off, crimson to her
brows.
“Shall I throw myself on my knees?” cried
Dane, choking. “Or off the rocks I’m not fit
to be anywhere else — but in one of those two
places.”
They had left the trees behind them, and were
standing on the edge of the great chasm, which
was filled by the passion of the rising tide. It was
heavy twilight now. Cara looked down.
“If you went over there,” she said steadily, “I
don't know but I might go, too. And if you went
on your knees, I should lift you up.”
“Lift me up!” entreated Dane. He fell, in the
dusk, and bowed his face before her, and put a
fold of her dress to his lips. -
Across the ravine, strolling through the shrub-
bery towards the bridge, a massive figure, moving
slowly, paused. Bareheaded, and smiling, with the
attitude and motions which betoken ease of mind
and heart, the preacher set his foot upon the iron
bridge; it trembled, expectant of his tread, but he
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did not cross. Carved from the departing day and
the advancing night, like a startled purpose or
arrested feeling, he might have been struck out of
the granite on which he stood. It was darkening
fast about him. All his strong outlines dimmed
before they turned and reassumed the foliage and
blossom of his own garden. From granite to shadow
he melted imperceptibly. It was now dark. The
preacher walked unsteadily; his head sunk upon
his breast. The figures across the chasm had not
stirred. In the gulf, the passion of the rising tide
mounted with an inexorable Sound.
Dane came out from Mr. Sterling's room with
brilliant eyes. The details of the interview between
the two, known only to themselves, had left the
young man his self-respect and his ecstasy. In the
flush of these, he drew the girl's hand powerfully
through his arm and proudly led her to her father.
Cara felt the new element in his touch; it filled
her with delight and fear; this was the moment
when her feeling came out of the glamour in which
it had floated—a beautiful and dreaming con-
sciousness— and faced the conditions of life. As
she had come in from the twilight, and the illusion
of the sea, and the bewilderment of the rising tide,
abruptly to the lighted house, and the familiar
sights of the sick room —so the scenery in her
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heart had shifted suddenly. All that was powerful
in the force of habit, all that was sacred in family
relations and in old friendships, all that had dig-
nity in the atmosphere of class, assumed a value
which she had never felt before. Suddenly she
perceived that she understood what it all meant.
Her heart brimmed with a tender longing to share
the cup of her joy with her father. She thought
of her dead mother wistfully. She wished that she
could kneel and lay her head upon that phantom
lap. It had not suggested itself to her before, that
she had burst into the garden of love without a
guiding hand.
“Dear Papa!” she said helplessly.
He laid his high-veined hand upon her head,
for she had dropped upon her knees beside his
bed, and soothed her feebly.
“There, there, my child ! It's all right, Cara. I
am not strong enough to-night to talk it over, but
it's all right. I am very fond of Dr. Dane. It is
not—precisely such a marriage as the – ladies
of our family have been accustomed to make, my
daughter. But I don't know that this matters . . .
much. If he makes you happy — ”
“May God do so to me, and more also, if I do
not make her happy! ” interrupted Dane, with un-
governable fervor.
“I am very fond of Dr. Dane,” repeated the in-
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
valid wearily, and turned his head upon his pil-
low. He did not respond to the lover's passionate
objurgation; and its evident, though impetuous,
sincerity sunk into a silence which was not with-
out embarrassment.
“Papa,” said Cara, rising from her knees, “I
want you to understand. I cannot deceive you
about this. It makes me very happy that you feel
so – Oh, happier than I know how to say. And
I should have been miserable if it had been any
other way. But, Papa, if močody felt so—if the
whole world went against us — I should marry
Dr. Dane.”
“And don't you suppose I knew that?” asked
Rollinstall Sterling, with a sombre smile. His gray
lashes twitched and worked rapidly, as they did
when he was under much emotion — a nervous
habit acquired since he had been an invalid.
“But I did n’t,” interposed Cara, “I did not
know a girl could feel like this. I did not under-
stand about it. I don't care what marriages the
ladies of our family have been accustomed to
make. I could live on a desert island — with him,
Papa.” All the scenery of her feeling had shifted
swiftly back. The force of habit and the usual rela-
tions of life retreated like stage settings with which
a drama had done. With a beautiful gesture she
turned to Dane, and laid her hand in his.
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
“I could starve,” she said.
The nervous flutter of the invalid's eyelids in-
creased until the twitching became almost convul-
sive. He seemed so exhausted that the daughter
and the doctor reproached themselves for allowing
him to undergo so much excitement. The doctor
prescribed something, and they left him alone for
the night. .
In the middle of the dim drawing-room Dane
stood for the first time, a lover accepted and accred-
ited, and held out his arms. Cara crept to them
gently. She did not speak, and he did not urge
her. He led her to the cretonne sofa, with the
roses, and they sat down together. Cara left her
hand in his, but held her head erect upon her own
shoulders. He felt that she retreated from him at
that moment, he did not know why. Cara did not
find it necessary to tell him, and he hesitated to
ask her. A certain delicate dignity, peculiar to
herself, and always unexpected in so gentle a
woman, folded her apart from him. She did not
know how to say, she did not even wish to say,
what she felt just then.
Suddenly his own words crowded into her
thought: —
“It is for all your life, remember.”
She turned and put up her arms; as his clasped
her, she lifted her lips.
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“Oh, be good to me,” she said. “There won't
be . . . anybody else.”
It did not occur to Cara until the next day that
she would be expected to announce her betrothal
to her cousin at once. She waited until afternoon
for him to make his daily visit to his uncle's
house; but he did not come. She watched for his
leisurely, large outlines on the iron bridge, until
she grew uncomfortable, and so sat down and
wrote an impulsive note, which said:—
DEAR COUSIN STERLING, - We have missed you
all day.
CARA.
She had, in fact, called Kathleen to carry this,
when she changed her mind abruptly, tore up the
note, and went herself. She ran lightly across the
bridge, without looking down into the chasm, -
a thing she did not always like to do, -and
hurried through the garden. As she approached
the house her feet began to obstruct her, and she
lagged. He was sitting on his piazza with a book;
but he was not reading. His face was turned to-
wards the sea. There was a southeasterly, and the
surf had its raving, thwarted Sound; it was like
the rage of some primeval life, conscious of hurt,
and ominous of pangs to come.
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
She stood still at the foot of the piazza steps, in
her light summer dress with its rose ribbon, and
her shade hat hung across one arm, a girlish fig-
ure, looking younger than her years. She glanced
up at him like a child or a penitent, coaxingly.
“We have missed you all day,” she began, with
conscious awkwardness. “I came over to see — I
came over to tell you —”
He uttered a few inaudible words, and with the
something beautiful and reverential in his man-
ner which he cherished for her, led her up the
steps. She would not sit, and he stood beside her
on the broad piazza. Jane crossed the hall and
shut the door, and her footsteps ceased upon the
ear in the silent, lonely house.
“Why, Cousin Sterling !” said Cara, “you don't
look well. Is anything the matter?”
“You came to confess to me — not I to you,
Cousin Carolyn,” he answered, smiling.
Her heart leaned towards him now, bent with
the pressure of a lifetime spent in leaning on him.
She felt as if she could have sat on the floor
and buried her face on his big knee like a very
little girl. She wanted his blessing just then, as
much as she had ever wanted anything in her
life.
“Cousin Sterling,” she began, turning swiftly
white about the mouth, in a fashion she had when
5
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
she was deeply moved, “I have promised to marry
Papa's physician, Dr. Dane. I came to tell you.
I thought you would come over this morning.”
“Never mind, child,” he said gently.
“I hope — we hope you will like it,” faltered
Cara, in unconcealed embarrassment. Sterling
Hart walked the length of the piazza, and stood,
looking seaward and surfward, silently.
“Cousin Cara,” he said, without turning around,
“do you love this man P”
“I do.” Unconsciously Cara found the phrase-
ology of the marriage service on her trembling
lips.
“With all your heart?”
“With all my heart.”
“And all your soul ?”
Cara felt frightened, and something hurt at the
pertinacity and solemnity of the preacher. A flip-
pant reply rose to her lips: “Can't I get my soul
out of your diocese, Cousin Sterling?” After-
wards she was glad that she did not say it.
“Is there any difference P” she began in a trem-
bling voice. But it faltered away into an impetu-
ous, half-fretful cry: —
“Oh, &less me, Cousin Sterling ! I do need it.
Papa is so sick — and I have n't any mother—
and you've always made up for everything all my
life ” &
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
He turned slowly, and walked the length of the
piazza towards her. He had a remote, exalted
look. Old Bible words came curiously to Cara's
mind; something about a face which “shone as it
had been that of an angel.” .
“The Lord bless thee, and keep thee,” said
Sterling Hart. He laid his hand upon her soft,
bowed head; and she received his benediction
silently. She wondered why it did not make her
feel as much happier as she had expected. But
she did not speak, nor he, while he conducted her
quietly through the garden and over the iron
bridge. There he left her. He retraced his steps
across the bridge, and they stood for a moment,
with the chasm between them, before he lifted his
hand and, Smiling, turned away.
“Cousin Sterling,” she said, “did you never
think of it—all this while P”
He shook his head. “Not once in all this while.”
Cara would have been glad if her cousin had
shown a more pronounced pleasure in her engage-
ment; but her mind did not dwell on his eccen-
tricities. It had now ceased to matter to her what
anybody thought or felt about her affairs. The
world and all that was therein looked small to
her, and distant, like a dwindling planet seen from
a whirling, rose-red star. The system of things
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
narrowed to a dizzy spot, in which she and her
lover stood alone. Clasping arms and clinging lips
bewildered her. The passion in his vows made a
rainbow mist about her; she looked through it
with virginal, young eyes, and saw the man as a
god walking. Her thoughts of marriage were vague
and delicate; fearing and trusting, she leaned to-
wards it, not unwilling.
“It will always be like this,” she dreamed. “I
shall never be lonely again. Every day there will
be a new happiness.”
She had been a reserved, shy girl, and had not
talked with other women about many things of
which women speak more freely than they did in
an elder day. She did not tell her intimates what
her offers of marriage had been. She was used to
being called old-fashioned because she did not dis-
cuss engagements or family difficulties. No per-
son thought of retailing scandal to her. Her ideas
of the great relation of life were gained chiefly
from her reading; poetry, romance, and fiction
had taught her that love was an eternal fact; that
the true thing was indestructible, and that happi-
ness was to be had by believing in it. The novels
ended on the wedding day. On the perfume of the
orange blossom joy fed, and found immortal nutri-
tion, as some strange being of an unknown race
— some essence evanescent, but fixed — some or-
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
ganism of fire and pearl—may maintain life upon
ether, or light, or foam.
The motherless girl shared her visions of the
future with no one. Her lover was the last to know
what they were. When he suggested a speedy mar-
riage, she assented with a sweet and gentle readi-
ness to meet this wish of his, as she chose to meet
his every one. She was not conscious, at this time,
of many wishes of her own. She felt herself extin-
guished in her love. She was an obliterated wave
in a mighty tide.
They were married in October. It was late in
the month, on the twenty-eighth of a series of
wonderful days which were long remembered on
the East Shore as having made that autumn
splendid. Clouds found it impossible to cover the
sun. Fogs blew in, only to fly out. It rained at
night, to shine in the morning. The colors of
the water were those that north winds paint, with
southerly moods between : purples, greens, and
bronzes, deep agate effects, and sepia stretches of
seaweed exposed by wind and tide; the lead-gray
fishing schooners were reefed to the teeth, careen-
ing like racing yachts upon a horizon line that
had the hues of malachite, and seemed as solid.
Then, the next day behold, all the blues on the
palette tossing wildly, steel shadows, iron gulfs, the
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
smoke of blown spray, and warm rocks frosted
with unfrozen foam. Perhaps at Sundown all the
glorious rage would yield and cuddle down like a
& spaniel; there would be left a milk-white sea, fair
as a midsummer calm, with Crawling hulls and
all canvas up, against a volcanic sky, Cooled by
lakes of beryl.
Scarcely a breath would meet the cheek; the
surf in the ravine sobbed away; the Summer of
autumn crept in as if it meant to stay all winter.
Flowers lived late in the garden, and the fall dande-
lions burned in the grass steadily.
It soon fell out that Cara did not want a wed-
ding, but a marriage.
“I should like to go out and stand on the iron
bridge some afternoon at high tide, with only
Cousin Sterling to marry us, and Papa to witness
— and Clyde, of course — nobody else, except the
sea,” she said. “And there's a little place in the
mountains where I had a happy time one summer
with Janie Dale. She's a girl I went to school with.
I'd like to spend Sunday at Dipdown; then come
right home and stay. It would spoil it to travel
about. I should like —” But she did not say what
more she would like. She wanted a star to them-
selves, in fact—they two to be in a world together.
This not offering itself as a practical honeymoon
schedule, she sighed, and accepted the bridal con-
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
ditions of her own planet to a certain extent. She
waived the iron bridge. She consented to the usual
necessary relatives, and wrote to Janie Dale. And
one day she expressed a wish that Dr. Frost be
bidden to her marriage, with two or three other
family friends.
But Thomas Frost found himself prevented by
important professional engagements. He wrote
her a ceremonious note, and hoped she would be
happy with the man of her choice.
The man of her choice stood in the centre of
the bridal group, a proud and solitary figure. “I
have n't a relation left but my brother Clay,” he
sighed, “and I don't even know where he is.”
“Never mind, dear !” said Cara. She had al-
ready acquired the habit of comforting him with
this wholly womanly, half-maternal phrase when
any trifle troubled him. Sometimes she had mo-
ments of wishing that he had a mother or a sister
to put arms about her, and say, “We will love you
because he does"; to tell how good a son he was,
how kind a brother, what a tender husband he
would make, and how glad a wife she ought to be.
But she never told him that. And Dane came to
his wedding day with only a friend or two — uni-
versity men — and at Cara's pretty insistence,
Solomon Hops and Nannie.
3 y 3
“It’s natur’,” said Solomon Hops, “an' when
I IO
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you’ve said a thing's natur', you've teched a great
subjec'.” -
But Cara consoled herself for all lapses in her
perfect happiness by tying white ribbons on Clyde.
The wonderful weather seemed eternal. The
wedding day was one of those miracles of the New
England climate which October reserves to itself.
It was April at dawn, it was June at noon, it was
September at dusk. There were autumn leaves
and dandelions, there were rose berries and live
pansies, there were open windows and wood fires,
there was a South wind and a tossing surf. Cara
wore her mother's veil; it wrapped her soft, un-
ornamented silk from head to hem, and made
a mist about her. With bridal eyes she sought
Dane's trustfully. His swam at her look.
“Thou God!” said the young man to his soul,
“make me fit for this!”
He could not have told when he had prayed
before. .
So the Reverend Sterling Hart married Cara
and Chanceford Dane. It was said by those who
heard him, and who knew him well, that the
preacher read the vows of the marriage service as
they were never read before, by him, or any other
man, giving to them such solemnity, such sanctity
as the world, which makes of marriage a merry
thing or a light choice, cannot be expected to
I I I
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
understand, being unworthy. All that was pre-
cious and noble in his own high nature, all that
was sheltered and sacred in his lonely imagination
and great white heart, seemed to lavish itself upon
the sacrament which made his cousin wife to the
man she loved. There were more tears than Smiles
at Cara's unworldly wedding; but they were such
tears as men and women go glad for and after-
wards do not regret or forget.
When she had gone upstairs, and it was said
that the carriage was at the door, that the train
would soon be due, that the time was short, the
preacher beckoned Chanceford Dane, and drew
him into her father's room, the only spot where
they could be undisturbed. And here he shut the
door. But when he had done this, Sterling Hart
did not find the words that he wished to say. He
stood at his great height. His eyes dwelt upon
the young man's ecstatic face with a sad sincerity.
He scanned it feature by feature. Suddenly he
stretched out both his hands.
“Oh, be kind l’ he faltered. “Be kind to her l’”
But when the bridegroom would have answered
him, hot with the hurt and amazement of the
words, the preacher laid a finger on Dane's open-
ing lips. He stood colossal and commanding: as if
he wore the authority of the sons of God. With
II 2
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
bowed head and dumb mouth Dane left his pre-
SCI) C62.
The preacher had come down to the end of the
avenue alone, to see her drive away. The splen-
dor of the weather had fallen, and a fog, like the
smoke of a battle, was rolling up from the sea;
it came between his eyes and her face, as she
looked back once, he thought a little wistfully,
from the carriage window. Something tugged at
his hand, and a low sound like a half-suppressed
human moan attracted his attention. He looked
down. --
Clyde, in his broad, white ribbons, stood there
mournfully; he did not seek to follow the car-
riage; he lifted his eyes with a hurt expression to
the man. -
“Clydel” said Sterling Hart, “she's forgotten
us both.”
As soon as he had said the words, it came to
him that when she leaned to the carriage window
with that lovely wistfulness of hers she had not
been thinking of him at all. She was looking for
Clyde. -
In the carriage neither spoke. Cara leaned
against the arm that compelled her, silently and
gently. But when they had boarded the train,
II.3
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
she found it necessary to talk of little matters—
as if they had been acquaintances, or friends.
She said, “I missed Kathleen at the wedding.
I was very fond of her. It is five weeks since she
was married.”
And Dane said, “Did she marry that waiter
from the hotel P” eagerly, as if he cared. Then
Cara talked about her father and her cousin, and
of family affairs and plans, as if he had been
making an evening call, and would soon go, so
that she must say all that she had on her mind at
OIl C62.
“Papa is so well to-day! Did you notice? And
he seemed not to mind it at all. It is just like
Cousin Sterling to take him to town and carry all
the care until I — until we go home. Cousin
Sterling always carries all the care. And when
we go back, we are to have the house all to our-
selves. And the sea. And Clyde. Don't you miss
Clyde P” asked the bride, naïvely.
“It had not occurred to me,” replied Dane;
“I’ll try to miss him if you want me to.”
They chatted like neighbors, and discussed their
wedding as if they had been guests. But as the
train drew into the hills, Cara grew grave and
still. When he lifted her out of the cars at Dip-
down, he was troubled to see that she was pale,
and had a homesick look. She refused to ride,
II.4.
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
and insisted on walking with him to the hotel.
There were but a few guests left, and they were
all indoors, for the mountain night was chilly. A
huge pine-wood fire was leaping on the hearth in
the large hall. Cara's color came back when she
saw it. She clung to him suddenly.
“Oh, the mountains frighten me! I'm a sea
girl. I always was. But that looks as if there were
people in the world. We’ll go home Monday,
won’t we, dear?”
“We’ll go home now, if you say sol” he said,
stopping short. . -
“Why, there's my cottage!” cried Cara. “The
one where I stayed with Janie Dale. It's all
lighted up. Why, we're not going there & Oh,
that was nice of you!” she sighed gratefully, for
he led her into the cottage. Fires were there, too,
leaping on every hearth; the bare, white-plastered
walls were hung with cloth of gold; the scent of
unseen roses stirred the warm air.
“Come,” he said comfortably, “take off your
hat. They 'll send supper over when you 're
ready.”
Some one in the hotel parlor, at the piano, was
singing industriously, and the words came over
to the cottage quite plainly: —
“I have no home, no place, no life,
But only in thy heart.” *
II 5
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
Cara stood for a moment listening, before she
turned and looked at him. It was a look which
would follow a man to his last dream; an angel,
or a ghost, as he himself elected.
Dane sank slowly to his knees, and hid his
bowed face upon his young wife's hand.
CHAPTER VIII
THE preacher mounted the stairs slowly. They
were wide stairs, and low, easy to climb, but he so
rarely trod them that the act had in itself a certain
ceremonious strangeness: to this the marked gen-
tleness of his footfall added a delicate impression.
His figure bent slightly, with the effort to reduce
the effect of his great weight upon the padded
steps. One would have thought that he was about
to enter the chamber of death, or danger. But
Mrs. Dane was convalescing rapidly, and per-
fectly. Her little boy was three weeks old, and
Mr. Hart had not seen the mother or the child.
When the nurse admitted him to his cousin's
sitting-room, he said, “I thank you, Miss Black,”
in the tone of one upon whom an undeserved and
incalculable favor had been bestowed. He stood
for a moment silently, touched by a certain em-
barrassment which at times possessed him, and
which in a man of his large acquaintance with
life was noted either with perplexity or admira-
tion, according to the temperament of the ob-
Server. In fact, this modest self-consciousness was
I 17
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
really a more beautiful thing than most persons
were capable of understanding.
The young mother sat in a tall, cushioned chair,
with her baby in her arms. The chair had been
moved up from below stairs, and like the rest of
the furniture in the drawing-room, wore the old-
fashioned cretonne, white with pink roses. One of
these looked over Cara's head at Sterling Hart as
he came into the room. Her pallor sent a visible
shock through him for the instant; but the radi-
ance of her helped him to recover himself. She sat
smiling and shining as if she leaned towards him
out of a world where to smile and to shine were
the only possible duties of a woman's spirit. She
was draped in soft wool — for the late September
afternoon was chilly — and the stuff was of pale
rose color, and fell about her in long lines. The
baby on her lap was folded in white, embroidered
delicately; it wore a little old-fashioned lace cap;
its head lay upon her long, maternal arm; both
her hands were busy with the novel task of pre-
serving the poise of the little creature upon her
yet unaccustomed lap. In the deep hearth a fire
was singing Softly ; the draperies at the windows
of the small room were white, and transparent;
the walls were of pink, and pale; a warm, delicate
tint suffused the atmosphere. The preacher's lips
opened slowly: —
II 8
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
“The Madonna — of the Rose,” they said.
“Oh, Cousin Sterling!'. Cara held out one
hand, which he took so reverently that he could
hardly have been said to grasp it; and when he
had touched it, he laid it back slowly in its former
position, about the child. “Plenty of other people
can say pretty things. It always took you to Say
the real ones, Cousin Sterling — the deep-down
ones, the things with roots. See now ! What do
you think of him On your sacred honor as the
most eminent preacher in this country — how do
you /čke my baby P”
“How can I possibly tell, Cousin Carolyn P. It
is your baby.”
“Say you see how much he looks like his fa-
ther,” demanded Cara, anxiously. “He will have
the eyes. And I am sure he is going to have that
white lock on the top of his head. I should n't
wonder if he were gray there by the time he goes
to kindergarten.”
“I do not see the least resemblance,” replied Mr.
Hart, without smiling. He put out his large hand
and touched the baby's fingers, which sprawled in
his palm.
“Like a red spider,” observed the young mo-
ther, candidly. “They always do look like some
of the inferior species — at first. I don't know why
I flattered myself that my baby would escape the
I IQ
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
universal doom. Chanceford says one of his pa-
tients asked if it were a Maltese.” -
“I can guess who that was,” replied Mr. Hart,
with a shrug of his massive shoulders.
“Can you ?” asked Cara, indifferently. “I am
sure she has no children, at all events.”
“No, she has no children.” -
“I am glad you don't think it was funny. Chance-
ford did. But I am not sure that I understand why
you don't.”
“Probably because it is your baby. Do you think
I should mangle it if I held it a minute 2 I kept
one a whole afternoon once, on a parish call, to let
a poor woman go out and get the air. It cried two
hours.” w
Cara laid the child in her cousin's arms, and he
returned the little creature, as he had held it, with-
out remark. Across his face there passed a sensi-
tive expression, half feeling, half light.
“You are well?” he asked abruptly. “That is,
I mean, you are gaining all the time?”
“I am perfectly well!” cried Cara, girlishly. “I
am to be let out on the piazza next week—with
the baby. And then I am to go to drive— with the
baby. But the only thing is, Clyde can't go. We
have to tie Clyde up. Did you notice P He is
jealous. He is frightfully jealous. So Chanceford
chained him. He snapped at the baby; I mean,
I2O
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
Clyde did. That is, he pretended to. I am sure
Clyde could n't really. He cares too much; for
me, I mean.”
“It does not occur to you that there might be a
relation between caring and Snapping,” interrupted
the preacher. “Do you still keep to the name you
chose for the child P.”
“It was my husband's mother's name, you know.
It seems to me a beautiful name. But we shall al-
ways call him Joy,” said Cara. She repeated the
word, fondling the baby with the two liquid vow-
els. “Joy! Joy!” she cried. There was that in her
rapture which dazzled Sterling Hart, and his own
eyes filled, as if they had been struck sun blind or
snow blind. Cara did not look at him. She kissed
the child. Under the tender ardency of her caress
the baby cried, and when she began to remember
that the world contained any other form of human
life except that which she had contributed to it,
Mr. Hart had left the room.
Cara thought that he might have supposed it
was pins. It did not occur to the Madonna of the
Roses that the surging of her own happiness could
have risen to the tide mark of emotion in her cou-
sin's feeling. She listened dreamily to his retreating
footsteps, and turned her cheek upon the baby's
head.
“Miss Black?” she called. “Before my husband
I2 I
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
comes up, will you get me some fresh lace? This
one at my throat is crumpled. And Miss Black?
You have n’t heard him come in, have you?”
The preacher went down the stairs quietly. His
high head was bowed. Was he musing or praying?
It would not have been easy for him to say. He
was conscious of breathing rarefied air. It seemed
to him that he had found a wayside altar on some
mountain of snow. His mood was remote and
elate.
It was with a sense of disturbance to it that he
found himself repeating: —
“The Children of Alice call Bartrum Father.”
He came down and into the hall with grave, de-
vout eyes, and that tender curve upon his Roman
lips which those who knew him loved and watched
for. He was about to open the front door when he
remembered that he had come in by the side
piazza and left something in the dining-room —
a book or a cane, in his abstraction he could not
recall what—and turned in at the open door to
capture the truant impression. As he did so, he
was aware of the odor of cigarettes, and the sub-
sidence of subdued voices.
The room was occupied. Mrs. Douce Marriot
sat in one of the tall carved chairs, languidly puff.
ing at an Egyptian Sultana; her free hand played
I 2.2
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
with a long, slender glass, half full, upon the table;
she assumed a graceful pose; her fading face, still to
be called handsome, had an attractive vivacity; her
tailor-made gown of bright dark cloth expressed
her celebrated figure. Dr. Dane stood near her at
the sideboard. The glass in his hand was emptied.
His color was slightly raised, and his laughing eyes
amused themselves.
The two turned as the preacher entered. He
stood for a moment and regarded them. He did
not smile. But Mrs. Marriot scintillated:—
“Oh, Mr. Hart | Such a pleasure l’” She rose
and made as if to extend her hand, but changed
her mind. The preacher returned her bow coldly.
Douce Marriot did not commit the mistake of of-
fering explanations. She talked about the baby,
whom, she observed, she had hoped to be allowed
to See.
“At least, incidentally,” added Mrs. Marriot.
“And now, Dr. Dane, about that prescription.
Can I have it filled here, or must one send to
town? I have such a picturesque neuralgia l’ she
suggested. “It is worthy of framing. I have to tie
my face up in Portuguese silk shawls.”
“I am sorry,” said Sterling Hart, speaking rap-
idly and mechanically, “to have intruded upon a
professional call.”
Mrs. Marriot felt that the preacher studiously
I 23
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
avoided an emphasis upon the adjective. She fol-
lowed his retreating figure with a shrewd, brilliant
glance. Dane put down the decanter, which he
had lifted. :
“How did you find her?” he asked lightly. “And
the boy? How do you like the fellow * *
Mr. Hart did not reply. There was that in the
young father's tone which was offensive to him; it
had the modern irreverence, the spirit of the age,
which is capable of saying: The mother and the
kid. The preacher took his book—it was “The
Essays of Elia”—went out to the side piazza, and
closed the door between himself and the two.
They crossed his imagination like bacchantes
on a piece of pottery. As he stepped out upon
the lawn he found himself repeating dully: —
“The Children of A/ice ca// Aar/rum Aather.”
The descending sun flung out one of the ban-
ners of advancing autumn upon a windy sky, whose
clouds marched and countermarched with the dis-
order of retreat. Upon the sea the color was wild
and capricious, escaping from pure yellow to blood
red, and before the eye had named the tint, drop-
ping to cold purples and surly bronze. As the
preacher trod the worn grass path which led from
the lawn to the bridge, a gleam like an arrow of
vengeance shot across the horizon, and made, to
I 24
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
his fancy, as if it tried to enter the ravine. The
tide was high and heavy; it had its savage tone;
this deepened as he approached the gorge, and
raged so that it quite muffled to his ear the sound
of human voices rising from a source unseen, and
not audient to him until he had pushed past a
tangle of overreaching shrubbery, and come, in
fact, almost to the bridge. This was wet with spray,
and trembled stolidly, as iron does under shock,
with the reverberation of the surf below. As he
hurried on, uncomfortably conscious of inexpli-
cable tragedy, the cries increased and became
articulate.
“Blank you!
fling your
riddance to it !”
Then came the answering yell:—
“Help! Help! Help! Murder! Help! Dr. Dane!
Mr. Hart! Somebody Anybody Murder Mur-
der | *
& C
you! you to ! I'll
Carcass to blank and good
| *
you to | you to
Between gasps of rage the first voice returned
this monotonous anathema with the persistence
of a Savage whose imagination is incapable of
varying his profanity. w
Crouched beneath a group of lindens, whose
low-lying, well-trimmed branches, sweeping to the
ground, almost covered him from sight, knelt a
I 25
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
white-haired, hard-faced man. This was Solomon
Hops. He had no coat; his woolen shirt-sleeves
were rolled to his shoulders; his sturdy arms
gripped at Something which he was holding over
the edge of the chasm. His face, purple with pas-
Sion, glared down.
Mr. Hart had pushed, running through the lin-
dens; but when he saw what he saw, he stopped and
trod quietly. For he perceived how tremendous
would be the consequences of any mistake on his
part. He dared not excite the old man by startling
him, but not to interfere was out of the question.
Writhing in the clutches of Solomon Hops —
oaths above, and death below — a human figure
hung partly supported by a strip of shelving rock
a few feet below the edge of the ravine. This shot
one hundred feet down to the cauldron that boils
through the deepest and angriest fissure in the
granite of the East Shore.
Although the twilight was closing fast, it was
not so dark but that Sterling Hart was able to
recognize the figure of the doomed and shrieking
man. It was Timothy George, the caterer. His
cry came up, raucous and wheezing, like the cry
of a dying animal:—
“Mr. Hart | Mr. Hart | Save me! He's a ma-
niac He's a murderer! Oh, save me!”
“And he 's a brute beast !” raved Solomon
I26
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
Hops. “I histed him over, and I’ll heave him
down. Lemme alone, Mr. Hart. This ain't your
business. It ain't anybody's but mine and his'n.
Lemme be, sir. I don't care if I do swing for it.
I am goin' to send this fellow to , so help me
God . "
“Oh, come, come, Mr. Hops | " said Hart,
quietly. He spoke with what might be called the
peremptory tact of one who is accustomed to con-
trolling masses of men. “Whatever wrong he has
done you I'll see righted. But if you don't look
out you'll let him fall. It is n’t possible that you
really mean to commit murder, of course. You
have given him a good round scare—why not let
him go at that? Here, I'll help you. Firmly now,
gentle there ! It's going to be harder getting him
up than it was letting him down. Perhaps it is
just as well I happened along.”
While he was speaking the preacher had thrown
himself flat upon the brow of the rocks, and thrust
down his mighty arms.
“Blank him to —!” repeated Solomon Hops.
“Lemme heave him over. He ain't ſº to live. He
ain't fit to trod the solid yearth again.”
“If that is the case,” said the preacher, sooth-
ingly, “I’ll back you up, Mr. Hops, and you shall
settle your quarrel, man to man. You shan’t settle
it this way. Ease off a little till I get a firm grip.
I27
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
No P You won’t P Stand back, there then l’ cried
Sterling Hart, commandingly. “Back, I say. I
won't have you commit murder — not before my
eyes. Back there ! I'll get him up alone.”
This, with the giant in his arms, the clergyman
did. The scramble, the struggle, the shouts, the
cries, the tremendous strain of muscle answering
to muscle — these occupied one of the immeasur-
able atoms of time in which lives or souls may be
saved or lost. A wave from the churning chasm
clambered a hundred feet after the cowering crea-
ture who had escaped it, and soaked him as he
crawled from the edge of the gulf, and fell sprawl-
ing. The fellow's face was scarcely whiter than
that of the preacher, who stood towering above
him. Solomon Hops made a gurgling noise in his
throat. -
“There's other ways. I kicked him offen my
doorsteps, and he run. I chased him and then I
done it. But there's other ways.”
“If you'll tell me what the trouble is,” began
Sterling Hart, with authoritative persuasion. “But
you see you have n't.”
He still stood between the two men, whom, un-
noticed by them, he was gradually drawing from
the edge of the ravine. It was darkening so fast
that the three figures melted into the dusk, and
looked like trees or shrubbery fantastically cut in
I28
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
the human form and endowed with human pas-
sions, and the voices that expressed them.
“'Tain't fit to tell,” gasped Solomon Hops. “It
has to do with a lady. It has to do with a girl —
mine — my girl.”
“Ah!” said Hart, in a tone of stinging con-
tempt. “It is that, is it?”
The scorn in his voice was like the lash of a
whip in the hands of an archangel. In all his life
Timothy George had never known what it was to
feel such shame before. He cowered visibly.
“I’d been drinking,” he muttered.
“He insulted her,” panted the old man. “My
girl | He took her to Sandasket on that there
blank trolley line. If her mother'd been a-livin’—
but livin' mothers let 'em do it, and there you are.
She did n’t take any money with her — the way
girls do when they go off with a fellow. She
trusted him. She was keepin’ company with him.
She said, “Father, we'll take the nine o'clock car.’
It come to be ten o'clock; it come to be eleven,
and got to be midnight. Mr. Hart, I set watchin'
for her all that night. 'Long about five o'clock,
when the birds were singin', she come crawlin’
home. ‘He let the last train go,' she said. “Father,
he insulted me, and he's the only man that ever
did.' (Blank you to you !) She dars n’t
go to the police because of the talk and the news-
I29
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
papers. She – she — she — I don't know how she
done it, for she don't tell. Maybe she'd 'a' told
her mother more. But Nannie got away and run.
She got out into the road and she began to run.
Nannie she run till she dropped, and fell, and up
and run again — in the country, in the dark, at
one o'clock at night—and so she struck the trol-
ley line and walked it — through the woods and
cross the meaders—thirteen miles the whole way
home, and tumbled down come mornin' on her
father's steps. . . . My girl | Her that everybody
set so much by-so pretty, and gradooated at the
high School — and dressed so delicate, and has
such ways—like a lady — and could of had her
pick of anybody—not a fellow in Balsam Groves
but would of asked her if he darst — and never a
word ag’in her all her days more'n ag’in the Virgin
Mary settin' on a star in heaven. . . . AVannie /
And now it’s all over this town —”
The preacher's clutch tightened on the coat col-
lar of the collapsing figure that he held at arm's
length from the reach of the old man's fury. As
if he had been a rat, and the distinguished divine
a terrier, Timothy George felt himself shaken to
and fro in two tremendous hands.
“What have you got to say for yourself P” thun-
dered Mr. Hart.
“I’d been drinking,” pleaded Timothy. “If
I3O
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
there's any talk, I'll marry her; I'm ready any
time.” -
“You !” A voice like the voice of a formless
spirit vibrated out of the dark. “Marry you ? If
you were the only man left upon this earth, and
the whole world were packed with women talking
about me, — I'd be cut in inch pieces by their
scissors, – I'd be stung to death by their tongues,
before I'd marry — you.”
Pale and panting, for she had run all the way
from home, Nannie, in her gray skirt and white
blouse, stood swaying in the wind that blew rudely
from the sea.
“Send him away, Mr. Hart,” she said more
quietly. “That's all I want. Don't let Father do
him a harm — the scandal — men don't think. It
would make everything worse. He has n't hurt
me . . . only my reputation,” added Nannie, drear-
ily. “I guess I can stand that somehow. There's
only one thing I can't stand, – that is his ever set-
ting his foot in Balsam from this day on forever.”
“If he ever does,” interpolated Solomon Hops,
grimly, “I’ll kill him on the spot, and all the par-
sons this side of hell shan’t stop me, either.”
“You’re hard on me, Nan,” pleaded Timothy
George. “Rum done it.”
With one scornful white finger Nannie pointed
into the night. She made no other answer.
I3 I
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
Timothy hung his head and cowered away. His
drenched clothes, soaked from the surf in the
chasm, spattered her as he passed her by. He
thought how she used to worry over him if he wet
his feet on a stormy night. Nannie had been very
fond of him. He experienced the surprise of a low
man before the incredible scorn of a high-hearted
woman whom he has alienated by one fatal act
of brutality. He turned like the cur he was, and
crawled. The girl put her hand through her fa-
ther's shaking arm and led the old man away, and
no member of this singular group spoke an articu-
late word.
Solomon Hops might have been heard mutter-
ing: “ him to ” But his utterance was
thick; he was drunk with anger, and staggered.
When Timothy George had slunk over the lawn
by a cross-cut to the street, he felt a hand upon
his shoulder. The preacher, who remembered that
the Founder of his faith lived and died for the
contemptible as well as for the respectable, stood
high above the cringing figure.
“Nevertheless, Timothy,” he said, “it is not
necessary to go to perdition for this.”
“Ain’t it?” asked Timothy. “What place else
is there P’’
He stared stupidly at the minister, and turned
on his heel.
I 32
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
“Rum done it,” he repeated monotonously.
“Rum done it.”
Sterling Hart returned slowly to the chasm, and
was about to cross the bridge to his own house,
when Clyde dashed out of the shrubbery, barking
with the ferocity of a collie who has arrived upon
the scene of excitement too late to be of use.
“I had to unchain him,” observed Dane, step-
ping up rapidly. “He would have broken his neck.
What was all that noise — the cries, and the rest
of it? It sounded like a fight. Were you in at the
death P”
“Pretty nearly,” replied Hart. He related the
circumstances in a few words. “Was your wife
disturbed by it?” he asked anxiously. “Did she
know anything about it? I was afraid she might.”
“I don't think so,” returned Dane. “Excepting
Clyde, of course; she must have heard Clyde —
he shrieked so. I have just been down the avenue
and back. Mrs. Marriot came without her horses,
and she was afraid—you know how dark our
avenue is. I took her to the end of it.”
“Then you have n't seen Cousin Carolyn yet?
You are not sure that she knows nothing of this
unfortunate disturbance?”
“Why, no,” said Dane. “I have n’t seen her
yet. I am going to her now, at once.”
I 33
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
“If she should inquire,” suggested Mr. Hart,
hesitating a little, “perhaps you will be so good
as to tell her to feel no concern about the matter.
It is all in my hands. I will attend to it. She is
rather fond of the girl, and this will distress her.
We must keep it from her for the present.”
“Oh, certainly,” said Dane in his light way.
“It was a confounded scene. I did n't know the
fellow drank to that depth.”
The two men parted without further conversa-
tion. The preacher passed over the gulf that sepa-
rated his home from the other. The iron bridge
vibrated gently beneath his slow, restrained tread.
He still walked as if he were afraid of disturbing
somebody. His head fell forward on his breast.
He was sick at soul, nauseated with life, and with
that which is called love.
CHAPTER IX
THE collie Clyde ran the length of the avenue,
nose down and sniffing anxiously. At the road
he planted his feet, and stood, like the iron dogs
that are set to guard old-fashioned estates. One
ear pointed upwards and forwards; but the other
lopped down—as a collie's ears will disagree when
he is perplexed. The dog's eyes were heavy with
speculation; he experienced unshared and unshar-
able responsibilities.
The street was almost deserted, and cracked
with frost, for it was late November, and the morn-
ing bleakly cold. Far in the crisp distance, driven
rapidly through the village, a solitary carriage
whirled; it was drawn by a cream-white horse,
and without coachman or footman; its single oc-
cupant a gentleman who looked neither to right
nor left, but rode abstractedly. The collie had not
arrived in season to observe whether the man,
who had driven from the direction of the city,
had glanced at the Sterling place as he went by.
Charged by some powerful sense of canine duty,
the dog began to examine the hoof marks and
wheel marks of this team ; nosing them thor-
I35
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
oughly, and scenting the air through which they
had passed. After a few moments' hesitation he
began to follow them, slowly at first; then he
broke into a long, loping gait, which increased as
he reached the village Square. One or two trades-
men who met the dog spoke to him : — .
“Clyde P Why, Clyde You're going the wrong
way.”
A grocer called out: “Better go home, Clyde.
Your folks will be thinking you're lost.”
Disdainfully disregarding these impertinences,
the collie ran on. The distance between himself
and the open phaeton with the solitary occupant
had lessened perceptibly; he found it a mortifica-
tion to admit that he could not overtake the car-
riage, and Cantered after it with an angry anxiety.
Beyond the chocolate éclair house of Solomon
Hops, a road turned abruptly from the highway,
skirting along the cranberry swamps of Balsam
Groves, and slightly ascending as it made for the
great woods, known by the name of the county —
the densest, the largest, in the eastern part of the
state. Towards this forest the phaeton, slowing a
little as the road climbed, began to move steadily.
The dog, but not rapidly, gained upon it. The
road had now narrowed to a cart path, and branches
of Oaks and chestnuts, pines and maple, closed
about the head of the rider. A wild-apple bough
I36
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
swept so low as almost to hit him in the face,
and he pushed it aside with all his strength. He
did not appear to have very much, and grappled
with the stout branches weakly. In doing so he
turned his head, and looked back down the rough
way on which he had begun to climb the hill
known by the country folk as Balsam Mountain.
But the apple bough rebounded behind him and
screened from his sight the view of a pursuing
dog — a breathing, moving spot of black and tan,
whose pantings, though they could neither be
seen nor heard, were somehow to be inferred and
felt.
The dog, however, in that critical instant, and
at that baffled distance, had seen the man. It has
been said that dogs, in all probability, regard the
master of the household as the chief of the tribe.
Clyde, who had never taken the oath of allegiance
to Dr. Dane, had recognized the countenance of
his chief, - the white and rigid features of Mr.
Sterling. He gave a yelp of joy, and cantered up
the climbing road. But the collie was not a young
dog, and had run far and fast. It was a personal
humiliation to admit that he could not take Bal-
sam Mountain on the gallop, but this fact was
forced upon him; he lost ground, fell back, and
indeed found himself obliged to stop for his breath,
drop flat on his side, and rest. By this delay he
I37
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
lost time, and the chief of the tribe disappeared
from his strained and anxious sight.
Rollinstall Sterling drove on slowly. Now and
then he spoke to his horse—very kindly; he was
a man who loved horses—and encouraged it up
the rough road. After a time he reached, as he
had known that he should, the spot where wheels
could climb no farther; he got out of the phaeton
with the slow motions of an elderly man to whom
life and limb have become objects of caution, and
fastened the horse by a rope halter to a tree. After
some reflection he thought better of this, and re-
moved the tie rein, turning the team so that it
faced towards the bottom of the hill, and standing
it carefully on such level as he could find. The
woods were sprinkled with small stones, mouthfuls
bitten from the granite of the Cape, and he stooped
and placed some of these under the wheels, so that
the weight should not come too heavily upon the
animal in its constrained position.
The spot where the team had halted was a clear-
ing, and gave an open outlook upon the meadows.
In fact, an important object in the clearing could
be seen from certain points below, and Solomon
Hops, conducting a surveyor over his most hope-
ful Cranberry lot, made a telescope of his hands,
peered through it, and said:—
I38
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
“Looks like Death 'n' the pale horse up yonder.”
When Mr. Sterling had removed the tie rein,
he replaced it by a bit of light cord or stout string.
The pale horse was a cribber, and if occasion called,
could gnaw the string, and would. The master
patted the horse, and turned away up the “Moun-
tain.” When he had climbed a short distance, he
returned and blanketed the animal tenderly.
The man climbed on : quickly at first, then he
began to lag; his breath shortened, and he sat
down. He was in the heart of the forest and on
the height of the hill. The woods closed in around
him solemnly. Their dampness struck to his aging
blood, and he felt very cold. He shivered, and
buttoned his overcoat to his thin throat. Suddenly
it occurred to him that before very long he should
be colder. -
His hand crept to his breast pocket, and with-
drew a small object, which he laid upon the moss
at his side. It was red-cup moss, and he noticed
the tiny tapers of color that burned and broke
where they were crushed. An acorn fell from some-
where with a soft thud, and a squirrel scampered
after it. The squirrel stopped, and regarded the
man, who saw that the little creature's heart beat
wildly.
“A bird shot would stop it,” he thought. “How
little it takes 1’’
I39
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
After a while he said aloud:—
“What's the use of waiting P’’ His shaking
hand stole to the thing upon the red-cupped moss,
picked it up, and laid it down. -
“I don't know that there's any hurry about it,
after all,” he thought. He took out his pencil and
pocket memorandum, and began to cast up some
accounts. This absorbed him for a time — proba-
bly a very short one, but he could not have told.
He put the book and pencil down presently, and
satstaring at the underbrush. The forest was heavy
at that point, and pressed upon him, as if it had
pursued and surrounded him. He could not see
the sky, and on reflection was glad that he could
not. The muscles of his frozen face stiffened; he
looked 'straight before him; a little snake crawled
from somewhere and slid away, watching him with
cold and narrow eyes; he did not observe the
snake. His head fell upon his breast, and then into
his hands. -
No one could hear—oh, no one could hear him,
and the man began to sob. As he sobbed, he
groaned. All the signs of suffering that civiliza-
tion teaches us to repress fought their way to the
surface of him, in the savage solitude of uncom-
panioned Nature. Terrible sounds, such as the
deepest human tenderness never witnesses from
any man of us — sounds which friend nor wife
I4O
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
nor daughter may ever hear—confided themselves
to the silence of the forest. This escape of emo-
tion is the refuge of those whose life is broken at
the roots; it is the last right of the despairing,
as it was the first instinct of the wailing infant.
Rollinstall Sterling wept with the freedom of a
child and the anguish of a disgraced and aging
Iſla, Il.
He was so absorbed in his misery that he had
not heard the crackling of the moss and twigs;
and when a soft, wet tongue lapped his hand, he
started with superstitious terror, cried out, and
Sprang.
The motion knocked the pistol, which lay at full
cock; it went off, and the woods rang and rever-
berated with the shot.
At the report the collie leaped in fright, and
cuddled against his master like a lap dog. Mr.
Sterling stroked him kindly.
“Never mind it, Clyde There are four car-
tridges left. But I won't bother you with them.
You can go back the way you came. Clyde I Go
home, sir. I do not want you, Clyde. Go home, I
say.”
The collie wagged his tail pleasantly, but did
not move.
“Go home!” repeated the master. “Go home to
your mistress. There is nothing that you can do
I4 I
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
for me; kisses won't help me now. I never was
very fond of dogs' kisses. You know she taught
you not to bother me. Go home, Clydel”
Clyde had always obeyed Mr. Sterling, of whom
he stood in considerable awe; but this time he
refused outright. Into the animal's beautiful eyes
a strange entreaty leaped. He put his paws about
the old man's neck, and delicately began to lap his
€2.I. r
Mr. Sterling stared at him, trembling. He
thought: “I never can do it with the dog looking
on. I must get rid of him somehow.” He gave the
creature a rough push. Clyde answered it with
grieved reproach, but he did not stir. After a few
moments he crawled up, and with the timidity of
a rebuffed collie licked the master's hand again.
Neither the man nor the dog spoke, and this pan-
tomime of advance and repulse continued for some
moments. Then Mr. Sterling, with his natural
stateliness, began to argue with the dog.
“You don't understand, sir. You have mistaken
my meaning, sir. I don't want you, Clyde. Go
home, I say!”
The dog crept up and laid his head in the collie
fashion, in perfect silence, on his master's knee.
He had the appearance of having come there to
stay. He was a heavy dog, and it was difficult to
move him. After some thought Mr. Sterling tore
I42
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
a leaf from his note-book, hunted for his pencil,
and wrote : —
To the REVEREND STERLING HART,
Balsam Groves.
DEAR STERLING, H I sent you a letter from town
by private hand. My man will bring it out, but it
would not reach you till noon. Clyde has followed
me, God knows how. I cannot get rid of him any
other way, and I am sending him down with this.
In view of possible accident to the note, I cannot
explain myself further. You will find my white
mare in the clearing halfway up Balsam Moun-
tain. Please see that she is given a good supper,
if you find her before dark. My letter will give you
full particulars.
Yours,
ROLLINSTALL STERLING.
He took an old envelope from his pocket, read-
dressed and resealed it, and showed it to the dog,
who sniffed at it slowly and intelligently.
“Clyde, go home. Go home with this letter.
Don't take it to your mistress. Take it to Mr.
Hart. Understand, Clyde Not mistress, but Mr.
Hart. Don't stay here any longer. Don't stop with
the horse. The horse doesn't want you. I don’t
want you, sir. Go home, sir. Carry the letter home
— to Mr. Hart.”
I43
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
These words, articulated very slowly and dis-
tinctly, were repeated two or three times. The
collie listened to them, at first with one ear up and
the other down; but presently both shot upwards
and forwards, and comprehension fell on every
feature of his alert and handsome face. He seized
the note and trotted off. After he had gone a few
steps he returned, dropped the paper, and humbly
kissed the old man's trembling hands. Then his
jaws closed upon the letter with a snap that the
most celebrated fighters in Balsam could not have
loosened, and he shot down the cart path at a gait
which rapidly took him out of Mr. Sterling's sadly
pursuing eyes. The white mare, tethered by her
piece of twine, whinnied as the collie cantered by.
But Clyde, though he recognized the salutation
by a civil swish of the tail, did not stop. He took
the descent of Balsam Mountain mightily, with
tremendous strides and leaps. Two or three times,
to get his breath, he had to drop the letter, but
he put a paw upon it, bit it up again, and bounded
OI).
In the village no one happened to observe him,
and the collie made his way through the square,
undisturbed and undiverted from his purpose.
This took him doggedly homewards. At the ave-
nue of the Sterling place he seemed confused,
paused, and looked about with a troubled air.
I44
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
After some hesitation, he walked up the avenue
perplexedly, glancing towards the house where
the dearest mistress in the world with the newest
and the most objectionable baby was sitting on
the sunniest piazza in a windless corner that
looked upon the sea.
Halfway up the avenue the dog turned abruptly
and made a cross-cut towards the iron bridge.
Over this, as chance decreed, Mr. Hart was walk-
ing slowly. The collie, who was now a good deal
exhausted, weakly dropped the note at the preach-
er's feet: it fell short, and blew over the ravine.
As luck and the winds would have it, the paper
lodged on the shelving strip of rock where Tim-
othy George had hung and clung for his life. A
strong railing had been set there. Mr. Hart, being
poignantly familiar with the topography of the
spot, flung himself on the ground, stretched his
hand beneath the railing, reached over, and quietly
possessed himself of the letter.
Rollinstall Sterling sat with his chin in his
hands. His eyes looked into the woods, but saw
nothing. The great perspective of the forest seemed
to have melted from him, and only a little fore-
ground of dead leaves and bare thicket remained.
He shivered with the cold, and now that the col-
lie had gone, he felt unendurably lonely. He was
I45
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
not a dog lover, and had never been deeply
attached to Clyde, who seemed to him like a re-
tainer, loyal and worthy, and to be treated accord-
ingly. But despair, which snatches at every trifling
assuagement, had its way with him, and the fact
was that Mr. Sterling was pathetically touched by
the dog's appreciation.
“After all,” he thought, “Clyde respects me.”
He added, “And trusts me.”
This deference, this confidence, taking the last
form which life could now offer him, moved him
more than he would have thought possible. It
could not be denied that for a long time, or for
what seemed to him a long time, the incident of
Clyde's appearance and departure affected the old
man profoundly. It might also be said that it led
him to reconsider his purpose.
He picked up his memorandum book, that still
lay on the moss beside the pistol, and began to
cast up accounts again. He did this rapidly and
mechanically, as if the sum were too familiar to
deserve attention; and with a groan he pushed
the book back into his breast pocket.
He thought— What did he think? What does
a man think who has lived a long and honored
life, and finds or seeks at the end of it a dishon-
ored death P. This one bore an eminent mercantile
name, one of the oldest, one of the most enviable
I46
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
in the state. Wealth, ease, luxury, - these had
been accepted as matters of course, and with the
instinct of his good blood he had never overvalued
them. Position he had valued, and all that goes
with it, — the deference, the confidence, and the
honor of men; these he had possessed.
In the financial world his credit rung gold true;
his opinions were sought; his advice was followed;
his views of affairs were rated as driven men still
in the trampling stampede rate the wisdom of a
superior who has withdrawn himself in an hon-
ored age from the scramble of youth and the
march of middle life. It was a matter of course
that he should be the trustee of a dozen estates.
Above the mere material advantages of a rich
man's career Rollinstall Sterling had estimated—
no, let us say that he supposed himself to have
estimated—the plain, spiritual blessing of charac-
ter; the possession of unquestionable integrity;
the pride of an irreproachable name.
Was it this very assurance, in a measure, that
had led him to trifle with it? So confident of him-
self, so confident of the confidence of others, had
he leaned too heavily upon his spotless reputation,
till the weakened bridge broke beneath him
Probably he himself would have been the last to
be able to identify the tortuous road by which he
had traveled. It may take years to ruin a life; but
I47
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART"
the ruin of a soul lies in the first deliberate, dis-
honorable choice — the choice that is confused
perhaps with the higher motive, or discolored by
some self-delusion so adroit that the nature of the
deed escapes the careless perception. To retrieve
dishonor is more possible and less rare for the
rude than for the cultivated man.
There is no physical malady so difficult of dis-
guise as moral disorder; and none so hard to heal.
The incurable diseases are yielding, one by one,
to science. The fatal illnesses of the soul remain
half studied and still unconquered.
Rollinstall Sterling, shivering on Balsam Moun-
tain, thought less of the wrong that he had done
than of the opinions people would form of him for
having done it; this, at least, was the way his
mind worked at first. The blot upon his reputa-
tion seemed to be more important than the black-
ness of his soul. It was as if his life were a
kinetoscope, whose plates slid before him rapidly;
he sat like a spectator who has paid a price —
an awful price — to see the show. Curiously irrele-
vant memories, selected by who knew what power,
forced themselves upon his consciousness. He
saw himself at the directors’ meeting, where they
had elected him president of his bank — his first
position of the sort. He heard the language of the
vote which had been cast in his honor. He re-
I48
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
membered the carved cupids on the private din-
ing-room in the hotel where he had lunched with
his most intimate magnate that day. He could
recall the menu down which he went as far as
broiled live lobster, and that his friend, who was
an officer in the humane societies, commented
On it.
He saw himself in his office benignantly head-
ing subscriptions — all the conservative and im-
portant ones; everything came to him first.
He was at Washington leading a delegation
that represented the distinguished merchants of
New England, that carried to Congress a measure
upon which the eyes of the country were fixed.
The Ways and Means Committee listened to him
with deference. The President, in a private inter-
view, talked half an hour about their university,
and then casually remarked: “By the way, I don't
anticipate that you will have any difficulty with
your bill — so long as you are behind it.”
When he came home, a committee of students
were at his house. They asked the privilege of
arranging a day for the lecture which he had pro-
mised them on Mercantile Honor. When he gave
the lecture the old hall was packed; he knew the
intoxication of public address, so seldom expe-
rienced by a man of affairs. He was a favorite in
the university, to which he had been a generous
I49
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
donor, and of which he was in a commercial sense
the most eminent alumnus.
As his mind fled back it occurred to him how
little criticism he had met from his fellow men,
how little they had hindered, how much they had
helped him. He had been honored by the honor-
able. He had been trusted by the trustworthy.
But this was not the most or the worst of it.
He had been loved — ah! how had he been loved! .
— by the beloved. There never was such a daugh-
ter. How could there be? Who else had Carolyn's
thrilling affectional sentience? Her motherless
soul had opened before him like a flower too ex-
quisite to be touched. He had breathed it, and
had broken it; yet he knew that she would forgive
him that. Whoever derided, she would comfort.
Whoever scorned, she would defend. He thought
that if he could have fled with her to some of
those ideal and impossible shores of which dis-
graced men dream, he might have got some sort
of foothold and climbed a little way up the moral
precipice down which he had dropped.
But Carolyn had her husband; and her child.
By the great natural road that broadens between
father and daughter she had escaped him. The
desolate world had no occupant for the dishonored
Iſla I).
Upon the inevitable outcome of his situation
I 50
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
—if he lived—he did not, for he would not,
dwell. He persuaded himself that this would be
worse for her than the other way. He had become
an adept in self-persuasion. Long ago, more years
than he could recall now, he had recorded upon
the chart of his moral disease the wavering tem-
perature line on the other side of which a man
loses the power of being honest with himself.
Now, in the hour of his last moral conflict, delu-
sion after delusion chased him. He found it as
difficult to feel truly as he did to think clearly.
As his mind darkened and his will weakened, one
thing alone remained distinct to him — his daugh-
ter's face. It assumed the movement of slow
and solemn regression: at first he saw it just as
she was, sitting in his wind chair on the piazza
towards the sea — the new motherhood of her, all
Madonna, with the baby on her lap. Then she
slipped back a little, and he saw the bride of her,
the rapture — she was all new wife. What could
be more “mystic, wonderful” Nothing but the
unwon girl. . . . How exquisite!
She came and sat upon the arm of his chair, in
her white dress, with her velvet hands, her two
long braids of bright hair. She laid her cheek to
his: “Blue to-night, Papa?” she said. “What ails
you, dear? Don't you want a kiss?”
While he was arguing with his anguish, and
I 5 I
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
wondering what reply he could make to her, —
not daring to touch her, being unworthy, - be-
hold, he held in his arms a child. She was quite a
little girl. She was crying, and he comforted her.
Then she laughed, and he kissed her—yes, he was
fit to kiss her them. She put up a little mouth, like
an apple blossom, and began to cuddle to him,
and to call him “Dee Papa! My dee Papa!”
“Carolyn !” he cried. “Carolyn /*
It was mid-afternoon when Sterling Hart came
into the house and asked once more for Dr. Dane,
who had been out all day. Carolyn told him so.
She was crossing the hall, and he could not escape
her: nor the hard duty which it seemed must fall
on him, as everything else (concerning her) that
was not easy had fallen. He had always been the
one to stand between her and the cruel edges of
life. He had hoped that her husband might have
spared him this.
“Chanceford is out on some consultation or
long case,” said Mrs. Dane. “He has one of his
busy days. I expect him home about— Cousin
Sterling!” she put her hand to her heart slowly.
“Something has happened. . . . It is my father,”
she added. She sank back and sat down on the
stairs. “Was it his heart?” she asked very quietly.
“Yes, thank God!” said Sterling Hart. His
I 52
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
passionate gratitude that he could say this and
tell the truth — for he himself, climbing Balsam
Mountain with Solomon, had found the pistol ly-
ing on the moss beside the unwounded dead—
exalted him so that he was hardly conscious of the
effect of his words and manner upon her. “He
did not suffer — that is, it must have been a matter
of a moment — what is called an instant death.”
“You are not telling me the whole.” Cara lifted
her white face; it was strong with the courage
before calamity which surprises us in the tender-
est women. “You are keeping something back.”
He kept it back as long as he could; for she
did not urge him till he chose. The rest of the
tragic story came to her knowledge Soon enough.
But this one thing the preacher restrained from
her till it was not possible to do so any longer.
Even then he had to be the one to tell her. Her
husband said he could not do it. Dane hated the
unpleasant, and avoided it when he might.
In the ruin of her father's honor Carolyn's pri-
vate fortune — with his own, with others not his
own — had gone the way of the speculator who
plunges that he may swim, and at the moment
when he least anticipates it, sinks beyond rescue.
The weight of the transparent and pliable seas,
heavier than the opaque and immovable moun-
tains, holds him down.
CHAPTER X
THE blind flapped in the storm, and Mrs. Dane
left her seat by the window and went out on the
piazza. The catch proved to be broken, and she
hunted up nails, hammer, and hatchet and tried to
effect some amateur repairs. She did this with the
patience of one who had been accustomed to all
sorts and conditions of household drudgery and
to the expedients of poverty for a much longer
time than, in fact, she had known anything about
them. It was but a year since the death of her
father, whose beautiful homestead, claimed by
wronged and restless creditors, had been promptly
bought in by his kinsman, Sterling Hart, and ea-
gerly offered to the homeless daughter.
“Honor me by occupying it, Cousin Carolyn,”
he had urged. “Please me, and stay.”
But Carolyn had not stayed. She and her hus-
band were agreed, at least, on that. The preacher
was not a rich man, and no rent which Dr. Dane's
uncertain income would permit could decently
be offered for one of the great houses of the
East Shore. After one hard winter in the read-
justed conditions of her old home —stripped of
I 54
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
its servants, and terrified by its fuel bills — Mrs.
Dane and her husband and child had moved
across the road into the little white house known
as the nasturtium cottage. There, Cara had re-
sumed the struggles of a life whose outward de-
privations had gradually come to her to seem the
least and lightest of her perplexities.
Once, in the blush of her betrothal, she had said
to Chanceford Dane, “I could starve.” This, in
fact, she would have been capable of doing. She
would have died for him without a groan; suffered
for him without an outcry. She had loved him so
much that neither dying nor suffering counted
very much to her. She had believed him worth
anything that he might cost her in the essence
and value of a woman's life. There were no pangs
of body or spirit which for his sake she would
have refused. Neither variety nor monotony of
endurance could have vanquished her so long as
she endured for him. Cara possessed in a degree
unknown to most women the love genius. She
had, like other endowed souls, to pay the price of
her gift.
This, in a measure, she was beginning to esti-
mate, but with the merciful vagueness which marks
the first stage of a woman's disillusion. In a way
her exquisite sensitiveness might be said to have
been her protection as well as her betrayal. It
I 55
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
intervened between her lot and her consciousness
for a longer time than it could have done had she
been a ruder or a colder woman. It delayed her
inexorable fate, because it delayed her acknow-
ledgment of it to herself. She found it incredible
to suppose—therefore impossible to admit—that
her idol had neither deserved nor valued the sacri-
fice of her sweet nature to her ideal of himself;
or, indeed, to her ideal of his affection for her.
She had not offered him a niche, but an altar.
To suggest to herself that she had misdeified the
man she loved was to overthrow the religion of
the system of things. She approached the know-
ledge of the truth with the slowness which usually
precedes an abrupt and startling revelation.
Dane had met the loss of their property with
the irritability of a pleasure-loving man whose
early experience of hardship had acquainted him
with the nature and meaning of poverty. His brief
draught of luxury had not made it easier, but
harder, for him to reassume the petty economies
of a narrow income. Of the two, Carolyn, who had
never known an ungratified wish, bore their fallen
fortunes with more cheerfulness and far more
poise. Dane had learned too well the fatal art of
spending freely. His struggling practice did not
meet his needs. He ran up bills which he could
not pay, and Swore because he could not. The
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
first time that he swore at her, his wife received
the outburst with the dumb astonishment of a
doe who has seen its first hunter and met its first
wound. She accepted her husband's apology in
trembling silence, but whether she remembered
or forgot the shock of that shot, he never knew.
The circumstance eluded her expression as some-
thing too coarse for it. She puzzled Dane. Her
reserve annoyed him. The very exquisiteness of
her, which had charmed him at the first, began to
irritate him. The rudeness of his early life re-
turned upon him now and then like an old dye
that one supposes washed out. He became what
we call in family phraseology “difficult.” It was
not until the evening of which we speak that it
occurred to Mrs. Dane that he could be anything
In Ore.
She had been watching for him at the front
windows of their living-room; patiently, as doc-
tors' wives do, and without the anxiety of other
women for the fate of delaying husbands.
There was no fire on the black hearth, – a
luxury not to be thought of when the little fur-
nace was started,—and she had pushed the small
couch, reserved for the baby's use, near the regis-
ter, for the night was cold. The child was asleep.
It was a healthy, happy baby, not too sensitive, as
the mother perceived with a curious mingling of
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
regret and satisfaction. Above the white woolen
afghan which covered the little relaxed figure the
child's moist hair shone on its forehead. Joyce
had his father's hair and eyes. Where would the
inheritance stop? Mrs. Dane had begun to won-
der, not without anxiety. Blessed is the mother
who can say: “God grant that my boy repeat his
father, soul and body 1"
Carolyn, in her mourning dress, sat by the
streaming window with both hands pressed to
the sides of her eyes that she might peer out into
the street. While she did so, the blind, rebellious
to her feminine carpentry, slammed again in her
face and cracked the glass. She ran out once more
upon the wet piazza. While she stood struggling
in the wind and splashed by the rain, trying to take
the blind from its hinges, she saw that her husband
was driving slowly up the avenue to the stable. It
was a noisy storm, and she had not heard wheels
or hoofs; but the horse (it was her father's) was
white, and she perceived the dull gleam of him,
and that he had unexpectedly stopped.
“Drive right on, Chanceford,” she called. “It’s
only the blind. I can attend to it myself. Dinner
is all ready for you.”
Dane made no reply, and the horse whinnied
anxiously.
“Clyde 2 "she called. “Clyde Where are you?”
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THOUGH LIFE Us Do PART
But the dog was not there. Slightly startled,
Carolyn ran out into the storm, and down the
terrace, against which the horse had driven one
wheel of the buggy. This, obstructed by a bush,
had stuck in the soaked grass. The buggy, which
a less conscientious horse would have overturned,
was empty.
Mrs. Dane clambered over the wheel and drove
on to the stable. Her first impulse to drive in
search of her husband had given place to a cold
and sickening prudence. Without exactly knowing
why, she thought she had better not assume that
there had been an accident — not yet; not too
SOOI).
She ran into the house for her raincoat, came
out again, went a little way down the sidewalk, and
scrutinized the storm-beaten road. It was quite de-
serted. She walked on hurriedly, going faster and
further than she knew, until she came to the choco-
late éclair house, where Nannie was lighting the
gas and drawing the shades. At this point Mrs.
Dane turned about and came back. She now re-
membered that Solomon Hops had one of his per-
sonally conducted rheumatic attacks. These were
more strenuous than dangerous, and she felt sure
that the doctor had made this call the last on his
rounds on his way home. Whatever had happened,
horse and driver had separated somewhere be-
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
tween the two houses. Now, she reasoned (more
calmly than most young wives would), the chances
were that her husband would be at home before
her. Her steps quickened to a run. When she
came opposite the Sterling place, her old home,
her dog leaped out upon her; whining and bark-
ing, he urged her across the street. Against one
of the great stone pillars which guarded the en-
trance to the avenue, the figure of a man leaned
heavily; his crushed felt hat slouched over his face,
and his head fell forward upon his breast. Clyde
put his fore paws dutifully, rather than affection-
ately, about the man's waist, and seemed to make
something like an effort to support him, until Mrs.
Dane had reached the spot.
“Oh, are you hurt?” she cried. Her wet hand
slid into her husband's. He pushed it off.
“Where is that horse?” he snarled. “He dragged
his weight and came home without me. My foot
caught in the reins somehow, and I had a nasty
tumble. Solomon will talk about his symptoms all
night. Only way I can stop him is to put a ther-
mometer in his mouth. What are you here for,
anyhow 2 Pity there was n’t an accident. It would
have given you something to fuss about.”
Carolyn made no answer. She helped him up the
steps and into the cottage hall, where he stood with
sodden and evading eyes. She took off his wet coat
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
and led him into his office. Neither spoke, and he
sank down heavily into the office chair.
“I will bring you a cup of coffee,” she said, strug-
gling for composure; but her voice shook. It took
a little time to make the coffee, and the Irish maid
of all work fretted about it all the while. When
Mrs. Dane came back to the office she found the
doctor stretched on the lounge, past speech or
motion, as unconscious of her presence as he was
of his disgrace. In all her sheltered life Carolyn
had never been so near a drunken man. She bent
over him and touched his reddened cheek with her
light, white fingers.
“Dear,” she said, “are you sick? Oh, what can
I do for you? Chanceford | Chanceford l’
At this moment the child across the hall waked
and began to laugh, and then to call: “Mum –
mumma P Pup — puppa P Puppa P” g
Carolyn stood for a moment irresolute, and then
she turned away and shut the office door. She
took the baby, and sat down with him beside the
cheerless register, and stared at the window where
the storm was raging. Beyond the anger of the rain
and wind she could hear the sea upon the cliff —
the old familiar, mighty roar, mastering every lesser
sound, as the great master the little sorrows of life.
For one wild moment it seemed to her that if she
wrapped the baby up quite well, and ran out with
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
him, and kissed him once or twice, and slipped off
into the chasm with him quietly, it would be the
kindest deed that she could do, or dream of doing,
by his father's son. But she was a sane woman, and
she sat still by the register, and laid her cheek upon
the baby's curls. One great, dry sob tore up from
some unexplored capacity of anguish within her,
but she did not cry. Clyde came up and kissed
her, but she did not notice Clyde. The child
bubbled on : “Mum – mumma P Pup — puppa P
Puppa P" - g
Dane's was one of the natures which harden
when they should melt, perhaps thaw when they
should solidify. The consciousness of error did
not make him tender. The fact that he had de-
based himself in the presence of his wife irritated
him. His Southern pride flared in him, and he
omitted to express to her his more or less genu-
ine regret for what had occurred. He found it
hard to forgive her for having been a witness of his
weakness. In itself considered, he would have read-
ily told her that he had taken a cup of afternoon
tea with Mrs. Marriot—if he had stopped with
the tea. He felt unwilling to complicate one act-
ual fault with the appearance of another in Cara's
mind. He took the refuge of the weak nature, or
of the weak element in a stronger nature, and as-
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
sumed a wounded air. His injured silence distanced
his wife more utterly than any speech or language
could have done — as he had known that it would.
Cara, who had rehearsed over and again with her-
self the difficult scene in which she should try —
how carefully how tenderly 1 – to say the right
thing, the gentle thing, the wifely one, that which
would forgive without humiliating, and stimulate
without reproaching, found herself thrown back
upon the fact that there was to be no scene at all.
It was scarcely a matter of weeks before she per-
ceived that this grave episode in their mutual life
was not to be material of discussion between
them. The subject dropped like a blazing coal,
and scorched the ground on which they stood.
The smoke of its burning came up and enveloped
her in a Smothering Sensation — half astonish-
ment and half a stifling doubt of her own judg-
ment. It seemed to her that she ought to have
been able to find some way of helping Chanceford;
it did not occur to her to rebuke him. But she
found no way. He held her at the arm's length of
his temperament. His injured manner gradually
gave way to his light one – debonair, and smiling,
as if nothing of Consequence had happened.
The husband and wife began to tread the diverg-
ing paths between which an important moral
question has protruded. Carolyn had reached the
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
point in a wife's experience where, whatever she
says, or omits to say, upon a sore subject, she is
conscious of giving offense. She longed inex-
pressibly for some sort of supporting counsel, but
the dignity of her soul refused to seek it of any
other mind or heart. She found herself locked
back upon herself, passionately praying for guid-
ance which only Heaven could give, and in which
Heaven seemed to take no visible interest at all.
She sought the greatest, the Supremely precious
good of human experience — the direction of
duty.
It took her some time to understand that this is
not to be had for the wishing; if it replies to that
uplifted concentration of the spirit which we call
prayer, who but the devout shall know?
Carolyn soon gave up trying to learn what she
ought to do for Chanceford, and simply did the
things she knew she could do. Sometimes he
seemed to feel sorry for her. Sometimes he was
kind. At first he did not repeat his fault. But by
midwinter he was drinking heavily. His practice
began to suffer, and his temper with it.
It has been said by those who are experts in the
subject, that the wife of a drinking man always
carries in her countenance the evidence of her
lot. Cara's beautiful face assumed pathetic meta-
morphOSes, passing from stage to stage of the fate
I64 —d
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
which drives the sensitiveness in and draws the
hardness out. So gentle was her fibre, so ineffable
the tenderness of her instincts, that she could not
harden; she could only sadden. She developed a
patient philosophy.
“The world is full of women,” she thought.
“They all endure the lives which men inflict.
Many of them must suffer as much as I do;
some of them must suffer more. I suppose I can
bear my share.”
Once or twice she pleaded with her husband.
She never reproached him. But neither her ex-
pression nor her reserve appeared to touch him.
She had reached the world-old crisis where a wo-
man to whom a man has given his wildest wor-
ship, his most passionate allegiance, learns that
her influence upon him has retreated from the
foreground of his consciousness.
This shock to the heart is as common as the
marriage bond; women are apt to forget that it
means a mutual misery in which a man must
share in a man's way. She, by reason of her sex,
will suffer more; but he, if only because he suffers
less, will be the more perplexed.
Dane had passed the point of perplexity, and
arrived by rapid bounds at that of conscious er-
ror. He drank all winter, and the spring found
him a tempted, yielding, and a half-ruined man.
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
Mrs. Douce Marriot always arrived in Balsam
Groves upon the first of May; in this particular
she was no better nor worse than other taxpay-
ers. For weeks her elaborate place had been in
the hands of its gardeners and spring cleaners,
and upon the afternoon of the thirtieth of April
she slid from her town house to her shore house
as easily as she put her head under the imported
carriage dress which her maid held over her per-
fectly adjusted coiffure. In fact, Mrs. Marriot
drove out from the city, - the day was so gentle,
and the horses must be got over the road, - and
her husband, making one of his rare public ap-
pearances in her society, sat and smoked the ride
out beside her. He was a heavy, silent man, ca-
pable of keeping his own counsel, and that of his
wife, for whom, in a sense, he cherished an attach-
ment; he made it a point not to believe the things
he heard about her, and it was certain that he had
never heard the most objectionable. Her manner
towards him was perfect; she entertained, if she had
ceased to charm him; they passed a pleasant even-
ing together in the great blue room of their sum-
mer home, and the next day he kissed her good-by
and sailed for somewhere, to return at midsum-
mer. He would cable frequently; he found it “so
much cheaper than writing.”
“Douce," he hesitated, with his foot on the step
l-
I66
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
of the trap, when she drove to the station, “if I
were you, I'd go slow with that fellow—you know
— old Sterling's daughter married him. He is n’t
in it, exactly; he does n’t trot in your harness; he
might take you too seriously — men who have
married above their station are dull about those
things, and the wife — she is —” He broke off,
biting his cigar. “You’ll pardon me, I'm sure,
Douce P”
“Why, of course, Harry,” replied Mrs. Marriot,
amiably. “And thank you, besides. You know
I'm always glad of your advice.”
“Take it or leave it!” called the husband, laugh-
ing, as he swung aboard the train. “Only don't say
I did n’t give it.”
Mrs. Marriot kissed her gloved hand to him
through her dotted lace veil, and sat soberly
watching the train until it had become a speck
upon the track. A certain sentimentality overtook
her, and she put her handkerchief to her eyes. It
occurred to her that she was very fond of Harry.
She drove home slowly, and, feeling the need of
diversion from the circumstance that her husband
had gone abroad without her, sat down and wrote
several notes. One of these went to a college boy,
inviting him to dine; one to an artist, with whom
she had appointments for a portrait; a third to a
politician, with whom she had decided not to take
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
an automobile ride; a fourth acquainted the vil-
lage doctor with the fact of her return to Balsam,
and besought his attention to her “picturesque
neuralgia,” which, it seemed, no physician in town
had shown any capacity whatever for compre-
hending or treating.
It was not more than a few days after Mrs. Mar-
riot had taken up her legal residence in Balsam
Groves that Mrs. Dane received a peremptory
summons for the doctor from the case of Solo-
mon Hops, who, it appeared, had undergone what
Nannie, sobbing at the telephone, described as
“some sort of a fit or stroke.”
The doctor's wife (as doctors' wives do in serious
cases) made eager and sympathetic efforts to notify
her husband, trying to reach him by wire wher-
ever she might have a chance of overtaking him;
in fact, searching the neighborhood, before she
remembered having heard him say that Mrs. Mar-
riot had returned, and her neuralgia with her. But
Mrs. Marriot's telephone, it seemed, was not yet
connected for the season, and Mrs. Dane did the
only other thing that suggested itself. She tossed
on her long coat, called the little Irish maid to the
baby, and herself ran over to give the summons
of Solomon's emergency. -
It was almost twilight, but not quite, and the
Sea, as she hurried up the avenue, called to her
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
with the change of tone which she had always fan-
cied it assumed at the coming on of night—as if
it dropped from the major to the minor key. The
doctor's buggy stood just outside the stables; a
glance told her that. Her mind was quite occupied
with Nannie and Solomon, and she rang Mrs.
Marriot's bell abstractedly.
“Call the doctor,” she began. “There is a very
sick patient.”
Yes, madam. The doctor was in the library with
Mrs. Marriot. Would Mrs. Dane please step in 2
The butler waved a stately hand towards the blue
ITOOTY).
“I will turn on the light,” he suggested.
“Oh, don't wait for that! Don't wait for any-
thing!” cried Mrs. Dane. “It is a very sick pa-
tient. Only say that to the doctor, and mention
that I am here.”
She stepped into the blue room hurriedly, and
sat down on the first chair she saw. She had a
light step, and had, in fact, run over in her slippers.
The Wilton carpet received her foot without a
sound. Within the large, high, darkly decorated
room the twilight had settled heavily. She accus-
tomed her eyes to the obstruction by degrees, and
it was — how long The respite of a moment?—
before she became aware of the presence of others
in the room. Two figures, blurred against a shad-
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
owy sofa, sat unconscious of her. She looked, and
got to her feet. Her first impulse was to flee; but
her second thought and second observation told
her that it was too late, for the returning steps of
the butler, padded in his felt slippers, sounded
across the marble of the hall.
The doctor and the patient had now advanced
to meet the wife. In her long coat Carolyn looked
taller than she was; she stood quite still, and
silent.
The servant saved the situation, as the servant
so often does. He slid from bulb to bulb, and the
electricity shot all over the great room. The blue
velvet papering on the high walls scowled at the
light; a satin chair somewhere received it more
cordially, and glittered with it. Mrs. Dane fixed
her eyes upon the satin chair. She did not glance
at her husband. She found herself talking about
Solomon Hops; telling how ill he was, and what
Nannie said; and then she turned. In the door-
way she looked back.
Across the long, elaborate room she saw the
two standing and staring. Mrs. Marriot's expe-
rienced face had crimsoned, but Dane was blazing
white. He held his head haughtily. He seemed to
fling at his wife the spirit of some challenge or
some defense.
“It is not personally conducted rheumatism
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
this time,” said Carolyn, quite as if nothing had
happened. “Solomon is very ill. I tried every-
where to find you. The telephone was not con-
nected.”
As if she were the one of those three who
should explain, who should apologize, she found
herself uttering these futile words. But she did
not utter any more. When Dane came out to the
buggy his wife was not to be seen.
“This is most unfortunatel” sighed Mrs. Mar-
riot, swaying on the piazza in her pale blue gown;
the dress was spangled here and there, and glit-
tered before Dane dizzily. He smote her with one
fierce frown. At that moment he could have struck
Douce Marriot to the ground. He was seized with
moral nausea; of her, of himself, of the chance
which had brought about this fatality. He leaped
over the wheel, and lashed the white horse down
the avenue.
It was late when Dane came home. He ob-
served that Cara did not come to meet him at the
door, as she was in the habit of doing, but this he
had expected. He took off his coat slowly, and
went into his office with hesitating feet. The room
was empty, and the house was still. After some
delay he crossed the hall with evident reluctance,
and wavered on the threshold of the living-room
I7 I
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
where his wife was sitting, with their sleeping
child.
She rose as he entered, and both stood regard-
ing each other with the consciousness that the
irremediable had happened. Dane had a defiant
look. But Cara's face pleaded even then — with
him, with fate, with the shock under which every
nerve of her soul and body shook. She was gray
white, and ghastly—but gentle; how gentle, how
womanlike, how piteous to see, he could not re-
fuse to acknowledge to himself.
“Well?” he began, in a tone which his wife had
long since learned to recognize as one with which
it was impossible for her to deal.
“Have you anything to say ?” Carolyn uttered
the words with a quietness which astonished her-
self more than it did him.
Dane tossed back his handsome head. “No.
Not to any question put in that way. No. I don't
Say I might not have; but under the circumstances
— no. I am evidently prejudged. What would be
the use P”
“Very well,” said Cara. She tottered, and sank
back into her chair beside the child. “I must —
think. I do not know — what—to do.” She passed
her hand confusedly over her eyes.
“If a man's wife can't trust him, - if she must
come spying upon him, - that's reason enough.
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
I decline to offer any excuses —at present. It
depends upon circumstances when or whether I
explain the situation upon which you so unwar-
rantably intruded. I say, a man's wife should
trust him —”
“Against the evidence of her own senses?”
asked Carolyn. A slow, contemptuous curve turned
her delicate lip. She could not help it, and she did
not know it.
“Against any evidence 1” thundered Dane.
“Until she has heard what he has to say.”
“If there were anything to be said —” returned
Cara, drearily.
“That is for me to judge,” replied Dane. This
preposterous answer took away her breath, and
she sat panting and mute before him.
On his tempestuous face shame and sorrow
warred with something like compassion for her,
but he gave no expression to either. He turned
on his heel, and made as if to leave the room, but
lingered.
“Can I have anything to eat?” he asked, as if
nothing had happened.
“Maggie will wait on you,” replied Cara. Her
chin quivered, but her voice was quite firm.
“Very well,” he said in his turn. He went out
to the dining-room, and rang for his belated meal.
Cara did not join him. No further words passed
y
I73
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
between them, and when he went upstairs her
door was locked.
As it had been with that other offense, Cara
found herself completely disabled in the moral
conflict by the offender. Dane assumed his in-
jured air; and his wife, torn between her sweet
impulse to be more than generous to him and her
scathing consciousness that there are things which
a wife must not overlook because that is the easi-
est way to live, fell back upon a tentative and
terrible silence. No virago's tongue could have
scourged Dane as this spiritual dignity did. He
felt humiliated by the very sight of her, — and
Dane never could bear to be made uncomfortable.
Cara attended to his wants politely. But upon the
frozen misery of her face he dared not dwell. They
stood upon the opposite sides of a glacier whose
stealthy current she could not cross, and he would
not, if indeed he could. Their daily life took on
the hopeless character which marriage alone, of
all human relations, may acquire.
Already they seemed to themselves to have been
separated for a longer time than they had been
united. Dane's frowning face darkened day by day,
and one morning he hurled himself out of the
house and aboard the first train to the city. He
returned in the late May twilight, and she heard
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his step ring through the hall. He called her
imperiously. -
“Cara? Cara! I wish to see you — at once,
please.”
She was putting the baby to bed, but she obeyed
immediately. Dane beckoned her into the office,
and shut the door.
“I may as well tell you what has happened,”
he began.
“If it is anything worse —” she pleaded. But
she thought: “What could be worse?” Then her
heart fused within her, and she cried out: —
“Chanceford | Chanceford | We did love each
other I don't want to make a mistake. I’m not
a hard woman. I could forgive . . . anything I
ought to. Oh, I did love you ! I did love you ! If
you only had one word to say to me!”
“I have three,” replied Dane, stolidly. He put
both hands on her shoulders — would he have held
her off, or drawn her towards him P. She could not
tell; perhaps he did not know himself. He looked
straight into her piteous eyes, and with great dis-
tinctness and deliberation said:–
“I have enlisted.”
Her face dropped against her hands upon the
office table. The light from above selected her soft,
brown hair and the contour of her womanly head.
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
Dane felt as if these outlines were being etched
upon his brain with a burning graver.
“I have enlisted as a private,” he said, “in this
accursed war.”
CHAPTER XI
No one who lived through the American Civil
War could face the spring of 1898 without a
grip at the heart such as the present generation
cannot understand. But between the novice and
the expert in suffering there may not, after all,
be much to choose when we come to that; and
the woman who had never before searched the
lists of “Killed, Wounded, Missing” for a name
she dared not see, had — what advantage over
her who was gray with the memory of a fading
pain P Women, who are the worst victims of war,
whichever way we look at it, rapidly acquire its
terrible lessons; and Carolyn in six weeks came
to feel as if she had been widowed sixty years
by the blunders and brutalities of the governing
SCX.
From the first she had no delusions as to the
outcome for herself of this latest and saddest of
our national errors.
When her husband kissed her good-by-for he
did kiss her—she thought quite clearly: “I shall
never see him again.”
Few words had passed between them. As if he
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
had not offended or inflicted, and as if she had
not endured the consciousness of perplexed duty
which is so much harder than simple, clear-sighted
misery, they set about their hurried preparations
for his departure to the front. To the last mo-
ment she hoped that he would do or would say
something to ease the intolerable situation under
which they parted. But Dane did nothing of the
kind. It occurred to her that there was probably
nothing that he could do or say to blunt the edge
of the facts; and yet she was never quite sure of
that. Like thousands of women before her, Carolyn
cried out upon her fate to make it possible for her
to treat the man who had wronged her as if he
had not done it.
“There must be explanation It cannot be as
it seems. Dear God! Only find me some way in
which I can respect and trust him, and I will ask
nothing more of life l’
But these passionate prayers were of the spirit,
not of the lips. Husband and wife parted without
reference to the cause of their divergence. At the
last moment she cried out wildly — futile words;
she did not know what. She only knew that she
would have forgiven him anything to keep him
back. But with war, as with grief or death, who
shall intermeddle P He seemed touched by her
heartbreak, and his rigid mouth melted.
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
“It won't be long,” he said. “And then —
things may go better, girl, by and by.”
He went from her bareheaded, and she stood in
the window, with the baby in her arms, and watched
him until he reached the street. He swam before
her burning eyes until they went black blind. The
last thing that she saw was the gray lock on his
dark hair. It lay flat and stern, like a band of steel
across his head.
Who forgets what a spring it was 2 No one in
whom the abhorrence of war and the condemna-
tion of it are so vigorous as scarcely to fall below
the personal stake in personal pain. The fields of
New England—were they ever so fair An ex-
traordinary light grew and remained upon them;
day by day they received this luminousness of an
order so marked, of a gleam so gentle, that one
could not but regard it with a startled imagina-
tion. It was as if the spirit of peace, terrified and
trampled, had fled to the sanctuaries of Nature for
protection. On the hills a glory gathered. They
interchanged signs solemnly: “There is no slaugh-
ter and no heartbreak. Who suffers ? We enjoy.
Who trembles? We stand. Who calls it War P
We call it May.”
The summer advanced brilliantly, - a hot sum-
mer. The mother of the lad who had been drawn
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to the front by way of the state militia—a sum-
mons he thought it would be cowardly to evade
— recalled all that she had read, and imagined
more than she knew of the semitropical tempera-
tures. Somebody blunders, and preventable dis-
ease begins to write its fatal record in the bodies
and the lives of men. Chickamauga tells her shame-
ful story to history, and the spectacle of her rotting
soldiers disgraces the humiliated flag. Blistering
troops, broken by sickness and famine, hurl them-
selves upon San Juan and mass on Santiago.
We call it May. We call it June. We call it
red July. Now, whatever name the meadows and
the mountains give it, we must call it war.
To gratify a jingo, to please a politician, men
die and women live; the dearest is taken and the
loneliest is left; the “little war,” like the large
one, slaughters and Smites at the whim of the
fighting animal, man. The women of America
and Spain, - the patient, unconsulted women,
who may not govern, who cannot fight, — these
“give their happiness instead.”
Mrs. Dane sat on the narrow lawn in front of
her cottage, absently playing with her baby. The
low nasturtiums (she had planted them indoors,
and early) were in blossom, massed upon the trel-
lis of the piazza, and the climbers crept over the
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
white clapboards. Cara's pale, faintly sprigged
muslin gown and the white dress of the child took
the foreground; they were delicately expressed
by the riotous color.
Joyce was a happy child, laughing easily and
often. Cara's baby was a natural optimist. He had
inherited, with his father's love of pleasure, his
father's love of music, and sang many little songs
to himself; he seemed to have more happiness
than he knew what to do with, and pelted her with
the songs. These had a refrain, his favorite: —
“Mum – mumma P Pup — puppa P Puppa £"
Cara listened to it patiently.
The surf was heavy that afternoon, and the sea
called in the minor key, which (as we have said)
Cara fancied that it took towards night. There
was a stiff Southerly, and the wind blew as winds
do when they seem to have come from a long dis-
tance, and to be articulate with messages and
meanings that mankind is not wise enough to
understand.
Cara addressed the wind: “You come from
Cuba,” she said.
Her lips were moving with these fantastic words
when Sterling Hart suddenly stepped between
her and the brilliant but declining afternoon. He
did not speak, nor she. Afterwards she recalled
his countenance as it had been that of an angel
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
—the angel of compassion whose sacred mission
it may be to smite and solace, too. Her startled
eyes traveled slowly from his face to his hand;
this held a folded paper, an envelope, and yellow;
his fingers were purple from the knuckles to the
tips where he had clenched them when he crushed
the envelope.
“Let me read the telegram,” said Cara, dis-
tinctly. “I would rather do it. Hand it to me.”
He obeyed her, without a word, and without a
word she read : —
“A illed in the charge at San Juan.”
The yellow paper fell and fluttered to the grass.
The child saw it, and laughed, and snatched at it.
His little white lap blazed full of nasturtiums, and
with one of these, a flame-red one, he beat the
telegram. Then he gurgled merrily: —
“Mum – mumma P Pup — puppa P Pup-pa £"
CHAPTER XII
DANE had died easily, if notinstantly—shot through
the head. After a little delay he was brought home,
and a grave in the country churchyard of Balsam
Groves received him, for Carolyn had wished this
to be so. Thus it befell that Dane did not lie in
the burial-place of his wife's family, and for him-
self, he slept, as he had waked, disconnected from
the traditions, an unrelated man. It might almost
be said that he was a non-conformer to the end.
In death, as in life, he did not seem to belong dis-
tinctly anywhere, or he did not find the place where
he belonged.
Sterling Hart read the burial service over the
shattered and disfigured dead, and himself gave
over to the wife the last sign and the only comfort
left to her, — a handful of bright, black hair; upon
it lay the gray lock which had crossed Dane's
young head.
Sterling Hart thought of everything. Nothing
was overlooked or undone. All the chances of
war which one does not discuss with the be-
reaved, Cara's kinsman had considered thoroughly.
Against every freak of fate, which it was neither
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in her nature nor experience to imagine, he had
protected her. He sheltered her from every shock,
from every care; he spared her all the pangs he
could. If, when he buried Chanceford Dane, he
believed in his great, honest heart that she was re-
moved from the surest and the most incurable pain
of all, Carolyn will never know.
Against the preacher's mighty tenderness she
leaned without knowing it, as unconsciously, as
inevitably, as upon the everlasting arms of the
sacred metaphor. Her mind and heart were not
occupied with her cousin. She mourned her hus-
band, and reared her child, and began to turn the
unread pages of widowhood slowly. On Sundays
her sad feet, like those of other desolate women,
carried her to the country churchyard. She re-
mained in the nasturtium cottage as the climbing
blossoms clung to the white walls. She had set her
tendrils there. *
For a time such methods of presenting her pe-
cuniary circumstances to her mind as it was possi-
ble for a truthful man to pursue sufficed her; but
Sterling Hart knew that this could not last long.
He stood between her and the facts, ingeniously
averting the time when her grief would yield to her
practical sense, and her pride and intelligence unite
against him. º
Soon after her husband's death, her maid Kath-
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
leen returned and attached herself to Mrs. Dane.
Whether Kathleen had left her waiter, or he her,
no one asked; but that he drank madly every-
body knew. The procession of cheap cooks filed
out of the nasturtium cottage; the affectionate
face of the loyal family servant slipped in, and
Carolyn reassumed that measure of domestic com-
fort which after all goes so much farther to make
life endurable than a bereaved person is willing
to admit.
To her at this time came, on one excuse or an-
other, her country neighbor, Nannie Hops. Nan-
nie in a way cherished a genuine attachment for
Mrs. Dane. This dated back to the era of art
portfolios, and the gown of gray and white which
Miss Sterling had honored Nannie by wearing
on her betrothal day. But that was not the whole
story.
Against the brutal scandal which had well-nigh
swept the “native" belle of Balsam Groves off her
pretty feet, Mrs. Dane had set herself with the
quiet force of her still powerful social influence.
She had fought for Nannie persistently, with the
indifference to popular opinion which was the priv-
ilege of her caste. She had trampled on the slan-
der with a scorn equaled only by her determina-
tion. Nannie thought that she would have given
her saddened life for Mrs. Dane.
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
It was more than a year by several months after
the death of Chanceford Dane when there befell
in late October one of the most memorable storms
that the East Shore has known in recent days.
It set in slowly, having threatened for forty-eight
hours, and reached its climax with the ferocity of
the deliberate. The sun had not been visible for
two days, and the sky presented a mask like gray
felt. The sense of a dying year was everywhere.
The sumac and ivy which embellished the boul-
ders left by a fine taste undisturbed in the great
places of the summer people, burned dully, and
the yellow maples that bordered the village roads
stood in rows, like torches half extinguished; many
of them were bared before the storm came on, and
all day the air had been thick with the ruins of the
remainder. Driving, dizzy leaves slapped one in
the face if one turned against the wind, and piled
under foot on sidewalks and over the long avenues,
— chiefly deserted and closed, but still open here
and there for a few lingerers on the coast that is
earliest sought, latest left, and most beloved of
all our pleasure shores.
The temper of the storm was gloomy in the ex-
treme, and there was, from the first, Something sin-
ister about it. In the afternoon the blow mounted
to an ominous gale. The offshore fishermen (for
there were a few who still pursued their natural
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
calling in this land of luxury, where the “native”
fattened on the city strangers) flapped down in
oilskins and rubber boots beyond the life-saving
station and below the great cliffs of the Sterling
place to see to their dories. These picturesque
figures hauled on their mooring lines to tauten
them, and yelled to one another—a fisherman
shouts, but does not speak— through the roar of
wind and surf: —
“There's goin’ to be a breeze o' wind.”
By three o'clock the telephone wires began to
go down. Before dusk it was raining wildly. All
the afternoon the cliffs were black with people
watching the sea. This raged with an infuriated
will, which was as if it were heavy with an unac-
complished purpose, malign and unthwarted; or if
benign, too inscrutable for human intelligence. All
day the water line trembled with scudding schoon-
ers and sloops, reefed to the last possible stitch,
and laboring painfully. Everything caught out,
got in, if it could; and nothing that was in went
out. Every harbor from Boston to Portland was
full; after two o'clock no steamer left her dock.
The staggering sails on the horizon grew fewer.
One white sloop, that ventured too much canvas,
drove before the wind for a while, and suddenly
went down, bow first. She sank as a stone sinks
that a boy has tossed off a wharf; and it was a week
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
before anything was known of her. One of the
fishermen in Balsam Cove pushed back his drip-
ping sou'wester, and said to his mate:–
“Nawthin' but one o’ them dum furriners or
blarsted coasters will monkey 'round in this here
to-night, you bet.”
The houses, like the ships, were reefed. Every
blind was fastened, every door locked. Nothing
that could give the wind a chance to slap was left
carelessly at its mercy. Carolyn had done every-
thing that she could think of to keep the cottage
dry and fast. She was sitting in her husband's
office, where there was a fire. Now and then she
spoke cheerfully to Kathleen in the kitchen through
half-opened doors.
The little boy had been given his supper, and
his mother was beginning to undress him before
the fire, for there was none in the bedrooms, and
the night was cold. The collie was asleep upon
the rug beside the child. Joyce, in his little white
nightgown, with his yellow curls, made Murillo
cherubs of himself against the birch light, pass-
ing from one round warm pose to another, each
charming, and all happy.
Joyce had the maturity of only children who
are shut in to the society of sensitive mothers.
For a little fellow he was a large talker, and he had
the Curious, interrogative temper frequent in boys
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of alert intelligence, and unbearable to every one
but parents. He pelted his mother with questions
as he would have pelted her with pebbles or nas-
turtiums.
“Mum—mumma 2 Is God a zhentleman?”
“Joyce, I told you before. You must not talk
too much about God. It is n’t nice for little boys
to joke about him.”
“No, but Mumma, is God a zhentleman?”
“Mamma can't answer such silly questions. She
does n’t know much more about God than you do,
Joyce.”
“Oh, I know all about him,” insisted the child.
“I say my pwayers to him, don't I? Boys don't
talk to people he don't know. Say, Mumma, is n’t
God a zhentleman?”
“Listen to the storm, Joyce. There! Hark!
Aren't you glad we’re not out there in one of
those ships? Kneel down and say your prayers
and tell God so.”
“Clyde gotta say his pvayers ºf I do,” objected
Joyce. -
“Very well. Clyde may say his prayers, too.
Come, Clyde.”
The boy and the dog dropped obediently to
knees and haunches. Joycerolled his curls upon his
mother's lap. With eyes wide open, and one fire-
painted cheek upon her hand, he began: —
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
“Now I lay me down to sleep—” but there
stopped short.
“I raver sing 'em. May n't I sing 'em? I like
song pvayers better ºn talk pwayers. Mumma,
is God a 2hentleman Ż"
“I don't know,” said Carolyn, boldly.
The child whisked over on her lap and stared
into the fire. In a pretty plaintive soprano he be-
gan to sing: —
“Now I lay me down to sleep,
All vose ships sail on 'e deep — ”
At this point his devotions came to an abrupt
end. With solemn eyes and flaming cheeks he
stamped his bare foot upon the rug.
“Mumma P Mumma! I don’t b'lieve God 7s a
zhentleman —sending such a norful storm on all
vose ships!”
The nasturtium cottage shook in the blast, and
the boy began to tremble. Carolyn cuddled and
comforted him; she was one of the women who
are born to cuddle and comfort, — a gift by no
means bestowed on all mothers, – and as soon as
he was asleep she wrapped him and carried him
upstairs to bed. When she came down and re-
sumed her solitary chair by the office fire, she found
the collie tramping the room restlessly, and whin-
ing at the uncurtained windows.
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
“There's rockets!” cried Kathleen, running in
from the kitchen. “It’s a ship! She's struck some-
where! What an awful night to be droonin’ in 1”
The dog stood up like a person, with his fore
paws on the window sill, and gazed seaward anx-
iously. He looked curiously tall, and unnatural;
his sable hair bristled, and his ears went down.
Angered because he could see nothing through the
darkness, or possibly for some other reason, he
began to growl.
“Oh, the poor min! The poor, poor min l’
sobbed Kathleen, wringing her sympathetic Irish
hands. At this moment the old brass knocker hit
the front door hurriedly, and a familiar voice
cried : — *
“Mrs. Danel Mrs. Dane! Let me in l’’ The vis-
itor was Nannie, who pushed in, dripping and
excited, in her long raincoat, with the hood over
her head.
“There's a schooner ashore | She's struck just
off your father's place! The whole town is on the
cliffs. I can't stay still. Nobody can. I'm going.
Leave the baby with Kathleen, and come, too.
Come!”
On the impulse of the moment Carolyn caught
on her own raincoat, and followed Nannie into
the storm. It was not raining as heavily as it had
been, but the gale was approaching a hurricane,
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
and it now appeared that fog was added to the
perils of the night. This is not common with a
gale of that character, but it sometimes happens.
The two women ran over the Sterling avenue,
and out upon the cliffs. Each in her own way, both
were sea girls, and the passion of the sea was on
them. They held each other's hands as they ran,
and pushed silently against the wall of the wind.
Carolyn noticed, after a time, that the collie had
followed her. Clyde was a sea dog, and could no
more be kept away from a wreck than other people.
As Nannie had said, the whole town was out,
and the cliffs were alive with moving human figures.
Some one had built a bonfire, and patches of glare
contended with blocks of gloom. From the life-
saving station below the Cove a wagon was rush-
ing with apparatus. Fishermen were bellowing
wildly:-
“It’s one o' them yellow-pine coasters! Blowed
clean outen her course—God help her!”
Then another answered:—
“Look at her! Look at her | Look! She's
struck bows on Sterling's reef! See! See
They've stopped sending rockets. They've used
'em all up!”
“God A'mighty!” said a very old fisherman,
slowly. “Hear 'em I Hear 'em! What's the good
o' yellin' like that? Ain't we doin’ all we Ken £º
2. ' I92
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
Mrs. Dane and Nannie got out upon the cliff's
edge, and clung together silently. The dog stood
trembling with excitement beside them, and the
three watched the tremendous scene which had
brought the village to the spot.
Upon the forked tongue of the rock known as
Sterling's reef, a hundred feet below the piazza of
the summer people, the toiler of the sea lay pound-
ing in the breakers. She was a yellow-pine coaster,
as the omnivoyant eye of the fisherman had dis-
cerned, bringing her cargo from some Southern
port — in Florida, it might be. The gale had
beaten her out of her course; the fog had blinded
her out of her reckonings, and she had struck just
off the great chasm — as cruel a spot as could be
found upon the East Shore for a boat to batter her
brains out. The cliff was not sheer, but ragged,
and now slippery with spray, and its slope could
hardly be said to hold a fighting chance for a
climbing life.
It lacked but a little of full tide, and the shock
of the breakers on the granite was something
hardly to be imagined by softer shores. The
schooner rocked like a chip, and her lights looked
as small as candles, seen through spray and fog.
She hammered on the reef desperately, as if she
had a mind of her own, and were trying to hew a
footing for herself, on which to hold like a thing
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
of the land. Cries came up, but they were inar-
ticulate. Cries went down, but the throat of the
gale swallowed them. No vocabulary was possible
between rescuers and perishing but that contained
in the signals of the life-saving service.
The apparatus had now come up, piled upon a
wagon, dashed by road and avenue, and tearing over
the beautiful Sterling lawns. The schoonerseemed
to roll and stretch her hands to snatch the slender
line that carried the first strand of rescue to her.
The breakers smote her so that one would have
said: “She is swamping.”
Carolyn clutched at Nannie's shoulder, and sud-
denly sank down upon the cliff.
“It makes me faint!” she gasped. “There is a
man washed over ! I don't think anybody has seen
him. He will be dashed to death in the ravine. I
cannot — I cannot look any longer.” *
“I did n’t see any man,” soothed Nannie. “I am
sure you must be mistaken. I don't believe any-
body is drowned. I don't believe anybody is going
to be drowned. I think she struck and wedged
wherself somehow. I will go and ask.”
Nannie ran, and Mrs. Dane sat still. She hid her
face on the collie's neck, and sobbed a little from
sheer weakness and excitement. She thought,
“He is some other woman's husband; and she
will never see him again.”
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
The wreck and the setting of the scene had un-
nerved her. She sat shivering by the closed and
deserted house of her old home; in fact, she had
crawled up against the foot of the eastern piazza
— the piazza where she had sat with Dane, and
watched the sun rise on the night when the young
doctor had saved her father; she in her long pearl
cloak with its rose lining, and furred edge trembling
with every breath; he with his lowered voice, his
wooing eyes; and both hidden from one another in
the shelter of that silence which precedes acknow-
ledged love. Her mind worked as that of a very
young person will when one is overborne by sor-
row or care too early in life; she experienced as
much perplexity as pain.
She naïvely said to herself, “Why, I used to
think this was a pleasant world!” Her little boy's
question seemed to her to have been let loose on
the brutal gale, and to come thundering in on
every death-dealing wave: “Is God a gentleman?
Is God a gentleman?” She did not look again at
the breakers where she had seen the man washed
down from the schooner. She said, “He must be
beaten to death by this time.”
While she sat, for the moment sunken in her
own sensitiveness, the crew or a part of them were
got ashore upon the life line. She did not watch
the thrilling scene, but covered her face from the
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
sight of it, and wished that she might never look
upon the Sea again.
“Don’t take it so, Mrs. Dane! Don't!” said
Nannie, suddenly appearing in her long, wet coat.
“I’m sure there was no man washed over. Nobody
thinks so but you. And, dear — listen | It's just
as I told you. There won't be anybody drowned.
Three have come over on the lines already. Cap'n
and the mate won't leave the ship, and they say
the cap'n's son's aboard, too. But they expect every
minute she will — Oh, there ! Look! Look! See
f/a/ /’’
Nannie cried out, and Carolyn, quivering, got
to her feet. The two women clung together, sob-
bing as women will, in tense moments, while the
wrecked schooner yawed in the breakers, rose like
a rearing horse, and went headlong, far upon the
reef. A tremendous comber dashed her high and
dry, and fixed her there.
Now, above the cannonade of the sea, the voice
of the very old fisherman uprose shrilly: —
“What did I tell yer? She's run her nose in
tight. To blazes with the breeches buoy | Every
mother's son of 'em can walk ashore. I bet my dory
she’ll hold till ebb.”
“'T ain't a big crew,” he added; “just a handful.
If every soul of 'em ain't walkin' Balsam streets
Come mornin', I'll eat my sou'wester.”
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
“There!” cried Nannie. “What did I tell you ?
Now they’ll walk ashore on the bowsprit. Mr. Hart
is down there,” added Nannie, abruptly. “He’s
trying to help. I saw him with the fishermen.”
“He always is trying to help,” answered Carolyn.
“He can't live if he does n’t. If God is anything
like him — ”
Her excited thought worked on : “Is God a
gentleman 2 Is God like Sterling Hart?”
“All the same,” she said dully, “there is a man;
he was washed over. And God is letting him die
down there.”
She put out her hand, with the instinct of the
lonely and the dog loving, to seek comfort in her
collie. She was startled to find that Clyde was no
longer beside her; nor, indeed, was he to be seen.
She called, but he did not come, and did not an-
swer. She got to her feet and ran along the edge
of the cliff, whistling and shouting his name as she
ran. Then Nannie saw her throw up her hands,
and thought she was crying out loudly, “He has
gone down! Clyde is halfway down the cliff —
Clydel Come back! Come &acá, sir! Oh, he will
be washed into the surf! He will be drowned, too!”
Impetuous and fearless, Carolyn started to fol-
low the dog. The spray spattered a hundred feet
from the caldron below, and hit her, as she groped
for the narrow footway that wound across the cliff.
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
It was the boundary beyond high-water line de-
manded by the winter people from the summer
people; in this case seldom used except in evidence
of possession, as a street railway runs a car over an
abandoned track once in so often to preserve its
charter.
The path, if such it could be called, was nearly
three feet wide, irregular and jagged, now wet and
slippery with spray. Clinging like a goat, the col-
lie had followed this for some fifty feet, and then
abruptly left it. Carolyn hurried after him, calling
as she went. But she had not gone far when she
was stopped by a tremendous grip upon her arm.
Sterling Hart rose above her like some primeval
figure carved out of granite. He swung a lantern
in his hand, and she could see his commanding
face. He wore oilskins and a sou'wester, like the
fishermen, and looked a demigod, born of sea and
shore. Without a wasted word he turned Carolyn
around on the narrow ledge and sternly bade her
go back.
“But Clyde will be drowned l’ she protested,
sobbing.
“I will find the dog. Go back!”
“And there is a man down there. The man is
drowned ’’
The very old fisherman had come to the edge
of the cliff, and was looking over. The preacher
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
curved a trumpet of his hands and made out to
be heard through the thunder.
“John Tobey, come down I Get some boys and
come ! There is trouble here.”
With the shouts of the sea loving and the sea
daring, the fishermen scrambled after the preacher.
Carolyn, from above, could track them by the
swinging of their lanterns. Halfway down the cliff
the lanterns paused. The surf, leaping fifty feet,
extinguished one. The noise of the breakers was
as frightful as it was deafening, but cleaving it
sharply, she heard, or thought she heard, the bark
of her own dog.
“I vum,” said old John Tobey. “There he is
The critter's there! What's he got in tow?”
Drenched by spray, and slipping as he strug-
gled, teeth set in an arm, in a shoulder, in a hip,
anyhow, anywhere he could, the collie was trying
to drag a human figure out of the reach of the
surf. This was dashing already dangerously near
the man, and the dog himself was hard put to it
to keep his footing. When the fishermen came
down Clyde growled. He suspiciously scanned
the preacher in his oilskins, and reluctantly yielded
to him the broken and unconscious man.
Clyde stood before his mistress, panting and
drenched, pleasantly wagging his tail. The dog
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seemed to smile. Carolyn laid her wet cheek on
his wet head and kissed him girlishly. When
she lifted her face, the preacher and the fisher-
men were passing by her. They did not speak to
her.
There was a little pile of dead, wet leaves blown
against the piazza, and on this the rescuers silently
laid their burden down. Carolyn saw that they
carried an elderly man; his short, drenched hair
was quite white, and his face was averted. One
limp arm lay out on the grass. His clothes were
badly torn from him, and he was so mangled that
she turned her eyes away and shuddered.
Her natural self-possession had now come back
to her, and with it her natural sympathy.
“Is he dead P” she asked quietly.
“He’s battered to jelly,” said old John Tobey,
“but he's a livin' man.”
“Who is going to take care of him P” urged
Carolyn, anxiously lifting her tender face to her
cousin. “Somebody must. My house is nearest.
Bring him there. I will do the best I can.”
“Not on any account,” replied the preacher,
decidedly. “My house is nearest. We will take
him there. This is a case for surgeons and a hos-
pital, whichever way you look at it — but he can't
go now. Boys! This way. Some of you fresh
hands that are n’t tired out! Bring this poor fel-
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
low with me. We will give him all the chance he
has.”
The tragedy of that October gale, like the short
story demanded by the modern reader, had its
happy ending. The remainder of the wrecked
crew walked ashore on the bowsprit, as the old
fisherman had foretold, and “every mother's son”
was saved. The fate of the stranger whom the Sea
cast upon the Sterling cliff was not so promptly
decided. He lingered for some weeks in the Bal-
sam hospital with a broken leg and mangled head
and face; and went upon the dangerous list, but
yielded to treatment, and was discharged—to what
fate nobody knew. When the preacher, who had
conscientiously followed the case, came out from
the city to call at the hospital one dark December
day, he found the patient gone. He did not return
to Balsam Groves, but sunk out of sight as he had
sunk from the schooner into the breakers of such
life as the friendless and the crippled know.
To Carolyn the whole episode was as poignant
as it was painful. Its impressions lasted a long
while. The storm, the wreck, the surf, the cast-
away crawling like a broken lizard upon the rocks,
dragging his shattered limb to save his — who
knew how worthless, how hopeless 2–life; the
dog, daring destruction to rescue this unknown
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specimen of the master, man; the unconscious
body as it lay upon the wet, dead leaves against
the piazza of her old home — these flashlights
faded but slowly from her brain and heart. The
individual perished, but the type grew more and
more to her aroused and uneasy interrogation.
The cruelty of the sea seemed to her scarcely
more savage than the teeth of life. Carolyn was
no theologian, but the unanswered question of the
ages began to gain ground with her: Why? Why?
If “God were a gentleman" — why?
She was beginning to learn that though the
first pang of widowhood may be loneliness, the
worst is despairing doubt. Lost happiness is easier
to bear than lost faith. She felt her lot severe, for
she was young, and she had known great joy. But
the education of Sorrow is never so thorough as
when it is given to the nature that has the love
genius and the genius of suffering; for these twain
are one. With the docility of a sweet woman,
Carolyn spelled her lessons out. Although she
could not know it, she was about to meet the move-
ment of events which would tear out half the pages
of her widowed life, and insert the blank spaces on
which experience inscribes the unimagined or the
unimaginable.
CHAPTER XIII
DOUCE MARRIOT lay among her great pillows and
looked at the loves carved and gilded upon the
posts of her Empire bedstead. The little glittering
figures carried garlands which met above her on
the headboard. At the foot they carried nothing, but
sat in groups of two, and whispered, kissing. The
room was large and ornate; everything about Mrs.
Marriot had always been ornate. There is a sim-
plicity of principle which extends itself to the de-
tails of life, and the absence of which tells upon
them. The bed-chamber was decorated in yellows,
rising to the gold light, relieved by tapestry panels;
on the tapestry knights and ladies rode beneath
and through oak leaves, dead and brown. Across
the room from the bed's foot a mirror flashed from
velvet rug to frescoed ceiling. The frame of this
glass was swathed in tulle below its parted lace
draperies, and thus gave to the complexion that
softness which women love, and demand of their
mirrors, by any device that art can offer.
Douce Marriot glanced across the gilded loves
at the reflection of her too experienced face within
the glass.
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
“I am a mummy,” she said, “already.”
The woman of pleasure recoiled from the image
of the face and body whose celebrated charms had
left a trail of broken hearts and wasted homes be-
hind her. She had been ill but a week — a foolish
illness, an exasperating thing brought upon her
by the neglect of a housekeeper (summarily dis-
charged), whose fatal work could not be undone.
The house was cold, the room unsunned, the mat-
tress damp — who knew what?— and the first of
May that year was as raw as the grave. The mis-
tress of the most elaborate place upon the East
Shore, coming out with her usual business punc-
tuality, had been confronted by the great tax-gath-
erer, whom no evasion or persuasion may escape.
One of the racing pneumonias which are the ter-
ror of New England had attacked the superb
vigor of Douce Marriot's beautiful body, and that
which she had called her soul found itself face to
face with the unpleasant circumstance of death.
Her keen intelligence was not to be deceived, and
since the first forty-eight hours of her illness she
had not expected that she would recover.
Her servants and her husband, important to her
in the order of this going, attended her dutifully.
The house seemed to brim over with relays of nurses,
relieving one another with the regularity of the
severe or dangerous case. Experts from the city
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
consulted every day beside the gilded bed, and the
old Balsam doctor turned his less dangerously sick
patients over to a colleague, and slept every night
at the great house. Mrs. Marriot was aghast at the
inconceivable position in which she found herself.
That she must some time die like common peo-
ple, she had, of course, been obliged to admit; but
it had never suggested itself to her that this vul-
gar outcome of a life of pleasure could occur be-
fore one was old and ugly,– too old to arouse
admiration, or that which she had been pleased
to call love. Upon the sex intoxication she had
fed all her days. Had she lived long enough to
exhaust its interest, she thought she would have
minded dying less. Death seemed to her a high-
wayman, with hands upon her throat, and about
to rob her of inexhaustible treasure, — her per-
sonal capacity for joy. Who else, she reasoned,
had her sumptuous resources P Why could not
some colder, plainer, uglier woman die 2 Some
one without her genius for playing the great game
between man and woman 2 Some one who knew
less of the delight of living; perhaps—ah, yes, her
honest self admitted — some one who bore less
of the responsibility of inflicted pain.
She was not fretful or exacting. Her polished
manner and her liking to be liked followed her to
the end. Her nurses and servants found her con-
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siderate, and her husband, shaken by a real grief,
haunted her sickroom.
She put out her already wasted hand, and
he, sitting close beside her, took it in both of
his.
“Harry P” She spoke with difficulty, but with
a distinctness which indicated that she would fight
for her power of expression to the last. “Harry,
you are very good to me. I don't deserve it. Harry,
listen. There are two people I must see. Go send
them to me. Let Mrs. Dane come first. I have a
word to say to Mrs. Dane. It will not take me
long; and then, oh, then I must see Sterling Hart.
Don't let there be any talk about it,” she added
shrewdly. “Bring them separately, and quietly;
no fuss. I don't think there is any too much time
to spare.”
“I will see to it myself,” said Harry Marriot,
choking. He pressed his quivering lips upon the
hand that held his marriage ring. He cared for
Douce as if she had been a better wife.
Mrs. Dane passed the open portières of the blue
velvet room without looking in. She had obeyed
the sacred summons of the dying, but she winced
away from it in every nerve. The face of the but-
ler, too poignantly recalled, seemed to her gro-
tesque, like a gargoyle, and to have what she
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
would have called the assumed unconsciousness
of one. She trod the soundless stairs reluctantly,
and entered the sickroom not without marked
dignity of manner; but at the sight of the sinking
woman her natural tenderness of heart overcame
her. She sat down beside Douce Marriot's bed as
if it had been that of any other sick person, and
murmured something inarticulate in the way of
sympathy. Instinctively her hand stirred towards
the sufferer, but it fell upon her black dress, and
there remained. -
“This is very good of you,” began Douce Mar-
riot, as if she had been receiving in her drawing-
room. “But I expected it. I thought you’d come.
You are made that way. And I,” she added slowly,
“I am made the other way. That is how it came
about. I can't talk — not very much. You see.
But I sent for you because I had to. There's
something I must tell you. I had to send. I've
got to say it.”
A little gold French clock on the mantel above
the flickering fireplace ticked delicately between
these labored sentences, as if it supplied a punctu-
ation imperative upon them—the Solemn punctu-
ation of time.
“It’s not a nice thing to have to say—about
one's self,” continued Mrs. Marriot, as distinctly
as she could. “But it is the truth. Mrs. Dane,
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
your husband was not to blame — that day. It
was not Dr. Dane's fault. It was mine.”
Between the ticking of the gold clock Douce
Marriot heard one sharp gasp — no more. Caro-
lyn's face had gone as white as the folds of tulle
upon the mirror, and looked as if it would crush
as easily. But she showed no other sign of agita-
tion.
“It was entirely mine,” repeated Mrs. Marriot.
Her head, sunken in her deep pillow, tossed fever-
ishly once or twice, but she was as composed as
the other, and her physical weakness made this
fact, somehow, remarkable.
“I ought to have told you before,” she added.
“But I did n't. A gentleman does n’t explain at
the expense of a woman — sometimes not even to
his wife. He did n’t, — did he P”
Carolyn shook her head.
“I thought not. It would n’t be like him. It's
a pity. But it can't be helped. I’m going to die.
You know that, don't you? Well, I am. And I
had to tell you first. I had to, - don't you see P”
“I see,” said Carolyn Dane. §
“The whole blame is mine,” reiterated Mrs. Mar-
riot. “When the devil was sick, the devil a monk
would be. I found it inconvenient to die without
easing you . . . of that. I never did anything I
. regretted more. Made up the way you are,
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THOUGH LIFE Us DO PART
you must have taken it . . . hard. Relieve his
memory of that. He does n’t deserve it. Lay it on
me— put it all on mine, when I am . . . floating
about . . . a clammy ghost. Lord!” said Douce
Marriot, “what a devil of a thing it is to die!”
But Carolyn sat still with her face in her hands.
For that first moment her intense personal emo-
tion isolated her from the world and all that was
therein; the living or the dying were alike to her,
spectres with which she had no concern. Then
she uncovered her eyes, and they turned to the
panting figure on the bed.
“After all,” she said gently, “you must have
borne the harder end — of this.”
Douce Marriot regarded her solemnly. If she
had wished to be forgiven, the woman of the world
would not say so. She felt that she had received
a nobler treatment than she had the right to ex-
pect; but she did not put it to herself in this
phrase. There are certain high-minded adjectives
not apt to be used except by natures capable of
that which they represent, and this may be called
one of them. The sick woman closed her eyes be-
fore the subject wearily; and Carolyn crept away.
In the hall she met her cousin, coming from the
great blue drawing-room. He looked something
startled at seeing her where she was, but asked
no questions. They met and passed with a strong
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
and silent hand grasp, and the preacher went on,
and up the stairs. -
“I see that you have no strength to talk. Can
you put in a few words what it is you wish to say
to me?” Sterling Hart sat by the elaborate bed,
and looked with a solemn pity at its occupant.
“It is about this business of dying,” said Mrs.
Marriot. “You understand the subject; I do not.
What is one to do under the circumstances P.”
“Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, His only
Son, our Saviour,” replied Mr. Hart, devoutly.
“Oh, I have always been a good churchwoman,”
pleaded Mrs. Marriot. “I never doubted the doc-
trines. . . . Is that all?” -
“No, that is not all. You should repent of your
sins.” -
“My—what?”
“I said “your sins.’”
“Oh, you mean my—indiscretions? My follies,
I suppose. I admit that I have been imprudent.”
“It is a difference in definition,” replied the
preacher. “You have sent for me. I am a clergy-
man of the Christian faith. I cannot play with
words or blunt the facts to you. If you do not wish
to hear the truth, I can do nothing for you.”
“A dying woman You are hard I"
“No! No! God forbid! Not hard. Only honest,
only true.”
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
“The follies of a gay life! Every society woman
makes some mistakes.”
“I do not speak of follies. I do not refer to your
mistakes. I am talking about your sins. I say you
must repent of them before you die.”
“I never was spoken to so before,” Douce Mar-
riot whispered, “not in all my life.”
Panting, she tried to struggle up against her
pillows, but fell back. She looked at the gilded
loves upon the foot of the bed, and quoted with
a dreary Smile : —
“What became of them, I wonder,
When the kissing had to stop P”
In the long mirror, between the folds of chalk-
pale tulle her own shrunken face gazed back at
her.
“I am a Protestant priest,” replied the preacher,
kindly. “I have no right to force a confession
from you. You are an intelligent woman; you can
deal with God directly.”
“God?” she repeated. “God | What's that £ I
have been interested in other matters. God, -sins,
—repenſing?” She repeated the three words with
a curious intonation. “It is a foreign language,”
she said, with one of her shrewd smiles.
Mr. Hart looked across the gilded bed at the
knights and ladies who rode forever through dead
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
leaves upon the tapestry. His eyes assumed a
strange luminosity, as if he saw nothing without
them, but dwelt on images which came from
within.
“If your time is as short as you think,” he
said in a changed voice, “I ought to tell you the
whole truth, or none of it. I ought to tell you
the utter truth, or I ought to hold my peace for-
ever.”
“The truth!” she gasped. “The truth / I want
it. I want just that. Tell me what you mean by
that word ‘sin.” I am a reputable woman. I have
never compromised myself.”
“No,” said Sterling Hart, unexpectedly. “You
have been too prudent to compromise yourself.
Yourself you have protected. Others you have not
protected. There are women with ruined reputa-
tions who are less to blame, in the sight of God,
than you. You have gone to the very verge of
evil — as far as you could—without hurling your-
self down. You have played with the greatest
danger of a human soul and a human body. You
have made this the business of your life.”
He was stopped by a low, protesting cry.
“Let me call your husband, your nurses!” urged
the preacher, himself almost as pale as she, with
the tension of the scene. “You are too weak for
this. I will stop where I am. I will offer a prayer
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
for you—if you wish me to-and leave you at
once. I will not go on.”
But she commanded, “Go on! Go onl”
“It is all in a few words,” he explained. His
face worked with an infinite compassion, while yet
it recoiled with an exquisite abhorrence.
“You have played with the natures—with the
lower natures—of men as if they had been chil-
dren's toys. You have broken the hearts of women
as if they had been shells beneath your feet. You
have made yourself a drunkard of admiration as a
man becomes a drunkard of wine. You had the
gift of beauty, and you degraded it; of charm, and
you debased it. You have been a light woman.
This is a sin. The things that you call imprudences
are sins. Your indiscretions—they are sins. Re-
pent of them: there is time. Call them by their
true names — it is too late to call them by any
other. This is one of the things,” added the
preacher, brokenly, “that Jesus Christ lived and
died for . . . to understand a position like yours
. . . to forgive . . . to be gentle . . . to overlook,
to forget, to reinstate you in your own Soul . . .
to restore a precious thing you miss—your self-
respect.”
Then she cried out upon him, “My self-respect?
I lost it so long, so long ago! If I had my life to
live over, — if I could begin again — Pray!” said
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
Douce Marriot, peremptorily. “You are a good
man. You speak the truth. You are not afraid to.
Pray for me. Whatever this repenting means . . .
obtain it for me. I am very ill. I cannot . . . un-
derstand theology. But I am sorry. I am sorry
for . . . almost everything.”
So the preacher fell upon his knees, and prayed
for the soul of Douce Marriot; and the loves upon
the gilded bed, that had never witnessed anything
like this before, seemed to stop whispering and
kissing to listen to him. It was the prayer of a
great man, as well as a good priest, and it wrestled
mightily for the woman of this world with the
forces of the other.
Her husband had stolen into the room, and
knelt also, weeping, by the bedside. Douce Marriot
put out her feeble hand. She was quite self-pos-
sessed, and had a strange expression.
“Harry,” she said quietly, “don’t cry. I wish I’d
been . . . a better wife.”
As the healer of souls went out of the sickroom
he met a healer of bodies on the way to it. En-
grossed in the agitation of the scene through which
he had passed, Sterling Hart passed the man with-
out a glance, bowing abstractedly. The physician
was a stranger to him, but he knew that strangers
had been called to the case, whose hopelessness
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
he had taken for granted from the husband's re-
port. When he had passed the man, it occurred
to him that this was none of the eminent city ex-
perts, and as he stood at the front door he looked
back.
The physician was mounting the stairs slowly
and with difficulty. He was evidently lame, -an
elderly man, and he stooped.
The clergyman observed the doctor carelessly,
and passed on. But the butler followed, and
said: —
“It’s the new one, sir; it's Dr. Royal. The old
one from Balsam, he's gone to bury his mother,
and he sent this one instead, sir. Maybe he’ll be
doin' something for her, do you think, sir?”
The preacher answered absently. He gazed at
the servant without seeing him, and went out into
the cold May noon. As the greatest are the most
modest men, so the consecrated are the self-dis-
trustful. Sterling Hart recalled the intense scene
of the morning with sensitive challenge of his own
spiritual perception and power. Had he gone too
far, or not far enough? Had he prepared the woman
for another world, or only shortened her life in
this 2
The healer of bodies limped on up the stairs
and entered the sickroom. Dr. Royal sat down
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
beside the patient, and touched his finger to her
pulse. He did not immediately speak. Mrs. Mar-
riot opened her eyes with a flicker of interest.
“Oh,” she said. “Another stranger ? Well, do
your best, or worst. It does n't signify.”
CHAPTER XIV
THE miracles are of every age and always with us.
Douce Marriot did not die. The case, considered
practically hopeless by the eminent experts, took
an incredible turn. Whether the healer of souls or
the healer of bodies wrought the marvel, no pru-
dent person was prepared to say. Moral invigora-
tion is a lordly stimulant, and has been known to
do great deeds. What we call the repentance of a
human soul is a medicine whose place has never
been classified in any materia medica; and that
Mrs. Marriot had actually partaken of this heroic
remedy it proved (as soon as anything could be
proved) difficult for the scoffer to deny.
The elderly stranger, he who had but a few
weeks since begun to practice in Balsam Groves,
quietly refrained from claiming his share of re-
cognition for the recovery of the patient. But it
was whispered about that this modesty was, as
modesty so often is, the mask of power; and it
soon became understood that the new doctor was
of a younger professional faith than that by which
the great houses of the East Shore were accus-
tomed to live or die; in fact, he belonged to a
different school of therapeutics, and so it might
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
have happened that he gained the case which his
more conservative colleagues had lost. At all
events, from whatever cause, Douce Marriot got
well.
Then there was witnessed one of the splendid
spiritual phenomena which sometimes flash across
the skies even of our cold days. From a woman
in the depth of her being devoid of principle, Mrs.
Marriot convalesced into a devotee. With her
natural acuteness she perceived that nothing
could altogether restore to her the confidence of
her own sex or the respect of the other. She went
So far as to feel that she must content herself with
the affection of her husband and the forgiveness
of her God. She reconstructed her life rapidly,
with tremendous enthusiasms. She was like a
builder who begins at the top of his house. She
did not climb a moral ladder, but took a spiritual
flight. If she had been a Catholic—so profound
was her renewal — she would have entered a con-
vent. Her church provided no such solution for
her, and with something of the picturesqueness
which belonged to her she did the most appealing,
the most dramatic thing within her reach. The
East Shore smiled when it went forth that Douce
Marriot had joined the Salvation Army.
In process of time the penitent forced the skep-
ticism of society into astonished respect. She
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
passed through her moods and phases of spiritual
experiment like any mentally undisciplined and
emotional woman who had never before given
life and the world a thought, except through the
brain cells of her own egoism. At first she went
so far as to don the uniform, and in a poke bon-
net, with a tambourine, she shared the spectacular
services of the strange people with whom she had
chosen to ally herself.
In due course she passed this stage, and reached
a more thoughtful one, whereon, in fact, she per-
manently remained. Her intelligence, her energies,
and her fortune she gave over solidly to the prac-
tical work of the sincere and dedicated sect whose
simple principles of Christian faith had enlisted
her allegiance.
But her time, as much of it as he chose to com-
mand, the remodeled wife gave to her husband.
Unbelievable as it would have seemed, she became,
in a word, a home-loving woman. No decadent
fiction would find material now in Douce Marriot.
She remains to this day an unimpeachable wife.
This plain and prosaic rôle she fills with an ease
not uncommon among women of pleasure who
have renounced their follies before age has com-
pelled them to.
“People say she's got religion,” said Nannie
once to Mrs. Dane. “At first everybody laughed.
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
Now nobody does. Whatever you call it, she's got
something, and it's something you can't laugh at
if you want to.”
“Who should want to ?” replied Mrs. Dane.
But she changed the subject proudly. Nannie had
noticed that Mrs. Dane never spoke of Douce
Marriot. Nannie took this to be a sign of breeding
in her finely reared friend. She slid from the topic
gradually, herself moved by a delicacy partly nat-
ural and partly acquired from this acquaintance
which was the romance of Nannie's saddened life.
“At all events, there's no doubt of one thing,
—it was Dr. Royal who cured her. She would
have died but for his happening to be there that
day. You see, he practices differently — not the
old way. He does n't drug people to death; he
gives nature a chance, anyhow. You know Father
says: “When you say a thing's Nature, you've
touched a great subject.” With filial respect,
Nannie evolved Solomon into high-school gram-
mar. “He has helped Father—you would n't be-
lieve how much. Father thinks so much of Dr.
Royal already—more than of anybody, any doctor
since — ”
Nannie's sentence broke awkwardly, and the
girl could have cried at her faux pas; but Mrs.
Dane quickly set her at ease with the grave smile
of one who has, in some sense not shared by
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
others, or for some reason unknown to others,
become mistress of her sorrow.
“I know how fond your father was of Dr. Dane.
But if this new person can help him, this — what
did you call him 2 If this Dr. Prince can relieve
him any—”
“His name is Dr. Royal,” said Nannie, with
a glaze of severity. “Why, everybody knows. He
is getting a great deal of practice. You wouldn't
believe how popular he is already. I must say I
think his being cast up at our feet that way had
something to do with it. Everybody in Balsam
loves a shipwrecked man.”
“Oh, is there really anything in that story P”
asked Carolyn, absently. “Are they quite sure?
It never seemed to me very probable.”
“Ask Mr. Hart,” returned Nannie. “He knows.
Why, I tell you everybody knows. There is no
possible doubt about it. This is the man. He went
somewhere, after he left the hospital, and got well.
Why he should turn up and settle here — He
says it's because we saved his life. He is n’t the
sort of man you ask questions of. His leg did n't
set very well. Haven't you noticed how lame
he is P”
“I have never noticed anything about him,”
answered Mrs. Dane, wearily. “I have never seen
him that I know of — unless — if there is any-
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
thing in this dramatic story—that one night
when Clyde saved him. . . . Has Clyde seen him?”
she demanded suddenly. -
“I don't think so. No, I'm pretty sure not. . . .
Mrs. Dane P’’ said Nannie, abruptly. “What do
you suppose I’m going on this way for about the
new doctor P You know I don't gossip, don't you ?
I've had enough of that, haven't I? Has it oc-
curred to you to wonder what I am talking about
Dr. Royal for £" -
Carolyn shook her head indifferently. She found
Nannie, for once, a little tiresome that day. It was
a July day, and the two young women were sitting
on the cottage piazza screened from the street
by drapery of nasturtiums. Mrs. Dane was darn-
ing little blue stockings for Joyce, and the boy
himself was playing with the collie on the grass.
“Geet up! Geet up ! Scat Shoo! Scat! Why
don't you geet up P” screamed Joyce, shrilly. He
flung a handful of pebbles at a passing horse, and
startled the creature, who shied. Then Clyde
barked at the horse and leaped upon it, biting at
its nose.
“There he goes,” observed Nannie. She pushed
aside the green and yellow, and looked out. “That
is Dr. Royal. There he goes this minute.”
“I am sure I never saw him before,” replied Mrs.
Dane, laying down the little stocking to glance.
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THOUGH LIFE Us Do PART
“That man—on the rocks—but then I should n’t
know him, either. All I saw was — let us forget
it. It was a dreadful sight!”
“Shoo! Shoo!” screamed the boy. “Scat! Shoo!
Scat! Geet up ! Geet on l Nobody's sick in this
house ! Nobody wants you here /*
“The truth is,” observed Nannie, boldly, “I want
you to do something. I want you to do something
to help us — Father and me—and Dr. Royal. I
want you to rent him . . . I mean Dr. Dane's—
that is, your office.”
“Be so good as to explain yourself.” Mrs. Dane
brushed the little blue stocking off her lap with a
touch of hauteur, at which the village girl winced
sensitively, but she persisted.
“Old John Tobey's is no place for him; he is
very uncomfortable there, and Father wants him
in the house. He has set his heart on it, the way
he did with Doctor—before. He says he wants a
doctor handy. The trouble is, we have rented the
old office to the new dentist. We have promised
it for a year, and there we are. We can do all the
rest of it. We can take Dr. Royal for a mealer.
He can have that bedroom off of Father's. We
haven't an inch of office room for him under our
roof, anyhow you can fix it. I thought perhaps
to help Father—to please me—and then, Mrs.
Dane,” added Nannie, timidly, “he could pay
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
you something, the market value of the room. I
thought perhaps — ”
“I thank you, Nannie,” said Carolyn, moregently.
“I will consider it. I will ask Mr. Hart.”
“If you did,” retorted Nannie, “he wouldn't let
you do it.”
“But if I should agree to do it,” argued Mrs.
Dane, “if I should agree to do it first? Come again
to-morrow, Nannie. I will think it over. Tell your
father I will consider it very seriously.”
That evening she took her little boy and duti-
fully went to her cousin's house. She made the
short cut across the lawns of her old home (now
occupied by Summer strangers), and saw from a
distance that Mr. Hart was walking towards her.
The three met midway of the iron bridge — Caro-
lyn clinging to the child, with her arm around
him.
“He is afraid of it,” she pleaded, looking down
into the chasm. “I used to love it when I was his
age. But Joyce is not like me.”
Sterling Hartlifted the little fellow and carried
him over. The preacher had his happiest look.
His face was still and shining.
“You honor me, Cousin Carolyn,” he said. “I
was on my way to you. But this is better. This
pleases me. Will you go into the house? Or is
the piazza cooler P”
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“I don't care,” said Carolyn, uncomfortably. “I
have only come to tell you something. It will not
take long.”
They passed into the large, lonely house. He
led her into his study among his books.
“Cousin Sterling,” began Cara, without looking
at him, “I can't go on this way any longer. I don't
know much about business, – I never was brought
up to understand those things, – but I am sure
there was n’t enough left of my property, after my
father's — there can't be enough to support us.
Don't think I don’t guess what you have done,
all you have been, how generous, how chivalrous.
Cousin Sterling ! Cousin Sterling! I would rather
die than hurt your feelings, but I cannot go on
like this. I must do something, — I must support
myself and my child. I am going to teach draw-
ing. Nannie is getting me up a class. They call it
an Art School | " One swift, mocking smile went
up whimsically from her sad face to the preacher's
listening one. ſ
“And I am going to be visiting housekeeper
for some —for some of my old friends. An hour
a morning for each house, you know. When I get
used to it, that will be as easy as swimming. That
was Mrs. Marriot's idea. I have quite a waiting list
already. You did not think it would come to this
when you converted her, did you ?”
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But the preacher would not smile. A frowning
silence answered her.
“That is n’t all,” added Carolyn, quite distinctly.
“I have rented one of my rooms. I have rented
my husband's office to this new person, this Dr.
Royal. He is to live at Solomon Hops's,” she
went on timidly, for she was frightened at the dis-
pleasure on her cousin's commanding face. “He
will take his meals there, and he will sleep there.
This is only for office hours, and, you see, on ac-
count of the dentist, and poor Solomon can't live
without a doctor in the house, – and he offers a
very good rent, — and it pleases Nannie —” she
floundered helplessly, and went over her depth in
her broken words.
“I can't have this,” cried Sterling Hart. “I can-
not have it!” He rose to his great height, and
stood against the background of his books. The
quiet, the shelter, the thoughtfulness of the room,
its familiar atmosphere of ease and dignity, for
a moment overcame her, and she lifted to her
Cousin a piteous, homesick smile. He stretched
out his arms.
“See ” he said, “they are strong enough to
carry it all.”
But she shook her head, and weeping, left him.
He lifted the child, and in a silence that neither
broke, walked beside her across the iron bridge,
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which, still as ever, spanned the gulf between
himself and her.
Even the boy did not talk. His respect for the
ravine was too great. He shut his eyes that he
might not see it, and cuddled on the preacher's
neck, his little head curled like a Maltese spaniel's
beneath a master's chin. Joyce was always at his
best and prettiest with Mr. Hart. The elf or the
imp went out of him, and the Murillo cherub
came in. The childless man liked the fatherless,
unruly little fellow, and a big, warm hand patted
him all the way across the iron bridge.
“Mum – Mumma,” suggested Joyce, when he
had said his prayers that night, “if I were God, I'd
be like Mr. Cousin Sterling Hart. 'I ain't God,”
added the boy, argumentatively. “I know ain't's
bad grammar. You don't need to tell me fings I
know. Say, Mum – Mumma, does n’t God ever
talk bad grammar P I should fink — why, I should
fink. He’d do it zhust for fun. If I were God, you
bet I'd talk bad grammar. I'd do it every Sunday,
after shurch, Mumma.”
Dr. Royal came slowly up the path to the cot-
tage. He had walked, it seemed, from Solomon's,
and was evidently tired. The collie followed him,
sniffing at his heels. Mrs. Dane had not wit-
nessed the meeting between the man and the dog,
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which occurred at a little distance from the house;
but it struck her as doubtful whether Clyde recog-
nized in the new lodger the derelict whom he had
saved from the sea. The dog looked perplexed and
excited, a trifle sullen. He stood with one ear up
and one ear down, and studied the stranger, while
Kathleen admitted him cordially. Afterwards
Clyde came to the mistress, and said something
which she did not understand.
Mrs. Dane was sitting in the office in her
black dress. She rose as the physician entered,
and greeted him with that marked graciousness
which one assumes to conceal a reluctant wel-
come. She was pale about the mouth, but she had
her charming manner. The physician observed
her keenly.
“You are very good to consider this matter,”
he began at once. “Pray believe that I appreciate
your hospitality.”
“Let us call things by their true names from
the first,” replied Mrs. Dane, smiling cautiously.
“It is not hospitality. It is business. You need an
office, and I —” She stopped.
“You are perfectly right, Madam,” answered
Dr. Royal, quickly. “We will call everything by
its true name—if you do me the honor to admit
me as your tenant. It is a pleasant room.” He
looked about it, sighing contentedly. “A man
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could not ask a more homelike place to —to do
good work in. The thing I fear most is that the
calls of patients may annoy you. Not that I have
so very many yet. But I should be quite candid
with you. Their number is increasing. You might
find their presence troublesome.”
“On the contrary,” replied Mrs. Dane, with a
formal bow, “I am accustomed to that. I am the
widow of a physician, you remember.”
“So,” he said, “I have been told.”
Carolyn, who had up to this regarded the man
as one looks without seeing, through the film of
the emotion and the reluctance that contended
within her at the admission of a stranger to her
home, now concentrated her gaze upon him studi-
ously. She saw a middle-aged or elderly man as
gray as he at whom she had shuddered when he
was laid, the mangled prey of the hurricane, upon
the dead leaves at her feet. She saw a face bearded
as white as its hair, and blasted by suffering;
rather a gentle face, appealing, and Sad. She was
prepared to believe the story of his shipwreck
when she perceived how marred and scarred his
countenance was. He seemed to have been beaten
or shattered by physical disaster. He was, it ap-
peared, incurably lame, and limped at every step;
not painfully, but patiently. Nothing about him
was, so far, repulsive to her. But his voice—and
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Carolyn was sensitive to voices — was scarcely
less than that. It was hoarse, and grated upon her
taste, if not her nerves. She made up her mind
before he had spoken six words that she did not
like it.
She made as short work as she could of the
business details necessary to the occasion, and as
soon as possible she rose to put an end to the in-
terview. The lame doctor stood leaning on his
cane, and she could not help thinking that he met
the situation gently, timidly, in fact, as if he were
unduly conscious of the trouble that he was about
to make her. He gave the impression at that first
hour that he was considerate of her, that he was
not absorbed in his own interests, that he was
capable of appreciating her position and respecting
it, as no vulgar man could do.
“He is a gentleman,” she thought. At that in-
stant the little boy pounced into the office, and
backed up against her to regard the stranger, who
glanced at him politely,– Scarcely more than that,
—indifferently asking: —
“And his name, Madam?”
“Joyce,” replied the mother; “shake hands with
Dr. Royal.”
Joyce debated obedience to this command with
a silent scowl, but decided to extend a little criti-
cal hand. This Dr. Royal took ceremoniously, as
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if they had been two gentlemen, and dropped it
slowly. -
“When may I come P” he asked, looking around
the office. He had already noticed the bookcases,
filled with medical works, well bound and abun-
dant; and he had observed that the glass doors
covering them were locked.
“Would you like the bookcases removed 2"
suggested Mrs. Dane.
“Thank you, - no. My library is not so large.
It will occupy but little space.”
Carolyn was silent. Common kindliness and
courtesy prompted her to offer the use of her hus-
band's library to the physician lodger. But she did
not do it. Her revolt at the situation in which she
had placed herself was more acute than she had
foreseen, and she felt it to be impossible to see
Chanceford's books in the man's hand.
“When do you wish to come P” she asked, re-
verting to his unanswered question.
“At once. This evening, — this afternoon, —
if I may. Would that inconvenience you?”
Dr. Royal put the point half urgently, half tim-
idly, as if it really mattered to him more than he
found it chivalrous to say.
“No,” said Mrs. Dane, hesitating perceptibly.
“On the whole, I don't know that it makes any
difference. You might as well come to-day.” If
23 I
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
r—
her tone said, “And have it over with,” her words
did not. The lodger bowed without reply, and
took his hat. -
In the afternoon, Dr. Royal's belongings pre-
ceded him. These proved to be few, and easily
bestowed, - a box of books, no more than one;
his instruments and medicines; a Smoking-coat
and cap; an extra raglan and pair of rubbers, for
wet weather; trifles indicating that the man was
obliged to be careful of his health. Just before
dark he followed his scanty property. Carolyn
winced when she heard the latch-key turn in his
hand. She sat still and did not present herself.
But the collie did, and the boy. Barking and laugh-
ing, the two ran to greet the stranger's incoming
step. Clyde received the doctor with respect, or
even cordiality, and Joyce played about the office
until his mother called him away. She went up-
stairs to put the child to bed, and remained some
time in the little fellow's room. She tried not to
hear the feet of the stranger moving about her
husband's office, but his steps pursued her shrink-
ing ears. Gradually she became accustomed to the
sound as one does to a dull toothache. A few taps
from a hammer indicated that Dr. Royal was nail-
ing up his sign above her cottage door.
“Mumma,” said Joyce, sleepily, “did God make
Dr. Royal 2"
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“Joyce, how many times must I tell you? You
should not be always talking about God. Yes, I
suppose He did.”
“I should fink,” argued Joyce, “that God
would n't trouble himself to make such a sorry-
fool man.”
“Such a what? Oh, sorrowful.”
“I said 'sorryfool, did n't I? Say, Mumma,
could God make a green pig if He wanted to ?
Mumma! Could He make a blue kitty with a pink
tail and a purple — purple — purp — ”
The sketch of this artistic animal lapsed slowly,
and silence received it on her uncritical canvas.
When the boy was quite asleep, Mrs. Dane came
downstairs. She really had no excuse for doing
otherwise. The office door was open, and the
warmth of its lights melted across the hall. As
she crossed the glimmer, in her black dress, the
doctor came out and spoke to her.
“I am going now. Shall I put out the gas, or
would you like to have me leave it for a while I
thought perhaps you might — Pray feel at lib-
erty to occupy the room when I am not in it. I
should be more comfortable. I do not like to feel
that I am turning you out — I should take it as a
courtesy.”
“Not on any account,” quickly answered Mrs.
Dane. “I thank you, but the room is yours.”
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
“Pardon me,” said Dr. Royal. “I will bid you
good-night.” -
He bowed, and shut the cottage door. Carolyn
remained alone in the living-room. Pugnaciously
she said to herself, “I will not step into the office,
I will not do it.” In an agitation of which she
felt ashamed, she ran out of the front door, and
sat down on the piazza behind the nasturtiums.
It seemed to her as if she could not bear the roof
over her head. She laid her burning cheek upon
the arm of her piazza chair, and So, seeing no-
thing, started when a voice from the summer
darkness said : —
“Has that man gone?”
“Oh, Cousin Sterling !” Half laughing, half
crying, she put out her hands impulsively, and
the preacher gravely closed his own about them
both.
“I never was so glad to see you!” pleaded
Carolyn. “Yes, Dr. Royal has gone. Office hours
are only from seven to eight. You see he will
go early and often, like the American voter. He
seems,” she added, “to be in poor health. One
cannot help regretting that. What do you sup-
pose Joyce called him P”
“What did Joyce call him P”
“A sorryfool man.”
“Oh, we're all that! Joyce is usually more
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original — Come down to the shore,” said the
preacher, “and forget it all. No 2 Well, never
mind. Then I will stay here.” -
He threw his head back with a lofty motion of
his chin that every one who knew him loved.
Carolyn looked affectionately into his powerful,
protecting face.
CHAPTER XV
THE point where a repugnance turns into an at-
traction is as hard to draw as the water-line in a
smoky sou'wester.
Dr. Charles Royal proved an unimpeachable
tenant. With a tact which Mrs. Dane could not
overlook, he tried to intrude on her as little as
possible; making himself, so far as he might, a
shadow upon the walls of her life. The hours
which he spent in his office were limited, and it
was a considerable time before he ever exceeded
them. Now and then, upon a stormy evening, she
observed that he would stay and smoke after the
patients had gone. For this indulgence he had
asked her permission. At first the scent of tobacco
in her widowed house had been painful to Carolyn.
She was a little shocked to find how soon she
wonted herself to it, and that, in fact, it ceased to
be disagreeable to her.
For a week or two she continued to wince from
the click of the latch-key in the stranger's hand.
Before she was in any sense aware of it, she had
begun to experience in this trifling sound some-
thing akin to pleasure. Her lonely house seemed
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less desolate to her for the presence of this other
lonely person, the quiet, unobtrusive, busy man.
Mrs. Dane was now a woman of business, and
it may have been in part her preoccupation in
the delight of becoming a wage-earner that forced
her out of the morbid reluctance with which she
had received her lodger. She began, in a word,
to view him and herself more naturally, and so
more cheerfully. The physician, whose quiet eye.
was trained to observe everything, noticed be-
fore the summer was over a certain gentle differ-
ence in her, like the brightening shapes of a cloud
whose shadow one has been watching. Once or
twice he thought he heard her singing about the
house. They met, of course. Now and then they
interchanged a few words. When occasion called
for it, they talked a little, – of his practice, of her
boy, of affairs. Neither spoke of the other's pri-
vate history; their attitude was as impersonal as
if they had been meeting and parting at some so-
ciety function. Carolyn's fine dignity found itself
matched or even challenged by a reserve quite the
equal of her own. In one respect she allowed her-
self to overstep the invisible line which her tact
and good sense had drawn between them. His
delicate health appealed to her. She could not re-
strain her natural sympathy with suffering. She
found it impossible not to consider him, to regard
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his comfort. She acquired the sense of responsi-
bility which a warm-hearted woman feels for any
member of her household. He observed that she
directed her maid to dry his overcoat upon a
stormy night. Once, when he had a coughing
cold, Kathleen brought him hot coffee; Mrs. Dane
had noticed that he drank nothing stronger. One
morning—he had been her tenant for six weeks
— he found the glass doors of the bookcase con-
taining the medical library unlocked. When he
called her attention to the circumstance, she
said: —
“Use them. Why not? I have begun to think
that I was mistaken about that. The dead are not
selfish; it is only the living. I am sure my hus-
band would prefer it. Pray feel at liberty to consult
Dr. Dane's library whenever you choose.”
Dr. Royal regarded her gently. His sad eyes
said, “I know what this costs you.” But he did
not speak. He handled one or two of the books
with the affectionate eagerness of a struggling
professional man who finds at his command a li-
brary beyond his own means. She saw that his
hand was unsteady as he returned the books to
their shelves.
“You are kind to me,” he said.
“And you to me,” said Mrs. Dane, impulsively.
She was frightened when she had spoken these
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four words, and half ashamed of them. She turned
away from him, and drifted out of the office door
like a flying feeling. As if it would help matters
any, she came bravely back, and explained herself:
“I mean —you are such a considerate tenant.
You have made so little trouble. You never
make any if you can help it. And you have been
very good to my little boy. I have to leave him
alone so much. He says you tell him stories,
and —”
“Does he?” interrupted the doctor. “Then he
tells tales. I advised him not to mention that.”
“Thank you for mending the blind the other
day,” proceeded Mrs. Dane. “And the bulkhead
— Kathleen says you did something to that. And
Joyce's express cart — I am not a very good car-
penter. And I am pretty busy with my scholars
and my employers. A great many things have to
go—” She paused uncomfortably.
“You have your share of care,” replied the doc-
tor, quietly. “Will you permit me to say that you
carry it remarkably well ?”
“I thank you, Dr. Royal,” said Mrs. Dane, re-
gaining herself and speaking ceremoniously. She
looked very young in her widow's dress; she
had her sweet expression. The doctor watched her
with slow, pursuant eyes. But patients were arriv-
ing, and their complaining voices rose between
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
the two. And now, as Carolyn went out of the
door to her morning's work, she met her cousin
Coming in. -
“Where to-day ?” he asked happily, falling into
step beside her. “Let me go, too — a little way.”
“Yes,” said Carolyn, dreamily. “You can walk
with me — a little way.”
Then she began to chat merrily enough. “I
have a servant to dismiss for Tracie Benton's
mother. And a Mab Miller luncheon to oversee.
And my “Art School’ has an exhibition this after-
noon. “Picture it! Think of it!' I am as busy as
a miracle. Sometimes I think I am a miracle.”
“When you are tired of the miraculous, let me
know,” said Sterling Hart. He looked down from
his great height with a grave, composed smile.
But his eyes were not composed. He had never
been reconciled, as the phrase goes, to Carolyn's
stubborn venture at the game of self-support. The
Art School and the play at keeping house for
East Shore society he could tolerate if he must.
The tenant he had never forgiven. Carolyn per-
ceived that he experienced unprecedented respon-
sibilities in her behalf. He made it natural to see
her frequently— more often than ever in her life.
She felt shielded and beloved by her kinsman.
When she was with him he seemed to bound the
map of her life. She rejoiced in his familiar per-
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
sonality, in his tried character, in his strong, safe
qualities. The stranger within her gates passed
easily out of her mind. If his sad eyes, his appeal-
ing smile, remained with her, it was on the level
of that subconsciousness where a lonely woman
thrusts the least vital, but possibly the most dan-
gerous, of the conflicting affections that beset her
widowed life. Carolyn walked on happily with
Sterling Hart. His good spirits, his good health,
his good fortune, rested her.
“Dear Cousin Sterling!” she said. “Nobody ever
has to feel sorry for you.”
Sterling Hart lowered his luminous eyes upon
her. He did not find it necessary to reply. She
felt, without seeing, that proud upward motion of
his chin which she had never known in any other
person. It intensified the antique impression of
his Roman head and face, with their multiple,
modern waves of feeling. He seemed to her—for
he had always seemed to her—as much stronger
as he was taller than other men; as much nobler as
he was more self-commanded. Once she had seen
him possessed by an angel's anger. Why should
she recall it now, -in this mystical, magical sum-
mer morning 2 There was an August fog, a great
and glamorous shining, half gold, half silver, and
all glory. As he towered against the sea-line, this
rayed about him, like the aureola of Some mighty,
24 I
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
manly saint. Yet once she had seen him look as
if he could have crushed a man by a blow of his
clenched hand. He had come unexpectedly upon
her husband in one of Chanceford Dane's dis-
graced hours, and stood looking at the pitiable
figure — as he did. He had an angel's beauty, but
all an angel's Scorn.
The mist in Carolyn's eyes grew thicker than
the shining fog.
“Poor Chanceford l’ she thought. “Oh, poor
Chanceford l’
In the revolution of an instant, “all men beside
him were but shadows.” He alone had substance
who had taken the first kiss from her young lips.
That day she went to the village churchyard, and
carried flowers from her cottage garden to Dane's
rather lonely grave. She knelt beside it in a pas-
sion of penitence. Ever since what might be called
the death-bed confession of Douce Marriot, Carolyn
had felt as if the attitudes had been reversed be-
tween herself and her husband's ghost. Whatever
her wrongs, she now regarded his as deeper. She
sensitively arraigned herself that she had given
the natural interpretation to his proud and unfor-
tunate silence. At times she broke her heart over
the injustice which she had so blamelessly done
him. Her regret was a brimming reservoir which
answered to every stir in the sluice of feeling. At
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every crevice her sorrow overflowed in self-accu-
sation. It needed but a touch, a jar, to start the
surging current. Swept away by it and into it,
she knelt that day and rededicated herself—any
loving and grieving woman knows how— to the
memory of her dead.
When she rose from her knees she perceived
that some one was entering the churchyard by the
avenue which she must pass to leave it.
In her thin black dress, with its muslin finish at
throat and wrists, with her wistful face, her pale
coloring, her wearily folded hands, she stood as if
she had been carved upon the marble that marked
her husband's grave — a statue of Grief Perplexed.
Her uneasiness did not diminish when she saw
who it was that she must greet and pass. Dr.
Royal had uncovered his gray head. He gave no
other sign that he was conscious of her presence,
and continued his stroll through the churchyard
by another way.
That evening at office hours Carolyn was not
to be seen. Patients were many, and the doorbell
rang steadily. When they had all gone, Joyce and
Clyde pranced in to play with the doctor. But
Mrs. Dane remained upstairs. If she listened for
the uneven step of her lodger, she gave no sign.
His kind, hoarse voice parleyed with the boy, and
cherished the dog; absently, she thought. She
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crept down the back stairs, being minded, she
could hardly have told why, to escape him. She
stepped into the living-room, thinking that she
would light the gas, but did not light it, and sat
down in the dark, irresolute. The office door was
open. Within its plaque of light she saw the man,
the child, and the dog, — each quiet, and all con-
tent. The collie was asleep, with his long nose
upon the doctor's foot. But Joyce—where was
the boy At first she doubted the evidence of her
optic nerve, and smote the mist from her Smart-
ing eyes to see, and see again, the curling child
cuddled beneath a white beard in the stranger's
neck; like a love into a cloud or mantle; a little
melting shape that trusted where she questioned,
and clung when she rebuffed.
In the dark there, unseen, and now unseeing,
her face fell into her hands. Against every fibre
of her nature, every sinew of her will, she found
herself dragged by the undertow of a mysterious
attraction. How should a high-minded woman
experience the tides that dashed her feeling to
and fro P. She sat drowned in the crimson of her
self-scorn. For there are three tidal waves on the
ocean of widowhood. If the first is loneliness and
the second despairing doubt, the third is disloyalty
to the dead.
Carolyn felt that she was in the breakers of her
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own being. She called upon her husband's name
and memory as she would have called upon the
power of God if she had been a drowning woman.
“Chanceford'ſ Chanceford! Can't you help
me?”
The click of the front-door latch interrupted
this prayer of the wife. When she looked, the
office was empty. Clyde was fumbling in her neck
with his cold nose, and her little boy—less keen
of divination than the dog—stood calling for her
in the hall. She heard the tired step of the lame
doctor limping down the path.
Sterling Hart was uneasy. Himself he would
have flung to any fate for Cara's sake. He would
have effaced himself from her life if that could
have purchased her happiness. To give her joy he
would have paid any price in personal suffering.
His feeling was as simple as Christianity, whose
other name is sacrifice. It could hardly be said
that personal hope entered very much into his
consciousness at this or any other time; although,
perhaps, more at this than any other. But that he
was distinctly uneasy he did not deny to himself.
His cousin's acquaintance with the physician, her
tenant, troubled him. -
Any persistent idea is a stream which every-
thing tends to increase. Rivulets of impressions
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
from one source or another ran into the preacher's
prevailing anxiety for Carolyn. One September
day he saw Mrs. Marriot driving a Salvation Army
lassie to the train, and on the way home she over-
took him, beckoning.
“Is Mrs. Dane going to marry the new doc-
tor?” she asked point-blank. “He is a brilliant
fellow, and he saved my life. I am under obliga-
tions to him that one can never overlook; and it
is plainly not my business, Mr. Hart. But—”
“But what?” demanded the preacher.
“I don't know,” replied Douce Marriot. “That's
just it — Z dom'ſ Amozy but what.”
In October Nannie Hops came on some trifling
pretext to the preacher's house. The girl seemed
troubled, and there was a tangle in her pretty
brows.
“Father returns the magazines,” she began.
“He thanks you, Mr. Hart. Mrs. Dane and I car-
ried some to the Art School to show the pictures.
Mr. Hart, there's something I want to say to you.
It is about Mrs. Dane.”
“Go on,” said the preacher, for Nannie stopped.
“If she should marry Dr. Royal—” faltered
Nannie. “You know how much we think of Dr.
Royal, don't you? You won't take me the wrong
way, will you? I — why, I admire Dr. Royall" cried
Nannie, vehemently. “But — ”
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
“But what?” asked Sterling Hart, as he had
asked before. And, as before, the answer came : “I
don't know — Mr. Hart, I don't know. There are
things—”
“What things?”
“I don't know how to explain myself. There
seem to be reasons — ”
“What reasons P” persisted the preacher.
“That's just it,” said Nannie. “If I could put
my reasons so you could understand them, - but
I can't do it. I don't know how to tell you why I
feel the way I do.”
“I think you ought to be explicit,” replied Cara's
kinsman, frowning.
Nannie said a few words in a lowered voice.
“Is that all?” cried the preacher. He gave a
large masculine wave of the hand, as if he dis-
missed an unimportant and feminine thought.
“It is nothing against Dr. Royal!” repeated
Nannie. “It is n’t the first thing against Dr.
Aoyal. But—Mr. Hart! Don't let Mrs. Dane
marry again. Don't let her marry anybody. It —
it's too soon.”
The preacher stared at the excited girl; he had
gone quite pale. He felt, for the instant, as if a
sacred secret, scarcely admitted by his own Soul
to itself, had come back to him from the atmos-
phere in articulation.
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It proved to be a cold winter, and life in the
cottage became difficult and bare, accordingly.
All that remained of the threadbare nasturtium
draperies on the piazza trellis broke away under
the first big storm like a valuable old rug that has
been put into a washtub. The furnace was middle-
aged and as fretful as a sick woman. The plumb-
ing was fickle, and the halls drafty. Kathleen had
the toothache, and Joyce took cold. The boy's
little illnesses the doctor treated skillfully, with a
care amounting to tenderness. To the assortment
of emotions with which she now regarded her ten-
ant, Carolyn began to add gratitude.
Dr. Royal was chronically, ingeniously kind.
Too often she heard him limp down the cellar
stairs on a bitter evening, to feed or inspect the
old, cold furnace for her. Sometimes in the drift-
ing snows she would find the lame man digging
out her paths. He put aside her protests as if they
had been snowflakes that he rubbed out of his
eyes; quite silently. It proved difficult to conceal
the shifts and secrets of her impoverished house-
hold from him. Nothing escaped his knowledge,
as nothing eluded his relieving instinct. He be-
gan to seem to her the most thoughtful of men.
Over the disk of other manly qualities that she
had known his slowly advanced; as an eclipse
slides over the moon or the sun. It was impossi-
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ble to disown the terrible candor of memory
which confronted the dead with the living; and
unhappily for the ghost of Chanceford Dane, mar-
riage had not expiated the faults of his careless
nature to his wife.
Dane's had been a gay, gregarious nature, debo-
nair and winning. Charles Royal was a thought-
ful man, personally unattractive, and morally a
magnet. Dane had not been always kind. The
doctor had an undiverted tenderness. Dane had
neglected her when he felt inclined. Royal had
the plain, domestic devotion which women rate
so high in the scale of masculine qualities. Dane
had demanded everything, and given what he
chose. This man asked nothing, and gave her all
he had—his silent homage, his delicate protec-
tion. He had the attitude of romance in the dull
conditions of daily life. He was to her as if she had
been the queen of the sad earth and the happy
heaven. Yet it was impossible for her to deceive
herself — she knew that he loved her; the more,
because he did not say so. Her common prudence
and common sense taught her that this man of an
unknown past, of an uncertain future, must not
be permitted to endear himself to her. But her
trembling heart told her that she was approaching
the invisible boundary where a man and woman
must separate or unite. She recognized the way-
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marks of the familiar road with the cautious can-
dor of one who experiences a second love, and
who would convince herself, if she could, that she
was not disloyal to the first. Again she knew the
eternal pang and the eternal joy which keep the
world's heart young.
“This cannot last,” she said. “I must put an
end to it.” Sometimes she added, with the docility
of a little girl who lives in awe of family traditions,
“Cousin Sterling is perfectly right. It has got to
stop.” -
But nothing stopped. The romance and the
winter ran their course. As Cara sat attentive to
the rhythm of the surf upon the ice-bound coast,
it seemed to her as if she listened to some ancient
saga frosted with the rapture and the bitterness
of life; to some perplexity as new as last moon's
phases; some secret as inscrutable as to-morrow's
fate.
Sterling Hart watched her with mute, strong
eyes. He came out frequently from the city; so
often that she felt the silent protest of his presence
against the current of her heart. He observed her
Sadly. Less and less he argued with her or coun-
seled her. Once again he felt himself rivaled by
the inferior nature. Now, as before, he was baffled
by the magic which wove its web around her.
It will be well remembered by his people and
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
by the public that the Reverend Sterling Hart
did that year a thing not very common in the pul-
pit of his church, and without recent precedent
in his own. He preached what is known in the
phraseology of moral reform as a temperance
SCIII) OI).
It was a Sunday evening sermon, after Easter,
in late April. The church was crowded to the
aisles, and largely filled with men. It had been
understood that the eminent clergyman would
treat the subject of the drinking habit, and a per-
plexed surprise was felt by the ignorant — none
whatever by the wise — when it was noted that he
handled his vulgar theme with an extraordinary
reServe.
He did not describe degradation. He portrayed
nobility. He did not depict the deformities of sin.
He dwelt on the beauty of holiness. He spoke
of honor, of self-control, of purity. He spoke of
strong and steadfast qualities, of beautiful and
winning things; of all that is high-minded, whole-
souled, and clean-bodied; of all that a man might
be who honored his manhood — not of what he
had become who had failed in reverence for it.
Once he drew himself to his commanding height
(one of his people who loved him used to call it
“his archangel size”), and his noble countenance
blazed with a white fire of contempt and pity such
25 I
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
as one may live a long life and not see on any
face. -
“And yet,” he said, “there are men who give
themselves up to low sins . . . and drunkenness.”
As the preacher spoke these words, far back in
the packed house his luminous eye fell upon two
men, one young, one elderly, sitting side by side,
and listening with held breath. Something in their
attitude and absorption, something more in their
appearance, arrested his attention. One of the men
he knew, and the other — he thought the other
was no stranger. But as he gazed, out of the man's
soul there leaped a look—one only—before which
the preacher's startled heart stood still. As soon
as the service came to an end he disappeared
from sight, and in an incredible time, still in
his gown and surplice, his forehead wet yet with
his emotion, reappeared in the crowd of wor-
shipers who were thronging to the vestibule. The
younger of the two men who had aroused his at-
tention was about to push through the muffled
doors when the clergyman laid a hand upon his
shoulder.
“Timothy Timothy George?”
“Well, sir,” said Timothy, deferentially. “It’s
me, sir. That was a wonderful fine sermon, Mr.
Hart.” -
“Never mind the sermon,” said Mr. Hart.
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
“Where's the man P. Who was the man that sat
next you? Has he gone?”
“He seems to have,” replied Timothy, with a
stolid, guarded look.
“There was something about him,” insisted the
preacher. “I thought at first I knew him. I was
sure I did. But he was so far off, - and the light
was dim. Then I thought, — do you know him,
Timothy 2"
Timothy was silent.
“Come with me,” said Mr. Hart, authoritative
and pale. Now Timothy was one of the preacher's
penitents, and he followed with docility to the
pastor's room. There Sterling Hart shut and
locked the door.
“I thought,” he repeated, “that I knew that
man, – and while I was preaching, suddenly he
seemed to me — I thought I was mistaken. Was
IP "
“I don't know, sir,” said Timothy, doggedly.
“If I did, I don't see as I’ve got any call to jab-
ber, — do you? But I don't. I tell you, Mr. Hart,
A dom': Amozy.”
“Very well,” replied the preacher, rising. “Good-
evening, Timothy.”
Timothy stood twirling his respectable derby
in his decently gloved hand. He looked troubled
and irresolute.
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
“Mr. Hart, sir, you saved my life, my scander-
lous life. And you've saved me, me that used to
drink like a codfish till you caught me with your
trawl. I don't believe I've got any call to refuse
you anything you want of me. Do you?”
“Oh, I don't know,” answered the preacher
wearily, irresolute in his turn. “You must judge
for yourself. You have a conscience of your own.
Use it.”
“I’m willing to tell you,” said Timothy, slowly,
“what I don't know.”
“Very well,” replied the preacher. “Sit down,
Timothy.” Timothy sat down.
“When I left Balsam Groves that time,” he be-
gan, “you know, sir, I've never been back P”
“I should not advise you to do so,” replied the
preacher, gravely. -
“Rum done it,” urged Timothy, falling back on
his old phrase.
“But nothing can undo it, Timothy. I have told
you before. Some things never can be undone in
this world. That was one of them.”
“Folks say there is a dentist,” suggested Tim-
othy, suddenly diverted from the topic which had
brought him to the pastor's study. “Is she going
to marry him P’’
“We did not come here to discuss the young
lady,” replied Mr. Hart, with some severity. “You
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were about to tell me more particularly what oe-
curred when you left Balsam Groves.”
“Maybe you have forgotten I went West,” said
Timothy. “I went to ” Timothy named a
large and thriving city. “It’s one of those places
where strangers float like spars. If it's a woman,
folks say ‘What's the matter with her?' If you're
a man, they say ‘What's he done?’ I beat about
there, you know, sir, for a year, and then — ”
A knock at the pastor's door cut Timothy short.
Mr. Hart admitted one of the wardens; it was
something about a quarrel in the choir. The pas-
tor listened patiently. When the warden had gone,
he locked the door again.
“Now, Timothy,” he said, “go on.” Timothy
resumed his story.
CHAPTER XVI
THE collie Clyde sauntered out into the street,
sniffing the cool May evening. He had the air of
a gentleman of leisure making up his mind which
one of his clubs he would run into. His manner
was detached and assured. His fine eyes had their
mildest look, and he smiled broadly, as he had
been taught to do when he was a puppy and
wished to make himself attractive. A boy might
have to stay at home on a pleasant evening and
say his prayers and go to bed. But a dog had life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness left at his
command. Of these Clyde made the most in a
well-bred way; speculating idly while he protected
the family, keeping the nasturtium cottage well
in the corner of his black-brown eye, upon the
incidents or occupants of the community. For
instance, neighbors. This subject had the infini-
tude of eternity to the collie's mind. There were
new ones, strangers, presumably about to Occupy
the dog's old home, the Sterling place. For some
days signs of life had stirred about the grounds,
and wheels had rolled heavily up the long, muddy
avenue; luggage had arrived; mechanics had come
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
and gone; tradesmen had whistled up and away;
evidences of impending habitation had multiplied;
and the topic was perplexing. Clyde strolled over
the road, stationed himself at the opening of the
great avenue, and sat with one ear up and one
ear down. The symptoms of human approach he
understood, but human gossip was unfortunately
Occult to him. Clyde had an excellent vocabulary,
but it was not varied enough to suit the Occasion.
He had heard the master race talking of brides
and honeymoons. But what was a bride, and what
a honeymoon This was not in the language of
his tribe. More than once he had heard it said in
his presence:–“There was never any bride there
before but Mrs. Dane.” But the collie had no lexi-
con; he found the idiom untranslatable. The only
point perfectly clear was that trespassers existed,
and that they had chosen the family property for
an intrusion possibly capable of explanation, but
not yet justified to the judgment of the family dog.
Clyde sat between the two great stone posts of
the Sterling place, and considered the matter.
Now, the truth of it had not by human expres-
sion or canine instinct reached the collie's intelli-
gence. Clyde as yet had no perception of the fact
that the villain, who (in his own words to Sterling
Hart on a tragic summer evening some years ago)
had been dismissed from the stage in the first act,
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
had returned to flit across it for a brief and final
SCCI) e.
It was a strain to the imagination to think of
the vivisector as a bridegroom; it was not with-
out a sense of humor that one identified the golf
champion as a bride; but thus it was, and was to
be. Whether Mab Miller, the golf girl, had mar-
ried Dr. Frost, or he had married her, was one
of the uncertainties of history; but that they were
married was past dispute. The tenants of the
Sterling place (whether friends of the bride or
relatives of the bridegroom), who had leased it for
two or three years, had amused themselves by one
of the pretty attacks of hospitality which the East
Shore assumes easily and even often; they had
offered their great house and their own servants
to the bridal couple for the month of May, dis-
porting themselves on a yacht in Southern seas
until the honeymoon should have waned from
“their own hired house,” and trying to believe
that they had in so far added to the romance of
the world. It proved harder to think so than one
would have expected. The vivisector and the golf
girl were not poetic material, make the most one
might of it. But they were facts; and they were
there. They had steamed out from the city in a
white, flower-strewn automobile after their noon
wedding; and as quietly as possible, and almost
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
unobserved, had whirred up the avenue, and pos-
sessed themselves of the old, stately house, as dear
to Cara still as the pangs of a lost love, and always
thought of by her gently and in silence, somewhat
as she thought of her husband's grave.
She had not seen the bridal car when it raced
up; and as it happened, Clyde himself had missed
this tremendous event. The collie was conscious,
as dogs are of lost opportunities, that something
of interest had occurred, witness of which fate had
denied him. He sat rather sullenly guarding the
egress from the avenue, that nothing more might
escape him. While he did so, he saw that the
automobile was rushing down. He arose with dig-
nity and reluctance to avoid the juggernaut, and
stepped aside upon the lawn — disdainfully, be-
cause he perceived that the carriage and the
chauffeur were both strangers. As the car dashed
past and whirled away, something dropped, and
Clyde put his paw upon it. It was a man's glove,
a faultless bridal glove, worn for an hour, loosened
and forgotten. With one ear up and one ear down,
the dog considered the glove for some moments.
But these were incredibly few. With a howl of
rage he flung himself upon it, worried it as if it
had been a rat of the lowest social order in the
vermin world, and, suddenly tearing it as if it were
shredded flesh, muscle from muscle, nerve from
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nerve, he dashed it away, and leaped up the long
wooded avenue. As he went, he took mighty
bounds, scorning the earth, Scaling the air. But
when he approached the house the dog grew astute,
crushed his anger into diplomacy, sniffed, and
secreted himself, watched, crawled upon his belly,
hid, and smouldered in the shrubbery. There, a
quivering, splendid creature, with ancient, unfor-
given wrong tense in every rigid line of his beau-
tiful body, with death and fire in his eyes, and an
ominous patience in his attitude, the collie bided
his time.
It had been a clear, late sunset, and a brilliant
moon arose. There was no darkness, but the even-
ing advanced from glow to gleam. The windows
of the great house flashed warm light, and the
movements of a luxurious home set in as quietly
and steadily among the trained servants as if the
place had been occupied for six months. The bride
(in Cara's old room) was dressing for dinner, and
the newly wedded husband strolled out of the
house; he had the thoughtful mood in which the
most thoughtless of men will find himself upon
his marriage evening. -
Thomas Frost sat in Mr. Sterling's wind chair
upon the piazza that faced the sea, but the night
was cool and he did not remain there. He got up
and paced the piazza for a while. He did not
26O :
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
smoke. His tall, rather military figure moved to
and fro with precision. With a cold gray eye he
observed the sea. Both his firm, sinuous hands
were in his pockets. His mind was active. What
he called his heart was occupied. His heavily lined
face assumed the mould of satisfaction, — with
himself, with his marriage, with his position, with
his prospects. That he had been appointed to the
Chair of Physiology in an important New England
Medical School was, he reflected, no more than his
distinguished skill as an experimenter deserved.
He would enter upon the honors of his professor-
ship soon after the expiration of his honeymoon.
This, meanwhile, after the scientific method, he
set himself to appreciate. Once he left the piazza
and walked restlessly among the shrubbery, glanc-
ing towards the nasturtium cottage, which, for the
thickness of the intervening trees, he could not
See.
“She made a most unfortunate marriage,” he
thought. He raised his eyes to the windows of his
wife's room; her substantial shadow passed before
the shade. Just then she raised it, opened the win-
dow, and saw him. The muscular arm and hand
which had wielded the best brassie and driver in
the Country Club relaxed and wafted down a kiss.
This the bridegroom felt under obligations to re-
turn. To do so, he withdrew his right hand from
26 I
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
his pocket. Then Mrs. Frost let down the shade
again. -
He was standing looking up, moonlit and visible
every contour of him in the bright night, every
personal sign and scent of him given to the soft
wind, when the shrubbery behind him stirred a
little, as if a snake had crawled through it. Thomas
Frost turned to reënter the house, and had set
one foot upon the piazza steps, when an ominous
muttering sound annoyed his ear. This grew into
a formidable growl. A dog, raging with memory
of the unforgiven, leaped and sprang. The collie
would have none of the physiologist's body except
his hand, - the hand that had committed the un-
pardonable sin of all that man may inflict upon
an animal; the hand that had dissected conscious,
helpless flesh alive. Clyde's teeth fastened upon
the vivisector's cruel, valuable right hand, and
Crushed it, crunching.
Kathleen had her evening off that day, and
Joyce had been answering the doorbell. But the
child was now in bed; patients were many; the
reception room was full, and Mrs. Dane had taken
upon herself this domestic task. The front door
was closed. A long scratch, followed by a heavy,
thumping sound, besieged it, and two or three
Sharp peals of the electric button Succeeded. Caro-
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
lyn opened the door, and said, “Why, Clyde! Did
you ring that bell ?”
No person was visible, and she let the dog in.
He was panting heavily, and quivered in every
nerve. As if he had been a child, he flung himself
upon her lap, and put his paws about her neck.
Although his eyes were wild, they had a solemn
look. He whined and sighed, and then he began
to sob like a little overwrought boy. Cara bent and
put her cheek upon his forehead to comfort him.
As she did so, she perceived that his mouth was
dripping, and that it dripped red.
The telephone called loudly at that moment, and
the doctor answered it without delay. With a word
of explanation to his waiting patients, he hurried
limping out into the hall, and seized his hat.
“It is an emergency call,” he said to Mrs. Dane.
“There seems to have been a little accident among
those bridal people. I must go at once.”
He was gone some time, so long that the patients
grew discouraged, and drifted one by one away.
When he returned, the office was empty, and the
house was still. Clyde was asleep upon the rug;
in his sleep he groaned and growled. Mrs. Dane
was sitting by the office fire. She rose to greet the
doctor, but asked no questions.
“Can I have a little hot water?” he asked
quietly.
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She brought it, and he boiled it over his alcohol
lamp, that he might sterilize his instruments; he
put them away before he spoke.
“There is something you have got to know, and
I may as well tell you. It is an unfortunate affair,
and Clyde was mixed up in it. He has bitten a
man.”
“Not — not— ” she began, and paled.
“Yes, he has bitten Dr. Frost. He has hurt his
hand pretty badly — his right hand.”
Cara got down upon the rug beside the dog,
and drew his head upon her knee. Her trembling
fingers touched Clyde's old scar—the scar so deep
that the hair had never covered it.
“He may have had a reason l’ she cried.
“Yes, I know,” replied the doctor.
“What do you know?” The searchlight of her
troubled eyes traversed the physician's face.
“He told me,” observed Dr. Royal, quietly. “He
explained the circumstances. He said that he once
experimented on the dog — of course not know-
ing him to be yours. He said that Clyde had never
forgiven him; that he had attacked him before.”
“Oh, what will they do to Clyde P” moaned
Cara. “If they are going to kill him, I would
rather do it myself. I will chloroform him. No
one else shall touch him.” She began to tremble
heavily.
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“Don’t distress yourself,” said Dr. Royal, kindly.
“Clyde will not be harmed. Frost does n’t want
the story to get out. I don’t think he is par-
ticularly proud of it. He says he does not wish
his wife to know. He invented some explanation
of the accident. I think it will pass. I believe he
slipped on the rocks; had a bad fall; a rolling
stone hurt him; something of that kind—that is
his business. Mine is to keep a patient's confi-
dence—I told you because—” -
“Yes,” interrupted Carolyn. “You had to tell
me. I ought to know. We shall have to keep
Clyde tied up.”
“Till Frost leaves the village, I think you will.
He won't stay any longer than he can help. If it
proves serious, he will go back to town, where he
can get a bigger surgeon than I am.”
“Will he lose his hand?” asked Carolyn, with
difficulty.
“No, oh, no. Only his honeymoon. With proper
care, I think we can save the hand; but I am afraid
— it will be rather stiff.” **.
“It is shocking !” said Cara, with emotion.
“It is unfortunate,” replied the doctor. “Neme-
sis usually is. The most interesting thing to me
about it —” he paused.
“What is the most interesting thing to you
about it?” demanded Mrs. Dane.
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THOUGH LIFE Us Do PART
“Why, that he does n’t want his wife to know.
The terrible and beautiful power of the marriage
bond has set in already.”
“Upon Thomas Frost?”
“Even upon him.”
The two were standing opposite each other as
they exchanged these words. Their eyes, brimming
lakes of feeling, met as if they united in one un-
fathomable sea. Carolyn felt herself swayed to the
deeps. Between her allegiance to the vanished and
her attraction to the apparent, she vibrated in a
piteous vacillation. The old contention between
the quick and the dead made havoc of her, and
she had no more power of resistance to it than
a battleground has of rebellion to conflicting
armies. The moment had become so tense, it
was with a sense of escape that she heard the
steps of her cousin upon the piazza, and turned
at his familiar hand upon the door to meet and
greet him. This she did with a cordiality so
assumed that he felt it—his hurt face showed
how much. He glanced from her to her tenant,
first with the priest's and then with the prophet's
look. - +
Clyde came out slowly to extend the hospitality
of the cottage to its kinsman. The dog walked
with dignity. Not a cloud of guilt lurked in his
fine eyes. He spurned the floor with a lofty pride.
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
He had the air of a noble avenger, who had righted
the wrongs of a race.
Impulsively, without remembering that she was
not free to speak of it, and because she had always
told everything to Sterling Hart, Carolyn hastened
to give the story of what had happened. She saw
that Mr. Hart was troubled, if not alarmed.
“I will go right over and see him,” he said, turn-
ing about.
“Excuse me,” interrupted the physician, step-
ping forward, “but this matter is not to be known,
if you please. Mrs. Dane very naturally made an
exception of you — as I was forced to make one of
her. But nothing whatever should be said. In any
event, I am sure you would wish to wait before
calling on Dr. Frost. He is really in too much suf-
fering to see any person.”
“I am not attached to Dr. Frost,” urged Mr.
Hart, with some feeling, “but it is precisely where
there is suffering that my profession calls me.”
“And that mine, in this instance, must dissuade
you,” said the physician. “I would advise you to
wait for some days. We don't know yet how this
is going to turn out. I may have to spend most of
the night with him. He is considerably hurt.”
The two men regarded each other in surcharged
silence.
“Very well,” said the clergyman, “if the case is
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yours, I will not go — not at present. Instead, if
you please, Dr. Royal, I should like a short inter-
view with yourself. In fact I may admit, if you
will excuse me, Cousin Carolyn, that I came with
this purpose in view. I thought I should find you,
sir, at your office hours.”
Carolyn moved away quickly, and her cousin
shut the office door. She thought, but she might
have been mistaken, that he slipped the key. He
remained in the office for a long time. She could
hear the poignant murmur of their voices, inter-
spersed with significant silences. She grew uneasy,
she could not have told why. As the interview
progressed, her discomfort increased.
To escape her unpleasant position, she wan-
dered restlessly about the house, and thinking to
make sure that Kathleen had left the dampers as
they should be, went into the kitchen. Now Clyde
had shadowed her closely, aggrieved that he was
denied the Society of the two gentlemen upon an
evening so eventful in the family history; jealous
of attention, and nervous for praise, he pushed
through the pantry and pawed at the office door.
This was not locked, and Clyde, who was distin-
guished for his ability to open doors, forced the
latch by means best known to himself, and lunged
in, heavily and pleasantly wagging. There was a
distinct interval before the door was closed again,
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and in this time there wandered out to Mrs.
Dane's apprehension the articulation of these
words: —
“You may be the most irreproachable man in
this world, sir, but we know nothing about you.
Your past is a blank to us. Your present is a mys-
tery. Apparently you have no antecedents, or none
which you are willing to present. I am the only
living kinsman of this lady who has the right to
protect her. In my judgment, your presence in
Mrs. Dane's house has continued long enough
. if not too long,” added Sterling Hart, with
fervor.
Wincing and quivering, with fire in her cheeks,
and her heart leaping in her throat, Carolyn shrank
back. Her first impulse was to enter the room —
it was hers — and confront the two men with the
matter under dispute between them — it was her
affair. But the instinct of a lady to avoid a scene
deterred her. She went back into the living-room,
and stood still, - tall and distinct beneath the
lighted gas, trying to decide what she should
do.
This she found not easy, and she still remained
irresolute when the key slid in the office lock, and
the door opened. Mr. Hart held it ajar with his
hand upon the knob. He had his giant look; his
face was imperturbable and grave. He was saying
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—and it struck Carolyn that he made no effort to
conceal from her that he was saying:—
“I have put the case to you plainly, man to
man. I have explained my reasons to you — why
I experience the uneasiness that I do. I will deal
with you fairly, but you will do as much by me
. . and by this lady, sir. Give us your creden-
tials. Clear up the points that I have mentioned.
I will give you, - Dr. Royal, I give you a week.”
Sterling Hart crossed the cottage hall, and con-
fronted Mrs. Dane with a gesture at once com-
manding and entreating.
“Good-night, Cousin Carolyn,” he said gently.
“I am afraid that I perplex or grieve you. I have
no alternative. I will explain myself — with Dr.
Royal's permission —at another time. We are all
tired to-night.”
He closed the cottage door, and his strong step
rang down the walk. Mrs. Dane and her tenant
stood regarding each other silently. The collie
ran between them, restlessly whining. Joyce in
his bed upstairs waked and called : —
“Mum — mumma P” Maudlin with sleep, the
little fellow dribbled into the dialect of his baby-
hood: “Mum – mumma P Pup — puppa P Mum
— ma P”
Mrs. Dane ran up to the boy, and when she
came down the office was empty. The doctor had
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gone for the night. She realized, not without a
pang of perplexity, or even anxiety, that he had
gone without a word.
The vivisector lay upon the couch in the Ster-
ling drawing-room and nursed his mangled hand.
His wife devoted herself to his emergency without
a weakened nerve. She read to him for hours;
her strong throat never tired. She tramped on
errands for him all over the village. Her well-
developed feet made frolic of the six-mile walk
to Balsam which she took to find the particular
orchids that struck his scientific fancy. For what
might be called more human flowers, Thomas
Frost did not care. It occurred to him that he
had married a healthy, sensible, and not a selfish
girl, who could attach herself to a man in the
proper feminine ways as successfully as she had
wielded a brassie. He went so far as to wonder if
the golf girl, after all, might not prove a champion
wife. But upon mere matters of sentiment his
mind did not dwell tenaciously. His enforced
inactivity and acute suffering had converted him
into a raging schemer. His gray eyes Smouldered
like cool embers.
Against the dog he was powerless, perforce. A
man cannot sacrifice his reputation, or even his
domestic happiness, to private vengeance upon an
27 I
THOUGH LIFE Us Do PART
animal. Unfortunately, Mrs. Frost was fond of
dogs; she had three in her father's home.
Then, if the story should leak out, his colleagues
would be ill pleased. The new professor would
start under a sentimental cloud. A disabled hand
might be overcome; demonstrators could be found
to perform the butchery while he supplied the
oratory of his brilliant experiments. But when it
came to a moral blur, what could be done 2 No
understudy could supply the ethical quality.
But for this obstinate fact, Clyde would have
been shot through the head without delay. The
vivisector was not stupid, and he accepted his
situation. Against the dog he could not avenge
himself; but the woman remained.
Thomas Frost had some years since passed the
point of sensitiveness to the sight of suffering. It
had become as easy for him to inflict as for an-
other man to spare. He thought of Carolyn Dane
with a cold conviction that if she could be made
to suffer for the fault of her dog, it would not be
more than she deserved, at least no more than
he was willing to impose. He brooded upon the
matter with an icy bitterness.
While receiving the surgical attention of Charles
Royal, he scrutinized the man. A chance ques-
tion to the old Balsam doctor; a clever hint to the
Consulting surgeon from the city; a few flying
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arrows shot into the mind of Sterling Hart when
the preacher made his priestly call — these psy-
chological experiments occupied the ruined honey-
moon of the vivisector. The human heart had
become his laboratory, and in this, though some-
thing of a bungler at that finer art, he worked
with a determination which was a substitute for
skill. The experiment did not occupy much time.
Within two weeks Dr. Frost returned with his wife
to her father's house, where three fine dogs em-
braced the bride, and sniffed at the bridegroom.
Sterling Hart did not return to Dr. Royal's
office within the week whose iron boundary he
had set before the man. He lingered two weeks;
he delayed for three. If he came to see his cousin,
it was at hours when the tenant could not be found,
and to speak of subjects in which the doctor had
I\O COIACCII).
It could be seen that Mr. Hart obviously avoided
the matter which had annoyed and troubled Caro-
lyn upon his earlier visit; and she, full of a mingled
emotion, half resentment and half fear, did not
herself recall it.
But one evening in the later May — a rainy
evening, when patients would be few — the
preacher presented himself in office hours, and
asked distinctly for the doctor.
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The two men met courteously, but without cor-
diality. The preacher, with some hesitation, took
the patient's chair. The physician retained his
own. His manner was as grave as that of the
other, and possessed, it might be said, an equal
dignity. He was, in fact, the first to speak.
“Well,” he said, “my time is more than up. I
am not sure whether I should thank you for the
reprieve. But I am ready to hear whatever you
have to say to me.”
“It will not take long,” replied the preacher;
curtly for Sterling Hart. “It is chiefly in a word:
You have given me to understand that you are
an educated physician, properly graduated.”
“I have, because I am.” -
“You possess, of course, the diploma of some
accredited institution P” -
“I don't frame it and hang it,” returned Dr.
Royal, with a smile whose bitterness was disguised
by its gentleness. “It is in one of the drawers of
my desk.”
“Are you willing — pray excuse me — that I
should see it?” asked the preacher point-blank.
“No,” said the physician, with equal bluntness.
“At least,” he added, “not under the present cir-
cumstances. I can conceive of those in which I
might be.” -
“Pardon me,” proceeded Sterling Hart, with-
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out smiling, “but the time has come when I must
tell you that it is said, - I have been told,— the
authority is good, Dr. Royal, or you will believe
that I should not act upon it. I learn that your
name does not stand upon the list of registered
physicians of this state.”
“Have you been meddling — looking that up 2"
The lame doctor got to his feet, and took fire,
like a less gentle man.
“I never thought of it!” blazed back the
preacher. “If I had, I should undoubtedly have
done so. I have my cousin's interests to protect.
Nothing else matters to me beside those. I could
not have a charlatan — an adventurer — assuming
and sustaining the position which you hold in this
house.”
The doctor waved these words off with a ges-
ture whose dignity impressed itself upon the
preacher even in that agitated moment.
“You would be quite right,” he replied with
unexpected self-possession. “I should not blame
you. . . . I suppose,” he added, wheeling, “Frost
told you this P’’
Mr. Hart, too, got to his feet. He made no
reply to this question, and the eyes of the two
men met poignantly. Then the preacher said:—
“Would it matter who discovered the fact — if
it were a fact 2 If it be a fact?”
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“He is capable of it,” mused the doctor, look-
ing into the fire more drearily than angrily. “I
might have thought of it — I did n’t, that's all.
. . . Mr. Hart!” He turned his marred face with
a pathetic movement, half appeal, half pain. “Mr.
Hart! The time has come, I see, when I must
answer your questions — some of them, at least.
We both belong to the confessional professions.
I ought to be able to trust you. Do you demand
my confidence P”
“I demand nothing,” returned the preacher,
quickly.
“Will you accept it, then 2"
The preacher hesitated. “I can't put myself
under bonds —” he argued hurriedly. “You must
see that. All I can say is : I have never betrayed
a human soul — that I can remember — in my
life.”
“It can't be helped, at any rate,” replied the
doctor, wearily. “There is no other way. I must
risk it. If you will be seated, Mr. Hart? Thank
you. I am rather lame to conduct a difficult con-
versation on my feet. Are the doors all shut 2
Where is Mrs. Dane P”
Mr. Hart looked out into the hall, and closed
and locked the office door again.
“I think she must be upstairs with Joyce,” he
said. He returned to his chair before the office
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fire. The doctor sat looking into it. It was some
moments before he spoke.
It was half an hour, it was an hour, it was two,
but the interchange of voices in the office did not
cease. Some time after ten o'clock, Carolyn came
down to put out the gas and go up to bed. Sud-
denly the office door opened, and she heard her
cousin saying gently : —
“How much time do you want?”
“How can I tell you?” returned the doctor.
“It may be a month; it might be a day.”
Then Sterling Hart came through the door-
way with bowed head. His manner indicated emo-
tion so great that Cara shrank back, afraid to
speak to him. But he took a step or two, and
approached her silently. Without a word he
stretched his arms above her head—not touching
her — as if he blessed her; as a priest, and as a
man, and as a kinsman; as if he blessed her alto-
gether and forever; and so, still mute, he left her.
In that moment she had seen his noble face; and
that it rained with tears.
Now, the evening and the morning were the
next day. The storm was spent. It was a shining
day, and blossomed like a white, hot rose. It was
the national Memorial Day, as it befell, and Caro-
lyn had been early to the churchyard, taking her
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boy and her flowers with her. This made her late
at her day's work, and she left Joyce, as her habit
was, in Kathleen's quite trustworthy care, and
hurried away, disregarding the child's peremptory
demand “to see some soiljers,” without her usual
attention to his fixed ideas.
Dr. Royal (to whom she offered that day an
abstracted greeting, as if the anniversary had
detached her altogether from him) paid his early
morning call on Solomon Hops, and was about
to proceed upon his rounds, when a change of
purpose took him ; he left his horse at his office
hitching-post, and made across the lawn of the
Sterling place towards the house of Mr. Hart,
musing as he walked. As he leisurely approached
the ravine and the iron bridge he heard, or fancied
that he heard, a scream, followed by another, and
another, each cleaving the May morning like a
rapier, and Seeming to him like a succession of
mortal stabs. The lame man limped into a chaotic
run, and hobbled up — slowly, at his best — in
time to meet the preacher coming towards him
rapidly. Mr. Hart in his coffin will be no grayer
than he was at that monstrous moment.
In his arms he clasped a little shrinking figure.
It was Cara's boy.
“What is it?” demanded the doctor. “Let me
have him Let me have him — quickly l’
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But the preacher held his little kinsman to his
leaping heart. The motion was automatic and im-
perious.
“He fell,” gasped Sterling Hart. “He was com-
ing to find me, I think. He slipped and rolled —
off–off—” He shivered, and hid his eyes upon
the sobbing child.
“Not ſhere 3’’
Dr. Royal pointed to the chasm with a finger
that shook like a ribbon in a gale.
“He fell, and rolled—his little clothes caught
somewhere — I think it was the leather belt — he
was hanging—over the – over the-when I found
him. There was a break in the railing we put up
after Timothy George—nobody knew it. I was
out walking. It just happened so; that is all.”
“Give him to me!” insisted the physician, with
a formidable look. “You should not yield to any
feeling you have — any impulse or affection till we
know — God! Don't you see Joyce is in convul-
sions? Give me — that is — the child, I say!”
The preacher's mighty arms surrendered the
boy to the doctor, who laid him on the grass and
examined him in absolute silence. After a few
moments he lifted the lad jealously again to his
own breast, and the two men walked on with their
shuddering little burden.
In the May morning they looked at each other.
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
Their eyes said: “Which of us must tell her P”
“What will this do to her ?” They had gone but
a short and difficult distance when they met Kath-
leen running and panting.
“It was but the drop of me eyelash, the twist
of me head,” argued Kathleen, “an' when I turns
the tail of me eye, he was not forminst me. He'd
been that crazy over them soldiers since the drums
begun. He says, “Mr. Cousin Sterling Hart’ll
show me some soiljers—' Mother of Heaven
Mother of God l’ cried Kathleen. She gave one
glance at the writhing child, threw her apron over
her head, and dropped upon the grass. The two
men strode on.
When they approached the cottage they stopped
and stood irresolute. A woman's figure, draped
in translucent black, moved uneasily about the
grounds, and a woman's voice — the tenderest in
all the world of women that either the physician
or the preacher knew—was calling with penetrat-
ing sweetness:—
“Joyce P Joyce P My baby! My little man
Where is mother's precious boy P”
From the village churchyard, a mile away, the
throb of military music, like the beat of a heart,
pulsated plainly, and seemed to answer her. Now
the bugle was calling taps above the soldiers'
graves, where the living had left all they had to
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
give the dead, -their flowers and their tears.
But Joyce did not hear the “soiljers.” Without a
wound, without a break, without a bruise upon his
perfect little body, the child, smitten by terror and
shock, passed from convulsion to convulsion in
the doctor's arms.
CHAPTER XVII
CAROLYN crept, leaning upon one elbow. She
had put the child into her own bed at the first,
and there, on the edge of the broad mattress, she
had lain day and night. The sleeve of her loose
white gown was worn through to her bare flesh
from the constraint and persistence of her posi-
tion. She was able in this way at once to watch
the boy's face and to hold his hand while he slept;
so to foretell, by the tightening of little fingers on
her own, the advance of the throes in which he
would awake.
Outside of the sickroom it was laughing June.
For three weeks the child had floated between
life and death, as the little flags on the soldiers'
graves fluttered and fell with wind or calm upon
their fragile staffs. The flowers were ashes upon
the mounds, but the small human soul clung to
its rights in its racked body. Brain fever with
complications, superinduced by shock, were om-
inous words. The mother listened to them dully. It
did not seem to her to matter what they called it.
Nothing mattered. The child would die; that was
all. Nothing could save him. Consultants from
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the city came and went. She listened stupidly to
what they said. Dr. Royal would understand. She
turned to Dr. Royal. Carolyn's natural courage
had quite forsaken her in this last extremity. She
had reached the point of endurance where a
woman ceases to hope, or even to struggle for any
form of happiness, since fate has denied her so
many, and accepts as her lot that reiteration of
sorrow which we find to be the portion of certain
lives. All the optimism of the situation came from
the nature of Charles Royal. All the will power,
all the hope concentrated upon the sinking boy,
were his. He had held the flickering life in the
hollow of his hand. For three weeks he had not
known a night's rest or a day's relief. He watched
the disease as a burning glass observes a piece of
scorching paper. Sometimes it seemed to shrivel,
whether before his professional skill or his per-
sonal absorption. Then the lad subtly lost more
than he gained, and the unequal contest set in
again. The physician did not yield his case by the
width of a wearied moment, or the weakness of a
diverted purpose. Carolyn had no heart to wonder
at the tenacity of his determination to save the
patient, or at his affection for the child; but she
was steadily and acutely conscious of both.
Now, with the breadth of the little lad's bed
between them, they sat, she on its edge, he on a
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chair at the other side. It was a warm evening,
and all the windows were flung wide. There was
but one light in the sickroom, and that, shaded
from the little patient, embossed the doctor's face
and head and hands in a soft illumination against
the shadow of a screen. The screen was black,
and its embroidery gold. Carolyn could see that
one of his hands was clenched; the other played
along the boy's pulse like a listening finger on
an invisible flute, - a magical instrument, which
offered music, but did not yield it.
The “sorryfool man” looked older than usual.
It seemed to Mrs. Dane that he had aged rapidly
within the last few weeks. His hair was a shade
whiter; the hollows in his cheeks were gaunt. His
gray beard drooped at the corners of his mouth,
and she was sure that his unseen lips trembled.
Her wasted eyes traversed the familiar map of his
face. Perhaps for the first time it occurred to her
that there were spaces upon it marked “unex-
plored.” Certain sacred words forced themselves
upon her imagination, and her thought repeated
them, not irreverently: —
“For his visage was so marred, more than any
man.”
How brutally that wreck had treated him A
dark scar ran across his forehead and his temple;
one of his cheeks was quite defaced. The strain
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of his battle for the life of her child, the long-
drawn vigil, the lost vitality, and the sensitive
anxiety which she could not deceive herself in
thinking that he had experienced — these had em-
phasized his physical defects and deformities. His
hoarse voice was fainter than she had ever known
it ; more raucous, more unpleasant to the ear.
She had never seen him limp so much as he did
now. Her haggard eyes absorbed every feature,
every gesture of the disfigured and exhausted
Iſla Il.
“He stands between me and the worst,” she
thought.
Her hurt heart crawled towards him as a
wounded creature seeks the only shelter it can
find. She leaned to him with the passion of pity
which only tender women know for unselfish, un-
attractive men. Cara thought: “If you were well,
and strong, and handsome, and fortunate, I should
not care so much.”
A clock in the room ticked gently, and the boy
stirred.
“Has n’t he slept a good while P” his mother
asked.
“Longer than at any time before.”
“What did Dr. Strang say?”
“Oh, he agreed with the rest.”
“Does n't he think there is any hope?”,
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“Why do you ask me these questions P’’
“What did he say to you when you were alone
together?”
“The usual things. He advised anodynes, and
so forth.”
“Have you given them?”
“NO.”
“Do you mean to give them P’’
“NO.”
Carolyn looked at the child. Her face worked.
“Do you want Dr. Strang to take the case ?
I should not blame you. You are trusting me
very far.”
“I shall trust you farther, — to the uttermost,
to the end.”
Although subdued conversation did not disturb
the boy, but tended rather to soothe him (so large
a part had the element of terror taken in his dis-
order), yet they had been speaking in the lowest
whispers, scarcely articulate. Their own voices
sounded unreal to them. The physician did not
reply to Mrs. Dane's last words. His emotion over-
came him, and he made no effort to conceal that
it did so, but averted his scarred face from her.
His finger crept back to the child's pulse.
“He is still sleeping !” breathed Carolyn.
The doctor glanced at his watch. “Almost an
hour more than at any time before.”
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Her eyes ran to the little wrist where the trained
finger tip rested as lightly as a leaf.
“Stronger,” he whispered, “a little. More even,
I think.” e
Across his disfigured face a frail Smile stirred.
Carolyn's courage took fire from it. She sat with
held breath, as if the child's life—still a part of
her own being—would exhale with the action of
her lungs. Her eyes sought the physician eagerly.
But his cautiously replied.
Now, when Mrs. Dane turned her head, Kath-
leen at the door was standing with hot soup, and
beckoning to the doctor.
“You, too,” he said; and Carolyn followed him.
Kathleen took the watcher's place beside the boy,
and the two sat down in the hall. There was a
divan beneath the window, and a small light table.
They put the cups of Soup upon the table, and
sipped comfortably; they had never taken a meal
together, and both remembered the fact. Carolyn
felt curiously comforted, as a woman does by the
domestic atmosphere in her saddest moments.
This had suddenly and subtly become something
lighter and brighter than a sad moment.
“Is there any chance P’’ she asked outright.
“Do not be too sure of it,” he parried gently.
“It seems to me possible; that's all I can say.”
“If Joyce should get well — ” Panting, she set
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her cup down. “I think I would never complain of
anything, never ask for anything again. It would
be . . . so much happiness. I should not know
how to . . . bear it.”
“Do you mean,” demanded the doctor, unex-
pectedly, “that there would be no room left in
you for any other happiness Of any other kind,
I mean.”
His lowered voice took for the first time since
they had been together the tone which no woman
can mistake. Carolyn's eyes fled before the con-
centration of his.
“If the little fellow should live— could you not
bear any more joy P. Would that exhaust your
capacity ? You could be very happy, you know.
Power to be glad is measured by power to suffer.
And you —”
He stopped. Carolyn lifted her trembling face.
Before she could check herself her innermost, ut-
termost soul sprang to her lips.
“His poor father l’she said. “His poor father!”
The doctor did not answer. He regarded her
solemnly. The childwaked, calling faintly, and the
two returned to the sickroom together
The doctor did not leave it again until morn-
ing. He expelled the mother from the room
peremptorily, ordered her to go to sleep, and him-
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self watched the night out. When Carolyn came
back, the June morning was in the room. Birds
were singing everywhere. The pale, pearl-pink
dawn tinged the cheeks of the sleeping child. His
forehead was moist; his curls lay close upon it
in pretty rings. One hand closed about the doc-
tor's finger. The physician gently loosened the
clasp, and rose. He stood Shining against the tall,
black screen. He limped across the room softly,
and took Mrs. Dane's hands in both of his. She
stood flooded in his emotion and her own.
“There was a change at three o'clock,” he said,
“when the tide turned to come in. The worst
symptoms are under control of the last remedy. If
it holds — if it lasts — I think" — he choked.
Before Carolyn could speak he had raised her
hand to his lips, and she felt them quivering upon it.
The doctor did not watch the next night, but he
did not leave the house. To Mrs. Dane's sugges-
tion that he should occupy a comfortable bed in
one of her empty rooms (for he was wasted with
vigil) he returned a quick refusal, and went down-
stairs.
“I’m all right on the office sofa,” he said. “I
shall stay there, as I have done before.”
He slept, and heavily, for no emergency dis-
turbed him. The child fared well. Carolyn took
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her turn at watching, but was scarcely needed.
Joyce passed from one sane, Sweet sleep to another,
and with the second daybreak his mouth curled
into a smile, and from it the dearest word in the
world stole out quite distinctly: –
“Mum — mummar ’’
Carolyn dared not kiss, and could not cry, but
she lay upon the ragged elbow of her white
gown, and put her cheek to his. When the doctor
came in she rose and stood, a statue of rapture.
She could have knelt at his feet, and knew that
she could. Perhaps he had some consciousness of
what was thrilling in her, for he extended his
hand involuntarily, as if to check the expression
of her gratitude. -
The June day had a celestial gentleness. The
sunrise warmed without the window and within
the room. The child put out his little fingers as if
he would grasp the light, laughed Softly, and slept
again. The doctor moved unsteadily towards the
bed.
Now, at that moment, the collie came thumping
up the stairs, and Mrs. Dane, fearing the effect of
the disturbance in the sickroom, hurried out to
send the dog away. This proved to be a matter
of Some moments. It was necessary to persuade
Clyde or to convince him that he was not wanted
(never under any circumstances an easy task), and
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
in the end she was obliged to take him by the
collar and tug him downstairs. When she returned,
stepping without sound in her knit woolen slip-
pers, the doctor was sitting in her place upon the
empty side of the bed. He did not see her; he
did not hear her; and as she stood upon the
threshold, hesitating, she perceived that his arm
had crept beneath the child, and that his tears were
storming upon the pillow. Faintly to her ears
there came these smothered words : —
“Joy! Joyce! My little &oy / Papa's sommy &oy /*
Then he lifted his wet, disfigured face. Carolyn
stood staring upon him. He gently withdrew his
arm, got to his feet, and made as if he would leave
the room, but fell back that she might precede
him. In the hall they confronted each other.
“Cara!” he said, “don’t you know me — after
a// ?”
CHAPTER XVIII
THE great miracles of the healing art are the quiet
ones. The boy was now sleeping more soundly
than at any moment hitherto. A deep renewal of
brain and body had passed upon him. Only his
gentle, even breathing could be heard in the sol-
emn stillness of the house.
The two in the hall stood looking upon each
other, as two might who had met in the after life
that follows pain, and joy, and trust, and love, and
all the mere emotions of an unreal earth. Both were
as gray as the dead; but the woman in her long
white gown acquired an added pallor from the
circumstance of it. She was the first to speak.
“Dr. Royal, will you repeat what you said to
me—just now? I am pretty tired, -and you, -
you have not slept. We are neither of us quite
ourselves. I should not wish to . . . wrong you
. in any way.”
She uttered the words gently, as one speaks to
a person mentally confused. It was plain to him
that her instinct was to treat him as though he had
given utterance to some temporary but unpardon-
able hallucination. -
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“I have said it,” he replied with a terrible brevity.
“I am your husband. I am Chanceford Dane.”
She retreated from him with an evasive, pitying
glance.
“My husband — you know that—is dead. He
is buried in Balsam Cemetery. I put flowers on his
grave the day that Joyce — that Joyce — Go and
rest!” she urged compassionately. “You have ex-
hausted yourself—for our sake. You are starving
for sleep. Go —go, and feed the famine of your
brain. Then — ”
“Only one thing can feed my famine,” he made
answer to her. “I am your husband. I am your
husband, Chanceford Dane. I know that I have
forfeited my right to be believed. You must do
as you choose about that. But, as God lives, I am
telling you the truth. That poor fellow yonder in
the churchyard . . . whom you cried over that
day when you took the flowers . . . is my little
brother Clay.”
“Come downstairs,” said Carolyn, quietly. “I
will call Kathleen to stay with Joyce. Get on the
office sofa, and sleep, Dr. Royal. You must, — do
you see P You must! It is more necessary than
you understand.” -
“If you call Kathleen —just yet — I shall tell
her. I shall tell everybody. Cara! stand where you
are and listen to me. I will speak . . . at last. I
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
tell you I will speak, and you shall listen. Cara!
Cara / Look at me. Don't turn away so soon.
Look back. Lift your eyes. Don't you know me
in spite of all? Don't you see anything about me
that you can recognize if you try, - if you should
want to try P”
In a silence crueler than any words she shook
her head.
“Oh, I know what a wreck I am! A shattered,
grotesque thing; a mask; a gargoyle! Even my
voice—if my voice had been left me, I could not
have carried it out. But I thought — I hoped —
if I told you (I always meant to tell you, when I
dared) that you would find something in me that
would remind you . . . Cara! Look! Look again!
Don't you see? Can't you see?”
She turned her head and obeyed him slowly.
Her eyes searched his marred face, lighted now
by brilliant, insomniac eyes; traversed his gaunt
figure; took note of every physical defect and
deformity that had ravaged him. Not a feature,
not a contour recalled the beauty, the grace, the
scintillant face and frame which had held the
debonair soul of Chanceford Dane. She did not
speak.
“Now I understand,” he said, “how dead people
feel. I never did before. They come into their old
homes; nobody knows it; nobody knows them. I
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have always pitied them. They must be an uncom-
fortable lot for a while.”
Something in the whimsical words — what was
it? —for a startled instant reminded her of Dane.
That glint in his dark eyes, burning through the
solemnity of the situation, stabbed her like a fine
electric needle. Chanceford never tolerated the
intense; he always threw it off as soon as he could.
Few tragedies but yielded to his sense of humor.
His wilful voracity for joy had remained with her
as the most memorable thing about him. In the
forced merriment of that momentsomething leaped
from the being of the man to hers. She received
a current of mystery charged with a thousand volts
of emotion. It seemed to her that either ecstasy
or annihilation hung upon the instant. Old re-
membered hours, old forgotten things, closed and
crashed about her. Smitten half with terror, half
with joy, her lifted face received the impact of his
personality. Her brain began to reel.
“It is not he who is delirious,” she thought.
“It must be I.”
She thrust up her hands to clasp her forehead,
as one does in a moment of unbearable mental
confusion. As she did so she felt one of them
seized. Before she could withdraw it, he had kissed
her arm. His lips sought and found the ragged
elbow of her white gown, where love, and grief,
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and watching, had worn the muslin through, –
and there rested on her, warm and shrinking.
Carolyn gasped and swayed. The disfigured face,
the crippled body, the shattered voice had not be-
trayed him. His flesh had become the prison of his
soul, and hers had given her no key. But before his
touch the heart of the wife stopped. She swayed
and fell. She was not a fainting woman, but for
this second, as for that first time when Dane took
her from the Country Club after Clyde had turned
upon his tormentor, she drifted away. He caught
and laid her upon the divan where they had been
sitting. When her mind anchored, she was lying
on the bed in her husband's old room, -that which
he had occupied when their estrangement began.
She herself had always retained the one that they
had shared.
The doctor was sitting beside her, and Kathleen
was in the room. It was now broad, bright day.
The child called from the sickroom.
“GO, Kathleen l’ the doctor said. “Sit with
him until I come. Mrs. Dane has had an ill turn.
She has watched too long.”
The two were left in a silence which ached
about them. She could not, and he did not break
it. He did not touch her again. Presently he said,
as if nothing had happened, “Lie quietly. Stay
where you are. I must go to Joy.”
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At the old, familiar baby name, forbidden to
her lips since the year her husband died, the color
splashed on Carolyn's ashen face. She struggled
up against the pillows and watched the doctor
limping from the room. Her head swam so that
she laid it back and closed her starting eyes.
The doctor remained with the child and did
not immediately return; when he did so, his morn-
ing office hour had struck, and patients were clam-
oring for him downstairs. Kathleen was in the
room with a breakfast tray. The girl's presence
checked the natural movement of a tremendous
situation. Carolyn said, “I will go at once and sit
with Joyce.”
And the doctor answered, “Are you able 2 Are
you sure ?” as if nothing had occurred.
He went to his morning's work methodically.
The day set in like any other day, and moved
prosaically along. Nannie Hops ran in to ask
what she could do. Mrs. Marriot stopped in driv-
ing by, to offer her horses, “if Mrs. Dane would
take a mouthful of air.” Mrs. Marriot had invited a
phalanx of the Salvation Army to a lawn party at
her house that afternoon; but the horses would be
free till luncheon; she urged the ride upon Mrs.
Dane. Sterling Hartcame over anxiously and early
to inquire for the child. Carolyn lay upon the little
fellow's bed, and denied herself to all her world.
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It occurred to her that she had to reckon with it,
sometime, somehow. It suggested itself to her
that, if the claim which this man of mystery put
upon her were genuine, the world's attitude to-
wards it could not be ignored; perhaps not even
scorned. Her whirling brain already perceived
that she was like a swimmer caught in a long,
deep seine—entangled, whatever happened, al-
most beyond hope of rescue; she could not sink;
she could not rise; the meshes were tight upon
her hands, her feet, and strangling at her throat.
She saw that, whatever course she should pursue,
she might be forced into a position either false or
fatal. The necessity of concealment, even for the
sake of throwing off concealment, was hateful to
her. Her instinctive candor, her translucent na-
ture, recoiled violently. In all her sweet, white
life there had never been anything in her conduct
which she must disguise, or allow to appear as
other than it was. It seemed to her intolerable
that she must sustain for one hour a position she
might, or might not — God knew l— be able to
explain to all the world. At first the woman was
stronger than the widow in her.
As the day progressed, her consciousness of
danger surmounted almost every other sense
of her situation, except that of the insolence of
events. This grew into something incredible, when
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hour upon hour moved on, and the impending
interview between herself and Dr. Royal was frus-
trated at every point. Nannie returned and came
upstairs without permission. Nannie had great
news; for she was engaged to her dentist after all.
Carolyn listened dully. Nannie was grieved at her
friend's attitude towards the most wonderful thing
in the world; her pretty New England profile
drooped when Mrs. Dane said apathetically: —
“Why should a woman ever marry anybody?”
Downstairs Sterling Hart sat stolidly waiting
for a rift in his cousin's obdurate seclusion. Joyce
was restless, and only an omnipresent mother
could suffice him. Then a mortal case demanded
the doctor. It was afternoon before he could hew
his way through the blockade of daily life, and
seek her; as he did.
Now, peremptorily, he put Kathleen on duty in
the sickroom, and in a tone that admitted of no
reprieve he said:—
“Mrs. Dane must rest. I shall take Mrs. Dane
downstairs for a while.”
It seemed terrible to Carolyn that he should be
giving reasons and excuses, keeping up the sub-
terfuge in teeth of such delusion as possessed
him. She obeyed him reluctantly. He led her into
his office and shut (she noticed that he locked)
the door. Then his formidable manner fell from
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him instantly and utterly, and he stood before her
like a culprit. She could see that he drooped in
every nerve and muscle.
“Well,” he began, “what have you to say?”
“I am here to listen, not to speak,” said Caro-
lyn, Coldly.
“You should be merciful—if nothing more.”
“You must be explicit—if nothing more.”
“I cannot be less. I wish to be more. If you
would give me a chance —” He stood panting.
“It is an incredible claim — that which you
make. You do not seem to realize how unbeliev-
able it is, though a woman . . . even if she wanted
to believe it. You do not seem to understand the
position in which you place me — you, whoever
you are, whatever you are. Your story is so . . .
unreal, so unlikely. On the face of it, why should
I believe it? Nothing in fiction or on the stage
could be more unnatural.”
“Life is more extraordinary than any replica of
life,” he answered quickly. “You should know
that.”
“Oh, I know,” she returned wearily, “that such
things sometimes happen. I have heard of them,
of course – now and then. I never knew anybody
to whom they did happen.”
All the conventional in Carolyn's nature rose
to the surface; family position and tradition; ex-
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perience of the commonplace and the accepted –
these comfortable facts only one thing had ever dis-
turbed. Her father's death, and the wretched way
of it, had, in a measure, prepared her to under-
stand that fate did not swerve from the third rail
of its terrible track for East Shore society. Sud-
denly she felt herself old and disillusioned. It
occurred to her that anything might happen to
her — mystery, melodrama, or a preposterous
and tragic joy.
“I do not present my claim without evidence,”
said the doctor, abruptly. “I have all . . . that sort
of thing.”
He unlocked a drawer in his desk and tore out
a mass of papers; these he tossed about and laid
in her lap.
“My diploma is here. See The certificate of
the medical examiners in this state (I had the
notion to get that, too, after I graduated); army
records, journals, personal accounts; an order
from my surgeon to come and help him in the
hospital. They found out that I knew something,
and kept me at it. Letters and more letters
These are from Balsam patients. That is from
Sterling Hart. And here — ” From a carefully
sealed package he broke the wax and laid in her
hand her own letters written to him while he was
at the front. “There was a great deal more of it,
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but it got lost in the scuffle. These I managed to
hold on to through everything.”
“These have not been in the water,” said Caro-
lyn, quickly, “and you were, a good while.”
“That is clever of you,” he said, smiling drear-
ily. “A man could not fool you if he wanted to.”
He threw his head back with a merry gesture
which it almost seemed to her she could recall.
“No, I did not trust my papers to that coaster;
in November, too. I had sent them North before
then. But that is the least of it.”
Carolyn rose suddenly and dropped everything
from her lap except her own letters; these her fin-
gers instinctively clutched.
“When a man is dead,” she said, “under such con-
ditions his papers may fall into anybody's hands.”
“Very well,” said the doctor, dully. He turned,
and limped to the window.
“If I could take adviceſ" cried Carolyn. “If I
could tell anybody If I could talk with Cousin
Sterling —”
“Talk with your Cousin Sterling !” urged the
doctor, wheeling. “Show him everything. Tell
him everything; he has seen it all; he has heard
it all. He is satisfied with the proofs of my claim.
Aſe does n’t take me for a worse scoundrel than
I am.”
“Does n’t he P’’ asked Carolyn, stupidly.
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Her hand crept to her pocket and hid her let-
ters there. They were few and worn and yellow.
Her fingers closed upon them convulsively.
“Don’t you see P” she gasped. “Don’t you see
what this means? If this is true? If you are what
you say you are 2 . . . If a man treats a woman —
treats a wife like that — why, you have deserted
me !” She broke into dry, dreadful sobs. “Oh, I
had rather you had died I had rather you had
died ”
She whirled, and turned the key, and fled from
him.
All the rest of that day she denied herself to
him. But for the illness of the boy he was sure
she would have left the house. Only the tenuous
thread of that little life held the two beneath the
same roof. Had it not been for the child, he felt
that she would have judged him without defense.
In the evening he sent up these words to
her: —
“It is necessary that I should finish my story.
Let us have it over with at once. After that, do
with me as you will. Leave Joy with Kathleen,
and come down.”
The message was written in his own hand, and
signed C. D. She obeyed the summons, as he had
thought she would. She did not speak. They sat
down on opposite sides of the Office table.
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“Have you sent for Hart?” he began.
“ No.”
“Are you going to ?”
“Not yet. Nobody, no third person, can help
us. When I have heard what you have to say I
will decide what I ought to do.”
He perceived, or he thought he did, that Caro-
lyn's whole nature was suffering from something
akin to that which surgeons call shock when they
deal with the effects of a physical accident. She
was both gashed and stunned. Her gentlest in-
stincts were in a state of collapse. Her excitement
was visibly increasing, and the doctor's composure
grew as hers declined.
“I will make it as short as I can,” he said
quietly. “It is n’t a very long story, anyhow. But it
is a little complicated, like a novel where the plot
has run away with the hero. You are perfectly
right; we will not clip the truth; we will have it
down to the roots. I did desert you, if you choose
to call it so. I don't suppose it is possible to con-
vince you that I did not mean to do it at the
first. . . .
“I was a pretty miserable chap, anyhow you
look at it, when I enlisted. A man is, when he
goes wrong; there is n’t much fun in it. I had
gone wrong, but then, you see, I'd been wronged.
It was n’t just as you thought it was. A man can't
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explain at the expense of a woman ; that 's the
code. I’m not so sure it is n’t a damnable code
on occasions.”
“When my husband was dead, and everybody
thought she was dying — a woman confessed to
me,” interrupted Carolyn, “that I had been . . .
mistaken.”
“Oh, she did, did she P’ queried the doctor. “I
wondered what she wanted of you.” He showed
but little interest in the matter, and drummed
upon the table with his long, thin fingers.
“I got to feeling pretty bitter, and all that—
thought about marriage the way a man does
when his has failed. I don't deny — I won't keep
back any part of the price of it all — that I had
times of thinking I'd like to get out of it; for
your sake more than for mine. I used to reason:
‘She would be better off.' Then poor Clay turned
up in that accursed war — it was just one of the
desperate chances that we met at all — and that
gave me something else to think about. I don't
know that I mentioned Clay, did I ? But I wrote
you, did n't I? I meant to.”
“Sometimes,” said Carolyn, cautiously, “I had
letters from my husband.”
“You see Clay had that white lock, too,” pro-
ceeded the doctor, as if he had not heard her.
“The older he grew, the more it seemed to show,
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for he never got gray at all. He looked a great
deal like me, too, when he outgrew his youth, his
first youth. The resemblance was very marked. I
would n’t have believed it possible. We had three
or four good hours together, in spite of all, at odd
times. He was terribly shattered . . . poor Clay !
He went down at San Juan. He was in the
charge. And so was I. I was half blown to atoms.
It was n’t the wreck so much; that only finished
what the shell began. But I was nearly shot to
pieces. You see I was hit in the throat (that did
my voice up); but my head was the worst — de-
lirious for I don't know how long. Nobody knows;
it settled into amnesia — one of those cases of
alteration of personality, when a fellow forgets
who he is. After hospital, I went — God knows
where; and I did — God knows what. My opinion
is I sent the package North about that time.
“One day I looked up and saw that I was work-
ing in an orange grove in Florida. There were
the everglades, and the darkies, and the oranges
blazing on the squat trees. I went into the house
and asked the man who owned it — he was a nice
fellow, graduated at Princeton — if he had any
Northern papers. He kept them on file, the way
people do, you know, in dull places, where no-
thing happens, and I read them every one. That's
how I found it out. I read about my funeral in Bal-
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sam Cemetery, and all the rest of it. ‘Well, I
said, “she is rid of me now. It's the best thing
could have happened to her.' Besides” . . .
“Besides what?” asked Cara, with dry, judi-
cial eyes.
“Why, I was still drinking, that's the upshot
of it. Army life does n't help a fellow that way.
And then I'd had a pretty hard time — not that
I want to excuse myself, - for anything.”
“Go on,” said Mrs. Dane. She sat with her
face averted from him; the white splashes that had
settled about her mouth were extending slowly.
The feeling recurred to her that he and she might
have been two ghosts comparing notes on the his-
tory of a closed existence.
“I said, ‘I won't go back to be a burden to her
— to disgrace her. Since I’m dead, I’ll stay dead
—awhile, anyhow.' It was quite a time before it
occurred to me that I might . . . I might dis-
grace you in Some other way. You are so young,
so beautiful, still. And I knew how a man would
feel about you. One day I came to my senses,
what there was left of them, and I said, ‘You’ve
been a fool long enough. Go home. Go North
the first chance and tell her.' I meant to, Cara!
I meant to, from my soul!”
“Go on,” repeated Carolyn. “I am listening. I
hear everything you say.”
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“There's one thing,” interpolated the doctor,
“before I forget it. It seems to belong just here.
I had been studying—that's the curious part of
it — all that while I was dissociated from my per-
sonality — that is, when I did n’t know myself.
Anything else I knew except my own history. I
had forgotten that I ever practiced medicine; but
the odd thing was, I meant to practice medicine;
I studied all my spare moments. That surgeon I
spoke of had lent me some books. He was n’t like
the rest; he belonged to the new faith; they slip
through sometimes, even among the cut-and-dried,
even in the army. I studied his materia medica. I
read, and read, and read. You know how I used
to hate my profession ? How I used to scribble,
and play the violin, and hanker after a literary
life, and all that nonsense? You could n’t under-
stand — no layman could—how I despaired of
curing the sick on the basis where I stood. I
never respected my own materia medica. When
I found one that I could trust, and found that it
did what it claimed to be able to do, I began over
again in dead earnest. In spite of everything, it
has been a joy to knuckle down to work. I've
found something—got something left in my
spoiled life; even if I have lost — you.”
He lifted his head with a dignity before which
Carolyn's drooped; but she did not speak.
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“The worst of it was the dipsomania, Cara. A
man can find a lost memory—a lost mind, if you
will—more easily than he can lose a fixed appe-
tite. It fluctuated as all disorders do. There were
times, - I will not keep anything from you, girl-
there may be yet. I can't guarantee that the war
is over in me. All I can say is, I've found my
colors, and I’ve learned how to fight; how not to
run under fire, and the tactics of it. When I came
North in that coaster I had made up my mind
what I would do. The first thing I meant to try
my luck with you; I meant to tell you the whole
story. After that—”
“I should like to know where you sent the
papers?” asked Carolyn, without a sign of emo-
tion.
“Why, to Dipdown. I expressed them to that
old hotel—you know—where we went—”
A low, choking sound, half a cry and half Suffo-
cation, escaped her.
“They were left there indefinitely to be called
for. It was the strangest thing. I had forgotten
everything else—who I was and where I lived;
but I remembered Dipdown. I remembered that
cottage near the hotel, with the open fire and the
roses. When the time came, I went up and got
the things. They had the address of Charles
Royal on them; I had got the name fastened on
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me, somehow, so I held to it. I went into a fish-
erman's house there, one of the mountain fisher-
men, and caught trout for a living. I fished and
lived out of doors, and drank Cold water and
warm milk and fought with beasts at Ephesus,
till I got the upper hand of myself. That was
after I got out of the Balsam hospital. I have n't
touched a drop since I came from Dipdown. I
don’t pretend to say . . . but I have n’t, so far.
That's all. You can form your own opinion of
my chances.”
“I can form my opinion of your conduct!” said
Carolyn, suddenly slipping into a bitter wail. “A
man who is shipwrecked at his wife's feet — know-
ing everything – all she has suffered — and does
not tell her, does not tell her even then l’’
“You shuddered when you saw me,” urged the
doctor, piteously. “I was pretty far gone. But if I
/had been dead I should have known you. You
came up and looked at me. I felt that I was hor-
rible to you — the way I looked, the flotsam that
I was; I lost my pluck. I said, ‘I can’t risk it —
not now.' I suppose I was a coward. I'd rather
have faced the charge at San Juan again than to
face you. Now that I have done it,” added the
“sorryfool man,” with conviction, “I don't know
but I should have stood a better chance then.
Should I ?”
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“Go on,” repeated Carolyn. “Finish your story.
Explain everything you can.”
“There is n’t much left of it,” replied the doc-
tor, shrinking. “I have covered the most neces-
sary points, haven't I? After all, it is n’t any-
thing I can say that is going to weigh with you.
You know I am naturally an outright, downright
fellow. I did n’t realize when I got myself into
this scrape how hard it would be to play a rôle.
There have been some dangerous breaks. Douce
Marriot was very shrewd — you know she is; she
half suspected me of being an adventurer while
she was getting over the pneumonia. Then Nan-
nie — you remember, don't you ? I left my old
violin at Solomon's — forgot to take it away when
we were married. One night I came across it in
the hall closet where I hung my coats. I could
not help it; I took it out, and began to play — it
was very rash. I played that old thing you used
to like so much, –
‘Oh, promise me that you will take my hand,
The most unworthy in this lonely land.”
“She came in and heard me, and she stood
stock still. “That is Dr. Dane's violin,’ she said.
‘Why do you touch it? I would rather that you
did nºt touch it. Why, you play like a dead man l'
Nannie said.
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“Then there was Clyde. If he could speak Eng-
lish he would have given me away a hundred
times. I don't think he suspected me in the least,
drenched in all that salt water. But when he met
me on the street, the day I came home — you
did n’t see that. He growled at first; you know he
never liked me. Then he screamed, and screamed.
I thought he would have knocked me over. After
that, he seemed to pity me.
“Then one night I went to town to hear Ster-
ling Hart preach, and a fellow came in and sat
beside me, and I saw that it was Timothy George.
He was in the charge at San Juan, you know.—
perhaps you don't know. Well, he was, and I guess
he never swallowed the story. He was in Clay's
regiment. He tried to sound me that night there
in the church. But he did n't make much head-
way; although my opinion is, he had run across
me and my scars in the hospital or somewhere.
He had never seen me since my hair went to
ashes, and it puzzled him. I told you, did n't I,
that when I looked in the glass that day in Flor-
ida—the day after I read the papers— I found
it snow-white I don't know when it turned, any
more than you do. Timothy told your cousin
whatever notions he had got in his head, and
Hart came down on me — that night in the office,
you remember. I had to tell him everything —
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there was n't any other way out of it. I never
meant that anybody should hear it first. I meant
to give you your rights, so far as that went. It was
the only one I had left to give you. Is there any-
thing more you want to know P” asked the doc-
tor. He rose abruptly and stood before her.
It was terrible to her to see that he winced so,
as if her very being had become a flaming Sword
that hewed him down. His voice sank.
“What I have been saying, Cara, is the least
of it all. These are little things between yourself
and me. They only go about so far to prove my
claim, and there they stop. There are — other
things that I could say. Before the courts of
heaven I could plead my case, but in earth or
heaven no living ear but yours can hear that evi-
dence. It is not of a nature that I can force upon
you. When you are ready to listen to me, let me
know.”
Carolyn had risen, too, and stood staggering
before him. Now she thrust out both her hands
as if he were the judge, and she the culprit, and
so pleaded before him.
“Let me think I Oh, let me think! Give me
time — a little more | For that would mean — for
that would mean —” she stopped.
“Calm yourself,” said the doctor, “Be as quiet
as you can. You shall have all the time you want.
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I must go up and see Joy now. Stay where you
are. I will be back presently.”
His slow, laborious step climbed the stairs, and
she heard it crossing the floor of the child's room.
After a short time he came down and put on his
hat and coat.
“He is doing remarkably well. He will be quite
safe with you and Kathleen. You can telephone
if I am needed. I will say good-night.”
She echoed the word automatically. “Do you
mean to — leave me — so P”
“I must either go or stay,” doggedly replied
the man. She did not answer, and he moved to-
wards the door. She did not follow him. When
he opened the door, she perceived that the shin-
ing day had descended to a stormy night. It was
raining hard, and drearily. He stepped upon the
piazza, and put up his umbrella. She came to the
threshold and remonstrated; something about the
wet, and how tired out he was; he did not reply.
When he had got down the steps, he turned and
said, quite in a natural, every-day voice: —
“Send for your cousin. Send for Sterling Hart,
and talk it over. He has advised you all your life
— remarkably well. The only time you did n’t
follow his judgment you married me. Whatever
comes, I will not be the man to spoil your life a
second time. You shall not make another mis-
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take if I can help it. You shan’t acknowledge
me because you pity me. Take your time, and
counsel, Cara — dear.”
He slipped into the last word against his will, it
seemed, and limped pathetically away. Carolyn
stood shaken with an irresolution more pitiable
than his pride or his despair. The heart of a
wounded woman goes by a strange way, and the
man has never lived who could follow the route
of it.
“It’s raining pretty hard,” she faltered.
“Good-night,” he gently said.
When he had limped a little distance down the
sidewalk, she called him faintly.
“Dr. Royal P Doctor P Doctor!”
But the doctor did not turn. His uneven step
thudded on the gravel walk, and lapsed from it.
Carolyn shut the door and crawled upstairs to the
boy's room.
She got into her white gown, and lay upon the
outside of the bed. She looked at the black screen,
empty of his presence who had stood there shining
the night he saved her child. Her confused eyes
traced the pattern of the gold embroidery. This
was easier to do than to trace the workings of her
own mind and heart. Now a tragic hope, now a
taunting pride, swung her to and fro. Curious fears
came upon her; womanish, unreasonable worries.
3 IS
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
Suppose he met with some mishap before the morn-
ing, some one of the accidents to which physicians
are liable, called to emergency cases and driving
in the night? Suppose, indeed, he turned and fled
from her again It occurred to her that he was
capable of it; it occurred to her that she had par-
leyed with his forbearance, with his misery, at a
cruel leisure. Once, and again, and again, she started
to go to the telephone, and recall him to the house.
She lay all night with wide eyes, burning into the
darkness. Once she turned her arm and glanced at
the sleeve on her white elbow; her lips crept to-
wards the ragged spot that his had touched; when
she found that they could not reach it, her face
blazed, half with a sense of humor, half of shame.
At the first gleam of the dawn she ran downstairs
and summoned him. He answered his call bell
immediately.
“He has been listening for it,” she thought.
She tried to collect herself, but the receiver shook
in her hand.
“Doctor, will you come over ? Please?”
“Is Joyce worse P”
“No. Oh, no.”
“Has he slept well? Is there any return of the
fever ?”
“None—none at all. He has slept all night.”
“But you wish me to come P”
|-
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
“If you will be so good.”
“Very well,” he said in his ordinary voice. “I
will get there as soon as I can.”
She was waiting for him downstairs; it seemed
to her an intolerable, interminable time before he
came limping up the walk in the gray-rose light.
She had opened the front door softly, and stood
upon the threshold in her crumpled, loving, mo-
ther's gown. They passed into the office together,
and she shut the door.
“Have you slept?” he began.
“No, have you?”
“Oh, no. Have you communicated with your
cousin P”
“Yes.”
“What does he say?”
“I don't know. I called him up just now. I
asked him to come over by and by. I asked him
not to come till after . . . after I had seen you
again.”
“Did you?”
A subtle change passed upon the doctor's sleep-
less face. His expression could not have been
called hope, but it had ceased to be despair.
“I have been thinking,” he suggested humbly,
“that I ought not to intrude upon your conscience
in any way. You used to have a tremendous New
England conscience, Cara. You shan't deal with
3 I 7
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
me from a sense of duty. And your pity I won't
have. I could go away again, Cara . . . if you
would rather. I need not stay; I suppose I could
start in somewhere else. You need not acknow-
ledge me unless you want to. I could manage some-
how . . . now I have seen you.”
Then she cried out upon him, and her shaken
voice was more piteous than his.
“Tell me! Tell me everything . . . all you
meant to say . . . those things that nobody else
could hear.”
“I could n't tell you,” he said almost inarticu-
lately, “over there.”
“No,” she said. “I understand that. I know you
could n't.” -
“My God!” he cried, “would you trust me so
far as that & Without consulting any one P With-
out — ” .
“I shall consult my own soul,” said Cara, sol-
emnly. “And yours. There is no other on this
earth whom it concerns. I will listen to all you
have to say to me — ”
“Then you will listen here,” he warned her.
He held his arms out, all shaking as they were.
Without a tremor, as without a blush, she stirred
to him. Before he could touch her, she heard the
man sob. Then she began to tremble.
“Oh, Can you forgive me . . . ever in this
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THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
world Wait! Wait! Before you tell me any
more; before I hear a word of it; I must make
you understand — I will trust you first. And you
shall tell me afterwards.”
She lifted her lips to his marred face.
In the deepening dawn they sat solemnly while
he gathered his strength to offer her the sacred
evidence that he had promised. He began by speak-
ing of little things—delicate memories, trifles of
their courtship, and betrothal.
“We sat upon the piazza—it was just this
hour—and saw the sunrise on the sea. Your fa-
ther was better, and we could leave him with the
nurse. Her name was something colored — Black;
Miss Black. You sent Kathleen to bring me sand-
wiches because I had watched all night. You had
on that long gray cloak — it had pink about it —
Over your white gown; it was edged with some sort
of fluttering fur – white; it floated with the mo-
tion of your breath. I don't think you ever had
seen a summer Sunrise before. The color was upon
your face. You looked . . . so beautiful to me. I
thought: a man might give his life to win her.
I won you, and I ruined mine and yours.
“I never, to this day, have understood how you
came to capsize; you're such a clever sailor. How
Clyde pulled you through the Surf and fought me
3 IQ
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
off I put you in my buggy, dripping wet. In my
office, afterwards, you wore Nannie's dress—gray,
with white above. And I told you—you remem-
ber what. “I am in the undertow,' you said. “Let
me drown.'
“At sunset you met me on your father's lawn.
You still wore Nannie's dress, half gray, half white.
Do you remember what you said about it? Shall
I tell you? No? I thought you would remember.
“Clyde wore a white ribbon on our wedding
day. You leaned out from the carriage, you leaned
away from me, to look back at Clyde. On the cars
you talked of all sorts of common things, as if you
had met me on an accidental journey. You told
me Kathleen was going to marry a bellboy from
the hotel. At Dipdown you did not like the moun-
tains. You wanted to go home. You felt happier
when you saw I had the cottage ready for you.
What big, beautiful mountain fires those were !
Don't you remember the roses P. . . I knelt to you,
Cara, I knelt at your feet. I was n't a praying fel-
low, but I prayed. You could n't know that. I said,
‘Thou God! Make me fit to take her to my life.’”
Cara, in his arms, had ceased to tremble, she
had ceased to weep. She lay quite still, and gently
she put up her hand, and stroked his wet, dis-
figured cheek.
They spoke of many things, although it was
32O
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
chiefly he who talked and she who listened, for a
time. He reminded her of matters that she remem-
bered, and of some that she had forgotten till he
spoke of them. He recalled little scenes between
them, trifles, the friction or the harmony of mar-
ried life — what happened on such a day, and what
on such another. They spoke of graver things,
incidents and episodes, tenderness and coldness,
records in the journal of their hapless marriage.
He would say, “Do you remember that? Have
you forgotten this 2 " And she could not gainsay
him. They recalled memories precious and holy,
known only to themselves. They spoke of the
sacredness of marriage, of the rapturous hope with
which they had entered upon it, and the despair
into which it had betrayed them; of the ever-
living power of the sacred bond which they felt so
strangely and so strongly holding them together,
after all. They spoke of love; of its higher nature,
and its other, and of the kind of love remaining
possible to them, after their tragic experiment at
it; a something bare of all illusion and timorous
of joyous promises, a quiet confidence tried as by
the fire of life, and not afraid of it because they
had known the worst that it could do to them.
They spoke of the love that seeketh not itself; the
sacrificial love, the only kind that lives in the
dying of all the substitutes that mock the name.
32 I
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
Then Cara spoke — so gently, so humbly, that
it was difficult for him to follow the Sweet impulse
of her heart, so long unknown to him — about the
twice-told love that she had cherished for the man;
he who had won her first, and then again; he to
whom she brought the love of wife and widow
too, and laid both with a womanly fervor at his
sad feet.
“Oh, you love like a goddess!” he would have
cried. “And forgive like a spirit.” But the words
failed upon his lips, and all he could say was
“Cara! Cara ! Cara /*
Now, while they sat so, in the broadening,
brightening day, in the silent house, whispering
and breathing cheek to cheek, the unlocked door
turned inward softly, and the preacher stood upon
the threshold. His luminous eyes had their priest's
and prophet's look. His hands, stretched out be-
fore him, uttered the benediction of the soul that
forgets itself in the blessedness of another.
Cara slipped to her feet, and advanced to meet
him. Dane followed, not timidly, but with his gray
head lifted. His marred face was so irradiate that
it was the high light of the room.
“Cousin Sterling,” said Cara, in a ringing voice,
“please go and tell Kathleen, - and Nannie. Tell
everybody, - all the world. Explain it if you can.
322
THOUGH. LIFE US DO PART
But if you can't, it does not matter. I don't mind
any of those — little things.” -
“I can protect you, I think,” said Sterling Hart.
“At any rate, I can try. Have you put all your evi-
dence before her ?” he demanded, wheeling upon
the man.
“Ask her,” said Dane.
But the preacher turned his face away.
“God hath joined you together,” he answered
brokenly. “Who shall put you asunder? Cousin
Cara, . . . if you are happy . . . I shall stand
between you and all the world.”
He raised himself to his commanding height,
with his lofty, upward motion of the chin.
Now while the three stood there, something
puzzled as to their next word, and not without
embarrassment, the child waked and crooned in
a pretty singsong from the room above: –
“Mum – mumma P Pup—puppa P Mum –
map.” Cara started and stirred. As she ran up
the stairs, the two men heard her calling all the
way: —
“Mother is coming to her precious one. Joy!
%y / "
The collie heard the foreign word; he came in
and seriously scanned the faces of the superior
beings, who regarded him with unusual respect
and emotion. In the storming of the human
323
THOUGH LIFE US DO PART
drama, who had paused to recognize its dumb
unconscious hero?
But the dog retreated haughtily from them, and
went with splendid and confident motions up the
stairs. Dane had taken a step forward, but fell
back.
“After you, Clyde,” he said, with his whimsical
smile.
The morning moved into the summer day. The
tide was racing in. The surf leaped through the
great chasm, and spoke in a tongue that no man
understood. Only one tried to translate it, and
he sat alone upon the cliff's edge, and studied—
after all his experience and his wisdom, his power,
and purity of heart, and effacement of self—the
grammar of life. It seemed to him that he had
gone back to the elements of existence, to the
difficult, primitive lessons of a man's soul. The
preacher watched the tide come in, and surge upon
the old, eternal barriers of the granite; madly for
the moment, according to the nature of tides.
“Presently,” he thought, “it will ebb.”
He stayed and watched the pit of foam until it
slipped, seething down. Then he lifted his eyes to
the sea-line, where the sky met it.
-*.*.
(The ſtillergite pregg
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
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THE EVASION
By EUGENIA BROOKS FROTHINGHAM
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THE OPENED SHUTTERS
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