The RIALTO Series. Vol. i, No. 25. May, 1890. Monthly. Subscription $8.00 a year. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, Chicago, 111., Feb. 16, 1889. Fabian Dimitry. BY r FAW(!ETT. RAND, McNALLY & COMPANY, CHICAGO AND NEW YORK. FABIAN DIMITRY. FABIAN DIMITRY EDGAR FAWCETT, AUTHOR OF THE EVIL THAT MEN Do," "OLIVIA DELAPLAINE,"ETC. CHICAGO AND NEW YORK: RAND, MCNALLY & COMPANY. PUBLISHERS. 1890. COPYRIGHT 1890, BY RAND, MCNALLY & Co., CHICAGO. TO LILIAN WHITING, IN APPRECIATION OF HER NOBLE AND WOMANLY INTELLECT, HER LOFTY IDEALS, AND HER VALUED ENCOURAGEMENTS. New York, January, 1890. 2061739 FABIAN DIMITRY. 1. Who has not seen the multicolored lights of the Alhambra flame in Leicester Square from the gloom of a London evening? Almost every third American whom one meets, it might now be answered, in these days when the awful sweep of ocean from New York to Liverpool has become like the trivial terrors of a swollen brook. Still, by early November, there are few transatlantic theatre-goers remaining in "the gray metropolis of the North." Either they have all sped home again across those heaving marine leagues which they contemn so magnificently, or they have drifted to the south of Europe in search of that clement thermometer which they rarely find above the toe of the Italian boot. (5) 6 FABIAN DIMITRY. Ray Eninger, though an American, had not migrated from London at all, much as he detested tawny fogs and vacillant rain- spirts. He had found himself in the region of Piccadilly at about nine o'clock, and had half made up his mind to seek a book and a hearth-blaze at his easeful Jermyn Street lodgings. But great vapors that had hid the sun all day had now rolled frqm a sky full of soft yet keen stars, whose silver peace mocked the turbulence below them. Eninger had passed the glare of the Criterion and the Pavilion with a sense of gaining some sort of real repose both for eye and ear a little further on. But though Leicester Square was in a way quieter, with its lines of drowsy cabs and its heavy central masses of shadow, the two huge luminiferous theatres which presently rose before him were but aggressive repetitions of the structures he had already left behind him. The Empire he had always thought peculiarly and British! y vulgar. The Alhambra he had not visited in several years, and a caprice to do so here assailed him with such an unforeseen suddenness that he FABIAN DIMITRY. 7 indolently yielded to it. He had no sooner strolled past its radiant portals, however, than he became the prey of a bored feeling. ' ' Eng- land is a man's country," somebody had said to him not long ago, and he had never more clearly seen the truth of this bold phrase than just here and now. The women present were presumably not all of a lax trend. Some were, as a glance at them told you while you observed them strolling unes- corted through the arabesqued and sumpt- uous lobbies; but others had not their brassy stamp, and might, for all one knew, be seated beside their true lords with whom they had come hither from chaste homes in Brompton or Chelsea. And , yet the men ungallantly clouded the air with smoke, or drank from little shelf-like stands in front of them the potions of clubs and taverns. It was a splendid, even a patrician interior. Its immensity invited the roving eye, which lit on nothing tawdry, on much that was artistic. The ballet then in course of prog- ress might have shamed our own Niblo's Garden at its finest. It seemed as if the FABIAX DIMITRY. stage could hold no more of spectacular and processional pomp, whereupon new lanes of light would burn among its amazons and bac- chantes as new phalanxes of bright-clad shapes came marching from viewless lairs. The entire scale of the entertainment was so fine and distinguished, in spite of its commonness as mere drama, that Eninger asked himself why drink and tobacco should be permitted thus to flout and cheapen its handsome smartness. He had bought a stall but did not choose to take it. He kept wandering hither and thither, with half a mind to drop in rumination on one of the velvet lounges and half a mind to wander forth again below the inconstant London stars. People passed and repassed him, but he scarcely noted their faces, irritated with himself for having let his feet stroll where all men and women must of necessity be strangers. He was a man marked among his friends for an excessive nicety and fas- tidiousness. He had been called, both in New York and London, a snob, yet unjustly when all was said. The Alhambra now FABIAN DIMITRY. 9 emphasized for him a rawness of life from which he shrank and had always shrunk. Possessed of a fairly generous income, hav- ing chosen the career of a physician from desire rather than need, being endowed with a tall, trim shape and a visage blond, deli- cate though virile, equipped with a charm of tactful mien and talk not usual among men of even the older races, he had shone a kind of social star in circles where he had not sought to push entrance yet whose reigning powers had welcomed him on terms of pecu- liar flattery and acclaim. Not long ago, at one of the great English country-houses, he had committed what now remorsefully pierced him as an act of dismal folly. A certain Lady Beatrice Brashleigh, daughter of an earl and niece of a duke, had won him, with the blue of her big eyes and the music of her suave voice, into an avowal of passion. Lady Beatrice did not, by any riieans, fix a vacant stare on the presumptuous American or endeavor to slay him with her noble birth. She simply burst into tears and murmured something about papa objecting; and soon 10 FABIAN DIMITRY. Eninger had found out that papa did seri- ously object. His transatlantic origin was not a chief drawback to the match, for the earl was by no means a rich peer and Lady Beat- rice had a bevy of sisters. But for an Amer- ican suitor Eninger*could not make meaning enough settlements. Such a marriage as that, declared his lordship, must have a heavy golden reason for being. In the case of En- inger it was golden, but not sufficiently heavy. He left Brashleigh House one misty Sep- tember morning, and fancied that as he cast an upward look at its ivied stonework he caught one vague glimpse of a maiden' s pale and tear-stained face. But the vision did not haunt him long. What haunted him much longer was the cut, the sting that had been dealt his pride. He had, after all, been in love with Lady Beatrice more through imagination than heart. He had liked that historic perfume which hovered about her surroundings with so much of the delightful tenacity of tradition. Still, he now recalled his past acquaintance with her rather in the liii'lit of an escape than a sorrow. FABIAN DIMITRY. 11 " I shouldn't have known what to do with her after I'd got her/' he had mused. " Sooner or later I mean hard work as a physician, and New York shall no doubt be the scene of my labors. How absurd it would have looked over there, that ' Dr. and Lady Beatrice Eninger!' And yet she might have clung to her title always, for she was proud of it though ever so fond of me." For some time, this evening, Eninger sat on one of the velvet lounges and watched, at either of the large buffets which his vision was able to command, that extraordinary capacity of the English theatre-goer for pour- ing down fiery fluids. The first impression of respectful novelty which even the average Londoner can produce in his kinsman over- sea had long ago lost its force with Eninger. He was used to all the different "types," of whichever sex, and extremely fatigued with most of them. "How peculiarly and specially vulgar," he caught himself think- ing, " a vulgar London crowd is able to ap- pear!" . . and then, in a flash of discovery, he saw the man who of all others living he 12 FABIAN DIMITRY. would have held too refined and fastidious to pass the lintels of a place like this. " Why, Fabian!" he exclaimed, and sprang up from his seat, seizing the arm of the stroller. Then, as a smile of recognition answered him, he went on with vehemence: " What on earth brings you here?" " Do you mean to England, my dear Ray?' 1 replied the other, with a voice exquisitely soft and yet somehow not of the quality one would call womanish. He had, however, limpid brown eyes which many a woman might have envied him, and round his pure-cut, beardless lips lingered the double spell of sweetness and intellectuality. Eninger slipped a hand within his friend's arm. " Oh, I meant," he said, " this great, smart, beastly place. Come and sit down for a minute." He turned to look after his former seat but perceived that it was occu- pied. He soon glimpsed a distant table, however, and drew his friend toward it with an insistent warmth which bore odd contrast to his former languor. The table was small, and as they sat down beside it he resumed FABIAN DIMfTRY. 13 merrily: "Let's drink something. Every- body is drinking something, I observe. And a cigarette you'll like these, I think; they're a trifle rare. So the ballet hired you? Well, it is good, what I've seen of it. Why under heavens didn't I know you were in London, Fabian? Have you been here a long time?" ' ' Nearly a year. ' ' " Nearly a year!" echoed Eninger. " Fan- cy!" he pursued, unconscious, no doubt, of the anglicism. "This town is such a monstrous maze, isn't it? Twin brothers could live here for an age within the throw of a stone from one another, and yet never meet." " Quite true," acceded Fabian. ' ' And the last time we met was about two years ago at one of those semi-literary even- ing pow-wows which they give so badly in New York." " Yes; I remember." Eninger glanced at him sharply. "My dear Fabian," he said, " you're not like your old self." 14 FABIAN DIMITRY. Fabian smiled, and his face, beautiful and poetic without a smile, drew, when thus illumined, a soft, pleased cry from his com- panion. "Ah, that's more like you!" exclaimed Eninger. Then, as the smile faded, he went on: ''You once had such glorious spirits. What's tamed them or who?" "Who?" repeated Fabian, while he drooped the brown eyes, dark-lashed and lucid, that burned from his oval face. "Does my interrogative pronoun bore you?" said Eninger; and he lifted to his lips the glass which a waiter had just filled for him. " I do hope you haven't forgotten, dear boy, what tremendous chums we once were at Harvard." " Indeed I haven't, Ray!" They looked at one another in silence for a little spare. "You're going to account for yourself," announced Eninger, terminating the odd pause. "You're going to tell me something." "Well, perhaps." "We ought to have written one another, FABIAX DIMITRY. 15 Fabian. It's been a horrid shame that we've drifted out of our nice fraternal habit of cor- respondence. Probably the fault was mine but no matter whose it was. If we had exchanged letters through all these months I might well, I might have given you an appreciable plot for one of your plays. Or have you renounced the making of plays altogether?" Fabian slowly shook his head, with what struck Eninger as a subtle melancholy in the motion. "]N"o, Ray, not quite; I suppose I shall always go on groping a little along that line. It's all I ever could do, you know." "But for the present you've neglected your talent?" "Yes . . And so you've been living through a drama that you think my poor languid muse would care for?" Eninger gave a curt, ambiguous nod. "I'm not just sure of that," he returned. "My drama is of the Robertsonian school plenty of small talk, a little satire, and enough comedy to hide the real tragedy of tears behind it. I've no doubt you'd think 16 FABIAN DIMITKY. it very flat and stale. But unless I'm wholly wrong, Fabian, my opinion of yours would be ever so different." Fabian sat staring for some time at the glass whose contents he had scarcely tasted. At last he gave a slight start which made his slender and supple frame actively vibrate. "Let's get out into the streets," he said, rising. ' ' We can talk better there. You evidently think I've been having an infernal sort of experience, Ray. Does my face tell you so?" "By no means," replied Eninger, now ris- ing also. " But it hints to me that you're a sadder man than when I knew you last." "Yes and in some ways a wiser one," muttered Fabian, below his breath, while they quitted the noisy, smoky, brilliant theatre. "Which way shall we gof he added, after they had gained the refreshing dusk and coolness of Leicester Square. "Whatever way you please," Eninger answered, and soon he forgot all thought of locality, his friend spoke to him so fluently, FABIAX DIMITEY. 17 so feverishly, and yet with such a potent charm. "We're here, almost at her very door," Fabian finally said, after they had pushed their way through a narrow street into a square whose drowsy old trees were mur- murous below a late-risen fragment of moon. " Ah, Ray, think of the dramas that a fellow like me could find hidden away among these grim, ancient houses! How still they all are if s the reticence of death, yet of recollec- tion, too! Yonder' s the house where sJie lives. Seven or eight generations of them have lived and died in it. They're poor, now, as I told you. They wouldn't be spending their days in even so fascinatingly pictur- esque a spot as this Lincoln 1 s Irin Square if poverty hadn't held them here." " And yet," said Eninger, feeling the need of some sort of speech, "you tell me that you met her with her father summer before last off in the Engadine." "Oh, yes. The old Colonel's bronchitis had got devilish during the raw spring. They scraped up enough money to take the 18 FABIAN DIMITRY. trip. You see, there are only two of them, father and daughter; the} r can graze starva- tion without tumbling into it. Still, there's a big mortgage on that little house, and some day the very worst may happen. It's hard, Ray, they're as good blood as any in Eng- land, but the last of an impoverished line. I doubt if half the grandees (some with titles bought ten years ago) are even aware they exist." Eninger stared into his friend's face, which the glamour of moonlight seemed now to invest with a new repose, patience and spirituality. "Alicia Delamere," he said; "it's a lovely name, certainly. And you say that she Here he broke short off. "For God's sake, Fabian." he quickly went on, "why don't you marry her and make an end of it?" The sculptural lips of Fabian tightened together a little. "I've told you why." he said. Those words had for his hearer a horrible pathos and solemnity. "But she loves you," he began, "and FABIAN' DIMITKY. 19 "I think she loves me yes, I feel inwardly certain of it," struck in Fabian. "And you love her?" "Devotedly." "Then cast that scruple of yours to the winds!" exclaimed Eninger. "Would you, in my placed" queried Fabian, grasping his arm. " Would I?" he repeated, staggered by the question, as applied to himself. "But I've never seen her I don't love her." " If you did love her," persisted Fabian, with eyes unrelenting, and with hand that did not in the least relax. "But I've never loved in that way," w returned Eninger, with an evasive air that was perhaps more apparent because he strove to hide it. "Ah, " said Fabian, dropping his arm, yet slipping an arm of his own round Eninger s neck ; "I see that you would have just my torturing hesitancy, were you situated as I." Together the two friends quitted the moon- lit square, which was for one of them clad evermore in a new spell of gloom and wist- 20 FABIAN DIMITRY. fulness. Its gray memorials of how men fade and inanimate things remain, had always for Eninger been pregnant with sug- gestion; but now, at this mysterious moment, not far from midnight, and under this eerie moon of a London autumn, the whole quarter (for reasons that chiefly concerned his com- panion's late discourse) appeared haunted by the influence of some grisly curse. FABIAN DIMITRY. 21 II. Nor did Eninger by any means rid him- self of that sensation when he paid, with Fabian, a visit to the Delameres on the fol- lowing day. The small house in Lincoln's Inn Square was no less shabby within than grimy without, but Alicia Delamere lighted its dinginess as a buttercup lights a dingle. She had hair almost as golden as that flower, and so white a throat that it made the ardent yet velvety blue of her eyes burn all the more deliciously keen. Her figure, however, as Eninger soon told himself, was by no means a perfection of moulding, although lissome and graceful, while her deportment betokened neither the air de race nor the simple equipments of ordinary tact and finish. Watching her with the cold eye of criticism, he pronounced her manners almost piteously deficient. She had pretty hands, but was forever moving them about, like an embar- 22 FABIAN DIMITRY. rassed child; she would smile naturally one minute and artificially the next; her post- ures, whether she sat or stood, were one perpetual bashful unrest. And yet it soon began to dawn upon Eninger that she was irresistibly charming. It was not that he grew to approve her, but rather that he took a secret pleasure in watching her defects. She was not at all like an English girl, nor yet like an American : she had far too little gravity for the first and far too much reserve for the last. Eninger got rapidly to be fond of watching her; she made him think of a briar-rose in a breeze, of a little ruffled brook between fringes of cresses. Her wild- ing sort of demureness refreshed him after the correct repose of Lady Beatrice. Then, too, there was a pathos in her shyness. For had not Fabian told him that her mother had died when the dug was at her baby lip, and did not this gaunt, sour old spectre of a father look as though he could no more rear a delicate young daughter than stand on his bullet-shaped, grizzled head? It struck the new-comer as the head of a FABIAX DIMITKY. 23 possibly stupid man, and he soon learned that he had rightly judged it. But Colonel Delamere was not simply stupid. He at once fixed a fishy, viscous eye on Eninger, and paid him all the court that his ab- surdly stiff deportment permitted him to proffer. He was a man who in earlier life had been very arrogant, and after the fashion of arrogance that we sometimes may see full- blown in the military Englishman. He had never known just how to bend his back, even when the iron goad of penury smote it though indeed there had been a good deal of bending with him, as many knew. But after Eninger had become, during the next fortnight or so, a confirmed visitor at his dis- mal old domicile, he showed signs of soci- ality, rare with him as imprudence in a weasel. Meanwhile, on one or two occasions, Fa- bian was surprised at finding his friend in the company of either Alicia or her father. His surprise quickly wore off, however; for haur of his friend's intended sacrifice. But perhaps because his entire nature was built on pediments feebler than Fabian's he FABIAN DIMITRY. 41 had doubted if that sacrifice would ever be made. One evening changed all this. Fabian en- tered his rooms, paler than usual and clearly agitated. He gave Eninger no greeting, but planted himself not far from the door which he had just closed, while he curtly said : "I have lately been treated almost with open insult by Colonel Delamere." Eninger, who was in full evening dress, and had been about to start in a cab for the com- fortable little club, not far from Piccadilly where he often dined, looked placid and polite defiance as he answered : "Really, one would suppose from your manner, that you had been treated with open insult by me." Fabian tossed his head and smiled bitterly. "If you call treachery insult, yes," he responded. "Treachery?" repeated Eninger, squaring himself. "Come, now." "The Colonel isn't always a trustworthy man," were Fabian's next words, "but in this case I think he has proved himself one." 42 FABIAN DIMITRY. ' ' This case? W hat case?' ' "You've made it plain to him that you wish to marry liis daughter." Eninger turned rather pale, and locked his hands behind him. "Did the Colonel say that to you?" he asked. " Yes. Do you deny that he told the truth?" Fabian stood before his friend, inexorable' as an accusing judge. Eninger scanned his tranquil face for an instant and then threw up both hands, half turning away. "Good God, man," he muttered, "haven't you seen that I care for the girl? Because you reject her yourself must you keep everybody else from trying to get her?' ' After so speaking, Eninger held his counte- nance averted. It seemed to him that an immensely long period elapsed before Fabian again spoke. "I think only this," at length came the words he waited for. " If you did not seethe crime of such a marriage as I saw it, you might have used decent candor in telling me so." FABIAN DIMITRY. 43 Eninger clinched his hands and replied, with quivering lips. "Fabian," he exclaimed, "I accepted your prior claim. You renounced that claim you told me so. But if this be not true, I retire again in your favor . . . Stop! you're about to question my moral sense in wishing to marry Alicia. That you have no right to do. If you will say to me now, at this moment, that you will take the girl, I promise you I'll withdraw from ever trying to become her husband. If you refuse to adopt that course, I shall hold free the field of my own endeavor. Can you, honestly, call this treachery? Before you accuse me again, weigh well your words. You've always prided yourself on justice. Prove now that you've not dealt in mere vaunts." Fabian' s brow was a cloud of storm as he stepped a little nearer to the speaker. "Justice!" he exclaimed, with a passion- ate sorrow in his tones. "Can you dare to use the word? I've told you everything. You know what such a marriage may mean!" 44 FABIAN DTMITRY. Eninger slowly inclined his head. "There are such things as childless mar- riages," he answered coldly. Fabian stared at him in silence. If his look had been purely one of scorn, its object might have flung back hot resentment. But it was both more and less than this. It brimmed with an arraignment that seemed to search and scorch the inmost soul of the man who guiltily met it. 4 'As you will, Ray Eninger," he at last said. "We will speak no more of either treachery or justice. I shall leave England in two days' time; that I promise you. The field of endeavor, as you've termed it, is quite clear. There is my answer. What your own conscience and honor may say to you in the coming years I shall not presume to question." He turned, after thus speaking, and opened the door near which he stood. As he passed from the room, Eninger was on the point of uttering some angry retort; but swiftly a great exultation replaced his ireful impulse. He sank into a chair, covering his face. The FABIAN DIMITRY. 45 thought of what might now occur, dizzied him and made his blood bound. Calmer moments brought him suffering. He perceived how he must have soiled him- self in the sight of the friend whose respect he had treasured; for after all he was of too high-strung and delicate a fibre not to feel in full degree the shame of his own disloy- alty. But a certain reparation might be made in the future. He began to build hopes on such a contingency, and to picture Fa- bian as a guest in his New York home. Why should this, not sooner or later come about? Far stranger things had happened, and there were elements, qualities in Fa- bian which seemed all the more stimulant and tonic to him now that months of separa- tion had again given place to companionship. As for Alicia's love, why should it not change its current, so that when she once more met the man who had set throbbing her maiden pulses he would seem to her only a vague image beside the dominant one of him whose name she now bore? And as for Alicia herself, surely to become his wife 46 FABIAN DIMITRY. must prove, should she ever accept such a fate, more of blessing than curse. He would guard her as the lid guards its eye. If insan- ity lurked like an ambushed bravo in her brain* he would keep the foe at bay with all the spells his medical craft could conjure. His vigilance should be sleepless and his most potent spur toward the deepening and broadening of scientific research should spring from eager interest in herself. If the world ever knew him for a famous physician it would be chiefly through her precious though unconscious aid. He trembled, all this while, with dread of Alicia's discountenance. That he should win her, too, merely as the 'suitor with the well- lined purse, was wholly repellent. She had known Fabian first, and even his desertion could not be expected instantly to turn the tide of her sentiment. Eninger was .ihvady schooling himself not to care very much if the girl should become his with a pronounced preference for Fabian; but he lint.-d to think that she might perhaps marry him with no more human motive than one FABIAN DIMITKY. 47 of cold-blooded expediency. The old Col- onel was of course his ally, and yet he feared lest Alicia's father might either ruin the cause by bungling, or else goad his child into a role of self-immolating hypocrisy. After some reflection Eninger concluded that there was only one course to take he would avoid the Colonel altogether, and go straight to Alicia with his passion and his promises. He did so, a few days later, and the expe- rience bred for him nothing but anguish. Alicia answered him with tone and mien that there could be no mistaking. " I'm grateful to you," she said, in her flut- tered and breaking voice. "I I did not think you believed Well, no matter, though, Mr. Eninger. The the fault may have been altogether mine." " The fault?" he queried. "I mean that perhaps I I led you to think I cared for you in that way. And if I did, it was very blamable in me very!" "No," he returned; "I don't accuse you of any coquetry; and the blame is all on my 48 FABIAN DIMITRY. . side. I should have remembered that Dimi- try " "Ah, don't mention his name!' ' she cried, bursting into tears. "You loved him, then? You mean that I could not replace him in your heart?" "My heart!" she exclaimed, with a sud- den plaintiveness that touched him past words. "My heart is broken!" And so speaking she slipped from the room in a tumult of tears. Eninger spent the rest of the day in dull despair. But that evening, just after he had returned home from a dinner of which it seemed mockery for him even to pretend to partake, he was surprised by the appear- ance of Colonel Delamere. The Colonel, with his gauntness, and his supercilious carnage of the head, and his buckram demeanor, was at no time a pleas- ant vision; and yet a delicious little shaft of encouragement seemed to pierce Eninger on now beholding him. Was it not possible that the wine of hope might be borne him -v. 11 by so graceless a cup-bearer? FABIAN DIMITRY. 49 Hope the Colonel did bring, but not of a sort which his host greatly relished. "My good Eninger, ' ' the father of Alicia was soon saying, in his thin, chill voice, and with one bloodless hand stroking a spectral wisp of white whisker, "you have quite misunderstood my poor, dear girl, I assure you." "You're mistaken, I think, Colonel. By the way, let me offer you a cigar." "Thanks, thanks, very much," replied the Colonel, who doubtless had every desire to be gracious, though his nose continued in the air and his lips retained their pursed, imperious look. " Really, you Americans do manage to procure such superb brands. Now, my dear Eninger, I must maintain that you've read Alicia wrong wholly wrong." "You have been talking with her, I sup- pose, Colonel?" "Yes; but not persuasively, not a coercingly; pray don't imagine it. She's irritated, stung, at the way in which Dim- itry darted across the ocean. But, compared 60 FABIAN DIMITRY. to yourself, my dear man, she holds him as a fellow of very trifling note." "Then she's wrong," muttered Eninger, and he meant the words from his inmost soul. "Ah, don't run yourself down," admon- ished the Colonel. "It's such a vile world, my boy, that even so thoroughly good a chap as yourself will have plenty of hard things said of him by other lips than his own! . . . But bless me, you've thrice Dimitry's force and distinction. Depend upon it, Alicia will confess as much to you, also, if you'll only be patient and make allowances for a girl's whims and freaks." " I'd be patient enough, sir," said Eninger, with sad austerity, "if I thought she would tell me in the end that she felt a little genu- ine love for me." " A little?" echoed the Colonel, with hilar- ity about as successful as though it had been attempted by a skull; " why, bless me, Eninger, she's got a tremendous amount, though it happens to be stored away some- where behind her nonsensical shyness. Trust me. now; I'm telling you plain truth." FABIAX DIMITRY. 51 But Eninger did not at all trust the Col- onel. He had begun clearly to see of what foxiness this broken-down old idler had made him the object. The Colonel had lately met at his club a certain New York man who had known the Eningers, root and branch, for forty years, and could have told Ray's income to within a dime. Doubtless he had told it, and these recent profuse civil- ities were the result. The young physician squarely faced what he was convinced to be the truth. It was horrible to think of Alicia having steeled herself into an acceptance of his suit. It was almost as horrible as to lose her outright. And yet had she not told him that her heart was broken? . . . He lay awake half that night, wondering what he should say to her if his feet strayed into Lincoln's Inn Square the next morning. Till ten minutes after breakfast-time he kept telling himself it was best not to go at all, but a quarter of an hour later he was quitting Bond Street for Oxford Street, and moving thence in an easterly course through the weirdest of amber fogs 52 . FABIAN DIMITRY. The old square looked, as he reached it, like some misty and somnolent borderland between dream and reality. But when he had got inside the little Delamere house, and had found Alicia beside a fire in the small sitting-room and somehow appearing almost as if she had been expecting him, then every hint of illusion thoroughly vanished. "I've come," he said, as he took her cold hand in his, "to ask after that broken heart." -He smiled, though very sympathet- ically, as she withdrew her hand. "Do you know," he softly went on, "that I've been wondering whether I could not, if you gave it me, somehow find a way of joining the pieces together and making them look as though they had never been separated never in the world?" He did not mean a word that he said, and the spirit within him was very heavy as he thus spoke. He had indeed come to her hiiting his own weakness for having come at all. He expected soon to go away, and to go with an inward curse at his stupidity, to 1:0 with a vow that he would take the FABIAN DIMITRY. 53 cast-off leavings of no man on earth. But Alicia smiled sweetly although sadly, and he saw some kind of gleam in the smile that made him drop into a chair at her side. And then she told him, with a voice trem- bling less and less till at last it grew quite firm, that perhaps she had been foolish and willful yesterday, and that if he forgave her it would put his generosity to test. He took her hand, at this, and she let him keep it. "Do you mean," he" asked, off his guard and covertly thrilling, "that you really can care for me as as I want you to care?" Of course this was imbecility, but he did not feel it then; and before any reaction had had time to set in with him self-mockingly, she had told him that she cared for him a great deal, though doubtless not half so well -as he deserved. She made her confession with an arch loveliness that blinded him to its probable falsity. What could he do? He adored her, and it was so easy to take her in his arms and swear that she should never know an unhappy moment as his wife, if devotion could save her from one. After f>4 FABIAN DIMITRY. that hour a seed of confidence was sown within Eninger, quick to burst and grow. He forgot to repine at the prepossession wrought in his sweetheart by Dimitry; he remembered only that there was a force of usurpature in his own passion which sooner or later would rule unchecked. It is but fair to record at once that he did not miscalculate. In a few weeks Alicia and he were quietly married. They soon after- ward sailed for New York, and the Colonel accompanied them. Not that Eninger by any means preferred this arrangement. The Colonel appeared strongly to do so, however, and declared that life without his dear child would be desolation. This struck Alicia's husband as probably most true, since the poor girl had for six or seven years past borne the worst brunt of their poverty, and without her tact, thrift and pluck it might have been a case of sink, not swim. The Colonel gave no signs of grief at parting from his native land, and after he had reach- ed New York was housed much more com- fortably in the pretty Forty-Second Street FABIAN DIMITRY. 55 dwelling rented by Eninger than he had ever dreamed of being in the draughty old tenement on Lincoln's Inn Square. But forthwith he broke into cynicisms and in- vectives that had America for their one pitiless object. He seemed to see as wide a difference between the customs of London and New York as if he had been trans- planted from the river Thames to the Yang- tse-kiang. Everything here was vulgar, crude, odious. Even the incessant glare of sunlight hurt his eyes. He declared the icing of sherry barbarism and the wearing of overshoes idiocy. He said that it gave him neuralgia to sit in one of our "tram- cars," the people about him spoke through their noses so aggravatingly. He affirmed that our newspapers nauseated him, and the filth of our streets likewise. He spoke of "dear old England" and "this infernal country " with a lack of restraint that made Eninger recall how many of his kindred had lost mental balance, and wonder if a loose brain-screw might not account for his sudden fanatical bias. 56 FABIAN DIMITRY. "You're so patient with father," said Alicia to him one day. " I thank you for it with all my heart!" " Oh, I'm in hopes his nonsense will wear off, ' ' answered Eninger. ' ' Besides, it' s easy enough to bear almost anything from your father!" He stooped and kissed her on the throat, and saw her blue eyes moisten as he did so. "Ah, Ray, you're too good to me!" she broke forth. He took both her hands, holding them and staring down at her with a subtle hunger in his eyes. "No one could be that, darling. You deserve all that human kindness could devise for you. Unfortu- nately, in my case, that isn't much. But if the little I can do is only a help toward your happiness, I shall feel vastly encouraged." " A help toward my happiness!" came her little flute-like cry. "Oh, Ray, what are you saying? Don't you know that I'm happy already?" "Perfectly?" he asked, with his eyes still fixed on her face. He turned a little paler FABIA1ST DIMITRY. 57 as lie put this question to her, though it is doubtful if she saw him do so. "Perfectly!" she answered, while a sort of confessional flash leapt from her eyes, and her lips remained parted as though she were on the verge of saying more. He drew back from her a little, still clasp- ing both her hands. " Do women forget so soon?" he said. "Do broken hearts mend so quickly?" She reddened, and her eyelids drooped. ' ' It isn't every woman who finds a consoler like you!'' she answered. "And I Jiave consoled you? Absolutely?" "Absolutely!" she replied, and once more her gaze met his. He knew then that she had ceased to feel a shadow of regard for Fabian Dimitry, even though he had not been wholly certain of this until now. They were alone together, and he caught her to his breast with a stifled sob of joy. "What a victory I have won," he said, as he looked down into her smiling and blush- ing face. "You deserved it," she said. 58 FABIAN DIMITRY. The words went through him like a knife. He thought of Fabian Dimitry, who had loved this woman devoutly as himself, and yet had gone away from her with that calm sublimity of self-renunciation which braves being misunderstood, unjustly scorned. "No," he said, in a slow and changed voice, while he took his arms from about Alicia' s neck ; " I did not deserve my victory. ' ' FABIAN DIMITKY. IV. He watched her health from week to week almost from day to day with f urtive but eager interest. There were times when it seemed to him that she had all the hardihood of some strong rose-tree which may put forth, if you please, faint-tinted blooms yet rears them on sturdy stems. Again he would be troubled by what struck him as an accent- uation of her old restless manner. She would sometimes vaguely assert of the atmosphere on our side of the ocean that "it made her feel so different," and once, after a statement of this kind, Eninger said to her, in a voice that quite hid solicitude: ' ' You think the air here doesn't agree with you, Alicia. Come, now, confess." He went to the arm-chair into which she had thrown herself, and sat down, bendingly, caressingly, at her elbow. It was dusk, and they were waiting dinner for the Colonel, 60 FABIAN DIMITRY. who had condescended to walk out that after- noon in the detested New York thoroughfares, and who had not yet chosen to return. "Oh, I shouldn't say thatf" answered the young wife, shaking her head with some negative vehemence, " I've no doubt it agrees with me capitally. Only, it well, it makes me feel so so different." " That is what you always end by saying." He took one of her hands in both his own, and then let one of his middle lingers glide along the artery at her wrist till it rested on a certain spot there. " How ' different ' does it make you feel? Try and explain to me." She gave a slight laugh. ' " I don't know that I can, Ray, really! Well, I seem some- how to be living faster than I did in Eng- land. I don't take the same pleasure in rest; I rarely want it; and yet I'm sometimes rather tired, too more tired, I think, than I used to be there." ' ' You' re nervous, ' ' Eninger said. ' ' This is a nervous climate," he added; "notori- ously so." " But I'm not ill," protested Alicia. "I'm FABIAN DIMITRY. 61 the exact reverse except for that occasional tired feeling. Often I've the sensation of being too healthful!" "Yes, I know,'' said Eninger, with his face graver, perhaps, than he was aware of. "Stop feeling my pulse as if I were an invalid!" she cried, with a pretty mock- petulance. She snatched her hand away from his hold and threw it round his neck, kissing him with tender abandonment. "I'm so far from being an invalid, Ray! My new life here has refreshed and fortified me so! Only ' ' And she broke off, with another laugh, clinging to him and peering into his eyes, her blond brows embarrassedly clouded. "Only what?" he asked, mystified not a little. " You'll think it so absurd." "Never mind if I do. I've thought you absurd before. All women are, now and then. Tell me." "Do you know," she hesitatingly began, "I I have such a sense, at times, of ex- travagance. " 02 FABIAN DIMITRY. " Extravagance!" " Great! Of course you recollect how much cheaper nearly everything is in London than it is here." "Oh, yes." ".Well, I suppose it's the change the freedom from that iron necessity of being compelled to keep watch on every penny, mixed with a sort of unconquerable surprise at the higher prices on all sides of me." "And this gives you the idea that you're extravagant, Alicia?" "Yes . . Oh, the feeling is so hard to describe!" She closed her eyes for a moment, and pantomimically waved both hands before her face. " It's as though I must be wrong as though I couldn't be so well off in the world as you've made me! You know what a struggle those last three years in London were, Ray! They begot in me the instinct of saving all I could, and of longing to get more more! And now that I've all I want, the old self-preservative impulse of the genteel pauper still remains." Her face was lit with smiles as she ended, but somehow a shadow FABIAN DIMITRY. 63 of apprehension crossed the mind of her hearer. "I love her so dearly," he thought, "that I am not capable of being her physician. If she is ever ill positively ill I should dis- trust every drug that I prescribed for her." But aloud he said: "My dear wife, your odd fancies do not surprise me. I might talk gravely about them and say that certain mental functions had been disturbed by those horrid latter years of your London life. But I won't, for She lightly interrupted him, just then. " Don't!" she exclaimed, in her soft English voice that had such inalienable charm for him. She was facing the open doorway and his back was turned toward it. "Here is father," she went swiftly on, " and while lie is near Well, Ray, you understand." Ray indeed understood that any incau- tious word against London life, whatever its form of depreciation or innuendo, would have taxed in drastic way the Colonel's gloomiest funds of sarcasm. On this par- 64 FABIAN DIMITRY. ticular evening, through the dinner that was now promptly served, he showed himself in a mood of especial bitterness. "I hope you enjoyed your walk, father," said Alicia. " It was such a bright, crisp afternoon." "Bright crisp," muttered the Colonel, as he wiped a stain of soup from his mous- tache far better soup than he had for a long time touched in Lincoln's Inn Square. "Say staring and piercing. That's about what your Fifth Avenue was while I tried to walk it. The pavements were full of little clots of snow that was each one a peril and snare. I suppose the only thing that kept me from breaking my legs was that beastly pair of rubbers with corru- gated soles." "Don't revile them, then, Colonel, if you think they saved you," said Eninger. He had drilled himself into one changeless tolerance of the Colonel's morbid assaults. " You must have seen a lot of pretty girls with nice rosy cheeks, father," said Alicia, "in such nipping weather as this." Her FABIAN DIMITRY. 65 words had the aim of dissipating irony, but they only fed it afresh. " Pretty girls!" he grumbled. "Yes; I saw a bevy of 'em just now four or five, all slipping along together like hoidens, and pushing each other with the maddest screams. I've no doubt they were the sorts of American girls who call themselves ladies. They were very handsomely dressed, in their silks and furs." "Perhaps they were only very young girls," said Alicia. "They were old enough to do indecent things, however." "Indecent? Really?" observed Eninger. " Such as what, pray?" "Wave their handkerchiefs to men across the street men whom they evidently didn't know from Adam," growled the Colonel. "Oh, they couldn't have been ladies, then!" exclaimed Alicia, with an uneasy look at her husband. Eninger smiled, with a little impatient toss of the head. "They may have been well- reared girls enough." 66 FABIAN DIMITRY. "Well-reared!" cried the Colonel. "Oh, bless ray soul! Come, now!" "You forget," pursued Eninger, "that the American girl may do innocently what the English girl would only do. immorally." "I don't understand," bristled the Colonel; "I don't understand at all!" " Of course you don't," said his son-in-law, coolly. "It would be rather surprising if you did. You know nothing of my country, though to hear you professionally abuse it one would suppose your slanders were based on some sort of real information." Here Alicia cast him a beseeching look, and he paused, regretful that he had even said thus much. But from that hour the Colonel (who had reason to value his clem- ency) was more tactful in treating interna- tional points. Perhaps there soon appeared causes of a social kind why the gruff old creature should ivgjird Americans more blandly. Eninger hud kindred and friends in town who at once joined forces, as it were, about Alicia and made for her a "circle." She swiftly be- FABIAN DIMITRY. 67 came popular, as all agreeable Englishwomen do in New York. Her sweet face and even sweeter voice were themes of loving rapture among damsels whose younger sisters might have been those very madcap culprits de- nounced by the Colonel. Eninger laughingly said to her one day that he only wished he had made as great a professional as matri- monial success. Invitations of all sorts were handed in at their modish little oaken door- way. Alicia was bewildered at meeting so many people in so pell-mell a rush. "I make mistakes in their names," came her comic wail; "I blunder about them absurdly. The women don't mind it, but the men are so sensitive." She was all the more win- some and especially to the men because of these bewilderments. Her complete free- dom from affectation gave the dilemmas in which she was plunged an enchanting naturalness. She was so frank, and yet so would-be courteous, that no one dreamed of feeling affronted. And yet one afternoon, at somebody's tea, when she addressed Mrs. Wynkoop Westerveldt as Mrs. Tomlinson, 68 FABIAN DIMITKY. certain followers of the former lady thought that she would never pardon so irreverent a mistake. For between Mrs. Westerveldt and Mrs. Tomlinson stretched a wide gulf one which no acquaintanceship had ever bridged, and which was firmly guarded by snobbery from undergoing any such process. Mrs. Tomlinson was a clear-brained, warm- hearted woman, who supported a large fam- ily by her pen, and yet found time to see a little of society in a Paris bonnet and a pair of chic gloves, paid for out of her own earn- ings. Mrs. Westerveldt was a woman who had in all her life scarcely even lifted a finger for herself and never had done so for anyone else. But one woman was merely tolerated among the gay throngs that a healthy, gregarious impulse made her now and then seek. The other, rich, calm and somewhat disdainful, was almost courted like a queen. Mrs. Westerveldt did not, however, show Alicia the slightest pique. She was, indeed, rather more polite after than before the commission of Mrs. Eninger' s error. FABIAN DIMITRY. 69 "You and I should know one another quite well," she said very sweetly. "I am an old friend of your husband's. Ask him about Gertrude Ten Eyck; he will tell you that we used to have many a dance together at the old Delmonico Assemblies in Four- teenth Street." She smiled brightly as she said this, and it occurred to Alicia that she had a face of marble, with ice for its smile. She was un- doubtedly beautiful, but did not her beauty repel rather than allure? So at least it seemed to her present observer, who had yet no idea of the immense condescension which she had now seen fit to bestow. Later this fact became plain. The words of Mrs. Westerveldt had been delivered in a crowded drawing-room on Fifth Avenue, and near her stood several ladies and gen- tlemen who had the air of seeking her notice. But she did not bestow any upon them. She watched Alicia rather closely with a pair of languid gray eyes, and soon proceeded to say a number of civil things that were ex- pressed with a neat, terse ease of phrase. 70 FABIAN DIMITRY. Not long afterward, a babbling little man of whose name poor Alicia was totally uncon- scious but whom she recalled having met on the previous day, told her that Mrs. Westerveldt was a great personage in New York and that people fought for the honor of darkening her doorways. Eninger loathed kettledrums, and had begged off from going to this one. But when his wife mentioned to him that she had met Mrs. Westerveldt his face brightened nota- bly, and he at once said: "Gertrude Wes- terveldt? Dear, dear of course we were great chums, once. She married a million- aire twice her age, who died a little while after the wedding." " She looked as if she might do any cold- blooded thing like that," said Alicia. " But she used to be very handsome." " She still is," conceded his wife. Eninger might have said more, but he pre- ferred to keep silent. In the whirl of mer- riment that now caught the town, he pres- ently came face to face with Mrs. Wester- veldt. They shook hands with one another FABIAN DIMITRY. 71 and talked trifles. Music was floating through a great screen of glossy leaves just behind them, and the large hall in which they stood was dim by contrast with the stately drawing-rooms beyond. Through the doorway of one of these they could see Alicia, stationed in a blaze of light, talking blithely to a little crowd of men, with smiles on her sunny English face. Two or three male adherents were standing near Mrs. Westerveldt, and one of them held her fan. It was always like that with her. Wher- ever she moved there were gallants wfro bowed their homage. Sometimes she gave them freezing responses; just now she was quite ignoring them. Her gray eyes, indif- ferent and yet subtle, had lifted themselves to Eninger's face and dwelt there intently. " Your wife is charming," she presently said, in her measured voice. "Do you find her so? I'm very glad to learn it." " I didn't know you preferred that type." "You mean such a blond?" "Yes." 72 FABIAN DIMITRY. He gave a slight shrug of the shoulders. " How can one ever be sure, in these matters, until the time comes?' ' " You' re right. One can't be. But you must take good care of her, now you've got her." He started a little. "Oh," he said, " she can take care of herself." " Don't be so very certain. Those English women are not like us." He smiled as he watched her, so serene, with her chiseled, ivory face, her diamonds and her dignity. "Not cold, like American w^omen, you mean?" He felt so certain of Alicia that it merely diverted Mm to make this retort. Besides, he knew that it hid a challenge. "Are we American women so cold?" she asked. One of her retainers, at this point, dipped forward with the mechanic affability of his kind. " Your fan," he said, and extended it to her. "Thanks," she returned, taking the fan and looking at him, but not seeming to see him. FABIAN DIMITRY. 73 "That is hardly apropos" she went on to Eninger, paying no more attention to the gentleman just addressed. "You've called me cold, and here I'm supplied with this." She unfurled it softly, and its wedge of rose- tinted satin showed a little monogram of diamonds at one corner. The gentleman who had returned it did not depart. He had evidently made his act a reason for re- maining longer in her train and getting a gracious word from her as the result of his devotion. Bat she extended him no notice whatever. Eninger now leaned nearer to her and said, in a voice and with a way that had made him liked and courted before his mar- riage, when he had gone a great deal among the fashionables of his native town: "Perhaps the fan was returned to you with a sarcastic intent." "How?" she questioned, somewhat quickly, for her. " To wake the little real spark, concealed deep down." " So very deep downf she questioned, 74 FABIAN DIMITRY. with the pupils of her gray eyes momenta- rily wed to the pupils of his. " Do you then really think me you! a woman like that?" With the dulcet wails and tremolos of the music aiding her, she contrived to make her voice sound scarcely louder than a whisper to him. "Ah," he said, stirred by old memories and swayed by the flare and prattle of the hour, " I think you (why should I not think you, please?) a woman without an emotion." He saw her furtively bite her lip. He had said the one thing that the world had always said of her as Gertrude Ten Eyck and that it now averred still more stoutly since she had become Mrs. Wynkoop Westerveldt. It occurred to him, however, that perhaps he had done her a somewhat uncivil turn by his candor, even though it had borne a dainty sting of not unflattering flirtation. But, as if in sudden antithesis to the unemo- tional woman he had just called her, there appeared at his side a woman of strongly opposite type. She was leaning on the arm of a gentleman FABIAN DIMITKY. 75 much taller than herself, and it would not have been hard for her to find an escort of this eclipsing stature. She was fair of tress and tinting, and over-plump for her age, which visibly verged on forty. She was dressed with an undue youthfulness; they had jocosely alleged of her for several years that she flatly refused to be presented at the Court of St. James because baby-waists and sleeve-loops were impracticable in such a surrounding. On her fat neck sparkled a string of phenomenal rubies, and her fleshf ul arms were banded with circlets of like gems almost as precious. She gave Mrs. Wester- veldt a short, intimate nod, seemingly tak- ing for granted that it was returned, and while drooping her small body toward Enin- ger, broke out in a shrill, amical, falsetto voice: " Your wife is just too perfect! We're all crazy about her. She's a tearing success!'' Meanwhile the little lady had given his hand a vigorous shake; and then, with the effect of being dragged off by her compan- ion an effect for which he was no doubt 76 FABIAN DIMITRY. blameless, as her see-saw and almost tum- bling walk soon evinced she passed into a living thicket of guests, grouped one or two yards beyond. Eninger turned toward Mrs. Westerveldt. "There's your old aversion," he murmured. "Don't call her old," came the reply, while there seemed scarcely a motion from the clean-cut lips that gave it. " She'd par- don anything except being called old." He laughed. "It's so odd," he said. "In the other days you detested her so, and here I come back to New York and find you meeting her as you used and detesting her as you used, precisely the same." " How can you say that?" said Mrs. Wes- terveldt, faintly smiling. "People only detest when they feel. But you've just told me that I'm a woman without an emotion." He laughed again. "Oh, hate isn't an emotion," he said; " it's a manifestation." "Of what?" she answered chillingly, with a reaching forth of her arm to one of her attendants, who proffered his own with an obsequious duck of the figure, as though FABIAN DIMITRY. 77 thrilled by such a favor. "Of bad breed- ing, or merely dullness?" Before he could reply she had moved away, and while the possible sarcasm in her placid words appealed to him, he asked him- self if he had dealt her an offense. But her displeasure or the reverse of it seemed a minor affair now. In the time not long ago, when she was a reigning maiden belle, he had cared to keep in her good books. But now all that was changed. Besides, had they not often smiled together over her antipathy for this rowdy little Mrs. Atter- bury, who a moment before had swept past them? It was the glacial Gertrude herself, not he, who had given Adela Atterbury that name of "rowdy." The two women had always been to him amusing antipodes. Miss Ten Eyck, with her patrician reserves and her frosty Jiauteur s,had no doubt addressed rather potently his own cult for the select, the choice, the uncommon in all dealings with life. Mrs. Atterbury had always been to him a sort of unholy bacchanal spectacle a maenad in a baby-waist, and 78 FABIAN DIMITRY. without as much as one idealizing grape- leaf. She was older by four or five years than Gertrude Ten Eyck, and although the new young social autocrat met her every- where, she was even then married to her present lord, Lewson Atterbury, or " Lewsy," as almost everybody called him. "That woman is my horror," Miss Ten Eyck had once said to Eninger. ' ' The great trouble is that I can't cut her. If only I could, it would be quite different. But she was Adela Ostrander, and for a Ten Eyck to cut an Ostrander would be ridiculous. And yet, as it is, she makes my flesh creep. She has no more sense of her position than if it were an old shawl. She drags it after her through the highways and hedges. Why, almost any reputable person who pleases can actually know her. She's not the faintest sense of what it means to keep oneself rare. How can society deal with such people? They're like traitors inside the gates of a city when they've been born, as in Adela' s case, within gentility's limits. But the bit- terest thing of all is that one must go to her FABIAN DIMITRY. 79 Wednesdays. Oil, the rabble at those Wed- nesdays! One meets there the most impos- sible persons. The dreadful little woman has what she calls literary tastes. I suppose she has. But as if democracy couldn't get along without thrusting itself into our good old families! Its field is certainly huge enough in other directions. All her set ever asked of her was to marry a gentle- man and behave like a lady. That covers a good deal of ground, I grant; but birth has its exactions, and she's a living defiance of them all." Those odious Wednesdays yet continued, however, and it was not long before Eninger and Alicia went to one of them. Mrs. Atter- bury had had a fair fortune when she mar- ried, and her husband, though himself in Wall Street, had been the son of a rich silk- importer. Their added incomes enabled them to entertain finely in a home of smart present- ments. Eninger had found that society had changed markedly since his brief relative absence. But he was unprepared to meet so many strange faces, even in the drawing- 80 FABIAN DIMITRY. rooms of Mrs. Atterbury. Among the faces that were not strange he was keenly startled to discover that of Fabian Dimitry. Fabian looked paler and somewhat thinner than when last seen in London. His brow and eyes appeared to have gained, for this reason, in the way of intellectual beauty and power. Eninger and he did not once exchange glances; this may or may not have been chance, but afterward Alicia's husband felt inclined to think that Fabian had observed without seeming to observe him. How had it been with his wife? He took occasion to question her while they were being driven home in the carriage. "Oh, yes, I saw him," returned Alicia composedly. "How handsome he looked, did he not?" A sudden little stab of jealousy pierced her hearer. " You thought so, then?" he replied, with almost harsh directness. ' ' Of course I did, ' ' she affirmed. ' ' He is handsome. Don't you agree with me, Ray?" "Well yes," he acquiesced. And the carriage rattled clamorously onward, as FABIAN DIMITRY. 81 vehicles are apt to do over the stern-stoned thoroughfares of New York. "It's odd," Alicia presently said, her suave English voice breaking in with melodi- ous effect upon the strident rumble of the wheels, "it's odd, Ray, how much we can outlive in a little while!" " And you've outlived ?" he began, not ending his sentence, but letting a sudden clasp of his hand upon her own end it in- stead. "Oh, Alicia, dearest," he soon went on, " you can truthfully tell me that there's no afterthought no lingering sentiment no P "Hush, Ray," she shot in, with speed and yet very solemnly. " I was a girl, then; I'm a woman, now, and you've made me one. I think it' s not a matter for us to talk of at much length. Only, love, I've this to say: Not merely can I look at Fabian Dimitry now without a tremor of the old feeling, but I caught myself watching him to-night (he never seemed to know if I was there at all, by the by) with actual wonderment that I should ever have cared for him as I did. 82 FABIAN DIMITRY. Yes, Ray, wonderment is the word that, simply." As she paused he saw by the flash of a lamp through the window that tears were glistening in her eyes, and that the glance which burned from them was passionately wistful. In another moment he had leaned down and seized her in his arms. * ' My own my treasure ! You are all mine, now! I've won you completely, at last!" " You'd won me weeks, months ago," she answered. "And there's not a gleam left, not the dimmest, of that old feeling for Mmf" ' ' No, no! not the dimmest. It' s quite gone. It's all been swallowed up in my deep, absorbing love for you." He had ceased from his fervid caress, but he still held both her hands in the darkness. One of them was gloveless, and that he lifted to his lips, letting it rest there while he touched it with short, soft kisses. And after a little while he said, in a voice that surprised IUT because it was so grave, with no trace of joy in it whatever: FABIAN DIMITEY. 83 ' ' I think he saw us both quite plainly to- night. Perhaps he waited for me to give him some sign or for you." "Forme, Ray!" she exclaimed. " You're still angry with him, then?" ' ' No not angry ; I can 1 1 be any longer . . And yet " " You don't forgive him." " I I haven't thought about it lately." " You believed that he treated you in a really dreadful way.' ' "Ah, yes, " she murmured, drooping her head in the dusk. "But why speak of it now?" " Because," he said, "I'm certain that you wronged him." "Wronged him?" she flashed out, old memories of pain and revolt seeming to waken in her. ' ' How can you say such a thing? You can't be aware " F m aware that he loved you very dearly," was the interruption, " and that he gave you up." He saw her form erect itself to the utmost where she sat beside him, and could fancy 84 FABIAN DIMITRY. that he glimpsed an indignant sparkle in her eyes as well. "Pray, for what reason," she slowly asked, " did he give me up, as you call it?" Eninger now inly cursed his own folly. Why had he thus let a conscience-twinge betray him into so indiscreet an admission regarding Fabian? If Alicia had never sus- pected the real truth, why should it be his office to enlighten her? "Perhaps the renunciation was made on my account," he said. "No," denied Alicia, with ringing tones. ' ' Men don' t do those things for one another. ' ' She caught her husband's arm with sudden and tense grasp. " I understand," sped her next words. "Ray, it was because of that taint in our blood." He remained silent. "Ray." "Well?" he returned. "It was because of that. Answer me! Am I not right?" "Perhaps." FABIAN DIMITRY. 85 She sank back in the carriage. "I was very stupid I should have seen," he heard her mutter. ' ' There was never the least mean- ness about him and he was the sort of man who could have held his hand in the flames and burned it off if some noble cause made that needful." These were by no means loud sentences, but Eninger heard every word of them. He folded his arms, there in the gloom, and sat silently gnawing his lip. Who could say what revulsion in Alicia this new knowledge might produce? Suppose it undid the work of months and left her once more in love with him whom she had learned to despise as a mere coarse trickster? A result no less grotesque than calamitous and yet what wizard had ever yet been found keen enough to predicate concerning a woman' s heart? 86 FABIAN DIMITRY. V. It was quite true that Fabian had seen both Alicia and Eninger. In a crowded room one can very often see without appearing to look. At first Fabian feared that he would be obliged to quit the entertainment altogether, for the image of Alicia set his heart leaping and his ears humming in a way that made him dread some sort of piteous public col- lapse. But soon calmness brought its prized relief. He then wondered, with a clearing brain, what idiocy he might not have been saying to the lady in whose company he had stood. But among our dra, wing-rooms, as he might have recollected, a brain may often go wool-gathering without any decided chance of having itself seriously missed. His passion for Alicia was just as warm and vital as it had ever been, and the wound dealt him by his own act of self -sacrifice had FABIAX DIMITRY. 87 suffered cruel re-opening through this recent meeting with her. He had not wanted to appear at Mrs. Atterbury's reception, but that lady had put forth quaint and voluble entreaties which finally made him yield. He had always disliked society, and had shunned it in a way rare with one whose name and place there are excellent as were his own, and whose purse is the stanch if not corpulent abettor of both. Society, he was wont to say, undermined sincerity in the sincerest people, and its effect upon his friend, Mrs. Atterbury, was deplorable to him in the extreme. Still, he would not have Adela change her nature. She was full of refreshment to him just as she existed. He had never even remotely dreamed of being in love with her, and the feeling that she woke in him could safely have been called good-fellowship. There was that in Adela Atterbury which made him freely pardon her vulgarity ; but he would never have found enough in Gertrude Westerveldt, on the other hand, to have pardoned that lady her refine- ments. The latter, whom he had met, was 88 FABIAN DIMITRY. merely an odious snob to him; but in Mrs. Atterbury, with all her loudness and eccen- tricity, he recognized the worth of a true- souled woman. It amazed him that she could endure some of the people on whom she smiled. Not a few of those who would have been called the most desirable struck him as the shabbiest in either mind or manners. "I don't understand you," she had said to him one day. "You're a democrat, you despise caste; and yet you mix with this quality a dislike of your fellow-beings." " You're wrong," he had answered. "I'm not afraid of solitude, and I greatly prefer it to the company of people who jar upon me." But she would always have it that he shunned his kind. There were moments when she seemed to him so prancing and skittish a figure that he could not help wish- ing she would shun hers instead of thus gracelessly courting it. The way she clad herself, and the intoxicated style in which she pursued pleasures that to one of her mind and age should have appeared wholly trivial, often pierced him with repugnance. FABIAN DIMITRY. 89 If he had felt a grain of sexual sentiment mingle with his regard for her he might have reproached or even hotly quarreled with her on this account. As it was, he not only tol- erated, but tried quite to overlook her faults of manner and taste, while letting the rays of her exceptional intellect meet his admir- ing eyes. Her life had often struck him as a tumult of anomalies, incongruities. Without appar- ent time for anything, she accomplished marvels. She patronized literary entertain- ments and amateur theatricals; she was ubiquitous at afternoon teas; she never missed a new play unless to miss it were discretion; she was never absent from her box at the opera on the Wagner evenings, and bowed before that mighty musician with no blind homage but a keenly clear- sighted one; she read all the best books and a few that were good neither as art nor ethics; her charities were not only profuse but personal, and for her jaunty, buxom, ill-dressed little shape to pass from hospital to drawing-room was an occurrence of great 90 FABIAN DIMITRY. frequency. She possessed the qualities of a brilliant, social leader, but it is doubtful if she could ever have become, even in some city less juvenile and provincial than New York, any except the peculiar power she had here made herself. A chief must not be too approachable; she was extremely so. He must not forget dignity; she remembered it about as much as might a fire-fly. He must not show himself too voluble; as someone cruelly said of her, she had a tongue with a biceps in it. And lastly, a chief must have a little clan of retainers and adherents, not averse to occasional bowings and hand-kiss- ings; her associates were all on the most inti- mate terms with her, and thought no more about the making of deferential salaams to her than if she had been the wife of a city alderman. Since Fabian's return from England, her warm sympathy with him as a writer of plays had strengthened their previous friend- ship. "You can do it if anybody can," she assmvd him. kk I guess there isn't a man in FABIAN DIMITRY. 91 this country who's got it in him as you have. Last night we had a box at Wai- lack's. A lovely company, but such a rubbishy play, my dear boy! The motive was tame and mean and stale; the charac- ters were all weakly drawn, and not one of them developed through the dramatic and logical action of events. It wasn't art; it was cheap trick. It wasn't life; it was a tawdry lithograph of life, in a frame of such beauty and taste that you almost fancied you were looking at something poetic and fine. . . . Winnie Amsterdam kept gab- bling to me all the time. He's such an ass, you know; but even he was better than the play." Fabian, though well accustomed to her leaps from sense, and sometimes eloquence, into slangy trivialities, now coolly answered: " It is so strange to me that a woman of your brains can put up with these fellows whom you yourself denounce as simple- tons." "Oh, Lord, we'd have a sweet time, we women," she exclaimed, "if we only allowed 92 FABIAN DIMITRY. clever men to talk to us. We can't afford to take our pick. We've either got to poke off at home or else we've got to cast our nets for all kinds of fish. But, gracious me! I don't want to complain. I have a good enough time; I go in for a good time, and I have it. By the bye, when I got home from the theatre, last night, I pitched right into that book of poems you'd lent me a week ago. I was awfully ashamed of myself that I hadn't had a speck of time to look at it before. We were right here in this very room, Lewsy and I. He wouldn't go up to bed he can be such a mule! It was after twelve; we'd been blown off at Delmonico's by Jimmy Vanderveer. Lewsy fell asleep on that lounge, and snored horribly. I told him this morning it wasn't only the cham- pagne; he'd had a few cocktails in the after- noon, though he swore he hadn't. But then you never can trust Lewsy about cocktails; lit- /.s such a liar when he tipples. But he can't fool me; I always spot him always" ' ' And the poems?' ' asked Fabian. ' ' Did you care for them?" FABIAN DIMITRY. 93 At once he was presented with a new Mrs. Atterbury or rather, not one new to himself, for he had observed and been charmed by her in this same vein many times before. "Care for them? Why, the man has a striking gift. He can turn a lyric like Heine. He has the same sense of saying a thing as if it must have been said that way, and not as if he'd dragged his brains to find the strongest way out of several others in which it miglit have been said. There' s so much in that inevitableness of phrase and of intel- lectual process. You recognize it when you meet it. You can' t explain it, but the truth, the justice, the nicety, the felicity, the sin- cerity, all strike you. This young poet ought to live. I mean, of course, if he pre- serves his ideal with the proper artistic con- science. What he still lacks, I should say, is a secure instinct of selection. He doesn't always grasp just the right chute de phrase, and he doesn't always either choose or grasp his subject as he might. But there's a subtle native music in him that delights. I felt it, in spite of Lewsy's 94 FABIAN DIMITRY. heavy snores, which were certainly not musical." "Your criticism is truth itself," said Fabian. He looked at her and marveled at her queer, repelling, fascinating many- sidedness. He had no friend who was so near to him in judgment and penetration of his own work. Eninger, he had often mused of late, might have told him things that even this curious and notable woman might not have hit upon. Still, Eninger and he were forever parted. He said as much to Mrs. Atterbury after the reception at which he had seen Alicia and her husband. It was the day following that reception, and the hour was between five and six o'clock. His hostess had chosen to be at home to him alone, and considering her countless poten- tial engagements, Fabian could not help holding this concession of privacy as one that teemed with compliment. It had never occurred to him it never could occur to him in any ordinary course of experience that she might possess the least tender occult FABIAN DIMITRY. 95 reason for such a gracious act. She was a woman whose oddities had always been cele- brated for pausing at the ranker kind of scandals. It had been this about her deport- ment; it had been that about her attire; it had been the other thing about her compan- ionships and patronages. But about her fixed fidelity to the man whose name she bore there had never been heard even a doubtful whisper. Mrs. Atterbury's was a basement-house, and the reception-room in which she and Fabian were now seated looked from two heavily-draped windows immediately forth on the street. It would be hard to plan a room of richer and yet more harmonious tintings, or one whose embellishments (all choice and costly) were disposed with a nicer art. The contrast between this irreproach- able room and the absurdly youthful and tasteless garb of his friend, as she sat loung- ingly near him with her small, plump body half buried in cushions and her small, plump feet placed cross-wise on a tufted stool, struck Fabian as at once sad and comic, 96 FABIAN DIMITRY. " So you hated my Wednesday, you hor- rid thing," she had been saying to him, in affirmation rather than query. "Yes; you needn't deny it. Toward the last you looked not merely bored out of your boots, but agonized. What was the reason of it? Was it fatigue or disgust?" "Neither," said Fabian; and then, with an impulse to confide in her, he told not only of his agitation at lately seeing Alicia, but of his former engagement and its gloomf ul end. His auditor gave him the most rapt attention till he had finished. Then she said, with a breaking voice and humid eyes: "You gave her up on on that account! And you loved her!" " I loved her," said Fabian. "It was saintly of you! There " and she reached out one of her fat little hands. "Just give it a shake that's right. I oughtn't to have called it saintly heroic was the word. No wonder you know how to write good plays. You've got a nature so high that you can see from it right straight down into other people's." FABIAN DIMITKY. 97 "I did merely what I could not help doing," he returned. " Oh, precisely. And so did Ray Eninger do merely what lie couldn't help doing. But look at the difference. Well, you're crazy about her still, I suppose?" "I'm still in love with her." "Ever so much?" He smiled. " Yes; ever so much." There was silence, during which Mrs. Atterbury stared at a picture on the opposite wall. Suddenly she said, with a quick turn of the head toward where he sat: "Come to Egypt with Lewsy and me this winter. If you'll say yes I'll start inside of a week." "You woman of quicksilver!" he said. " Will you never tire of darting about?" "That's no answer," she scoffed, not by any means playfully. "Come with us. Make up your mind, and come." " Your husband in Egypt! He'd jump off the highest pyramid he could find, from sheer ennui." "No he wouldn't. Lewsy' s too fond of 98 FABIAN DIMITBY. himself and all his belongings ever to commit suicide." "I've settled down to work, you know, in dead earnest. Travel and industry are sworn foes." "Nonsense," she retorted, biting her lip, while her face clouded. " You'll just stay here and eat your heart out." "Not at all," he said. "I'll stay here and try to get a manager and a theatre for one of my plays." She gave a nod or two of ironic assent. "Oh, of course! And not make another effort, I suppose, to see her even once again!" "No." And the little word could not have sounded firmer if his lips had been of bronze and had spoken in some sort of metallic lan- guage. " That's hardly human," said his listener, " though Heaven knows you've given proof of being almost superhuman. You can't but realize that she must still care for you provided she ever cared." "Oh," he replied, "I dare say she de- spises me. Eninger, you know, may have FABIAN DIMITRY. 99 told her nothing as to my real motive in giving her up. And I well, well, I some how could not tell her. I left her to suspect. Perhaps she did not, and if she did not, then, as I have said, she despises me." He spoke these words with much quietude, but with that unconscious hint of inward funds of power that eludes all definition or portrayal. Adela Atterbury, as she watched him, thought how simply yet loftily great he had shown himself. " Ah," she now ex- claimed, "it's a shame that any woman should be so deceived. She ought to know the truth. It's not common justice to your- self that you should let her stay in ignorance of it. If she's half the true woman her face indicates, she'd not only pardon you, but " "Love me all the better, perhaps you mean!" And as Fabian thus made interrup- tion he spoke with a far more bitter accent than any which he often used. "Ah, no; she's a wife now, and pray Heaven she may be a happy one. I go out into the world so little that the chances are slender of my ever 100 FABIAN DIMITEY. meeting her again. Still, I shall always like to know that fate has been good to her; I shall like to watch from a distance the way in which it shapes her future." "I see!" exclaimed Mrs. Atterbury, push- ing away her footstool and giving one of her silken pillows a subversive toss. " You will like to be a martyr for the rest of your days. Ah, talk of virtue being its own reward, and of the joys reaped from self- abnegation! For a completely jolly life commend me to the man who serves self, not to him who slays it." "I don't claim to be a slayer of self, nor even its disciplinarian," said Fabian, while the repose of his manner contrasted oddly with the fret of hers. "But if both were true I should expect greater happiness, all told. For say what we will, that deli- cate, yet splendid moral hardihood which renounces every pleasure tainted with evil is more sensitive both to joy and pain than the weakness from which temptation seldom gets a rebuff. The vine that climbs high has tendrils which the tap of one's FABIAN DIMITRY. 101 finger-nail could wound, yet which almost might win vantage from a wall of polished marble." "Ah, save that sort of diamond-dust to sprinkle over your plays," replied Mrs. Atterbury, with a little skeptic laugh. "It's brilliant, and even the gallery might like it if used with due economy." "Don't try to be cynical, my friend," said Fabian; "it's the one intellectual effort to which you're clearly unequal." Her face softened, and she looked at him with a steadfast glow in her honest hazel eyes. "I'd show you how kind I could be if/ were only that fate you j ust spoke of. Oh, but the fates were three, were they not? Well, I'd choose to be the one with the shears. I'd use them to cut off Ray Eninger in the nower of life, and make your Alicia a bewil- dering young widow." " As far as I'm concerned, you'd be throw- ing away your time," said Fabian, with a smile that just hovered, and no more, at the edges of his placid lips. "What!" she burst forth, her sympathetic 102 FABIAN DIMITRY. gaze changing to one of suspicious poign- ancy. "Do you really mean that you never have moments of the least regret for acting as you did?" "I would do it over again if it were to do," -he answered. Then a light seemed to break on his noble and gentle face as he added: " Do you know what I often long to hear concerning her?" "What?" asked the lady, a little tartly, and as if out of patience. "That she's very happily married to her husband and has quite fallen in love, with him." Feeling thus, Fabian might have been gratified by an interview which took place between Eninger and his wife that very even- ing. Until then the husband had felt as if a heavy seal of silence had been laid upon his lips. For over twelve hours he scarcely <'xHi;iu