-5" .- OP CALIF. LIBRABY, LOS ANGELES A SON OF A SON OF AUSTERITY By GEORGE KNIGHT Frontispiece by HARRISON FISHER NEW YORK HURST & COMPANY PUBLISHERS Copyright 19') 1 The Bowen-Merrill Compaajr Copyright 1912 The Bobbs-Merrill Compenr A *> o( AasterMr TO THE MEMORY OF D. S. C, V ' ^ - ^ r- - CONTENTS CHAPTER PACK i. THE SHE-WOLF'S CUB . . i II. THE INDISSOLUBLE PARTNERSHIP . 8 III. PORTIA . . . . .21 IV. VOX ET PR^ETEREA NIHIL . . 33 V. A LETTER AND A SERENADE . . 47 VI. THE PLAY OF TRAGEDY . . 6 1 VII. THE LAST JOURNEY . . .69 VIII. A CONTROVERSY AND A COMPACT . 82 IX. THE KING OF TERRORS . . .96 X. A MONOLOGUE AND SOME IMPERTINENCES 117 XI. AN INEFFECTIVE DEMURRER . .128 XII. A DEJEUNER AND A DEPARTURE . 135 XIII. THE CONSENT OF THE CAPTIVE . . 147 XIV. A QUESTION OF THE ABSOLUTE . 158 XV. PERCEPTION OF THE IRREVOCABLE . 170 XVI. AFTERMATH AND GERMINAL . . 1 82 vii viii CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE XVII. PHILOSOPHY OF FRUITION . .195 XVIII. NATURE AND CERTAIN VACUA . 207 XIX. UNMASKING THE ELEMENTAL . 2l8 XX. THE GORDIAN KNOT . . 2 28 XXI. HOPE OUT OF HELL . . . 240 XXII. A PARADOX OF MATERNITY . 2jO XXm. SPIRITUALITY AND A MATERIAL EQUATION .... 264 XXTV. INCREASE OF DEFINITION . . a8o XXV. LOVE, TIME AND DEATH . . 296 XXVI. SOME GEESE AND A BLACK SWAH . 308 XXVII. THE INEFFABLE PHENOMENON . 323 XXVTO. OUT OF THE BLUE . . . 333 XXIX. THE FLOWERING OF DESPAIR . A SON OF AUSTERFTT A SON OF AUSTERITY CHAPTER I THE SHE-WOLF'S CUB "My peace is gone And my heart is sore: I have lost him, and lost him For evermore. "The place where he is not To me is the tomb, The world is sadness And sorrow and gloom." The reader's voice was a penetrating baritone, sympathetic enough, though somewhat scantily modulated. He lay at full length on a truss of straw, with a paper-backed duodecimo between his elbows, while the afternoon sunshine picked him out of the dusk from an adjacent loophole. The ponderous murmur of uncouth machinery dwelt upon the air throwing into acoustic relief the words of Marguerite's lament "My peace is gone And my heart is sore, For lost is my love For evermore." 2 A SON OF AUSTERITY "Paul!" The interpolated syllable, an utterance laden with anxiety and thrilling with tears, died un- heard amid the somber vibrations which governed the student's ear. He went on, vaulting a quar- tette of stanzas- "Far wanders my heart To feel him near, Oh! could I clasp him And hold him here. "Hold him and kiss him Oh! I could die To feed on his kisses How willingly." "Paul!" This second summons came more distinctly from the horizontal doorway of the shadowy loft. The young man sprang to his feet. "Mother? Good heavens! what has brought you up here? Is there anything the matter?" Notwithstanding the title just given her, the woman who rose in the obscurity was totally un- like the speaker. Her face was a pronounced oval with steel gray eyes under the arched brows ; his was square and angular, with deep, compre- hending brown pupils. Time had added to this natural dissimilarity; the feminine head was al- most white, its smooth tresses showing pathet- ically sparse against the high temples the mas- culine was covered with a riotous array of crisp dark curls. THE SHE-WOLF'S CUB 3 "There there was no one about," she was answering evasively the least difficult of his ques- tions "and I wondered where you could be." Her son's mind still heavy with thought did not perceive the curious inadequacy of the expla- nation. He held up the small volume. "Goethe," he said. "I was thinking about you; shall I ever reconcile you to Marguerite's lack of spirit?" The listener's teeth caught at her lip the trembling mouth shut tightly, opened involun- tarily as if to speak, then closed upon the vehem- ent grasp of some recurring emotion. Paul sat down again and fluttered the leaves, scanning a page here and there. "Poor Marguerite," he murmured abstractedly; "she was rather a limp little soul." His glance wandered from the book. "Mother! why, mother, what is the matter?" She put out her hands toward him and the tears overflowed. Her answer was a species of sob. "Paul," she said brokenly, "your your father has come back." Paul Gotch sat looking at her; the sunlight flooding over him into a pool of dancing yellow. His mouth softened to an expression of tender interest as he gazed at the fragile figure before him. Suddenly the eyes of mother and son met : the man's face fell vaguely. The woman saw it and understood. Nevertheless, she held her peace ; she could do no other. Yet, on the instant, 4 A SON OF AUSTERITY her quivering features set in a cruel mask. From the lineaments of an experienced woman of mid- dle age, they became those of a vixen of fifty. The rumble of the machinery below seemed to grow upon the senses of both until it was like tLo roar of Niagara. Presently Paul spoke a subdued interrogation. "He is sorry?" It was an ungainly phrase, but the hard realism of his mother's bearing forbade the use of super- fluous rhetoric. "Sorry!" The word punctuated a forced nasal expiration that was a sneer run mad. Paul Gotch winced ; he fingered the "Faust" in puzzled embarrass- ment. Unexpectedly, Mrs. Gotch stepped forward, snatched the book from his hand, flung it down and stamped on it. Her son bent and took it up. When he re- gained his former position his eyes were con- temptuous and his nostrils dilated with the frigid anger of disgust. The two faces, fiercely an- tagonistic, gazed into each other; Paul began to straighten the crumpled volume. "Sorry!" said Mrs. Gotch once more. Paul devoted himself conspicuously to the dam- aged translation. "And if he were sorry," his mother flashed out, "what then?" Paul Gotch squared his drooping shoulders. THE SHE-WOLF'S CUB 5 "Nothing," he answered. "Pshaw!" retorted Mrs. Gotch, bitterly; "do you think I don't know what you mean? You set more store by a lot of rubbish you've read in those books of yours than you do by all my years of starving and struggling. That's why you sym- pathize with him. Ah, you're his son. after all; his own son, core-through !" Paul Gotch raised his head and his jaw fixed. The muscles at the angles thickened into fleshy swellings, so brutal was the strain put upon them. His mother repaid this physical demon- stration of revolt with a stare of virulent disdain, and the ensemble of both countenances became in- human in the extreme. Cynicism sprang to the man's rescue. "I suppose the wanderer has asked to see me," he suggested ; "is that it ?" Mrs. Gotch trembled with passion. "You surely don't imagine he's here for my sake," she snapped. Regardless of the gibe, Paul began to descend the hidden stairway. He halted abruptly, and returned, his face alight with a dreamy simplic- ity. "What is my father like?" he inquired. His mother lifted her hand, and struck him upon the cheek : a desperate, vicious blow, that stamped a quadruple bar of scarlet on a saffron ground. Paul's clenched fingers leaped to a level with his elbow ; then dropped. 6 A SON OF AUSTERITY "I think you forget yourself," he observed, icily. Mrs. Gotch shrank back, aghast at her o\vn ac- tion, and her son, crossing the rickety floor with savage strides, disappeared in the twilight of the awkward exit. His mother followed him. The apartment below was windowless ; but a wide opening in one of the rough board walls served the double purpose of door and casement. From its sill, a long slope of wooden beams sank to an irregular stretch of muddy clay, and upon the thwarts of the slope a narrow-gauge railway had been built. A rusty chain came up the incline, met a couple of giant pulleys, and plunged into the engine-room underneath. To its farther ex- tremity a laborer was attaching.a squat tip-wagon piled with masses of clay. The horse that had dragged it from the point where the clay was in process of "getting," stood dejectedly by. On all sides the brickfield rolled its solitary acres to the distant ring-fence of suburban roofs. Within the upper story of the engine-house a huge hopper pierced the planking, and into its battered funnel a slothful attendant shoveled, periodically, the disgorgings of the tip-wagons. Mrs. Gotch hurried down the artificial declivity that afforded the only means of access or depart- ure. Her son availed himself of it for a few yards, and then leaped into the ruddy mire of the clay bottom. They met at the base of the slope, and mounted together the acute scarp that led to THE SHE-WOLF'S CUB 7 a trapezium of unspoiled turf, whereon \vas perched a single white cottage. A low green fence surrounded it; it had green window-shut- ters, and a shallow porch of green trellis. The conventional flower-beds in the cramped garden were thronged with double daisies pink, yellow and blue. On the threshold Mrs. Gotch spun about. "Mind you," she said, vindictively, "go with him if you want to." Paul Gotch laughed easily; he had recovered his savoir-faire. CHAPTER II THE INDISSOLUBLE PARTNERSHIP IN the front parlor of the white cottage a man was striding up and down half a dozen steps one way, half a dozen the other ; fitfully, like a caged animal. The room was low-ceiled and unsym- metrical, but substantially even handsomely furnished. A thick Brussels carpet covered the floor ; the chairs, the sofa, and the revolving book- case in the window-bay, were of heavy mahogany the two former upholstered in maroon leather and a few pictures, unambitious enough, yet well-chosen, hung against the walls. These lat- ter were further diversified by fixed book-shelves, brackets, and dependent pottery. Upon a round, four-legged table of black oak, pushed toward one of the flanking sashes, a large silver ink-stand made a glittering island in the midst of a sea of disordered literature volumes opened and closed, magazines, newspapers, and folios of soiled manuscript. Before this monu- mental confusion, the walker finally halted. He was a person of medium height, agile in his move- ments, and powerfully, though compactly built. 8 THE INDISSOLUBLE PARTNERSHIP 9 His hair and closely-cropped beard \vere thickly sprinkled with gray, and the irises of ni.-> some- what diminutive eyes were a pale neutral tint, splashed with vivid orange. His nu.-uth was selfish, and, by reason of a protruding nether lip, sensual to boot. Lounging at the table-edge, he lifted a batch of scrawled sheets and investigated them musingly. " 'The Economic Interpretation of History- Notes on Thorold Rogers.' Bah ! 'The Ethical Standards of Certain Poets ;' 'Beatrice Cenci and the Instinct of Revenge in Woman.' Good Lord!" he commented, "what a queer lodger Selina must have hooked ! Some literary card, I suppose. Poetry, too!" he was still wading through the heterogeneous mass "Hullo !" He had fallen upon a slip of paper crowded with a laboriously legible caligraphy. It was in- scribed To ONE GOTCH, UNKNOWN. The succeeding lines ran from a penciled mar- gin "And Abraham begat," saith Holy Writ, "Isaac, and Isaac Jacob;" naught is told Of those whose troth was plighted with these old Departed heroes, whose sweet lives were knit With their sons' grandsons, and whose subtle wit Made mighty statesmen of their "valiant mold" Dames whose full tide of virtuous crimson rolled In her pure veins that nursed the Infinite. io A SON OP AUSTERITY "The complement hereof Fate dealt to me. For I, that am not all my mother's child, Seeing my will is calm and hers is wild If I should question how I came to be, (I am that living soul for evermore) Do find this only: "And Selina bore." The reader's brows contracted and his mouth twitched. "Ha-ha!" he murmured craftily; "so this is the child's work a clever lad, and curious about his father. That is why Selina didn't want him to see me. Very well, Selina!" He drew out a swollen pocket-book, folded the copy of the sonnet, and insinuated it into one of the flat compartments. After which he chose a seat, reached his umbrella from the corner, put it between his knees, clasped his fingers over its buckhorn crutch and leaned his jaw upon his knuckles. All was very quiet, save for the per- vading tattoo of the mill that beat the clay into an interminable slab for cutting. Soon the lis- tener was aware of footsteps in the passage with- out and his face sharpened. A fugitive anxiety flitted across it as he diagnosed the firm self-pos- session of a tread that was not his wife's. How- beit, when the door opened to admit Selina Gotch and her son, his expression had become one of thoughtful, almost listless, composure. As they entered the room he rose, and put out his hand not effusively, the cold eyes had been too perspicacious for that, but soberly and with diffidence. THE INDISSOLUBLE PARTNERSHIP 1 1 Mrs. Gotch sneered as she comprehended her husband's rapid discernment. Paul made no response to the proffered salu- tation. His mother caught her breath. Gotch the elder turned to his wife, skilfully disguising the unreciprocated gesture. "So this is our son, Selina," he said. "This is the son that as an unborn child you deserted," retorted Mrs. Gotch, implacably. Two of the three were studying the third they were Gotch the elder, and his wife, Selina. One, and that one Paul himself, was contemplat- ing the shrewd, authoritative face of the man who had just claimed to be his father. The youngest of the trio spoke first. "What is your Christian name?" he asked. "Christopher," replied the other; "what is yours ?" Mrs. Gotch answered the inquiry. "Paul," she said, exultantly. Her husband felt the point of her triumph. "I am sorry you didn't call him after me," he owned ; "but there, I didn't deserve it." "I should think you didn't," assented Selina Gotch, viciously. The visitor bent his head with an air of af- fected humility. His wife flamed into impotent rage at his astuteness. "Oh, you disgusting hypocrite," she cried. The son intervened. "Won't you sit down?" he said. Christopher Gotch acted on the suggestion, and 12 A SOX OF AUSTERITY knitting his fingers over his umbrella, propped his chin upon them as before. Paul took a lounge that was set over against his father's chair, and leaned back in it; Mrs. Gotch stood bolt upright, quivering with the extremity of her jeal- ous suspense. "My mother/' began Paul, directing his remark to the vigilant figure opposite, "has naturally given me some account of your conduct towards her." He might have been dictating to an aman- uensis, so expressionlessly level were his tones. "But," he went on in the same peculiar fashion, "I have come unavoidably to regard with a cer- tain distrust her recollection of any event which may have involved a serious personal equation." Gotch the elder was perplexed by his son's ju- dicial manner. Nevertheless, he gathered, though tardily, the significance of the latter's stilted ex- ordium, and shot a stealthy glance at his wife. She was livid with resentment. "Of this distrust," continued Paul, "it is per- haps only fair that you should have the benefit unlikely as it is that in the present case the really material facts can be challenged. However, will you have the goodness to answer deliberately the questions I am about to put to you ?" Christopher Gotch gasped, recovered his breath, considered the apathetic pose of his in- quisitor, and replied in the affirmative. "Thank you. Question number one is this: You are legally married to my mother?" THE INDISSOLUBLE PARTNERSHIP 13 Gotch the elder reviewed the situation, and de- cided upon candor. "That is so," he admitted. Paul proceeded. "I am told that you left her six months after the wedding. Is that also true ?" Christopher Gotch coughed. "Well " he fenced. "Yes or no, please," desired the querist, ab- ruptly. The response came at last ; it was not a denial. "You knew that she was friendless?" "I should not have called her so," objected the other. "Name to me any one friend to whom she could have applied for aid." There was no answer. "You knew," added the young man, "that her marriage had alienated her from her only living relative?" "I hoped," said his father, gently, "that my departure would have paved the way to their reconciliation. "You were acquainted with her father?" "Slightly." "Did you ever discover anything in his charac- ter which might have justified your entertaining such a hope?" Christopher Gotch remained mute. Paul shifted his position and pursued his interroga- tories. 14 A SON OF AUSTERITY "Do you know where I was born?" His father shivered. "Not in the ?" Paul finished the sentence without altering the singular monotone of his voice. "In the work-house." The color was coming back to the face of Selina Gotch. She stepped forward that she might see the countenances of both men. "Had you any reason," demanded Paul, ruth- lessly, "for supposing that I would be born any- where else ?" Christopher Gotch flushed crimson. "I thought I should be able to send money," he stammered. "You knew that the rent of your house was even then in arrears, and that the landlord was a grasping usurer." The impeachment went by default there was no disclaimer. "Had you any means of ascertaining my mother's future address?" Silence. "Had she any means of communicating with you?" Still silence, broken by an expiration of pleased malice from Mrs. Gotch. "You have made no sign these five-and-twenty years ; why are you here now ?" The baited sinner glanced piteously at his wife. "I I have explained," he said; "I am sorry for the past. I am rich, too ; I can atone." THE INDISSOLUBLE PARTNERSHIP 15 Paul smiled sadly. "Is that your only motive?" "My only motive." The inquisitor accepted the assurance. "You will be pleased to hear that we have been fortunate. My grandfather died intestate these works are my mother's. We have all we want." Christopher Gotch sighed. "I I am very lonely," he confessed. Involuntarily Selina drew nearer to her son. A short step more would have brought her be- tween him and her husband. The pensive smile flickered about Paul's mouth. "And so," he interpreted, "you have come courting my mother over again." "Yes," answered Christopher Gotch, unstead- ily. "It's a lie," cried his wife insanely, "it's a lie, Christopher; you want the boy, you know you want the boy." She clenched her hands as though to strike him; her thin bosom rose and fell convulsively. Paul surveyed them a moment. "I suppose that is so?" he inquired. The full lips of Christopher Gotch worked un- der his gray mustache. He looked troublously at the two the woman who had grown old in his absence, the child to whom he was a stranger. "After all," he said, "you are my son." 1 6 A SON OF AUSTERITY "I am much more my mother's," replied Paul, impassively. "Your life is in my brain, I sup- pose, but her blood is in my veins. She bore me in a work-house hospital ; she did the work of a menial that I might become a scholar; she has given me out of her prosperity as freely as she gave to me out of her adversity. And now you come to me and ask for a share in me, who am wholly her property. Tell me, would it be just to grant it you?" "Just?" muttered Christopher Gotch, "just? no, it would not be just." His son made an expressive motion as of dis- missal. An odd gleam sprang into the other's eyes, and he turned to his wife. "Selina," he remarked, banteringly, "has the lad a sweetheart?" "Certainly not," said Mrs. Gotch. Her husband repeated the words mockingly. "Certainly not," he mused, "certainly not ! No, of course, it would not be just." "Why wouldn't it?" parried Mrs. Gotch. "You have done so much for him," expounded Christopher Gotch, "a sweetheart would have done nothing for him. Yet, if he had one, he would love her better than you. That would not be just." "You have wronged us actively," demurred Paul, seizing upon the point. "True," conceded his father; "you have a log- THE INDISSOLUBLE PARTNERSHIP 17 ical mind, my son. But I, who have wronged you, only wanted a little of your love ; when you get a sweetheart you will take all your love from your mother, who has done so much for you, and you will give it all to the girl." "That is silly," declared Paul, ruffled; "the question is not of love, but of the most elementary justice." Gotch the elder rose, took his hat and crossed the room. "Good-bye, Paul." he observed; "you are a very Solomon. Good-bye, Selina ; I am sorry there are so many pretty girls in the world. The Gotches are an impressionable stock. Good-bye again ; I can find my own way out.'' As the sound of the escaping latch on the outer door came to their ears, Paul spoke to his mother. "I didn't expect any one like that," he said. "No," returned his mother, dubiously. "No" he was revolving the concluded inci- dent in his mind; "but my father is clearly no fool." While Selina Gotch pondered this negative ver- dict Paul settled himself at the round table. His mother swerved from her thoughts, comprehend- ing, with a sudden painful pleasure, that the bat- tle was over, and that victory remained with her. Her pulses quickened as she looked at her appar- ently pre-occupied son; an awkward tenderness shook her worn frame. 1 8 A SON OF AUSTERITY "Would you like some tea, Paul?" she asked nervously. The young man raised his head, a suppressed smile in the depths of his brown pupils. "I think I should." he decided, upon reflection. Mrs. Gotch set about preparing the suggested meal. Practical ministry is the one refuge of inarticulate spirits. When he was alone the student abandoned his seat and peered cautiously through the flimsy curtains of the bay window. Christopher Gotch was just ascending the steep counter-slope which led from the muddy bottom of the vast and tortu- ous trench that cleft the broken meadow. He had evidently rejected the simplest means of exit from the brickfield a wide cinder-path running east and west. Paul watched him out of sight, and then went back to the round table. Unconscious of his son's surveillance, Christo- pher Gotch gained the summit of an elongated hillock, and following its sharp sow-back, passed from the scope of Paul's vision. At a convenient spot he paused to survey the surrounding country. On his left was the solitary cottage, elevated, with its trim garden, upon an expanse of ragged turf; on his right the grouped outbuildings of the "works," the double stories of the engine- house dominating the low roofs of the drying- sheds. Behind him, half a mile away, one high- road skirted the rolling acres of plastic earth, sprinkled here and there with matted grass and THE INDISSOLUBLE PARTNERSHIP 19 lusty dandelion flowers. In front, at the same distance, was another and busier thoroughfare, and on it, at the northeast limit of the clay-field, a church with a lofty spire a spire delicate and soaring beyond the common, rich with pinnacle and crocket, and carried upon a splendidly ornate tower. Gotch the elder paid but scant heed to this sym- bol of passionate aspiration, being engaged in estimating the yearly income and capital value represented by the neighboring brickworks and messuage. "Selina has not done badly," he told himself. For a while he seemed lost in contem- plation, then rousing, strolled toward the adjacent engine-house and outbuildings. Upon the side nearest to him was a range of fires sacred to the drying-sheds. An open well lay in front of it, and at the farther side of the shallow ditch a row of furnaces gleamed through the skirts of their iron doors. Above, the oblong blocks of steaming clay were laid in serried thou- sands upon the hot pavement. One man wrought in the well to keep the fires going; another stood upon its edge and leaned meditatively against a pillar that stayed the roof. This latter was a surprisingly short and sturdy fellow, with a dense black beard, and sloe-black eyes. He was taking rapid stock of the new- comer, of his silk hat, of his silver-mounted um- brella, of the diamond and chrysoberyl ring upon his little finger. 20 A SON OF AUSTERITY This profound regard did not in the least em- barrass its object, who moved on calmly, viewing the plant and buildings as he went with tolerant interest. The dwarf changed his position, the better to continue his scrutiny. "Yon's mair than a look o' the young master," he muttered; "I'm thinkin' he'll be sib to'm." Christopher Gotch disappeared, continuing his circular tour of inspection. A shrill sound startled the brooding Scot the unnatural call of the steam-whistle. The end of the working-day had arrived. The stoker got out of his pit and approached the dwarf. "Who goes on after me to-night, Mr. Gary?" he asked. The foreman named the relief. "Has he no' come?" he inquired. The reply was in the negative. "I'll send ye a man roond," said the Scot, and strode off, walking fast but clumsily. As he stepped free of the obscuring block he saw that the person who bore so notable a resemblance to Paul Gotch was lounging westwards through the amber radiance of the setting sun. CHAPTER III PORTIA PATRICK STUART, vicar of St. Faith's, sat in his library. Before him lay a pile of quarto sheets, closely covered with heavy yet fretful handwriting, not unlike mediaeval text. The first of the folios bore the inscription EZEKIEL XXVIII, 2, and the motto "Thou art a man and not God, though thou set thy heart as the heart of God." Opposite the vicar, as he sat at a pretentious rosewood escritoire, were a couple of French casements. Through one of these he could dis- cern the Gothic tower of his church, its aerial spire truncated by the lintel of the window, and silhouetted against a low moon. He looked out at the soaring structure, sighed gustily, and gath- ered the blotted pages together. He had finished his sermon, and the physical chill that follows hard upon inspiration was beginning to lay hold of him. As he slipped the completed essay into a worn morocco "back" heir to so many pre- 21 22 A SON OF AUSTERITY meditated harangues the folding- doors at the farther extremity of the room yawned by cir- cumspect installments. Patrick Stuart glanced up. "Come in, dear," he said tenderly; "I have fin- ished now." A little figure stepped forward a figure that had the stature of a child, with the mature, though blemished, outlines of a woman. As she came faltering towards him with the cautious footsteps of the blind, the rays from the vicar's reading-lamp shone upon her face pure Greek, with sightless violet eyes and a quivering, sen- suous mouth. A deep cape of scarlet the upper portion of some stage-doctor's robes hung down to the hem of her skirt, and her chestnut hair was put up in a coronet of braids beneath a scholar's cap. Patrick Stuart's face lit with surprise. "What have you been doing, my darling?" he asked gently. "Do I look pretty?" queried his visitor. The question hurt there was not much beauty in the stunted form and crooked shoulders. But, at the crisis of his hesitation the vicar's gaze traveled to the exquisite features, and marked, with a novel attention, the lustrous purple orbs, and the palpitating, rose-leaf flush upon the transparent skin. "Very pretty, my child," he answered, and spoke the truth. PORTIA 23 ''Pretty like other women?'' insisted the elfish mortal. Patrick Stuart winced at the impending decis- ion. He fingered his handsome Vandyke beard, of golden brown. "Of course, dear," he assured her. "Justine did me this way," went on the in- quirer ; "she says I am Portia now Portia in the 'Merchant of Venice' ; we found the things up-stairs." The vicar's brows wrinkled irritably, but he made no response. "Justine says," pursued the imaginary Vene- tian, "that this cloak of mine is red. You tell me what red is." Patrick Stuart was thrown upon that afflicted worthy who conceived scarlet as resembling the sound of a trumpet, but waived the subtle com- parison. "I do not think I could make you understand," he said, almost brusquely, sighing, for the hun- dredth time, at the psychological barrier between his daughter's mind and his own. The quaint one came forward, and, kneeling at his feet, burst unexpectedly into tears. "Dearie," it sobbed, "I am so lonely." The vicar's eyes moistened, and he put an arm about her. "Poor little Elsie," he muttered huskily "father is very thoughtless." 24 A SON Or AUSTERITY The cap had fallen from the chestnut locks, and the smooth, pale forehead gleamed in the lamp-light. Suddenly the tears stanched, and the sensitive lips ripened into a feminine pout. "Say I am very pretty," was their petition. Patrick Stuart's nostrils dilated momentarily; a gesture of displeasure, even of contempt, at the obsession. "Very," he returned dryly. Elsie held up a blue-veined wrist. A slender bracelet was clasped upon it a bracelet that mounted a single giant ruby. Patrick Stuart recognized the jewel as an artificial one recog- nized it merely by virtue of a previous acquaint- ance, the paste was too good for extempore de- tection. "This is pretty, too, isn't it?" inquired the wearer of the bracelet, touching the mimic gem. "Justine says it is like fire, only it won't warm one; but it is like fire when it is red red like my cloak. And the bracelet is pretty, too," she ran on, "like a ring. See, I can move my fingers round and round it, and never come to the end." She thrust the ornament back into its place, and sitting down upon the floor, leant against her father's chair. "What have you been writing about?" she asked; "tell me, Dearie, it's nice to know before any one else." The vicar took out his manuscript and read the text aloud. "Oh!" observed Elsie, discontentedly; "about God again !" "S-s-sh! darling," said her father, a rebuke in his voice. "Well," persisted "Portia," "I'm tired of hear- ing you preach about God. Why doesn't He speak to me as well as to you? Is it because I can't see? you say you can't see Him; I don't understand." The vicar cleared his throat; Elsie compre- hended' the motion. "No, don't tell me -now," she commanded; "I know I'm stupid, but I hate to be explained to sometimes. Go on about the sermon." Patrick Stuart reviewed the tenor of his proxi- mate deliverance. "It is about the essential futility of ambition," he began, stiltedly, epitomizing the drift of the discourse "there is no limit to the desire of the human spirit, but that desire is, in its essence, impossible of attainment. Human ambition is infinite human capacity is finite. The tireless pertinacity with which some men Napoleon, for instance have pursued their aims, lends a ficti- tious divinity to their characters. But, after all, their hearts were the hearts of men, though for years, it may have been for the best part of a life- time" the epitome was becoming hopelessly 26 A SON OF AUSTERITY lame, it beat a hasty retreat to the text "they set their hearts as the heart of God!" "What is the heart of God?" propounded Elsie. The vicar pursed his mouth. "It is a figurative expression," he returned, "for the Divine Individuality that in the Omnip- otent which most nearly approaches personality in man." "What is the Divine Individuality?" pursued Elsie, ignoring the explanatory clause of her father's last sentence. Patrick Stuart hesitated. "Is God someone?" demanded the crkic. "N-not exactly," confessed the vicar, startled by his own candor. Elsie sniffed. "It seems to me," she said languidly, "that you don't know much more about God than I do." She got up and marched over to a settee, in whose depths she buried herself. "I'm going to sleep," she announced. The vicar took up a pen and some note-paper. Half an hour later there was a tap at one of the French windows. Patrick Stuart rose and withdrew the catch. Paul Gotch stood without. "Are you alone?" he asked. "Unsociable being !" bantered the vicar. "Yes, I am alone, saving Elsie's presence. But she is asleep, poor little girl!" Paul stepped into the room a spacious, oak- PORTIA 27 paneled apartment, with an octagonal oratory, built out from an abbreviated corner. "Sit down," said Patrick Stuart, hospitably, and, closing the window, returned to his com- fortable position. The other flung himself into a basket-chair and crossed his legs. "Anything new ?" inquired the vicar. Paul Gotch yawned. "A hitherto defaulting ancestor of mine," he remarked quizzically, "has taken unto himself flesh and blood and submitted them for my ap- proval." "Good heavens!" said Patrick Stuart, "you don't mean that your father " "Exactly," interrupted the son of Christopher Gotch. "Dear me!" commented the vicar, falling into an exclamatory climax; "and may I ask ?" "What I thought of him?" concluded Paul. "By all means: he is a man rather like myself, I fancy he came out of the affair very cleverly." "And your mother?" Paul laughed not unkindly. "Objurgatory to a degree," he answered. Patrick Stuart nursed his ankle. "Did did anything happen?" he ventured. "N-no," decided the narrator thoughtfully. "I was obliged to present my ancestor with his pass- port. There was no sputtering; he saved me the trouble of conducting him to the frontier. I had 28 'A SON OF 'AUSTERITY to try to sentence him almost impromptu, how- ever, and with my nerves shattered by a previous interview with my mother. You know my fond- ness for the chiaroscuro of a hayloft?" The vicar assented. "She came to inform me of my father's ar- rival," explained Paul, "and mounted to the dim recess where Dobbin's bedding and provender are stored. Dobbin is our horse-of-all-work, an eld- erly, inoffensive animal, long since reconciled to Gary's tip-wagons. When my mother found me I was reciting 'Faust' from a divan of straw. I must have betrayed an undue interest in my long- lost father ; her jealousy caught fire, and we had a scene. The wanderer's return had driven her to the verge of hysteria; unwittingly I precipi- tated it, with startling results." Paul screwed himself down into the lounge. "I suppose wife-desertion is an unpardonable sin," he observed, with a tentative air. "I should say so," pronounced Patrick Stuart, meditatively. "So should I," agreed Gotch the younger, in the same doubtful fashion. The vicar looked at him swiftly and began upon a question. "Is your ?" "My ancestor," suggested Paul. "Yes is he well-to-do?" "He said as much," was the reply, "and some- how I believed him." PORTIA 29 "Did he did he make any overtures to to your mother?" asked Patrick Stuart. "I believe not." Paul Gotch smiled grimly. "What was the object of his return?" Paul touched himself on the breast and the vicar nodded, comprehending. The two men relapsed into silence ; the plight of Christopher Gotch was not without its appeal to their masculine souls. At last Paul spoke out of his reverie, the con- trolling thought expressing itself in an abstracted sentence. "They must have loved each other once," he murmured. "Who?" asked Patrick Stuart albeit he knew. "My father and mother," said Gotch. "It was very strange to see them, Mr. Stuart how strange I can not describe. I am because what has been has been. Not all the desertions in the world can undo me; not eternity can undo me as we believe. And to-day you should have seen my mother's face." The vicar's glance met that of Paul Gotch, and he moved his head sympathetically. Paul leaned forward a sudden excitement dis- solving his assumption of cynical indifference. "Of course she was in the right," he went on, "but do you know of what it reminded me?" Patrick Stuart made a negative sign. He was gazing curiously at the shining eyes and working 30 A SON OF AUSTERITY countenance. Paul Gotch answered him with a fierce energy. "That speech of Lucifer in Mrs. Browning's 'Drama of Exile/ " he said ; "yon know it 'Countless angel-faces still and stern Pressed out upon me from the level heavens Adown the abysmal spaces and I fell, Trampled down by your stillness and struck dumb By the sight within your eyes 'twas then I knew How ye could pity, my kind angel-hood.' " The vicar shook his head dissentingly. "The appeal ad misericordiam" he objected ; "that ap- peal can be made on behalf of a martyr or a gallows-bird it is pathetic per se!' He was interrupted by a faint crooning sound, that slipped insensibly into actual melody and articulate utterance. It came from the couch where Elsie lay to all appearance sound asleep. A fold of the scarlet cloak covered the lower part of her face the heavy ring of yellow metal had fallen from her childish wrist and lay upon the floor, its blood-red ornament burning in the lamp-light a symbol of human passion jewel- ling eternity. The words that came to the ears of- the two men were strangely apposite they wedded them- selves to an old and grieving air "Oh, waes me for the 'oor, Willie, When we thegither met, Oh, waes me for the time, Willie, That our first tryst was set. PORTIA 31 "Oh, waes me for the loanin' gree. Where we were wont to gae, And waes me for the destinie That gart me luve thee sae." The vocalist stopped abruptly. "What a remarkable thing/' whispered Paul Gotch, "to sing in one's sleep !" Patrick Stuart smiled. "Elsie is a veritable witch," he answered, low- ering his own voice. "Whether she is asleep or not, neither you nor I will ever be quite certain." "That is part of a wonderful Scotch poem," observed Paul Gotch, in the same fashion; "I have heard Gary recite, and what is more tragic still, sing it. But how did she come to know it?" "Sh-h-h!" warned the vicar, "she is indisput- ably awake now." The demure figure, half-woman, half-child, had risen to its feet, and stood sightlessly regarding them. "Good-evening, Mr. Gotch," observed Elsie, "you see I have been making a fool of myself or rather Justine has. Will you give me my cap ? I dropped it somewhere there." Paul took up the desired article from the side of the vicar's chair and took it across to her. She put it gravely on her head and assumed a the- atrical pose. "Now I am Portia again," she told him "only prettier, Justine says." It was impossible to tell whether she were art- 32 A SOX OF AUSTERITY less or fantastic, so elusive were her changes of manner and e.xpression. \Yithout warning, she made for the folding doors by which, an hour earlier, she had entered. "Good-night, Mr. Gotch : good-night, Dearie," she said, groping for the handle. Paul moved to turn it, but before he could cross the floor she had passed out. He looked questioningly at the vicar. Patrick Stuart opened his palms, Gallic fash- ion. "I never attempt to fathom Elsie's proceed- ings/' he confessed; "she has become more of an enigma to me than ever." "What a pity!'' replied Paul, musingly; "I should like to know how Elsie learned that par- ticular Scotch song." CHAPTER IV VOX ET PRAETEREA NIHIL . To the east of the Gotch brickfield, and imme- diately behind the long garden and paddock of the vicarage, was a patch of cultivated ground, enclosed on three sides by a stout paling, on the fourth by the boundary wall of St. Faith's. In this reclaimed portion of the wilderness flourished an extraordinary medley of flowering plants, shrubs, and kitchen stuff. It boasted a small lawn, a "rockery," and a forcing frame or two, and was, in some sort, a detached supplement to the narrow border of grass and double daisies which surrounded the white cottage, half a mile away. Here, under a yellow afternoon sun, a man was at work weeding. His long arms and large, coarse hands bore a strange disproportion to his short, squarely-set frame. A thick black beard hid his mouth and chin, but his black eyes were piercing and intelligent, and when he straight- ened himself to draw an occasional marked in- spiration his teeth showed themselves to be sin- gularly clear and even. At such moments, also, 33 34 A SOX OF AUSTERITY his pose became as vigorous and alert as when, standing on an angle of the engine-house block, he had gazed after the retreating form of Chris- topher Gotch. His task completed, he emptied the basket of uprooted growths on to the inevitable compost- heap, and going across to another bed stooped to tie up a row of carnations. Embarked upon the process, he began to sing to himself in the pleas- ant abstraction of the man who is laboring con amore. His voice was a rarely full and delicate tenor, with a bird-like sweetness in it. The song was one of those quivering lyric poems which the erotic genius of the Scots has heaped upon the altar of the grand passion "Her bower casement is latticed wi' flowers Tied up wi' siller thread, An' comely sits she in the midst Men's langing een to feed; She waves the ringlets frae her cheek Wi' her milky, milky ban' An' her cheeks seem touched wi' the fiager o' God, My bonnie Lady Ann. "The morning clud is tasselt wi' gowd Like my luve's broidered cap, And on the mantle that my luve wears Is mony a gowden drap; Her bonnie ee-bree's a holy arch Cast by nae earthly ban', And tne breath of heaven is atween the lips O' my bonnie Lady Ann." The singing ceased, and the dwarf went on VOX ET PR ART ERE A NIHIL 35 silently with his occupation. Some one spoke to him suddenly. "That is very pretty, fairy prince, is there no more?" Allan Gary looked up. On the low sandstone slip which backed the carnation-clumps, Elsie Stuart was leaning. Her sensitive face was framed in a loose gray hood the nebulous, ap- pealing gray of the dove and a gray cloak cov- ered her shoulders. The coral lining of the hood threw a tremulous glow upon her cheeks and temples, and her chestnut hair added a peculiar, yet not discordant, note of color. A soft light came into the dwarf's eyes; his powerful chest swelled and sank as he studied the picture. Yet he answered deliberately. "There's nae mair o't to the purpose," he told her. Elsie plucked at the clasp of the cloak. "Who taught it to you?" she inquired. "Naebody," replied the Scot; "I juist read it in an auld book." The blind girl threw back her hood petulantly. The sightless orbs gleamed with pathetic anger. "Oh, how I wish I were like other people, fairy prince !" cried the pouting lips ; "I can only read a few silly books, and Justine says there are millions she could read if she had time." Allan Gary sighed mournfully. Elsie put out her hands toward him. "Why won't you come near me?" she cried; 36 A SON OF AUSTERITY "I wanted to touch your face, you sounded so sorry for me then." The dwarf did not answer ; he was poring upon the eager countenance of the blind girl. "And you won't even tell me your name!" urged Elsie. Allan Gary shook his head in an involuntary denial of the implied request. "I canna, little leddy," he said, piteously; "oh, I canna. If I tauld ye, ye would find oot a' aboot me, and ye would na come to speak to me or to listen to ma songs ony mair." "But I would," promised Elsie, "and surely your name wouldn't tell me that much." "It would tell ye ower much for ye to bide my presence," replied the dwarf, miserably. Elsie yielded the point. "Well, come and let me touch your face," she begged; "then I shall know you." "Na, na," protested the dwarf, stepping back, "it mauna be, little leddy, it mauna be." "Oh, you are mean," retorted the appellant. Allan Gary winced. "Ye wouldna say that if ye kent a'," he per- sisted steadily. "Tell me all, then," demanded Elsie, with a show of reason. "Na, na," repeated the other, "I canna, I canna ; it would be to say guid-bye t' ye for ever." The blind girl pursed her lips and sulked. "Do you know what I feel like, fairy prince ?" she asked abruptly. VOX ET PRAETEREA NIHIL 37 The dwarf's answer was a sad negative. "I feel," said Elsie, with a startling abandon, "as if this wall were the end of the real world, and that I should like to climb on it and jump out into fairyland." "There is nae fairyland here," the Scot told her sorrowfully, "naething but a bit o' garden." "Whose garden?" demanded Elsie. "It belongs to Mistress Gotch, she wha owns the brickworks near by," explained Allan Gary, nervously. "That will be Mr. Gotch's mother," said Elsie ; "he knows my father. But why do you come to her garden so often, fairy prince?" The Scot bit his lip. "Because," he said, hoarsely, "because o' a lit- tle leddy 'at lives on the ither side o' a stane wa'." The blind girl clapped her hands delightedly. "Oh, I am glad!" she cried. Allan Gary trembled. "And now," added Elsie, returning to the at- tack, "you will tell me what you are like, won't you?" "Maybe," said the dwarf, evasively; "but ye tell me first what ye think I am like." Elsie reflected a moment, and then answered dreamily. "You are taller than me, though not much, and oh, so graceful and brave, like a fairy prince. That's why I call you 'fairy prince' and because you're so mysterious. Then, your face is very 38 A SON OF AUSTERITY proud, and set as though you feared nothing. But your mouth is kind, and your breath is like the scent of a tea-rose. And your hands " Allan Gary looked at his broad, thick palms and knotted fingers. "Your hands are very soft and gentle, but very strong, so that you could pick me up and carry me all over the world, without ever getting tired. I would love some one to carry me always, my feet get so stiff and my side aches. But you you walk over the grass so lightly and yet so proudly oh, I know ! and because you are so beautiful you will not tell me who you are, so that you can go away when you are tired of me, and I shall never be able to find you again be- cause I do not know what you are like or any- thing about you," Her voice broke as she reached the end of her involved concluding sentence. "Na, na," said the dwarf, huskily, "I'm nane o' thae things God knows Wha made me as I am! but until ye send me awa' I'll no' leave ye, He is my witness. But promise me ae thing." Elsie assented eagerly. "If ony ane should see ye speakin' tae me," said Allan Gary, "an' should begin to tell ye aboot me, ye will stap yer ears and rin awa' ?" She promised reluctantly, yet pleased that he should proffer a request. "But won't you do something more than talk VOX ET PR ART ERE A NIHIL 39 to me?" she besought him; "see, touch my hand" and she held out her dainty fingers. The dwarf's face distorted with painful emo- tion. "Dinna ask it," he said ; her arm dropped de- spondently. "Bide a wee," cried the Scot, moved with a thought. "I'll pit ye a waft o' heaven in yer nostrils that'll show ye I'm a leevin' soul and no' a bodiless voice." He ran clumsily across the plot of garden to a point where a strip of hawthorn hedge had been enclosed by the wooden paling, and tore down a bough that was still in flower. Elsie remained passive, awaiting his return. "Pit oot yer haund," he instructed, when he came back, having trimmed the hedge of the thorns. She obeyed. Allan Gary held the mass of odorous blossoms within her reach. "Mind yersel' wi' the sma' prickles," he said. Elsie took the branch in her arms, and cried out at the perfume. "Is it a flower?" she asked. "A hale world of flooers," answered the Scot; "ye maun pit it in water and it will live for days. They ca' it 'may.' ' The blind girl was hanging over the creamy bloom in passionate adoration. 40 A SON OF 'AUSTERITY "Did ye -never smell it before?" said Allan Gary, surprised. "Never," confessed Elsie; "I am horribly ig- norant, fairy prince. You see, I have nearly always had an ache of some sort, and then, not being like other people This was her one periphrasis for her lack of sight. "I never could get on with my lessons. Once I went to a school, but it frightened me, and I never went again. Then I had a governess, but Justine and she quarreled dreadfully, and so I didn't learn much. Since I've been able to talk to you I've understood quite a lot of things for the first time.'' The dwarf was contemplating her worship- ingly ; a fugitive anxiety interrupted his reverie. "Have ye never spoken o' me to your freend, Mistress Justine?" he inquired. Elsie's expression grew dazzling in its astute- ness. "Only about a fairy prince I knew," she re- plied, "and then, you see, I invent such a lot, they don't believe a word I say." "Tell me another thing," pursued Allan Gary, wistfully ; "what made ye believe I was sae bon- nie?" His picturesque neighbor drew a luxurious breath. "The way you sing," she said; "fairy prince, if you are only half as beautiful as your voice, VOX ET PRAETEREA XIHIL 41 you must be as beautiful as an angel. Do you suppose they sing songs like yours in heaven. fairy prince?" "In the tradeetional heaven," remarked the Scot, dryly, "the angels are no' supposed to have sweethearts, and sin' sweetheirtin' is the reason for sic songs as mine, I shouldna look for o\ver mony o' them in the place ye name." "H'm !" mused Elsie ; "and what is the tradi- tional heaven, fairy prince?" Allan Gary reflected. "That," he said, "where they coont on spendin' an eternal Sabbath in a transcendental kirk." "Dear me," commented the puzzled auditor, "and what other sort of heaven is there?" The dwarf lifted his eyes to the lucid zenith. "That," he answered, "in which the best God we can think o' will mak' our best thocts come true." "Well," decided Elsie, dubiously, "anything's better than the first one." A swelling clamor rose upon their ears a clamor that grew and grew until the air rocked in eddies of tempestuous sound. "That's the tea-gong," said the blind girl ; "they always beat it like that for me they never know where I am. Good-bye, fairy prince." She sprang up, and passing around a screen- ing privet hedge, hurried towards the house. Undisturbed by the brazen din that had re- called Elsie to the vicarage, her father was pacing at the moment the floor of the sunny sitting-room 42 A SON OF AUSTERITY pacing it with restless, varying strides, the mus- cular expression of impotent anger. In a deep chair by the fire sat a woman a woman with a dark skin, thin lips, and glittering dark eyes. Her hands were yellow and shrunken, but supple and even aristocratic. They were busily plying a netting shuttle, the product of which lay on the lap of her silk gown in delicate confusion. "Justine/' burst out the vicar, savagely, "I tell you I will not have it. Do you hear?" "Without doubt," answered the other; "you speak loud, and I can not shut my ears." Patrick Stuart reddened; the contempt of the retort was obtrusive. "Understand distinctly," he went on, striving for self-control, "the next time I catch you" the contingency was somewhat vulgarly ex- pressed, but the vicar's anger had burst his teg- umentary culture "fostering the insane vanity which Elsie inherits " Justine sneered. "Certainly," she observed, with elaborate satire, "let us calumniate the dead; the dead can deny nothing." "If I calumniate the dead," persisted the vicar hotly, "it is because the calumny is true." The statement was suspiciously like a contra- diction in terms, but it passed unchallenged Justine was in no mood to split hairs. She laughed provokingly. VOX ET PRAETEREA NIH1L I U "True?" she repeated; "la pauvrc Gabrielle! to be a woman and to marry a priest !" Patrick Stuart dragged at the reins of his anger and answered quietly. "That is sheer impertinence, Justine," he told her, "and you know it. My commands are ex- plicit you will disobey them at your peril." Justine leaped up, the blood flaming in her sal- low cheeks. "Bah !" she exclaimed, snapping her fingers at him "that for your perils ! that for your com- mands; I despise them, I laugh at them, I dis- obey them always, always, always! I will make la petite happy until I am dead ah !" she interrupted herself sharply, though the vicar had not spoken ; "you wish it may be soon, but I am well and strong, I shall live many years. La petite is mine mine," she ran on, spitting the words out in short stinging clauses that made the English speech sound like her native tongue; "her mother gave her to me, and I will make her happy. Oh, yes, Mr. Stuart, I will tell her the charming stories that you detest; I will repeat her the little songs that weary you; I will teach her to make Juliet and Portia and Cleopatre, and she shall be a woman, and not your daughter at all. Mon Dieu!" she apostrophized him fiercely, "am I an infant that you command and command and command?" Patrick Stuart quailed before the flood of Jus- 44 'A SON OF AUSTERITY tine's indignant oratory. She saw it, and pressed her advantage. ''del!" she cried crisply, with a stamp of her foot ; "did Gabrielle Andre " "Gabrielle Stuart." interrupted the vicar. Justine made a wry face and evaded the cor- rection. "Did the poor Gabrielle," she said, "desire me to remafn always with la petite, to keep her always gay, always like a little bird, a kitten, a butterfly, only that I should be disarm, retreat, dismiss, by a priest ! Listen, Mr. Stuart," Justine parted the surname into two contumelious syllables, "have the goodness, if you please, to retire on the in- stant, or I dismiss myself. Perhaps you desire that I whisper to your parishioners how the mother of la petite was once upon the sta age?" Patrick Stuart cringed it was not the first time that threat had fallen upon his will as the whip-lash falls upon the cur's back. Justine drew herself up scornfully, anticipating the effect of her ultimatum. "I have my dismissal, then?" she demanded. The vicar covered his face. When he looked up again his cheeks were ashen-gray. "You are a madwoman, Justine Dupin," he began hoarsely, and stopped. A whimsical mel- ody was nearing them along the corridor without. He could distinguish the words with increasing precision ; they were bizarre in the extreme. VOX ET PRAETEREA NIHIL 45 "Life's a hostel kept by Fate Where upon our way we wait Sing, sing, let the merry cymbals ring: Life's a hostel where we drain Draughts of pleasure, draughts of pain." The door opened and Elsie entered. In her arms she carried the bough of blossoming haw- thorn that Allan Gary had given to her. "Justine," she called, "look what I've got a fairy prince gave it to me." Patrick Stuart's mouth fixed sternly and he would have spoken. The Frenchwoman scowled him into silence. "Mechante!" she declared ; "what will the fairy princesses say?" Elsie laughed coquettishly, and the vicar flashed a threat across the room. "Smell, Justine, smell," she cried, and waved the branch so that the white bloom rained about her, showering Patrick Stuart with the pallid flowerets. "It is like heaven," said Elsie, unconscious of his presence ; "not the traditional heaven, Justine, but the other. Doesn't the scent make you feel as if something was going to happen ?" She took up her song and carried it on fantastically. "Fate, Fate, the hostess, gay coquette, Laughs, laughs, whene'er we frown or fret. If we groan and moan, alack, we must bundle, we must pack; The hostel's full, the night is late, 'Tis in vain to frown at Fate." 46 A SOX OF AUSTERITY The vicar turned and went out; the last line had smitten cruelly on his ears. " "Pis in vain to frown at Fate." Justine caught at the wild refrain and sang it with her excited charge. "Sing, sing, sing; let the merry cymbals ring." CHAPTER V A LETTER AND A SERENADE "Do you mind reading it over again?" asked the vicar, musingly. Paul altered the position of the lamp, and turned to the beginning of the small folio. "My DEAR BOY," he began: "I admired your action the other day ex- ceedingly, and I may say frankly that I admit abstractly its justice; but can I not plead for some mercy at your hands? I deserted your mother when I was not a great deal older than you are now, and I do not attempt to minimize the heinousness of that proceeding when I say that I was overcome by the hopeless impasse in which I found myself, as a result of marrying at a time when I could scarcely earn bread for one, let alone two." There was a pause ; the just completed sentence had been a long one. Patrick Stuart did not avail himself of the interruption to make any 47 48 A SOX OF AUSTERITY comment he felt that the inchoate glibness of the composition had struck as unpleasantly upon the ears of the younger man as it had upon his own. Paul resumed his task with impenetrable self-possession. "I could make no headway in England, and I determined to go out alone to the States, hoping to find a foothold there, and, sooner or later, send for your mother. Upon landing in New York, I was plunged, by the mysterious loss of my wallet, into absolute and God-forsaken pov- erty, and being ashamed to write until I could send your mother some money, I put it off from day to day. Finally, I went West, and began to do well ; but my courage failed me when I thought of writing, and I planned to come home and explain viva voce. Then I suffered a sud- den reverse of fortune lost eighty thousand dol- lars in twenty- four hours and had to work like a slave to make it all over again, which I did, and to-day am worth a million and a half." Paul knew that Patrick Stuart was regarding him with a gentle keenness that verged upon cyni- cism, and guessed that the vicar was preparing to discount a surrender. An odd expression hov- ered upon the reader's lips as he went on with the letter. "I am not going to tell you any lies about my feelings for your mother; you're too clever to believe me if I did, else I might, for I can't bear 'A LETTER AND A SERENADE 49 to be out of friends with you. I came home be- cause I heard of you from a man I met in Xew York City, Captain Peters, you remember him. of the 'Pocahontas.' I never had but one child in my life, and I'm mighty anxious that we should be chums. I can't write any more about it; I'm fifty-six, Paul, but the very thought of you brings the tears into my eyes like any woman's. Write and say you'll see me sometimes I'll settle down in London and come up here once a month to see you. Your mother shall have nine-tenths of you nineteen-twentieths if you like, only don't harden your heart against me. My God, but I should like you to have shaken hands with me. It's hardly good enough that a man shouldn't touch his own flesh and blood for ever, because he was once a bit of a coward. Write me a line, my boy; you may have youngsters of your own some day, and the devil may tempt you to sin against them. I loved your mother once (as she loved me, though she did keep a per contra ac- count with all my faults in it you'll believe the balance wasn't too big!) But you're my own, and I can't let you hate me. Write to me, Paul, for God's sake." Paul Gotch lay down the pages of lank scrawl, and surveyed his auditor inquiringly. "Well?" he observed. The vicar pondered. "It may be only clever," he decided at length ; 5 o A SON OF AUSTERITY "but it rings true in parts. What is your an- swer?" The son of Christopher Gotch took up a pen and drew a sheet of paper towards him. He wrote steadily, and Patrick Stuart waited. In a moment Paul Gotch handed him the brief manu- script. It ran "On July the fifth, 1873, Mr- and Mrs. Chris- topher Harding sailed for New York in the 'City of Toronto.' ' "What has that to do with anything?" de- manded the vicar. "I understand," replied Paul coolly, "that my father rejoiced in a 'middle name.' The 'middle name' was Harding." He put a double line under the seventh and eighth words of the writing, so that the clause "and Mrs." stood out with redoubled signifi- cance. "Dear me," said Patrick Stuart, comprehend- ing, "how very lamentable." The adjective re- ferred to the breach of morality on the part of the said Christopher Harding Gotch, not to his possession of an alternative cognomen. "Have you a Bible handy?" inquired the younger Gotch, desisting from his occupation of crossing the t's and dotting the i's of his laconic communication. The vicar reached to a luxurious calf-bound volume, the other opened it, turned to the Book A LETTER AND A SERENADE 51 of the Prophet Malachi, verified a passage and copied it on to the slip. It was a grim, yet sim- ple saying The Lord hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth, against whom thou hast dealt treacherously. Paul Gotch folded the note, guiltless as it was of superscription or signature, and asked for an envelope. The vicar gave him one ; he placed the ultimatum inside it, moistening the adhesive mar- gins of the flap, and closing the slender receptacle with quiet deliberation. Then he addressed it thoughtfully Christopher Harding Gotch, Esq., The Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool. "I am afraid it is the only course to pursue," said Patrick Stuart, "especially in view of the regrettable connection which is implied in the fact, your cognizance of which you reveal to him. How did you become aware of it?" "It was my mother's trump card," returned Paul; "she feared something of this sort, I sup- pose" he motioned to the letter of Christopher Gotch "I found the 'Toronto's' passenger list for that voyage on my blotting-pad this morning. The tell-tale entry was marked with a heavy cross recently made. The ink is still pale. Heaven knows how she got hold of the thing; the 'stars in their courses,' I suppose." 52 A SOX OF AUSTERITY ''You have considered the possibility of a coin- cidence?" ventured the vicar. "You mean with regard to the name Harding?" elucidated Paul. "Is not the conjunction with that of Christopher almost tantamount to proof?" "Circumstantial evidence." objected Patrick Stuart, though somewhat feebly withal. "Three days before the 'Toronto' sailed," re- joined Paul Gotch, gravely, "my father left his home for the last time. In September of the same year, my mother tells me. she heard of their that is, his presence in San Francisco." "He must have gone saloon, or at least second- class, for his name to get into the passenger-list," demurred the vicar. "How could that be? he says he was bankrupt of funds." "My father." explained Paul dryly, "is ob- viously more ingenious than honest." "Dear me!" ejaculated Patrick Stuart; "I am very sorry for your mother, Paul." "She is much to be pitied, yes." said the son of Selina Gotch, without enthusiasm. "I am a lit- tle sorry for my father ; he is evidently capable of a rather ardent paternal affection. However, fiat justitia, you know." He went across the room, glancing at the clock on the mantel. "Half-past ten," he remarked ; "and I have this note to post. Good-night: I will let myself out as usual" He unfastened one of the French casements, stepped through, and disappeared in the external gloom. A LETTER AXD A SERENADE 53 The vicarage of St. Faith's a dingy. r a favorite with the inhabitants of the vicarage he heard the sound of singing, and thereat pausing to listen, recognized, to his entire amazement,, the voice o Allan Gary. The words of the song were ro- mantic, the subdued air lingering and tender. "Her cheeks are like the apple-bud, Her brow is white as drifted snaw, Her lips are like the berries red That grow upon yon garden wa', "Ilk color that the heavens can gie Does but ae lovely rainbow fill; Sae a' that's sweet on earth is she, My bonnie lass ayont the hill." Paul Gotch peered cautiously ahead, and de- scried the shadowy figure of the singer perched upon the low roof of a shallow ground-floor story that abutted on the rear wall of the vicarage prop- 54 A SOX er. At a window immediately above was a glim- mer of white raiment. The watcher stole a pace or two nearer and listened. The song was con- tinued. "Gin I'd been born a belted knight, Or laird o' muckle gear and Ian', I wadna lay me down to sleep Afore I gat her lily han'. "But waes my heart! I'm but a herd, An' sae maun tether down my will, Yet come what may, I'll olimb the brae And see my lass ayont the hill." "Thank you, fairy prince," murmured a voice, which could belong to no other than Elsie Stuart ; "sing me another one." "Na. na, I maun gang noo," answered the Scot, sorrowfully; "God know r s I hae been mad to come here at a' in sic a fashion." "But I asked you to, fairy prince," protested Elsie; "you said you would do anything I asked you to. And when Justine read to me about Romeo and Juliet, I wanted some one to come and talk to me at my window. No one can hear us. Besides, what if they did ? you're not -a bit nice to-night, fairy prince. " 'Oh, gentle Romeo, If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully.* That was what Juliet said. Romeo was a Mon- tague, you know, and Juliet a Capulet their fathers hated each other. You're not going, fairy prince?" A LETTER AND A SERENADE 55 "It's gettin' ower late, little leddy," whispered Allan Gary. "I don't care," retorted Elsie, pettishly, "it's all night to me; I believe you're afraid. Romeo wasn't afraid and Juliet's people wore swords,'' she supplemented with elfin malice. ''Gin I am afraid," said the Scot with bitter- ness, "'tis for yersel', I hae naething to be feared for, but the loss o' ye for ever. The lo'e o' ye has made a selfish fule o' me, or I wad hae had mair thocht for ye than ever to hae spoken t' ye, muckle less come here at sic an 'oor." "Fairy prince, fairy prince," cried Elsie softly, "tell me that again; 'lo'e' means love, doesn't it? you don't talk like other people, fairy prince, I expect you haven't learned English properly, like Justine. Tell me," she urged, "doesn't 'lo'e' mean love?" Allan Gary did not answer. Elsie laughed richly. "I know it does," she informed him, and added meditatively: "You never told me you loved me before." "May God damn my soul to hell for telling it ye now," swore Allan under his breath. "Oh-h, why?" asked Elsie. The Scot started, horror-stricken. "Ye didna hear?" he besought her "God for- gie me for blasphemin' i' yer ears; na, na, I dinna lo'e ye, I dinna lo'e ye." "That is not true, fairy prince," retorted Elsie, 56 A SOX OF AUSTERITY bluntly. "When you talk to me your voice sounds as Justine made hers when she read what Romeo said to Juliet, and you say the same things, fairy prince, only far nicer. And I know you love me, because I love you." Allan Gary sobbed tearlessly. "Na, na," he pleaded, "dinna tell me that dinna tell me that; I hae wranged ye eneuch with- oot that. Say ye dinna mean it.'' Elsie cooed ; a bird-like murmur of delicious dissent. " 'Oh, gentle Romeo,' " she quoted, humorously, " '. . . If thou think'st I am too quickly won, I'll frown and be perverse and say thee nay So thou wilt woo, but else, not for the world.' " "For God's sake, dinna talk like that," begged the Scot, "I maun say good-bye t'ye for ever oh, that I had never spoken to ye at a', never seen yer bonnie face, never heard yer lintie's voice, never lookit on the winsome wee thing that God has pit ayont the reach of me ayont the reach o' ony man." "Fairy prince," cried Elsie, fearfully, leaning over the sill and calling sibilantly into the night ; "what do you mean, fairy prince ? Shall I never have any one to love me? will no one ever kiss me? can I never have somebody of my own my very own as Juliet and Portia and Cleopatra had?" A LETTER AND A SERENADE 57 Her chestnut hair fell out over her shoulders, and the scent of it came to Allan Gary's nostrils. "Oh. please don't say that, fairy prince." she wailed ; "I do want somebody. I was born to be pitied and made much of. My heart aches al- ways because I am lonely. Don't say it must go on aching. Will no one ever love me, because I am blind? Oh, fairy prince, say you love me." Allan Gary lifted up his face. "The Lord hae mercy on baith o' us," he said, brokenly, "for I maun aye lo'e ye." Elsie drew in her breath a sob of shuddering, uncontrollable happiness. "Kiss me, fairy prince," she cried, "kiss me!" And Allan Gary straightened himself from his precarious foothold and kissed her upon the lips. . . . Paul Gotch withdrew into the shadow of the poplars. An uncertain wind stirred them with the sound of a sigh. He looked up at the deli- cate dusk of the June night. "Great God," he murmured, "Thou that doest all things well what a tragi-comedy is this!" He stood awhile among the clustered saplings, then heard the sound of the dwarf's descent and followed him quickly. Progressing by short, uncouth strides, Allan Gary cleared the plantation, traversed the open churchyard, climbed its low wall of sandstone rubble, crossed the cinder-path that led to the white cottage, and descended a muddy slope into 58 A SON OF AUSTERITY the bottom of the clavfield. A master of it. mutable geography, he threaded the maze of its- pools and hillocks at a rapid rate ; Paul Gotch had much ado to keep him under observation. Soon the dwarf came upon the inclined viaduct that ran up to the second floor of the shadowy engine-house; he breasted it sturdily, Paul close at his heels. The sound of the stoker's shovel floated to the ears of both from the well of the drying-shed, and each trod with a sudden ex- travagant caution. Half-way up the rough de- clivity the Scot stepped off, gained the door of a small office, unlocked it, and entered. His pur- suer took up a strategic position, and waited. A moment later Allan Gary reappeared, carrying something under his arm. The watcher's heart leaped as he divined, from a random outline, its ominous nature. The dwarf paused to secure a rasping padlock ; that done, he addressed himself toward the giant kilns, whose ghostly vapors rolled fitfully over the clay, going northward with the wind. Paul Gotch resumed his cautious pur- suit of his henchman. Beside the tallest of the smoldering piles Allan Gary halted, and choosing a spot in its sloping face where the imprisoned fire had eaten its way between the superincumbent strata of bricks, he bent to the lurid glow. Paul crept up behind him and shuddered to perceive his occupation. He was loading a shotgun. The capricious halo that waxed and waned about him gleamed inter- A LETTER AND A SERENADE 59 mittently on the brown barrels, and \varmed the brass setting of the cartridge into bronze. The snap of the closing breech smote awaken- ingly upon Paul's ear, and he started forward to seize the weapon, but Allan Gary laid it down un- cocked, and burst out fiercely. "I winna do't ! I winna clo't !" he cried. "She said, 'Say ye lo'e me, fairy prince/ an' I said, 'I maun aye lo'e ye, lassie.' An' gin I gae to see her nae mair; gin I sing to her nae mair; gin I come nae mair to len' her ma een that she may see ilka flooer and tree, ilka bird and beast, as nane but me can show them to her gin I put death and hell atween us, will she no' ca' to me i' her leddy voice, 'Fairy prince! fairy prince!' I canna do't her voice wad come to me under the mools, and I couldna rest i' ma grave. I canna live withoot her, and God hae mercy upo' me, I canna dee withoot her, either." The distressful monologue lost itself in a spasm of tears. Paul Gotch moved slowly into the equivocal radiance that shone about the vague extremity of the kiln. Allan Gary looked up, startled ; his eyes met the eyes of the disturber. "Ye're oot late, laddie," he said, trying to speak unconcernedly. Paul touched the shotgun significantly with his foot. "Allan, Allan," he returned, sorrowfully; "what can I say to you, my poor friend ?" The Scot lifted his face to the sky, flooded with the pallor of the risen moon. His mouth quiv- Go A SON OF AUSTERITY ered and grew hard ; then he answered somberly "Sae naething to me at a', lest I curse ye as Job cursed them that comforted him wi' words." Allan Gary turned and strode off hastily, mak- ing for the eastern boundary of the estate where the tower of St. Faith's rose dimly against the indigo horizon. Paul took up the discarded weapon and set out across the clayfield in the direction of the Gotch dwelling. As the gloom closed about him, a tall figure stalked from the shadows that slept to windward of the burning mass, and peered along the ragged ledge between it and the brink of the precipitous "cutting." Be- neath lay a chance pool, swollen by the recent rains the transverse lines of light, thrown from the side of the kiln, made a shining grille upon the surface of the black water. The new-comer had no eyes for the pool or the path, he was gaz- ing eagerly into the darkness ahead. "It is the boy, sure enough," he muttered; "I thought I hadn't missed him. Which way did he go ? Damn the place, it's as dark as a wolf's mouth." He plunged into the night, cursing as he went, and vanished suddenly. CHAPTER VI THE PLAY OF TRAGEDY "WHERE shall we lay him down?" asked the dwarf softly. Paul hesitated on the threshold of the little lobby, but answered with decision. "Here," he said, and opened the door of the room where he had held that strange inquiry into his father's marital misconduct. Allan Gary whispered to the group behind them three tall laborers in the knee-girt cordu- roys and cotton shirts of their class. Something grim and stark swung between them, upborne on a stout plank. Two pairs of brown palms gripped one rough extremity, guarding an iron-gray head. A few drops of soiled water splashed upon the oilcloth of the passage. The three carried their burden into the bright chamber. Paul drew out the couch and helped to lift the rigid figure upon it. For a moment the dead man's shoulders rested heavily in his son's arms; a pale shaft from the window glit- tered on a gold pin in the drenched scarf. Their embarrassed co-operation ended, the 61 62 A SON OF AUSTERITY brickmakers shuffled reverently out of the apart- ment ; Allan Gary remained. Paul turned to him, catching at a question. "Do you know who this was, Allan?" he said harshly; "this harmless clay that lies so still in the sunshine." "Yin o' yer ane fowk, is't no'?'' replied the Scot, wondering; "he's a rare look o' yersel', puir body. Yer mither'll be sair put aboot; nae doot he lost his way i' the dark, and the pits are just brimmin' after the rains." Paul Gotch regarded the speaker curiously. "It was my father, Allan," he said; "my father! He came back to us tw : o days ago, and we sent him away, after fair trial and verdict. And now, Allan, Tragedy has played her ace, and where are our court cards of virtue and justice?" The dwarf bent his head. "May God hae mercy upon him," he murmured. "Why not?" said Paul, the thought springing to his lips; "we had none." Allan Gary sighed, and followed his subordin- ates without offering to continue the argument. "My God !" quoted Memory in the ear of Paul Gotch, "but I should like you to have shaken hands with me." He stood looking at the stalwart form so mas- terful in its experienced middle-age. A canary, hung in a cage close by, stirred cheerfully and broke into a flood of melodious assertion. The watcher roused, and lowered the blinds. The THE PLAY OF TRAGEDY 63 little creature lapsed into silence with a regretful chirp, and Paul left the shadowy chamber, aban- doning it to die discomfited musician and the heedless dead. When he returned, it was to cover the immo- bile face with a soft white square. The deter- mined profile still showed vaguely, acquiring a novel dignity in repose. "My God !" sounded again in the recesses of Paul's mind, "but I should like you to have shaken hands with me." The repetition was more thrilling in the funereal gloom than it had been in the gathering sunshine : the son of Selina Gotch yielded to an uncontrollable impulse, and stooping, he took the icy fingers in his own. Then he went to his mother's room. Pausing upon an upper landing, he tapped lightly at a thin panel. Receiving no answer, he tapped again. "Come in," said a tremulous voice, heavy with sleep. Paul entered quietly, and stepped to the bedside. Selina Gotch raised her eyes to her son's and smiled wanly. "You're up early," she told him; "have you had your breakfast?" "Not yet." said her son, evasively; but the tender vigilance of the inquiry moved him. He bent and kissed her. Selina Gotch's emotions were very quick and strong; the gray eyes filled with tears, and the frail lips responded quiver- ingly to the caress. The touch of the dead man's 6 4 A SON OF AUSTERITY fingers seemed to fade away before the access of feeling that pulsed warmly in her son's veins. "Something has happened," lie began, with caution; "an accident in the clayfield some one, unfortunately, has been drowned." His mother's expression contracted to one of pity. "Not another child?" she said, nervously. "No," answered Paul; "a man; some one we know ; slightly, that is. You knew him better at one time." He stroked her hand a spare, smooth hand, at once fine, and powerful. "Can't you guess?" he asked; "it is my my father." Mrs. Gotch gazed at him incredulously. "He must have been in the neighborhood," pursued Paul, as indifferently as was possible, "and not being familiar with the pits, stumbled into one. Gary found him this morning, quite dead." The tears had ebbed from Mrs. Gotch's eyes, her mouth hardened. Her son comprehended. "He may have been trying to see me," said Paul; "but if so, he did not succeed. On the contrary, I wrote him a brief note yesterday in answer to one I received from him " Selina Gotch took a deep breath of painful an- ger. "Letting him understand that I had become aware of certain new facts, and that it was even THE PLAY OF TRAGEDY 65 more than ever impossible for us to become acquainted. That letter," went on Paul, mus- ingly, "he can not have received, and now he will never receive it." Mrs. Gotch glanced jealously at her son. She herself had no words to express the subtle anxiety which troubled her. "I am sorry he should have met with such a death." said Paul, fathoming his mother's thought ; "I believe that is all. Why should you doubt me ? You chose him to be my father ; you loved him once, and I am because of it. He sinned against you, and I denied him part or lot in me. What more would you have? One can not hate by merely willing it." The racked maternal bosom swelled in a spasm of bitter resentment, and Selina Gotch wept. "I wish," she sobbed, "we had never heard of him again." "It might have been for the best," said Paul; "I think his coming back has " He checked himself abruptly. "Has what?" persisted Mrs. Gotch. "Has taught me that I have a heart," con- cluded her son ; "at least I never knew it to ache before. And now it aches strangely for you and for him ; yes, and for myself, too." An impulse of candor seized upon him, over- whelming the stiff reserve which he inherited from his mother. "You have made me very happy always," he 66 A SON OP AUSTERITY told her impetuously; "I feel as if I had just awakened from a long and sheltered dream ; as if my fort of philosophy had heen carried by as- sault, and Life and Death, with all their ban-dogs of perplexity, were howling round the citadel. Poor pale Amazon, you kept the gates gallantly, but it was no use, you see." He shrank into silence, startled by the unusual frankness of his outburst. Selina Gotch stirred. "I had better get up," she said; "there will be a great deal to do." Paul rose. "I will attend to all that I can myself/' he an- swered, and met her glance doubtfully. "We shall not quite be able to hide our skeleton from the Public and the Law," he added ; "but we shall try, shall we not ?" Selina Gotch motioned affirmatively; the con- cession was to her son, not to the dead. "You you would rather not see him," fal- tered Paul. Mrs. Gotch knitted her brows. "Why should I?" she inquired. Her son found no reply sufficiently satisfactory to an impromptu judgment and so departed. In the hall he reached for his hat, went out into the vast clayfield and strolled towards St. Faith's. As he skirted a stretch of hitherto un- touched grass-land, whose miscellaneous slopes and flattened hillocks strewn with the orange stars of the dandelion, native to the raw earths THE PLAY OF TRAGEDY 67 of the locality ran down to the largest and shal- lowest of the clay-pits, he saw that Elsie Stuart. chaperoned by the precise figure of Justine Du- pin, sat upon a strip of velvety turf that looked across the brown pool. He gained the spot and spoke to them. "What brings you here?" he asked the blind girl ; "are there no parks?" "Much good parks are!" snapped Elsie; "the trees worry me with their fuss and chatter. Here I can feel nothing but sun and emptiness, and my thoughts can go on forever without bumping against anything." Suddenly interested, Paul seated himself on a bank beside her. "May I learn what you were thinking about?" he said. "You may," replied Elsie. "I was lying on Aladdin's carpet, curled up on a bed of flowers, and floating to the other heaven, the heaven where the angels all have sweethearts." "Why the other heaven?" demanded Paul. "Well, you know," explained the blind girl, "there are two heavens the traditional one and the other one. In the traditional one it is always Sunday, and they only sing hymns; in the other they never have any Sundays, and they sing songs that make your heart fly round in your chest like a bird in a cage. Which heaven are you go- ing to, Mr. Gotch ?" "I haven't decided," said Paul, beguiled, de- 68 A SON OF AUSTERITY spite his melancholy; "in any case I have no sweetheart, Elsie. Do they provide them in the other heaven?" "I should say so," responded Elsie, "but the best sort are the ones you find here and take with you." Paul studied sorrowfully the glowing face of the speaker, he knew what had lent that warmth to the soft cheek, that light to the wide violet orbs, that velvet laughter to the childish tones. He broke off the conversation. "Is your father at home, Elsie?" he asked. "Poor Dearie has had to go to a diocesan con- ference," said the blind girl, mischievously. "I went once, and they put me up in a gallery sort of place, while all the clergy talked down below. Such a lot of funny little voices, like bees on the sandhills in the sun." Paul turned back. "Good-bye, Elsie," he called, "good-morning, Miss Dupin; I will see Mr. Stuart again." He reached the white cottage after a detour to the mill, where he failed to find Allen Gary. Re-entering the narrow passage he noticed that the door of his work-room was open, and glanced in. Selina Gotch sat by the body of her hus- band, her arms thrown upon the table, her head hidden between them, her shoulders heaving. Paul crept away, and stole into the sunlit meadow, possessed by an infinite astonishment. CHAPTER VII THE LAST JOURNEY THERE is a sound, not born of any living thing, a sound, obscure yet awfully distinct, that seems like the last querulous protest of the dead against oblivion. It is the whine of the long screws in the closing coffin. This sound fell upon the ears of Paul Gotch : he rose and buttoned his frock-coat. Mrs. Gotch went out of the dining-room, to return with a loose dark ulster. "Put this on," she said, solicitously. Her son hesitated. "It it isn't black," he an- swered. Mrs. Gotch proffered the garment, mutely insistent; Paul surrendered. His mother settled the collar her fingers trembling. Paul drew the gray head to him and kissed it; Mrs. Gotch looked up timidly. "Don't take off your hat," she murmured; "it has been raining, and the wind is quite cold this morning." Cautious fingers rapped interruptingly upon a panel of the door, and a face appeared, plump, 69 70 A SON OF AUSTERITY vinous, ludicrously mournful. The bilious eyes beckoned privily to Paul ; he complied with the gesture. "Shall we," desired his ghoulish cicerone "shall we lift the body now, sir?" The young man assented vaguely and went back to his mother. Some subtle rapport of an- tagonism troubled both, yet shunned the defini- tion of speech. A confused soft babel of foot- steps penetrated from the lobby without, men moving with difficult breathing under a grim bur- den. The glances of the listeners met; Paul sighed and left his mother alone. Mrs. Gotch stole to one of the small panes and peered through. The brickfield was veiled in a thin mist, tat- tered capriciously by a raw north wind. Occa- sionally the fleecy screen faded into uncertain showers. The bearers of the coffin moved down the narrow walk, threaded the gate and advanced swayingly over the cinder-path toward the east- ern roadway. Paul followed them, a tall, de- spondent figure. Some titanic emotion clutched at the heart of Selina Gotch; she could not weep, nor could her agonized bosom dilate upon its delirious protest of jealousy; she felt the currents of being pause in her convulsed frame, her brain numbed ; for a second the darkness of the Unendurable blot- ted her out. Then she crept back to conscious THE LAST JOURNEY 71 existence, a frail, stricken creature with the cup of bitterness empty in her hand. Patiently the somber carriers marched with their load. Not a flower lay upon the yellow casket, no pall covered it from the condensing clouds that rolled about it. Shoulder-high and feet foremost Christopher Gotch traveled to his grave, as virile and dispassionate as in life. And after him came his unwilling captive; the spoil of a victory plucked out of the very jaws of de- feat. At the border of the clayfield were a hearse and a single carriage. A little crowd marked, with its opposing groups of spectators, the way to the two pompous equipages. The coffin slid shriekingly between the planes of frosted glass and shining enamel; Paul mounted into the lumbering ark behind, there was a clatter of hoofs, and the wheels, clearing the curb, settled into those slow revolutions which, all too quickly, devour the last journey. The Law had set its seal upon the remains of Christopher Gotch, apologetic officials had come and gone in its formal service, twelve reluctant strangers had seen a bloodless face and rigid limbs and rendered judgment thereon; Christo- pher Gotch might claim unlike Ophelia his "bringing home of bell and burial." His pulses had been stilled by chance, not choice ; be his rec- ord what it might, the church would not turn her countenance from him. 72 A SON OF AUSTERITY Out of the finite Unknown came Christopher Gotch to ask for love and pardon ; into the in- finite Unknown he had departed, haply on the same quest. Paul plumbed the shallows of his own faith as he sat in a corner of the gloomy car- riage. Once he smiled wanly; the Future focus- ing itself automatically into the Paradise of con- vention, an irreverent realism had suggested his mother's uncompromising attitude even towards a redeemed Christopher. He shuddered to fathom the inherent ferocity of the fend. The hearse swerved into sight beyond the win- dow at his elbow as it rounded a corner. Ahead lay the broad central avenue of a handsome mod- ern city of the dead ; its well-grown trees and thick plantations cowering wetly in the dank at- mosphere. The vehicles stopped at one of the neat ceremonial churches scattered over it. A mute opened the carriage-door and the solitary mourner descended. The shouldered coffin passed into the weather-beaten porch and came to rest upon the trestles at the entrance of the aisle. Paul noticed that the rain-drops were standing on the polished elm in beads like tears. He gained one of the comfortless pews and took a seat. The church was empty, and, in spite of the June day, bitterly chill and damp. Paul surveyed the bare structure, its severely plain chancel, its greenish diamonds of leaded glass, its grained reading-desk, its harsh concrete pave- ment and altar-steps. He turned and looked at THE LAST JOURNEY 73 the gaunt, flowerless casket upon the trestles, then at the frowning walls about him. A cynical thought put itself into a slashing epigram \viih a verse-like swing in it '"Thou hast brought tin- dead to a God as dead." The sentence pleased him, it was so brutally apt ; he pondered possible rhymes. A slight bustle at the west end of the church roused him from his absorption. Another coffin was being set down side by side with that of Christopher Gotch. Paul's irritable humor kin- dled into resentment ; he wished he had arranged for a private service and asked Patrick Stuart to officiate. There would have been a wealth of ar- tistic comfort in his beautiful manners and gentle, bearded mouth. Who were the new-comers? doubtless some homespun folk with noisy tears and unkempt lamentation. While he fumed, cold and petulent, the mourn- ers came up the aisle, a knot of women, chiefly of that gross, gadding sort which joys and sorrows with its neighbor not seldom maugre its neigh- bor's permission. Amid this escort there moved a young girl, slender, erect, pathetically hung with crape, frozen by tragedy into a bewildered calm. Her flimsy sables were crisp and new; those of the attendant matrons limp and rusty, the charitable resurrections of more personal woe. Paul's anger ebbed from him ; the sullen church had gained an instant sanctity from that white 74 A SON OF AUSTERITY maiden visage with the drooped lids. He gazed at it curiously it had an air of piteous steadfast- ness ; a repressed sob hung at a delicate angle of the mouth. The women settled themselves on either hand with reciprocally sympathetic signals. The chaplain hurried into position at the read- ing-desk, a short, prosaic figure in a flapping surplice. His voice was weak and reedy, and its echoes danced fantastically among the brown rafters piping the supernal hypotheses of that majestic consecration which has challenged for so many centuries an unanswering mystery. Paul Gotch's sceptical mind wavered under the lyrical, melancholy English of the psalms, and warmed to the silver trumpet of the apostolic harangue. The girl, among her uncouth escort, was weeping silently, little flushes of carmine throbbed in her cheeks and tinged her ears and eyelids. Paul watched her, wondering who of all her kin lay there beside his father on the trestles two lifelong strangers, cheek by jowl in death. The lesson over, the chaplain came down the church; the women abandoned their pew and rustled in his wake. Paul stayed where he was, deeming la place aux dames an applicable canon. To his surprise the coffin that was raised to the shoulders of its bearers was that of his father. He went hastily along the aisle. The weighted mutes strode out into the porch, and the two chief mourners found themselves unexpectedly THE LAST JOURNEY 75 face to face. For a moment they stood so, fasci- nated by an impulse of curiosity, then Paul bowed deeply and passed on. His eye fell upon the re- maining coffin. It bore a cross of lilies and nar- cissus ; nevertheless, he could read the name on the half-hidden plate "Frances Latimer" -, the succeeding dates were forty years apart. "Her mother," he said to himself as he went on into the open. A doubtful rain was descend- ing; the chaplain had donned a silk hat, his scanty surplice shook in the intermittent breezes about his clumsy boots and trouser-legs. The final resting-place of Christopher Gotch was near a portion of the great cemetery still park-like and rural. Wide stretches of rough natural green-sward, shadowed by ancient oaks, skirted here the dense assemblage of gleaming monuments. Paul watched perplexedly as the service ended. He could not touch the moist earth when they came to the hideous "ashes to ashes"; the chap- lain dropped a convenient clod, then glanced at him pityingly. The hollow rattle wakened Paul's comatose fancy, and set it on the brink of illimit- able horrors. By the time he had it mastered again, the chaplain had concluded the collect, re- peated the benediction, and was off to his sec- ond service. The dead man's son lost himself in a troubled reverie. Too honest for equivoque, too cynical for credulity, too imaginative for negation, he 76 A SON OF AUSTERITY was contemplating, for the first time with a defi- nite stake in the phenomenon, the cessation of physical existence The catastrophe of which he was himself the expression and the memento the catastrophe of an embittered life seemed hysterical and overwrought beside the crushing terror of this other; the catastrophe of death. He asked himself questions which outran his vocabulary and left him gasping in a sea of pure thought. The raucous tones of the chaplain's voice re- vived his interest in the material world. A stride or so away were the feminine mourners. The laborers beside him ceased to ply their spades. The matrons wept heartily out of mere barbarous fellowship; their charge had no tears now. A dizzying tension of will was evidently all that stood between her and an insanity of sorrow ; her eyes were closed, her lips compressed, her nos- trils dilated. Once or twice, as the women whis- pered to her, she took her breath in a sick sob, or moved her head, as a child that refuses comfort. It was the Sentient in the grasp of the Inflexible. The guard of matrons closed vigilantly about her, but there was no need of the precaution ; the final words of the service spoken, she turned and went away with her attendants, walking unstead- ily, like one in a dream. The sextons began to fill in somewhat of the newly-tenanted graves. Paul sought out and dismissed the waiting car- riage, to return home on foot. A meal was ready THE LAST JOURNEY 77 for him in the parlor of the cottage on the clay- field a pleasant, cheerful meal with a bright fire accompanying it to conjure the vapors of the squalid afternoon. He shut the door behind him as he entered, and shivered strongly, finding Death's shadowy Beyond the more awful in pres- ence of Life's fond, familiar Here. His mother's little maid waited on him nerv- ously ; it was her privilege but seldom. "Mrs. Gotch had a bad headache, sir," she told him, bringing his plate with a certain coquettish grace she had put on a clean print gown, also there was a red ribbon at her throat "and went to lie down for a while. But when I peeped in to know when you would be back, sir, she had dropped off and was sleeping beautifully. So I brought up your dinner myself." "That was very considerate of you, Margaret," answered her master, glancing at her with reti- cent kindness. Margaret blushed at the glance; poor soul, she had no need; her tiny image in those dusky pupils sparkled on the surface only. They were contrasting cruelly her simple features and transient bloom of youth with the insepara- ble beauty and Olympian grief of that white face on which they had lingered so wistfully for an hour. "Mr. Gary has been asking for you, sir," inti- mated Margaret, with unnecessary devotion, when next she came through ; "he said he would 78 A SON OF AUSTERITY call up again. Will yon have your coffee now, sir?" "Thank you," murmured Paul out of his own thoughts, and Margaret retreated, indefinably re- gretful at the approaching termination of her ministry. P:iul sipped his coffee luxuriously; Margaret had dowered it richly with cream. She herself stayed to draw the coals together in the high grate, peeping reverently meanwhile at the young man's lounging figure. At length she stole quietly from the room. Beneath that pink hoi- land bodice a brave if uncultured spirit was flut- tering a soft breast with futile tenderness. "Mr. Gary, sir," she returned to say. Paul re- linquished his cup and got up from the table. "Don't let me disturb ye," protested the dwarf. "Not at all," responded the other; "have some coffee." "I thank ye, no," said Allan Gary. He sat down near the threshold and fumbled with his hat. "Ye'll hae had a sair day the day," he went on, his black orbs gleaming with an eloquence the monosyllables belied. "Yes," assented Paul, dreamily; "I have been to the jumping-off place, Allan, and my eyes have seen no farther into its darkness than others have done before me." "It's a fearsome riddle," said the Scot. He THE LAST JOURNEY 79 hesitated a moment, then continued suddenly : "Ye'll no' guess why I'm here?" "No," admitted Paul. "I'm on a selfish errent," said the dwarf, fiercely; "but it maun oot. I've come to ask ye to set me free I canna stay \vi' ye any langer." "My dear Allan!" began Paul Gotch, "you can't mean that." "Aye, but I dae," said the Scot, with self-con- tempt ; "it'll tak ye aff yer buiks and spoil a' yer graund works it'll fash ye and yer mither tae deith, but I dinna care. I'm aff aff tae see life, aff tae tak my fill o' the warld, tae find a short road tae the Deil somehow." Paul Gotch stared at the speaker, amazed- then in a flash comprehended and bent his head before the dwarf's wild, inverted woe. "Ye've been gude frien's tae me," pursued Al- lan Gary ; "ye and yer mither. I've had a bonnie time wi' ye and yer buiks, Paul; my mind's a span taller. An' I hae been true man tae ye an' dune weel by the mill. But I maun gang, I maun gang ye'll gie me leave ?" "Yes," promised Paul sadly; "is there no other way?" "Nane," said the dwarf; "ma life's a revellt skein, but I hae had ma 'oor. Dinna ye greet for me, Paul; ane withoot eyes has lookit intae ma saul and found me worthy o' her. Ye kent a' the ither nicht, didna ye? and ye didna de- spise me ; so I'll no' lie tae ye. But I maun gang, 8o A SON OF AUSTERITY I'm a man like yerseF. and her face grups me aboot the heirt. I mauna be where she is she lo'es me too, ye ken." A dry sob burst from his lips; Paul wrung his hand dumbly. "I will arrange everything/' added the younger man, after a hiatus of troublous feeling; "how soon do you want to go?" "I'll bide till ye're in the way o' doin' without me," said Allan Gary hoarsely ; "ye're ower gude, ower gude. But if ever ye lo'e a lassie o' yer ain, ye'll ken a' that's i ma heirt this nicht. Dinna trouble tae let me oot." He drew the door open with a jerk and disap- peared hurriedly. Paul passed the next hour brooding over the dwindling fire. Mrs. Gotch roused him. "You are very thoughtful," she said, with latent jealousy. "I was thinking," answered her son, "of a girl I saw to-day she was burying some one very dear to her, her mother, I imagine; poor child, she seemed overwhelmed with grief." He put an arm about the worn figure beside him. "Her mother !" he repeated ; "after all, our mothers are more to us than any one else can ever be." For an instant Selina Gotch's heart was at peace. "Not to a man," she objected belatedly, though without intentional point in the remark; "you know the old rhyme THE LAST JOURNEY Si " 'My son's my son till he gets him a wife, But my daughter's my daughter all her life.' " "Would you mind?" asked Paul, obliquely. "Letus wait and see." suggested Mrs. Gotch, with unconscious prudence. CHAPTER VIII A CONTROVERSY AND A COMPACT "MR. GOTCH !" said the voice of Elsie Stuart, descending to Paul's ear as he stepped into the ample hall-way of the vicarage, "will you please come up-stairs?" Paul obeyed, in part ; he went to the middle of the long flight. There he halted doubtfully. "Come right up," demanded Elsie. "I knew it was you by your step. Justine is out I I want you to see Tommie ; I have just got him." Having no courteous alternative, Paul followed Elsie into her own domains. "Tommie" proved to be a splendid Angora cat, coiled sleepily in a flannel-lined basket, a silver bell dangling at his aristocratic neck. "Isn't he soft and lazy?" inquired Elsie. "But he's got a wicked face you've only to feel it so." She drew her small fingers over the feline head. "There," she said, "that makes me think of awful things ; things with queer shivery smiles waiting for you round corners. Ugh !" The blind girl felt for the tiny jaws and pulled 82 A CONTROVERSY AND A COMPACT 83 them asunder. "Here are some nice teeth for you," she went on, "and here" she spread a dainty paw to demonstrate the curved talons "here are some pretty claws. Oh, you little beast" she apostrophized the drowsy animal "how I hate you!" Elsie faced about suddenly. "Mr. Gotch," she said, "what do you think of people who break promises?" "Men or women?" queried Paul, with gentle cynicism. "Why?" demanded the blind girl. "Well," returned Paul, quizzically, "there's really not much difference in theory, but the prac- tical wisdom of several centuries has decided that a man must keep his word, a woman may." "Thank you," said Elsie, "that's a poor joke. Never mind, I suppose it's true. Now, I'm going to ask you a question, Mr. Gotch a very impor- tant question. Will you swear to answer me truthfully?" "I swear," responded Paul, sitting down, the better to consider the situation. "Then," said Elsie, "what do you know about gardening?" "Absolutely nothing," confessed the witness. "Do you know anybody who does ?" proceeded the examining counsel. Paul bit his lip. "No-no," he said, warily; he recollected that Allan Gary was a master of the art in question. Elsie, seated on the table 84 A SON OF AUSTERITY edge, was pointing her toes with a notable as- sumption of indifference. "May a man tell fibs ?" she asked, with the ut- most sweetness. "A man may," said Paul, trying to turn the conversation ; "a woman must. You simply re- verse my previous rule." "Pshaw !" said the blind girl, recklessly, "hasn't your mother a garden?" "Scarcely enough to mention," retorted Paul. "Who looks after it?" persisted Elsie. "When I can find time, myself," said Paul, mendaciously, forgetting his recent disclaimer of horticultural knowledge. "Thank you," sniffed Elsie, slipping from her throne ; "that will do ; you were going to see my father, pray don't let me detain you," and she caught up the Angora in her arms "do you know, I feel that Tommie has taken quite a dis- like to you ; run away quickly, he is very danger- ous at times to to strangers!" With which fling Elsie disappeared through a door at the farther side of the sunny sitting-room, leaving her invited guest to his own devices. He took his departure, thrilled by a great pity, and regaining the hall, entered the library. "I come unannounced," he said, apologetic- ally, "your French windows permitted me to see that you were alone. But I needed the services of a mat our moorland residence is> still over our 'A CONTROVERSY AND A COMPACT 85 ankles so went round to the front and was cap- tured by Elsie." "Tommie, I suppose," remarked Patrick Stu- art; "he is Elsie's newest treasure." "Treasure!" ejaculated Paul, wheeling out his favorite arm-chair ; "she assured him in my pres- ence that she hated him." "Elsie is a woman," said the vicar; "with women petting generally takes the form of bully- ing." "Sagacious man !" bantered Paul ; "I envy you your stock of aphorisms. Repeat me some on on Death, for instance.-" The vicar grew serious. "Death is too grim a subject for the aphorist," he protested. "My apostolic namesake did not find it so," re- plied the younger man; "defend me, oh son of the Church, her service for the dead." "Which part of it," parried the vicar. "All of it," answed Paul, "but especially that 'sure and certain hope' which is neither sure nor certain. Said over a saint it is a tragedy for the living ; said over a sinner it is a comedy for the dead." Patrick Stuart made a motion of dislike. His visitor was ruthless. "The Galvanism of it hits like a bludgeon," he said ; " 'shortly to accom- plish the number of Thine elect' whittle that down, you amiable Jesuit." "There is no need," demurred the vicar, skil- 86 A SON OF AUSTERITY fully; "I am no Low Churchman, to claim plen- ary inspiration for the Prayer-book." "Nay," said Paul ; "if you are going to jetti- son your spiritual cargo at that rate I am done. But tell me 'in the beaten way of friendship,' as Hamlet has it where do you suppose my luck- less devil of a father is now ?" Patrick Stuart took a quiet inspiration. "You hit between the eyes. Paul," he commented. "And then get ready to parry one of your cross-counters," was the retort; "well, fire away." "Can you reply to your own question?" de- manded the vicar. "No," said Paul, frankly. "Yet you quarrel with my answer," objected the casuist. "I haven't heard it yet," fenced Paul; "what is it?" "He is in God's hands," said Patrick Stuart. "An anthropomorphic simile," thrust his op- ponent. "In God's keeping, then." "You base one hypothesis on another," came the swift riposte; "the old story of the elephant and the tortoise." "Do you challenge my primary one ?" "The existence of God ? no." "Do you accept it?" "As a working hypothesis, yes. Is it likely ever to be anything else on this side of the grave?" A CONTROVERSY AND A COMPACT 87 "If it ever were anything else on this side of the grave would not the Christian faith become a contradiction in terms?" Paul threw himself back in his chair. "You are one too many for me!" he owned; "but you still leave my father an uncharted comet." "In a universe of law and order," returned the vicar, with a smile of the practiced debater who has once more demonstrated his skill. His adversary abandoned the duel. "A new aspect of the paternal problem has pre- sented itself," he observed inconsequently ; "it appears from American advices that there are, as my father hinted, dollars, also a will a will chiefly charitable but with a sweeping codicil in my favor. My father was a careful man; the codicil bears date immediately before his sailing for England." "I congratulate you," said Patrick Stuart. "So can not I myself," rejoined Paul; "being the victim of a syllogism as thus. Wealth got- ten by deserting a wife is unholy. This money was got by deserting a wife. Ergo, this money is unholy; corollary, I can not avail myself of my father's bequest." "I think," criticized the vicar, "that your sec- ond premise is a little obscure." "My mother's commentaries reduce it to noon- day clearness," declared the logician. "May you not eventually regret this this chiv- 88 A SON OF AUSTERITY alric abnegation?" propounded his mentor, "in the event of marriage, for example." The younger started, then regained his indif- ferent bearing. "I hope not," he replied ; "how- ever, I am about to add to my resources a pro- fession, once the occupation of that illustrious nation, the Jews. I allude to brickmaking." "Paul!" ejaculated Patrick Stuart. "It is quite true," asseverated the other calmly. "Gary is leaving us, and I am going to give an eye to the business myself. Under these circum- stances, I have rejoiced my mother's heart by accepting a small salary out of the earnings of the mill." "And abandoning your pen?" "Not in the least," decided Paul; "that has prospered in my hand, and seems likely to go on doing so ; I am a budding capitalist. No, I shall only enter the province of Goshen on Fridays and Saturdays, to pay wages and balance books. Gary has found me a brother Scot for whom he vouches, without enthusiasm, yet also without circumlocution. So everything is as it should be." "Have you ever realized, Paul," asked the vicar, "that you are actually a very odd person ?" "Am I?" responded his protegf, and fell upon thought. "Is your engagement to supervise the brick- making enterprise not not likely," asked Patrick Stuart, "to prove in the end irksome, to to ?" 'A CONTROVERSY AND A COMPACT 89 "To an essential dilettante such as I ? perhaps so. Yet there is a promising- precedent when the plague of darkness fell upon Egypt it was in the land of Goshen that there was light." The vicar smiled. "I can break a lance with you at argument," he rejoined, "but you are my master in analogy. Only, as you kno\v, the com- parative is the dangerous method." The other had risen and was overhauling a row of book-titles. "Lend me a bit of print," he said. "I seem to have lost touch with my own demure collec- tion. Where do you keep your poetry ? I fancy something a trifle maddish." The vicar indicated the press verbally. Paul surveyed the shelves. He put out a finger and thumb and took down a thin yet handsome quarto. "Poe," he remarked; "what a glorious get-up; archaic prints, though." "Yes," admitted Patrick Stuart ; "it dates back to the days of peg-top trousers and decent wood- engraving. Are the verses maddish enough for you?" The student was turning the stiff pages. "Ara- besque interrogation-points carved on tomb- stones," he said, "but 'Annabel Lee' is immortal. When I was a round-eyed, big-headed cubling, the slave of a Dutch grease-agent those were the days before we fell heir to the land of Goshen I read the poem in a dingy library-book one doleful November evening; and when I came to 90 A SON OF AUSTERITY the lines about 'the angels up in heaven went en- vying her and me.' I gave a lachrymose gulp that dwells in my memory yet. The statement was so frightfully succinct. I had a bad habit of snivelling in those times; not pusillanimously, of course the throb of sympathy woke, vibrated into pain, and there were tears. My mother has the faculty still a word or a glance tender be- yond the common wets her eyes in a twinkling." He tucked the book under his arm. "I can borrow this?" he inquired. "Certainly," said the vicar, "but have pity on my margins my pet Milton is a thing of horror, thanks to your misplaced humor." Paul laughed and carried off the volume. Elsie was waiting for him in the hall. "Mr. Gotch," she began, "I was rude to you just now; I apologize!" "My dear Elsie!" said Paul, deprecatingly, but the blind girl insisted. "I was, I was, I was!" she repeated; "and I was a contemptible little minx, too: I tried to break a promise I had made. That will do, Mr. Gotch, thank you." And she returned up-stairs with much dignity, to call down from the landing, "I was wrong about Tommie; he was evidently quite fond of you." Paul went away, saddened by a wondering re- flection. He had asked himself what would be- come of the other's arch gaiety under the blow that was in store for her. A CONTROVERSY AND A COMPACT 91 The crux of the problem was not long post- poned. That same night Elsie crept out to the sandstone wall whose breast-high parapet divided for her the Real and the Ideal. Allan Gary had already gained the trysting-place. The blind girl was in a coquettish mood. "I am sorry I wasn't here first," she said; "I'd have scolded you finely, fairy prince. Tell me, is there a moon?" "Ay, a real bonnie yin," said the dwarf. "S-s-h!" whispered Elsie; "speak low. I will tell you something, fairy prince* I am afraid of the moon. It is a mystery a great, cold, smooth mystery, high up in the air. Only fairies are not afraid of her. Sad stories always have a moon in them. Justine has told me a few ; those where the lovers don't get one another, where men fight, and horses gallop, and women scream. And then everything is quiet again and the moon comes out, and it grows colder and colder till you scream and waken up, and it's only a story, after all." "Ye shouldna think o* sic things," said the Scot, anxiously. "Oh, it's not so bad as I make out," confessed Elsie. "Sometimes I like it, just as I like your songs the sorrowful ones that bring a lump up in my throat 'Wae's me for the 'oor, Willie,' and the rest of them." Allan Gary dashed his hand to his eyes. "Sing me that one, fairy prince," demanded the petulant voice. 92 "A SON OF AUSTERITY "Onything but that," said the dwarf, brokenly; "onything but that !" "Why not?" inquired Elsie; "I often sing it to myself, especially that bit about 'Wae's me for the destiny that gart me luve thee sae.' I asked Justine what destiny was, and she said 'Fate,' and fate is like all sorts of things, but most like a big wind that blows and blows and blows, and you've just to go with it. Fate is like the moon, a mystery you can never puzzle it out." She broke off. "You talk now," she said, "I've told you enough." The Scot nerved himself to the ordeal. "I hae a favor t' ask ye," he said. "Yes, what?" responded the blind girl. "Ye mind," went on Allan Gary, "the promise I gie'd ye no' tae leave ye till ye should send me awa?" "Of course I do," returned Elsie*; "I never felt certain of you before. But as Mr. Gotch says, men must keep their promises women can if they choose to. At least, that is what he meant." "Weel," said the dwarf, "I want ye tae gie me that promise back again." "Certainly not," declared Elsie; "and I really didn't think you'd get tired of me so soon." "I weary o' ye !" cried the Scot tempestuously ; "my God ! it's teirin' me heirt oot tae bid ye let me gae dinna ye mock me." "O-o-oh!" said Elsie, with a coo of infinite penitence and compassion ; "I didn't mean it, fairy 'A CONTROVERSY AND A COMPACT 93 prince ; I didn't mean it, really. But I can't let you go don't, don't ask me to!'' "Then I maun gae withoot yer leave," said Allan Gary, brokenly; "I hae dune ye a cruel vvrang, and I maim e'en break ma word tae set a' richt again. But dinna ye think I can forget ye dinna ye think that." Elsie gasped, caught at her full white throat, and sank shuddering upon the wall. "I knew it ! I knew it !" she cried, chokingly. "I knew you were never really mine never! G back to your own place, fairy prince ; I will stop here and let the moon make me colder and colder until I die." Allan Gary struggled with his misery. Elsie caught a pathetic sound. "Oh, I am cruel !" she said dejectedly ; "it's as hard for you as it is for me, isn't it? Fate has got hold of you, and it's no use fighting; I will be brave. Have your promise back again. Now you can go away without breaking your word, like a true knight; and I can die without being ashamed of myself." "Dinna speak o' deein'!" begged the dwarf; "if ye wad hae me curse the day I saw the licht, tell me I hae made ye loth to live." "Why should I want to live?" asked Elsie, weakly; "you are going away forever I shall fancy you are dead, too." Allan Gary was silent. A woman's soul is 94 A SON OF AUSTERITY bird-like and frail ; this one might slip out of life so easily. "Listen !" he said ; "wad it mak ye ony happier if I promised ye a sign that I am no deid?" Elsie breathed a sigh of relief at the implied division of the victory. "Send me a gnome once a month to tell me that you are alive and love me," she offered, "and I will do anything you wish." "I hae nae gnomes tae sen' ye," said the Scot, "but yince a month I'll sen' ye a flooer, and ye' 11 ken it comes fra me. If it disna come for twa months together, I'll hae passed awa. And if I can, I'll wait for ye on the ither side; an' if there is nae ither side, I shall hae rest from my punish- ment." "Punishment!" answered Elsie; "have you done something dreadful, like the Wandering Jew?" "Ay," said the dwarf, "I hae stolen a young thing's heirt out o' her bosom and her peace with it. An' sae I hae lost my ain peace for ever." "That's me," whispered the blind girl; "never mind, fairy prince; I am really quite absurdly happy. I shall know that you are somewhere loving me, and if I cry over it, I shall be enjoy- ing myself in a fashion. Don't be silly and blame yourself, fairy prince, because it's all fate, and fate is a bigger mystery than the moon. You'll kiss me good-bye, fairy prince?" T A CONTROVERSY AND A COMPACT 95 "Gin yell'll let me/' said Allan Gary, huskily. Elsie held out her arms. A pair of bearded lips met hers in the darkness, then parted from them, and she was standing alone by the sand- stone wall with the poplars shivering overhead. CHAPTER IX THE KING OF TERRORS THE low-ceiled room, whose wide bay windovv held Paul Gotch's oaken work-table, was no longer the abode of quiet thought and patient labor. A shadow haunted it the shadow of a man who had passed its door but once in life and once in death. The strengthless ghosts of memory are often more persistent than those of superstition; er*er it when Paul would, the place seemed ten- anted. Once a board creaked under his foot, and recollection photographed upon his retina the powerful figure of the mysterious Christopher : square shoulders, acute eyes, assertive mouth, the salient features of a vigorous frame and striking physiognomy. Upon the settee was a dull patch or two, where the dripping body of the drowned had taken the gloss from the leather; imagin- ation blotted them out all too easily by a phantasm of the rigid limbs and strenuous torso, gallant as those of Velasquez's "Dead Warrior." Selina Gotch, more hostile and no less sensitive than her son, shunned the apartment for some while. Paul 96 THE KING OF TERRORS 97 fretted unprofitably over his pen, and lost him- self in interminable reveries. It was upon such a mood that Allan Gary broke with his farewell. "I've seen yer mither," he said abruptly, paus- ing in the middle of the floor ; "she sent me in here. I was for gettin' awa withoot troubling ye ; I hae had ma fill o' pairtin's." Paul left his chair and grasped both the dwarf's hands in his own. "It wouldn't have been kind to leave me out, Allan," he protested. "Maybe no," answered Allan Gary, dispiritedly; "weel, guid-bye t'ye." "Mayn't I know where you are going?" asked the younger. "I dinna ken," returned the Scot. "You'll write to me, then," entreated Paul. The dwarf shook his head. "I maun forget ye," he said, "it's the only way ; ye're ower near her; I hae gi'en a promise already I sair mis- doot the wisdom o'. Dinna bind me tae ma folly wi' any mair." "Very well," said Paul; "since you wish it, you shall shake off the dust of your feet against me and my house. Good-bye and good luck to you, Allan; our friendship has been very pleas- ant." "Ye're richt," muttered Allan Gary; "it tak's nae toll o' a man's peace that his heirt has been warmed in the light o' anither man's countenance. 98 A SON OF AUSTERITY 'Tis like the blessing of God, 'at mak's rich and brings nae sorrow with it. The heirt 'at turns itself toward a woman is like the bird 'at sings wi' its briest to a thorn ; eh, but the sang is bonny, and the stound is sweet." He stopped to listen hungrily. "Did ye hear that?" he said. "What was it?" asked the other. "Her voice," whispered the dwarf; "she hasna come tae see ye, surely." "It is hardly probable," said Paul, marveling. Allan Gary caught his arm in a grip of steel. "I maun be fey," he said, sibilantly, "there 'tis again." "Then I am, too," said Paul, "for I could have sworn that none other than Elsie Stuart had spoken. As they strained their attention the door was thrown open, and Mrs. Gotch's little maid came in, announcing: "Two ladies to see you, sir." The women who entered were Justine Dupin and Elsie Stuart. Allan Gary drew back, clutching nervously at his soft hat. His eyes met Paul's beseeching, tragic, the white spark of agony in them. The next moment, realizing that Elsie was accompa- nied, he slipped behind a broad four-fold screen. "Good-morning, Mr. Gotch," said Elsie. Paul started ; both at the forced animation of the tone and the utter dejection of the usually lively little figure. "I have come to see you at last and THE KING OF TERRORS 99 without an invitation. Justine can go and talk to your mother, who is very nice indeed ; we have been speaking- to her in the hall. She thought we wanted a subscription." "I am very sorry," put in Mrs. Gotch from the threshold ; "but hearing you were from the vicar- age" "Quite so," conceded Elsie; "I tell papa we have far too many beggars going around for St. Faith's, it's disgraceful. And you really won't mind me seeing Mr. Gotch alone on a matter of business just for a moment ; he's a great friend of my father's, you know." "Not in the least," remarked Selina Gotch; "come, Miss Dupin, let me show you my chick- ens, I have quite a lot ; it is my one hobby." "Then you have always fresh eggs," said Jus- tine, practically; "I would love them for Elsie." And she swept her black silk skirts from the room. Paul put his visitor into a comfortable chair and paused beside her, anxious for the tortured Gary, and hazarding useless guesses at Elsie's mission. The blind girl mused, her embarrassment show- ing itself in her face. "You know, Mr. Gotch," she began tentatively, "that I am very ignorant." "Circumstances have been exceptionally cruel to you, my poor Elsie," said Paul. "That doesn't help me, does it?" inquired Elsie, ioo A SON OF 'AUSTERITY at a tangent; "I am ignorant shamefully! and I want you to explain something." "I am quite at your service," was the somewhat indiscreet response. "Then," said the blind girl, rising quickly, "what is it to be dead?" Paul Gotch was taken aback. "Dead !" he repeated, "surely you know." "Surely I don't know," flounced Elsie. "When I ask Justine she says, 'N'importe, ch/rie,' and when I pout, she says, 'One is whisked off to fairy-land, I'oil'b tout!' When I ask Dearie he says, 'God takes us to be with Him for ever, my child;' and when Dearie talks about God he doesn't believe a word he says. What is a fun- eral, Mr. Gotch?" "Tell me first," Paul stipulated, "why you want to know so much all of a sudden." "Why?" cried Elsie; "oh, because because some one I care a good deal for said oh, well, we've all got to die ; Dearie tells us so in his ser- mons, and I want to know what dying is." Her elected authority noticed by chance the volume of Poe on the edge of the table, and shrank from sowing in this delicate intellect the seed which had brought forth such horrors in the poet's mind. Yet the nebulous is often more terrible than the precise. "When we die, Elsie," he said slowly, "we cease to be part of the world of living, thinking, THE KING OF TERRORS 101 acting men and women, and our spirits fly away " "What are our spirits?" he was interrupted, to be further posed by the remark : "If you're not going to be honest, Mr. Gotch, I shall go back to Justine at once, and I shall dislike you extremely ever afterwards. I can always feel when people are just parroting there, I've said it, and I don't care !" Paul gathered his dispersed wits. "I beg your pardon," he returned ; "I will tell you as much of the truth as I know. Death is something that no one can explain, just as life is something that no one comprehends. When we die, all that is peculiarly ourselves leaves us we do not eat or drink or walk or recognize our friends; we are silent and still, as if we were sleeping. In a short time what of us is left would begin to pass away, too, as snow does un- der your fingers. So while it is yet what the living knew and loved, they put it from them and think only of the man or woman who was so dear to them." "What do they do with it?" queried Elsie, fear- fully. "In some countries they burn it/' said Paul, with considerable trepidation ; "in most Christian ones it is laid very gently in a great chest lined with cushions and buried in the ground, and the grass and the flowers grow over the place where 102 A SON OF AUSTERITY it lies, and the trees bend over it and the rain sheds tender tears over it." The blind girl shuddered. "Is that all?" she said : "I think I guessed that much." "All that we are certain of," owned her pre- ceptor; "but the world has never really believed that that was the end. Just as this town is not the only town, so our earth is not the only planet in the sky. It has always been trusted that we live again elsewhere in a happier and a better world." "Some of us," said Elsie; "you mean heaven what about h'm! you know." "Yes," answered Paul, sadly; "men have also imagined a place of punishment for the wicked. But if we do live a conscious existence again, that will be because there is a God, and a God that understands everything. We are only un- lucky mites, we men ; if He is, He is God, and He will pity us." "So it's only a chance, after all," concluded Elsie. "To be more frank than most people dare be, yes," said Paul. Elsie meditated deeply. "Thank you," she observed at length; "it's a weight off my mind I don't think I'm afraid any more. Still, it's better to live, isn't it? it may be all there is for us." "That is so," said the expositor; "and the THE KING OF TERRORS 103 thought is the mainspring of all human endeav- or." "Do you believe in God?" pursued Elsie. Paul pondered. "Candidly," he admitted, "I regard Him as a Probability of the highest order ; once or twice at important moments in my life I have staked heavily on that Probability." "You are a very honest person," was Elsie's final comment. She turned about. "There's Justine come back for me," she said. Paul held his breath. Allan Gary, moving with stealthy steps had crossed the room and gained the unlatched door. As he drew it ajar the hinge had creaked and provoked Elsie's con- cluding remark. He looked at the blind girl as he stepped out a look passionate and pitiful to the limits of expression and made to Paul a lingering gesture of farewell. "No," said Elsie, after a pause, "it's my mis- take. I have another favor to ask you, Mr. Gotch ; take me to one of these places where they put the dead people." Paul demurred. The blind girl insisted. "I only want to know if it feels any different," she vouchsafed. "But Justine will object," temporized Paul. "We won't tell her," was Elsie's solution of the difficulty ; "you can just say you're taking me for a jaunt papa is always telling me to go for jaunts." 104 A SOX OF AUSTERITY Before this ingenious determination her host was impotent ; he went to the sitting-room and gave a diplomatic version of Elsie's message. Justine shrugged her shoulders. "You see how wilful a &^5/mine is, Madame." she expounded to Mrs. Gotch ; "eh bien, I will walk myself a little, and come again for Elsie when she shall have returned." "Nay," said Paul, "I will bring Elsie to the vicarage myself." "Xot too late, that is understood," cautioned Miss Dupin, seriously. "Quite," asseverated the custodian, and took himself off, glad not to be further questioned as to his charge's whim. "This is where you make your bricks, isn't it?" asked Elsie, clasping his arm as they traversed the clayfield. "Where they are made for us," said her guide. "That's what I meant," retorted the blind girl : "is it a nice business ?" "The mill does most of it," intimated Paul; "the thing responsible for that noise you may have noticed. In the old days brickmaking was a very sloppy process men and boys and water ad lib. Now the pug-mill does it nearly all." "Then how do the men and boys get a living now?" queried Elsie. "An economic problem of the worst sort, Miss Wisdom ; in the language of the discreet political THE KING OF TERRORS 105 scientist, they have been absorbed by oilier indus- tries. Here is our tram." He piloted the blind girl to a corner, and they talked of indifferent matters. A brief ride brought them to the massive pillars and entrance gates of the cemetery to which Paul Gotch had journeyed under such diverse circumstances. As they walked down the principal avenue, he told Elsie of his father's strange visit and singular death. "I'm so sorry I asked you all those questions," said his companion, "it only reminded you." "No," decided Paul; "I think it helped to clear off some of the haze in my mind." "And he is buried here?" inquired Elsie; "take me to it, please." The son of Christopher Gotch directed their course towards the still virgin portion of the great enclosure. His father's grave was as yet a strip of ruddy earth, the sign that a superstruc- ture was intended : head and coping-stones were in preparation, though Selina Gotch did not know of it. "Is this the place?" inquired Elsie, feeling that Paul stopped. Her guide assented. The blind girl stood re- flectively for a space. "Y-yes," she said ; "it makes one feel sad and cold. Are there a lot of people buried here?" "A vast multitude," answered Paul. "Poor things !" sighed Elsie. 106 A SOX OP AUSTERITY Paul did not answer ; he had turned towards the grave where the woman Frances Latimer had been buried : it was already covered with green turf no costly monument loomed on its horizon. The arm upon which Elsie leaned was trembling ; a sudden commotion had sprung up about the man's heart. By the verdant mound which swelled over that bewept coffin, a woman lay a woman who was very, very still. He knew her for his black-robed queen of tragedy. Though why his heart beat so wildly he could not have told. "Elsie," he said, with dry lips, "close to us there is a a young lady by a grave ; I I think she has fainted." "Then take me to her," said Elsie; "Justine faints sometimes after a row with Dearie and I always bring her round myself. Then you can run and get some water." Paul led the groping Samaritan across the sward. The woman was indeed she whom he had seen in the church a few days earlier, Elsie's ringers touched a soft bosom ; she knelt down and they traveled to a pale face. Then she made a lap and lifted the relaxed shoulders into it. "Quick," she cried, "the water." Paul ran fiercely; a cottage was not far off, about it a sweep of youngling shrubbery the material for future plantations. No one was within; the seeker found a tap and a glass, and hurried back with the cool fluid. THE KING OF TERRORS 107 Elsie had freed the throat of her uno /: ; .us patient; she heard her emissary's step, aiui drew the wrappings to with hovering maternal lingers. Paul stooped and held the glass to Elsie'.', hand ; she dipped her fingers in it and wetted the low, wide forehead. Presently there was a long and hopeless respiration. "Go away," ordered Elsie; "she'll be afraid of you." The command was obeyed ; the blind girl was mistress of the situation. Her patient stirred in the protecting arms, cried "Where am I?" and sat up. "S-s-sh!" said Elsie, clinging to her cautiously ; "it's all right; you went off, you know, and I brought you to. But please don't run away, be- cause I'm blind, and your collar wants fastening." "I don't understand," objected a tremulous voice; "how did you know I had fainted if you are blind?" "I had a gentleman with me," announced Elsie, cheerfully, "and he saw you. So first I sent him for some water and then I sent him about his business. May I call him back? He's really very nice. You needn't be afraid of either of us ; I'm Mr. Stuart's daughter, the vicar of St. Faith's, and he is a great friend of my father's. May I call him?" "Oh, yes, please," answered the patient, who was presentable once more. loS 'A SON OF AUSTERITY "Mr. Gotch," summoned Elsie, "you can take the man his glass back now/' "With pleasure," said Paul, and stepped up again. The other of the sighted persons rose to her feet, or rather tried to, for she swayed and stumbled, to be caught by a strong hand. "I'm afraid you are not yet quite fit to move," its owner warned her. Their eyes met, and he saw that she recognized him. "Dear me," exclaimed the blind girl, "is she going off again?" "No, oh, no," was the unsteady reply; "I'm not faint now I I think it's because I haven't had any breakfast or dinner." "Juste del!" said Elsie, who had a polyglot vocabulary ; "you must be starving ! Mr. Gotch, please get us out of this place and find a quick way home. What is your name, my dear ?" "Hero Latimer," replied the other, "but I couldn't think of " Elsie cut into the foolish proud sentence. "Really, Miss* Latimer," she declared, "you musn't; I love having visitors. Take this glass back, Mr. Gotch; if it is on our road, take us, too." Paul gave his arm to the dictatress; he had not as yet looked straight at Hero for as much as might amount to one whole minute. "Now, my dear child," said Elsie, when Paul left them to restore the stolen article and to tip THE KING OF TERRORS 109 the astonished keeper "you are a child, aren't you?" "I am nineteen," returned Hero, a little stiffly. "And I'm nineteen hundred," retorted Elsie "when you've got incipient spinal curvature, days sometimes count a million to the dozen; I'm blind and I'm queer; I always want my own way, and I always get it; I've no sisters or brother or mother ; only a father and Justine, who looks after me. But she is out, and I've got a darling room of my own. So come home with me and see my cat Tommie, with hair as long as mine, and tell me your troubles." Hero Latimer studied the strange figure beside her. "I am very sorry," she began; "it all sounds fearfully miserable." "And yet I am not," retorted Elsie, obscurely ; "buvons, mangeons, chansons, rions, which is to say, drink, eat, sing, and laugh ; it's no good mak- ing faces. And now here's Mr. Gotch, so we'll soon be home. Mr. Gotch, you can take us there in a cab?" "Please," besought Hero, but Elsie was ada- mant, and into a four-wheeler they got as soon as they had passed the gates. Paul studied the face of Hero Latimer, the blind girl sat opposite him with their patient by her. His lady of tragedy had eyes of a gleaming, lucid blue, and her dark hair overshadowed them on brow and temples with a feathery cloud. Her no A SOX OF AUSTERITY countenance was at once sad and imperious, deter- mined and subdued. Something in it moved him deeply. On the way to the vicarage he heard broken snatches of conversation, audible between the tor- menting rattle of the conveyance. They gave him occasional glimpses into an odd feminine world. "I was really doing my best/' said Hero, who was thawing under the sunshine of Elsie's dex- terous sympathies ; "but I could scarcely see for crying, and my fingers were all thumbs, that cheap kind of tulle that goes as limp as a rag with the least handling. ... I would have to make it good ... of course, it was silly and then . . . and paid me off, and I felt that miserable !" "The spiteful cat!" said Elsie, with a colloquial accuracy that Paul had not given her credit for. "So I went to be beside mother," pursued Hero, lowering her voice they were on a bit of respectable macadam now ; "and what with being so wretched and not having any lunch and only a drink of milk for my breakfast " "Of course, dear," said Elsie, squeezing the speaker* s hand ; "and now I'm going to give you something awfully tempting to eat, and you shan't think about anything but being petted and com- forted." They made a curious picture, the stunted girl so eager and fostering, the riper woman so sullen THE KING OF TERRORS i \ i and restrained. Yet there was a suggestion of Teuton strength about the largely-moulded lips and chin of Hero Latimer that was lacking in I he acuter contours of Elsie's face. Mobility \vas the characteristic of the one, endurance that of the other. Also into Elsie's face there stole at times a nuance of expression, bizarre to the vergc of madness; in Hero's blue eyes there dawned now and again a poignant sympathy, dovelike and sweet. Such a gleam of absolute, pulsating ten- derness fell upon Elsie's crooked shoulders. Paul saw it, and a pang of covetousness burned at his heart. Arrived at St. Faith's, he paid the driver of the cab, and would have taken his departure, but Elsie stayed him. "Come and have some tea, Mr. Gotch," she requested ; "you can talk to Miss Latimer while I go and coax the people in the kitchen." Paul ascended to the upper levels of the vicar- age with a sense of inevitableness tugging at his nerves. A few days ago he sat looking at Hero Latimer, ignorant of her name, her character, her occupation; and now he was moving beside her, his intuition that she was motherless confirmed by knowledge, and aware, moreover, that she was that pathetic being a finely-touched woman-soul bitted and thonged by economic slavery. How quickly he had strung the beads of evidence to- gether ! the resolute mouth and chin, the blue eyes, alternating timidity and dewy calm, the re- ii2 A SOX OF AUSTERITY vealing sob, "I went to be beside mother." the quick, proud "I couldn't think of it!" he held her spirit in the hollow of his hand. Palpitating with such novel thoughts, he waited alone in Elsie Stuart's jealously-guarded "den." Hero came in a moment or two after, hatless and deprived of her jacket. Elsie's swift yet varying footsteps paused at the door as her guest entered, and she called out to Paul that he was not to let Miss Latimer mope. Paul's usual insouciance had fled ; he could only suggest that Hero should take a seat. Miss Lat- imer accepted the recommendation, and both promptly became dumb. At last Hero gave her- self an admonitory shake one more token of a halting courage and a determined will. "I think, Mr. Gotch," she said nervously, "that I have seen you before." At the word memory stung her, but her mouth set bravely. "Pray do not pain yourself with the recollec- tion," besought Paul. "It it was my mother," added Hero, as if to justify her emotion. The young man bent his head. "A terrible deprivation," he said, and added, out of a burning desire to be better known to her : "yet my position was even more tragic, because -I can not grieve as you can. I was parting from a father whose only child was born in a work- house, a man who, five-and-twenty years ago, abandoned his wife when she most needed his THE KING OF TERRORS 113 help and protection a father who met his death because he came two thousand miles to ask a love and forgiveness which justice withheld from him. It would have been less hitter to have known and honored him all my life and. as you do, to have mourned my loss unashamed." Hero looked at him interested vet puzzled by the fluent self-revelation. Lacking- print or the pulpit, it roused her mute personality to a lurk- ing disdain. Nevertheless, she was attracted by the indefinable masculine distinction which had so piqued her. He noted her silence, translated the fractional variation of her expression, and winced. Unwit- tingly he revenged himself upon her. "A beautiful day, is it not?" he inquired, de- scending to a most uncomplimentary depth of the conventional. Hero's lip twitched and her eyes ran over with amusement ; she was as acute as he was. "Days depend upon other things than the weather, you mean," he said, a little relentingly; "yet we have to be very miserable not to be the happier for a spring morning or an autumn after- noon with a clear sky overhead and the frost on the grass. Even the prince of pessimists admit- ted that it is a pleasant thing for the eyes to be- hold the sun." He was talking beyond the prescribed vapidi- ties of the tete-a-tete, yet he could not help it. The fastidiousness in the somewhat classic coun- ii4 A SON OF AUSTERITY tenance galled his dominant mental qualities into an obstinate appeal for revision of the too hasty judgment passed upon them. Hero was equally obstinate. ''Suppose you've no time to think of such things?" she said, hit- ting the bull's eye of his aesthetic target. "You are right," he remarked, surrendering; "an effective margin of healthy attention is neces- sary for the enjoyment of such pleasures. It is, alas, denied to most in the struggle for existence." Hero studied the author of this concession. He was evidently not trying to be clever, his mouth simply opened, and a type of English she had never before encountered flowed around an idea to lend it a vexatiously adequate garb of speech. Elsie and a maid with the tea-tray saved Hero* the perplexing task of a provisional judg- ment. The blind girl was a most assiduous hostess, and Hero ate heartily. Under the stimulus of the meal and the excitement of the chatter, the rose-leaf tinge warmed her pale face and throbbed in her finger-tips : she had firm, small hands ; Paul indexed them as yet another sign of char- acter. Hero did not speak often, being constrained and shy, but she kept going a vigilant analysis of Elsie's uncanny cleverness and Paul's masterful sincerity, opening her eyes at the unexpected ignorances of the one and the transient humors of the other. Both were overstrung, Elsie by the THE KING OF TERRORS [15 rarity of a visitor and Paul by a feveri.-h hope of extracting from those blue eyes some flicker of predilection, at the worst, of respect. Even the cultivated intellect remains primeval squinting toward the peacock. When she went away she had promised Eisie to repeat her visit. The blind girl pressed for a date. "I can't say for certain," urged Hero ; ''you see " "Oh, of course," said Elsie, in a stage aside; "you'll be rather unsettled for a bit, won't you? But you must let me know how you go on, dear ; I shall be quite worried about you." Hero made the desired engagement hastily, surprised to find that Paul insisted upon playing escort. They parted, these two, twice so strangely brought together by Fate, in front of a despondent house in a mean street. "Good-night," said Hero; "and thank you for taking so much trouble. Please thank Miss Stuart again for me." Paul held out his hand; Hero touched it .with a vague misgiving. "Good-night," he answered; "I I couldn't help hearing that you are in some doubt as to the future. It is a brutal world for women I wish I could offer to help you. But you are proud, and we are strangers. Yet I, too, am anxious for you you were not made to buffet with the u6 A SON OF AUSTERITY laws of supply and demand. I could wish you a very sheltered and gracious life. Forgive me for saying so much. Good-bye." He watched till the door closed behind her. Some moments after he was still standing, lost in thought. CHAPTER X A MONOLOGUE AND SOME IMPERTINENCES IT would have been well for Paul Gotch if at this juncture he could have taken counsel of a woman. Instead, he communed with his own heart and with the night. Over the trim thresh- old of Self, Love sprang, and fled, carrying its rosy torch, from cavernous strait to strait of per- sonality. And to that gay beacon there trooped a m$le of quintessential imaginations fear, jeal- ousy, solicitude, conjecture, hope deferred, ardor spurring prudence, homage leading passion blind- fold ; all the misty faction of Romance grew lam- bent and flashed and flickered down the corridors of thought. The man's soul tracked them in a blinking ecstasy. The morning dawned a regal June day a First Day. A dozen bells wagged their iron tongues remotely a ripple of ordered notes be- tween from the north-west, where a square Nor- man tower housed an ancient peal. The city slumbered in the sun; its indifference fretted Paul's exaltation. He donned a rumpled cos- 117 ii8 'A SON OF AUSTERITY tume, consecrated to indolence, and walked out into the clayfield. A puny butterfly one of the common greenish- white variety was drifting hither and thither over a ragged oasis of turf. He pondered its erratic flight. "As a caterpillar/' he said to it, "you crawled where you would, in reason, and doubtless your Lilliput wanderings met provender enough. Your wings were a Greek gift; they have made you the sport of every zephyr that lacks a toy. And I who moralize over you am busy unpacking my pinions to wrestle with forces no less mighty. My chrysalis has burst, too, little butterfly; I am in love. My independence, like yours, is escheat to Nature; I am no longer a philosophic integer, I am a discontented decimal. What a rout of maimed comparisons! Adieu, little butterfly, a sunny third act to your trivial drama and a quick curtain." A second white flake danced up, and the two morsels of existence fluttered about one another. "Good God!" said Paul, with a sudden fero- cious humor, "may it not be that atomy number one is vowing eternal loyalty to atomy number two, and atomy number two is credulous! Truly Pythagoras had more respect for the spirit- ual than to surrender nine-tenths of life to the automatic. Reincarnations of Romeo and Juliet, immutable heirs of mutability, count me with Pythagoras, and wanton unchallenged by a brag- A MONOLOGUE 119 gart materialism. Are not the heavens propi- tious, is not the air calm? he loves you, testy demoiselle, and Time is very short. Coquette, coquette! you are no less marvelous than the gray matter of Plato's brain, your death no less profound a tragedy than the passing of Socrates." He strolled back to the cottage and lunched with his mother. As soon as the meal was over he dressed carefully and made ready to go out. "Are you going across to Mr. Stuart's?" asked Mrs. Gotch, a trifle of envy pointing the interro- gation. Paul laughed. "Not this journey," he replied ; "I propose call- ing on a new acquaintance I don't know if I shall be away long or not." Mrs. Gotch took to the lounge and a book. Paul set off alertly; his destination was no other than the house to which he had, on the previous day, escorted Hero Latimer. When, however, he had turned into the sordid street grubbily decorous in its Sunday calm his limbs were trembling and his mouth parched. A child ran to his knock ; he asked with dry lips for "Miss Latimer," and his pulses halted. "I'll tell her," said the mite, affably; the call- er's heart beat again. He stepped into a tawdry parlor, smelling of furniture polish and hereditary chattels. There were indistinct framed photographs and colored "enlargements" by way of wall decorations, a 120 A SOX OF AUSTERITY tinsel cascade bid the grate; on the mantel, glass shades protected unnatural waxen stacks of fruit and flowers. Paul's spirits steadied themselves to resist the doleful influences of the place. A footfall sounded on the creaking kitchen stair, and Hero entered, astonished to see him. Paul noticed that she wore a black silk blouse and a skirt of an odd, girlish type ; they lent her a youthful, modern aspect in her ampler mourn- ing garments she had showed singularly classic and mature. "You will be surprised at this visit," he began confusedly. "Y-yes," admitted Hero; he imagined a rebuke in her tone. "I I could not help coming," pursued Paul ; "I have been thinking about you all last night and this morning." He paused, but was given no assistance. "You seemed so unhappy," he murmured, "it is not right that you should be at the mercy of un- reasonable employers or of unsuitable friends." Hero projected a repulse. "I need have no friends that I don't choose/* she said. Yet her face softened after the com- pleted speech it had proved more discourteous in the implication than she had foreseen. "Unfortunately, accident makes them for us," dissented Paul ; "it is very natural that the social- ly-handicapped who have been generously en- dowed with personal qualities should prefer asso- A MONOLOGUE 121 ciation with those beneath them in character and ability to a temporarily more exacting intercourse with their equals. Progressive deterioration is inevitable under such conditions. 'Let noble minds keep ever with their like/ said Shake- speare's much-misunderstood Polonius." He checked himself the retort had become a solilo- quy. "It was nice of you to come," said Hero, po- litely, "but I am afraid I must get back to my work you see, I have to make myself useful." Paul wrinkled his brow. "At least," he pleaded, "let me say why I have thus intruded upon you." He got a chair for her; she accepted it with reluctance, twirling a slender ornament on her finger he stooped and looked at the trifle daringly. "You wear a ring," he said, and breathed hard; "Miss Latimer, forgive my asking a question which means to me more than I can say. Is that ring a pledge of affection?" Hero chafed visibly. "Oh, I have no right to put such a question," he cried ; "I am unbearably impertinent ; but you will tell me, Miss Latimer. If if that jewel was given you by a friend who may some day be more than a friend, I will ask your pardon and go away, and you shall never see me again. My misery and my madness will be nothing to you." Hero stared at him with wide, unbelieving eyes a spasm of alarm shook their clear gaze. 122 A SON OF AUSTERITY "I am in earnest," said Paul Gotch, quivering- ly, "absurd as I may appear to you, I am in such earnest as it is given to few men to be. If I inquired flippantly or without respect, you would have a right to refuse me an answer or to evade the question with an easy lie. But you dare not do that you have other defenses against my pre- sumption if you should need them. There are some natures that may speak each to each as readily out of mystery as out of familiarity; we are what would be called strangers, but I know more of your soul than another would know if he had spent a lifetime with you. It is because I have seen into you and know you, that you will tell me who gave you that ring." The girl was mastered by the vibrating sen- tences, and touched to an infinitesimal degree by the spasmodic feeling that distorted the speak- er's face. She tried to smile, but wept instead. "It was my mother's," she sobbed. Paul's dynamic intensity passed from him into space he fell on one knee beside her. "Cruel! cruel that I was!" he ejaculated, with an extravagant joy; "forgive me, I I was reck- less, foolish the poor little pearls ! I should have known." The storm of tears had left Hero's cheeks drip- ping as a poplar drips in an April shower. She sought for her handkerchief, found none, and blushed. Paul drew from his breast-pocket an immaculate square still neatly folded as he had A MONOLOGUE 123 picked it tip shook it out with amazing self- possession and put it into her fingers. Hero regarded him with an indignation which verged on the farcical, but at this point the tears overflowed again. In her embarrassment she used the handkerchief. Paul availed himself of the fact to proceed. "I gathered yesterday that you are mother- less," he said, "and probably also fatherless. You are now about to seek for fresh employment in your occupation, and, unstimulated by your moth- er's companionship, to mingle with your intellect- ual inferiors and to subside insensibly into a tol- eration of their incapacity and of your own iner- tia. The crisis is, you will admit, a momentous one, and that alone can excuse my uninvited presence here, to say nothing of the proposition I am about to make." Hero was listening, behind the pocket-hand- kerchief. "I am a man of four-and-twenty," continued Paul, "with a fair income and an even temper. These are the sole practical inducements that I can urge on behalf of my request. A single un- practical appeal I can add to them the old and hackneyed one, I I love you." Hero Latimer shrank to the limits of her seat, dropping the handkerchief precipitately. Paul trembled. "I have been a quiet, studious sort of person all my life," he said, pleadingly; "women have 124 A SON OF AUSTERITY been to me merely the subjects of an occasional trite cynicism, a spurious omniscience. My father, as I told you, deserted my mother before I was born; my early years accustomed me to dispense with all emotional or material superflu- ities. A week or two ago our prodigal came back he had heard of me and was drawn towards me I sent him away, doing my mother the only justice I could. He died by accident, trying to see me privately. That opened my heart; I was restless, eager, seeking I knew not what. In such a moment you passed tragic, black-robed, pitiful and my heart closed with your image in it. You passed again; my heart opened again your image faded, and my heart cried out for you you yourself, who will not fade." "Indeed !" interpolated Hero, stemming the tide of fantasy. The dark eyes read her mind; they dilaced, shining with an unearthly dread. "Not that," begged the man at her feet, cower- ing as from a blow, "not that !" A little time only a little time before you say it ! If you were near a drowning man and he called to you for help, you might not be able to give it to him, but you would not put out your soft white palm to push him down down under the black water. If you were the captain of a firing-party and a poor devil of a spy asked you for a moment a moment to breathe his sweetheart's name and think of all that should have been you might A MONOLOGUE 125 cry, 'Ready, present!' you dare not finish it you dare not ! Have some mercy ; do not answer lightly. I have had such thoughts thoughts of Eden and romance : I knew why God made man, I forgave Him death." He dragged himself up, panting. "I beg your pardon," he stammered; "I think I lost myself just then." His forehead was wet, and his breast heaving. Hero studied him, fascinated, overawed, yet, as he had said, cold. "Of course you are right," he gasped ; "it was a mad scheme, but I meant well. I want you to believe that." "Oh, I do! I do!" cried Hero, melting; "I am so sorry, but really, I have only met you twice before." * A strident query interrupted her, penetrating from below. "Hero Latimer!" demanded a voice an omi- nous, insolent voice ; "are you ever going to finish these dishes, I'd like to know ?" Hero's face darkened; the eclipse repeated itself on Paul's countenance. A sense of desola- tion bowed the figure in the silk blouse. "Now go," she besought, "or I shall get into trouble, and I can't afford to quarrel with them just now. They are not bad people, truly, they helped my mother." "May I not see you again?" said Paul, misera- bly. 126 A SON OF AUSTERITY "Yes, yes," consented Hero; "only do go now." Paul snatched at the permission, and went; on the step he caught a reluctant hand, and kissed it burningly. The latch snapped a disdainful, metallic click and Hero hurried down-stairs. Once again Paul lingered nor was lie the first to pluck a chilly comfort from the neighborhood of an inhospitable threshold. While he brooded, pacing a short beat, over the equivocal interview which had so abruptly terminated, a door banged and some one ran out into the silent thorough- fare. The fugitive's skirts brushed against him they were Hero's. "Mr. Gotch!" she said. "I was going in a moment" mumbled Paul. Hero looked at him closely. "Why why were you waiting about?" she insisted. Paul could find no response less jejune than his posi- tion, and that was pregnant with the ridiculous. "Listen," added Hero Latimer, hysterically; "you spoke the truth. Such people aren't fit to live with. She struck me, and and called me hideous names. I don't love you, but if you wish you can take me away. I don't know where I was going when I came out to do something silly, I suppose." Paul answered soothingly, collectedly. "You shall never regret your confidence in me," he said ; "if you can trust yourself to go back for your hat, I will take you at once to see my mother." A MONOLOGUE 127 Hero went slowly up the few steps and knocked. A response was not forthcoming, she waited hopelessly; angered and ashamed, she returned to Paul. "It's no good," she said vehe- mently; "I'm locked out." "Then," decided her new guardian, "we wilt find a hansom." And in such strange fashion did Paul Gotch bring home his betrothed. CHAPTER XI AN IX EFFECTIVE DEMURRER PAUL GOTCH was striding over the clayfields towards the white cottage, humming the bluff chorus of the "Yeoman's Wedding." The morning air fanned him exhilaratingly, the ruf- fling tarns of black water lent it a sharp, enig- matic flavor. He ascended the rubble walk, gained the lobby and hung up his hat. "Margaret," he called towards the back of the house; "will you ask my mother if she can see me?" "Yes, sir," said Margaret, coming into the passage ; "she is in the parlor, sir, with the young lady." Margaret spoke with wan deliberation ; a sharp- toothed devil was gnawing at her pleasurable re- gard of him. Paul went into his own room, opened the win- dows, and chirruped to the canary. Selina Gotch came behind him ; he turned and kissed her boy- ishly. "How is the little woman?" he asked. "Having her breakfast," answered Mrs. Gotch, with prosaic accuracy. 128 AN INEFFECTIVE DEMURRER 129 "I I couldn't bring myself to face Stuart's smile," said her son; "so I just ran clown to the North Western ; it was easier. Besides, I wanted to go to the bank this morning/' He took out his pocket-book and extracted a packet of notes. "Should I give her these myself?" he inquired, with some disquietude, "or tell her you will see to everything of that sort?" "She would probably like it better from you," was Mrs. Gotch's grave verdict. Selina was very quiet and studiously non-committal ; Paul felt it. "Mother," he said, putting a hand on each of her thin shoulders, "you are good to her for my sake, be good to her for her own." Selina Gotch's face did not alter its calm ex- pression. "She is a nice, lady-like girl," was her rejoinder ; "we shall get on very comfortably. It is you who are taking risks." "True, oh, queen," said Paul, gaily; "nothing venture, nothing win. Can I go to her now?" "I suppose so," replied his mother; "when do you want it to be?" "As soon as I can fix things up," said Paul ; "we shall run away for a few days, come back here and settle down." "Here!" repeated Selina Gotch; "is that wise?" "Of course," said Paul; "do you think I am going to leave you to your own devices? My dear soul, you would get the big blue hump." Mrs. Gotch's mouth worked. 130 A SON OF AUSTERITY "I don't want you to think of me," she urged. "Rubbish!" said Paul; "and now let me go to my pretty captive." He stepped across the passage and entered the other living-apartment. Hero sat over her meal, more incongruously youthful than ever in her loneliness. Her blue eyes were limpid with tears. "Good-morning," remarked her visitor; "may I interrupt?" "Please do," cried Hero; "I am glad you've come." "Not more glad," said Paul, ardently, "than I am to hear you say so." "Oh, I don't mean that," objected Miss Lati- mer; "I wanted to ask you if I couldn't go back again ; I don't think I want to be married." Paul was stunned. "Of of course," he whispered, hoarsely ; "you are free to do as you wish." "Oh," begged Hero ; "don't look like that, don't you make me hate myself." "I wouldn't have you unhappy for the world," said Paul, altering his demeanor, if anything, however, for the worse; "but you are quite sure that you desire to return to your your protect- ors?" "No, I'm not," flashed out Hero; "I'm not I'm too selfish and too comfortable ; I have had a nice breakfast, and I haven't had to get up and drag myself down to the shop; I shouldn't mind stopping in the least if if " AN INEFFECTIVE DEMURRER 131 "If it wasn't for me," concluded Paul, wrung into brutality. "Only for your own sake, though," supple- mented Hero, quickly; "I like to be with you, you are very kind and and interesting, but shouldn't make you happy, really I shouldn't, and it is wicked of me to think of staying." Paul came very close to her. "Hero," he said "I may call you Hero, may I not?" "Yes," permitted Hero, sadly. "If I have seemed to consider exclusively my own point of view in this matter," he pursued, with tremulous sincerity, "it has, I trust, been only so in appearance. I cling to my hold over your destiny because I believe that it is the best thing for you for your inmost being. Those ter- rible women who were with you at the funeral, you know what they are actually coarse, vulgar, rampant in emotion, foul-tongued in anger, fit mothers of the low-browed, unshaven, taciturn populace. Yet their daughters are at times what their grandmothers may have been noble, femi- nine, potential. They are hectored into a sullen conformity to their sphere. They marry boors boors of broad cloth and the ledger, boors of corduroy and the pick. What do they become? Envelopes of unlovely flesh, sealing in some mo- ribund cell a microscopic soul." Hero shivered with Captain Pistol's as- tounded hostess she might have retorted, "By my 132 A SON OF AUSTERITY troth, these are very bitter words." The glowing mystery of Paul's diction lent an adventitious hor- ror to the truth which she perceived dimly through its savage phrases. "Whatever were to happen as a result of our marriage,'' added Paul, "you shall blame me for. And I will comfort myself with this, that if my love can not beget love in you, at least it can fence your nobler qualities from the devastating feet of the mob. Even if you should grow to dislike me it will take a little time, and I shall enjoy a tran- sient happiness not that I will force myself upon you in any way ; you shall not be able to dis- cover the limits of my humility and my obedience. If your life is to be spoiled I had rather your path led to the cliff of tragedy than to the Slough of Despond. It shall lead to neither if I can help it ; yet which risk will you take, that of the catas- trophe or the quagmire ?" "Oh, if you will never, never blame me, what- ever happens," cried Hero, "I I think I will stop." Paul stooped, drew the hoop of pearls from the speaker's hand, and pushed it on to his little fin- ger. Then he took another ring from his pocket a ring contained in the conventional morocco case. It was set with small diamonds. Hero permitted him to slip it into the place of her mother's jewel. Her eyes shone the stones sparkled so translucently. "As long as I wear your ring," swore Paul, 'AN INEFFECTIVE DEMURRER 133 solemnly, "whether you wear one of mine or not, I will never judge you nor think ill of you." He touched her drooping brown head. "And now," he said, "I have these for you," and he laid the notes on the table ; "you will, of course, need a great many things. In a few days I shall have made all arrangements. Have you ever seen London ?" "Never," murmured Hero, a gleam of interest lighting up her expression. "Would you like to spend a few days there?" asked Paul. Hero gasped; she was vis^a-vis with the fu- ture. But the word London rang magically in her ears. "Must we go away?" she thought it consider- ate to ask London sounded synonymous with extravagance. "Not if you would rather stay," she was told. The alternative displeased her unpronounce- ably. "It will cost a good deal," she ventured, meaning the London journey. "Not it," said Paul ; "then we will go, provid- ing you do not change your mind. I will ask my friend Mr. Stuart, the vicar of St. Faith's, it was his daughter you met to marry us. Un- less you would like some other form of ceremony. I am traditionally a Nonconformist, but Stuart is such a congruous hierophant I beg your par- don, I meant he is in the picture where such things 134 A SON OF AUSTERITY are concerned. Or would you care for the reg- istry office?" Hero whispered that she had no preference. "Then Stuart it shall be," decided Paul ; "good- bye for the present, Hero, and remember, you may shun me if you choose, hate me if you must, but you need never fear me. You shall control me with one strand of a spider's thread." He departed without offering to salute her by any other form than that of speech, and Hero abandoned herself to tears. The thought of wed- lock served, however, to set her eddying mind on fripperies. She picked up the notes. Not that she was mercenary, but the feminine mind cere- brates peculiarly. There were five of the rustling sheets and they were for ten pounds each. Between her and a certain mean house in a dingy street a mile away a gulf had opened ; nor was there in the situation on her side any of those elements which bridge even such abysses. She sat down, not unhappy, and began to meditate, with indubitable consola- tion, the genesis of her trousseau. CHAPTER XII A BEJEUNER AND A DEPARTURE "TOMMIE," said Elsie Stuart to the silver- belled Angora, "I am very happy this morning. Wake up, you sleepy, smiling thing, and listen." With which admonition she shook the fluffy creature till it whimpered for mercy, whereat its mistress gathered it into her arms, infant-fashion, and hugged it maternally, rocking the while. "Why am I so happy?" she continued, answer- ing an entirely imaginary question; "because oh, because there are some delicious, delicious flowers from my fairy prince, and because Hero is going to be married to Mr. Gotch. So I shall have two of the nicest friends to go and see when Justine and Dearie are dull, and when I am all by myself you don't count, dear, you know I can dream about somebody who isn't a friend, but a wonderful, beautiful mystery." She slid the Angora into her lap, bent her head, and drew a long breath. A cluster of carnations nodding on her bosom yielded their rapturous perfume. The cat disentangled his lithe limbs, sat up, and proceeded, with one agile paw, to 135 136 A SON OF 'AUSTERITY smooth his furry countenance. Elsie diagnosed the quaint operation and laughed out suddenly. "Oh, you funny, Jntinan animal," she cried, and began to pet it. "Mr. Gotch, Miss Elsie," said one of the maids, showing that gentleman in. The blind girl rose and welcomed him, dropping Tommie to the floor. "Good-morning," she remarked ; "Dearie's not down yet. Isn't it impolite of him to ask you to breakfast and then to keep you waiting for it?" "I am early, I believe/' protested Paul; "as a matter of fact I have been up for hours. To be honest, I spent several of them watching a cer- tain little house on the clayfield ; otherwise I was mortally afraid it would catch fire, be whirled into space by a cyclone, or disappear by art magic." The other clapped her hands. "How lovely !" she said ; "come and tell me all about it." "There is no more to tell," the visitor assured her, sitting dow^n. "And you really are madly in love with her," propounded Elsie, standing in front of him. "Insanely," owned Paul. "It's very romantic," decided the blind girl; "I didn't think you had it in you you always seemed so so sniffy. But I like you for it, Mr. Gotch. Dearie says you are a drastic antidote to the conventional, which sounds as though it A DEJEUNER AND A DEPARTURE 137 was awfully wise, but I expect it isn't. Is Hero as happy as you are?" "I hope- so," was the reply. "I've asked her two or three times," confessed the candid psychologist, "but she didn't say much. She holds herself in a lot, doesn't she?" Paul sighed involuntarily; the suppressed re- gret of the vocal gesture warned Elsie's sensi- tive sympathies into good breeding. She took to a tangent. "Please catch Tommie for me," she requested. Paul set about capturing the reluctant creature, on the heel of which operation the vicar entered, drowsy but cheerful. The British breakfast fol- lowed him, Justine appeared, exquisitely dec- orous, and Paul was in the midst of his last bachelor meal. Patrick Stuart talked about the weather and the war, but under his handsome mustaches a humorous mouth was covertly rallying Paul. The day was gloriously bright, the ample win- dows were open, and the exhilaration of the sum- mer air ended by moving the party to a flow of slight jests and unreasoning laughter. The vicar pledged the young man's future in his tea-cup. "Here's to the Benedict that is to be," he said, with gentle mockery. "I see him now, no more the strenuous philosopher, the rigid censor of the times, but sleek, contented, epicurean : I see sweet reasonableness distilling from his ink-pot, con- 138 A SON OF AUSTERITY servatism budding in his brain; I see the Incor- ruptible reconciled." Paul had no wits to buckler his dignity, but his eyes threatened the tormentor. Elsie helped him out. "Dearie knows some of the biggest, ugliest words," she interposed, "that were ever invented. And nearly all of them have pretty little stings in their long, long tails. Don't mind him, Mr. Gotch, I believe you're too honest ever to get fat and stupid, which is what Dearie is trying to say without letting you be quite sure he means it." Her father was obviously disconcerted by this audacious flank attack. "Do you think," said Paul, charitably trans- posing the conversation into a different key, "that happiness is necessarily stunting to the finer qualities ? I have a theory that it develops them, as sunshine brings out blossom." "Some deserts enjoy perpetual sunshine," slipped in Patrick Stuart. The aptness of the retort staggered the initi- ator of the comparison thus extended. The vicar surveyed him pleasurably ; "I am always caution- ing you against the pit-falls of the comparative method," he added. "Grant me an armistice," besought Paul, "I am terribly obtuse this morning. If I had even a modicum of intelligence I should try to develop the thesis that great happiness is more stimulat- ing than nourishing. Properly handled, that ar- A D&E&NER AND A DEPARTURE 139 gument ought to knock the bottom out of your satire." "Great happiness, yes," allowed his opponent; "but the soul of marriage is mediocrity. It is a huge emotional average-adjuster." "To those who possess the capacity for acute happiness," objected Paul, rousing himself, "an average portion is an ultimate tragedy. And as you evidently see in tragedy the ideal mental stimulus, that ought to satisfy you. But tragedy does certainly not conduce to the laying on of fat." "At your old trick again," said Patrick Stu- art, reprovingly "tossing with a double-headed shilling. Either way I lose." "The dishonest coin," Paul told him, "was as dishonestly obtained : I picked your pocket of it." The verbal fusillade had stirred the blood of both, and Justine's urn was emptied amid a lively continuation of the debate. Breakfast over, Paul fretted aimlessly in the library, while the vicar wrote sundry letters and interviewed a curate. The impatient bridegroom sat down with a book at the edge of the curious oratory that sprang from a truncated corner of the apartment. It held a modest altar, a Bible, a hassock and a crucifix. There were faintly-tinted panel win- dows leaden trellis and diamond panes on each side; the sunshine pierced them dustily. Paul looked at the slender, carven figure dang- ling shrunkenly from the ebony cross in that grim 140 A SON OF AUSTERITY death-throe, whose stiff familiarity has so long since blunted its appeal. In his nervous state it smote him newly. The Bible beneath it was gilt- edged and luxurious, boasting an embroidered marker. The vicar and the curate were chattering, with curt mutual comprehension, of various sick and needy in their cure of souls. Two kindly Chris- tian gentlemen, the bland superficiality of their religious thought ceased to offend the critical on- looker ; the oratory and its contents seemed justi- fied by their philanthropy. The old and peaceful atmosphere of the Church, the Church pastoral, the Church consoling, the Church soporific, drew about him. Was he not himself a witness to its omnipresence? had he not chosen it to register his alliance with the woman he loved, to lend that dubitable union a dignified formality in the sight of the world ? Abruptly he noticed that one of the French win- dows on the same side as the oratory stood ajar. Behind it was the poplar plantation, swaying in the doubtful breeze; beyond and above these plumy saplings rose the vast arch of the Other- where, infinitely blue. And in it hung the pallid cobweb of a daylight moon, suggesting, with an edge of serrated shadow, the dread realities of the material universe. He knew something of astronomy; that terrific desolation, so extrava- gant, yet so concrete, struck him cold. He got A D&E&NER AND A DEPARTURE 141 up and walked through the open window into the green enclosure of St. Faith's. From the low boundary-wall at its southern side he could see along the narrow cinder-path that ran eastward to the cottage in the brick- field. A wisp of filmy smoke was lingering about its chimney-stack. There also breakfast had by now been cooked and eaten; soon Hero would come to him down that same prosaic ave- nue, "as a bride adorned for her husband." He laughed aloud awkwardly, then blushed to hear his voice in that revealing sound. Hero had indeed breakfasted, and, dressed in her wedding-garments, sat waiting for Mrs. Gotch. She wore a gray frock with white rib- bons and a big and feathered hat of the first-named hue. Her gloves were just being coaxed into their place. The last button fastened, she folded her hands in her lap and abandoned herself to re- flection. As the thoughts gathered and grew the moisture gathered and grew in Hero's eyes. Presently the tears were running in good earnest. Selina Gotch came down-stairs to find her pros- pective daughter-in-law sobbing pathetically. At the sight Selina's practicality rose in arms. "My dear Hero," she said, with incisive point, "if you are going to be made miserable by this marriage it shall not take place. I have all along tried to remember that it was not my business, but Paul knows exactly what I think of it." 142 A SON OF AUSTERITY The fountain of Hero's grief dried up. She put her damp little handkerchief in her pocket. "I am quite sensible now," she returned, sim- ply, and ignoring Mrs. Gotch's proposition; "I fancy it was with feeling all alone in the world, just for a moment. If you don't mind, please, I'll run and sponge my face." Selina Gotch signified her approval of this course, and herself took a seat in her son's chair beside the round oak table. A thick manuscript lay in front of her, divided at a particular page by an inserted penstalk. Instinctively she picked up the latter and went on with the familiar task of touching the rough masculine scrawl into legi- bility. Unexpectedly she relinquished it and be- gan to don her neat brown gloves; she had con- sidered, distastefully, that Hero might also usurp this one of her functions. The younger woman returned almost jocund; her pride had been whipping her ingenuousness ; her cheeks were flushed, her bearing defiant. "I am ready now," she volunteered, and the two left the cottage, threaded the walk between the daisy-beds, and gained the cinder-path. Mrs. Gotch advanced with a vigorous and elastic step; despite her years, "her eye was not dimmed nor her natural force abated." Her dour virility contrasted strangely w r ith the tender youth of the drooping girl beside her. Selina Gotch was power in demonstration, her companion, power concealed. One was gray with the gray A DEJEUNER AND A DEPARTURE 143 of the sword-blade, the other ruddy with the faint rose of smothered embers. Yet, blown into life, the embers might have conquered the steel. Paul saw the oddly-sorted pair as they pro- gressed towards him. Upon that path he had followed his father's coffin his father, whose cynical lips had prophesied to his wife the in- justices of her son's inevitable amour. It seemed only yesterday, and here she came the One Wo- man mastered by a will his mother had resisted, enforced by a love his mother's devotion had not skilled to win, came to put her hand in his, to plight him her innocent troth, to crown the cup of life with the champagne of self-fulfillment. He marched into the vicarage and summoned Patrick Stuart. "If I am to meet my bride at the altar, most amiable hierophant," he told the vicar, "you will have to hurry, for they are coming up the cinder- path, and my mother, I will be bound, is quite ignorant of the ecclesiastical proprieties." Patrick Stuart laughed good-temperedly and took him across to the vestry. Matins was just over; the officiating curate met them on his way out. The vicar asked him to have the south transept entrance opened and the west door closed for half an hour. As a rule, St. Faith's stood un- closed during the day, year in, year out. "Got any one to give the bride away?" de- manded Patrick Stuart, practically. "Good heavens, no !" said Paul. 144 A SON OF 'AUSTERITY "Better requisition Manners, then," advised the vicar; "he'll do it more artistically than the verger." The neglectful bridegroom ran after the gaunt young Oxford graduate. That genial person re- turned with him, and the three proceeded into the nave. Elsie was already there, so was her guardian Justine, the latter according to her wont, reservedly amused. Airs. Gotch and Hero had that moment reached the incense-laden interior of the church. Seeing them the vicar went to his place, Paul strode to the chancel steps, Mrs. Gotch beat a retreat to a convenient pew, and Hero was left alone. On the instant her nerves grew tense, her pulses drummed in her ears, her limbs turned to lead. In all the world there seemed but one thing the figure of Paul Gotch. With difficulty she moved towards it; Patrick Stuart had re- course to his book, and the marriage of Hero Lat- imer began. Paul's gaze devoured her expression; it told him little, yet that little stabbed him to the quick. There came again into the face of Hero Latimer that look of blind endurance which had possessed it when first he saw her. Again the tremulous carmine fluttered under the delicate skin, again the young breast rose and fell in those short, pite- ous sighs, the more piteous for being, as they are, inaudible. He felt as one may feel who holds a small wild bird in his hand and wonders if its A DEJEUNER AND A DEPARTURE 145 tiny heart will burst beneath the hammer-stroke-. thumping in his palm. Vet every word of the musical sentences read by Patrick Stuart sounded distinctly in his ears. A thousand high emotions took shape and beauty in his swift brain as it spun them about an image of the sweet, sad womanli- ness before him. He felt no shame that he had so bound her to him, only a fierce daring and con- fidence in his power to mold the future into a justification of what he was doing. As in a dream they went through the time- honored ritual, Paul with a sense of sardonic humor keen almost to bitterness lurking in a corner of his spirit. However, tactfully prompt- ed in due season by the vicar, he bent his proud head and knelt, half-ashamed, half-contemptuous, moved somewhat by imaginative sympathy. Hero, on her part, did not falter. She might have been a perfectly-tutored young aristocrat at a marriage of convenience. Paul admired her, secretly. The numb perceptions of both responded vaguely to the succeeding formalities the vicar's congratulations, Mrs. Gotch's kiss, Elsie's de- lighted interest, the signing of the register. Aft- erwards Paul knew that his mother's eyes had pitied and reproached him, that Patrick Stuart had sighed apprehensively, that Hero's cheek had been very, very cold. But at the moment his head swam : he was to himself, if not to outward appearance, an automaton. 146 A SON OF AUSTERITY When they drove away in the hired brougham neither spoke. Once their glances met; Hero's limpid, passive, enigmatic ; Paul's evasive, even sorrowful. He took her hand in his and held it. So they reached the station. CHAPTER XIII THE CONSENT OF THE CAPTIVE .ABOUT these two, so inexperienced, so diversely strenuous, London closed its great arms, and, like mirrors in a suddenly-peopled room, their souls thronged with contesting life, their own and yet not theirs. Metropolises are the ganglia upon the nerves of history ; the thrills of forgotten national emotions linger in them ; they are sympa- thetic one with another. All the capitals of the world are within arm's-length each of each, the provinces are hyperborean. In some respects this is disadvantageous ; it dis- torts the proportions of society and exaggerates the value of the arts. But it lends itself largely to the perception of types. Hero felt the latter fact, with a species of instant elation ; she was not to be classified and she knew it, hence the charm of classifying others; individuality is a notable relish. Types crowded here on every hand, victualed themselves in her sight, neighbored her at the play, passed her in the corridors of the huge ho- tel. A new passion, that of observation, sharp- H7 148 A SON OF AUSTERITY ened her interest in living. Every 'ocracy grew definite, their skyey sections ceased to overawe her ; she ended by contemning Bond Street. All this in a week ! Paul bridled himself vigilantly ; her wits peeped out of their seclusion as mice from their holes; sometimes he dared scarcely breathe lest he startle her into self-consciousness and suppression. His delight in her opening personality became acute. Slowly her renaissance ripened into speech ; cer- tain subtle chivalries drugging her fears, she for- got herself; London annihilated her habit of in- trospection she became communicative. Paul collected fragments of biography. Her mother had been possessed by a curious religious fervor. Churchwoman though she had been by birth and training, she had imbibed the extravagant doctrine of the Faith Healers ; some- what of Hero's habitual gravity was thus ac- counted for. But the excess of spirituality that had warped Frances Latimer's sanity had not controlled her daughter's intellect. "I used to wish sometimes," said Hero, som- berly, "that mother had never seen a church or a Bible. She was very, very kind, and happy, I suppose. But she forced herself to be certain about things no one can be certain of, and some- times when she realized that deep down in herself she wasn't certain, she got so miserable that I hated religion." "Things no one can be certain of!" The 149 calmly-uttered phrase startled Paul. Its modest yet uncompromising intelligence was doubtless characteristic, but it came oddly from the soft feminine lips. Reticent and uncultured as was his little consort, the glimpse of agnosticism served to show the philosophic bent of her facul- ties. Not that there was anything austere in her out- look upon the teeming humanities of the modern Babylon into which she had been tossed. Such trifles as set her aglow with humorous sympathy ! a screeching newsboy with a wild mispronunci- ation, an unctiously attentive waiter, a caricature combination of hat-brim and monocle, a confiden- tial bus-driver, the size of a constable's inhibitory palm at a crowded crossing comedy set her quivering in an instant. Her appreciation of the "lions" was erratic. Ecclesiastical architecture left her cold, the Law Courts fascinated and Westminster disappointed her; her conception of Parliament had been me- diseval, the real thing proved dingy. A glimpse of the Terrace interested her, however ; she won- dered what the waitresses thought of the M.P.'s. The City terrified her yet not unpleasantly, as It seemed. From the top of a 'bus she studied the countenances of the thronging money-makers. "How awful it would be to work for these men!" she whispered; "they have cruel faces." 150 A SON OF AUSTERITY Paul murmured that happily she was not likely to have to. Hero looked at him suddenly. "If it wasn't for that," she told him, "I shouldn't dare to feel how cruel they are." Something in the confession warmed her hus- band's heart. One day they went to Kew, found their w r ay into the sub-tropical palm-house, and climbed to the gallery that runs round the dome. The house was deserted, the gallery empty even of the child- ish explorers who form the bulk of its patrons. At an angle they paused, leaned upon the railing, and gazed at the luxuriant greenery. Beneath them was a huge tree-fern a vast and symmet- rical cup of overlapping fronds. "I came through here often," said Paul, "be- fore I discovered the existence of this gallery. Then for the first time I looked into the heart of that great fern you see below. I wonder if there is any way in which I could command as enlight- ening a view of yours." Hero shook her head it was a pretty head, shapely and fine, large, yet counterfeiting deli- cacy. "I am like a sick man by the pool of Bethesda," added her husband, fantastically; "waiting from day to day for the troubling of the waters. Your heart, Hero, is a placid lake ; it has depths, but it would not avail me to plumb them now it could only aggravate my disease. Will the hour ever come when its currents will set towards me, when THE CONSENT OF THE CAPTIVE 151 its waves will leap my way, when the winds that stir it will blow upon my fever, when I shall leap in and be healed?" Hero lifted her head and considered this rhap- sodic simile; her lips were scarlet and a little pouted, her regard gentle yet perplexed. "I ask myself sometimes," said Paul, "why Fate should have joined our lives in so ironical a knot why you should be so much to me, I so little to you." His wife drew a compassionate breath. "And yet," added the soliloquist, "as often as I ask myself the question, I am compelled to admit that I would not have had it differently. What- ever Destiny holds in store for you and me. Hero, I can not deny that my wooing has been sweet is sweet. Since I met you I have had a lingering pain at my heart which has become familiar, even pleasant. If I lost it though in the shock of some great happiness I think I should miss it." Hero's gloved fingers were plucking at a creeper that trailed against the railing. "I feel," continued Paul, "as if love recipro- cated were bound to prove mortal, and as if I, by being defeated, had escaped defeat. Why should one withhold any price which might eke love out to the end of this life, perhaps beyond ?" He also began to pluck at the creeper, speaking covertly to her. "I love you, Hero, and I shall love you always, whether you learn to love me or not. You may 152 A SON OF AUSTERITY not easily forgive me for urging you to decide between the precipice and the quagmire what if I have myself mistaken the roads! When we were married, my mother's eyes pitied us, and some women have the gift of prophecy. I have had horrible dreams, lately, Hero dreams about you . . . and . . . myself ; I have known those shadowy paths where the Future treads on one's heels, pursuing, pursuing, faster and faster, and one leaps into consciousness and the Present, with madness ebbing about one's heart." She glanced at him, herself vibrating with his bizarre emotion. His eyes were fixed on her. "You are the only Woman to me, Hero," he said; "a threadbare oath, but sometimes a true one. Think what the Only Flower would be, what the Only Meadow, what the Only Sea-shore, and realize what the Only Woman is to the eyes that have chosen her." Hero made a little moan pitiful, protesting. "Oh, I know! I know!" she cried. Then they were silent. Descending from the gallery they walked in the long vista of greensward which skirts the palm-houses. The goodly panorama was still foreign to the sight of these provincials from the austere North ; they felt as if they were manikins in a painting. Groups of domesticity were planted on the edge of copses; here and there a brace of lounging lovers. The rattle of the tea- drinkers came across from the pavilion; they THE CONSENT OP THE CAPTIVE 153 readied it and shared a pot at one of the small tables. Hero began to feed an itinerant peacock. The process attracted a tiny child, all lustron- yellow curls, starched laces, and pink sash. The mite came up and stood gravely, her small dimpled hands behind her back. Paul marveled at the ex- quisite fragility of the little creature, its rose-leaf complexion, stippled with brown, its velvet lashes, its demure, meditative mouth. His wife put out her hand and coaxed it to her. Together they supplied the ravenous fowl woman and child lost in their occupation. The dark head and the golden one were close together, both very pure, very delicate, poignantly appeal- ing. A lump rose in the man's throat. The next moment the bird had stalked on, the child had run back to its guardian, and Hero was brushing the crumbs from her gown. When they left the Gardens, evening and after- noon were, like Shakespeare's night and morning, at odds which was which. A line of brakes was drawn up in the roadway, clamorously soliciting custom. Paul Gotch picked out a couple of box- seats and helped Hero to one of them. Soon they were bowling eastward through the waning day. Paul wished the journey might last forever, so gallantly did the fresh team beat a flying tattoo upon the macadam, so cheerfully the four wheels rasped and swung. A soft shoulder rested against his, a vagrant curl slipped from its pins 154 A SON OF AUSTERITY to caress his cheek. He could watch at his leisure a proud little nose, and those pale drooping lids, whose expanse of veined white over the full pupils had made memorable his first glance at their owner. In Picadilly Circus they took a hansom to Fras- cati's. Hero looked at the swarming streets, the gathering lights, the scurrying night-cabs. Her breast heaved with a sudden excitement; there are moments when London intoxicates. Far off, through a tunnel of black darkness, she seemed to see a swift procession of pictures a mean street in a Liverpool suburb, a bare work-room in the shopping-quarter, a weary "improver" weep- ing for a spoiled length of tulle, a lonely grave in a desolate burying-ground. That was once her all. Now she was come indisputably into her kingdom ; she had a lover a passionate, worship- ing lover, held in bondage by the invisible cords of her womanhood, and hanging upon her lips for the very breath of life. He had made her ex- istence a thing eager, colorful, rapid, of endless potentiality. All this he had done, and had re- mained, to the point of desperation, humble. Nevertheless, she estimated him highly, not intent upon depreciating her own feminine prowess. She was a woman; she had become, as every woman may, a queen. Outside, London swirled by her radiant, wide-spreading, ecstatic she felt herself enthroned, the beggar-maid turned em- press. THE CONSENT OF THE CAPTIVE 155 They dined in a corner of the balcony, not too near the band. Hero enjoyed her meal. Pau! reminded her of the first one they had taken to- gether and of the difficult conversation that had preceded it. "I am afraid you didn't approve of me a bit," he said. Hero blushed. "I was very hungry," she re- marked, apologetically; "I am always cross when I am hungry. Was I awfully impertinent ?" "You were not impertinent at all," her husband protested; "the impertinence was mine. I read your thoughts; the crime and the punishment were one. There is a cruel little story about a Runic ring that gave its possessor the power of seeing thoughts as thin flames about people's heads, and of reading in that manner what was going on in their brains. The ring had a motto a hideous, truthful motto this was it: 'An open door, an open heart, a naked sword.' ' His wife crimsoned. "I am sure if you could read my thoughts," she told him, "you wouldn't find anything half so terrible." "How unlucky I am," said Paul; "I didn't mean that at all, though it did seem rather like it, I own. I know you could think nothing even of me that was not kindness itself; and that is much more than I have any right to ask." "Why. do you always end with that sort of re- mark?" she inquired. 156 'A SON OF AUSTERITY "I don't understand," said her husband; "what sort?" "Those that always sound as though you were making believe to be very humble," Hero told him daringly; "you're not really humble, are you?" The black eyes flashed. "Not in the least," he replied; "I should have known better than to act in your presence. I beg your pardon; you shall no longer be offended with mock virtues. Perhaps you would prefer savage ones." "They might become you better," said Hero, jumping blindly at the significance of his repartee ; then shrank back, appalled by her own audacity. Paul surveyed her with such utter astonishment that she burst out laughing. It was the only time that Paul had heard that sound from those sober lips. Smiles had hovered round them, mockery and contempt had thinned and distorted them, but hitherto laughter had not broken forth. The silver chime, a crisp, staccato phrase of merriment, lured him into speech. "I would crawl ten miles on my hands and knees to hear you laugh like that again," he said, extravagantly. The idea set Hero off once more. "I don't think you would look very dignified," she answered, regaining her gravity; "and it would hurt you horribly before you got through with it." THE CONSENT OF THE CAPTIVE 157 Paul knitted his brows at her. "I begin to suspect," he vouchsafed, "that I have been shockingly blind ; I hardly seem to rec- ognize you in your present mood." His wife's mouth twitched. "You have been very serious," she admitted; "if only you knew what a relief it is to have had a good laugh." Paul contemplated the glowing face, so mis- chievously arch. "How pretty you are !" he said, leaning across the table. Hero attacked her portion of the dish before them a mysterious pudding with a name all n's and ^'s. Yet her blue eyes were very bright. "Do you know," he observed, "I could go on forever telling you how much I love you." "I I didn't interrupt," said Hero, and laughed again at her husband's astonishment. CHAPTER XIV A QUESTION OF THE ABSOLUTE THE long train jarred its way into the terminus and halted after the habit of trains, sickeningly. Mrs. Gotch had come to meet it : she sought for her son among the instantaneous crowd. Find- ing him, her eyes made a keen inquisition upon his face, harvesting surprise; it was unaffectedly gay. Hero's was hardly less bright, dulled a trifle, maybe, by fatigue, otherwise her transfor- mation was complete. She had on a smart black costume that had not been in her trousseau when she went away; a fashionable toque lent a note of accentuation to her head and shoulders. Her hair was done unusually; Selina Gotch recog- nized the latest mode. The slender figure was carried with a new ease and independence; at a blow Hero had cut her provincialism adrift. Mrs. Gotch suspected her for it. Paul caught his mother's eyes and smiled, so ardently happy that she perforce smiled also, re- joicing in his happiness. The women kissed; their better selves throbbed momentarily at the 158 A QUESTION OF THE ABSOLUTE 1 59 contact. The man chartered a four-wheeler and gave orders about the luggage. They alighted at the rough wooden gate by St. Faith's and went to the white cottage on foot. Paul walked spring- ily on the familiar path and looked out fond 1 ;,' over the uneven landscape. "Our ancestral halls are not impressive, are they?" he remarked to his mother; "but our cubic allowance of air is a thing to thank God for." "I'm afraid Hero will find it very unpleasant on rainy days," said Mrs. Gotch the elder. "I don't mind that so much," confessed Hero, with a recrudescence of honesty in the tag of the sentence; "but there are so few people about. The crowds in London were lovely, such queer people, I could have watched them for weeks. If I had to be very miserable I think I should like it to be in London. I am sure I should feel too insignificant to take my troubles very seriously. If I got anything on my conscience here it would grow and grow and grow till I should want to jump into one of those muddy pools." "I know what you mean," returned her hus- band; "in London there is no room for one to cast one's private shadow, here it stretches for yards, huge and terrifying, staining one's past or blackening one's future. Egoism is largely an affair of environment ; solitude may swell it to a disease, as in melancholia." In an upper room of the cottage Hero spread 160 A SON OF AUSTERITY out sundry of her London purchases, yearning for feminine sympathy. Mrs. Gotch accorded it, whimsically but sincerely. Hero scented disap- proval of certain merely pretty things. They had procured for her, however, a little gold watch, to which she took no such exception. "Paul bought so much for me that I insisted he should get something very beautiful for you," said Hero, unconsciously. The next moment she was blushing red-hot from crow r n to tiptoe there had been a cruel stab for maternal pride in the suggestion of Paul's negligence and her interven- tion. But she had sense enough to leave the slip alone ; balm, though never so subtly administered, could only gall such a wound. "Now I will go and draw the tea," said Mrs. Gotch, after due recognition of the gift; "every- thing else is ready," and she departed. Hero, left alone, looked out of the window and pondered the harsh browns and greens of the prospect. The pug-mill was thudding monot- onously; the sunshine danced on the windy sur- faces of the mimic meres ; some juvenile anglers, tattered and barefoot, were bobbing for "jack- sharp" in the dusky water. "If I don't have the dismals before I'm much older," reflected the spectator, candidly, "my name is not Hero Latimer." Again the swift corporeal blush overspread her ; she recollected that her name was indeed not that which she had just uttered. She was a mar- A QUESTION OF THE ABSOLUTE 161: ried woman, plighted and espoused, and her name was Hero Gotch. She said it to herself, not greatly liking its triplet of syllables. Then, with a philosophic grimace, more humorous than ill- tempered, she descended to the high tea, of which she had caught a glimpse in the small parlor. That apartment proving empty, she went into Paul's work-room. Her husband \vas reading O letters, and spoke to her casually of their contents. He would have liked her to presume upon scan- ning them, but she was not sufficiently coquettish. Instead, she considered his library, pleased to find herself mistress of so much print. Paul came and put an arm about her. "My mind misgives me that you may be lonely here," he said ; "if so, let me know before you get too depressed and I will invent diversions. I warn you because I have a bad habit of getting absorbed; it may not hold where you are con- cerned you are very dear to me, sweetheart but it is as well to be on the safe side. I have never been married before, and they say man and wife soon bore one another. What sort of books do you like? Here are novels, a small selection; these are travels, these historical and political, these biographies, letters, and memoirs the flesh and blood that the historian pickles. London in- terests you: that rack is stored with London ghosts, scandalous folk, many of them, but im- mortal for all that, and most with a red scar or 1 62 A SOX OF AUSTERITY two over the left breast, where Dan Cupid's arrow went in." He showed her a corner where was a low rocking-chair, a big screen drawn about it, and a table with a shaded lamp. "Your shrine," he said ; "you admitted that you liked a rocking-chair, so I had one sent up. The corner would be draughty without the screen. And here is a hassock for your feet a hassock is to a rocking-chair what mustard is to beef. Fin- ally, oh goddess ! be propitious to thy worshiper and honor thy shrine not seldom." "You are very good to me," murmured Hero. "A selfish goodness," returned Paul; "you have rounded my life into completeness. If I knew a language that only you and I could read, I would write up over your shrine in golden letters a wonderful proverb that certain wiseacres threw out of the Scriptures, 'A friend and companion never meet amiss, but above both is a wife with her husband.' ' He drew her to him and kissed her quiveringly. Mrs. Gotch was summoning them from the next room. Later in the day the vicar called, bringing Elsie, "You are complimented, Hero," said Paul "this is Stuart's first visit to these rural haunts my fascinations never lured him hither." Patrick Stuart was shaking hands with the person addressed; a glance at the faces of both had brought a pleased, if quizzical, light into his own. "Take Dearie away, Mr. Gotch, and let me have a share of Hero," instructed the blind girl ; "make him understand how your machine eats clay and spits out bricks." Paul bore off his indolent guest, bribing him with the suggestion of a cigar. Elsie launched into intimacy. "Now, darling," she cried, "tell me, are you very, very happy?" "Very," said Hero, putting her guest into a seat; "London is a perfect miracle." "London be bothered," said Elsie; "do you like being married?" Mrs. Gotch the younger colored. "It is nice to be free," she owned, "and to go about and to have some one who is very, very fond of you." "And whom you are very, very fond of?" de- manded the persistent psychologist. "Of course," said Hero. "Humph," retorted Elsie; "is he a wonderful, beautiful mystery to you?" Hero hesitated about the penultimate adjective, inclined to agreement upon the noun, but in the end demurred. "I don't think he's a mystery," she decided; "he is gentle and thoughtful and and interest- ing and unexpected, and so fond of me he quite frightens me sometimes. But I believe I know just how he works." "And you don't feel as if you wanted to cry out 1 64 A SON OF AUSTERITY for joy when you remember that he loves you better than anybody else in the world?" pursued Elsie, incredulously. "You don't feel when you think of him as if you hadn't eaten anything for years and some one had just said 'roast chicken' ? You don't feel when you are with him that you are dreaming the most delicious dream of your whole life, and that you are afraid of waking up and finding yourself alone?" "I believe not," yielded the witness. "What a pity !" said Elsie. "When you've got it like that, love's the most beautiful feeling you can have. But I don't suppose it's more to you than lots of other nice things that one doesn't rave about. Justine called you un coeur de glace, and she told me a story about a princess who lived at the North Pole, and had a heart of ice and a new husband every week. When she kissed them they all died, and she built up their bodies into a tower a thousand feet high, and stood on it every night when the moon came out, singing. And the wind carried her singing away, and new hus- bands came to her in shiploads ; but they all died, too. I made up some of the story myself," added Elsie, with an engaging frankness. Hero smiled; but the fantastic epilogue was not without its sting. She turned the talk into a less embarrassing channel. Meanwhile the vicar was felicitating Paul. The two men strolled up and down a flat bank of red clay and trampled loam, Patrick Stuart nurs- 'A QUESTION OF THE ABSOLUTE 165 ing his cigar with an appreciative angle of his sensitive mouth. "Your experiment appears to have been success- ful," he conceded, a propos of nothing; "young Mrs. Gotch seems quite reconciled to your uncere- monious incursion into her life." "I trust so," answered Paul. "Are you satisfied yourself?" ventured the vicar, tantalizing his palate by withdrawing and returning the fragrant Muria. "If a man does not know the whole, how can he distinguish it from a part?" queried the other, mystically. "Meaning ?" suggested Patrick Stuart. "That a man can never be sure if he has called forth the absolute love of a woman," interpreted Paul; "or if what he enjoys be as Windermere to the Pacific." "Can not he?" commented the vicar, dryly. "He may suspect," allowed his prote'ge; "can he be sure ? temperaments vary." "Yet each has its own maximum of emotion what you have called its absolute love," rejoined Patrick Stuart; "so long as a man's absolute of emotion is not below that of his -his inamorata, he can estimate the degree of her love which he evokes by his own degree of contentment." "If the woman's absolute be lower than the man's?" queried Paul. The vicar "lipped" his cigar. "The dissatisfied heart is fickle," he said. 1 66 A SON OF AUSTERITY "Indeed," persisted his companion; "I thought it was the satisfied one." "A commonplace of cynicism," asserted the elder man. The most constant thing on earth is a dissatisfied heart that has hope; but if you are not contented with the absolute of any soul, you must seek a greater absolute in another." "There are at least three separate and distinct discrepancies in your completed argument," snapped Paul. "I know," rejoined the logician ; "in love con- tradiction is the essence of sound philosophy. How brazenly yellow those dandelions are! Don't you suppose Elsie will have finished petting your wife?" At the entrance to the small and daisied garden he threw away his cigar and studied Paul kindly. "Prosperity to your affaires de coeur, my son," he said; "Elsie is to me a memento that I was once, as you are, a yeasty compost of the cultured and the primeval. My life came out of the kneading-trough plain bread a trifle 'sad/ as housewives have it. Yours may prove cake, in which case, 'may good digestion wait on appe- tite.' If not, take, as I have done, to tobacco." He stepped within for Elsie, made his adieux, and went off fondling, with his mobile lips, a second cigar. The sunset was flooding the lucid sweep of the west ; Paul and Hero stood for a moment to look at it. A QUESTION OF THE ABSOLUTE 167 "You spoke the other day in London," he said, "of your mother and of her religious fears. Do you remember using the phrase things no one can be certain of?" "Yes," admitted his wife her tone had in it an echo of alarm. Paul motioned to the glowing arc of the hori- zon. "That thrills you?" he asked. Her face was answer enough. "Is it more beautiful or more sad?" pursued her husband. Hero plunged into herself. "More sad," she replied. "Why?" Paul drove her back upon rarely- used faculties. "I think," said his wife, nervously, "because it is so beautiful and lasts such a little while." "All sovereign beauty saddens," murmured Paul ; "either it passes from us or we from it. That sadness is the protest of man against the Finite. There are times when I think it proves him a child of Infinity, at others I feel with you that there are things no one can be certain of. Yet if there is to be, at long last, no answer to the imperious desires of the spirit, such as there are to those of the heart and the body, we need not regret having tried to believe it. We shall merely have been greater than the event. Phi- losophy itself anticipates the fact bv hypothesis 1 68 A SON OF AUSTERITY so science has been made possible. Have you no hypothesis of the Eternal ?" Hero cast down her eyes, abashed. There is a spiritual pudicity, as a physical. The tremor of the sunset answered the fluttering tints about her cheek and throat. "We can always do right," she responded, ob- liquely. "A man's or a woman's theory of God is their effective moral compass," insisted Paul ; "ethics vary with geography and the date." The shy thinker, driven to the wall, took refuge in analogy. "I suppose I'll have to grope my way," she said. The pathetic quip disarmed her husband; he stood thinking for a moment. The air was cool- ing fast ; the voices of the children on the patches of greensward eddied to his ears; the calm pes- simism of evening was invading the rugged out- look. "Theories apart," he confessed, suddenly, "that is what we are all doing steering by the stars, as it were. And who appoints us our stars? not ourselves. Love and Ambition, Philosophy and Religion, all have taken their tithe of wreck, all have brought storm-tossed souls into harbor. Not till the ocean of existence shall have been plumbed and charted will star or compass prove infallible.' A QUESTION OF THE ABSOLUTE 169 Mrs. Gotch was lighting the lamps ; Paul looked through a pane into his work-room. "See," he said, "your shrine gleams propi- tiously; that is my star to what end does it draw me on? Shall we go in, sweetheart?" CHAPTER XV PERCEPTION OF THE IRREVOCABLE THE little house on the brickfield was too mod- est and well-ordered to narcotize its women-folk with domesticity. Selina Gotch herself found time to read voraciously for preference a mod- ern type of fiction, massive, problematic, socially- resentful, often grimly humorous. Its iron emo- tions lent her a kind of countenance. A certain tact kept her from playing- goose- berry; she took her book into the parlor. Her teeth were sound and white; being fond of nuts, she munched them between whiles, like the sail- or's wife in Macbeth. She was an odd figure, with a blue and red Chinese bowl on her lap, full of whole and broken shells, a pair of crackers elbowing it, a heavy octavo lifted to her eyes ; at such moments, in a reluctant, passive way, she was glad of life. Occasionally she traveled afield to some suburb and cronied with odd folk over plenteous tea-tables. Amplitude in her had been frosted by adversity ; she had gnarled as a thorn- bush does in mountain winds ; she creaked sturd- ily against all external influences. Hero fath- 170 PERCEPTION OF THE IRREVOCABLE 171 omed her cheerfully, too comprehending to be critical. Hero herself was bourgeoning like a rose-bush in a moist April. She had discovered Dumas pere, not fils; Dumas and his brave mock France of the ancient regime. Through her illumined brain Gallic romance led its company of ardent puppets loyal, passionate, gallant, oblivious to the Decalogue, a swirl of rainbow butterflies about the fierce light of love. How could her woman's heart judge them? There was too much of hope and fear, of quick, short happiness with the pang of trepidation in it ; above all, too swift a retribution of maimed symmetry and singed wings. Plot and counter-plot flattered her woman's wit that probed them; the inbred qualities of her sex stirred maturely; the elated feminine mind cooed over the warm duplicity, the breathless good fortune, the velvet peccadil- loes of these sanguine men and women that ven- tured themselves so dauntlessly for one efflores- cent hour. At times she disentangled the Frenchman's history with the aid of more ponderous tomes; Paul smiled at her appreciatively, and added in- termittent synopses. The demure reader swept aside the fates of kingdoms to follow absorbing he's and she's down the dusty corridors of the past. Moved with the echoes of their murmur- ous courtship, she was unmindful of the recurrent stigma upon the white brows of the one, the ready 172 A SON OF AUSTERITY sword at the heel of the other. Were they not human had they not loved? She peeped at their happiness without a blush. Her husband took her often to the theater, thus unaw r ares he could pore upon her face; it grew so bright with sympathy, so glowingly alive to the imagined souls upon the stage. Other eyes rested upon her inquiringly, so magnetic was that pulsating sympathy. Paul could offer her few friends, his circle being masculine and of the smallest; the theater provided opportunities for that dress parade which is disdained by no woman. With her return from London Hero had re-assumed her mourning, but black can be made distinguee; he looked for the time when she could adopt gayer attire. Young women are like chil- dren they ail without their share of joyousness, even in fabrics. Unexpressed as it was, each tacitly recognized Selina Gotch's disapproval, both of the extent of Hero's wardrobe and the visits to the play. Paul's resources, however, swelled to meet both. The foresight of the hard old man who had leased the once unprofitable clayfield was being vindicated by the march of the suburbs; the lack of freight on the Gotch bricks brought an increasing prosperity to the white cottage. The matrimonial spur waged war with the indo- lence of the man of letters ; Paul made new alli- ances, found himself working different and more remunerative veins of literary ore. His days PERCEPTION OF THE IRREVOCABLE 173 filled, even inconveniently; his stimulus was the sight of that screened corner which he had christ- ened Hero's shrine. So the weeks flew. Paul, tied increasingly to the round-oak table, saw, nevertheless, that Hero took a sufficiency of exercise. At first she beat up quondam girlish acquaintances, but something had come between ; she sunned herself in their bewilderment for a while, then, fretted by their childish outlook, let them slip from her. She was all the more lonely. Yet the instinct of observation that had sprung to life in the London streets saved her from bore- dom; she walked enjoyably, drank tea, when she grew tired, in convenient cafes, and studied the local public as she had studied the metropolitan. She had an excellent memory for faces, and an eye to read them ; she marked a dozen amourettes and watched their progress gravely. Her taci- turnity increased ; it was an effort to speak to her husband of what she had done and seen upon these frequent constitutionals. Sometimes she would describe vivaciously for a few moments, and then, startled by her own act, retreat into herself. Paul humored her, now that she had become his wife; that methodical brutality with which he had marched into her existence, a psy- chological surgeon with verbal knife and cautery, seemed to have forsaken him. He was tremu- lously anxious that she should be happy in her own way at that ; he shrank from any appearance of dictation; in the most immaterial of trifles he 174 A SON OF 'AUSTERITY urged her to make embarrassing choices. Hero grew placidly self-contained ; reading, observation and thought built up her days into personality. Once or twice the theater wearied her. Summer verged upon autumn ; she felt the mel- ancholy of the period ; too restless to remain in- doors, she walked daily. Setting out upon a golden afternoon, she had gained the high-road that ran into the town, when a quick step roused her to a sense of pursuit. A moment later a voice spoke to her from behind a ringing, deter- minate voice, assertive, peculiar. "Well, this is a surprise !" said the voice ; "and yet I thought it couldn't be any one but little Fluffy." Hero turned. The speaker was a tall, squarely-built fellow, with a blonde mustache and eyes of a golden-brown, notable for their con- tracted irises. His nose was narrow and slightly aquiline the Bavarian type its nostrils caught upwards and outwards. He carried his head with a certain aggressive freedom, the set of his lips seemed a belated part of his expression. "By Jove," he added, as she faced him; "if I'd looked again I'd have said it wasn't you. How smart we are!" And a hand was held out to her a large, broad hand, with a big buckle ring on it. Hero gave him her gloved palm. "Good-afternoon," she said. The other was flashing masculine glances about her. There was an involuntary pause. PERCEPTION OF THE IRREVOCABLE 175 "And so," pursued her vis-'a-'i'is, "you haven't forgotten dear old Douglas and the prom'. Jolly times, weren't they? Been away this year?" "Yes," said Hero, inwardly amused; "Lon- don." "Keeping you standing, aint I?" she was told; "I believe I'm going your way" the action was suited to the word; "like London, eh?" "Very much," answered Hero, quickening her pace to keep up with the regardless strides. "Big place, isn't it?" dismissed the metropolis from the conversation. "I say, you know it's quite a treat, meeting you like this ; I've thought about you a lot. How are the other girls getting on are you still chummy with the same crowd ?" "I see them sometimes," said Hero, absently. She shied at the idea of proclaiming her marriage her thoughts were wrestling with methods of hinting it. "Been to any dances lately?" invaded her ears. Hero shook her head, perturbed by the ques- tion. "Remember my teaching you how to reverse ?" she was asked; "beastly crowd they get there, don't they? I'm off the Island for the future unless there's any hope of seeing you there next summer ; I don't mean to let you give me the slip again. What a quiet little puss you are! here I've been doing all the gassing and you primming your mouth just as you used to do on the Head when they sang i;6 A SOX OF AUSTERITY " 'Every pretty girl he kisses He says "This is champion, this is;" But he doesn't tell his missis By the sad sea waves.' You remember that thing, don't you ? gad. how the fellows used to howl it when they saw a couple spooning!" Hero was driven into resolution. "You haven't heard any news about me lately, Mr. Jephson?" she said. "Still the Mr. !" retorted the person addressed; "no, I've not heard a word of any sort. Began to think I should never see you again." "Well," burst out Hero, courageously. "I'm married/' Mr. Jephson whistled; then incredulity dis- placed surprise. "Rats !" he ejaculated. Hero colored. "Mr. Jephson!'' she cried. The other considered her glowing countenance, her stylish frock, her air of independence. His face wrinkled into a look of sly wisdom liber- tine, elusively cruel. "Fluffy," he cried, "you've not been and mar- ried some old bounder for his money ?" "I wish you wouldn't call me by that silly name," flamed Hero, on the edge of tears; "I always hated it. I must go now; I've told you the truth, and you needn't have insulted me for it." PERCEPTION OF THE IRREl 'OCABLE 1 77 The man Jephson descended from mirth to apology. "I beg your pardon," he said stiffly; "and may I ask your new name ?" "No, don't," besought Hero; "I I'm sure my husband and you wouldn't get on together : we aren't really friends after all." "The cantankerous brute," said the man Jeph- son. "Oh, I don't mean that," explained Hero; "it's you and I who are not friends. You only met me with some girls I knew. Do let me turn back now; I just came out for a breath of fresh air; I'm not going anywhere in particular." "Of course, if you wish it," was the grudging reply; "may I not see you part of the way?" "Please, no," insisted Hero. The man Jephson held out his hand once more. His flat brown eyes lingered on her like sugary flies on a window-pane. "I was as pleased as Punch when I saw you a minute ago," he said, "and now I feel as if I wanted to go and get gloriously drunk. I've always hoped to meet you again, you had some- thing about you that got round me somehow: I was certain you'd make a first-rate chum. Your husband's a lucky beggar." He squeezed her fingers and sighed. "So you're actually married," he muttered; "pretty frocks and no need to work ; by Jove, I'd 178 A SOX OF AUSTERITY have given you the same. Fluffy, I would, in- deed." "Mr. Jephson," murmured Hero, "you didn't mean what you said about getting drunk ! Please don't do anything so silly." The man Jephson looked at her. "No," he said, "I was only joking. But I'm sorry you've gone and fallen in love without giv- ing me a chance." They had paused on a corner fairly free from pedestrians; he detained her hand, though she strove to release it. "Is it love, Fluffy?" he asked her. Hero dragged her fingers away. "Good-bye,'* she said, and went off with a hasty step. The man Jephson made a stride after her, but she turned with such an imploring glance that he swung round and moodily retraced the road by which they had come. Satisfied that she was not pursued, Hero walked more deliberately. Her head, to sensa- tion, was spinning like a top ; the last few months seemed blotted out of her memory, even the recol- lection of her mother's death rolled up like a curtain. She was a girl again, a unit in a class, stamped mysteriously with its mark; in thought she slipped back into the mental gulf from which a strong hand had drawn her. She remembered that trip to the Island with a bevy of girl friends rackety, careless, honest for the most part, feminine wildings, shrieking PERCEPTION OF THE IRREVOCABLE 179 exultant over their holiday, self-respect and hys- teria at hand-grips, self-respect under. Not that she admitted this reflection she championed them hastily against her incipient censure. Again she saw the long sea- front, glaringly white, rampart-fronted, curvilinear, backed by stucco hotels, frowned on by broken hills ; she saw the Bay swing open to the nearing steamer, saw the lines of boisterous faces on the landings, felt the madness of the townsman's holiday in brain and blood. What uncouth follies that week had held! the extravagance of an all-too-brief emancipation bred them daily. But the ozone came back with the memory of them and pleaded their pardon; she had been herself, the self that it came easiest to be. The girls had paired off in the mock flir- tations of such maladroit revelers, she had fallen to the lot of the man Jephson he had elbowed crowds for her, distributed ( in joint account with the escorts of her companions) sundry small moneys, lounged with her on the spacious prom', christened her Fluffy her hair would feather over brow and temples chaffed her good-humor- edly and her banterers mercilessly. Once he had stolen a kiss a half of one ! on the margin of a shadow as they threaded the gawky straddle of the Iron Pier; she had sulked till he left. She paused, mounting a step. Unconsciously her feet had carried her to a familiar street, to the house where her mother had died. She i8o A SON OF AUSTERITY chilled horribly, and hurried to clear the grim, low-browed thoroughfare. Passing the residence of the guardian neighbor from whom Paul had delivered her, she bent her head, fearing a chance recognition. At the road-end she entered a 'bus, and was jolted toward the western skirt of the clayfield. Her thoughts overcame her ; her mind relapsed into its ancient blank, a sullen, discon- solate calm. When she went into her husband's room at the white cottage he rose and met her fondly, then darkened. Something had gone from her something that had enwrapped her since their return from London; the mellowing atmosphere of content ; there was a gypsy note in her expres- sion, the taint of fretful rebellion. She chal- lenged his eyes, and her countenance wavered; he ran his fingers through his disordered locks, dismissing his pre-occupation. "You look tired, sweetheart," he said; "there is a quaint melodrama at the Shakespeare; we will go and see it." She had sat down in the rocking-chair. Be- side it there was an unaccustomed article an acorn-shaped receptacle of green straw, lined with rosy silk. It stood on a wicker tripod, and the silk neck closed with a puckering ribbon. "A new ornament for the 'shrine/ " said Paul ; "your needle has been so busy lately it suggested a work-basket. See, I put your sewing inside myself." PERCEPTION OF THE IRREVOCABLE 181 He parted the throat of the cover to show her ; an embroidery needle ran deeply into his hand and he winced. Hero drew it out; a globule of blood appeared on the skin, spreading with sur- prising speed. "How deep it went!" she cried, touching the crimson runnel with her handkerchief. Paul trembled at the contact of her ringers. "I am a storehouse for proverbs," he told her ; "one fits the occasion exactly: 'There is little steel in the needle's point, but there is enough.' An odd saying, is it not?" CHAPTER XVI AFTERMATH AND GERMINAL ELSIE took suddenly to spending no small por- tion of her time at the white cottage. She had been withheld by a characteristic sentiment from incommoding the newly-married couple, but one day struck up a less conventional acquaintance with Mrs. Gotch the elder, and thereupon elected herself one of that person's privileged callers. Selina Gotch's conversation soon slipped round to her favorite literature, heretofore described, and upon Elsie evincing a profound interest, the elder woman read long extracts, judiciously sub- edited in parts. This incident repeated itself; reader and listener held long pourparlers, the state of society that with a small ^ for sub- ject matter. Hero was a frequent auditor at these debates. One October day a cold snap sent them into Paul's room, where there was a fire; its wonted tenant, a chilly mortal, was out. Hero sat in her "shrine," Mrs. Gotch on a spacious horse-hair footstool by the hobbed fire-place, Elsie on the couch. 182 AFTERMATH AND GERMINAL 183 "I like this place," said Elsie; "it feels like Mr. Gotch himself; you expect every minute to hear his voice saying one of those quiet, honest things that make you feel just as cross with him as you're ashamed of yourself. Dearie told him a while back that somebody or other was a prig- somebody that Mr. Gotch knew, my father can be awfully impudent when he likes. You could just hear Mr. Gotch think for a minute, and then he said, 'What we call priggishness is generally the victory of moral courage over good manners. Dearie coughed, and said 'Time,' and then they both burst out laughing. Dearie is awfully smart at getting himself out of a fix like that." "I'm afraid it was Paul who wasn't quite po- lite," put in Hero, a little seriously; she appre- ciated Patrick Stuart's delicate aplomb. "Now you're only trying to save my feelings about Dearie," commented the blind girl; "but I haven't got any. He's a perfect frard, and he knows it. Why, I've asked him thousands of questions that he can't answer, and yet he goes on telling everybody how sure they ought to be." "You mean about religion," said Mrs. Gotch. "I mean about God," retorted Elsie; "Dearie's a very clever man, but he can't keep his voice from letting out when he's only making believe. It gets a queer little ache in it, like mine when I'm telling Justine an extra big fib. When I was at Blackpool once there was somebody on the sands who used to preach against religion, and 1 84 A SOX OF AUSTERITY Justine and I used to like to listen. I never heard so much sense-preaching in all my life." "Elsie!" cried Selina Gotch. half amused, half horrified. "I don't care," said the heretic, composedly; "it's the truth, but I'll only make you hate me if I go on about Dearie and and God. I'm sorry the book's ended, and sorriest of all that they didn't get married. Your stories are fearfully interesting. Mrs. Gotch, but they make me feel as if I had a stone in my chest instead of a heart. Now Justine's always make me feel happy when there is a happy ending ; as if I were just cuddling down in bed on a winter night and dropping off to sleep thinking of all the nicest things that ever happened to me. When there is a sorrowful ending, still you know that the story was nice while it lasted, and there were some happy times in it. But in your books one gets to hate the happy tirrns, they seem, when you look back on them, to have been so so silly and babyish." "People shouldn't do things that won't bear thinking about," answered Selina Gotch. "Thank goodness, I don't worry about what has happened, or what's going to," snarled Elsie, and apologized immediately. "But I don't, all the same," she asseverated; "the doctors tell me I oughtn't to eat such a lot of goodies, but if I stopped to think about my health I shouldn't eat them, and I should be miserable. What's the AFTERMATH AND GERMINAL 185 good of being miserable in order to be well, when being well doesn't make one happy?" "It's better than being happy for a little, only to be all the more miserable at the end of it/' retorted the other party to the discussion. "Is it?" queried Elsie; "now there was Cleo- patra; I'm sure her life was worth living. She loved Antony and she ruined him, and he was a great hero; so he must have loved her a good deal to be willing to be ruined by her. But they had a lot of happiness there in that w r onderful old Egypt, and when Antony killed himself she killed herself, too. Of course, it was very sad that they couldn't live and be happy always, but they had to die in that way to be as great as they were. Justine says there are no people like them nowadays; that they have all died out." "And a good thing, too," Mrs. Gotch told her. "Dear me!" mused the blind girl; "you are unsentimental, Mrs. Gotch ; I do think it's a pity." "You see, Elsie," Selina Gotch told her, ply- ing the nut-crackers, "all the sentiment was knocked out of me long ago. Your stories are happy because they mostly stop at the wedding; it's after that that the trouble begins. Sentiment won't stand the matrimonial wash ; it needs some- thing more durab'e." "But people can't get married unless they love one another," cried the disputant; "you may like people very much, you may admire them very much, you may be ever so much pleased to talk 1 86 A SOX Ol : AUSTERITY to them and be with them, but that doesn't make you love them. Now. I admire Mr. Gotch, and all that, but I don't love him; Hero does. If I married Mr. Gotch I should pull all his hair off in a month, and all my liking for him wouldn't save me from doing it." "I married a man I loved, or thought I loved." said Mrs. Gotch, grimly, "and in six months he deserted me aye, and his child, too ! If I had married an honest man that I could trust and respect, I should have been a happier woman all my days, and my hair wouldn't have been snow- white before I was forty." "You poor, poor thing!" murmured Elsie; "but you must like to think of the time when you were fond of one another." "Not I," snapped Selina Gotch, severing with her even teeth the brown kernel of a hazel-nut; "I despise myself for having been so easily de- ceived. If women were the judges of character they are supposed to be, there would be fewer miserable love-marriages. But there, wisdom of all sorts only comes by experience!" "You are a very strange, queer person, Mrs. Gotch," replied her visitor; "what do you think of it all, Hero?" The reply was delayed; it ~ame from Mrs. Gotch the elder. "Hero went out of the room a moment ago," she said. . . . When Elsie returned home her habit was to come to the cottage escorted by Justine or one of AFTERMATH AND GERMINAL 187 the vicarage servants, and to make her way back accompanied by Mrs. Gotch or Hero, or even by the little maid Margaret she found Paul, who was nibbling brown bread and butter and sipping tea with Patrick Stuart. "Bad man!" she ob- served; "go to your wife." Paul sprang up, sending a spatter of the tepid fluid on to the vicar's Afghan carpet. "Is anything wrong?" he gasped. "Oh, dear, no!" said the blind girl, amazed; "I was only poking fun; I'm sorry if I startled you/' . The young man sat down again, relieved. Elsie talked discursively for a while, then went to her den. "How fond Mr. Gotch is of Hero!" she mut- tered to herself as she mounted the stairs; "it's only when you love some one very much that you're so ready to be anxious about them." The talk of the two men had turned upon the blind girl. Paul was remarking her extraordi- nary perceptions. "She vibrates to the tones of other personali- ties," he said, "as a piano-wire does to the note of a violin. Often she has told, in some inscrut- able fashion, when, at one of her daring speeches, I have changed countenance." The vicar heaved the profound sigh that the mention of his daughter had the power to draw from him. "Elsie is my Frankenstein's monster," he re- 1 88 A SON OF AUSTERITY sponded. "I called her to life, and she haunts me with a double tragedy that of my past and her present." Paul did not speak at once Patrick Stuart's references to Elsie were always enigmatic. At last he said, out of his own thoughts "Fatherhood has in it an elusive mystery, less coherent and more empyrean than that of moth- erhood. You remember it was the sons of God that saw the daughters of men at least in the mythology of the virile Hebrew. A parable of the real and ideal, is it not ? Yet why should we make one male and the other female?" "Because it chimes with the acutest of human experience," decided the vicar; "in the average the feminine standard tends above the masculine one ; but the humanity at the top of the spiritual scale is almost exclusively masculine. And it is when such sons of God see how fair can be the daughters of men that there issue those mental convulsions which leave behind them the wilder- ness of sex-cynicism. Nineteen-twentieths of femininity is bred and broken in view of the known characteristics of nine-tenths 'of mascu- linity. The idealistic male tenth goes seeking the idealistic female twentieth, the unsatisfied fractions in every generation nurse or vent their spleen according to their humor." "You speak bitterly," protested the listener. "So shall most men who stake their spiritual all upon a hypothetical greatness in the soul of a AFTERMATH AND GERMINAL 189 woman," persisted the other; "better risk your life, as duelists have done, upon the turn of a card. Elsie's mother was a silken moth impaled on an ideal the ideal was mine; in such cases both the thorn and the victim are sentient. Per- haps she was more than a moth ; she had the imi- tative genius which enables the player to reflect a king, as the dewdrop reflects a star. She was an actress a young Frenchwoman neurotic, generous, feminine, a finely-touched child, insane with vanity, a typical histrion. The stage was to her the arid, yet tropical, desert in which alone life was possible. Mastered by my love, my pas- sion, my grief, she abandoned it ; I exchanged my curacy; she discarded her theatrical pseudonym; we married." Patrick Stuart paused, trifling with his spoon and saucer. "I survived the next five years, she did not; there is a tragedy in a quip. Justine Gabrielle's bosom friend and companion swore to her to be- come the protector from me ! of Elsie, our one child, the ultimate cause of her mother's prema- ture death. To-day, in face and manner, she is the infallible reflection of Gabrielle; her mind has borrowed my passionate bent for I am pas- sionate, Gotch and added it to her mother's pet- ulant shrewdness ; Justine has made her a creature of the obscurely erotic. Is it not a devil's dance under the shadow of St. Faith's ?" He ended, biting his delicate mustache; then igo A put down his tea-cup, go: out a cigar and lit it; the tobacco reduced the pulsation?- of the heart. the crimson faded from his forehead. Paul fingered his chin, lost in thought. "But Elsie is your own flesh and blood." he said doubt- fully : "she is a sensitive, high-minded I had almost said, woman : surely she counts to you for much in spite of her inherited characteristics. You love her?" The vicar sneered a smile and a gibe in one. "At odd moments," he answered. "Gabrielle looks into my face out of her sightless eyes, and I do more than love her I wrestle in an agony of self- contempt that her mother's beauty and affection were not enough for me. At such times Elsie is consoler and avenger. At others she recalls to me the barbaric vanity, the pagan tolerance, the ecstatic luxury, of her mother, and my soul writhes in horror and disgust, as it writhed at Gabrielle's feet. Such women, Gotch, are hell's ambassadors ; they fire in us the artist, the evan- gelist, and the man, and bind our souls in triple cords of compromise. I tell you, Gotch, Elsie is the bewitching copy of my most subtle sins, mis- shapen, blind, yet beautiful." His cigar had gone out ; he re-lighted it "There !" he said, "I have blown off steam : I knew I should own up some day, and surely enough you have found me in the babbling mood. Forget the fact as soon as possible ; don't, if you AFTERMATH AXD GERMIXAL 191 can help it, anatomize me in that philosophy-box of yours." "Indeed," confessed Paul. ''I was anatomizing myself." "As how?" asked Patrick Stuart, with the ghost of a smile. "I was wondering," said his protc^gif, dryly. "however I came to consider myself a judge of character: I owe you many apologies." "The heart," responded the vicar, breathing out a wide smokerring and watching it drift "the heart knoweth its own bitterness." Again he smiled a frail yet valiant mirth, and, with a bashful grasp of Paul's palm, said good-night. The emotion softened his face into a poet-like youth fulness. Outside the vicarage Paul got upon a clanking, jingling tram, and was borne town wards. He did not notice that Hero, unattended, was com- ing down the cinder path from the cottage. Reaching the high-road, she turned in the direction of a number of shops, which clustered together somewhat past St. Faith's. As she walked on, some one stepped to her side and stayed there. It was the man Jephson. . "Don't be angry with me," he said, meeting her eyes; "I I found out where you lived from one of the girls I came across. I've been fooling round for hours on the chance of seeing you." Hero was thunderstruck; as Mahomet's coffin hung between heaven and earth, so did her char- 192 A SON OF AUSTERITY acter between the bohemian and the bourgeois if one fretted her by verging on the stolid, the other terrified her by unmasking the elemental. "Don't look like that," begged her molester; "I only wanted to say good-bye and ask you to wish me good luck. I'm I'm off to Africa; the West Coast, Fluffy, about a beastly bridge : I may never see Old England again. I've been thinking about you an awful lot since I met you the other day, you are such a good sort and as pretty as a picture, Fluffy, by Jove you are! I stole a kiss off you once, it was a rotten thing to do, but I'm dashed if I can be sorry for it." The woman was recovering her senses. "You musn't talk to me like that, Mr. Jephson," she told him, with a simplicity as stern as it was moving. "Oh, Fluffy," was the dismal answer; "why did you get married to that Gotch fellow? You see, I've been finding out all about you ; they say he's no end of a prig ; I'm sure you can't really be happy." "Please to remember," requested Hero, strid- ing'quickly and with head down, "that Mr. Gotch is my husband." "Worse luck !" retorted the man Jephson. "By gad, Fluffy, what a jolly time you and I could have had together ! you weren't born to be Mrs. Sobersides. I'll bet you've never tasted cham- pagne since you were married." Paul Gotch's wife stood suddenly still. "Mr. Jephson," she said, "if you don't want AFTERMATH AND GERMINAL 193 to make me hate you, go away immediately. How dare you speak to me like that?" ''It's only for once," was the muttered answer; "I had to let you know how I felt, I've been bursting with it for a fortnight. It all came to me when I left you the other day. You needn't be so hard on me, I dare say I'll soon pop off when I get out to my job it's near the spot they call the White Man's Grave. You surely don't grudge me a kind word to think of out there, Fluffy. At least say you forgive me." "Yes," yielded Hero; "only go away." "Don't you think I should have made you a decent sort of husband ?" persisted the other. "I know the ropes a bit, Fluffy, I could have given you some fun." "Oh, don't, don't!" cried Hero; "good-bye, please." "You'll shake hands?" urged Mr. Jephson. His request was granted with painful reluctance. Her soft fingers were clutched as in a vice. "By Jove!" said Mr. Jephson, rapturously; "you are a pretty little woman. Damn Africa! would you like me to come back, Fluffy? per- haps I shan't croak, after all." Hero evaded reply and darted into a neighbor- ing shop. She took an unconscionable time to transact a fractional amount of business; when she came out the man Jephson was gone. She went back to the cottage with her head in a whirl. Yet she was vaguely sorry for the man Jephson. 194 A SOX OF AUSTERITY It was on the same evening that Paul Gotch. going into his room, found the lamp aglow in Hero's "shrine," and a ruffle of white cambric thrown upon the rosy lining of her work-basket. He picked it up a tiny unfinished garment ; his eyes shone, he kissed it suddenly; then laughed, both to and at himself. CHAPTER XVII PHILOSOPHY OF FRUITION PAUL GOTCH was lounging to and fro across the floor of his work-room, a meditative, softly- perambulating figure. He could not have known it, yet his feet kept the invisible path upon which his father, nearly a year before, had indulged in a similar sentry-go. The dead man's son was thinking of his progenitor as he marched now and again through the shimmering plane of sunshine that fell from the window. Once he sighed heavily. The sigh had an echo; the echo was a little murmurous sob, the drowsy demurrer of sleep against awakening. Paul Gotch abandoned his species of beat and went to that screened corner which he had christened Hero's "shrine." A new piece of furniture had been added to it a swing- ing cot of white wire, with filmy pink draperies. A ruddy spheriod dinted the pillow the tiny glowing head of a young child. Paul laid a hand on the edge of the machine and moved it gently. The complaining murmur became a coo of contentment and faded into silence. The 195 196 A SON OF AUSTERITY watcher, regarding the occupant of the small couch, yielded to an ecstasy of thought. " 'Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born,' " he quoted, "and yet it is no longer fashionable to ask 'Whence?' or 'Whither?' still less 'Why?' Mysterious atom! are you all transcendental dust, or do you boast an immortal spirit, impris- oned in an urn of mortality, like Scheherazade's genie in his leaden box ? Was Pythagoras right, or is your soul as youthful as its earthly casket, a very fledgling spirit? Or are you indeed soul- less, one more of Nature's jests, who made the interminable wrappings of the onion to envelope nothing?" The slumbering object of this apostrophe fret- ted in its sleep, poking a midget fist from under the padded counterpane. Paul smiled whim- sically. "You dislike the idea," he said to it; "so do we all we even weep over the onion, but we have not invented a core for it, as we have a soul for ourselves." He sat down in his wife's chair and stretched out his legs reflectively. "Your grandfather lies in Anfield," he went on ; "and who knows if that is the end of him or not? The church-bells chime to him across the flats from Walton and Kirby, Croxteth and Faz- akerly, the spires point to the sky, the parsons PHILOSOPHY OF FRUITION 197 preach, the people sing and say 'amen.' What did he think about such things? the gray, hard, selfish man, whose bowels melted at last over the son of his loins what will you think of it one day, little life, where still burns a spark of his? To be born, to sleep, to eat, to drink, to beget, and to die ; that is all Nature asks of man or beast. And yet we wrap our heads in clouds of our own breathing and say 'We are not as the brutes.' How do we know it? because we are dissatis- fied with Death well, have not dogs howled on their masters' tombs?" The soliloquist bent over the cot and pushed the frail red fist with the tip of his finger. The minute digits opened, then closed tightly; the child still slept. "There," muttered Paul, absorbedly; "I shook hands with him dead, and you clasp mine living so three generations touch three men, one that was, one that is, one that shall be. Thus shall sinner slip into saint and saint into sinner. How Cupid sells us love for lives and gambles with his wages !" He extricated his finger-tip and soothed the protest of the deprived. "Here," he told himself, "four lives meet, with four million behind them, and all that ever was since time began has made for this. So many wooings, so many matings, so many younglings, and, at the last, the Babe of Babes. How Nature flatters ! the cynical broker." 198 A SON OF AUSTERITY At this point Hero's rocking-chair lost its tenant, for her husband shook himself into the actual, marched to his table, took a pen and sat down, resolved to abjure any further meditation upon paternity. The day was very fine and bright : he looked at the arch of blue firmament that spanned the brickfield. It was dappled with flying clouds, the sunbeams swept before them in patches of yellow vivid blots that eddied across the browns and greens of the Gotch estate. The pug-mill thudded unobtrusively, a pale haze flick- ered about one of the long kilns. Once more Paul Gotch lost himself in reverie. A footstep roused him after some indefinite lapse; he turned, saw Hero, and smiled. It was at such moments that she glimpsed his inexpres- sible regard for her. Her face warmed some- what with an answering surcease of gravity ; she paused by the cot, brooding suddenly upon the little flushed cheek and forehead; Paul rose and gained her side. Together they stood passively. "Isn't it an odd feeling?" asked the man under his breath ; "you are no less you nor am I less I, yet that somnolent morsel is both you and I; what sort of a destiny will we work out for it, or it for us? The Chinese worship their ances- tors, though they are the only indomitable gods, and the worship of posterity might easier produce more in the way of results. What an inspiration of national and civic rectitude there is in the con- templation of a single youngster! I would put PHILOSOPHY OF FRUITION 199 up the innocent countenance of a child in every council-chamber and over the altar of every church, yes, on the top of the Speaker's Chair itself. And underneath I should engrave this motto 'Do What is Best for Me.' " Hero peeped at him a characteristic glance, amused, maternal, a trifle admiring, the least fraction reverent. "Oh," cried her husband abruptly; "I saw a good name to-day, sweetheart ; I found a long list of them in a cyclopaedia." He reached the volume from his table, opened on a paper-marker, and ran his finger down a column. "Oliver Gotch," he said ; "how does that sound? full, round, dignified. Oliver is not too deli- cate for the harsh monosyllable which follows it ; I think I should like Oliver Gotch ; you could put anything before or after it Oliver Gotch, M.P., Oliver Gotch, Q.C., or Q.C., M.P., or the Rt. Hon. Oliver Gotch, M.P., or even Sir Oliver Gotch. It would sound equally well as Professor Oliver Gotch or Dr. Oliver Gotch, or follow a book-title or even sign a poem, though Gotch is hardly poetical, is it?" The mother of the hypothetical Oliver was ob- viously troubled; Paul noticed and interpreted. "Dearest," he said, "a fig for Oliver; I abandon it from this moment. Let us call him Roland." The quip failed to reach the target of Hero's comprehension : the disconsolate look grew. She 200 'A SOX OF AUSTERITY sought to hide it by stooping over the open pages of the cyclopaedia ; her husband stroked the brown head. "Sweetheart," he told her, "choose a name that pleases you and I am pleased. It was your life that was put in pawn for the lad ; you shall call him Cholmondeley Majoribanks if you will." He laid the volume in her lap and stayed watch- ing her. Hero scanned the double columns of small type with a face of indecision. She glanced swiftly from off the page. "I think I should like to call him Cyril," she said nervously; "wouldn't you?" Paul considered. "Cyril Gotch!" he rehearsed the juxtaposition with critical care; "rather ecclesiastical, isn't it?. The Rev. Cyril Gotch! He'll be lucky if he escapes taking orders with that name. Yet, on the other hand, it is more poetical than Oliver Toems and Ballads, by Cyril Gotch;' it has a quaint flavor, but I don't dislike it. What made you fancy it?" "It it just caught my eye," faltered Hero. "Well," concluded her husband, "since you have taken a liking to it, Cyril he shall be. The name has one advantage : there is no ridiculous diminutive, such as converts James into Jim, or Michael into Mick. Long life and happiness, therefore, to Cyril Gotch ; may he inherit his mother's wits and his father's obstinacy, may his PHILOSOPHY OF FRUITION 201 ambitions be worthy, his sins magnanimous, and his love fortunate." There was a note of abandon in his voice. Since the birth of his firstborn his imagination had been electric; at the slightest increase of tension it began to sparkle like the brush of a dynamo. "I must really begin to put my philosophies in order, sweetheart," he remarked; "it isn't good to bring children up without a religion of some sort, and they haven't any sympathy with hy* potheses. 'Milk for babes,' said my namesake, and was hopelessly wrong when he said it; it's the children that need the strong meat of religion 'Thus and thus was it ; thus and thus is it, and thus and thus shall it be' not a real 'if in the whole catechism." "I don't think children need to be bothered with religion," objected Hero, unexpectedly cour- ageous. Paul shook his head. "There you are wrong, little woman," he an- swered; "few great men have been bred atheist, though the greatness of many a priest-bred soul has made it turn infidel. But we must learn to believe before we are able to doubt with safety. The child is suckled before it is weaned ; it creeps before it can go. We build from the scaffolding of religion the temple of ethics; we win the ex parte injunctions of morality with forged affi- davits, and there is no trial on this side of the grave." 202 A SON OF AUSTERITY He gazed at her doubtfully. "You see I can't keep my head below the clouds/' he apologized ; "I felt just then as though I had a pen in my hand. Forgive my habit of monologuing; it must bore you horribly." "Oh, no," said Hero; "I I like to hear you, only " "Only " repeated her husband with a per- suasive inflection. Hero burst out there was with her a perpetual choice between volcanic self-revelation and an almost sullen reticence. "You make me feel so stupid," she cried; "so ignorant, so little and mean; I wouldn't care if I never thought of the things that you worry about. And when you make me think about them I hate myself I'm not fit to have a baby of my own." She was driven upon a gentle weeping by the recoil of her own emotion. Paul bent over her, moved with her vague affliction. "There needs no more scathing indictment of my philosophies," he protested, "than that they make you shed tears ; I am always terrifying you with my scarecrow thoughts, standing between you and the sunshine, as I do now. I am a great fool Life, while it is life, should think only of itself: 'It is a comely fashion to be glad.' Da you know, dearest, I am half in mind, like Faus- tus, to burn my books in a modern equivalent, to forswear the Baconian method. Would it PHILOSOPHY OF FRUITION 203 make you any happier if, like Banqno's, there was no speculation in these eyes that I do glare with ?'' "You you needn't sneer at me," Hero had to say. "God forbid," said her husband, alarmed ; ''I was sneering at myself, who can not be contented with all that should make a man happy, but must needs send my wits wandering over the edge of the world." He took the drooped hands into his own and caressed them. "How you must despise me !" got out his wife ; "you'd have been much happier if you'd married some one who was really clever and serious." "I did," said Paul, banteringly; "you are so serious you don't smile more than once a month, and so clever you can pick the kernel of a thought before I have half expressed it. Your successor, sweetheart, shall be a fool of the first water. And now a truce to gloomy fancies and argu- ments ; you shall go out this evening, baby or no baby. Where is the paper, while we see what is on?" He drifted from the room in search of it. Hero dried her eyes and scolded herself as- siduously. The ruddy little head drew her atten- tion, and her mouth softened. The mother in her stirred, and her expression changed; she drew a lingering breath. "He is like Paul now," she reflected "now his eyes are shut. But when he opens them he 204 A SON OF 'AUSTERITY will be like me." She knelt at the side of the cot. "Poor baby," she said, "your father will love you more than I shall ; sometimes when I look at you I am ashamed you have no right to be, really you are a soft little, warm little lie, baby dear, and your father believes you. Oh, I wish I were fonder of him, fonder of you !" Paul came back with Mrs. Gotch the elder. "I have been telling Cyril's grandmamma that he is Cyril," he said, "and I am afraid that she will require reconciling to the fact." "Not at all," retorted Mrs. Gotch; "but Paul asked my opinion, and I admitted that I thought he might have chosen something more manly and less like the name of a character in a novel- ette." "Paul can call him what he likes," flashed Hero, from the depths of her rocking-chair. "Excepting his famous namesake, the Alexan- drian, I have nothing against Cyril," laughed the authority; "Hero likes Cyril, and it is her baby, so Cyril it shall be. I feel now as if to re-christen him would be to destroy his infant individuality. No, St. Peter shall open him an account in the Big Book under the name of Cyril ; may the balance prove on the credit side." Neither of the women caring to pursue the sub- ject, the decision became absolute without more ado. Despite her objection to his "unmanly" cogno- men, Mrs. Gotch was more than willing to take PHILOSOPHY OF FRUITION 205 sole charge of her grandson, and Hero enjoyed her evening at the play with all the vivacity of disuse. Her husband put an arm about her as they drove home. "I have just discovered that I am jealous of Cyril," he said. Hero started. "Why?" she demanded. "He has been engrossing too much of your attention," explained Cyril's father; "I feel that this evening's frivolity has taught me how much of the spiritual law, as represented by our two youthful hearts, has been sacrificed to the nat- ural world as represented by Master Cyril." Hero was relieved by this piece of exegesis she would scarcely own to herself the fact or its explanation. Arrived at the cottage, she went into the work- room to warm herself. An envelope stood on the mantelpiece an envelope with a foreign stamp and postmarks ; she opened it casually. It was on thin glazed paper, and read "DEAR MRS. GOTCH, Africa has not yet done for me, as you see by this. Indeed, I hope soon to be in England again, and to renew some old acquaintanceships. Truly yours, CYRIL JEPHSON." Hero stood gazing at these simple lines fas- cinated by their coolness and skilful superficiality. 206 A SON OF AUSTERITY Paul came in from hanging up his coat ; his wife's eyes glanced from him to the missive; suddenly she realized the betrayal in the Christian name of the signature. "A letter, sweetheart." her husband said ; "what news?" Hero crumpled the epistle and threw it into the fire; Paul lifted his eyebrows inquiringly. "It's from some one who should not have writ- ten to me," answered his wife, quiveringly ; "some one I forbade even to speak to me. Please don't ask me anything more about it." "I wont," said her husband, lightly; "aren't you ready for supper, sweetheart? The mater says that Master Cyril has slept like a top." Hero winced at the last sentence and looked at the fire-grate. The final ashes of the consumed sheet were just flickering into sable. CHAPTER XVIII NATURE AND CERTAIN VACUA THE child Cyril waxed imperceptibly, as chil- dren do. Asleep, Hero had remarked, he bore a marvelous resemblance to Paul : there was some- thing absurdly man-like in the full forehead, the deep upper lip, the stamp of inert power upon the soft cheeks and dimpled nose. But when the large white lids swung up from the baby eyes there looked out the lucent blue orbs of Hero herself, as strangely characteristic and mature as the imagined cast of thought that had lingered about the sleeping face. The contemplation of this innocent duality fed in Hero an unusual imaginativeness. She began to weave allegories of self-pity about the little creature ; that blended personality seemed a wrong done to herself, the soul that looked out through those azure windows was part of her soul, a portion of her spirit rent from her and prisoned in a flesh that was not her own flesh. Quietly as the currents of life flowed about her, she herself was a whirlpool of thought and emotion ; she had ailed somewhat after the child's birth; pathology 207 208 A SOX OF AUSTERITY could have mapped her present mood on paper with all the cogency of a self-satisfied material- ism; her odd regard for the child was symptom- atic in the extreme. The tiny countenance, so amorphously like her husband's, begot in her a kind of resentment ; imperiously, arrogantly, it thrust upon her its continual necessities. Yet she pitied it for its eyes. She had called it Cyril, a transient folly, that meant, even to herself, rather less than half of nothing. A sudden rapport between the printed name and a tolerant memory had set her tongue in motion; once she blamed her husband for his ready acquiescence ; truly she would have thanked him for some fraction of that masterfulness he had been wont to use. In any case, having sug- gested the luckless cognomen, she dared not show him the man Jephson's letter. It is in her flip- pant humors that Fate is most dangerous; her jests undermine kingdoms. The child was to Paul a primeval compliment, the last link in the circle of masculinity ; to Hero it was the final fetter upon her vanquished indi- viduality ; to Mrs. Gotch it was a nursling and an occupation; to Elsie Stuart it was the key of essential womanhood. When it was laid in her arms she vibrated with a new passion, she glowed with the tremulous ardor of a Madonna. The doors of her heart opened for it, and a host of eager impulses surrounded it with extravagant attentions. She sang to it, laughed to it, NATURE AND CERTAIN VACUA 209 romanced to it, cooed over it softly as Cytherea's doves she \vas the purest of Cythe- reas, rapt by the most innocent of Adons. Once the child, entrusted, sleeping, to Elsie, woke and wept assiduously; Hero took it to her and stilled its hungry acclamation with some hasty nourish- ment. The blind girl heard the determined pip- ing die into a flattered sigh ; a paroxysm of un- conscious envy gripped her, her viewless eyes widened, her mouth parted, her cheeks flushed. The ministering mother glanced up and saw it; bitterness came into her mouth ; she knew of what she had been robbed. Elsie was interested in the details of the infan- tile existence; her inquiries elucidated a lack of reciprocal warmth on Hero's side. Mrs. Gotch, who had joined them at the sound of the child's weeping, protected her daughter-in-law. They had never exchanged a word beyond the compara- tively superficial, these two, yet they understood. If to understand be not quite to forgive, as has been argued, it is at least to pity. "Babies are a great nuisance, when all is said and done," put in the elder woman ; "and what is far worse, a great responsibility/' The blind girl sniffed, disparaging the defense. "If I were Hero," she returned, "I should like to have one baby for a while, just so that I could enjoy the very, very own feel of it, and then I would like to have a hundred." "Elsie!" cried Mrs. Gotch, incredulous. 210 A SON ()!' AUSTERITY "I would/' persisted the other; "and I would have a big warm house for them, with soft car- pets and nice cushions, and I would play games with them from morning to night, and I would go to sleep with all of them cuddled down beside me." "Indeed," said Selina Gotch, with grim humor; "and who would find bread-and-butter for this infant school of yours?" "Their father," returned Elsie joyously ro- mancing was always ecstatic with her; "and he would be a wonderful, beautiful mystery." "He would if he kept that crowd in boots," interpolated Mrs. Gotch. "And when he came home at night," said Elsie regardlessly, "we would all sit round till he had finished his dinner, and then he would play games, too, and sing to them. And when the children were tired we would put them to bed and sit by the fire ourselves, thinking what we would do with the babies when they were grown up. Oh, it would be lovely!" "Would it?" said the experienced one; "I should like to see you try it for a week," and with this observation she went back to the kitchen. Elsie fumbled for Hero's chair and sat down on a neighboring footstool. "Aren't you a happy girl ?" she murmured. "I suppose so," said Hero, smoothing the little gown into order. "If that were my baby," pursued the romancist, NATURE AND CERTAIN VACUA 211 "I should only be afraid of one thing squeezing it to death out of love. / feel as though T had just come to a fine dinner where every one had filled themselves up and were just drinking coffee and saying how grand it had been, and as if no one asked me to sit down or said they were sorry I was late, but all the while I had a horrible feel- ing of emptiness. You are lucky, Hero." "Oh, don't, don't !" begged Hero, and choked on the remainder of the adjuration. Elsie heard a gasp. "What is the matter?" she cried; "I didn't really want you to sympa- thize." Hero caught at the pretext. "You poor dear," she asked, in a pause between silent sobs ; "would you really like to be me?" "Well, no," answered Elsie, honestly ; "not you, but I should like to be you if I were I and Mr. Gotch were somebody else. Then, of course, the baby would be my own. But I'm not lucky as you are, I have to be content with loving a mys- tery." "That sounds very unsatisfying," said Herojx she knew sufficient of Elsie's romance to be cautious. "You musn't be told any more," warned Elsie ; "I gave a solemn promise. I've tried to break it already, but never again ! I felt as mean as mean could be." "What a strange girl you are !" murmured the other, evasively. 212 A SON OF 'AUSTERITY "Never mind,'' said Patrick Stuart's daughter; "it's all over, my knight went away ; I set him free and he went away forever. I heard him cry as Dearie did once when I vexed him awfully. And that night I cried pints myself, and the next, and the next, but the days went and went and I stopped crying. You won't ask me any more, will you?" "No," responded Hero, and kissed her pathet- ically. "Lend me your baby to hold," commanded Elsie, with stern self-constraint ; "give it me quick or I shall burst out crying now." The warm little bundle was laid in her offered arms; she rocked it instinctively, crooning to it in the fashion of all mothers. "Elsie," broke out Hero, watching her, "tell me, what do you think makes us love a person?" "Nothing makes us," decided Elsie, sapiently; "we just do it. It's fearfully bad for us some- times, but we do it, all the same. There's a sor- rowful song about it, where the girl says and " 'Waes me for the time, Willie, That our first tryst was set;' 'Waes me for the destinie That gart me luve thee sae.' It's a funny language, but I've had it all ex- plained to me it means just what I told you; NATURE AND CERTAIN VACUA 213 it was a bad thing for her that ever they met, but she couldn't help it, she had to love him in spite of it. And I guessed, somehow, he wasn't a good man." "Was he good to her?" asked Hero, tenta- tively. "I'm afraid not," said the commentator; "it was a queer song, and I only remember bits of it, but she was dying because of something he had done to her. But she only asked him not to for- get her, and she didn't even have to tell him she forgave him; she just hoped he'd be happy, and said she'd never loved any one but him." "I think she was a little fool," declared Hero, with a reversion to the practical. "Exactly," assented Elsie, cuddling the baby; "every one is who is in love. Justine says it is the most beautiful foolishness in the whole world, and when you've got it you quite pity the wise folks." "I wouldn't go on loving any one who was cruel to me," insisted Hero; "if they were cruel they couldn't love me, and I should despise my- self if I could go on loving any one who didn't love me." "You couldn't help yourself," rejoined the blind girl; "you would just go on hoping and hoping that his heart would come back to you. Sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it does; I know lots of stories about cases like that, and .some of them are so sad they would make you cry on 2i 4 A SOX OF AUSTERITY your birthday. But they are all beautiful, be- cause the people loved one another once and were just madly happy for a while." "I don't see how a thing can be beautiful when it's as dismal as it can be." complained the critic. "Everybody has got to be dismal some time or other," said Elsie, philosophically; "it's all ac- cording to your fate, the thing is that you have been happy. Dying's like going to sleep with the toothache, only you don't waken up again; but it's not so bad if you can remember some really nice times when you hadn't the toothache." After all, there was something of the Ironside in the listener; she revolted somberly against Elsie's paganism. Yet she saw no choice be- tween it and reprobation of her own discontent. The sullenly-indomitable in her character de- murred to the carnal self-surrender which she diagnosed in the blind girl's attitude towards the grand passion. Hero herself was in no mood to abandon her personal quarrel with Destiny for the discussion of the abstract : like Maeterlinck's obsessed heroine, she was not happy. All else paled into irrelevance. As often, however, as she intruded into that sub-conscious debate which her obscurer faculties carried on in continuation of her talk with Elsie, her sentimentality, instead of groping in the future for some desired object, reverted to the man Cyril Jephson. He was the only male upon whom, by chance or inclination, her halting fancy NATURE AND CERTAIN VACUA 215 had dwelt even for a little. He was unexacting, boisterous, loudly cheerful ; she topped him men- tally with ease, yet felt herself abashed by his sanguine humanity. His eyes had appreciated her without infusing that homage which is too supernal not to be embarrassing. By degrees she came to trifle wittingly with her recollection of him; re-reading "Marguerite de Valois" she slid her personality into the skin of the Duchess de Nevers, discarding that of the Queen of Navarre the red-headed Coconnas had more in him of the man Jephson than had the gentle La Mole. Other changes took place in her sympathies; the presence of that now sedulous recollection was as iron secreted near a compass, which, in deranging the needle, deranges much else. Had a wanton fate not prompted her to pro- pose Cyril as the name of Paul Gotch's firstborn, even had that signed note with its veiled promise half threat, half entreaty not followed; had Elsie not preached Kismet, Hero might still have trailed through the corridors of romance in Queen Margot's ruff and train, still rescued La Mole, with just a gleam of Paul Gotch in his handsome eyes, from the drawn sword of the pursuing Co- connas. As it was, Coconnas carried his red chevelure with the braggart air of Cyril Jephson, and Hero regarded him with the tolerant glance of Henriette de Nevers. So largely does the mind of the reader bulk in every tale ! 2i6 A SON OF AUSTERITY She spent long hours in her "shrine," dram- drinking with fiction for intoxicant; the child slept much, the cot stood at her elbow. Paul would peep at her across his table; he worked quickly and well, his pulses even and strong. Occasionally he paced the floor for exercise, some- times with Cyril in his arms; he bantered himself for a dry-nurse, but liked it, nevertheless. Am- bition in him took a new form ; he plotted a career for his infant son. His best friend could not have called him a romantic figure as he strode up and down, a gaunt being in a loose frock-coat, the child's draperies dangling across the black skirt of the garment. Hero laughed at him; disre- spectfully, though, he should have seen. He ended by misdoubting her indolent calm. "Are you happy, sweetheart?" he would ask, pausing by her chair. "Of course," she would answer, with a smile. "I wish I knew more of what went on inside that pretty head," he confessed once; "reticence comes natural to you, does it not ? That is what I tell myself, and yet I wish we talked more to- gether: I tried, till I realized that our conversa- tion meant my monologue." He laughed nerv- ously. "I'm sorry I don't please you," countered Hero. Paul flushed deeply. "There can be no question of your not pleasing me," he responded, "as long as you are well and at peace, but I have wondered lately if your life NATURE AXD CERTAIN VACUA 217 were not a fraction too hum-drum. Would you like to travel for a while ? we could afford it." He went on his knee to look at her. Hero stirred, then relaxed. "There is Baby," she said ; "you can not carry a child about at that age." Her husband's face drew into a spasm of regret. "Darling," he whispered pleadingly, "you you don't grudge him to me?" The protest was oblique, yet it touched Hero. She put her hand on Paul's shoulder; their gaze met, her eyes swimming with sudden feeling. "I I didn't mean it," stammered her husband, with quick, masculine penitence. Hero pardoned him confusedly asking herself many things. CHAPTER XIX UNMASKING THE ELEMENTAL PAUL GOTCH stepped out of the white cottage and walked leisurely towards the St. Faith's side of the brickfield. August was come again with the glowing skies, the hot, indolent breezes, the drowsy shimmer of her splendid noons. Twelve months of thought and feeling annihilated them- selves, the exquisite regret of pleasurable memory vibrated into being : once more he was wooing his bride a bride and no wife. The fretful roar of London drummed in his remembering ears, the mysteriously-recollected scent of a pink tropical flower in one of the hot-houses at Kew fluttered his breathing, it changed to the dry, harassing odor of Russia leather a woman in black lace had worn the curious semi-perfume at a Hay- market matinee, in the next stall to theirs. In flash after flash each sense dipped into the store- house of past feeling, electrified by the indubita- ble thrill of high summer. The soul of the man emerged tremulous, an old pang echoing at his heart : his lips shaped silently the name of his wife endearing adjectives clustering about it. 218 UNMASKING THE ELEMENTAL 219 As he crossed the cinder-path Paul Gotch be- came aware of a fellow that lay, chest down- wards, on a green knoll commanding- the white cottage a fellow in a smart tweed suit and bowler hat. He was ostensibly lost in contemplation of a penny illustrated journal. As the observer flanked the observed, he saw that the publication was one of those debauched prints begotten by the camera upon the press, and whose pages, at the moment, Libidina divided with Mars. Paul Gotch sneered, expressing a silent ferocity of pro- test; the lounger looked up in time to catch the sneer. In another moment the long limbs of the former had carried him past the spot. The other waited till his critic was out of sight, then rose, and, pocketing his paper, advanced towards the small house from which Paul had just made his exit. At the door he knocked de- liberately; the little maid Margaret answered it. "Is Mrs. Gotch in?" he asked. "Young Mrs. Gotch is," said Margaret; "the master's mother is in town." "That will do," she was informed ; "tell young Mrs. Gotch that a friend wishes to see her." And the speaker stepped into the Lilliputian hall. "Yes, sir;" returned Margaret; "what name shall I say?" "Oh, it doesn't matter about the name," was the reply ; "say it's a gentleman from Africa." "Very well, sir;" answered the little maid, and showed him into the drawing-room. 220 'A SON OF AUSTERITY The visitor took a seat and lolled therein for an instant, then made a tour of the apartment, peered at a book or two, glanced out of the window and shrugged his shoulders. "Beastly dull hole," he decided; "bet Fluffy's been bored to death." He listened intently ; a door opened and closed not far off, a step sounded without, and slowly, reluctantly a figure of anxiety and terror Hero entered. They looked at each other in silence a second's interval that seemed to embrace seonian vast- nesses ; Hero was trembling. At length she said, fighting for a simple sternness "You should not have written to me, Mr. Jeph- son; you should not have come to see me." "Dash it all!" objected Mr. Jephson; "you musn't take it like that, Fluffy; one would think I weren't to be trusted. Can't I call to see a friend just because she gets married ?" Hero's eyes reproached him; he knew that she shrank from referring to the nature of their last meeting. "I've had an awful time of it in Africa," volun- teered her uninvited guest, sitting down; "fever twice, bitten by half-a-dozen snakes, and got nearly killed in a row with a nigger. But I pulled through everything because I wanted to see you again ; I can't make it out, the hold you've got over me, Fluffy." "Mr. Jephson," said the person so addressed, UNMASKING THE ELEMENTAL 221 with pale, pathetic lips ; "if you call me that again I must ring for Margaret and ask her to show you out." Cyril Jephson stared, then laughed. "You are a plucky little woman," he responded ; "well, I'll swear off, though it is a pretty name and fitted you down to the ground once. You've changed a lot, though, by Jove ! I don't wonder, living in this hole. I've just had a week in Paris and another in London ; I was run down horribly and needed bracing up I was wishing all the time you'd been with me; gad, but you wouldn't know yourself when you'd had a few days with me! But there, I suppose I'm not to think of what might have been." "You must go now, please," said Hero. Her blue eyes were like stars, her cheeks had begun to burn, her mouth set in a determined line. But in her soft cheeks there were unmistakable hol- lows, to betray the strain she was putting upon herself. "Don't say that," besought Cyril Jephson, whetted to desperation by this firm front; "have some mercy on a fellow. You don't know how I've thought about you in that infernal swamp. I used to dream about the Isle of Man and the fun we had there. Remember our boat being caught in the current round Douglas Head, and how I swore at the johnnies that tried to help us, and would get her out myself because I couldn't bear to look a fool before you?" 222 A SON OF AUSTERITY Hero drooped ; the picture came back to her : as pictures will come back flung upon the can- vas of the mind beyond the power of words to copy. The sheer black crags, velveted skyward from their verge with motley greens and loamy yellow, dotted with grouped pleasure-seekers, and crowned by a castellated clump of brick and mor- tar ; the dove-gray piers and breakwater, the driv- ing spray, the swirling undertow, the shouting boatmen in the nearing gig, the fierce torso on the central thwart of the four-oar hat gone, coat off, muscles starting, face scarlet with energy and passion a Coconnas of the nineteenth century. For an instant only recurrent admiration over- came her ; she passed from it into calm. "You forget that I am married, Mr. Jephson," she said, coasting dangerously near argument. "Do I?" retorted the accused; "I wish I did. When I think of your husband I could wring his neck. He can't appreciate you ; I've met the sort. I'd have given you your fling lord ! a man can't knock about the world as I've done without know- ing something of women. I tell you, a woman wants her fling, and, by gad, if she's one of the right sort she's bound to have it." "I can't stay any longer," said Hero, distress- fully; "I have a friend here." "Dash it ! I'll bet I'm the older friend of the two," cried Cyril Jephson; "you'll let me be a friend still, won't you?" UNMASKING THE ELEMENTAL 223 "No, no," begged Hero ; "please go away and don't come any more ever." Denial is the throttle of emotion when it is absolute it raises the pressure alarmingly: the human engine has no competent safety-valve. Cyril Jephson became avid he fell on his knee.- ; both, which was a mistake. Paul Gotch, with more courtly instincts, had pleaded his cause upon one. The latter attitude has fewer con- tacts with the humorous. "Don't send me away altogether," urged the suppliant; "I can't give you up like that, Fluffy, I can't; you're the one woman I really want; it's awful to think I must let him have you, you know." "Oh, what am I to do?" cried Hero, meaning that when an able-bodied man will not accept his dismissal it is extremely difficult to get rid of him. "Say you're the least little bit fond of me," suggested her suitor coaxingly. His face was glowing, his eyes devoured her, his mustache bristled over his powerful teeth. "Certainly not," was the immediate decision. Cyril Jephson would have spoken, but Hero motioned him into silence, enforced by a whis- pered "Hush !" There was a halting step in the passage; it came to the threshold. A moment's fumbling and the door swung inward. Elsie Stuart entered, carrying the chilti in her arms. The petitioner had gained his feet; a glance _- 4 'A SOX iV AUSTERITY showed him the ::e\vcomer \\ as sightless : he re- ma ined mure. "Excuse me. dear." said Elsie, "but they've sent for me from home, and Margaret is busy with lunch. May I give Baby to his mother?" "Of course." answered Hero, blushing furious- ly, and accepted the small burden. The blind giri had on her hat. she made for the door: from that point she returned, disengaging something from her pocket. "Here is Cyril's rattle," she observed: "I am always marching it off with me." "Thank you. dear." murmured Hero, freezing horribly, and Elsie completed her departure. The man Jephson was tucking a perspicacious smile into the corners of his mouth. The other saw it and struck out desperately. "Mr. Jephson." she whispered a clear, sibi- lant threat, like the voice of a sword-edge in the air "go. or I shall hate you." "Then good-bye." she was told, genially; "but not not for the last time, eh ?" A stride or two and the outer door dosed softly. From the win- dow Cyril Jephson peered in. Hero was sitting, a figure of stone, the child slumbering on her lap. . . . So far as her superficial consciousness was con- cerned. Hero's mind remained, for some while thereafter, a more or less perfect blank. But there fell occasionally upon that raised tablet the shadows of a vague and mysterious cerebration. UNMASKING THE ELEMENTAL 225 The shadows themselves were no less vague than fearful. "Not for the last time," the man Jeph- son had said to her. An inference from the child's name and her apprehensive tremor had tempted him to indulge in that ominous prophecy. His discernment made her angry, yet warned her that his mood had become dangerous what the word meant she knew without thinking it had adumbrated ignominy. Elsie's paganism called to her wandering mind ; she fled from it, shiver- ing. For her the springs of action were in her- self ; drawn skyward, she hugged the earth ; dragged earthward, she fought to fly. Nor had the last year passed over her fruitlessly. Some- thing new asserted itself in her, a power of in- choate ethical criticism ; she protected Cyril Jeph- son from it, however, and feared herself for doing so as much as she feared him for needing it. One thing she permitted herself actively to cognize; she could not be said, in any feminine sense of the word, to love her husband. The tears welled up into her throat; she pitied him whole-heartedly at the admission; an orgasm of womanly compassion shook her into a sob, she blamed herself for her inability to warm to him ; yet the maternal in her regard for him lingered upon her palate like a taint. Once she had almost loved him unwonted comfort, exaltation, the pride of empire, had effervesced into a beady froth imitating the piled white foam of passion. Her thoughts came back to the child in her 220 A SOX OF AUSTERITY lap it was more like Paul than ever : her part in it seemed suppressed, hidden, a thing unhal- lowed her body had been tithed by Lticina; not so her mind, the child left her cold. Paul, on the other hand, felt his pulses beat back upon his own arteries. Nevertheless, Hero remembered his question, and knew that, in very truth, she did not grudge him this reflex of himself. But she herself was indifferent, as the mirror may well be. Her unwitting cynicism was profound. When next she looked down at the child it had awakened, and the serene blue of its delicate orbs was answering to her own. She recognized the fraction of herself and sighed. Yet she felt that she did not grudge that, either; she had taken deeply the imprint of Paul Gotch's character a certain breath of gentle comprehension was the result; at times she flattered herself with his ecstatic passion for her. Oddly enough, she did not regret her tribute to that passion : something in her had smitten him with a kind of madness, the fault was not his; she had liked him for his uniqueness, pitied him for his ill-starred attach- ment, beguiled him with a counterfeit, and some- time self-deceiving love, and paid his devotion- with a life. A quaint idea stole upon her that so she had earned her manumission. The return of Mrs. Gotch and the belated serv- ice of lunch broke in upon her confused medita- tion; afterwards she complained of a headache and went to lie down, giving the child into the UNMASKING THE ELEMENTAL 227 elder woman's care. Selina retired to Paul's work-room and perched herself in the sunshine of the window-bay, dancing her little grandson and chattering to him absurdly. Her theories ex- hausted themselves upon matrimony; childhood touched in her a vein of irresponsible naturalism. Paul arriving in due course, heard of Hero's indisposition, and came up-stairs to draw the blinds and prescribe a wet bandage. The physi- cian lapsing in the lover, he stayed to whisper and condole. His hands were cool and firm; they affected the dissembling Hero extravagant- ly. She pretended to sleep ; at last he went away with elaborate caution. Wearied by her excitement and the fatigue of complex thought, Hero fell asleep in earnest. Nor did she wake until it was verging upon dusk. She rose, put her hair in order, and descended, hungry and cramped. Paul's room was empty, her "shrine" dark. She passed to the parlor across the narrow hall. The door was not latched; she pushed it and entered. The table, was laid for dinner, the lamps lighted. In a big chair sat Mrs. Gotch, the child on her lap ; it was crooning and kicking. Paul leaned over it, inter- ested and amused. Hero seemed to be peeping at them from a -great distance something told her that if it were so they would be no less absorbed and happy. CHAPTER XX THE GORDIAN KNOT A DAY or two passed; the normal re-asserted itself. Hero slept and worked, ate and drank, nursed and read. Her tendency to inertia over- powered her unrest. A sequel of the recent strain abode with her; half of her mentality seemed asleep; her mind enjoyed a dull peace, such as a fatalist might borrow from his cynical creed. She lounged in her rocking-chair, a book in her lap ; the gentle stimulus of the tea-cup came welcomely to her drowsy brain, the sunshine yel- lowed the afternoons half-comforting, half-nar- cotizing her. Sometimes she dozed. Paul felt the heavy dubiety of her mood; he studied her face in one of her occasional trances. The woman, he saw, had dominated the girl, slumber accentuated the broad lines of the brow and chin, the white, veined eyelids lent the grave countenance an air of the largely classic. The mouth, slightly parted, was incongruously childish, retaining the incipient sob which he associated with his first observation of her ; it drew him as a magnet draws steel. Every fiber 228 THE CORD I AN KNOT 229 of his being craved that mysterious contact that we call a kiss. The lips were full and red, curved appealingly, the upper trembled in a ripe sus- pense, like a drooped and dewy cherry. Her hair, dragged somewhat downward by her position, fell over her temples and ears ; the little pink lobes of the latter swelling from under the impromptu bandeaux; she had taken the brooch out of her high collar, her throat quivered to the long sighs of her breathing. Behind her head was a big cushion with a cover of silk and velvet patchwork; some vivid tones stared her cheeks into the most delicate modulation of that magical nondescript, flesh-tint. Paul felt that there brooded about her a sense of self-contained beauty that excluded him like an abyss. Her almost petulant calm the ad- mission of a haunting discontent, shadowing though forgotten chid him into suppression. Languor became in him a paralyzing grief. The wedding ring on one small flexed hand challenged him ; he stooped pitifully regret is more master- ing even than passion and kissed her. The blue eyes opened affrightedly ; Paul Gotch saw into their pained, unresponsive depths, and something clamored about his heart. The backwash of de- feated rapture bellows among the caverns of hate. Hero saw that flash of madness in his visage, and a great pity moved her. She lifted her lips to his, pathetically, entreatingly, like an apprehen- sive child. He accepted the caress : her lips were 230 A SON OF AUSTERITY cold ! The dew had fallen from the cherry, the feminine had faded into the \voman. He went back to his seat and pretended to write. It was on the same day that Hero, passing through the hall, received from the maid Mar- garet, who had just taken it from the postman, a package addressed in a clerkly caligraphy. She recognized this last, and her nerves grew tense; she carried the parcel up-stairs and opened it. Among layers of cotton-wool and tissue-paper was a little silver cup. A note accompanied it. "DEAR MRS. GOTCH, I hope you will allow me to offer my namesake, through you, the en- closed trifle. Trusting soon to see you again and to have the pleasure of making your husband's acquaint- ance, Believe me to be, Very truly yours, CYRIL JEPHSON." She glanced mechanically at the cup ; it was en- graved with the fatal appellation. For an instant Hero hesitated between anger and tears; the cool deliberation of the letter alarmed and offended her, more of the former, however, since she slipped into dejected weeping. She felt in herself, and feared to feel, a curious lassitude. Yet under her inert bewilderment THE GORDIAN KNOT there stirred a recently-developed intelligence Encladus-wise, prophesying doom in huge trem- ors, scarcely understood. She glimpsed disaster, luridly. The cup peered up from among its wrappings like a frigid, contemptuous orb, mocking her. She saw again Paul's countenance, grief-wrung, suddenly comprehending Jephson's broadly dominant, disarmingly good-tempered. Imag- ination brought the two men together; the fan- cied juxtaposition was electrical ; a flash of hor- rible alarm glared across her thoughts; in that chill and vivid illumination she perceived a way out. So might lightning among mountains show to the belated traveler the sullen but opportune pass. She went to a bureau-drawer, unlocked it, with- drew a jewel-case, and lifted the tray. Beneath was a flat, parchment-bound volume, the typical bank pass-book. The balance was marked in the usual penciled figures. There were nearly sixty pounds. Action was foreign to Hero's character, but unaccustomed qualities had been integrating themselves; she found herself strangely cool and executive. All below-stairs was still, lunch over, the tea-hour yet to come. She sought for a com- pact Gladstone bag and began to pack it with necessities. Seeking for some linen, she met with a pile of tiny garments ; a wave of emotion rolled over her. She had remembered the child! 232 'A SON OF AUSTERITY \Yith the recollection came also the realization of her so trifling yet momentous folly; the child was Paul's son, and it bore the Christian name of Cyril Jephson. If her husband knew ! she hor- rified herself with the contingency. To petition the man Jephson for secrecy occurred to her. only to be repudiated; a blind instinct of self-respect fought with a flattering whisper that in a moment she could bend him to her will. The child was but little to her; she confessed the fact without shame, of the kind conventionally probable; what shame she experienced was that it could be without her warming to it. But con- templating Paul's futile tenderness, she was almost pleased that she need not leave him utterly lacking some part of her. Mrs. Gotch would rear it; it would grow to the masculine stock, a frail scion hardened into their stern vigor. She would be best absent from the hardening process ; she was herself a wilding, sensuous plant. The perception, not the simile, w r as Hero's. She sat down to write to her husband; then the tears fell swift and hot tears of mingled self-reproach and compassion, the gentler mood for him : she knew that she .was doing a cruel and a foolish thing, yet knew also that she had been wronged in the beginning, and that out of that wrong had sprung both pain and folly. Not that she passed any verdict upon Paul; she sor- rowed for that impetuous love which had so fruit- lessly enforced her. As she fastened the envelope THE GORD1AN KNOT 233 a novel pang was born at her heart and stayed with her many days. She completed her packing, secured the bag and hid it in a closet on the landing. Conceiving *j o no other way to dispose of the silver cup. she put it in a corner of the Gladstone ; her letter to Paul she laid by till she should need to use it. These grimly coherent preparations constituted the first spontaneous exercise of her own will during more than a year; already she felt the better for them. Elsie, inviting herself to tea, found Mrs. Gotch out, of which fact Margaret informing her young- er mistress, recalled Hero from her melancholy seclusion. The blind girl was exuberant ; a wonderful hat cardinal bows and black tips and a cardinal blouse made her curiously modern ; her perpetual cloak, a wrap in winter, a light dust-screen in summer, was drawn about her, theater- fashion, disguising her blemished shoulders. Her face was coquettish, her temper mirthful. She had several drooping purple plumes of heliotrope at her breast ; their scent floated from her. "How smart we are!" said Hero, kissing her guest ; "I shall have to make up to Justine myself one of these days." A casual phrase, this last, unwittingly stumbled into, though it left her shivering. "Justine's a dear," responded Elsie; "don't you like my flowers?" 234 A SON OF AUSTERITY "They are lovely!" her hostess told her; "but they are too sweet; they would make my head ache if I were to wear them." She added con- siderately: "They are just perfect a little dis- tance away/' "That is the difference between you and me !" vouchsafed the other; "I like very sweet sw'eets and you don't, I like very sad sadnesses and you don't, I like ever-so-muchness of all sorts, be- twixt-and-betweens only worry me. Shall I tell you something?" "Do," answered Hero. "My flowers," whispered Elsie, "are a mys- tery." "That isn't very clear," answered the recipient of this vague confidence. "I can't help it," said the blind girl ; "but that's why I am so happy to-day I could sing my head off with happiness." Hero said no more ; Elsie loved an atmosphere of bewilderment. "Where's Baby?" inquired the wearer of the heliotrope. "Asleep in the other room," was the reply. "Oh !" said Elsie, disappointed but reconciled a child's slumbers are sacred. "You are very fond of him, Elsie?" asked Hero, abruptly. "Of course !" The answer was almost startled. "I never knew much about babies before ; it's such a beautiful feeling when you've got the dear in THE GORDIAN KNOT 235 your arms. Often and often since I've wished I had one of my own. Once I told Justine I did, and she said, 'Heaven, petite, you must not tell all the world that.' " Hero sat down on the floor at the blind girl's side. "If anything ever happens to me, Elsie," she began slowly, "you will go on being very fond of Baby for my sake. You are happier than Paul or Mrs. Gotch; somehow or other, it seems as if ordinary people couldn't be happy without being wicked, but you aren't ordinary." "I'm nothing to boast about, if you ask me!" interjected Elsie; "I'm sly and cunning, and selfish and deceitful and "S-s-sh, dear!" cried Hero; "what nonsense!" "I am," persisted the confessee; "and what is most awful, I enjoy being all of them. When I think what I've done that Justine and Dearie don't dream about, it warms me like the hot port wine they used to give me when I was ill. You should see how I wheedle Justine to tell me stories about bad people. And when I'm alone I turn myself into those bad people. and do it all over again in my head." Hero pondered there was indeed a note of diablerie in the blind girl's mobile humanity. "But there !" decided Elsie, "I shall always love that baby of yours. He's the only thing that ever makes me ashamed of myself; if he were mine I should want him to grow up into a splen- 236 'A SON OF AUSTERITY did man, as gentle as Dearie, but much, much more honest as honest as Air. Gotch, even, but happier, and as beautiful and as brave as Lohen- grin : Lohengrin is nearly my ideal, but Elsa was a little fool. It's when I think what a wonder- ful man I should want a baby of mine to be that I am ashamed of myself. If he knew what I was like inside he'd be ashamed of his mother." Hero's eyes were full of tragic re-consideration ; she trembled at the thought of that packed Glad- stone up-stairs. The crisis of her hesitation was broken by a conventional tapping; Hero re- plied to it. "A gentleman to see you, ma'am," announced Margaret, and held the door wide. Cyril Jeph- son entered, hat off and bowing ; seeing that Hero was not alone he began upon a formal sentence. She caught at Elsie's hand and sprang up, gripping it tightly. "Margaret," she said in a thin, high-pitched voice, so strange that all three listeners started, "you are mistaken, I am not at home to any one." The man Jephson lost his nerve; this proud, fierce, pallid woman was no kin of little Fluffy, "improver" to the millinery. He mumbled a hasty apology and beat a retreat, escorted by the astounded Margaret. The victor remained standing, mute and rigid. "Hero, Hero!" cried Elsie, alarmed; "Hero, darling, what is the matter?" But Hero only fell on her knees and wept. The blind girl THE GORDIAN KNOT 237 smoothed the curls on her friend's temples. At last the weeper quieted. "You won't mind my not asking you to stay to tea?" Hero besought her visitor; "if I do, Paul will see what a state I'm in; if you don't, I can send him in a cup and go and lie down." Elsie kissed her and got up promptly. "Thank you ever so much," sobbed Hero ; "I've done what's right, so don't trouble about me in the least; I shall get over it." The blind girl hugged her tenderly and turned homewards with the wondering maid. Mar- garet's mistress went up-stairs and bathed her face pertinaciously. Then she got out her check and pass-books and slipped them with some loose money into the pocket of a durable black gown, which she donned with eager speed. Soon she was creeping down the narrow flight which led to the hardly less narrow hall of the cottage. Each step creaked noisily; she felt the Gladstone bag heavy in the extreme. A moment she paused outside the door of her husband's room ; she heard him cough and move his chair a trick he had when re-addressing himself to his work. The quiet of the place, the sun streaming through the semi-circular fan-light^ the warm familiarity of the grouped doors and stairway, all impressed her regretfully the fact surprised her. She hurried across the chicken-yard at the rear, 238 A SON OF 'AUSTERITY fluttering its feathered folk with her flying skirts, and let herself out at the rough wooden exit; it had to be locked after her and the key pushed under. Her direction lay not to St. Faith's, but from it. She made for the more definitely suburban road which ran along the other flank of the meadow. To the west of the cottage its north- ern frontier undulated markedly ; the hollows con- cealed her from possible observation. As she traversed it she was conscious that the once repel- lent prospect was also not without its claim upon her regret. The sky over it was splendidly ample, the air fresh and cleanly : the diversity of the land picturesque a certain solitude lent it distinction. At the western border she stopped to glance back, drawn by cords she had not dreamed could be so strong. Then she called upon herself to be resolved, and, mounting a lumbering omnibus, was carried the first stage of her momentous journey. At half-past two o'clock she reached a branch bank and cashed a check for the whole of her balance. A cab bore her thence to St. James's Street, to be whirled under the bed of the river. From the Great Western she took a ticket to the Metropolis, the less-favored route did her judgment credit. An hour to wait dragged painfully, but ended at length; the ex- press passed through Chester in the mellow fall of the evening. THE GORDIAN KNOT 239 From what was she flying? she could not, would not have told. There was that in her which, boggling at the Gordian knot, had cut it, as Alexander did. CHAPTER XXI HOPE OUT OF HELL THIS was Hero's letter written in a simple, almost childish hand. At the beginning it was neat, at the end it verged on the illegible. "Mv DEAR HUSBAND, [There was a spoiled sheet on the dressing- table where she had worked a sheet bearing these words, canceled; yet she had returned to the phrase.] "I am going to make you very miserable, and I hate myself for it. I am going away from you, yes, and from Baby ; he belongs to you most, he is not really mine. I have enough money; with Baby coming, it is a long time since I spent anything much; what you give me has quite mounted up sixty pounds. I am going away quite alone; but, dear, do I need to say that ? If only I could have loved you I should have been the happiest girl in the world ; I did not think there were any men like you. I have tried to love you ; sometimes I have thought 240 HOPE OUT OP HELL 241 I had got to, only for a feeling that I didn't want the things that you did. I expect it's the way I was hrought up. There is another reason for me going away. If I stopped you would learn to despise me : up to now I haven't done anything very wrong, only mean and contemptible, but I might. I wish you didn't love me, but I want you to be able to think well of me. Don't try and find me. please ; I can earn my living easily now. I know you would rather I let you look after me, but I should hate that. It will do me good to struggle a bit. Please don't think I regret anything, espe- cially Baby. I am a little fool for running away, but it is better for a woman to be a fool than wicked. Don't blame yourself ever about me, if I were worth it I should have been able to be happy with you. A sensible woman would give the world to have a man like you love her. Per- haps when I'm older and have worked the non- sense out of myself I'll come back to you if you will let me. Now good-bye, dear ; I do love you, somehow, that's why I'm going away to hide myself. HERO. P.S. I am glad Baby has my eyes." Paul Gotch mastered mechanically the contents of the four small pages; his brain sought to as- sume surprise, but his heart rejected the emotion. 242 A SON OF AUSTERITY Certain of the sentences fell on him as the indict- ment falls on the ears of the guilty. He had known all along that he was but as one who cele- brates a victory in the castle-yard with the keep unwon. And now from that stern tower had poured out a desperate sortie, with shocks of doom. He laid the sheet down ( Margaret had brought it to him, finding her mistress gone and the en- velope in a conspicuous place) and grappled with the imminent tragedy. So he had failed to mas- ter that proud spirit, that sullen yet persistent individuality. From its silver shield the gleam of his own passion had come back to him in a treacherous radiance, beguiling yet unwarming. The fact shouted itself into his ear; he cringed from a hideous realization ; the sinof the violator was his, his its black self-indulgence, its irrepar- able wrong, its loathing frenzy of remorse. The idolized moments of the past avenged themselves in shivering paroxysms of reproach. The still countenance, the soft maternal contours, un- touched by ecstasy, the virginal blue eyes, gentle yet' enduring he cried upon himself as Cain did. That she should need to seek in flight the isolation at which she so sadly hinted the shame of it struck him to the earth, his cloak of pride torn from him as .he fell. And still the avenging memories rolled over him, passing explosively from the positive to the negative of recollection ; the poignant thrill invaded intolerably hour after HOPE OUT OF HELL 243 hour of the cherished past. The hoarded wine of recollection became disgustful gall. Meanwhile intelligence analyzed automatically the essentials of the letter. A detail focused sud- denly; she had gone away to hide herself, and, in doing so, warned him of her suspicion, that somewhat, and indescribably she loved him. Also her flight was foolish, yet she had chosen folly to wickedness. A stealing calm penetrated the thinker's wounded consciousness; it was not wholly from him that she had fled. From her- self, then? that was impossible, save by a trite figure of speech. From another ? It was a fiend among thoughts ; yet he entertained it, gathering illumination. Except some rival fantasy had captained Hero's wayward impulses he would have tamed them, drugged with tenderness and peace, to his own pleasure. The argument was a rack to wrench him limb from limb, but he flung himself upon it. Balm for his bruises! How innocently she praised him her husband ! no nobler shadow fell across him ; he had magnetized her spirit it still pointed loyally to him, the needle to the pole. What other influence had biased her fate? she feared it, whatever it was : in flying she had pre- ferred folly to evil. Had she loved she would have stayed, being safe. Love only can protect from love and that which masquerades as love. A bitter cry broke from his lips; she had then fled from love and a love that, leaving her ideals 244 r A SON OF AUSTERITY faithful to their former liege, proclaimed itself love's counterfeit. The pangs of a too utter deso- lation laid hold upon Paul Gotch. Nevertheless he plucked re-assurance out of them. He had prophesied rightly the cliff or the quagmire ; the choice had been made, the best road taken. He had turned her life aside to the catastrophe ; she had met it with that native mag- nanimity which he had thought to discern in her. She had gone away quite alone "Do I need to say that?" whispered the scarcely-dried ink. His eyes wetted, his mouth gripped at its outrushing grief, his soul sprang up, passionate, vindicating. By God ! she did not need ; there had been that between them which had opened the windows of her personality her heart shrank from him, cowed by fate, mischance, the whimsical choices of the flesh, but her soul had walked with him as a friend. She should go out free, as a noble capitulant to an honorable liberty, with unstained banners free in the free air. Chivalry made him drunk with a splendid enthusiasm. She did not regret anything, especially the child. It cleansed his palate like a draught of spring water. A wild pleasure, with a wrung, piteous mirth in it, throbbed in his veins the emotion was half sane, wholly illogical, howbeit he hugged it delightedly. Lives sprang like weeds from the trifling amours of the mob glasses filled a score of times with champagne and then put by for ale. His had once been HOPE OUT OF HELL 245 brimmed with Tokay, and now it was dashed to pieces a worthy fate for the rarest crystal shaped by the blower's tube. He gasped in the Alpine atmosphere of tragedy. He went to look at his son. unconsciously re- taining the letter. The little one was lying- awake ; its pacific orbs regarded him, recognizing an intimate. There was in them no trace of that disquiet which had saddened Hero's. Otherwise the wide pupils, limpid and intensely blue, were those of his wife. The reflection provoked one of the indefinable recollections that will arrest the deepest train of thought. He raised the letter the postscript spoke to him with sudden force: "I am glad Baby has my eyes." Amid a fog of incredulous surmise he groped for the esoteric significance of the words; their equation came to him, strongly, convincingly, as totals come to the lightning calculator. She loved him and did not know it! some malign obsession held her in thrall : she could not read her own heart; notwithstanding, she copied its complex characters for him to decipher. "I am glad Baby has my eyes," he said it over to him- self, it warmed him like a cordial. Re-read, the letter set him girding at fate; it was so honorable, so wifely ! If witchcraft were not rank superstition and a spell might be cast by an enemy upon some noble matron, in whom the bias of sorcery and an old tenderness for a dear lord should grapple for the mastery, they 246 A SON OF AUSTERITY might so express themselves. What was he to do ? he plumbed the depths about him. Pursue her? it was the easiest course, the normal, the conventional, the sane. Yet he shrank from it ; it impressed him as ignoble there was a gravely obscure adequacy about her own defense of flight ; he yielded a bitter intellect- ual assent to her good faith. She had money, ample for her immediate needs he might be able to get more to her without incurring the odium of pursuit; he would try to think it out. And the future! He shied from the problem, feeling sub-consciously that at least he could endure ; irony indicated to him his strong point-^- quiescence. A misdirected activity had brought him to this pass. In such fashion a clumsy gen- eral might defeat himself more completely than the most wily foe could hope to. How he had muddled ! exaltation sank into despair. The dusk came down upon him like the materializa- tion of his own gloom ; the child slept again, dark- ness flooded the clayfield, involving the white cot- tage somberly, thought died into inert sorrow. When he rose it was to light the lamp in Hero's "shrine"; the yellow glow irradiated the empty chair, the table with its books, the silken throat of the work-basket, the arabesques of the screen. As he gazed the extravagance of his emotion frustrated itself; he became numb. He began to fold the letter, looking for the dis- carded envelope. Finding it, he restored the HOPE OUT OF HELL 247 note to its receptacle and smoothed the torn flap. There were some words upon it; he made them out with difficulty. "Please" yes, it was "please" "don't be very miserable." She had turned back to write that, underlining the adverb with an impulsive dash. A. moan burst to his lips how could he obey her? was he not, indeed. most, most miserable? Mrs. Gotch arrived at last ; she had been out to tea and had stayed to argue some debatable point of social ethics. Without a word Paul gave her Hero's farewell ; Selina read it, amazed. "Really!" she cried the harshness more of surprise than anger "what a mad thing to do !" "Unusual !" said her son, with equal sternness ; "but not mad honest, if you will. It would have been so easy to drift." "But Baby," demurred Mrs. Gotch, fragment- arily; "to leave the child like that!" "That she could so leave it," responded Paul, "is the measure of my folly and shame." His voice broke ; he seated himself abruptly on the couch. Selina threw off her mantle. "She doesn't say where she is going," remarked Mrs. Gotch. "She shall not be followed," Paul answered fiercely the meaning rather than the observation "she shall not be hunted down like a criminal." "You can't let the girl go away from you in such an extraordinary manner," snapped his mother, practically. 248 A SON OF AUSTERITY "It is her right," insisted the other; "she thinks she does not love me." Mrs. Gotch lifted her eyebrows. "But she does," cried Paul ; "she does she pities me beyond the limits of pity ; so love begins. Shall I turn persecutor and terrify her into hat- ing me?" "You must consider her reputation !" urged Selina. "Reputation be damned!" swore Paul lash- ing himself into frenzy "it is too -often the leper's cloak for me to covet it for her. I laid a mine that might have blown both our souls into the Pit; she has carried the touch-paper out of reach she shall not be hounded for it. She says that she went away alone; she need not have said it I would have trusted her; it is you women that can not trust one another. But / will trust her, though all the devils from hell mocked at me like apes in a circle. My God! can not a woman flee from temptation but you must chain her to it with gyves ?" Mrs. Gotch stared at him, open-mouthed; re- sentment flushed her thin cheeks and knitted her level brows. Paul anticipated her protest: he dropped his arm on the padded extremity of the couch and laid his face against it. Distraction had thrust him upon tears. His mother saw it, and hushed on the brink of passion. She sat down by him, a little troubled HOPE OUT OF PI ELL 249 at her escape from cruelty. Her son's bent shoulders heaved and the couch shook ; Selina's eyes moistened sympathetically, she touched away the salt drops with her finger-tips. Her return- ing palm fell upon her son's ; she patted it consol- ingly. He clasped her hand a gesture of peni- tence but did not speak. Selina Gotch bit her lips ; the tears began to flow indisputably. Mother and son sat thus for a long time ; the light still gleaming in Hero's empty corner, the child slumbering in its cot hard by. CHAPTER XXII A PARADOX OF MATERNITY HERO had taken her seat in an otherwise empty compartment; her lids were drooped, her gloved hands folded in her lap. The infernal rattle be- neath, behind, and before, dulled her senses like a narcotic. Time simulated for her the change- ful yet abiding present of eternity. Thus screened, the remorseless hours outran the rapid train. The dusk grew a swelling, purple flood, low- lying as an autumnal mist. Lights shone through it, coruscating, microscopic, solitary. A waning moon hung her sharp crescent above a wisp of gossamer cloud. Unknown shires, unknown towns, unknown villages eddied by ; their breaths played momentarily upon the fugitive now the passionate scent of maturing hay, now the mys- terious odor of some dank glen, now the indefina- ble stimulus of blown water, now the grim ex- halations of infrequent cities. She became im- personal the sentient without the reflective. At last the yellowing illumination of the lamp overhead conquered the external panorama, the windows turned mirrors. Hero's perceptions narrowed and sharpened. 250 A PARADOX OP MATERNITY 251 She surveyed the compartment its intelligent simplicity offended her; her thoughts, annihilat- ing space, made for the accentuated familiarities of Home; it was the first occasion on which her regard of the white cottage had justified the cap- ital letter. Nevertheless she recalled them the thoughts indignantly ; she disciplined them with stern persistence ; finally she succeeded in concen- trating them, not so much upon the future as away from the past. The physical obtruded itself after many futile attempts. Hero localized a gnawing dissatisfac- tion it was appetite, grown frenzied : the force of its suddenly-considered appeal brought a sob of self-pity into her throat, she had eaten noth- ing since noon. At Wolverhampton she was des- perate and defeated. The starting train drew her from the very threshold of the refreshment- room ; she sat down again in the lonely compart- ment, biting her lip. At Leamington her isolation ended. The in- truders were a baby uncomfortably pretentious in a stiff white hat and caped coat with fleecy trimmings and a woman. A glance at the lat- ter produced in Hero a haunting impulse of rec- ognition ; she groped for a clue and found it. The woman was a type Hero had seen the type in London and marveled. In brief, the woman and the child were anoma- lies each of the other. She was ample, high- bosomed, tightly-laced; for her the smart obvi- 252 A SON OF 'AUSTERITY ously invaded the flesh her crimpled coiffure, the flat curls on her low forehead, her dazzling false teeth, her staring box-cloth ulster, all proclaimed it, and proclaimed her, too, the essential Negation of Motherhood. The bahy piqued Hero's acute- ness. Hunger retreating temporarily before in- evitable famine, she began to study her neighbors the large and the small. Incontinently the child woke and cried ; chal- lenged by the roaring of the express it took up the challenge. Its guardian dandled it, petulantly and unavailingly. The infantile vision focusing Hero's friendly concern, the weeper paused to ponder her. A pang struck the young woman a pang ruthless, indomitable, crushing, as the knout may have descended upon patrician shoulders. She could have shrieked to think of the child Cyril. Almost her heart stood still; with a paroxysm that brought the beaded sweat to her brow it re- sumed its pulsations. Involuntarily, piteously, she held out her arms to the little one opposite. It made an inchoate motion, which its custodian interpreted by passing her burden across the nar- row aisle. "If you really don't mind," she said crisply; "he's just got me wild with his carryings-on to- day, and when I'm wild I can't do the least bit of good with him. Perhaps he'll behave himself with you, he does take fancies like that." The speaker settled herself comfortably into A PARADOX Or MATERNITY 253 her corner and began, for no apparent purpose, to take off her gloves. Hero saw that she wore, in addition to a wedding-ring, several jeweled circlets, assertively scintillating. "Going far?" asked the other, pulling the deli- cate skins into shape. "London," said Hero, touching the baby's cheeks to make it laugh. "So am I," she was told; "it's the only place worth living in. I've been out of it a week, and I might as well have been dead. Do you live there?" Hero answered briefly; she was getting the child to sleep. The wearer of the box-cloth ulster threw it open, revealing a somewhat soiled gown of fawn-colored material. "You do know how to manage children," she confessed frankly; "I quite envy you. Are you married ?" "No," said Hero. The lie burned her mouth, the golden symbol on her left hand seemed to as- sert itself even through her glove. "Ah!" was the indolent response; "I suppose it comes natural to some people. I always hated the idea of having them myself." The second of the three pronouns was adequate, if oblique. "That was only until you had one of your own," suggested Hero, rocking gently. "You wait till you're married," she was ad- vised, with a certain suppressed mirth that had in it a singularly shrewd element. "When any 254 A SOX OF AUSTERITY one is pleased it's the man, and that's only at first. Our fun is spoiled for years and years, but they don't care except when it comes to standing the ex's." "But all men are not alike," objected Hero, urged by a painful instinct of justice. "Oh, yes, they are," was the retort; "some of them are deeper than the rest, that's all." She dismissed the subject with a grimace. "Would it be troubling you too much," she propounded, "if I had forty winks? That child kept me awake all last night." "Not in the least," said Hero, obscurely crit- ical of her companion's egotism; "baby seems quite settled now." The other put up her feet, wrapping the skirt of her ulster round them. "You know, it's awfully kind of you," she ob- served, with an affectation of extreme gratitude, and in another moment she was slumbering heavily. Hero seized the opportunity to take off her own gloves and remove the tell-tale ornament from her left hand. She blushed hotly as she did so. Her purse was the only convenient hiding-place. She put the significant trifle into it with an equivocal respiration possibly of relief, not impossibly of regret. She fell upon contemplating the child; it was well-grown and healthy, yet, despite its ornate costume, vaguely unkempt; Hero noticed that A PARADOX OF MATERNITY 255 its garments were too tightly drawn about the short, apoplectic neck. Loosening them, she no- ticed that the linen so exposed was eloquently dingy. The discovery angered her. She looked at the gross, strong figure of the elder sleeper, fathoming her repellent naturalism. Again the child awakened, but without tears. Hero talked to it, glad of the necessity she was weary of silence. The little one was stolid there had not been lavished upon it those cease- less, tender evocations of intelligence which de- velop the mentality even of the suckling. Hero showed it the scenic photographs that decorated the compartment; a cow in one, a dog in another, furnished her with texts for babbling speech. The wide, brown eyes shifted interest- edly; the ill-balanced head followed her demon- strative finger. "Well," said the taker of the forty winks, sit- ting up suddenly, "you beat all for managing a child. I should have thought you'd had half a dozen of your own, only for your being so young. I am obliged to you; I was shaping for a nice headache, but it's gone off now. You must be tired, though" this last with unwilling polite- ness "let me take him. Come to mother, Babs." The baby shrank into Hero's bosom and wailed lustily. His mother reddened; pride covets all virtues. Cynicism saved the situation. "Oh, very well," she remarked, and shook her- self into order. Her foot had caught in a strip 256 A SON OF AUSTERITY of torn frilling; she dragged this latter up, ripped off a dozen inches and tossed it under the seat. The flounces thus revealed were elaborate yet untidy ; typicality extended its radius. "What part of London do you live in?" she inquired. "I don't know yet," admitted Hero, awk- wardly. The questioner peered at her curiously. "I see," she concluded ; "you're going to friends for awhile." "No," said Hero, reflecting that she might profit by a judiciously regulated frankness; "I have no friends, now. I have parted from them." "That's why you're going to London?" she was asked. "Y-yes," said Hero. "Ever been there before?" "Once," owned the cross-examined. The full, red lips pouted a humorous, worldly-wise expression was the result. "You've booked rooms somewhere, of course," she was informed; "we don't get in till nearly eleven." "I I haven't," said Hero, feeling weak; "I thought of going to the Station Hotel." The other acknowledged the information with a curt nod, and the child dropping into a doze, offered tepidly to repossess herself of it. Hero consented, and having surrendered the nursling, A PARADOX OF MATERNITY 257 promptly sat back and fainted, from the joint effects of hunger and excitement, and an abrupt visaging of the future. She recovered to find herself nauseated by brandy-and-water. The baby was crying deter- minedly, its mother knitting her brows in bewil- dered disgust at the complicated situation. "Did I go off?" gasped the patient. "I'm so sorry, but I haven't eaten anything for hours, that's all I'm not really ill." "Poor dear," said the other, relieved; "have some biscuits; they made me bring a lot for the child." She extracted sundry unsatisfying wafers from her hand-bag. Hero ate a handful ravenously, then set herself to still the infantile grief. "Mayn't I know your name?" inquired the donor of the biscuits ; "mine's Maitland Phemie Maitland, short for Euphemia, which I hate." Hero thought rapidly. "Mine is Frances Lan- caster," she said, giving her mother's Christian name and fitting to it a surname not unlike her own an alias should at least ring familiarly on the bearer's ears, if merely to avoid a suspicious inattention. "Excuse me asking it," went on Mrs. Mait- land ; "but do you earn your own living?" Miss Lancaster owned a trifle mendaciously that she did. "I'm a milliner," she added. The word brought back much. 258 A SON OF AUSTERITY "H'mf" said Mrs. Maitland. with meditative patronage. "Do you know. Miss Lancaster, it's a bit risky of me. but I've been wondering if I couldn't give you a lift. My husband's a sea- captain; I've got a little flat at Bloomsbury so as not to be dull when he's away, which is nearly al- ways. Would you like to put up with me? It would cost you less than you could do it anywhere else for. I'd make it awfully cheap for you, if you'd give me a hand sometimes with baby." The fugitive pondered ; Mrs. Phemie Maitland was the least lovely of types, but the child was re- assuring. She pitied it for its stolidity, its grimy linen, its fretful weeping. The observer watched the progress of her companion's hesitancy. "Try it for a day or two," she threw in, choos- ing her moment adroitly. "I've a decent little place I'm sure you'll be comfortable. Besides, you're not fit to go to a hotel to-night; you're as white as a sheet. Let me put you up till to-morrow. I'll not charge you anything if you'll only give an eye to baby ; he is so cross after he's been traveling." Hero was sick of indecision: she sprang to agreement. "Thank you," she said, wearily; "I will." Mrs. Phemie Maitland forthwith entered upon a process of conversational pumping which drove Hero to the verge of distraction. Yet she suc- ceeded in holding her own till they reached the great terminus in the north-west of London, A PARADOX OF MATERNITY 259 where she had a further glimpse of Madame Phemie's character, who bullied two porters with uncouth majesty while her dress-basket was be- ing hauled out of the van and loaded upon a four- wheeler. Hero chafed indignantly, shivering to and fro upon the draughty platform with the child in her arms; later, she extracted certain coppers wherewith to appease the myrmidons of the rail. When they rumbled out of the station she had contracted a supernatural headache. Mrs. Maitland's Bloomsbury proved to be Judd Street, that curious semi-thoroughfare which be- gins promisingly at Euston Road, changes its title half way down, and loses itself in the purlieus of the Foundling Hospital. Her flat was con- tained in a tall red-brick structure, before which the cab stopped. "Have you any change, Miss Lancaster?" Hero was asked. She assented mechanically. "My purse is in my under-pocket," explained Mrs. Phemie, descending; "please give him two shill- ings." The cabman opened a capacious mouth and nerved himself for the fray. Hero, trembling at the prospect of another altercation, paid out three of the desired coins. Up interminable flights of stairs the women labored, the younger burdened with the child. At the last door on the topmost landing Mrs. Maitland drew out a key and gained admission. A dark little ante-chamber faced them ; she groped 26o A SON OF AUSTERITY for matches and struck a light. Hero looked about her : it was her first entry into that peculiar product of the builder's craft, a self-contained suite. "Come in here, Miss Lancaster," said the pro- prietor of the flat, and led the way into a small room with, on one side, a lean-to roof and a dor- mer window. In it were a cheap Indian carpet, a table, some wicker chairs with cushions, a hang- ing corner-cupboard, and a gas-stove with as- bestos fringes. This last Mrs. Maitland set go- ing, after igniting a single-jet chandelier that de- pended from the ceiling. Hero was smitten unkindly by the fact that there were no books and no pictures, excepting, under the latter category, a few photographs on the mantel. She missed the generous fire-place of the work-room at the white cottage ; she missed the serried book-shelves, the flowers, the odds and ends of pottery, the rugs, the hassocks, the huge Japanese screen, the sweeping portiere, the walls crowded with objects pleasant to behold. This room was empty to the point of irritation. Mrs. Phemie Maitland was taking off her ul- ster. She was a plump contradiction art fetter- ing nature; the effect was a hardy simplicity of outline. "Baby w r ill be good w-ith you/' she remarked; 'I'll put the kettle on," and so disappeared into the rear of the flat. Re-appearing after an un- expectedly prolonged absence, she threw a cloth r A PARADOX OF MATERNITY 261 over one end of the table, and brought in a loaf, some butter, the tea-things, and a couple of tissue- paper parcels, grease-spotted. "I just ran out for these," she observed ; "I had nothing in. Do you like sausage? it was the only place open." Hero shivered, but evaded the inquiry. Mrs. Maitland dabbed on to a plate some circular slices of varying colors and diameters, and then having filled the tea-pot, took the child. ''Throw your hat and jacket down there," she said, pointing to the recessed window-seat; "we will carry them in after we have had something to eat I'm simply famishing." Hero choked through her supper. Hungry as she was, she could not do more than nibble at the enigmatic pabulum that Phemie Maitland de- voured with such gusto. The butter was strong, the tea weak, the loaf stale. The fastidious pro- vincial suffered acutely; she escaped further tor- ment by inquiring into the child's diet, and offer- ing to prepare it a meal. Phemie delegated the task with joy. "You do take to children," she said, increas- ingly impressed. The infant appetite being satisfied, Phemie mooted the idea of retirement, and having extin- guished the stove and the chandelier, showed her guest into the adjoining room. It was even more meagerly furnished than the other, boasting a bed, a cot, a toilet-table, a gas-stove alight and 262 A SON OF AUSTERITY filling the apartment with its disagreeable odor and Mrs. Maitland's dress-basket, which had been carried up by a lounger for twopence at the time of their arrival. "I've only got one bedroom," elucidated Phemie, calmly; "you don't mind, do you?" Hero did, but there was no manner of use in saying so. Mrs. Maitland went to shoot sundry bolts, and returning, fastened the door behind her. Quickly, almost brutally, she undressed the child and laid it in its cot. It was too tired to be fretful, and she herself sought slumber with the same self-centered indifference to Hero's proceed- ings that she had done in the train. "I've put you on baby's side," she intimated; "you are so clever at managing him you will turn the stove off when you're ready, won't you ?" Hero accepted both commissions the tacit and the definite one. She had sat down to brush her hair; it was a sensible method of fighting the devastating headache which had gripped her. Half-an-hour elapsed ; she had dozed in her chair, and roused to fancy her waking itself a dream. With wide, startled eyes she surveyed her sur- roundings the bare room, the cot, the dressing- table littered with powders and perfumes, and the flat white pots of would-be beauty ; she glimpsed the rolling black locks, the even complexion, the red lips of Phemie Maitland. There was a taw- dry bow or two among the cheap laces at the plump throat. Hero quivered with a vague dis- A PARADOX OF MATERNITY 263 gust; an impulse of flight prompted her. Then from the cot came a low, complaining murmur. Phemie answered it with a stertorous si eh. o Hero slipped across and soothed the child. As she bent over it an hour chimed from a neighbor- ing church she listened for the strokes : two o'clock. A dread Unknown palisaded that tiny spot with fears. Trembling and unstrung, she lay down at length to weep silently. Sleep was merciful; she wandered into unconsciousness. CHAPTER XXIH SPIRITUALITY AND A MATERIAL EQUATION "CHECKMATE/' said Patrick Stuart, moving a bishop. Paul Gotch studied the ending, then relaxed his attention. "You should have won/' commented the vicar; "but you handled your queen wrongly." "Woman against priest," said Paul, with sat- urnine humor, "there might at least have been a draw." "It does not follow," murmured the vicar; "I had a queen also." "And I a rook," answered the other; "are we playing with pieces, Stuart, or words?" Patrick Stuart tried to smile. He fingered a cigar, then lit it. Paul set up a problem. "Black to play and mate in three moves," he propounded. The vicar reflected, then pointed out the series. "Good," said the inventor; "and yet if I were to christen these bits of box- wood 'God/ 'Death/ 'Man/ and The Devil,' how you would wriggle 264 SPIRITUALITY AND AN EQUA TION 265 when I cornered God and the Devil with Man and Death." "Profanity apart," observed Patrick Smart : "I yield you an absolute freedom of nomenclature." "Peccavi!" grimaced Paul, acknowledging the covert rebuke : ''but if the nomenclature had some point, Man being the featherless biped himself, Death a day-old corpse, and God and the Devil a Bible and a volume of D'Annunzio! Would you not suspend the laws of thought that is, of chess would you not even, a move before check- mate, sweep the board and cry 'Allah il Allah!' as Mahomet did, defying criticism with a smile, as he with the sword?" "The laws of chess," said the vicar, "are arbi- trary, the laws of thought a misleading synonym for 'processes of thought.' You observe a pro- cess, you obey a law." "That is as much as to say, on the theological plane, two and two do not make four." "Do they on the mathematical?" desired Pat- rick Stuart ; "what about plus two and minus two, which make nothing?" Paul struck out. " 'For what man is there of you,' " he quoted bitterly, " 'who, if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?' Comfort me, thou man of God am I not in your parish ? Behold, I surrender to your ecclesiastical jurisdiction; bring forth bell, book, and candle, and exorcise me. Come, now, 266 A SON OF AUSTERITY begin ; you have a Gospel for the laity, expound it." The vicar flicked away the ash of his cigar, and looked pityingly at the speaker. " 'Believe and thou shalt be saved' is not that it?'' said Paul, strainedly. "From what do you wish to be saved?" he was asked. "From the resentment of being," came the dark answer. "The philosopher despises nothing," demurred the elder. "He may pity," parried Paul Gotch ; "a system of sentient existence which returns continually upon itself, and which provides no other reason for its being than that it exists, is at least pitiable. Resentment is the intellectual form of compas- sion. Philosophy aspires to prevent what hu- manitarianism only seeks to alleviate." "What do you suggest?" countered Patrick Stuart; "universal suicide?" "I suggest nothing," snapped Paul, irritably. "I find nothing in the terrestrial scheme to justify it ; I ask the reason of the External. You are a disciple of the External ; like Canning, you call in a new world to redress the balance of the old. Build me a golden bridge to it." " 'Philip saith unto him,' " repeated the vicar, albeit reverently, " 'Lord, show us the Father, and it sufrketh us. Jesus answered and said unto SPIRITUALITY AND AN EQ UA TION 267 him, He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.' " "I know, I know," vouchsafed Paul despond- ently : "it is noble, it is mysterious, it is challeng- ing, it is profound ; even to the student of compar- ative religions it is sui generis. Was it the cul- minating assertion of our futile spirituality; the incandescent credulity of an ethical genius the Shakespeare of religious thought? In other words, was that which happened in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate part of the world-tragedy or its vindication ? You take the latter view, I wonder. Hitherto I have been content to won- der, now a contrary fate drives me over the edge of the world for comfort, as once I went for curiosity." He bent forward, sending the chessmen rolling here and there. "Stuart," he said, "you and those who think more or less with you are the only court of appeal. If you have not some right on your side the material cosmogony is a spiritual vacuum, and, as Poe has told us, the hero of the Tragedy 'Man' is, after all, the Conqueror Worm. You argued, I remember, that nothing was so constant as the dissatisfied heart that had hope. / must have hope, then not the tinseled cherub whose name is Romance, but Hope, Hope, the not-a-sparrow- falleth Hope. You understand me; for God's sake if there be a God! produce the reasons for your faith, if reasons you have. I ask you for 268 A SON OF AUSTERITY them, not cynically, not lightly, but as a wounded man asks for water in a desert. You have loved, you have been worsted, you have endured ; if you know more than I know, speak! speak!" He pored upon the other's countenance as if he would have penetrated to the ultimate recesses of his mind. Patrick Stuart's mouth trembled, a shadowy confession hung about his eyes. Paul Gotch withdrew his gaze. When the vicar spoke it was in a shame-faced way. "If there were any such scientific proof as you demand," he ventured, "may I ask if you imagine it would be either a concrete or a simple one?" "What would it matter, so that it were proof?" fretted Paul, trifling with the chessmen. "It matters this far," went on Patrick Stuart, "that being, of necessity, complex and diffuse, such a proof would be, for ninety-nine out of a hundred, no proof at all. The overwhelming majority of the conventionally-educated would not so much as apprehend it though they might adopt it, nominally as a defense of, really as an adjunct to, their faith. Most of the remainder would attempt adequately to consider such a proof, and failing, might unluckily view their fail- ure as the break-down of your argument. One man in a hundred might be helped by it." "Take me for that man in your initial hun- dred," proposed Paul. The vicar evaded the suggestion. "By condi- SPIRITUALITY AND AN EQUATION 269 tioning the general belief in the validity of the spiritual," he proceeded "I adopt your preten- tious terminology upon the possibility of its rigidly scientific proof, you would deprive the mass of humanity of their sole moral corrective and ethical stimulus. And that, whether your scientific proof were forthcoming or not. It is as though you should forbid the entire British proletariat to eat until it had mastered the molec- ular theory." "Where does this lead?" fenced Paul. "To this," he was enlightened, "that it is neces- sary for the spiritual, however scientific it may be, to make a convincing appeal to some other faculty than the scientific." Paul rose. "And thus began," he retorted disdainfully, "superstition, hierarchies, Holy Mother Church, St. Bartholomew, Smithfield, suppression of knowledge, profitable piety, et hoc genus omne. Thank you, I have read too much history." "Thus also," said the vicar, calmly, "began aspiration, self-sacrifice, pity for the poor, all the ennobling fruits of confidence in the Unseen." "They will be evidence," Paul informed him, putting the chessmen away, "when I deny spir- ituality to be an enigma." He assumed a cheerful realism and took his departure, suddenly becoming more drooping and meditative than ever. There was a new note in his bearing, a trifle of the wanly patient. 270 'A SON OF AUSTERITY In the hall he turned, went up-stairs to the door of Elsie's private parlor and knocked. "Come in," he was requested. lie entered softly, to discover Justine reading aloud, and Elsie ensconced in an angle of the sofa, torment- ing the Angora. "Mr. Gotch !" exclaimed the blind girl, spring- ing up before her visitor; "I'm glad it's you," she added, holding out her hand ; "what is the matter with Hero? your mother will only tell me that she has gone away for a little while, Dearie only sighs, and Justine swears she can't find out a thing. Sit down, please; it's an age since you were up here, isn't it? not since Hero and you had tea together for the first time/' Paul met the Frenchwoman's eye, and made an appealing gesture. She nodded kindly and slipped out of the apartment. Paul led Elsie to the seat from which she had just risen. The blind girl felt the constraint of his manner and shivered. "Don't say she's ill," he was adjured piteously. "No," rejoined Paul, sitting down by her; he looked doubtfully at the classic white face with its swimming violet eyes. "That's a load off my mind," she assured him, relieved; "Hero is such a lot to me, and so is Baby is it Baby that is ill?" she added, with a quick, feverish anxiety. "No, nor Baby either," stammered Paul; SPIRITUALITY AND AN EQUATION 27 1 "Elsie, tell me, has Hero been happy lately? Tell me the truth without fear." The lustrous, strangely-tinted orbs quivered in sympathy with the delicate lips. Elsie dissented. "N-not very," she said ; "but, you know, Hero's not the sort of person to be made happy easily. That's what comes of holding- yourself in so much ; you get bottled up, and then happiness hurts you as much as miserableness." "Hero talked to you a good deal," ventured Paul nervously. "No, she doesn't," corrected Elsie, not noticing the past tense; "she can't do with talking about herself it hurts her. No, I just feel how she works, as I do with every one." "And how do I work?" asked Paul, half be- guiled, half halting on the verge of his evil tid- ings. The blind girl put her head on one side. "Oh, you," she replied, pursing her lips; "you're bottled up, too, only you get rid of it in big words. That's why it doesn't hurt you. But Hero doesn't know any big words, and she doesn't know how to use the little ones. No more do you." "And how can I learn?" demanded Paul, thoughtfully. "You can't learn," he was informed; "you don't do it because you would be ashamed of your- self for being babyish, and you won't know how to do it till you don't mind that. Justine and 272 'A SON OF 'AUSTERITY Dearie used always to be saying to me, 'Fie, for shame!' But I didn't care, and now I can always say exactly what I feel ; so when I'm miserable I'm not as miserable as I should be if I couldn't, and when I'm happy I'm happier. But bother me! what about Hero, when is she coming back?" The question smote cruelly. Paul bowed him- self and wrestled for control. "I don't know," he got out. brokenly. Elsie groped towards the sob the instinct of compassion translating itself into that of touch her soft hand, fragile and feminine, fell upon Paul Gotch's shoulder. Her face was dilated by an agony of suspense; it drove Paul to the merciful definition of speech. "She has gone away from me, Elsie alone, to live by herself," he said ; "she thinks she does not love me. I have made a sad mess of her life, you see." "How terrible !" whispered Elsie, slowly. "But you you are fond of her, Mr. Gotch?" The viewless eyes did not embarrass, as sighted ones would have done. Paul felt that some link of reticence snapped within him; the blind girl's "little words" sprang to his tongue. "She was the only thing," he gasped in a storm of tearless emotion, "I ever really cared for; I would have died to make her happy." The defeat of true love was a new phenomenon to Elsie; she regarded it with dismay. "You SPIRITUALITY AXD AN EQUATION 273 poor, poor people!" she murmured, then suddenly, "How Hero must hate herself!" "Don't say that," besought Paul ; "it's too awful I couldn't bear to know that I had first spoiled her life and then made her think herself to blame. It is my fault ; I wanted to tie her to me." "Hero has no right not to love you," snapped the blind girl, warmed by his grief, "when you love her as you do." "I heard once, Elsie," remarked Paul, sadly, "that you had said you both liked and admired me ; but that if you were married to me you would hate me in a month. Probably Hero has found me out she has had more than a month, you know." "I didn't," flashed the accused, tempestuously ; "I said pull your hair off. And so I would, and comforted you for it after that's how I work." There was silence between the two for some moments. Elsie broke it. "What will you do, Mr. Gotch?" she queried. "Nothing," was the reply ; "she wishes it. She has gone away to be free from me : how can I ask her to come back ? If I would I do not know where she has gone." "She is very cruel," asserted the blind girl. "Not cruel," said Paul ; "honest." It was the adjective he had suggested to his mother on the night of Hero's departure. "People have no business to ruin everything 274 A SON OF AUSTERITY with their honesty," retorted Elsie. "I am sure she would have loved you if she had stopped ; I believe you must be able to make love far better than I thought." "But what would you do," demanded Paul, passing over the naive compliment, "if you loved a person who loved you back again and all the time another person loved you too?" "If they were every bit as nice as each other," said Elsie, defiantly coping w r ith the dilemma, "I would love them both." Paul sighed. "Oh," cried the blind girl; "I think Hero ought to be ashamed of herself! And I shan't like love any more I used to enjoy making up love-stories, but I shan't a bit now; I think love is a stupid, unsensible business when the right people don't love one another. So there!" Paul Gotch accepted this dictum as closing the argument, and paid a melancholy adieu. Elsie followed him to the door. "Mr. Gotch," she whispered, "has Hero taken Baby?" "N-no," said the man under his breath. The confession crushed him. "May I may I come and nurse him some- times?" continued the blind girl, eagerly. Paul assented and went down-stairs; he was vaguely conscious that there was a glowing beauty in Elsie Stuart's face which verged upon the poignant. SPIRITUALITY AND AN EQUATION 275 He walked moodily across the brickfield. The heavy yet windless rain of late summer had fallen, with rare intervals of cessation, since daybreak. The odd panorama was assertively depressing; though, to a more elate sense, there might have been in the rich red soil, the beaded brown water, the sting of the soaked air, a promise of fertility made possible by this meteorological analogue of sorrow. On the threshold of the cottage stood Mar- garet, her hand upon the knob of the open door. Over against her was an umbrella-crowned figure. Paul went up the path towards it. From behind he perceived that it wore a fawn overcoat and trousers of rough tweed these latter turned up deeply over trim buttoned boots, splashed incon- gruously with spots of bright mud. "Some one to see me, Margaret?" he asked. The figure turned; the waved auburn hair, the blond mustache, the full chin, seemed familiar. Suddenly he recollected; they were those he had seen bent over a certain libidinous print one morn- ing on the clayfield. "No, sir," said Margaret; "for Mrs. Gotch, sir." "Ah ! then my mother is out," concluded Paul. "Please, sir, it's for young Mrs. Gotch," he was told apprehensively. Paul caught a swift inhalation before it had time to become a gasp, and graduated it to the 276 A SON OF 'AUSTERITY normal. He turned with grim courtesy, driving a suspicion to the arm's length of intelligence. "My wife is out of town," he said ; "won't you come in till the rain makes its next stoppage?" "Thanks, no; I don't think I will," stammered Mr. Jephson. "Nonsense!" returned Paul, sharply; the accent of dominance decided Mr. Jephson, as it was in- tended it should. He entered the narrow hall, Margaret taking his umbrella. Paul showed him into the work-room, a glance had proved it to be empty. He w r aved the visitor to a lounge and sat down in his own chair at the round table, pushing the screen as he passed it, to hide the empty "shrine" and the little cot. "Shocking weather, isn't it?" he remarked. "Beastly !" said Mr. Jephson, obviously uncom- fortable the compound discomfort of incertitude, conscious moral obliquity, and the presence of a superior intellect; he added, with a gleam of diplomacy, "I shall really be glad to get back to Africa before the winter sets in." "Going away for your health?" inquired the other, with obscure malice. Mr. Jephson winced ; the tone was irritatingly tolerant. "Oh, no," he hastened to explain; "business engineering; mining-stamps this time; the last it was a bridge. I've only been in England" he had reached his conversational objective at SPIRITUALITY AND AN EQUATION 277 last "a couple of months in the last two years." "My wife will be sorry to have missed you," rejoined his host; "a farewell call, I presume." "Yes, yes," said Mr. Jephson, indefinably alarmed. He fled to the jocular; "I must con- gratulate you," he pursued; "awfully nice to find Miss Latimer so happily settled ; I always had a great respect for her." "Very good of you, I'm sure," answered Paul, dryly; "may I ask if you are married?" Mr. Jephson ventured a wink. "Not got that far yet," he said; "one can't carry a wife about the world." "No," agreed the other, with design, "and be- sides, it isn't necessary, eh?" Again Mr. Jephson winked. "Not in that climate," he said; "by the way, may I have a cigarette ? I see this is your study." Permission was given, the inevitable offer re- fused, and the scent of navy-cut invaded the atmosphere. Paul's eyes devoured his guest the large, self-satisfied mouth, the restless asser- tion of the head, the curious, patronizing nostril. "Nice place you've got here," vouchsafed Mr. Jephson: "quite countryfied, you know. You're a literary man, aren't you ?" "A hack with ambitions," said Paul, falling into his natural manner. Mr. Jephson looked blank. "You'll be regularly famous some of these 278 'A SON OF AUSTERITY days," he declared, recovering himself; "Mrs. G. will be quite proud of you." "An unlikely contingency," got out Paul, with a double irony. Mr. Jephson swiveled in his seat and surveyed a tier of shelves, puffing his cigarette and observ- ing their contents. "You do a lot of reading, I suppose?" he pur- sued. "Yes," admitted the other, stricken with pain- ful amusement. "H'm!" said Mr. Jephson; "I never did much of it; I like a smart novel, though. I always wanted to learn French, so's I could read their novels, our fellows are so awfully narrow-minded. You get all that knocked out of you in Africa. Gad! I could tell you some things you couldn't put in your books." He arrested abruptly this flow of unwonted speech. "By Jove!" he cried; "the rain's stopped; I'll make a bolt for a tram. Good-bye, and thanks awfully. My regards to Mrs. Gotch." "Who shall I tell my wife ?" The inflec- tion completed the inquiry. "Oh, Jephson," was the confused reply "Jephson ; thanks again ; I turn to the left, don't I? Thanks." And Mr. Jephson splashed along the cinder- path. Paul went back into his room and set wide the leaf of the screen. A carbon portrait of Hero SPIRITUALITY AND AN EQUATION .79 hung above the cot, one more addition to the "shrine." Her husband looked at it with an almost expressionless gaze; a nuance as of bewil- derment lightened his countenance, his lips moved, seeking to remember. "The man," he murmured "the man that stakes his spiritual all upon a hypothetical great- ness in the soul of a woman what was he to do ? I forget. Speak bitterly ; that was it. Oh, Hero, Hero, that I should have to fight for silence!" CHAPTER XXIV INCREASE OF DEFINITION HERO was wakened in the morning- by a tap- ping at the outer entrance of the flat. She gath- ered a dubious consciousness in shock after shock of disgustful perception then, constraining her- self determinedly, put out a hand and roused her unkempt neighbor. "Mrs. Maitland," she said, anxiously, "some one is knocking at the the front door." Phemie Maitland stirred, threw out a drowsy arm and murmured mysteriously: "It's Edith; pop something on and let her in, there's a dear; I've got such a head this morning." Reassured by the feminine cognomen, though irritated at her companion's indolent presump- tion, Hero dressed hastily, went through to the tiny entrance hall, and unfastened the door which led therefrom to the landing. Without stood a small and intensely slatternly girl, probably of some twelve, possibly of some sixteen summers; her face and figure gave diverse warrant for either. Marking her lack of intimacy with Hero by a 280 INCREASE OP DEFINITION j8i surreptitious stare, this odd little person picked up a milk-can from the threshold, walked in, and made for the rear of the flat. Hero followed, to perceive the new-comer in the act of lighting a gas cooking-stove. Taking it for granted that Edith, like the ill-fated fish of the Arabian Nights. was "in her duty," she returned to the bedroom and completed her toilet. It was significant of her natural shrewdness that she locked the Glad- stone bag after using it it had, as most of these otherwise useful articles have not, wards of a strong and unusual type. While she arranged it to close, she caught a glimpse of the silver cup that she had thrust into it on leaving, and felt that this had become, in some inexplicable fashion, hateful to her. Finding that Mrs. Maitland still slumbered heavily, she passed out again to the kitchen, which was in shape and size an exaggerated cup- board. The slatternly girl was about filling a tea-pot, having set out on a tray, one plate- containing one round of dry toast and one pat of butter one knife, cup, saucer, and spoon. With- out a word she filled the cup, sugared it, added a dash of milk and carried the tray to Mrs. Mait- land. Reappearing, the other heard her voice for the first time. "She says," Hero was informed with an indica- tive jerk, "'at I am to ask you if you would like a cup." "Thank you," said Hero, "I would, please; let 282 A SON OF AUSTERITY me wash one for you" this from purely inter- ested motives. She stepped to the squalid sink and rinsed some china with elaborate thorough- ness, waiving the drying process there was no sufficiently inviting tea-towel within sight. "You are Edith?" she inquired, while so en- gaged. "Yus," owned the attendant, with the inde- scribable inflection of the Cockney affirmative. Hero was about to pour herself out some tea, when she recollected that the leaf quite probably had been introduced by Edith's grimy fingers in lieu of a spoon, and that the pot itself had con- ceivably not been cleaned for an age. She asked demurely for the caddy and made a fresh lot in one of her washed cups. Then, and not till then, could she drink. Edith contemplated her with cynical respect Hero felt called upon to explain, mendaciously. "I haven't to let my tea stand more than a min- ute," she said ; "I have indigestion if I do." "The other was just made," was the discom- fiting response. Hero laughed; not so Edith, who preserved a morose gravity. The former looked at her watch. "Half-past nine!" she cried; "good gracious! what about breakfast?" "I had mine at seving," said Edith, briefly; "Mrs. Maitland won't want none for hours." Hero groaned in spirit; the tea had called up her thwarted appetite as the Scriptural strong man rejoicing to run his race. INCREASE OF DEFINITION "Are you hungry?" she asked confidentially. "I'm always 'ungry," was the startling admis- sion. A florin descended in the small, dirty palm. "Get a shilling's worth of new-laid eggs," was the accompanying instruction, "and two slices of ham not very thick." Edith shambled off she wore flaccid boots, three sizes beyond necessity. At the kitchen door she turned, eyeing Hero with absorbed attention. Left alone, "Miss Lancaster" cleansed a pan, emptying the kettle for that purpose there was no hot water. Then she scrubbed down a portion of the dingy "fixed" dresser and washed some more crockery. There was a cigarette-end or two in the saucer of a coffee-cup ; she made a grimace as she tossed them out. Edith arrived belatedly. "I'd a fair do to get them eggs fresh," she announced. Hero put on the ham; as it began to fill the kitchen with its tasteful aroma Edith plunged into the little hall. She returned triumphant. "Thought I'd better shut her door," was the solution of this sortie. Its maker closed that of the kitchen as she spoke. There being no table in the latter apartment, Hero contrived fearing wholesomely Miss Edith's native grime to carry into the sitting- room in one tray-load all that was required for the proposed meal. After these measures of self- protection she was able to enjoy it with the des- 284 "A SON OF 'AUSTERITY peration of an eighteen-hours' practical fast. Edith ate with the curb on, her palate fighting her hunger. "You can cook!'' she observed, pushing her chair back; "I shan't mind turning to after that. It's my day for cleaning out the flat/' she supple- mented. Hero shivered and began to clear the table. While she washed the used dishes Edith bound her head in an alarmingly antique duster and swept the parlor carpet. Then, without more ado, she commenced to dust. Hero found her oc- cupied in this futile proceeding. "Hadn't you better wait till the dust settles?" she ventured. "I want to get 'ome to-dy," said Edith, with oblique satire. "Then leave it, and I'll do it," Hero told her. The criticised paused to consider. "Oh, I'll wait," said Edith sharply, shook the duster now removed from her inelegant coiffure and marched into the kitchen, which she began, on her knees, to mop with a dripping cloth and no little soap. The spectator gathered up her skirts, feeling much as Falstaff did in the buck-basket. To her as to another more famous dirt was the primary devil. She had, perforce, to dust the immature sitting-room. As she opened the window she saw that outside was a fair August morning. Folk loitered in the street below, a 'bus rattled cheerfully from wood to asphalt, there INCREASE OF DEFINITION 285 was a gay optimism in the air the thrill of Lon- don's good humor; the metropolis is hugely ca- pricious. In such moments the most detached of her units can not be lonely. When she had finished with the small, shad- owy room it was more definitely habitable than it had seemed the previous evening. Incidentally she studied the photographs on the mantel mostly feminine, all of the ultra-theatrical type, revelatory, seductive, appealing the appeal of the sledge-hammer. Mrs. Maitland came in to find her weighing these phenomena of civilization. Phemie had stayed to don a trio of mechanical "curlers" parents of those sinuous tendrils which lie like arabesques upon the forehead. The metal con- trivances pointed themselves at Hero as artillery from an eminence. "Sorry to keep you waiting so long for break- fast," said Phemie, sweetly; "admiring my pic- tures? They're all friends in the profession, on the stage, you know. My word, Edith has been busy!" she regarded her surroundings, struck by their unwonted brightness. Catching sight of a duster in Hero's hand she shrugged her ample shoulders. "Oh!" she commented, "it's you I suppose you got the jumps doing nothing; it's very nice of you, all the same. Did Edith think to give you anything to put on with? there wasn't much in, I'm afraid." 286 A SON OF AUSTERITY "I ventured," rejoined her guest, blushing furiously, "to send out for something." "How really sensible you are!" said Phemie, calmly, sitting down: "got any left?" "Yes," answered Hero; "it was ham and eggs may I cook you some?" "Miss Lancaster," was the yawning reply, "you are simply too good for this world." Phemie set a cushion behind her head, lit the gas-stove despite the brilliance of the day and stretched out her feet. In this chaste posture she awaited the arrival of her breakfast, which she disposed of ravenously. "Well," she vouchsafed, on getting to her third cup of terrifyingly strong tea, "you see what sort of a place I have here. Mr. Maitland pays thirty bob a week for it" which was an exaggeration of t\venty-five per cent. "suppose I ask you half-a- sovereign, and you to go halves in the house- keeping?" Thus challenged, Hero's instincts shied as a horse from a wolf; she drew together the words of a refusal. Suddenly the wailing of the child penetrated to their ears. Hero rose automatic-, ally. "Never mind," said Phemie; "Edith will take him." The shambling footsteps across the en- trance-hall showed albeit tardily that Edith had decided to do so. The only outcome was a more pertinacious sobbing. Hero went to the INCREASE OF DEFINITION 287 bedroom and gathered the weeper into her arms ! It cried still, though less loudly. "The child must be starving!" exclaimed Hero, conscience-stricken; "it's hours since it had any- thing; hold it" to the amateur nurse "while I make some food." Again Edith's eyes set up an inquisition upon the speaker's face black, sober, alert if childish, they incarnated apprehension rather than compre- hension. Hero fed the child in the kitchen; the languid presence of Phemie was irritating to her. Its wants satisfied, the youngling proved wake- ful, though quiet ; it smiled amicably at its minis- trant. Hero talked to it, reminding it of the pic- tures in the train, the dog that barked, the cow that "mooed;" it jerked its impotent limbs and babbled back meaninglessly. The woman's heart warmed to it; old habits prompted her. She stepped to the sitting-room. "May I bathe baby, Mrs. Maitland?" she asked. "If you like," gaped that person indifferently; "he was bathed only last Sunday, but I dare say it will amuse him." "Sunday," reflected the astonished Hero, "and this is Thursday ! Poor little thing !" She got out the requisite paraphernalia, and soon had the child splashing and crowing in the warm water; it was usually as has been said stolid to exasperation, but Hero bullied it into 288 A SON OF AUSTERITY mirth. Edith's gaze followed her acutely. Once her thoughts filtered into speech. "You was one of a big family!" she hazarded. Hero fathomed her, and told the necessary fib. "How many?" pursued the inquisitress. "Seven," said Hero, with an effort. Lies breed lies, nor are white ones less prolific than those of the darker shade. Seven seemed the smallest justification of the adjective "large." "I'm one of twelve," continued Edith; "was yours mostly brothers or sisters?" "About half-and-half," defined Hero, evasive- ly; "move the bath away, there's a good girl. How soon ought you to be going do you come for the day?" "It's about as I like to make it/' admitted the employed, candidly ; "I can always say she would have me stop ; I get half-a-crownd a week, so they can't do too much. Are you going to be here always now?" Hero hesitated; one child was kicking in her lap ; another, only less happily childish, stood be- fore her. Each seemed mutely beseeching her to remain. She contemplated her sixty pounds in reserve, and answered thoughtfully : "For a while, yes ; always is a very long time." "Then," said Edith, with meditative ingenuity, "I shall tell 'em as she says I've to stop the whole dy nar; you don't mind, do you?" She bent her knees to scan the deciding counte- nance ; her thin hands rested upon them, her black INCREASE Ol< DEI' I NIT ION 289 orbs grew wider and blacker. The elder woman shook her head pitifully, and went on drying the baby's pink skin. The earthly was drawing into focus again her vision had been approximating to the telescopic. Mrs. Maitland surprised them soon after this. She was ready to go out, her hair crimped won- derfully and brought over her temples, a new hat on. her ulster more staring than ever. "I must run and see my dressmaker, dear;" she said. "You'll excuse me, won't you? Edith can look after baby." "Certainly," rejoined Hero it was the inev- itable answer. "And you'll make up your mind to stay ?" fished Phemie; "do, dear I should be sorry to lose you. I must get some one to help pay expenses" this pathetically "and baby mightn't take to any one else." Hero glanced down at the tiny face on her bosom ; Edith's eyes were beacons of suspense. "I shall be very glad," she murmured; "for a while." Then, with an inspiration : "It depends where I can get work." "That's all right," said Mrs. Phemie, pleased with this instalment of so convenient a victory; "and you'll need a bit to look round, won't you ? it doesn't do to be in a hurry. Good-bye for the present, then. Bye-bye, Babs!" she waggled a plump hand at the child ; "mind you do what Miss Lancaster tells you, Edith." And thus, reeking 290 A SON OF AUSTERITY of patchouli and Happing the heavy clotii flounce of her ulster over a pair of high-heeled boots, Mrs. Phemie Maitland sallied forth. The next few hours passed uneventfully. "Babs" occupied Hero; Edith chattered disjoint- edly, yet without cessation. Profiting by Phemie's absence. Hero had all the windows and other ventilating devices of the flat brought successively into play; the "stuffy" odor of the suite, compli- cated by the dregs of cheap scent, was insuppprt- able to her free nostrils. A belated tea-lunch over, she sent the loqua- cious Edith home : the glib Cockney tongue was wearing in continuous operation. The baby went willingly to bed, the fatigues of the preceding day hung about its infantile brain. Quiescence fell on Hero like a shroud. She sat by the open casement of the parlor, musing. The street noises were subdued by dis- tance and the languor of the afternoon; behind her and on either side brooded an oppressive silence, the multiplex solitudes of superincum- bent habitations. Some profoundly perceptive intuition had cor- ralled, in a remote corner of her consciousness, all thoughts of the immediate Past; she would not permit herself to ponder them. Yet they fumed ominously in their isolation ; they reviewed themselves, since she would not. She could only avert her attention. In despair, she sought for a book; there were INCREASE OF DEFINITION 291 some on the top of the single tall cupboard in the bedroom. She carried to the window-seat in the parlor half-a-dozen paper-backed volumes, trash- ily produced, their titles in staring black capitals on the front cover. It could not honestly be said that certain of these latter startled her, rather they forbade her. She peeped into one volume, caught at a sentence, and read on. Once or twice the hand that held the thing drooped, but she did not abandon her undecided perusal. There was not a great deal of print in any of the books, and Hero was a quick reader she passed from one to another. Meanwhile the afternoon slipped towards evening the sky reddened, the light de- creased. There were delicate shadows about the face in the dormer window; the air fluttered a stray curl on the nape of the white neck. A noise on the distant landing roused her; she listened, but it died away. The tenant of some adjacent flat had returned; Phemie still lingered. Hero sprang up feeling as one who has nar- rowly escaped detection in the commission of some crime and restored the books to their place in the bedroom. Then she sat down once more and abandoned herself to a process of men- tal digestion. She had a quick, inethical sense of humor, a controlling, though passive, interest also ineth- ical in human nature, and a share of that in- stinctive cynicism which fathered the epigram: "Scratch a Christian and you find a savage." 292 A SOX OF AUSTERITY Romance was to her as it had been to Elsie a psychological fetish. But the blind girl had loved to finger its butterfly wings ; Hero, more perspica- cious, saw r that the idol had feet of clay. She had a ready internal sneer for those who, in speech or type, denied the fact. As for kissing these clayey foundations, that was another mat- ter; yet intuition kept her from mocking the genuflecting worshiper. Indisputably, Romance is monogamic thus the feet of clay are overlaid with silver. The acid of Domesticity revealing the ignoble extremities, a vulgar jollity sacro-sanct by centuries coats them against the weather. It is this jollity that sets the judgment tripping; it amalgamates coarseness and common-sense in a chemical par- adox; sub-acid to Romance, it negates the sour- ness of morals. Its appeal to Shakespeare is of immortal memory ; on it tw r o-fifths of the world's literature have been built. In a Serbonian and primeval bog of doubt Hero waded to the knee. If its tepid exhalations blinded her, she had the sense to perceive that under her cautious tread the bottom sloped into an abyss. At such a pass one can not swim in a bog. The chime of the parish bells came to her; drifting upon religion, her lip noted her disdain. Sheffield says of Charles the Second that he had discarded Christianity not so much by dint of reflection as of perception. It was the case with INCREASE OF DEFINITION J