7
 
 THE 
 
 QUICK OR THE DEAD? 
 
 A STUDY. 
 
 BY 
 
 AMELIE HIVES. 
 
 u Wanting is what ?" Jocoseria. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA: 
 
 J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY.
 
 PS 
 
 Copyright, 1888, by J. B LIPPINCOTT COMPANY.
 
 LIPPINCOTT S 
 
 MONTHLY MAGAZINE. 
 
 APRIL, 1888. 
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD? 
 
 I. 
 
 fTHHERE was a soughing rain asweep that night, with no wind to drive 
 _L it, yet it ceased and fell, sighed and was hushed incessantly, as 
 by some changing gale. Barbara was a good deal unnerved by the 
 lanternless drive from the station. The shelving road, seamed with 
 abrupt gullies, lay through murk fields and stony hollows, that she 
 well remembered ; in the glimpsing lightning she saw scurrying trees 
 against the suave autumn sky, like etchings on bluish paper; the dry, 
 white-brown grasses swirled about the horses feet in that windless rain ; 
 and after what thunderous fashion those horses pounded stableward ! 
 They hurled through narrow gate- ways like stones from a catapult, 
 rushed past ragged trees whose boles seemed leaping to meet them, spun 
 over large stones as though they had been mere fallen leaves. 
 
 The black driver urged his smoking team, as though dissatisfied 
 with their prowess, by sharp, whistling inward breaths, and upward 
 gestures of his bowed elbows. He was a grotesque figure against the 
 pennons of lightning. Barbara had smiled in spite of her fear, lie- 
 coming suddenly grave as they just grazed the corner of a slanting, 
 half-ruined wall, formed of rough stones and clay, the " Brook- 
 field Barn" of her childhood, and her fears were not calmed by 
 recalling the fact that only twenty yards ahead stretched a long, rani- 
 shackle bridge, formed of loose planks held in place by wild grape 
 vine branches and a stone placed here and there. This bridge dipped 
 its lithe middle almost into the waters of a hurling, brown stream, 
 known in the surrounding country as " Machunk Creek." There were 
 various legends regarding the origin of this name. The negroes said 
 that a man had crossed it at one time, carrying a chunk of " fat" light- 
 wood ; when on the middle of the one plank which then served for 
 bridge, he had dropped his pine-knot, and screamed out desperately, 
 
 438
 
 434 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD? 
 
 " Oh ! my chunk !" Theuce the title of the stream. Barbara, who 
 had always unquestioningly believed this story, could almost fancy that 
 she saw this swart, regretful figure poised now above the hurly of rain- 
 swollen waters, could almost hear his despairing cry. She thought 
 of getting out of the trap and following his example by crossing on 
 foot, when a dull, whirring rumble, followed by a certain rock-a-bye 
 motion, told her that they were upon the bridge. She shut her eyes 
 with an infallible womanly instinct, although it was then absolutely 
 dark, caught a fold of her inner lip between her teeth, and pinched the 
 back of her left hand firmly in the palm of her right. There was a 
 jolt, a spattering scramble from the horses, another of those sharp, 
 unique sounds from Unc Joshua the driver, and off they sped once 
 more into the ever-increasing gloom. 
 
 It was not until the next day that Barbara found there had been 
 lanterns, with candles ready for lighting, on each side of her. She had 
 been finally whirled in upon the gravel of the carriage-drive of Rose 
 mary, and had dodged the familiar arms of the box -trees, that scraped 
 and rattled against the sides of the flying carriage : then came orange 
 blurs of light, between thick, parted curtains, a semicircular glare 
 over the hall door, and little glowing ladders to right and left of it. 
 
 Her aunt Fridiswig had rushed to meet her, had embraced her, by 
 leaving a moist splash upon her elastic, night-cool cheek, and some of 
 a pepper-and-salt shawl-fringe caught in the button of her jacket. 
 She had escaped finally, saying that she would like a cup of tea in her 
 bedroom, and that her aunt could come and bid her good-night, but 
 was on no account to sit up past her usual hour for retiring. 
 
 She was leaning now in an old, chintz-covered chair in. front of a 
 chestnut-wood fire. How vividly that chair recalled other days ! She 
 smiled a little drearily as she ran her fingers into a little slit in the 
 stuff, which she had cut there herself, three years ago, while whittling a 
 peg for her easel. She had brought no maid with her, having looked 
 forward with a certain pleasure to the ministrations of the maid of her 
 girlhood, a dark-brown creature, with a profile like that of Rarueses II., 
 and wearing countless slubs of black wool tied up with bits of white 
 string. This person was moving about the room with a light, padding 
 step like that of a cat through wet grass. She was holding up and 
 admiring her mistress s cast-off furs and under-wraps, in the candle 
 light behind her back, passing her hand up and down the rich sables 
 with a voluptuous ecstasy of appreciation ; now tucking them beneath 
 her chin and regarding her reflection in the old-fashioned, gilt-framed 
 toilet-glass, now burying her face in them with a shudderingly de 
 lighted movement of her shoulders. Barbara sat listless, her damp 
 hair unwound about her shoulders, tapping the curled ends lightly 
 against the palm of her hand as she dreamed, wide-eyed, in the uncer 
 tain firelight. The maid, Martha Ellen, or Rameses, as Barbara called 
 her, came presently and began to warm a pair of red-heeled bedroom 
 slippers by holding them to the blaze, at the same time lifting one of 
 her pretty, yellow-lined hands, palm outward, to protect her face. 
 
 The gesture went through Barbara like a knife. How Val used 
 to laugh at it, when Martha Ellen went through the same perform-
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD? 435 
 
 anoe of warming his slippers ! She put up both hands to her breast 
 with a movement of anguish. Tears clustered hot and stinging on 
 her lashes, and great breaths that were deeper than sobs thrilled 
 through her from head to foot. Ah, she had been a fool doubtless to 
 come here, for, in the natural course of things, she must expect such 
 painful occurrences twenty times a day ; and yet there was a sorrow 
 ful sweetness in it, too. She let drop her hands, and, relaxing her 
 tense figure, sent a slow, miserable look around the room. It was 
 spacious, airy, Southern. A delicate, dawn-like mixture of rose and 
 gray characterized its furniture. The large, carved bed, of mahogany, 
 had hangings of rose and white. There were white goat-skins here 
 and there on the gray carpet, and some very good water-colors, by 
 French artists, above the chimney-piece. The chairs and couches were 
 many and capacious. The number of mirrors suggested a certain van 
 ity on the part of its occupant : there were eight in all, none of them 
 small, and all framed heavily in old gilt. A mahogany writing-table 
 near one of the windows had heavy brass handles, awink in the fitful 
 light. Barbara rose suddenly, and, putting back her heavy hair, began 
 to walk up and down the room on soft, slipperless feet. 
 
 " Wait, Miss Barbara, honey," urged Rameses, approaching her 
 mistress on her knees and holding out the now very-warm slippers 
 " You ll war out dern pretty stockin s." 
 
 Barbara stopped and stared down at her absently, then turned gently 
 away and re-began her long, noiseless stride. 
 
 " You can go," she said. " Never mind the slippers. I ll call you 
 presently." 
 
 As Barneses left the room, Barbara locked the door through which 
 she had passed, and then, turning, with her hand still on the key, took 
 another long, scrutinizing survey of the room. 
 
 Presently she went to one of the windows and drew aside the curtain. 
 The skirt of the sky was strewn from hem to hem with little, flittering, 
 filmy clouds, through which a wet moon shone vaporous; the tulip- 
 trees, nearly stripped of their golden, October leaves, thrust their empty 
 seed-cups out and up, like so many elfin goblets, to be filled with weird 
 mist-wine; the wind blew in puffs, like a thing breathing in its sleep, 
 and the rain had ceased. Barbara s hair made a mellow glow in the 
 wan light, and the already scarlet holly-berries blinked back at her from 
 the frothy gloom of the shadow-waves. A horse neighed impatiently 
 just below, and was answered from a far meadow. She could see the 
 light from her windows streaking the faded grass on the lawn. With 
 a sigh she let the curtain drape itself once more in its accustomed folds, 
 pausing to rest both hands on the mahogany writing-table, and again 
 devouring the room with that slow, absorbing gaze. As her returning 
 eyes fell upon the table on which she leaned, she gave a strange cry, 
 and pressed backward among the window-curtains, still keeping a fixed, 
 horrified look on the table. How bathos will intrude upon pathos! It 
 is the flippant Tweedledum of a most serious Tweedledee. The possible 
 viper from which poor Barbara shrank was nothing more nor less than 
 a half-smoked cigar, which lay in a neat little ash-tray among its ashes, 
 just as the man who had been smoking it had placed it there three yeary
 
 436 THE qUICK OR THE DEAD! 
 
 ago. Suddenly she fell on her knees beside the table, and, snatching up 
 the bit of tobacco, kissed it again and again. She was a woman with 
 an almost terrible sense of humor, and presently she began to laugh, not 
 hysterically, but quietly, appreciatively. She saw how ridiculous a thing 
 that act of hers would seem to an on-looker. And then again she kissed 
 it, and, catching her face into her two hands, went into a shuddering 
 passion of sobs, tearless, noiseless, and terrible. 
 
 Ail this will not seem overstrained when one knows its origin. 
 
 In this room, among these identical articles, just three years ago 
 Barbara Pomfret had passed the first three months of an absolutely 
 joyous married life ; two years ago her husband had died, and she had 
 come back an utterly unhappy woman to the scene of her former hap 
 piness. Every chair, book, knick-knack, rug, in this room, was asso 
 ciated in some way with her husband. The very pictures, the toilet- 
 glass, the ornaments on the mantel-shelf, all held for her some memory 
 which stabbed her as she looked ; and yet it was of her own will that 
 she had returned. She did not wish to forget, and she could not better 
 remember than in a place so fraught with memories. She had not, 
 however, calculated the full poignancy of the grief that was about to 
 claim her. As vanished scenes swept across her inner sight, there 
 came with them words and looks and tones innumerable. His arms 
 held her, his breath warmed her, his voice was in her ear, vibrating, 
 actual. She leaped to her feet, stumbling over her heavy gown ; her 
 fascinated, dreading eyes sought the vague gloom behind her, as she 
 hurried to the door. The room was full of his voice, of his sighing, 
 of his laughter. She breathed gaspingly, and caught at the key to 
 unlock the door. It was stiff with long disusage, and refused to turn. 
 There again ! his laughter, about her, above her, and his lips at her 
 ear. She could hear the words, loving, reckless, impassioned words, 
 not meet for a ghost to utter : " Barbara ! Barbara ! your curled 
 lips are a cup, and your breath is wine. You make me drunk ! 
 drunk !" 
 
 She grasped the key with both hands, panting, sobbing, her eyes 
 strained with a mighty, overwhelming panic. Still the senseless bit 
 of brass resisted. She caught up a fold of her gown and wound it 
 about the handle. Now his very lips were on her: they drew her 
 breath, her life. 
 
 " O God, help me ! O God, let the door open ! let it open !" 
 
 Miss Fridiswig, alone with her knitting, in the dining-room just 
 below, heard a sudden noise as of falling, and burst out into the hall, 
 to meet Rameses with her eyes goggling. They made a simultaneous 
 rush up the stairway, and nearly fell over Barbara, who was lying on 
 her face, half in and half out of her room. 
 
 Raineses, who was as strong as mast men of her size, lifted the 
 poor girl bodily, and laid her upon the bed. 
 
 They did all the disagreeable, useless things that people generally 
 do to a tainting woman, and by and by, when it was time for her to 
 return to consciousness, she opened her dark eyes, and drew several 
 short, difficult breaths. 
 
 " 1 know, I know, " she said.
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEADt 437 
 
 " You know what ?" coaxed Miss Fridiswig. 
 
 " I know, I know, " repeated Barbara, " I know where I am. 
 Must get a new lock to-morrow. Rameses sleep in here to 
 night. What s o clock ?" 
 
 " Mos twelve," said Rameses, who was holding Barbara s bare 
 feet in her hands. " You go tuh bade, Miss Fridis. Miss Barb ra, 
 you go tuh bade too." 
 
 " Yes, darling, you must, for my sake," urged Miss Fridiswig. 
 
 " Not yet ; not yet," said Barbara. 
 
 She tried to sit up, and fell back among the big pillows. A sudden 
 shivering shook her throughout. She made another effort, and got 
 her arm about Rameses neck. 
 
 " Help me " she panted, " help me off the bed quick. That 
 sofa there " 
 
 When they had made her comfortable on the sofa, she closed her 
 eyes and lay so still that they thought she had fainted again ; but as 
 Rameses moved to fetch some of the noxious remedies, she pressed 
 down a fair hand on the girl s wool, signifying that she was to remain 
 beside her. 
 
 " You go tuh bade, Miss Fridis," said Rameses. " Tain t no use 
 two on us settin up." 
 
 " No, not a bit," said Barbara. " Please go, Aunt Fridis." 
 
 " Ah, let me be of use ! let me be of use !" wailed Miss Fridiswig, 
 casting herself on her knees beside Raraeses, and leaving another warm 
 splash on Barbara s inert hand. 
 
 Barbara, who never willingly hurt the feelings even of a cabman, 
 did not know what to do, until it suddenly occurred to her to faint 
 again. When she came to herself from this simulated swoon, Rameses 
 had packed Miss Fridiswig, willy-nilly, to her virgin slumbers, and 
 was resuscitating the dead fire by breathing on it, after the Biblical 
 method. 
 
 Barbara lay watching her, stung again by an almost intolerable 
 pang. How often had she lain on that very sofa and watched Val 
 trying to imitate the negro method of kindling a fire, until his puffed- 
 out cheeks made him into a very excellent likeness of a wind-god 
 oouchant ! 
 
 When the wreathing, lilac flames began to whirr about the fresh 
 logs, she called the girl to her. 
 
 " Are you very sleepy ?" she said, smiling, a beautiful smile that 
 Martha Ellen remembered. It was associated with countless gifts, and 
 seemed to breathe of the summer, a season endeared above all others 
 to the sensitive little black. 
 
 " Lor ! Yuh looks jes like yuh use tuh !" she exclaimed, regard 
 less of Barbara s question. " I thought yuh done give up smilin when 
 [ seed yuh fust tuh-night." 
 
 "Did you?" said Barbara. She smiled again, and yielded her 
 hand graciously to the girl s caresses, repeating her question. Martha 
 Ellen asserted that she didn t feel sleep " nowhar near bout her." 
 
 " But it must be very late ?" Barbara said. " Are all the other 
 servants in bed?"
 
 ^38 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD 9 
 
 Martha Ellen thought so, and slipped a lithe arm about her mis 
 tress, who stood still for an instant, while the apparent seething of the 
 articles about her subsided. She was tall, and her figure in its silverisb 
 dressing-gown of white silk gleamed like a streak of moonlight in the 
 rich dusk. I once saw a stem of white wild-flowers lean against a 
 charred pine as she was now leaning against her dark-skinned waiting- 
 woman. 
 
 Presently she moved a step or two. The girl moved with her, 
 bending beneath the bare white arm that rested heavily across her 
 shoulders. As they paused again, she turned her face up, with a 
 sideward, expectant movement. 
 
 " I was going to say," Barbara began, " that if you know where 
 the little brass bed is, the one I used to sleep in as a little girl, 
 I would help you to get it." 
 
 " Naw, you ain t ; you ain gwine he p me git nuthin ," said Martha 
 Ellen, positively. 
 
 Her mistress was as positive. " It is entirely too heavy for you to 
 lift alone," she said. " If you know where it is, I am coming with 
 you to help you." 
 
 They went together down a narrow corridor that turned abruptly 
 several times, Martha Ellen in front with a candle that died out to a 
 blue splutter in the many draughts. 
 
 Following this elfish light, Barbara found herself at last in the 
 nursery of her childhood. She looked upward and remembered the 
 very cracks in the plaster ceiling : there was the identical one that she 
 had thought resembled the profile of George Washington on the 
 postage-stamps. Underneath it stood the brass cot. It was some 
 what tarnished, and the bows of pale-blue ribbon that enlivened its 
 head-piece were decidedly draggled. She untied them mechanically 
 and rolled them around her fingers, while Martha Ellen took off the 
 unsheeted mattresses. How long it was since she had slept in that gay 
 little bed ! There is nothing that makes us seem so unreal, so unfamil 
 iar to ourselves, as some pleasant child-possession seen unexpectedly in 
 "nhappy womanhood. 
 
 She kneeled long beside it that night, with palms pressed hard 
 against her eyes, forgetting to pray, in a great, struggling effort to 
 imagine herself once more a child, pleading for her pony s tail to 
 " grow as long as before the calf chewed it," for " Mammy to be white 
 in heaven," for " Satan to be forgiven after a long, long, long time," 
 for herself to be made a "good little girl and not so cross with 
 Agnes." 
 
 At first she was not conscious of any especial emotion, as she bent 
 against the cold linen of the turned-back bedclothes ; she had no par 
 ticular sensation either of happiness or unhappiness ; but presently vast 
 waves of passionate regret, and longing, and rebellion, surged over her, 
 each one, as it swelled and formed, more vast and annihilating than 
 the other. The undertow seemed dragging her down, down. God s 
 imagined face took on a horrible grinning. The ministering angels 
 seemed deformed creatures who writhed, and twisted, and uttered wan 
 ton gigglings as they circled about the Throne after the fashion of the
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEADt 439 
 
 witches in " Macbeth" about the caldron. Nothing seemed good ; noth 
 ing seemed kind. She could not even think of her husband as having 
 existed. He was a mere mass of repulsive formlessness in a slimy 
 wedge of earth ; perhaps he was not even that. She imagined his 
 ghastly skeleton tricked out in all the mockery of fashionable attire. 
 What delightful, smart, of-the- world- worldly coats he had worn ! 
 Why, if he were a skeleton now, one could see his tailor s name in 
 gilt letters through his spinal column ! Ha ! ha ! ha ! Ha ! ha ! ha ! 
 She had laughed silently at first, then in a choking whisper, then in a 
 ringing peal of sound that clashed through the silent house, chilling 
 the blood in Martha Ellen s rigid, black body. 
 
 It did not occur to her to go to her mistress. She sat up on the 
 pallet where she was sleeping for the night, folded herself in her own 
 embrace, and muttered between her clacking teeth, 
 
 " Miss Barb ra done gone mad ! she done gone mad ! / dunno 
 what tuh do ! Gord knows I dunno what tuh do !" Then all as sud 
 denly the laughter ceased. 
 
 There seemed to Barbara to be some glowing, resplendent presence 
 about her, lifting up her heart as it were with both hands. She took 
 down her palms from her strained eyes, and stared into the almost 
 absolute gloom. She even reached out her arms into it. The dark 
 ness seemed to cling about her. Little, every-day noises distracted her 
 attention, the snap of the dying fire as it settled among its ashes, the 
 lull and sough of an awakening wind through the branches of the tulip- 
 trees, the noise that a mouse made dragging some little thing along 
 the floor. She rose stiffly to her feet, and cowered shivering down 
 among the icy sheets. Again she held out her arms. The pressure of 
 a warm, curly head against her breast was with her as an actuality. 
 
 " Oh, Val," she whispered, " oh, Val ! Oh, darling, mine ! 
 mine ! mine ! Touch me, come to me, here in the darkness, here 
 where you used to love me. I will not be afraid, no, not the least, 
 not the least. Oh ! God God ! he does not hear me ! he cannot hear 
 me ! he does not care any more." 
 
 She flung herself half out of her childhood s bed upon the large one 
 of carved mahogany near which it stood, sobbing, shuddering, kissing 
 wildly the silken coverlet and pillows that rose softly through the thick 
 firelight, so finally slept, worn out, desolate, chilled to the very core 
 of soul and body. 
 
 II. 
 
 Rosemary was one of those old Virginia houses which have not 
 been desecrated with modern furniture, as gray hair with hair-dye. 
 Its rooms were gloomy in contour and atmosphere, but cheered by 
 bright hangings and flowers, like an old face with smiles. The house 
 of deep-red brick showed in sanguine streaks through tangled vines, 
 something after the fashion in which a Nereid s face might blush behind 
 her veil of verdant hair. There were many old portraits in the large 
 hall, as darkly ruddy in color as the outer walls of the mansion which 
 they adorned. An old spinet stood in the music-room, from which 
 instrument Miss Fridiswig used to coax forth ghastly jinking* (this
 
 440 THE QUICK OR THE DEADf 
 
 spin et could not utter anything so liquid as a jingle) on Sunday after 
 noons. 
 
 It was a most lovely old place to die in, but not, assuredly, one in 
 which to live. There was a suggestion of loneliness even about its 
 vegetable life which seemed depressing. Its trees, with the exception 
 of the tulip- poplars and acacias, were all mateless, not two of any kind. 
 Its flowers did not grow socially in beds, but here and there through 
 out the tangled grass. The very stalks of corn in the kitchen-garden 
 leaned away from each other. There was one dog, one cat, one horse, 
 one vehicle which Miss Fridiswig called a carry-all, and one aged black 
 to drive it. Barbara preferred walking, to this means of locomotion, 
 and was sometimes out from early morning until the woods were full 
 of lean shadows, that seemed as hungry as herself. 
 
 With what an appetite she used to return to Rosemary ! She some 
 times drank three cups of tea, and ate two partridges, together with 
 numberless biscuits, for supper. Miss Fridiswig, after having asserted 
 on several occasions that she would " ruin her stummick," considered 
 an unpleasant duty to have been performed, and refrained from further 
 remark. Miss Fridiswig was amiable and unobtrusive, and, when she 
 did not perform on the spinet, Barbara liked to think that she was 
 in the house. 
 
 October in Eden could not have been more perfect than October in 
 Virginia, indeed, far less so, as the ever- verdant leaves in that garden 
 could never have fallen brownly to the ground and so rustled almost to 
 the very knees of a person walking through them. 
 
 During these autumnal rambles, Barbara seemed to leave her 
 wedded self at Rosemary, and to pursue her maiden self with all the 
 sweet if sad persistency of a Dryad seeking her forsaken tree. 
 
 It was as if Happiness lurked somewhere in the golden-glad depths 
 of those many-stemmed woods, waiting only for the clasp upon her 
 kissing wings. 
 
 A sudden resolve one day took possession of Barbara. It occurred 
 to her while putting on her gloomy bonnet of heaviest crape. She 
 tossed it from her with a sudden resolve, and unwound the severe 
 plaits of her copper-brown hair, allowing them to curl richly into a 
 floating background for the clear but vivid pallor of her face. Ten 
 years appeared to have fallen from her with that burnished coronal. 
 The airy grace of girlhood seemed entangled in her airy tresses. She 
 then as hastily put off her sombre gown, and, going to an old press, 
 felt along its shelves until she had brought to light several articles, in 
 which she began to dress herself. Her toilet accomplished, she looked 
 like a girl of sixteen who had gotten herself up in as near emulation 
 of some favorite brother as possible. This boyish costume consisted of 
 a dark-blue flannel shirt, a short, clay-stained corduroy skirt, a leather 
 belt, a pair of chamois-skin shooting-gaiters, and a pair of stout laced 
 boots. 
 
 She gave one fleeting glance at herself in the toilet-glass, and then, 
 pulling on a dark-blue Tarn O Shanter as she ran, fled from the room, 
 down-stairs, out of door, far into the wind-stirred forest. 
 
 She sank at last upon a fallen tree, and glanced, panting gayly, ai
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEADt 441 
 
 t.ie beauty surrounding her. A flying squirrel whirred past her head, 
 and, alighting on a bole just beyond her, began its light, scratching 
 ascent. A ground-swell of wind, as it were, just lifted the overlapping 
 leaves about her feet ; while she could hear the occasional patter of an 
 acorn in the gold-barred silence to right and left, like the intermittent 
 tick of some genial old clock, that disliked to tell more constantly 
 the passing of such glorious hours. 
 
 There was a soft blue haze lying close to the forest-floor, through 
 which its boles and undergrowth darted blackly upward, like figures 
 from some tremendous witch-smoke, and a trail of Virginia creeper 
 spurting redly across the foreground suggested the blood-spurt from 
 the victim in the unholy sacrifice. 
 
 Barbara rested movelessly, absorbing the beauty about her through 
 the very pores of her soul. The roots of the fallen tree against which 
 she leaned, reaching crookedly towards a bough of golden maple leaves 
 overhead, reminded her of the fingers of a miser scooped to clutch his 
 gold. She laughed with a sudden whim. 
 
 " You shall have it !" she said, springing out and grasping the 
 bough, which she shook back and forth with all her strong young 
 might. She was an enchanting Danae under the shower of gold 
 leaves, the supple lines of her strained figure melting into the vapor 
 ous blue-gray of the wood beyond, her eyes laughing above the 
 unusual carmine in her cheeks. 
 
 It seemed a pity that the only witness to this ravishing scene should 
 be a little darky, with an embarrassing paucity of breeches, and a 
 -agged coat which trained upon the ground behind. 
 
 He paused, grasping a young sapling which he was dragging after 
 him, and gazed up at Barbara, who, pausing also, gazed down at him. 
 He was short and wizened, and had narrow, blue-black feet, upon which 
 he stood gingerly, the yellow-lined great toes curled heavenward. His 
 oily eyes were small, his countenance a dense bitumen hue, his inner 
 lips, hanging outward with astonishment, of a pale, moist pink, like 
 that of a toadstool rained upon. He was impish and uncouth even 
 for a little nigger, and looked like a crayon sketch after a painting of 
 Robin Good fellow. 
 
 " How-d e-do ?" said Barbara. 
 
 He replied with the staccato precision of a telegraph machine, 
 
 " I se fus -rate. How s yo se f ?" 
 
 " Thanks, I am in excellent health also," replied Barbara. " "Will 
 you tell me where you are going ?" 
 
 " Chissnuts," said the imp, laconically. 
 
 " Chestnuts !" echoed Barbara. She loosed the maple bough, which 
 swung in stately nudity to its accustomed place, and came forwaid 
 dusting lightly together her gloved palms. The knotty miser-roots 
 were now full of the plenteous gold, and she looked back at them over 
 her shoulder and smiled, before addressing the boy, to whom presently 
 she said, in a pleasant voice, 
 
 " Will you let me go with you, Robin Goodfellow ?" 
 
 " Tain t my name, he answered, with the same brevity which had 
 heretofore distinguished his remarks.
 
 442 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD1 
 
 " No, but it is my name for you," said Barbara, gravely. " What 
 have you to say to that ?" 
 
 He lowered one of his taut big toes, and burrowed with it in the 
 soft loam. 
 
 " Nothin ," he finally announced. 
 
 " Shall I come with you ?" 
 
 " Ef yuh wants." 
 
 " I do want. I want some chestnuts." 
 
 At this the imp grinned cunningly. " Yuh ll have tuh pay fuh 
 em, den," said he. 
 
 " I ll do that now," returned Barbara, taking a quarter from a 
 netted puree, which she always carried for this very purpose. 
 
 His little eyes seemed to dart towards it like those of a crab, and 
 he drew a swift tongue over both podgy lips, with the air of a gourm,el 
 regarding a well-cooked ortolan, while the cunning look on his face 
 increased in proportion as the grin vanished. 
 
 " You gimme dat fus , n den I ll thrash de tree fuh yuh," he 
 suggested. 
 
 " You thrash the tree for me first, and then I ll give you this/ 
 replied Barbara, firmly. 
 
 "All ri ," he said, a certain glaze which avarice had spread like a 
 coat of varnish over his black skin vanishing, to leave it as dully 
 grimy as before. 
 
 " By the way, what is your name ?" Barbara asked, as she walked 
 Seside him on their way to the chestnut-tree. 
 
 " Mos anythin ." 
 
 " Well, what is it as a rule?" 
 
 " Mh ?" said the child. 
 
 " What does your mother call you ?" 
 
 " Honey when she s please , n you Satan when she ain ." 
 
 " Hadn t you rather be called Robin Goodfellow than Satan?" 
 
 I don keer." 
 
 " If I give you this quarter and another for the chestnuts, will you 
 answer when I call you Robin Goodfellow ?" 
 
 " Mh mh." 
 
 She put the quarter in his upreached palm, and he transferred it 
 thence to one of his cheeks, the monkey-like pouch where a young 
 negro carries most of his valuables. It made an eerie clinking against 
 his teeth as he talked ; and when she finally bade him good-by and 
 gave him the other quarter, he tucked it away in the opposite cheek. 
 
 Barbara was so pleased with this unique and non-committal young 
 imp that she took him shortly into her service. He carried her easel 
 and color-box when she sketched, and occupied the back seat of her 
 Canadian fishing-wagon when she drove. During her day-long ram 
 bles he was nearly always to be seen trotting at her heels, and he slept 
 on a bearskin rug just outside of her door. She had at first attempted 
 to dress him picturesquely, but the result was not encouraging. When 
 Beauregard Walsingham (for such Barbara discovered to be his real 
 name) first beheld himself in his mistress s mirror, thus attired, he 
 gave vent to a choked howl of dismay and anger, and fled to the linen-
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEADt 443 
 
 closet. From thence he was imearthed, not too gently, by Ramesea, 
 who had no liking for him, and usually spoke of him as " that limb," 
 having declared him to be " ez ugly ez home-made sin n ez black as 
 the hinges uv midnight." 
 
 On being asked the cause of his excitement, Beauregard replied 
 that he " wa n t no circus clown, en folks done think he cuujud (con 
 jured) if he war dem dar things." 
 
 Barbara attempted to reason with him, but it was useless ; and she 
 at last adopted a stern and superior pose, and had the butler place him 
 bodily on the back seat of the fishing- wagon. He sat there, it is true, 
 but the fixed war-light in his greasy eyes was ominous. 
 
 His duty on these occasions was to open the many gates which dis 
 tinguish Albemarle neighborhoods. The first one on this afternoon 
 gave almost directly upon the brawlings of Machunk Creek, and after 
 Barbara had driven through, and was waiting for him to resume his 
 place behind her, he turned abruptly, and, with respectful but dogged 
 determination, waded out into the middle of the stream, cast himself 
 upon his scarlet-sashed little stomach, and rolled. A muddy unity of 
 tone was the result. Barbara looked ahead as if nothing had happened, 
 until he began to climb into the cart ; she then informed him that he 
 was to follow on foot the rest of the way, and she made the occasion 
 live forever in his memory by driving eight miles. It probably kept 
 him from taking cold, but it also subdued his dauntless spirit, because, 
 although he made no signs of giving in, when liameses girded his loins 
 next day with another as brilliant sash, he wore it meekly until Barbara 
 herself removed it before he went to bed. 
 
 Having conquered, she, woman-like, bestowed upon him that for 
 which he had fought, namely, an ordinary costume, composed of dark 
 brown cloth and silver buttons. So closely did this attire fit, and so 
 perfectly did it match young Walsmgham s complexion, that at a little 
 distance he looked like a brou/e nudity picked out with silver. 
 
 He was a strange, subtle little creature, of few words and secretive 
 habits. He had a melancholy instrument upon which he used to play 
 u Home, Sweet Home." Rameses called it a " mouth-harp," and it 
 used to set all the dogs howling, for Barbara had bought two grey 
 hound pups, which she was training. 
 
 Between the spinet and the mouth-harp, Barbara was sometimes 
 very miserable ; but she could not find it in her heart to separate Beau- 
 regard from the one object of his affection, which actually slept in his 
 dusky bosom every night. 
 
 Her girlhood s costume, once adopted, was worn as a constancy, the 
 walks which she took being of too wild and secluded a nature to subject 
 her to remark from any of the neighbors. She resembled the heroine 
 of a witch-tale, figuring all the week as a bright-eyed, wild-haired 
 brownie, and becoming on the Sabbath a sad, unspeaking woman, with 
 demure dark lids over eyes yet more demure and dark. 
 
 During those vagrant autumn days she became mistress of a rare 
 art, that of controlling her thoughts. She found that by a tiemendous 
 effort she could whistle them to fist and keep them hooded there, so that, 
 although they fretted and shook their bells, they did not soar away into
 
 444 THE QUICK OR TEE DEADf 
 
 the open and bring down unsavory winged things which she would 
 rather remained a-wing. Those first, horrible imaginings haunted her 
 no more. Her husband was with her now as the glad-eyed lover of 
 her young wifehood. She remembered his rollicking laughter, recalled 
 the movements of his eyes, walked often with the very warmness of his 
 arm about her body. She would not allow herself to think of the com 
 ing snow, and her life seemed a supportable waiting, a not altogether sad 
 wandering after something which at length she would discover. 
 
 She returned one evening far into the orange- l>elted radiance of the 
 heavy twilight. There were boughs of glowing leaves about her 
 shoulders, which framed her face as though in reality she were a 
 Dryad, looking through the screen of her guarding foliage, and she 
 held the greyhounds in a light leash, singing, as she walked, parts of a 
 song that her husband had especially liked : 
 
 " Bravo 1 Bravo ! Punchinello I 
 Bravo, Pun-chi-ne-ell-o I" 
 
 She had not a strong voice, but it was clear and carried well, and was 
 pleasant to drowsy ears, a twilight and firelight voice, one in which 
 to sing elf-songs, and ghostly ditties, or some such lay as this story of 
 Punchinello. 
 
 As she came up the long, narrow lawn, overbent by tall acacias, 
 she could see the wavering glare of a large fire in the drawing-room. 
 How often she and Valentine had hailed that leaping, twisting light 
 on their home-coming after just such walks ! She ceased suddenly to 
 sing, and dropped on her knees in the rank grass, while the greyhounds 
 leaped awkwardly upon her, having no instinct to tell them when 
 women kneel for prayer and when for play. She had been thrilled 
 with a possessing sense of his nearness : he was about her, close against 
 her with the other impalpable essences of this still, gold-gray evening. 
 The light in the drawing-room died down, almost went out, then leaped 
 higher than ever: some one had thrown on more wood. Kneeling 
 there on the windy lawn had chilled and dispirited her. She rose to 
 her feet, still grasping the gay leaf-masses, and entered the house. 
 
 With her hand on the drawing-room door, she paused. It seemed 
 as though an actual force was urging her away ; and yet there was no 
 one there. She turned and looked first over one shoulder, then over 
 the other, with a bird-swift gesture. No one. The puppies left out 
 side were whining and scratching for admittance. She hesitated, think 
 ing for a moment that she would let them in, but some strange feeling 
 withheld her. Then tossing wide the door with an impetuous move 
 ment, she went rushingly into the very middle of the room, where she 
 regretted her impulsiveness, for she saw that a man was standing before 
 the fire. He was bending slightly towards the blaze and scooping his 
 Lands to it, a very ordinary gesture, but one that hurt her. A man 
 may be individual even in his method of warming his hands, and this 
 was her husband s gesture. 
 
 During the moment in which this knowledge pierced her heart, the 
 man saw her, and came forward. She began to think that she was in a
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD1 445 
 
 dream, the figure, the step, the pose, were so identically her husband s ; 
 but the greatest shock of all was when he spoke. 
 
 " You must be Barbara/ was what he said, and the voice was Val^s 
 voice. The room swung about, and the fire leaped forward to meet her. 
 She put out her hand, letting fall the red leaves which she still held. 
 The man who had spoken with her husband s voice now supported her 
 to a chair with the very trick of arm that he had been wont to use. 
 She shut her eyes, fearing absolutely to look up, and put out both 
 hands, as though to push him from her, while he kneeled to place a 
 footstool under her feet, and then rose and slipped a cushion between 
 her head and the stiif chair-back. During these different movements 
 he uttered various disjointed sentences : " So sorry ! Ought to have 
 waited. Ought to have rung for lights. Firelight confused you. By 
 the way, I m Jock, Val s cousin, you know. He told me so much 
 I I mean I ve heard so much about you, feel as if I knew you, 
 you know. Are you all right now ? Do look at me : it ll steady you. 
 There s there s a strong likeness." 
 
 " I had rather rest a little, thank you so much," said Barbara. 
 The firelight through her hot lids made them seem like live coals rest 
 ing upon her eyes, while her mind and body seemed to sweep in circles 
 like a bird at poise. He had unconsciously named the very thing that 
 she dreaded. Were this " strong likeness " of feature as marked as 
 every other, she thought that endurance would be impossible. She 
 ventured to lift her eyes to the hand resting on her chair-arm : it 
 might have been thrust from the grave. She gave a sobbing cry and 
 etarted to her feet. Dering rose also, startled and alarmed. 
 
 " You are ill," he said. " Shall I call your maid ?" 
 
 " I will call her," said Barbara ; " I will call her." She flew past 
 him to the door, passed through it, and was gone. 
 
 Deriug s sensations were not enviable. He walked to the fire and 
 began to warm his hands again. 
 
 " I flatter myself that I know something about men," he said, 
 rather grumpily, " but I m hanged if I know a thing about women." 
 He then nestled down with a boyish movement of entire content into the 
 chair that Barbara had abandoned, and waited for further developments. 
 
 Nothing occurred until half an hour later, when Barbara herself 
 re-entered the room. He scarcely knew her at first, in her long black 
 crape gown, with her diadem of lustrous braids replaced, and he won 
 dered, as he took the hand which she now held out, if she were ever 
 going to lift her lids. 
 
 " She s handsome," he said to himself, " but she s too blonde and 
 too big. Her waist s too big no, it s her shoulders no, she s all too 
 big. Her hair s too red no, there s too much of it no, it s the way 
 she wears it." 
 
 Barbara, who was very apt at such things, did not rightly fathom 
 his thoughts on this occasion. She believed that he was pondering on 
 her pallor and red lids, and wondering if she had been enough in love 
 with his cousin to justify such a quantity of crape. If acknowledged 
 beauties could itnow the thoughts of most men when first introduced 
 to them, there would not be so much vanity in the world.
 
 446 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD1 
 
 Barbara, who was an acknowledged beauty, did not strike any 
 responsive chord in Dering until she turned him her profile in settling 
 the folds of her dress. It was vigorous, classic, enthralling, and he 
 admitted as much to himself while regarding it. 
 
 " Good brow," he meditated ; " good nose ; good line of lips, well 
 balanced, upper and lower equal ; good chin, splendid chin, massive, 
 but not heavy. Lots of will-power, no end to it." 
 
 " Won t you sit down ?" said Barbara. She did not look at him, 
 and held a hand-screen between the flames and her face, so that he 
 could no longer see it. 
 
 " Thanks," said Dering, resuming his nestling position. 
 
 Suddenly Barbara laughed. 
 
 " You remind me of a dog turning around before he lies down," 
 she said, in explanation. 
 
 " Lots of people have said that," he replied, easily, laughing also. 
 
 Barbara winced a little, and the light died from her eyes. She had 
 heard a great deal of Jock Dering, and was prepared to like him most 
 heartily, but if he continued to speak to her in her husband s very 
 voice, how was she to bear it ? They talked a little in a desultory 
 way, and presently a half-burned log fell crashing down upon the 
 hearth. As Dering stooped to replace it, Barbara involuntarily lifted 
 her eyes to his face. He was startled by the soft huddling against him 
 of her unconscious body. 
 
 III. 
 
 The extraordinary likeness which John Dering bore to his dead 
 cousin Valentine Pomfret was one of those rare but not fictitious freaks 
 in which heredity sometimes indulges. Twin brothers are often less 
 alike than had been those two young men, and the fact that Dering 
 was Pomfret s junior by a few years was overcome by the further fact 
 that for a few years poor Pomfret had been dead ; Barbara therefore 
 beheld in the Dering of to-day the exact reproduction of her husband 
 of three years ago. Voice, gesture, figure, and face were all identical. 
 There was the same curling brown hair above a square, strongly- 
 modelled forehead ; eyes the color of autumn pools in sunlight ; the 
 determined yet delicate jut of the nose ; the pleasing unevenness in the 
 crowded white teeth, and the fine jaw which had that curve from ear 
 to tip like the prow of a cutter. An unusual face, one in which every 
 new acquaintance would not be apt to recall hints of some friend or 
 relative. 
 
 In manner he was delightful, abrupt, frank, original, and a trifle 
 egotistical : in a word, Valentine Pomfret over again. 
 
 Barbara, who had not of course distinguished these further similari 
 ties between the quick and the dead, was sufficiently overcome by the 
 physical likeness. Its memory swept over her, now with a species of 
 horror, now with a sort of joy. She was in turns flooded with rapture 
 at having seen again her husband s face, and torn with an impotent 
 rage that any human creature should dare to move and have his being 
 in so exact a similitude of that dear body. She experienced the feeling, 
 intensified a hundred times, which rends a mother in seeing some care-
 
 THE qUICK OR THE DEAD? 447 
 
 less friend or sister flaunting the garments of her dead child. Now she 
 yearned for another sight of the dear face ; now she flung the idea from 
 her as utterly unnatural and abhorrent. She snatched Val s miniature, 
 warm with her bosom, and pressed it to her lips, then opened the thin 
 gold case, and hungrily fed upon its every tint and contour. When she 
 finally dropped it back beneath her gown, the case, having grown cold 
 in the air, startled her flesh, as a certain fact had startled her mind 
 while gazing upon the portrait within. His pictured face was not so 
 much like him as was the face of his cousin, John Dering ! She was 
 in her bedroom, and alone, so did not forbear to cry out, and moan, 
 and talk to herself in panting fragments, as she swept about the room, 
 taking first a vibrating stride or two, then leaning against some piece of 
 furniture and pressing away the hair from her face with both hands ; 
 then crouching and trembling with hidden eyes, or rushing from wall 
 to wall with all the restrained, breathless eagerness of some prisoned, 
 pantherish creature whose efforts for freedom had long been vain. 
 
 As she flung herself exhausted into an arm-chair near the fire, the 
 wide sleeve of her dressing-gown fell back, revealing the smooth flesh 
 of her arm, stained violet here and there by the rich veins. 
 
 She bent, uttering a sharp, inarticulate cry, and carassed it with slow 
 movements of her cheek. She remembered how he had loved to kiss her 
 delicate, inner arm when dressed in this very gown, and even as she 
 emiled for the dear memory there came upon her, with a surge of re 
 bellion and revolt, the knowledge that he was now above such fleshly 
 pleasures ; that he would not now care for any of the sweet, warm, 
 trivial things for which he had once cared so passionately. She leaped 
 up, lifting her hands high above her head and pressing them agonizedly 
 together. She tried to realize that he was a spirit, a purified essence, a 
 soul merely ; and as the idea took shape within her, she shrank from 
 and loathed it, then fell into bitter human weeping, sometimes pleading 
 for death, sometimes asking that God would work only His will with 
 her. 
 
 Dering, who was happily ignorant of the effect which his appearance 
 had produced, allied again the next afternoon, to inquire for her health, 
 but was told that she had gone to walk. He remained for some time, 
 hoping that she would return, but took his leave after an hour, wonder- 
 hag somewhat that a woman who fainted so easily should trust herself 
 alone on such long walks. The next time he saw her was in the heart 
 of an oak-plantation called the " Tarleton Woods." He had plunged 
 recklessly into its unknown vistas after a covey of partridges, and had 
 fancied himself lost, until he came upon Barbara. 
 
 She was seated high above him in the crotch of an old tree, and the 
 full light fell upon her in splashes through the leaves, like an overflow 
 of some bright liquid. The greyhounds were whimpering and scratch 
 ing at the bole of the tree, and she teased them by swinging the loop of 
 their leash just out of reach. 
 
 Dering spoke when within a few yards of her. " So glad you are 
 all right !" he cried, boyishly. " I called three times, but you were 
 always out. You seem possessed of the spirit of locomotion." 
 
 She looked at him from beneath her loosened hair, and controlled 
 VOL. XLL 29
 
 448 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD 9 
 
 her voice successfully in replying. She said that she was very soiry to 
 have missed him, but that she was generally out all day in both good 
 and bad weather. 
 
 " Can t I call in the evening, then ?" asked Dering. 
 
 She could not think of any plausible excuse, and said, " Yes." 
 
 "You don t say it very cordially," he objected, but in blithe, un- 
 offended tones. " Perhaps you d rather I wouldn t come ? Perhaps 
 people bore you ?" 
 
 Barbara could not help laughing. This seemed to embolden Dering, 
 who advanced and looked up at her. " Do you know I think we d be 
 such good friends ?" he said, genially. 
 
 " Why, I ve scarcely spoken two words to you," replied Barbara. 
 
 " One feels things sometimes," said Dering, not at all discomfited. 
 " I was sure I would like you as soon as I saw your profile." 
 
 "And how about it now that you have seen my full face?" 
 
 " Oh, I like it better and better. It has a generous, sensuous 
 breadth that is splendid." 
 
 " Nothing else in ous, I hope ?" said Barbara, dryly. 
 
 " Nothing you wouldn t like. I see you think me very free and 
 easy. People often do." 
 
 " I don t wonder," said Barbara, laughing again. 
 
 " Well, as long as you aren t angry I don t car*. You laugh like 
 a sport." 
 
 " Like a what?" said Barbara. 
 
 Dering shifted his position, and lounged against the tree-trunk. 
 
 " Yes, it s slang," he replied. " I ve an awful habit of using 
 slang : I m afraid I d use it to the Almighty if I were suddenly trans 
 lated." 
 
 " You d probably have to be translated for him to understand," 
 began Barbara, merrily, then stopped and colored. 
 
 " That s a dreadfully bad pun," she said, with humility. 
 
 " If you weren t up a tree already, I wouldn t spare you," answered 
 Dering. 
 
 " That s much worse than mine." 
 
 " I know it : I did it on purpose. Are you going to let me call ?" 
 
 " Why, yes, of course. Why do you doubt it ?" 
 
 " I don t know. I m an odd fellow. I fancied you had taken a 
 dislike to me." 
 
 " No, I have not," asserted Barbara, in a decided voice. 
 
 Then she grew very pale, and looked at him strangely. " I will 
 explain what made you believe that some day," she said. 
 
 She did not understand the violent revulsion of feeling which had 
 come upon her. She was glad, delighted, to be looking at him. It 
 did not shock her as she had dreaded. She felt light-hearted and gay 
 as she had not hoped to feel any more. She was only afraid that he 
 would notice the absorbed, thirsting stare with which her eyes returned 
 again and again to his eyes, and tried to fix them on other objects, 
 the dance of the sunlit leaves, the greyhounds, a cardinal-bird that 
 seemed to streak the veiled background with its flame-like flashings. 
 In vain. Something of the feeling that impels a wilful drunkard
 
 THE qUICK OR THE DEADt 449 
 
 seized upon her. She would intoxicate her bodily self with this long- 
 denied sight ; she would drink him into the waste places of her soul 
 and make memory green again ; she would here a sudden shivering 
 overtook her why should she not pretend in truth that he was her 
 husband? It would be known only to herself; an empty pleasure; a 
 mere painting of delight ; heaven reflected in a pool. The shivering 
 became so violent that Dering noticed it. 
 
 " You are cold," he exclaimed, quickly. " Don t you think you 
 stay out too late in these chilly autumn evenings ? You see the sun is 
 almost set." 
 
 " Yes, I must go," said Barbara. 
 
 He reached up and swung her to the ground. It was a light, easy 
 gesture, full of the restrained power that women like. To feel a strong 
 man minister to their fragile wants has all the fascination of watching 
 a steam-hammer employed in the frivolous occupation of cracking 
 almonds. To see the power that could crush transformed into the 
 power that befriends is in both cases blood-stirring. And then his 
 strong shoulders beneath her hands were so like Val s shoulders, and 
 the glint of his smile Val s own, and his impetuous way of piloting 
 her over rough places, all Val s. She stopped suddenly and put up 
 her hands to her throat with a wild gesture. Dering pulled up short 
 also, terribly alarmed, and fearing that she was going to faint again. 
 He could not think what he was to do in these lonely woods on the 
 edge of dark with a swooning woman, and a slight feeling of irritation 
 stung him. 
 
 "Good Lord!" he said, grasping her arm a little roughly, "you 
 don t feel faint, do you ?" 
 
 " No, no : just stifled for a minute," answered Barbara ; but as they 
 walked on he said, rather dogmatically, that in her state of health it 
 was little short of outrageous for her to be so much alone. 
 
 " My state of health !" cried Barbara, feeling also irritated. " There 
 was never a healthier woman than I !" 
 
 " Indeed ?" said Dering, dryly. " You won t deny, perhaps, that 
 there have been more prudent ones ?" 
 
 Barbara was silent. She felt that she could not then explain any 
 thing to him, and dragged him forward in her eagerness to be out of 
 that shadow-striped, many-noised wood. Dering s irritation vanished 
 as he felt the violent tremblings which swept her from time to time. 
 
 IV. 
 
 They stepped from the shelter of the woods into the teeth of a 
 brown gale. The hills lay in overlapping wedges of gray-violet 
 against a long ribbon of wan light, the Scotch weather-glim. The 
 fields were a seething reach of dark-gray weeds and grasses ; the sky a 
 flapping cloak of gray, blown back from the shoulders of some invisible 
 giantess, and the shadows on the bleached downs her footprints. 
 
 The wind blew in volumes bulging with fierce sound. It hurled 
 Barbara and Dering against one another, and tore away her hat, next 
 enveloped them in a sudden eddy of whirling sticks and leaves. Der 
 ing stooped his head and shouted,
 
 THE UICK OR THE DEAD1 
 
 " We can t go on in this. Isn t there some big tree we can get 
 under?" 
 
 " Yes, there is a tulip-tree at the foot of that hill," shrieked Bar 
 bara, putting her lips close to his ear. 
 
 He was conscious of her warm breath amid all that hurly. 
 
 They then struggled down-hill together, and at the bottom were 
 confronted by a tearing stream, shaggy with foam. He was hesitating 
 what method to pursue, when Barbara sprang forward and leaped 
 deliberately, first in and then out of the water, which was at no place 
 very deep. He followed, angry again. 
 
 " I never saw such a reckless woman !" he roared. But 
 the wind blew his words backward, and Barbara did not hear them. 
 She ran ahead and crouched down finally among the overhanging roots 
 of an enormous tree, and he came and seated himself beside her. To 
 gether they looked at the western sky. It was one vast, ragged con 
 fusion of cloud and glare. The naked branches of the trees along the 
 road knotted and unknotted themselves angrily, and through them the 
 wind slithered and hissed like a winged serpent. 
 
 " You must be bitterly cold," said Bering. " And your feet are 
 wet, too." 
 
 " No," answered Barbara. Then she turned her face towards him 
 with its up-blowing swirls of hair. He could make out nothing dis 
 tinctly, beyond the glisten of her eyes as the strange light caught them. 
 
 " I like it," she said. " It rouses me. It stings, but it wakens." 
 
 " That is why I like it," responded Dering, briefly. " It is like 
 drinking a witch-brew, cold in the mouth, hot in the vitals. I wish 
 we could be blown for a long way over those hustling tree-tops." 
 
 " Yes, I wish so. One cannot think much in such an uproar except 
 such thoughts as it suggests." 
 
 " You mean one cannot hark backward," said Dering. 
 
 " Yes. How did you know ?" 
 
 " I am beginning to feel your thoughts as they form." 
 
 " It is the wind. I am always full of electricity in a wind like 
 this." 
 
 " I feel it. I can tell you where your hands are without looking 
 at you." 
 
 "Where are they?" 
 
 " One over the other against your breast." 
 
 " Why, how strange !" 
 
 " You see I am different too in the wind." 
 
 " Yes, you are. We are like trees. The wind is our soul. It 
 blows life into us. Without it we are mere vegetables." 
 
 " I can t think of you as a vegetable," said Dering, and they 
 laughed a little. She drew nearer him ; he could feel the thick stuff 
 of her gown press against him in the blurred gloom. The wind 
 whirled around them, like an invisible elf romping. 
 
 " Your voice sounds so strange and bodiless," said Barbara. " I 
 can just see you." 
 
 " And I can just see you. It is the light of dreams." 
 
 " And of the places after death. You seem like a ghost."
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEADt 451 
 
 " You talk like one," said Dering. " You are entirely different in 
 this mood from what I thought you." 
 
 " Perhaps you thought that vividly-colored people never had gray 
 thoughts ?" 
 
 " Perhaps." 
 
 " You see that they do, though. I feel as though I had taken 
 wine. I want to talk. I want to say many things to you. They 
 surge up in my mind as the wind does in the woods there. Do you 
 think me crazy ?" 
 
 " No, but I feel a little crazy myself. You are like a big, flute- 
 voiced elf-queen sitting there with only your eyes aglow. Everything 
 has changed about you, my ideas and all." He laughed again. 
 
 "What does it matter? Let us give each other our red-hot 
 thoughts, not wait for them to cool to cinders in the breath of con 
 ventionality and commonplace." 
 
 " I will give you one now, then." 
 
 "What is it?" 
 
 " I like you." 
 
 " You did not like me at first, then ?" 
 
 " No ; I thought you ordinary." 
 
 " What has made you change your opinion ?" 
 
 " Perhaps you are really an elf-queen." 
 
 " Was it not the daughters of the elf-king who were hollow and 
 had no hearts ?" 
 
 " That was because they were stuffed so full of precious thoughts 
 ihat some thief stole them, and they gave their hearts away." 
 
 " Women never give away their hearts." 
 
 " What then ?" 
 
 " They are torn up, like the flowers of Eastern legend, that men 
 may find jewels at their roots." 
 
 " You are a strange woman." 
 
 " You are a strange man." 
 
 " If I were a doctor I should say you had a fever." 
 
 " I feel as though I had. See how hot my hand is, and I have my 
 glove off." 
 
 He took her bare hand in his; their full pulses throbbed into 
 one. She gazed at him with sparkling eyes ; her lips curled corner- 
 wise into a smile, and she drew ragged, uneven breaths. She fancied 
 that it would be like this if she had gone to visit her husband s grave 
 in this ghoul-light, and he had come up in his grave-clothes and sat on 
 its edge and talked to her. But Dering s hand was not the hand of 
 the dead. She drew hers away suddenly, and started to her feet, when 
 a slanting blast dashed her down again beside him. Putting out his 
 hand to draw her furs closer about her, he let it rest against her throat. 
 She shivered, and sunk down a little from his touch. 
 
 Barbara," he said, unsteadily, " you have played me some witch- 
 trick. What is this I feel for you ? It is gruesome, but strong. I 
 feel as though I did not want to leave you. I hate this murky half- 
 glimmer, and yet I would be content to sit here with you day after 
 day, night after night, for a long time [ think my mind must be
 
 452 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD 9 
 
 akin to your mind. I am hungry for your thoughts. If you were 
 Amina in the story, I think I would wait for you at the church-yard 
 gate every night and not be afraid." 
 
 Then she began to laugh, wild, clamorous laughter, made loud or 
 low as the wind swelled or withdrew. 
 
 " Yes, yes, yes," she said, " that is what I am, Amina. I live on 
 dead bodies. I am only happy when prying into a grave. Church 
 yards are my lurking-places. I must begin to eat rice with a 
 bodkin." 
 
 He held her firmly, still with his hand on her throat. 
 
 " Go on," he said, after a while, in a perfectly grave voice. "1 
 seem to understand your wild mood in some strange way. I shan t 
 attempt to reason with you. Some day you ll tell me everything." 
 
 " Yes, everything, everything," she panted, pressing close to him. 
 " You are good to understand. It sounds very crazy, I know." 
 
 " I think you must have suffered a great deal." 
 
 " I have ! I have !" she said, sobbingly. " Oh, I wish I could tell 
 you now !" 
 
 " You shall tell me only when you wish to. If it is now, I will 
 listen. But I can wait as long as you choose. I am very patient." 
 
 " Yes, you must wait. I can t talk connectedly in this wind : it 
 blows all but the dregs of my thoughts into foam." 
 
 " I am afraid, to be very prosaic, that you are taking cold. But 
 what are we to do ? Walking is impossible, for you at least, until this 
 hurly-burly subsides." 
 
 " I notice that your slang blows away too," said Barbara, with 
 sudden humor. 
 
 "Oh, my slang is a garment," he answered. "Whenever I go 
 swimming in very deep waters I leave it on the bank." 
 
 " How I love to swim ! It is one of the few out-of-door things I 
 really care for." 
 
 " You must look superb with that dark-gold head of yours drenched. 
 I should like to see you coming down a shadowy stream in this light, 
 laughing that dirling laugh of yours, like a true water-kelpie. How 
 the folks on the bank would screech and run !" 
 
 " I seem to suggest eerie names to you. First I am an elf-queen, 
 then Amina, then a water-kelpie. But I do swim well. I can swim 
 in surf. I am so strong. Feel." 
 
 " Gad ! you have got a biceps !" said Dering, amazedly. " You 
 are the most extraordinary mixture I ever knew. When you first came 
 in that evening at Rosemary, I thought you just big and heavy : you 
 didn t give me an idea of strength. Now you remind me of a war- 
 goddess : your piled-up hair is like a helmet in this curious light. Look 
 here : some day we ll go swimming together. I know the weirdest old 
 garden in Italy; there s an enormous lake in it, lined with white 
 marble ; you can see the ripples like gold threads against the bottom 
 on a moonlight night. I should like to see you with that water curl 
 ing about you. How splendid those arms of yours would look drip 
 ping from wrist to shoulder ! Ugh ! what a great, golden, uncanny 
 thing you are 1"
 
 TEE QUICK OR THE DEADf 
 
 " You must swim well yourself: don t you? A man should swim, 
 and ride, and wrestle, and fence, as he breathes." 
 
 " I have always thought so," said Dering. 
 
 " How alike we are !" 
 
 This sentence always marks a distinct epoch in the acquaintance of 
 a man and woman. The hands of friendship and love are drawn apart 
 as by two passing trains, and friendship is left on the siding. These 
 two turned their faces towards each other in the grim twilight, although 
 they could now discern only a vague massed darkness where each was. 
 
 " Yes, more than you know," said Dering, concisely. 
 
 " I don t see how it is : you understand me before I speak." 
 
 "And you understand me after I speak, what is really much 
 rarer." 
 
 The wind was now dying down. A fitful, whinnering gust occa 
 sionally shook the dry limbs above them, wailed up and down the road 
 for a little space, fleered sullenly to leeward, and was still. 
 
 Dering rose and held out his hands to Barbara, who found herself 
 on her feet and almost against his breast at the same time. She with 
 drew a little hurriedly, and the darkness fell down between them. 
 They then groped their way stumblingly to a gate just above, and 
 passed through together. Among the tall weeds on the comb of the 
 hill, some stars were a-tremble like belated fireflies. 
 
 " Thert are your elfin maids of honor coming to find you," said 
 Dering. " I can see the witch-fires in their caps." 
 
 " You see they don t know there is a mortal with me." 
 
 " Perhaps they mean that this mortal shall put on immortality." 
 
 " Don t !" said Barbara, shaken by one of the violent trembling 
 fits which had alarmed him earlier in the evening. " That s in the 
 burial-service How can you speak lightly of such things ? Oh, this 
 has been a terrible, terrible walk !" 
 
 " Thank you," said Dering, gravely. 
 
 "Don t laugh, don t laugh," she urged, grasping his arm with 
 both hands. " Oh, why did you say that ? I can see it all now ! 
 that horrible, long church, like a vault itself, filled with leering, silly, 
 curious faces, that mouthing man in his robes, the coffin Oh !" 
 
 " Barbara ! Oh, you poor girl !" said Deriug, with curdling pity. 
 He put both arms about her, and she clung to him, gasping and trem 
 bling, in the desolation of night-blurred upland. 
 
 V. 
 
 Dering came to Rosemary the next day, and the next, but Barbara 
 was not to be seen. For nearly a week she did not leave her room, 
 and when she came down at last, drawn by the wooing of the warm 
 November afternoon, which had in it some of the after-glow of sum 
 mer, like the warmth left by young lips en those of the aged, she found 
 Dering seated on the shallow stone steps of the old portico, playing 
 with the greyhound pups. He put them aside as best he could, to greet 
 her, and his eyes went deep into her eyes. He almost felt the moisture 
 of that diving gaze ; and then her lids fell, but his look remained upon 
 her; and after a moment or so he began to think that she inspired him
 
 454 THE QUICK OR THE DEADt 
 
 with imagination, such strange fancies stirred him when in her presence. 
 This afternoon, notably, she seemed to him, in her gray gauze gown, 
 like one of the mist-wreaths from that strange evening on which he 
 had last seen her, blown into this golden to-day, a pale cloud, in 
 shape of a woman, which some far sunset had kissed in dying, leaving 
 its light upon her hair. 
 
 As he rose to meet her, he noticed that she shrank, and, man-like, 
 misinterpreted the motion. He thought it was the memory of their 
 last walk together that caused that involuntary withdrawing, when it 
 was in fact the unmouruful character of the gown that she wore, an 
 airy thing, held in place by an old silver girdle, and meant only for 
 feminine eyes, as unwidow-like a garment as can be imagined ; suitable 
 perhaps for a young girl who mourns the death of her first kiss, but 
 nothing more material. Her bright, smooth flesh glowed through the 
 smoky folds, like Pleasure revealing herself through dreams. 
 
 Dering felt her beauty cling to him from head to foot, like a veil 
 whose woof was fire and whose warp mist. It thrilled and chilled him 
 at the same time. Pale and aerial as was her dress, it was like a breath 
 of cold air between them. He was reminded of some rich tropical 
 flower, blooming behind the meshes of the Spanish moss. 
 
 All this passed through his mind in a whiff. His words were 
 prosaic enough. 
 
 " I came to bring you a book," he said. " I suppose you ll laugh 
 at me and call me Browning-mad, but I like it awfully. It s all 
 scribbled up. I thought you were still ill, you know. I thought it 
 might cheer you." 
 
 " No, I don t laugh at you. I like Browning. It takes courage to 
 admit it, though : people always think one posing. It is almost as trying 
 to acknowledge Browning as it is to acknowledge the Deity." 
 
 " Yes, isn t it ? I wonder he acknowledges himself." 
 
 They laughed, Barbara with some nervousness. 
 
 " Suppose you come and sit here," said Dering, " and let us look 
 over it together. This air will be like wine to you. I ll get that fur 
 rug out of the drawing-room." 
 
 " Wait," said Barbara. " I am too chilly in this thin dress. While 
 you get that I will ring for a cloak." 
 
 She rejoined him with a dark cloak dropping from her shouldors. 
 With her Naiad-like attire hidden from sight, she felt more matronly 
 and at her ease. He was really a boy to her, just her age within a week 
 or two. She had heard of his every school and college escapade from, 
 her husband, and actually knew the names of two of his salad-day 
 flames. She smiled at him in a distinctly motherly way, as he seated 
 himself beside her on the rug with those nestling movements which 
 always amused her. 
 
 " I like you when you look like that," he said, pleasedly. " YOU VP 
 got an air of The Mother of Nations. Do you know you re a good bit 
 like the Milo?" 
 
 " How very absurd !" said Barbara, but glowed with the inward 
 satisfaction which always possesses flesh and blood on hearing itself 
 compared to marble.
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEADt 455 
 
 " Yes, you do. I used to think the Milo a big, lumpy woman ; but 
 she s the embodiment of grandeur to me now." 
 
 " I believe you thought me a big, lumpy woman at first ?" 
 
 " Not lumpy, only too big. See here : I ve got an odd trick of 
 opening books at random : I m going to open this for you before we 
 begin reading. Now " 
 
 She was interested, and leaned her head close to his over the opening 
 book. His curls seemed to spring against her hair with a certain life 
 of their own. She drew back, noticing it. 
 
 " What s the matter ?" said Bering. 
 
 " Your hair, it seemed to move." 
 
 " Did it ? I don t blame it. Look, this is for you : 
 
 " God, that created all things, can renew I 
 And then, though after-life to please me now 
 Must have no likeness to the past, what hinders 
 Reward from " 
 
 " Stop !" said Barbara. She put her open hand on the page, shut 
 ting out the words, and he glanced up wondering, to see that she was 
 strangely pale, not a vestige of color in lip or cheek. Under the 
 bright up-springing of her strong hair, her face had the whiteness of a 
 dove s wing against a flame-brown cloud. 
 
 " What s the matter ?" he said, again. 
 
 " I don t like that sort of thing. It s ghastly. Please don t do 
 anything like that ever again. I I loathe the supernatural. I don t 
 believe in it, of course, but I loathe it." 
 
 " I m glad you think me supernatural. I m beginning to think you 
 are. At least if you re not supernatural you re superwomanly. I never 
 saw any one an atom like you. I wish you d kindly tell me where I 
 made a mis-cue that time ?" 
 
 " Ah ! your slang-garment. So you don t feel yourself swimming 
 in deep waters this afternoon ?" 
 
 " No, only wading. It s deepish, though. I will soon take refuge 
 in naked English. I wish you d tell me what s supernatural in opening 
 a book at random ? If it hits, I call it a coincidence. I don t see how 
 that could possibly have hit, I must say. I thought it decidedly a-gley. 
 Was there any meaning in it ? There must have been, to work you 
 up so." 
 
 " Yas, there was," said Barbara, and again the blood rushed from 
 her face. Dering looked at her rather curiously for a few seconds, and 
 then held out the book. 
 
 " You open for me," he said. 
 
 " I told you I disliked the idea," then, with sudden contradiction, 
 " I ve done some wonderful things in that way myself." 
 
 " Why, do you open books too ? We are alike, by Jove !" 
 
 "Yes, I open the Bible sometimes; but that s an old Methodist 
 trick." 
 
 " Do open this now. I ve a reason." 
 
 Barbara took the book from him into her gloveless hands, which
 
 456 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD? 
 
 were long, and slenderly firm, with perfectly-kept nails dashed here 
 and there by little white flecks. Their touch lingered on the mental 
 sense, as rare music does on the mental ear, being full of swift, tin 
 gling pulses, warm and elastic as some fruit, a man s touch to a 
 woman, not quite human to a man. The hands of certain, women 
 are more subtly sweet of contact than the lips of others, and their very 
 hair seems to breathe. 
 
 She hesitated, opened the book hastily with her face averted, and 
 thrust rather than held it out to him. 
 
 " Shall I read what your finger marks ?" said Dering. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " Just that one line ?" 
 
 " Yes. It s probably something too deep for any one but Truth tc 
 dip up in her bucket." 
 
 " No, it isn t : it s Truth herself." 
 
 " Let me see." 
 
 They bent together again, then drew apart, but holding each other 
 with varying eyes. The line ran, 
 
 " I would love infinitely and be loved." 
 
 He leaned forward after a while, pulled a blade of grass, and marked 
 the place with it. 
 
 " It s awfully curious," he then said, tossing back on his foldel arms 
 among the gray fur, " most amazingly curious. I ve just been pass 
 ing through a phase of my life, which has been anything but an 
 orthodox one, by the way, and last night I came to that conclusion. 
 I think I would rather love infinitely, even without being loved, than 
 not love at all. I m not a bit sentimental, I do assure you !" he sup 
 plemented, hastily, springing erect all at once. Her gravely laughing 
 eyes reassured him. 
 
 " I never take remarks personally," she said ; then, with a change 
 of mental position as swift as had been his physical one, " Don t want 
 to love !" she cried, leaning to him ; " don t wish for it ! I used to ; 
 I used to pray for it every night. Oh, it sounds heroic, and superb, 
 and godlike, to say that you are willing to take sorrow along with love, 
 grief in proportion to it. You would not, when the time came ! 
 you would not ! If we live we suffer. We had better be the coals of 
 hell than the people they burn. And yet coals can t love, you know. 
 Oh ! I don t know what I m saying !" She got to her feet and ran 
 down the old steps, out into the dappled twilight. 
 
 Dering followed her. " Look here," he said : " you needn t evei 
 be afraid I ll misunderstand you. It would be absolutely impossible, 
 absolutely. Go on and talk just as crazily as ever you please. 
 "We re all crazy, every one of us, and the very craziest of all is the 
 man who says he isn t." 
 
 " But don t want to love," repeated Barbara. " It isn t a romantic 
 girl talking to you. I am a woman of twenty-six, and I know, I 
 know it all. Whenever I think of it, whenever I lie awake at night 
 and think of the whole weary thing, from first to last, I arn so grate-
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEADf 457 
 
 ful, grateful, grateful that I never had a child. I used to long for one. 
 Now I am so glad ! so glad ! I have gotten up on bitter, winter nights 
 in my thin night-gown, trembling all over with the cold, to thank God 
 for that ! At least I haven t that to answer for !" 
 
 " I , know so well how you feel," said John Dering, gravely. 
 
 " Most women are never happy until they have a child, you know," 
 she panted on ; " and at first, at first I did long for something to remind 
 
 something that belonged Yes, yes, I did want a child of my 
 
 very own ; but now I tell you I can t thank God enough " 
 
 She paused, expecting some words of remonstrance, and he said, 
 in a voice which was as different as possible from his usual boyish 
 tone, 
 
 " If I were a woman I should feel just as you do." 
 
 " Oh, how good you are ! how you understand !" she cried, pas 
 sionately, and reached him both her hands. He took them in his own 
 strong, nervous young hands, which moved incessantly even while hold 
 ing hers, and waited as if for her to go on. 
 
 " You are so good," she said, again. 
 
 " Why do women always persist in calling men good when they 
 understand them ? I honestly believe if Satan were to let a woman 
 see, while she was roasting, that he comprehended her sufferings, she 
 would say, How good you are ! }> 
 
 " But you are good : no man who was not would listen so pa 
 tiently and not sneer. I don t mean that you ve never done anything 
 wrong " 
 
 " I hope not !" 
 
 " Nor ever will again " 
 
 " Heaven forbid !" 
 
 " But you understand me." 
 
 " One has to be a bit good to do that," he put in, quickly and some 
 what shyly. She moved impulsively towards him. 
 
 " I am so glad you like me !" she said. " It isn t quite so dreadful 
 sfnce you have come." 
 
 " You dear thing !" 
 
 " No, it isn t, it isn t. Do you know I can remember when I used 
 to like to be alone? As a girl I liked it. Ugh ! how we change ! how 
 we change !" 
 
 " Yes, we do," said Dering, feelingly. 
 
 " Will you stay to tea to-night? We can have it all to ourselves in 
 the drawing-room, before that big fire. Aunt Fridis always sits in the 
 library. I make such good tea. We can have the dogs in. It will be 
 quite bright and cheerful, won t it ? I think we d enjoy a long talk 
 over the fire. A wood fire always thaws my thoughts. We could roast 
 some chestnuts, too." 
 
 " Nothing personal in that, I trust ?" 
 
 " What do you mean ? Oh ! that disgusting slang ! Never mind : 
 you can say anything if you ll stay. But you will stay, won t you ? 
 Are you fond of music? I play very well, really well, you know. 
 Oh ! I forgot there s no piano. Well, never mind : we can talk. 
 Every time we talk together I feel I know you ten years better." She
 
 458 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD1 
 
 was hurrying on eagerly, feverishly, glancing every now and then over 
 one shoulder or the other as at some haunting presence. 
 
 " I tell you what I m going to do," said Dering, suddenly. " I m 
 going to make you come in the house this instant, and then you re to go 
 up-stairs and put on something warm, a tea-gown, if you have one. 
 You are shivering all over, down to your finger-ends. And then you re 
 to pull up to that big fire you spoke of and let me amuse you : that s 
 what you re to do." 
 
 " Oh, how like Yal !" she said, under her breath ; " how like him !" 
 
 Dering turned a little sharply. 
 
 " What was that ?" he said. " I didn t quite catch it, you speak 
 so fast." 
 
 " Nothing," she assured him. 
 
 As they mounted the portico steps together he turned to her. " It 
 has just come to me what you said, and I don t want you to mislead 
 yourself. I m not really in the least like my cousin ; that is, except as 
 far as looks go." 
 
 She caught at his arm to steady herself, and her tempestuous 
 breathing frightened him a little. 
 
 " There," he said, " I m a brute. If he was Valentine I m certainly 
 Orson." And he smiled with a grim humor. 
 
 " No, no, you re not," whispered Barbara. " Only you have yet to 
 suffer." 
 
 " I don t know but what I have," said Dering, somewhat gloomily. 
 And then she let him guide her into the dark drawing-room and un 
 fasten her cloak. 
 
 VI. 
 
 As Barbara was about to leave the room, Dering came and put 
 himself in her way. 
 
 " I wonder if you would think me insufferably cheeky if I were 
 to ask you something ?" he said, with a suggestion of embarrassment. 
 
 " I should say that it depended a good deal upon the something." 
 
 " Well, then, would you mind putting on a white gown ? that is, 
 of course, if you change your gown. You don t mind, do you ?" 
 
 " Mind ? Mind putting on a white gown, or mind your asking 
 me to?" 
 
 " Either, both." 
 
 " Not in the least." 
 
 " You are a dear thing !" 
 
 He reached out his hand impulsively, she placed hers in it, and they 
 both laughed. She came back after a while, feeling rather too big in 
 her loose gown of white China crape. 
 
 " I feel something as I fancy a statue does, when it is suddenly 
 done into marble after having been in the clay for a long while. I 
 feel aggressively white; and there is so much of me to put in white." 
 
 " Oh, well, there s a good deal of the Milo," said Dering. 
 
 " Yes, but even she dispensed with her arms." 
 
 They laughed again, Barbara afterwards sitting silent for some
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEADt 459 
 
 time, and filliping at the little silver bells which ornamented her 
 hand-screen. They were both looking in the fire, but Bering could 
 see her from the side of his eye, and wondered how he could ever 
 have thought her too big. It was like cavilling at the size of a 
 flowering tree, he told himself. In reality Barbara would have been 
 handsomer had there been less of her and her good looks thus more 
 concentrated. As we grow older, we like our creeds and slippers 
 larger, our clubs and houris smaller. 
 
 Barbara was not in any way conscious of Dering, as she struck at 
 the fringe of bells : she was merely thinking how sad and pitiful a 
 thing it was that she would never again care what sort of garments 
 she wore, so long as they covered her and attested that she was in her 
 right mind. She could not imagine taking any interest in her attire. 
 When a woman neglects her wardrobe, it is as when a man loses his 
 interest in his cook. Like the proverbial straw, although of infinites 
 imal importance in itself, either fact will tell which way the wind of 
 destiny is blowing. When the wardrobe and the cook flourish, then 
 for the coast of joy : if they are overlooked, then for the islands of 
 disillusion or sorrow. A woman s hair, however, is the final test. As 
 long as she curls it she cannot be truly said to have resigned either soul 
 or body to despair. Let the accustomed and becoming ringlets be 
 brushed austerely back from brow and temples, then in truth is conso 
 lation an exile. Barbara s rich love-locks were yet curled above her 
 straight brows. 
 
 if you had asked her, she would undoubtedly have replied that 
 life to her was a burden to be borne, cheerfully or resignedly as the 
 case might be. She would have smiled at any suggestion of future joy, 
 as surely as she would have frowned to think that any one could deem 
 her capable of ever again desiring earthly felicity. She would have 
 told you that, to her, existence meant resignation and religion a great 
 patience. Yet, strange as it may seem, beneath all this weight of 
 gathered and dried twigs from the tree of a very sorrowful knowledge, 
 a tiny Hope rustled its yet incapable wings. It was too small and 
 just-born a thing to be conscious even of its own personality, much 
 less to make Barbara acquainted with that fact. She perhaps felt the 
 tickling now and then of its half-fledged pinions, but this sensation 
 disturbed rather than pleased. 
 
 Dering, who was much in love with her already, was congratulating 
 himself that at last he had found a woman, young, handsome, and in 
 telligent, who would sincerely give and receive, the highest order of 
 friendship. An old councillor had once said to him, " Young man, if 
 you want a friend in a young woman, choose one who has had some 
 great sorrow." Barbara had been the possessor of this required item ; 
 she, moreover, corresponded marvellously to his rather exalted ideal 
 of womanhood. Among many future delights which he pictured as 
 attendant upon their communion of soul, that of the letters which they 
 would exchange was predominant. What charming letters he felt sure 
 that she would write ! as easy and unconventional as the lines of 
 the delightful garment which she now wore. What delicate humor 
 would characterize them ! what a subtle play of fancy ! what quips and
 
 460 THE QUICK OR THE DEADt 
 
 quirks of lighter moods ! He could fancy those long, gracile fingers 
 moving over the thin, white sheets which she would send him, the five 
 rubies above her wedding-ring winking impishly from her other hand 
 used to steady the paper. He seemed to follow these graceful hands 
 from wrist to shoulder, from shoulder to throat; her bending face, 
 illuminated by the white reflection from the paper, grew also on his 
 sight. She would, perhaps, wear that dense yet filmy gown ; in the 
 privacy of her own apartment, she would have unbound the riotous 
 masses of her copper-colored hair ; her delicate foot in its web-like 
 stocking would be thrust in and out of her pretty bedroom slipper as 
 thoughts and fancies crowded on her ; she would doubtless have tossed 
 other discarded garments on some chair in that charming room ; the 
 peeps of delicate lace from crumpled petticoats would be enchanting. 
 She would 
 
 "A penny," said Barbara, "two, three, even four. Your 
 thoughts were so tremendous that you were literally glowering." 
 
 " I m sure I couldn t have been glowering," said Dering. 
 
 " That leaves me to infer that they were pleasant thoughts." 
 
 " So they were." 
 
 " Oh ! then I can have no hope of purchasing them. It is only 
 disagreeable thoughts that are purchasable. How the wind blows !" 
 
 " Yes : it seems the signal for it to wake when w r e are together." 
 
 " I am so glad you stayed ! but I m afraid your walk home will be 
 very dreary." 
 
 " I will have those unsold thoughts." 
 
 " Cannot you give me some, even if you will not sell them ?" 
 
 " Why, yes, I will. I was thinking what congenial friends we two 
 are going to be. I was thinking what delightful letters you could 
 write. I dare say you think me very presuming. Do you ?" 
 
 " No," said Barbara. She let the hand-screen fall with a little 
 tinkle into her lap, and held up her laced fingers between the flames 
 and her eyes. 
 
 " No," she said again, seriously, turning him her full face. " I do 
 not see how you could even say that (because I m sure you don t think 
 it), after the way I ve talked to you." 
 
 " If I had any doubts," replied Dering, " they are gone now." 
 
 " I am sure of it. I don t feel as though we would ever have a 
 misunderstanding." 
 
 " Nor 1." 
 
 " I do not see why people should ever quarrel. There are always 
 stones in any road, but a skilful driver avoids them. This very road 
 of friendship, one can either jolt over it or be whisked smoothly along, 
 counting idiosyncrasies as stones, of course." 
 
 " You must have been as strange a child as you are a woman," said 
 Dering. 
 
 " I don t know," said Barbara. " All children are more or less 
 strange, only grown people don t take the trouble to find it out. 
 Childhood is rarely ever commonplace. Every child has at some time 
 one thought original and startling enough to make its acquaintance a 
 benefit. I remember once a child telling me that she thought hie-
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEADt 461 
 
 coughs must be prayers to the devil. Did you ever hear of such an 
 extraordinary idea?" 
 
 She had been hurrying on, partly from real interest in her subject, 
 partly from a desire to be saying something. 
 
 Dering s absent-minded length of gaze gave her a slightly uncom 
 fortable feeling. She was almost used now to his resemblance to her 
 husband, and the dissimilarity of his spiritual self was beginning to 
 impress her. 
 
 " I don t believe there ever was a woman the least like you," he 
 said, finally, withdrawing his look. 
 
 " Oh/ returned Barbara, " every man says that to every woman 
 whom he particularly likes. It is the same thing as telling one s sweet 
 heart that she is the only woman who ever really roused one s whole 
 nature, or that no man ever loved quite as one loves her, etc., etc., 
 etc." 
 
 She rose and began to move up and down the room with the long, 
 padding gait peculiar to her. 
 
 " You move like a panther," said Dering. " I can t keep my eyes 
 off you." 
 
 " So I see," she answered, laughing somewhat nervously, and made 
 as though she would sink into a chair. 
 
 " No, don t," he pleaded. " Do move about. I can feel how rest 
 less you are. When you walk with that crouching, suppressed pace, I 
 can almost hear the jungle-grasses crackle back from your way. You 
 do change so ! Out in that wind you were like a witch thing, 
 uncanny, all eyes and a blowse of red-gold hair. Then when I meet 
 you sometimes walking, you are like a merry boy. Then you are like 
 a shadow-woman : you were this afternoon in that thinnish gray gown. 
 When you speak of Val you are like a beautiful, forlorn Peri. There ! 
 you have changed again, in a second ! I never saw anything like 
 it!" 
 
 She held out her clasped hands to him, as he rose and approached 
 her. 
 
 " Please do not speak of him," she said, in a strained undertone. 
 " Please do not, ever again." 
 
 Dering paused where he was, and did not come any nearer her. 
 
 " I promise you," he said. " I will not." 
 
 \ 
 
 VII. 
 
 Barbara had by this time become quite accustomed to the fact of 
 Dering s resemblance to her husband. True, an occasional trick of 
 voice or gesture would arrest her with a sense of pained cognizance, but 
 she was beginning to connect his personality also with himself, and 
 these characteristic traits, having a twofold association, wounded her 
 less and less. They were together more frequently and for a longer 
 time as the days fled backward, and it became his regular custom to 
 spend the evening at Rosemary. They were both bewitched by that 
 sense of unworldliness which possesses men and women of the world 
 when alone together in the country, and it seemed to them as though
 
 462 THE QUICK OR THE DEADf 
 
 they could never voluntarily have mured themselves in labyrinths of 
 brick and stone during these late autumn days, now discovered to be 
 the most desirable of all the year. 
 
 It was on a bitterly cold, gray afternoon in November that these two 
 comrades, as they now called themselves, were engaged in a game of 
 "graces" in the large central hall at Rosemary. The earlier day had 
 been tempestuous and clattering with wind-whirled sleet, but a tawny 
 cloud, that in streaming wildness resembled, perhaps, the flying rnane 
 of one of the Prophet s fiery steeds when in mid-heaven, now streaked 
 all the upper sky and sent a gold-red light glowing in at the hall 
 windows. There were eight of these, tall, shrouded shapes, like uncased 
 mummies, and where the faces should have been, that furnace-like 
 radiance shone through folds of sheer muslin. 
 
 The figures of Barbara and Dering were revealed as by a gilded mist, 
 while they swooped with elastic movements among the shadows, here 
 and there, which glittered as with mica. Now the rathe arm and throat 
 of Barbara came into bright relief against the dusky formlessness, now 
 it was Bering s gay crest of curls and straining shoulders. The orange- 
 ribboned hoops circled above, like two haloes uncertain as to which of 
 those handsome heads they were to saint. 
 
 Barbara suddenly caught one of the bright rings on her arm and 
 let it run up to her shoulder. 
 
 " You are not tired ?" said Dering. 
 
 " Only of this especial amusement. Look ! you cannot catch that 
 before I do !" She sent the grace-hoop spinning down the long hall as 
 she spoke, and leaped out after it. Dering was almost as quick. They 
 met hustledly in the gloom at the farther end of the house, and both 
 seized the hoop at once. 
 
 " I touched it first !" said Barbara. 
 
 " No, I !" declared Dering. 
 
 " Indeed, indeed I did !" persisted she. 
 
 " Indeed, indeed you didn t !" he returned, mockingly. 
 
 " I will have it, at all events, said Barbara. 
 
 "Oh, if you want to tussle " replied Dering. 
 
 Of all delightful autumnal experiences, a romp in a big country 
 hall towards twilight is the most exhilarating. Barbara and Dering 
 wrangled like a boy and a girl over the grace-hoop. She was as evasive 
 in her sudden dives and twistings as a dream-woman. Their breath 
 came hurriedly, and they began to pant and laugh together. Dering 
 was almost winning, when some small object tinkling on the bare floor 
 attracted their attention. Barbara suddenly released the grace-hoop 
 and rushed forward. 
 
 " You are welcome to your prize !" she called, pausing under one 
 of the windows to examine her find. " I have often longed to see what 
 you have in this locket. Now I will punish you for cheating. I will 
 find out who your sweetheart is, and I will never again give you any 
 peace !" 
 
 " Jove !" said Dering. " was that my locket ? Come, Barbara, 
 honestly, don t look at that, please ; I really ask you." 
 
 Barbara s reply was to press a little nearer the window, and curl
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD ? 4(53 
 
 her lips inward in her effort to separate the close rims of the small gold 
 case in her hands. Dering came up behind her, and unceremoniously 
 took both hands and locket into a tight grasp. This locket contained 
 nothing more sentimental than an absurd photograph of Valentine 
 Pom fret, taken when the two were at college together, one of those 
 deformed caricatures which one sometimes sees, and which consist of a 
 Brobdingnagian head on a Liliputian body. Dering, by this time, knew 
 enough of Barbara s morbid sensitiveness to dread the effect which the 
 sudden sight of this photograph might have upon her. 
 
 " I tell you I m not joking," he said. 
 
 " Nor I. There s no use trying to bully me. You know I m 
 nearly as strong as you are. If you want another tow-row, all right." 
 
 This time the scuffle was wordless and somewhat earnest. 
 
 " I don t want to hurt you," said Dering, finally. 
 
 " Don t alarm yourself. I ll stand any amount of mangling to 
 gain my end." 
 
 " You know I seriously mean to get that from you." 
 
 " So do I to sec it." 
 
 " I simply can t nurt you," said Dering, a little desperately, " but I 
 must have it. Why won t you see I am in earnest ?" 
 
 " "Why won t you see I am ?" 
 
 " But such an ado over a little thing !" 
 
 " That s what I ve been thinking." 
 
 " Barbara " 
 
 " It is my name." 
 
 " I give you your last chance. It s an antique resort, but if you 
 don t give me that locket I ll I ll kiss you !" 
 
 " What a truly terrible threat !" 
 
 " You don t believe it ; but I will, I tell you. I should think you 
 might see that I ve some real reason for not wishing you to see that 
 locket." 
 
 " How deeply penetrating men are ! As if that were not the very 
 reason that I wanted to see it !" 
 
 " You understand, then, that I really mean to kiss you if you don t 
 give it up? Really I do." 
 
 " Do you ?" said Barbara. She escaped him by a sudden flashing 
 movement, and rushed down the now almost absolutely dark hall, im 
 pelled by that delightful feeling of scared uncertainty which precipitates 
 children down a long staircase, past darkling coigne.s where clutched 
 fingers are waiting to grasp a loitering ankle. 
 
 She dashed into the as yet lampless dining-room, doubled, through 
 a little corridor, and rushed back on her own traces, laughing gaspingly 
 to think how she had escaped him. As she darted through another 
 door back into the dining-room, she found herself almost in Dering s 
 arms. Even then, however, he did not secure her : she escaped once 
 more, and fled into a dark little closet to the left, mistaking it, alas ! in 
 her excitement, for a corresponding door of exit. Dering followed her 
 at once. She gave a kind of laughing cry, like a hysterical child, and 
 flattened herself against the wall, thrusting the locket behind her; but, 
 catching her about the waist, he drew her forward, feeling for the 
 VOL. XLI.-30
 
 464 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD? 
 
 locket with his other hand. He might as well have tried to open a 
 hoy s fist. She bent from him, and made, this time, an altogether in 
 effectual attempt to get away. Dering, rather out of patience, stooped 
 down ; she turned her head, a little frightened, and her lips brushed 
 his, a touch light as flower-leaves, fine as fire. In another instant 
 both mouths had clung into a kiss. 
 
 A great mental blow annihilates memory, just as it is annihilated by 
 a great physical blow. Neither Barbara nor Dering recalled how they 
 came to be grouped before the dining-room fire, he leaning back in a 
 low arm-chair, she crouching with her hand-hidden face against his 
 knee. All about them was a winter silence, broken only by the tick 
 ing of Pering s watch and Barbara s long-drawn, sobbing breaths. It 
 seemed to him as though cold rills of wind were playing up and down 
 his limbs, while the chair in which he sat, together with himself and 
 Barbara, rose towards the ceiling, leaving the floor at a great distance 
 beneath. He looked far into the hot core of the fire, thence down at 
 the smooth curve of the head of his cousin s wife, thinking how like 
 were its shining strands of hair to the threads on a reel of silk, and 
 grasping more firmly the handles of the chair in which he sat, in order 
 to refrain from touching that winning lustre with his finger-ends. 
 
 Barbara s breath returned upon her face from the cloth of Dering s 
 trousers. She saw the fire-red in blurred lines between her fingers, 
 and put some meaningless words to the ticking of his watch, fantasti 
 cally likening it to an echo of his heart, which rapped hurriedly above. 
 She seemed to see through the to}) of her head his set face, unusual in 
 its fierce pallor, and with eyes gleaming as she had remembered them 
 for that instant when they had flashed into hers over that eager kiss. 
 The fire seemed a conscious presence to her, and its flames appeared 
 to leap and cognizantly peer between her hiding fingers, until she 
 felt almost as though inquisitive eyes were upon her. It was certain 
 that she thought of everything but her present situation. She was 
 kneeling upon a wrinkle in the hearth-rug, and, feeling that it chafed 
 her knees, was reminded of the Persian prayer-rugs, and so of the 
 desert, and so of the dreary possibilities which would be included 
 for a woman during a prolonged ride on camel-back. She wondered if 
 Dering had ever mounted upon one of those picturesquely-distorted 
 t>ea.sts, and was inclined to laugh when she found that she had forgotten 
 whether it was in one of their many stomachs or in their humps that 
 they carried the supply of water which prevented them from suffering 
 of thirst on their long journeys. 
 
 Dering, in the mean while, became also the victim of a profound and 
 ghastly desire to laugh. The corners of his mouth twisted eyeward in 
 a mirthless and distorted grin which would have inexpressibly horrified 
 Barbara had she chanced at that moment to glance up. He controlled 
 this risible phenomenon by a violent effort, however, and rasumed his 
 grim stare into the fire, venturing after a while to pass a somewhat un 
 certain hand over her bending head. 
 
 " No, no," whispered Barbara. 
 
 " I beg your pardon," he said, earnestly. " I won t touch you again. 
 F only want to do what you wish."
 
 TEE QUICK OR THE DEAD? 465 
 
 She murmured something which he had to bend down to hear, and 
 even then did not quite witch. 
 
 " It shall be just as you say," lie remarked, at a venture. 
 
 " You are so good," she whispered back. 
 
 "But what must I do? I leave it all to you. Must I go away? 
 I ll go abroad, if you wish it. I ll I ll go to India : I ve always 
 wanted to go to India. I ll send you some tiger-skins um that s 
 too commonplace, eh ? What was it Isaacs sent his sweetheart? Tiger- 
 *>ars, wasn t it ? I ll send you some tiger-ears." 
 
 " How can you joke about it ?" cried Barbara. 
 
 " I really don t know," replied Dering, sorrowfully. " Reaction, 1 
 suppose." 
 
 " Oh, it s all so dreadful ! so dreadful !" came the smothered tones 
 from his knees. 
 
 " No, I won t agree to that," he answered, firmly. 
 
 " Oh, but you must. It s the least that we can do." 
 
 "What is? to think it all dreadful?" 
 
 " Yes, all of it, all." 
 
 " Well, I just simply can t. It may be a want of refinement, o* 
 high feeling, I suppose one could find lots of names for it, but I 
 honestly can t feel that, you know." 
 
 " Oh," said Barbara, " I m sure you will. When you are by your 
 self, in the dark, quite alone, you you will see how awful it has 
 all been from first to last." 
 
 " No," returued Dering, " I know I won t. You had better make 
 up your mind to that. If you re disappointed in me, it s no more than 
 I am in myself." 
 
 " And me," said Barbara. 
 
 " In you ? Darling /" he breathed, tearing the fringe on the rathei 
 rickety old chair which held him, in the effort not again to touch her. 
 " How can you say such things to me?" 
 
 " Oh, I haven t said one-third that I ought, that I mean to. You 
 must be disappointed in me : you cannot help it. It s it s almost a 
 duty; yes, it s a sacred duty. Disappointed in me! you must despise 
 me!" 
 
 "That s utter nonsense!" said Dering, in a matter-of-fact tone, 
 which sounded as incongruously among the wailing harmonies of her 
 self- reproachful voice as would a penny trumpet among the andante 
 ripples of the Moonlight Sonata. 
 
 " I m glad you can look on it in that way," answered Barbara, 
 stiffly, if one can be said to do anything stiffly when one is limply 
 huddled against another s knee. " Yes, I I am really glad of that," 
 she added, with less certainty. 
 
 " Why, of course it s nonsense," said Dering, stoutly. " When you 
 are alone in the dark you will see that." All at once he succumbed to 
 a sudden, sweeping passion. " Alone in the dark, " he repented, lean 
 ing down his arms heavily upon her, and gathering the rich folds of 
 her gown in his hands. " Barbara, you need never be that again." 
 
 " What ?" she said, huskily, longing to hear the words she knew he 
 would utter in reply, and yet loathing herself for so longing. "What?"
 
 66 THE QUICK OR THE DEADf 
 
 "Alone in the dark," said Dering, tensely; and she felt his quick 
 breath glow among the fibres of her hair as his lips brushed them in 
 speaking. She cringed shivering beside him a moment longer, and 
 then got to her feet and hurried away from him to a distant chair. 
 When he followed her and bent over her, she shrunk down from him, 
 putting up her open hands between them. 
 
 " It is what I must be forever," she whispered, shakenly, " always, 
 always, always !" 
 
 " No," said Dering. He took her protesting hands in his, and laid 
 his lips first to one palm and then to the other. 
 
 " I tell you yes !" she said, passionately, her stormy bosom tossing 
 some little diamond pins that she wore into iridescent sparkles, " yes, 
 and yes, and yes 1" 
 
 Then she took his face into both hands for an instant, and held it 
 near her own. 
 
 " We are both mad, I think," she said. 
 
 " Mad if we persist in calling simple joy madness." 
 
 " I have no right to joy." 
 
 " But I have. Will you deny me that right V 
 
 " If it must come through me, yes." 
 
 " It must come through you, and I say no." 
 
 " We are both very obstinate," she said, in a tired voice. 
 
 " There you are perfectly correct," answered Dering. 
 
 " But I will conquer." 
 
 " There you are entirely wrong." 
 
 " Yes, wrong in everything. There you are right. Oh, do you 
 suppose I do not suffer ?" she cried, with sudden bitterness. " I have 
 no words to tell vou what I suffer." 
 
 "IS or I," he said. 
 
 She rose, and stood for an instant unyielding in his embrace. 
 
 " You are a man," was her final reply. " You have not the com 
 plex feelings that tear a woman. And you are responsible only to 
 yourself. You have never " she paused a moment, looking at him, 
 " you have never been married. You do not know what it is to hear 
 a dead voice ever in your ears, to feel always a dead hand claiming 
 you. You do not know what it is to sin against the dead. The 
 dead," she repeated, glancing dreadlngly about her. 
 
 " Barbara !" said Dering ; but she escaped him. 
 
 She rushed from him towards the half-open door, her stretched- 
 forth arms repulsing him as he advanced. 
 
 " No, no ! never !" she whispered. " There is a grave between us, 
 there Is an open grave between us." 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Dering did not seem to himself to walk back to the house at which 
 he was stopping. He had that sensation of gliding along without 
 volition, a foot or two above the ground, which we have all experi 
 enced in dreams, and his dovvn-bent eyes were not conscious of the 
 dreary glisten that the winter moon struck from the wet, dead leaves
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD? 467 
 
 about hia feet. There was of course no fire in his room when he 
 reached it, and the cold was intense ; but he undressed in the same 
 species of stupor, only rousing for a moment when in trying to brush 
 out his thick curls he discovered that the water into which he had 
 plunged them had frozen. He then managed to kindle a small fire 
 with some bits of light-wood and an old sporting gazette, kneeling 
 down before the brief blaze, his discarded coat held by the sleeves 
 about his neck in lieu of a dressing-gown. It was slow work, thawing 
 that thick mass of heavily-curling locks, and he threw on more wood, 
 still retaining his crouching posture. As the heat increased, he was 
 conscious of an elusive, subtle perfume, which escaped and returned as 
 will a remembered face ; and all at once he became aware of its origin. 
 It was that exquisitely fresh fragrance which sponges and some women 
 share in common, a smell of wild grasses and the sea, of a woman s 
 hair daily washed, in a word, of Barbara. For the few moments in 
 which he had held her in his arms, her head had leaned against his 
 breast. It was this delicate perfume of her hair which the fire was 
 now drawing from the cloth of his coat. 
 
 He rose and plunged into bed, giving a great, boyish shudder as 
 the cold sheets settled down about him. His coat he had thrown from 
 him, and he lay watching it now where it sprawled in a dark heap 
 near the fire-lit hearth. He longed to experience again that faint, 
 intoxicating odor, but something withheld him : it was like retaining 
 some spiritual portion of her against her will, and Dering s pride was 
 only exceeded by his honesty. He was bewildered as yet, and could 
 form no distinct idea of his position in regard to her, though of one 
 thing he was sure, namely, that he had no right to think of her as a 
 lover of his lady. Her morbid insistence about the dead had not at 
 all affected him, but she had repulsed his embrace, not yielded to it, 
 and he would not in imagination take into his arms a woman who in 
 reality refused to remain within them. He was a man of few but 
 thorough creeds, and chief of these was a belief, consistently carried 
 out, which ran to the effect that a man s thoughts should be as respect 
 ful to a chaste woman as were his actions. He knew the power of 
 perfume over the fancy, and he knew that self-control consists chiefly 
 in retaining the bolt in its braces, not in slipping it out and then 
 thrusting one s arm in its place. He lay quite still, shivering violently 
 and endeavoring to fix his mind on commonplace things. It occurred 
 suddenly to him that he had not said his prayers, which he did with 
 the same sweet, clean, boyish regularity with which he plunged daily 
 into cold water. These prayers varied. They were sometimes very 
 long, sometimes merely a word or two, never prearranged, and having 
 reference to anything that might come into his head : thus, for several 
 nights past he had included an ailing Irish setter in his petitions. He 
 was a being of vast and warm affections, and sometimes asked happi 
 ness for those whom he most loved, taking a certain pleasure in whis 
 pering their names into his locked palms. To-night his orisons ran 
 as follows : " Dear God, make Jock a good boy, and bless my father 
 and mother, and everybody. Amen." Then he jumped into bed 
 again, unconscious that he had repeated the very words of his child-
 
 468 THE QUICK OR THE DEADt 
 
 hood prayers, aud seeing Barbara s face advance and retreat on tho 
 waves of darkness, like a sea-tossed flower. He thrust out his arms 
 with a fierce, vehement gesture towards it, shutting his teeth until there 
 was a sharp ringing in his ears, and whispering imperiously behind 
 them, " Love me, love me." 
 
 Barbara, in the mean while, had also undressed mechanically ; that 
 is, she had cast aside her gown, and unloosened her ridgy hair, letting 
 the hair-pins fall one by one upon the carpet as she took them out. 
 Then she drew the glittering lengths together with both hands, aud 
 stood staring at her reflection in the glass. Presently a strange smile 
 broke the stillness of her face. 
 
 " Urn we know each other," she said, addressing her mirrored self, 
 " we know each other, you and I, but only we two. You really have 
 a good face, yes, really a good face, yes, a pure face. It s pure, 1 
 say. Look at your eyes, such a clear, dark brown, honest, deep, 
 truthful, real dog-eyes. And then your mouth s very fine, such 
 little, deep, cool, high-bred corners. I like to look at you ; yes, you re 
 very nice to look at, my good girl. Um you smile so complacently, 
 I don t think I ll pay you any more compliments. I think I will tell 
 you what you really are, what I see behind all that, what your 
 husband sees ! Oh, I know your name. You are called Barbara 
 Pomfret, Barbara Pomfret, Barbara Pomfret. Your husband s name 
 was Valentine Pomfret. You married Valentine Pomfret. He is dead, 
 but his name is not dead : it is alive in you. Your name is Barbara 
 Pomfret." She leaned forward here until her breath made a little tri 
 angular blur on the clear glass. " There s another name for you, too," 
 
 she said, " It is Wanton !" The word seemed to stab her a* 
 
 though some one else had uttered it. 
 
 " O God !" she cried, falling to her knees, " help me ! Dear 
 God, help me ! Hold me. Let him come to me, just a minute, 
 just a minute : I ll pay for it in any way ; I ll l>e so patient afterwards. 
 Val, Val, come ! Be disobedient, be blasphemous, be anything ; only 
 come to me one instant. You needn t even speak. Just let me see 
 you, you, your very self. 
 
 " Oh ! oh ! I forgot ! He would curse me ; he would ask you to 
 curse me. I have desecrated myself. Oh, if that kiss had only burned 
 off my lips ! Oh, can t I die ? Won t you let me die ? Won t you let 
 me die? Ah, let me die ! You won t hear ! If there was only some 
 one to ask for me, some one you loved. Oh, if Christ s mother asks 
 you, won t you hear her? Dear Mother of Christ, pray for me, 
 plead for me ! You have been a woman, a woman like me ! like 
 me!" 
 
 She fell upon the floor and writhed and sobbed until the boards 
 vibrated beneath her agonized movements. Her feverish breath en 
 veloped her face in a steam from her tear-drenched hair, as it had once 
 l>efore enveloped it that evening, and her face and lips were smarting 
 and scalded by the hot drops ever gushing. In the midst of all this 
 torture, she put out one of her burning hands and began to stroke her 
 >wn half-bare shoulders, with soothing, gentle movements. 
 
 " Oh, you poor thing," she sobbed, strangling, " if I could only
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD t 46<J 
 
 comfort you ! if one could only comfort one s self I" And then the 
 horrible silent convulsions of despair arid grief renewed themselves. 
 
 It was not until a full hour had passed that she rose, or made any 
 effort to compose herself. At ihe length of that time, however, she 
 kneeled up, and began gathering her soaked and tangled hair from 
 about her face, to which a net-work of bright strands clung inoistly. 
 Her under lip was drawn against her teeth every now and then by u 
 struggling breath, heavy with tears as a gust of summer wind witli 
 thick rain. These shuddering breaths recurred at regular intervals, and 
 were as though she were trying to force herself to swallow some noxious 
 draught, while her throat ached as though she had been guillotined and 
 was conscious of the wound. She got to her feet finally, swerved a 
 moment, and stood erect, looking about her with a just-born resolve ; 
 then she moved to the fire, which had glowered down in crimson rifts 
 among a crust of white wood-ashes, and spread out her hands to its 
 glow, at the same time looking up to the shadowy ceiling. Her 
 wretched face, glazed with tears, borrowed color from the rich coals, so 
 that as she kneeled, staring upward, with large, distended eyes, she 
 seemed like the Priestess of Fever presiding over her altar-fires. 
 
 It was only a few moments, however, before she rose again, and 
 passed from the warm room out into the dark and draughty hall with 
 out, where the watery moonlight fell in oblong shapes upon the floor 
 of waxed oak. This bleak and waning light only served to confuse 
 her, and, shutting her eyes, she felt her way with extended hands, until 
 her palms came in contact with the carving on a chest to one side. 
 Opening this chest, she filled her arms with some soft draperies, and 
 returned to her room, locking the door after her. She lighted the small 
 silver Pompeiian lamp that swung from the canopy-rail of her bed, and 
 this wan radiance fell down in languid uncertainty upon the kneeling 
 woman, and the mass of crushed white satin and lace with which her 
 arms were filled. This mass she extended upon the silken coverlet, 
 touching its folds into place with a soft and gentle reverence, and 
 spreading above it the veil of delicate tulle. She then took from her 
 throat the gold miniature-case which contained her husband s likeness, 
 and, opening it, laid it down upon the sheening folds before her. Next 
 she deliberately drew off her fur-lined dressing-gown and slip{>ers. 
 
 The fire was now a more pale blur here and there in the dark chim 
 ney-place, and a cold, bitter and intense, pervaded the room, while out 
 side the wind rose a little and then dropped abruptly like a thing too 
 heavy for its wings. 
 
 In the strong draught which passed from one loosely-hung door to 
 the other, the silver lamp swung to and fro, changing the shadows in 
 the satin folds underneath, and seeming to strike sparks from Barbara s 
 bending head. 
 
 All night she kneeled there, clad only in her night-dress of thin 
 cambric. The dreary winter sounds outside seemed not to disturb 
 her. Now one heard the clash of ice-coated twigs in the fitful gusts, 
 now the crisp sound of some hoofed thing as it broke through the 
 frost-rime matting the dead grass. Now a shutter clapped forward and 
 then back again, startling the house-dog to dismal barkings, or an owl
 
 470 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD 7 
 
 aorcamed its desolate tremolo, first close at hand, then flying farthei 
 off, as though to imitate an echo. 
 
 IX. 
 
 A whole week passed before he saw her again, and then it was only 
 by accident. He had walked over to Rosemary as usual, and, on being 
 told of Barbara s absence, had decided to strike out across the fields on 
 his homeward way, rather than take that monotonous tramp along the 
 frost-roughened roads. As he swung himself over the low gray fence 
 at the back of the stables into the brown aud neglected field beyond, he 
 felt as though he were becoming part of some cleverly-executed water- 
 color. The sweeps of ragged hill-side, undefined and vaguely dark in 
 the winter twilight, seemed as though roughly washed in sepia, and 
 their tall weeds bristled at top against a wall of clear, chrome yellow 
 ribbed with scarlet. 
 
 The broad backs of some huddling sheep caught here and there a 
 fkded reflection, and the hurried tinkling of the bell on the neck of a 
 homeward-driven cow broke the cold stillness. At tiie bottom of the 
 field an ice-coated brook pursued its sluggish way, and Dering paused 
 to break otf some slivers of the ice and transfer them to his mouth, a 
 boyish trick which he could never resist. As he stood erect, after ac 
 complishing this somewhat slippery feat, he saw a tall figure about 
 ten yards farther off, on the opposite side of the stream, motionless, 
 beside a half-burned brush fire. The pale smoke-spiral curled slowly 
 up beyond, seeming to encircle her in its mystic whorl. 
 
 In an instant he was beside her and had her hands in his. She 
 caught her breath sharply, but made no exclamation, and they stood 
 searching each other s faces in the feathery light. 
 
 He spoke first, excited and breathless: "You you? Why have 
 you tried to hide from me ? You cannot : it is useless. You see ?" 
 And he drew her towards him as he spoke ; but she was as rigid and 
 unyielding as a figure of iron : in truth her heavy black garments, seen 
 in this reddish-gray light, resembled draperies of that sombre metal. 
 
 " Let my hands go ! let my hands go !" she said to him. 
 
 For answer lie lifted first one and then the other to his lips. She 
 felt their warm clinging through her thick gloves, but this rich sensa 
 tion only served to fix her in her austere determination. 
 
 " I will not," she said ; and, drawing herself haughtily away to the 
 whole length of her long arms, she repeated, in a tone which she had 
 caught from him, and behind her closed teeth, " I will not" 
 
 " * Words, words, words, " said Dering. 
 
 He released her hands, took her in his arms, and crushed her to him 
 by main force. 
 
 " You see?" he said, again. 
 
 "That is nothing. It is nothing, I tell you. You are a man, and 
 your body is stronger than mine ; but your will is not ; no, your will is 
 not." 
 
 " You think so ?" whispered Dering, with his lips against her ear. 
 His breath streamed down her cheeks in among the black furs at her 
 throat, thrilling her to the quick, and she began to pant frantically.
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD? 471 
 
 " You are cruel," she said, repulsing him as best she could. " All 
 men are cruel. You are like the rest. You are cruel." 
 
 " No," replied Dering, " it is not I who am cruel. It is you. You 
 are cruel to yourself." 
 
 " I want to be ! I want to be !" 
 
 " You are cruel to yourself, but you are far crueller to me." 
 
 " I must be. I must be punished through you." 
 
 " You must be punished through no one." 
 
 " I tell you I must. I have asked God to punish me. I asked 
 him all one night on my knees, in the cold, with nothing on but my 
 thin night-gown. You remember that night last week, tJiat night ? 
 The thermometer went to zero. That was the night I asked him. 
 
 " You are mad !" 
 
 " No, no, I m not : I wish I were !" 
 
 " Perhaps it will help you to drive me mad? Will it?" 
 
 " I said you were cruel. Oh, women could not say such things to 
 to those who to those they cared for." 
 
 " Well, never mind, then. I don t suppose either of us know ex 
 actly what we are saying. Look here : you re not near warmly enough 
 dressed." 
 
 " I have on fur," she said, putting her hand to her throat with a 
 certain guilty timidity. 
 
 " Um yes, a little strip around your neck," replied Dering, un 
 convinced. " But this jacket is the same one you used to wear all 
 those warm October days. You see I remember." 
 
 " I am warm enough," she answered, through chattering teeth. 
 
 " Oh, if you insist, certainly," he said. Then there fell a silence 
 between them. 
 
 " How pretty that is !" she ventured at last, disturbing the brush 
 ashes with the toe of her boot. The coals glared in red strips through 
 the delicate white rime, like the core of some flaming fruit through Out 
 outer husk ; here and there little wavering corkscrew films went melting 
 upward. 
 
 " Very pretty," muttered Dering, absently. All at once he whirled 
 about, and caught her again in his arms. "Here," he said, "tell me 
 the truth here, breast to breast, heart to heart, life to life. I kno\v 
 that morbid thought that haunts you. Put it away. Do you hear ? I 
 command you. I am your lover. You hear? I command you to 
 stop thinking those awful, ghoulish thoughts. No, don t struggle, 
 please don t. Dear, so dear, let me tell you what I found last night 
 in my prayer-book. It s one I m awfully fond of: my favorite sister 
 gave it to me, the lame one, you know, who died. I was thinking 
 about her, and how she used to help me and love me, and 1 felt as 
 though she were telling me where to turn, and then I put my finger on 
 these words : The living the living shall praise thee, O Lord. 
 There, darling, that s it, The living. Don t you see?, Why, it was 
 just like a message, just like a word from God himself. The living, 
 Barbara, the living ! " 
 
 " Have pity !" she cried, hoarsely, clinging to him. " Mercy I 
 have mercy !"
 
 472 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD1 
 
 There were great, scalding tears in his eyes. " Oh, darling," he 
 said, "you ask uie that? when you haven t any mercy on yourself? 
 Oh, you poor darling ! For heaven s sake, Barbara, look on this thing 
 rationally, humanly, as we were meant to look on such things. Why, 
 darling, think of it ! he s not your husband now : he s a spirit, an 
 essence ; no more than that smoke curling up at our feet. There ! 
 there I I m a clumsy brute. Oh, I wish to God God would help me !" 
 
 Neither of these frantic creatures caught, in thus despairing apj>eal, 
 that touch of humor which grief, in certain moments of necessity, will 
 invariably borrow from mirth. They grasped each other, trembling 
 violently, and feeling the earth *^ave beneath their feet like a shaken 
 carpet. 
 
 Dering was the first to speak. 
 
 " Don t cry like that," he urged. " I can t stand it ; I simply 
 can t stand it. Darling, you will drive us both crazy ! Oh, why 
 can t you see it all as clearly and blessedly as I can ? Barbara, it was 
 meant to be ; it was, darling, I know it was. Look here : I didn t 
 mean to come to Virginia this autumn : I was going to Canada with a 
 friend of mine ; and he fell through a trap at a theatre and got awfully 
 hurt, and so of course we couldn t go. And then look here, dear, 
 please listen, please don t cry like that. Look : this will seem funny 
 to you, it s got a ghastly sort of fun in it, but I had taken a dis 
 like to you without seeing you. Honestly, dearest, I had. I made 
 Va I mean I made some one awfully angry once by telling them I 
 thought your photograph looked coarse. Think of it ! I said I thought 
 you looked coarse ! My darling, darling, darling J" 
 
 She shuddered afresh, pressing closer to him, and at the same time 
 urging him from her. 
 
 " It s what I am," she muttered, brokenly. 
 
 " What is?" demanded Deriug, startled, then, as her meaning flashed 
 on him, violently indignant. " You seem to take a sort of delight in 
 saying that sort of thing to me," he cried. " You know it s false. 
 You know the very idea s ridiculous. You know I only told you 
 because I thought it might take you out of yourself, it was so per 
 fectly ridiculous. Barbara ! stop crying." 
 
 " Oh, let me ! let me !" she whispered, with a beseeching move 
 ment of her whole figure. 
 
 " Why, certainly, if it comforts you, my poor dear," he said, stroking 
 all of her hair that he could reach beneath her close hat. To this she 
 replied by a wail of absolute despair. 
 
 " Nothing will ever comfort me again," she cried ; " and if it could 
 I ought not to want it to." 
 
 " My own girl, I wish I could make you see how morbid you are." 
 
 " How can you call it morbidness ?" she said, suddenly releasing 
 herself. " Suppose you had been my husband. Would you want 
 tue to forget?" 
 
 He noticed the same apprehensive, backward glance that followed 
 any mention of her husband. It touched him with a horrified and 
 gushing tenderness, and he spoke under its warm impulse. He took 
 both her hands, crossing one above the other, and pressing them con
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD1 473 
 
 viiicingly between his own as he talked. " Listen : let uie tell you 
 how I would have felt," he said. " I would have felt that anything, 
 anything which could add to your happiness while on earth would have 
 my blessing. Any true, honest, unselfish man would feel so. I m sur* 
 that it s just the way he felt." 
 
 He was astonished at the stricken cry which broke from her, as she 
 tore her hands away and faced him with tumultuous bosom. 
 
 " Then you don t love me !" she cried. " You don t know what 
 love is. You could never say that if you really loved me. It s hide 
 ous. You would never understand. Oh, it makes me wild to see how 
 calmly you stand there ! You don t know. Men never know. They 
 never really suffer. They get over things so. Their memories are 
 like like photographs, they fade out so. Women s memories are 
 like statues : you may break them in pieces, you may leave them out 
 in storms until they are all discolored, you can always put them to 
 gether again. No matter how stained they are, they always retain their 
 shape. It is our greatest curse. Yes, it is a curse upon us. We can t 
 forget ! we can t forget !" 
 
 She threw herself forward on her knees among the thick, tangled 
 grasses, and took her face into her desolate-looking, black-gloved hands. 
 Dering stood staring down upon her, helpless, almost hopeless. 
 
 " There s nothing I can say," he ventured at last, in a broken 
 voice. 
 
 " No, there s nothing, there s nothing," she said. " If I could 
 forget, there might be something. It s that awful distinct recollection 
 that I have of everything. Why, I can see him now, I can hear 
 him. I can see him lighting his cigar, coming home in the dusk. I 
 can see the very streaks of light on his hat-brim and between his 
 fingers, and the dead golden-rod stalks looking all pinched and gray 
 about our feet. I can hear him say, Look out ! there s a man-trap ! 
 as he caught his foot in a tangle of grass. I can see the way he used 
 to get about looking for a comfortable chair, with his cigar in one hand, 
 and a book folded over his forefinger. I can see him making tea for 
 me when I was ill, and burning his fingers, and dancing about with 
 pain ha ! ha ! ha ! He was so absurd sometimes ! Oh, Val ! Val !" 
 Hue ended, with a perfect shriek of desolation. 
 
 Dering felt as though she had thrust her hand into his breast and 
 was twisting his heart-strings about with her strong, supple fingers, as 
 he had seen her twist the greyhound puppies ears. At that moment 
 nothing appeared of much consequence. He thought mechanically that 
 he would go out shooting to-morrow, and wondered if the Irish setter 
 would have recovered sufficiently to accompany him. 
 
 Suddenly she stretched up to him two feeble, appealing hands. 
 u Let us go home," she said, wearily. " I am so tired. I feel so ill." 
 
 He put a gentle arm about her, and she leaned heavily against him 
 as they passed on through the overgrown field, the wild-rose brambles 
 catching against her sorrowful skirts and pulling them backward every 
 moment or so. It was too dark to distinguish anything save the gaunt 
 net-work of the trees against the lowering sky, and the dark jutting 
 of the stable-roof and the tall chimneys of Rosemary.
 
 474 THE QUICK OR THE DEADt 
 
 X. 
 
 Barbara, who lay awake nearly all of that night, had been sleeping 
 restlessly for about an hour, when Rameses awakened her. Her method 
 of rousing her mistress was somewhat unique, and consisted in kneeling 
 down by the bed and keeping her large, circular eyes upon those of 
 Barbara. On this occasion she had prefaced this performance by proj>- 
 piug an euveloj>e against the pillow, and as her mistress awoke she 
 pushed it towards her wi< h one slender brown finger. 
 
 "What is it? A letter? Is it time for the post? Have I slept 
 so late?" asked Barbara, hurriedly. Then she saw that there was no 
 etamp on the envelope, and recognized Dering s handwriting. 
 
 " Open the closet door a little," she said, and, leaning on her elbows 
 among the tumbled bed-clothes, she read the note in the chink of light 
 admitted through the window of the closet. Its contents were brief, 
 and ran as follows : 
 
 " I am going to New York on the first afternoon train. I will not 
 come to Rosemary again, to torture and worry you. I understand 
 perfectly. Never think that I misjudge you. Could you scratch me 
 just a word or two to take with me? Or send me a marked book, 
 one that you have marked, of course. If you need me or want to see 
 me at any time, you have only to telegraph Manhattan Club. I will 
 send you my address if I go abroad. I am afraid this is an unearthly 
 hour to rout you up, but I have to leave on a very early train to make 
 connection at Charlottesville, and I feel selfish enough to put you to a 
 iittle inconvenience when I think of those awful hours of waiting in 
 that village, and how a note or book from you would help me out. 
 
 " Yours, 
 
 " J. D." 
 
 Barbara put back her tangled hair, and looked up at Rameses out 
 of eyes heavy with tears and sleep. 
 
 " Who brought this ? Is he waiting?" she demanded. 
 
 " Yease m, he s a-waitin . Tis Unc Jim s boy Granville." 
 
 " Well, then, give me some paper, and a pencil, and a book to 
 write on." 
 
 She wrote the following note, still lying down in bed, and leaning 
 first to one side and then the other, as her arms began to tingle numbly 
 with the strain : 
 
 " If you would like, come over at two o clock and I can drive you 
 to Charlottesville in time for the 6.30 Exprass, and then you won t 
 have any waiting to do. If not, write me again, and I will send the 
 lx>ok you wish to the station. I thank you with all my (she had writ 
 ten " heart," then scratched it out elaborately and put a very distinct 
 " power" after it) power for your kindness to me always. 
 
 " BARBARA." 
 
 The signature also showed signs of fluctuation. It had first been 
 " Yours ever, B. R. P.," then "As ever," then merely " B.," and finally
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD1 475 
 
 a rattier infinitesimal " Barbara," as though she were trying to express 
 a whisper in writing by the smallness of her chirography. 
 
 The. reply to this missive came shortly, a telegraphic formula of 
 ten words : 
 
 " Will be at Rosemary 2 sharp. You are so good. J." 
 
 When Rameses had prepared her bath, and thrown wide all four 
 of the large windows, Barbara saw that it was raining gently but con 
 stantly. The whole lawn had a sodden, unkempt appearance, and 
 some plough-horses that had strayed into the enclosure glistened dis 
 mally. The roads would be in a frightful state, and she thought with a 
 palpable shudder of her long, dreary, companionless homeward drive 
 that evening. She decided that she would not trust herself to be her 
 own charioteer on such a gloomy night, and had recourse to the here 
 tofore despised " carry -all" and " Unc Joshua." 
 
 Bering was punctual to the second, and they set off at ten minutes 
 past two, half smothered in the fur carriage-robes with which Miss 
 Fridiswig had heaped them. 
 
 It was still raining as they drove out upon the high-road, but with 
 less steadiness, and the mists upon the hills, which were of a dark, 
 soaked purple, had lifted, and hung in dissolving wreaths here and 
 there above the rich slopes. Beauregard Walsingham rode behind to 
 open gates, and Unc Joshua had the front seat of the carry-all to him 
 self, slipping about at particularly uneven bits in the road, with & 
 creaking sound of damp leather. This carriage was perhaps twenty 
 years old, and rattled in more places than one could imagine it pos 
 sible for a vehicle of any description to rattle, filling up the gaps in 
 Dering s and Barbara s somewhat spasmodic conversation, as Feuillet 
 says the noise of Paris fills up the gaps in a Parisian s life. 
 
 He had told her perhaps ten times of her goodness in driving with 
 him to Charlottesville, for the same number of times she had replied 
 that it was only a pleasure, and they had admired in every variety ol 
 language every variety of tone in the dense gray air about them, when 
 he turned abruptly to her. 
 
 " How I will miss you !" he said, in a strangled voice, and then 
 twice, back of his teeth, in that way he had, and speaking in French 
 for fear of Unc Joshua, " Je t aime ! -je Ccdme /" 
 
 " No, no," she whispered, bracing herself away from him by means 
 of her hand against his knee under the fur robes. He drew off his 
 gloves and held it there, his pulses throbbing riotously, his eyes on hers. 
 
 " Don t look at me," she said, with some confusion. " It is so light." 
 
 " I believe I could see your eyes in the dark, like a tiger s." 
 
 "Don t talk so loud. He hears every word. They understand a 
 great deal more than you think. Oh, what a wonderful tone of red 
 that field is ! Why, it has a bloom on it like a grape." 
 
 " Yes, lovely, lovely. Leave your hand there, please." 
 
 " I never really, I never dreamed of such a color. And, oh, that 
 broom-field beyond, with the dark patches 1 And the belt of black 
 woods ! Oh r 
 
 " Yes, and that ragged blue line beyond. What is that ? Is it the 
 Blue Ridge? No, don t take it away, not vet."
 
 476 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD 9 
 
 " Yes, that s the Blue Ridge. I wish we could see it from llo?e- 
 mary. But you should drive through all this in June." 
 
 " Well, why shouldn t I ? I mean to. Look : I have something 
 to ask you. It isn t much. Look : I just want to take off your glove. 
 May I ?" 
 
 " No," she said, drawing short, difficult breaths ; " no. How can 
 you talk to me like that ?" 
 
 " Good heavens ! how am I to talk to you ? You should have lot 
 me go as I meant to. Why did you propose to drive me to Charlottes- 
 ville? You knew how it would be - No, I don t mean that. For 
 give me. But you must know that I can t be near you without telling 
 you how I feel to you. You must know that. Did you expect me to 
 drive all these miles like a stock or a stone? I m afraid that s not as 
 original as it might be, eh ? But look : let me take your glove off?" 
 
 In reply she drew her hand decidedly out of his, and buried it in 
 her lap. Her face was turned from him so that he got a mere sugges 
 tion of her profile, but he saw that she was blushing desperately. 
 
 " I bother you so," he said, with regret. 
 
 " No, it isn t that. Oh, what a water-color study that man would 
 make !" 
 
 " Excellent," admitted Dering. The man in question was a young 
 negro of strapping figure, to which his blue jeans shirt and trousers had 
 modelled themselves accurately. On his head was a moth-eaten seal 
 skin cap of a delicious mingled brown. His hands, one of which was 
 bandaged with dirty white cotton, were clasped behind his throat, and 
 he carried his gun through his bended arms. 
 
 On his trousers a brace of just-shot hares, dangling to and fro, had 
 left a moist crimson stain. It was the highest note of color in this 
 Btudy of faded blues and browns, the cotton bandage and the breasts 
 and tails of the poor " molly-cottons" being the only high lights, so to 
 speak. 
 
 "Isn t he like one of what s-his-name s aquarelles? Look, now! 
 there, as he comes out against that dull-yellowish field, there, with that 
 
 patchy gray sky above Oh, I wish I could paint, with my hands, 
 
 I mean : I am always painting pictures to myself with my fancy." 
 
 " So am I," said Dering. She colored deeply again, and seemed to 
 have caught the button of her glove in the fur robe. 
 
 "Let me help you," he suggested, and, having done so, kept her 
 hand in his. She had not time to withdraw it before they were aware 
 from " Unc Joshua s" back that something unusual was going on in the 
 road beyond. There is nothing more expressive than a negro coach 
 man s back, not even the eyes of a hungry dog. Apprehension was 
 written in the hunched curve of " tTnc Joshua s" vertobrse and the out 
 ward crook of his bowed arms. He half rose, still curiously contorted, 
 and peered from side to side between his horse s ears. 
 
 " What s up? Sit down. What s the matter?" said Dering, who 
 was sometimes exasperated by the theatrical gymnastics of would-be- 
 impressive darkies. " Come, what s all this about ?" he demanded again. 
 
 " Suppn s done broke down in de road, suh," rpplied Unc Joshua, 
 still curving and peering, " a wagon or suppu ."
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD* 477 
 
 Dering stood np also. 
 
 " What is it ?" said Barbara, a little nervously. 
 
 " I sees ! I sees !" now cried Unc Joshua : " tis one uh dem 
 young Buzzies. He cyart done broke down, right crost de road, too." 
 
 " One of the Buzzies !" cried Barbara, in dismay. " Good gracious 1 
 we will have to pick him up if his trap s broken. It s too bad ! Look 
 again, Uncle Joshua. Are you sure his wagon s broken? Perhaps the 
 harness is just tangled." 
 
 " Norm," said the old black, positively, "dey ain nuttin twangled 
 dar. Tis bust all tuh scrakshuns" (anglici unknown). 
 
 " I suppose this is young Buzzy coming here now," said Dering, in 
 a surly tone. " What a name ! Buzzy /" 
 
 " It isn t near as bad as the man," said Barbara, gloomily. 
 
 Young Buzzy here appeared at the side of the carry-all and thrust 
 out a lank hand, exposing a frayed red-flannel undershirt-sleeve in the 
 vehemence of his gesture. 
 
 "Howdy?" he said, including them both in this concise greeting. 
 " Howdy, Unc Joshua ?" he added. 
 
 Unc Joshua removed his battered silk hat, with an elaborate shirt 
 ing of lines and whip from one hand to the other. 
 
 " Mornin , suli," he said, " mornin , morninV 
 
 " I certVy am lucky," pursued Mr. Buzzy, again addressing Bar 
 bara and Dering. " I wnzn t bawn with a caul for nothin . Hyah ! 
 
 hyah ! Ever read David Copperfield, Mr. Excuse me, but are 
 
 vou Mr. George Pom fret ?" 
 
 " No ; my name s Dering," replied the addressed, whose manner 
 was perfectly courteous, if somewhat frost-bitten. Barbara was nibbling 
 her inner lip fiercely and trying to look as usual. 
 
 " Can t we help you ?" pursued Dering. " You seem to have com<> 
 to grief." 
 
 " Come to grief!" echoed the other. "Well, it s more like grief 
 had come to me. Hyah ! hyah !" And he laughed again, producing a 
 sound like that made by a stick drawn rapidly along an iron railing. 
 This laugh jarred so on Dering that he felt as though he would like to 
 loosen his skin and jump out of it : as the next best thing, he jumped 
 out of the carry-all and made his way to the wreck of Mr. Buzzy s 
 trap. That gentleman followed shortly, standing resignedly by while 
 Dering inspected the chaos of wine-sap apples, potatoes, and bundles 
 of fodder which were heaped up about the body of the broken wagon. 
 Its owner ventured no explanation, but remained passive, holding a 
 hairy wrist in either hand, and rubbing his thumbs about on his arms 
 underneath his red-flannel shirt-sheeves. He was otherwise attired in 
 a suit of snuff-brown stripes alternating with black, wore a soft gray 
 felt hat, and a red satin tie with green bars across it. 
 
 His face was of a shiny fairness, deepening to a mottled plum-color 
 on his cheeks and th e bridge of his nose, and his eyebrows, which he 
 continually rubbed the wrong way with one of those restless thumbs, 
 were of a pale straw-color, over eyes which matched the tint upon his 
 cheeks. He had lost a tooth directly in front, and could not keep his 
 tongue from incessantly playing in and out of this unpleasing hollow.
 
 478 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD f 
 
 Dering felt a great loathing swell his throat, and as Buzzy sidled nearer 
 over the soggy ground, his perfume of damp cloth, hair-oil, and stable 
 did not mitigate this sentiment. Was it possible that he and Barbara 
 would have to drive the rest of the way to Charlottesville behind that 
 reeking personality ? 
 
 " I suppose the old nigger and you and I couldn t patch it up 
 between us?" he suggested at last, but rather doubtfully. 
 
 " Not less we could work meracles," replied young Buzzy. " No, 
 that wagon s a goner." 
 
 " I m afraid it is," said Dering. 
 
 " It certVy is," affirmed its owner. 
 
 XI. 
 
 Dering remained silent after Buzzy s last remark. He could not 
 bring himself to make any suggestion concerning a more practical spe 
 cies of aid, namely, the transference of Buzzy and his goods and 
 chattels to their vehicle. They walked back to the carry -all in silence. 
 
 " Can you do anything about it ?" said Barbara. 
 
 " I m afraid not," replied Dering, sadly. 
 
 Barbara was also silent, struggling with the same distaste which 
 had tied Dering s tongue. Young Buzzy kept a steady and resigned 
 gaze upon the wagon, still thumbing his lean arms. Finally Barbara 
 said, with a sort of burst, 
 
 " Can t we give you a lift ?" 
 
 " I wuz thinkin bout that," replied the unfortunate. " I cert n y 
 would be ubbliged." 
 
 " What will you do with your horse ?" here suggested Dering, with 
 a sudden hope. 
 
 Mr. Buzzy was quite prepared for this emergency. " I ll give the 
 little darky somethin tuh lead him," he replied, adding, with a kind 
 of tilt in Barbara s direction, " With your permission, uv co se." 
 
 " Why, certainly," she answered. 
 
 He went off to attend to this little transaction, and Barbara and 
 Dering clutched each other s hands with a simultaneous movement. 
 
 " Will we have to take him all the way?" said Dering, almost tear 
 fully. 
 
 " I m afraid so," said Barbara, who was entirely tearful. 
 
 There was a lump in her throat that made her feel as though she 
 had swallowed a hot hard-boiled egg, shell and all, and it had stuck 
 just below the root of her tongue. Their hands tightened, they cast a 
 desperate glance about : young Buzzy was again approaching them. 
 
 " It s damnable !" said Dering, with perhaps pardonable violence, 
 especially as he apologized immediately afterwards. 
 
 " No, don t apologize," urged Barbara, hurriedly. " I say it s it s 
 damnable too !" 
 
 They burst out laughing just as Buzzy came up. 
 
 " We were laughing at my poor little follower s evident fright about 
 leading your horse," explained Barbara, with suave mendacity. 
 
 " He is right skeered," Mr. Buzzy admitted, " but he ll git over it.
 
 THE QUICK OR 1HE DEAD* 479 
 
 Jinks always balks at firs , Jinks my hawse, yuh know. It s 
 mighty kind in you to give me a lif, Miss Barb I mean Mis Porn- 
 fret. Excuse me, but that Missis business always sticks in my throat 
 when I look at you. You don t look a day older n you did when we 
 boys an girls used tuh dress the church for Chris mus " 
 
 " I don t want to hurry you, Mr. Buzzy," here interpolated Dering, 
 " but Mrs. Pomfret is kindly driving me to Charlottesville to catch the 
 6.30 train, and I wouldn t like to miss it." 
 
 " Cert u y cert n y," said Mr. Buzzy, who still hesitated, however. 
 He sidled towards Unc Joshua and took him into his confidence in an 
 undertone. " Say, Unc Joshua," it was thus that he expressed him 
 self, " s there any room fur them pertaters n wine-saps onder the 
 ^eat or anywhere? It ll mean a drink in Charlottesville, yuh know." 
 
 While he and Unc Joshua arranged this matter, Barbara and Dering 
 again devoured one another s rebellious faces with hungry eyes. All at 
 once Dering stooped and pretended to be arranging something on the 
 floor of the carry-all. In truth he was pressing his lips rapidly, first 
 against Barbara s gown, and then against the curve of her instep. 
 
 " Oh, don t ! don t !" she urged, in a vehement whisper. " My 
 horrid boot ! Oh, don t ! PLEASE !" 
 
 He lifted his head, a little flushed, and looked at her with a certain 
 brilliancy, as of one who has been drinking wine. At the same moment 
 Mr. Buzzy came around to the other side of the carriage. 
 
 " If you ll excuse me" he remarked, " I ll git one ur two pa ceta 
 fore we start." 
 
 " Certainly," replied Barbara again, and again Mr. Buzzy went off 
 in the direction of his wagon. He, his wine-saps and potatoes, being 
 safely stowed away, they started towards Charlottesville, stopped every 
 now and then by young Walsingham s appeals for help regarding the 
 recreant Jinks, who, as his master had said, balked sometimes. Buzzy 
 himself was inclined to be talkative, and told various anecdotes, in- 
 fjuding Unc Joshua in the conversation, with great geniality. 
 
 " Name of a dog," exclaimed Dering, in French, " this is atrocious !" 
 
 " Name of a blue pig, it is !" replied Barbara, gravely. They 
 laughed again. 
 
 " Yo re laughin reminds me," said Mr. Buzzy, " of a story my 
 ole Unc Nelson Cunnin ham use ter tell." And forthwith they were 
 regaled with one of the extremely long anecdotes of Mr. Nelson Cun 
 ningham. 
 
 " Please put your hand on my knee again, just once," urged Dering, 
 under cover of the boisterous hilarity which his own anecdotal powers 
 had called forth in Mr. Buzzy. " I won t touch it if you tell me not 
 to." He waited anxiously, and was presently rewarded by a soft clasp 
 upon his knee, which sent such a delightful thrill through him that he 
 actually smiled in response to Mr. Buzzy s toothy grin. 
 
 " That s what I call a first-rater," announced the latter, appealing 
 afterwards to Unc Joshua. " What you think, Unc Joshua ?" 
 
 " Fus -rate, suh, fus -rate !" _ 
 
 " Hyah ! hyah ! Unc Joshua, you know a good story when you 
 hear one eh ?" 
 
 VOL. XLL 31
 
 480 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD? 
 
 " Yes, mik 1 Hyah ! hyah !" 
 
 " Br-r-r ! I wish we could walk the rest of the way !" said Dering, 
 in overwhelming disgust. 
 
 " It is dreadful," admitted Barbara. " But here s the Long Bridge. 
 We are nearly there." 
 
 " What a lovely country it is !" breathed Bering, leaning far out to 
 have a glimpse of the pretty hills that hug Charlottesville, before they 
 were en-tunnelled by the Long Bridge. " I am never so glad that I am 
 a Southerner as when I drive near Charlottesville on a day like this." 
 
 " Or when you think that a few like Mr. B. are your compatriots," 
 suggested Barbara, who was so bitterly unhappy that she felt like in 
 dulging in wild laughter. As the rumble of the Long Bridge drowned 
 their voices, they could talk more unrestrainedly. 
 
 " You were so good to come," said Dering, to whom the novelty of 
 the idea made this remark seem ever novel. 
 
 " I wanted to come," answered Barbara, who found no monotony in 
 lliis reply. 
 
 " And you will telegraph if you need me, or or anything?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " Promise." 
 
 " Well." 
 
 " Say you promise." 
 
 " I promise." 
 
 He got his arm around her : for an instant she breathed difficultly 
 against his side ; then they rolled out again into the faded daylight. 
 
 " My Unc Nelson Cunningham use ter say he had eyes in the skin 
 of his back, like a pertater, when he sat befo two young folks goin 
 thoo a tunnel," remarked Mr. Buzzy, jovially, as the horses struck out 
 again into a round trot. " Hyah ! hyah !" 
 
 " Hyah ! hyah !" chuckled Unc Joshua. 
 
 " Beast ! I d like to choke him !" ejaculated Dering between his teeth. 
 
 " I wish you would," said Barbara, who was of a lively flame-color. 
 
 " You don t seem to perriciate my remarks ?" here put in Mr. Buzzy, 
 to whom this twisting of words constituted a form of humor. 
 
 " I don t think we were listening at the time of your last observa 
 tion," said Dering, grimly. 
 
 I said my Unc Nel " 
 
 " Good gracious ! is the Rivanna always so swollen at this time of 
 the year?" asked Barbara, looking out. 
 
 " Pen s on th rains. I said my Unc " 
 
 " The raias? But then it always rains a good deal in November, 
 doesn t it?" 
 
 " Well, right smart, gen lly. Unc Nelson said " 
 
 " Oh, yas, I remember now, of course. I wonder if any one could 
 swim the Rivanna?" 
 
 " I done it, lars/ summer," announced Buzzy, with an impressive 
 seriousness. He twisted about, hanging both arms over the back of the 
 seat, and looking down at that lazy river as though he expected from 
 it some sign of recognition. 
 
 " You must be a very good swimmer."
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD 9 4g) 
 
 "Tolabul. Torm Cuunin ham my Unc Nelson Cunnin ham s 
 boy kin outswim me, though. That boy kin swim ! You know him, 
 Unc Joshua?" 
 
 " Sut n y, suh, sut n y, sut n y. Marse Torni kin swim !" 
 
 " You mus remember him, Miss Ba excuse me, Mrs. Pomfret, 
 don t you ?" 
 
 " Oli, yes," said Barbara, vaguely. It was a species of utter, apa 
 thetic misery that had seized her. They had now entered Charlottes- 
 ville, and the drenched, forsaken village streets were beginning to depress 
 her unutterably. 
 
 " Drive us a little way up Park Street, Uncle Joshua," she said, and 
 leaned back, looking silently about, as they rolled along this charming 
 avenue, which is not unlike Lovers Lane in Newport. 
 
 It would be hard to decide which was most miserable, Barbara or 
 Dering. Buzzy s presence thrust into their tdte-a-tdte was something 
 as when a New-Orleans masker during Mardi-Gras shoves his grotesque 
 self between two lovers about to embrace. Their words choked them, 
 and they not only saw the actual Buzzy, but had exasperating visions 
 of brother and sister Buzzies, with his home in the background, a 
 home whose whitewashed walls bore many excrescences in the shape of 
 old photographs framed in round walnut frames, whose square piano 
 was covered with a red-and-black-starnped woollen cover, whose sofa 
 was of green reps disgorging black horse-hair, and whose hall was 
 carpeted with oil-cloth and strewn with round rush mats. Besides, it 
 was impossible to get rid of him : he had at once announced his in 
 tention of " sticking by them," to see Dering off, and to provide for 
 Barbara when he should be gone : so they drove to the station still with 
 Buzzy on the box-seat. Barbara, who had a nervous and uncontrolla 
 ble terror of locomotives, grasped Dering s hand unceremoniously as 
 they neared the net-work of tracks. 
 
 " Hyah ! hyah !" whispered Buzzy, whose shoulders they saw move 
 hilariously. 
 
 " Hyah ! hyah !" echoed Unc Joshua, huskily. 
 
 They got out of the carry-all in a dumb but violent passion, and 
 walked together to the waiting-room. 
 
 This waiting-room was big and airy, and when they entered there 
 was no one else in possession. Mr. Buzzy officiously darted off to see 
 after Dering s luggage, and they were at last free to indulge in conver 
 sation without an audience. Unfortunately, all the tumultuous ideas 
 which had clamored for vent in the carry-all seemed now to have 
 followed hot on the heels of the vanished Buzzy. 
 
 " I wonder if that clock s right ?" ventured Dering. 
 
 "Oh, of course," said Barbara. "They wouldn t dare have it 
 wrong." 
 
 " No, I suppose not," he admitted. " Then I ve got three-quarters 
 of an hour." 
 
 " A little more than that. Suppose we sit down ?" 
 
 " Good Lord ! what an oaf I am ! You must be tired to death." 
 
 They sat down, after Dering had made an elaborate arrangement of 
 his satchel and overcoat.
 
 482 THE QUICK OR THE DEADf 
 
 " Thirty-nine minutes now," said Barbara. " Does a waiting-room 
 depress you as it does me?" 
 
 " I don t think anything could be worse." 
 
 " I almost wish I hadn t come." 
 
 " Don t say that !" He slipped his hand through the hollow arm 
 of the seat, and took surreptitious possession of her now ungloved 
 fingers. 
 
 " Mind," she whispered, " the ticket-agent is just opposite." 
 
 " Disgusting !" murmured Dering. They were silent for a second 
 or two, at the end of which time he took a small object from his pocket 
 and laid it in her lap. 
 
 " I want you to keep that," he said. " It s it s the prayer-book 
 I was telling you of, the one, you know, I found that in, about the 
 * living, you know. Don t shrink, darling." 
 
 She turned to him with a sudden, wild movement that caused the 
 little volume to slip on the floor at her feet. " Oh, I am so unhappy ! 
 I am so unhappy !" she said, giving him her clinched hands, and with 
 drawing them as suddenly. Both stooped together to lift the fallen 
 prayer-book. 
 
 " Perhaps this will help you. You won t let me help you," he 
 said, despairingly. She sank back between the iron arms of her chair, 
 holding the book against her breast, and moving her lips slightly as 
 though in prayer. Dering bent down his head near her. 
 
 " Say something for me," he whispered, shakenly. 
 
 " I am ; I am. It s what I m doing." 
 
 " God keep you, my pure one, my true one !" 
 
 " Well, ef you two knew the trouble I d had checkin yo thousand- 
 and-one trunks, sir, you d take up a subscription for me right here in 
 this station-house !" ejaculated at this juncture the voice of Mr. Buzzy. 
 
 Dering looked up at him from under his lowered brows with a 
 quietly murderous expression ; Barbara, bending over, pretended to be 
 tying her shoe. 
 
 " How many of them cur ous boxes have you got, anyhow ?" 
 pursued the young gentleman, entirely unconscious. He wiped his 
 whole face and the spaces behind his fat ears with a large purple-and- 
 white silk handkerchief, regarding the fabric afterwards intently, and 
 then crumpling it into his hat, which he replaced on his head. " Why 
 don chu charter a cyar n chuck yore things in that ? T ould be a 
 heap less trouble. Well, here yo checks." 
 
 " Thanks," said Dering, pocketing them. " I m sorry you had so 
 much trouble." 
 
 " Oh, twa n t any reel trouble," replied Buzzy, genially. " I was 
 jes gassin . Look hyuh : wouldn t you like somethin tuh eat? both 
 o you ? They ve got a reel nice resterrant hyuh." 
 
 " Nothing, nothing at all, thank you," replied both, hastily. 
 
 " Not a cupper coffee ? Some tea, then ? They have firs -ratc 
 i scream sommer that ? Not a thing ? Well, Miss a Misses Pom- 
 fret 11 die fore she gits home : you may git on a buffet cyar. Lemme 
 git you a cupper tea ?" 
 
 This monologue was interspersed with a series of " No, thank yous/
 
 THE qUICK OR THE DEADt 483 
 
 "No, thanks," from Barbara and Dering. Their tormentor finally 
 desisted. 
 
 " Well," he ejaculated at last, " think I ll set down." 
 
 Barbara and Dering looked at each other with eyes that groaned. 
 They had now a scant twenty minutes. 
 
 " Yo train s due in twenty minutes," said Mr. Buzzy, blithely. 
 " Got all yo things together ?" 
 
 " Yes," snapped Dering. 
 
 " That s right. I reckon you re right use ter travellin . Ben all 
 over Europe, haven t yuh ?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 " Excuse me, but yuh cert n y look hit." 
 
 " Did you say my train was due in twenty minutes ?" 
 
 " Seventeen, now." 
 
 " Would you mind asking if it s on time ?" 
 
 " I know," said Mr. Buzzy. " Tis." 
 
 Barbara felt as though she could not stand it another moment. 
 Her ears sang, and she hated Buzzy in a way that astonished herself. 
 She thought that she would almost rejoice to see the Express that was 
 to bear Dering from her roll over the odoriferous body of the other. 
 She stood up to her full height, with a quick, gasping breath, and then 
 sat down again. 
 
 "Are you ill?" said Dering, in alarm. 
 
 " What s the matter ?" said Buzzy, also scrambling to his feet. 
 
 " Nothing. I was crushing my dress." 
 
 " Ha ! tJiat /" laughed Buzzy. " You shot up in such a hurry I 
 reckoned yore bustle must have springs in it !" 
 
 " Mr. Buzzy," said Deiiug, in elaborately slow and distinct tones, 
 " I have something of importance to say to Mrs. Pomfret, and I have 
 now only thirteen minutes in which to say it. Could you be so very 
 kind as to leave us together ?" 
 
 If he had thought to freeze Buzzy by this frigid and biting address, 
 he was vastly mistaken. 
 
 " Cert n y, cert n y," acquiesced that personage at once. " Why 
 didn t you tip me the wink ? I d er twigged. Reckon I ll go V git 
 a Bnack." And he went. 
 
 XII. 
 
 " Now !" said Dering, looking at her. His look was so intense, so 
 beseeching, that she imagined herself in his arms. 
 
 " My heart aches so ! it aches so !" she said, piteously. Her lip 
 began to quiver, and she turned from him, having that wisdom which 
 teaches a woman to let a man observe the signs of her grief everywhere 
 save in her face. She did not want Deriug to carry away a picture of 
 her features pursed up in the ridiculous distortions of real sorrow. 
 
 " It aches so !" she said, again. " I wish 1 could cut it out !" 
 She ground her teeth a little savasHy. "I suffer loo much!" she 
 panted. 
 
 Dering came close to her. His heart s core yearned over her, but 
 he had a consciousness in the very curls on the back of his head that
 
 484 THE QUICK OR THE DEADt 
 
 the ticket -agent was regarding them interestedly through his little 
 window. 
 
 " My love, nay heart s heart, what can I do ?" he whispered. 
 " What can I say ? You will let me write ?" 
 
 " Yes, yes," she said, in a choking voice. It hurt her to think that 
 he had considered not writing as a possibility. The big railway-clock 
 ticked on pompously. 
 
 " Can t you stop that odious thing ?" she asked, and then began to 
 laugh hysterically. 
 
 " Hush !" said Dering, taking her upper arms into a firm grasp, 
 and looking at her with bright, masterful eyes. " This has been too 
 much for you/ he said, regretfully, as they sat down again. " It 
 wouldn t have been if that gr-r-r that bad-smelling scoundrel 
 hadn t " 
 
 Here Barbara began to laugh again : he tried to silence her as before, 
 and ended by joining in. 
 
 "Oh, how ghastly it all is!" she exclaimed, finally, as, their parox 
 ysm over, she began to wipe her eyes with little sideward sweeps of 
 the different hems of her pocket-handkerchief. Then, with a violent 
 start, " Oh ! is he coming again ? I thought I heard him." 
 
 " If he does, there ll be one Buzzy less in his apparently prolific 
 family," replied Dering, grimly. 
 
 " Well, never mind him. Say something to me that I can remem 
 ber, something gentle. Oh, God ! I am so wretched !" 
 
 " Listen, then. I love you, I love you, I LOVE you." 
 
 " Hush ! be careful ! Thank you. Oh, you are so good ! Oh 
 look at that horrible baby !" 
 
 " Gir-r-r ! Why did you call my attention to it ?" 
 
 "But it is so hideous. It fascinates me. Look ! look! Why, its 
 head wobbles about just like She s !" 
 
 " Isn t that rather ungrammatical ?" he asked, making the national 
 joke then in vogue. 
 
 " And its hands ! they are all creased, as if they had been washed 
 and rough-dried and never ironed out. Isn t that little, blue-worsted 
 cap it has on, awful ? I suppose that woman is its mother. Look at 
 her poking it under the chin ! How can she ! Oh ! it s blowing bub 
 bles out of its mouth. Oh, how awful ! Can t we get away from it ? 
 anywhere ! anywhere ! Let s go out on the platform." 
 
 She dragged him out just in time to see his train come in. As it 
 clanked by, she lifted her great, wretched eyes, heavy with shadows, 
 full to his. 
 
 " I feel as if I had ten hearts," she said, " each too big for me, and 
 as if every time those heavy wheels*turned over they crushed one." 
 
 " Darling !" was all that he could answer, in a tone of entreaty. 
 
 " Will you write from Washington ?" 
 
 " This very night. I ll write on the train and post it when we get 
 to Washington. Barbara?" 
 
 " Yes. What is it ? What is it ?" 
 
 " Do you love me just a little?" 
 
 " You know I do. It is different, but I do. Dearly, dearly."
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DKAD1 485 
 
 " What do you mean by < different ?" 
 
 " I don t know. I ll write it to you. Don t let those men run so 
 near you with those great trucks : it makes me nervous." 
 
 " Then you will write to me ?" 
 
 " Yes. They will be very stupid letters, though. There isn t any 
 thing to write about here." 
 
 " You silly dear !" Barbara winced. " As if I wanted to hear about 
 anything but yourself ! You ll put tJuzt in sometimes, won t you? And 
 
 "I reckon you d better be giltiu yo things together," broke in Mr. 
 Buzzy, who here came towards them, nibbling the end of a chicken 
 wing. " Excuse me, but this fried chick n s too good tuh let slide. 
 I ll take yo satchel, suh." 
 
 "Thanks," said Dering. lie turned and grasped Barbara s hands 
 once more, as Buzzy disap]>eared into the sleeper. They both tried to 
 speak, swallowed, and murmured some indistinct words, which were 
 drowned in the noise of a passing truck. The locomotive gave a series 
 of hoarse, barking whistles, and the bell began to clang slowly, while 
 the jarring "jink-jank" of a train about to move off passed through 
 the whole fabric. Deering loosed her hands, clutched them once more, 
 gave her a heart-broken look, and plunged into the Pullman, just as 
 Mr. Buzzy swung staggering off on the platform. Barbara had with 
 drawn at once into the waiting-room, and was busy gathering up her 
 muff and umbrella, when Buzzy rejoined her. 
 
 " I say, now," he began, in a cajoling tone, " come V have a littk 
 snack. The coffee s jes ez hot V good. Will you?" 
 
 " Thank you, I m not at all hungry," stammered poor Barbara. 
 The spell of the horrible waiting-room was upon her, and she could not 
 imagine how happiness ever came to human beings who lived in a 
 world inhabited also by locomotives, negro porters, and young men of 
 Buzzy s ilk. She stared at him absently with her wide, beautiful eyes, 
 twisting the folds of her umbrella tighter and tighter in her strong, 
 ungloved hands. 
 
 " I m not at all hungry," she said, again. 
 
 " Some wine, then," he urged. " You look mighty pale. Virginia 
 claret s firs -rate, mh ?" 
 
 " I m not thirsty ; thank you very much." 
 
 " Well, but jes fuh med cine, mh ?" 
 
 " I don t want anything. I don t want any wine, thank you, Mr. 
 Buzzy." 
 
 Buzzy rubbed one of his lemon-colored eyebrows with a contempla 
 tive and dubious thumb. 
 
 " Uv co se, ef you re bent on it," he said. 
 
 " Thank you," replied Barbara, vaguely. 
 
 When she got into the cab which he had ordered for her, he stepped 
 in also. 
 
 " Jes drive with you to th liv ry-stable n see you in yore own 
 cay idge," he explained. " Unc Joshua took his horses there tuh feed 
 m, uv co se." 
 
 "Of course," said Barbara.
 
 486 THE QUICK OR THE DEADt 
 
 "CertVy has got dark sudden," he exclaimed, in another tone, 
 peering up at the dim sky, first through one window, then through 
 the other. 
 
 " Very," said Barbara. 
 
 " Choll tt sville ain t lighted s well s might be, is it?" 
 
 " Not at all," said Barbara. A droll sort of parody on a celebrated 
 saying began to drum regularly in her ears. She repeated it over and 
 over : " Some are born with neighbors, some achieve neighbors, and 
 some have neighbors thrust upon them." She was beginning to think 
 that Buzzy meant to drive all the way back to Ilosemary with her. 
 His monotonous voice interrupted her revery : 
 
 " Wonder why yo frien was so set on takin that p tic lar train ?" 
 
 " He wanted to be in New York to-morrow." 
 
 "Well, he could a taken th 7.30 jes s well." 
 
 "What 7.30?" said Barbara, excitedly. 
 
 " Why, the 7.30 Express." 
 
 She looked at him, feeling a quiver run through her, a thrill of 
 indignation and disappointment. " Do you mean to say that there is 
 another train that goes at 7.30?" she said, in a very low voice. 
 
 " Why, cert n y," replied Mr. Buzzy. He took off his hat, regarded 
 the purple-and-white material with which it was brimming over, and 
 then, as if undecided, placed hat and contents between his knees. 
 
 " Did you mention that to Mr. Dering ?" questioned the low voice. 
 
 " Never thought tuh. Thought he knew, uv co se. Hyuh we are !" 
 And he bounded out through the carriage door, which only opened after 
 vigorous batterings of his knee. He appeared almost simultaneously 
 at the other door, through which he thrust his affable visage. 
 
 " 3 S all right," he announced. " Unc Joshua s all ready, jes gotter 
 light th candles. Mr. Payne ll attend tuh them." 
 
 She leaned back in apathetic silence, after another dreary " Thank 
 you," and watched Mr. Payne s stalwart figure in its shiny oil-cloth 
 cloak, which reflected back the white-gray sky in a faint glisten. A 
 swift, pattering rain was falling, although through the fleecy clouds the 
 light of a full but unseen moon filtered wanly. " I don t b leeve you ll 
 need no candles," said Mr. Buzzy, turning around and around, and re 
 garding the dripping sky with face and hands uplifted. Mr. Payne put 
 those articles in, however, and Uuc Joshua drove off, after Barbara had 
 thanked both men for their services. 
 
 " Oh, it don t make a dit o bifiference !" exclaimed the jovial Buzzy 
 in return, having recourse to one of his contorted combinations of words. 
 
 Barbara, rolling along with closed eyes over the rough and night- 
 veiled roads that led from Charlottesville to Rosemary, tried to imagine 
 what Dering was then doing. She fancied him asking the porter some 
 trivial question, raising his voice a little in order to be heard above the 
 incessant clinking of surrounding objects. Then he took out a memo 
 randum-book and a pencil. He began his letter to her. She tried to 
 fancy the first words as they would look when written, but she saw so 
 many terms of endearment that she was undecided. Her imagination 
 was disturbed by visions of the omnipresent and always thirsty child 
 who traverses the aisles of Pullman sleeping-cars in the direction of tht-
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD? 487 
 
 water-cooler, followed by an anxious nurse-maid attached to the end of 
 its petticoat. This child had, in her imagination, flaxen hair which was 
 begrimed with cinders, and a corresponding complexion. It drank water 
 incessantly, spilling it copiously over its fat, chapped chin, and when it 
 was not drinking water it was gnawing a large drum-stick of chicken 
 or munching huge pieces of gingerbread. 
 
 There was the semi-invalid, who had gone to sleep with her head on 
 a soot-streaked pillow. There was the drummer, who had also gone to 
 sleep in a quilted travelling-cap, with a fat hand, ornamented by a large 
 blood-stone ring, displayed upon his gay trousers. There was the young 
 demoiselle with abundant curls and giggles, who was travelling alone 
 under charge of the conductor, and to whom the conductor was now 
 addressing a series of facetious remarks. There was the section full of 
 young men and women who talked in such loud, boisterous tones that 
 their conversation could be heard above everything else. There was the 
 fat woman who was forever putting things in her satchel and taking them 
 
 out ; the two middle-aged discussers of politics ; the She opened 
 
 her eyes and leaned forward, far into the raw, mist-laden air. The hills 
 were a blurred outline, the fields masses of rich gloom. She had one 
 thing, at all events, to be thankful for : she was not in a Pullman sleep 
 ing-car. 
 
 Unc Joshua had to lift her bodily out of the carriage in his strong 
 arms when they reached Rosemary. He and Rameses almost carried 
 her up-stairs to her bedroom, where a blithe fire was blazing and a 
 pretty tea-table drawn up before its glow. Martha Ellen, on turning 
 to greet her mistress with a pleased smile, was horrified to see her cast 
 herself on her knees before the big chintz-covered chair and break into 
 wild sobbing. 
 
 " Lor ! Miss JBarb ra ! Lor ! Miss Barb ra, chile ! Lor ! honey !" 
 she ejaculated, at intervals. " Miss Barb ra, my own Miss Barb ra, 
 don cry so ! Don , honey ! Lemme go fur Sarah. I m goin fur 
 Sarah." 
 
 She flew on nimble feet, and returned with this Sarah, who was a 
 little, delicate, thin woman of about forty, possessing a face as keen and 
 sweet as it was plain. She wore her black wool in neat masses pinned 
 close to her head, and her small figure in its close black gown re 
 sembled an exclamation-point, so slight and decided was it. 
 
 Though so diminutive, she was apparently very strong, for she 
 stooped and lifted Barbara from where she was kneeling, and took her 
 on her breast. She said nothing, merely motioning Rameses to leave 
 them, by a certain movement of her head. Then she began to rock 
 herself to and fro, with a gentle, crooning sound, such as women make 
 over ailing babies, stroking the lovely, copper-colored head on her 
 breast from time to time with her tender, dark fingers, sometimes press 
 ing a dusky cheek against its bright lustre, sometimes reaching up 
 furtively to dash the tears from her own eyes. 
 
 After a while she coaxed her mistress to lie on the sofa, while she 
 prepared a warm bath for her, moving about the room with noiseless 
 swiftness, her very skirts having a subdued sound, which was to the 
 noise ma le by the skirts of other women as a whisper is to laughter.
 
 488 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD* 
 
 The room was soon fragrant with the attar of roses which she hat! 
 shaken into the tepid water until it was milky, and she then arranged 
 some fine linen garments on the bed, and leaned over her mistress, say 
 ing, in a delicious guttural, 
 
 " Miss Barb ra, darlin , yo barth s ready. I ll go out in th hall 
 till you call me." 
 
 In reply, Barbara reached up her arms and drew down the small, 
 woolly head against her shoulder. 
 
 " Oh," she sighed, " I am so miserable ! I am so miserable ! I am 
 so miserable !" 
 
 " Yes, yes, darlin Miss Barb ra, but joy comes in th mornin ." 
 
 "Oh, but when will it be morning? Comfort me, Sarah ! Sarah, 
 can t you comfort me? I comforted you that time when you were so 
 unhappy. Didn t I ? Didn t I ?" 
 
 " Th dear Lord he knows you did, Miss Barb ra. I ll never forget 
 you, no, not whiles I lives, no, not when I m dead. I d come to you 
 out er my grave ef you called for me." 
 
 "Don t talk of graves ! talk of life, life, life ! Oh, Sarah, 
 isn t death a dreadful thought ? Isn t it awful ? Don t you wish we 
 could just disappear, just be snatched away somewhere, and nothing 
 be left of us ? Oh, I am so unhappy ! Comfort me ! Comfort me ! 
 Can t you think of anything that will comfort me ?" 
 
 " Think of how good you are, darlin . That ought tuh comfut 
 you. Think how ev ybody loves you, ev ybody, Miss Barb ra, down 
 to my po little girl, that you has done so much for. She thinks they 
 ain nobody like Miss Barb ra. She says a little prayer for you ev y 
 night. Think of all the good you has done. Think of how good an 
 sweet an kin you are, all the time, to ev ybody. Oh, Miss Barb ra, 
 darlin Miss Barb ra, you oughtn tuh be unhappy ! Now take yo 
 nice, warm barth, an then you ll feel so much better. I put so much 
 scent in it, th whole room smells jes like summer-time. Come on : 
 yo pretty little night-gown s all ready, an th white furs all spread 
 out fur you tuh stan on. Come on, Miss Barb ra. Let Sarah help you 
 up. Think of how ev ylmly loves you, th farm-nan s an ev ybody." 
 
 " Do they really love me, Sarah ?" asked the girl, in the childish 
 tone and manner that always accompanies absolute misery. " It is 
 good to be loved : isn t it, Sarah? It helped you that time for me to 
 love you : didn t it ? I m glad they love me." Then, as Sarah was 
 about to leave the room, " Put your arms around me once more. Hold 
 me tight, tight, tighter still : I don t care if it hurts. You love 
 me, -don t you, Sarah ?" 
 
 " Th dear Saviour in heaven he knows I does, Miss Barb ra." 
 
 "And you think I ll be happy some day?" 
 
 " Miss Barb ra, I knows you will, I knows you will." 
 
 "And will you pray about it?" 
 
 " I duz pray about it, darlin Miss Barb ra. They ain t no time, 
 night or day, when I prays, that I don t pray bout you. Now take 
 yo barth, fore it gets cold." 
 
 She went out, closing the door, which Barbara opened almost im 
 mediately afterwards.
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEADf 489 
 
 "Sarah " 
 
 "Yes m?" 
 
 " Sarah, come here just one minute. Just hold me again one 
 minute, and say you think I ll be happy." 
 
 The little woman clasped the beautiful figure with fervent, sinewy 
 brown arms. 
 
 " I knows you will !" she reiterated. " I knows you will !" 
 
 "And you love me?" 
 
 "Miss Barb ra, the good Lord himself will have to make you 
 understan that. I can t seem to do it. Darlin Miss Barb ra !" 
 
 When, having taken her fragrant bath, Barbara lay like some 
 sweet-smelling flower between the fine sheets of her girlhood s bed, 
 Sarah, kneeling beside her in the firelight, stroked gently and unceas 
 ingly the languid, half-bare arm nearest her. 
 
 " That s so good ! that s so good !" murmured the girl, in a tired 
 voice. Suddenly she roused herself. 
 
 " Oh, I forgot ! Look on the table, Sarah, and hand me that little 
 book, the one with the cross on it. There ; no, a little farther to 
 the end. There, that s it." She took it eagerly, and, while slipping it 
 under her pillow, kissed it furtively. 
 
 " Rub my arm some more, Sarah." In another moment she started 
 up again. " Sarah, bring the candle. I m going to choose a verse. 
 You open it. What s your finger on? Read it." 
 
 Sarah read slowly, in her uncertain, soft tone, and with her earnest 
 face close to the fine print. It is quite true that the little colored 
 woman read the following words to that beautiful, distracted, quivering, 
 yearning creature in the bed beside her, read these words : 
 
 " For in death no man remembereth thee, and who " 
 
 " That will do, that will do, Sarah. Put out the candle." 
 
 As the warm dusk of the firelight again encompassed them, she 
 reached out and drew Sarah to her with both arms. 
 
 " You don t know why, dear, but that was a message to me. Per 
 haps I may be happy again." 
 
 " Miss Barb ra, I knows you will !" 
 
 "Well, good-night, little Sarah. Don t forget to say that prayei. 
 Will you rub my other arm a little longer ?" 
 
 XIII. 
 
 It is true that Dering had made an attempt to write while on the 
 train, as he had promised, but it is also true that he was obliged to 
 abandon the idea, since his chirography, at no time good, was rendered 
 entirely undecipherable by the motion of the car. He replaced note 
 book and pencil, and gave himself up to contemplation of the flying 
 landscape. It was dreary, colorless, monotonous. The ragged negroes 
 and vehicles at the tumble-down stations depressed him. One horrible, 
 legless old woman, huddled in what appeared to be a very large, wooden 
 bread-trough, was made radiant by all the loose silver in his pockets ; 
 and she called on heaven to bless him until the train was out of hear 
 ing-distance. As it grew darker, the squares of light from the car-
 
 490 THE QUICK OR THE DEADt 
 
 windows, flitting up and down on the uneven ground, made him dizzy. 
 He drew down the curtain, and leaned back against the window-frame, 
 closing his eyes. The horrible, jarring din about him actually inter 
 fered with his thoughts, so that he could scarcely recall Barbara s face 
 as he had last seen it, sallow and pinched with grief; but he remembered 
 finally, with a species of incredulity, that it had been lovely in spite of 
 its yellowish tone and the great shadows under her eyes. How she had 
 looked at him that last second ! His heart gave a hot leap along his 
 breast to his throat, leaving a fiery track behind it as of sparks. He 
 tried to fancy her beside him : they were married ; her wrap and um 
 brella were on the opposite seat ; she had put her feet up beside his : 
 he could fancy the very lights that would sparkle on her smart var 
 nished boots. She would pretend to read : he fancied she would not 
 talk much to him : in fact, people would think they were rather bored 
 with each other. Then he would call her attention to some passing 
 object, and, as she leaned across him to look, he would kiss the great 
 knot of her sea-smelling hair. That would thrill her with an ex 
 quisitely delicate sense of loving and being loved : she would give the 
 subtle, cowering shiver that he remembered, and press slightly against 
 him as she leaned back with an expression more coldly bored and in 
 different than ever. It suddenly swept over him that with each abom 
 inable rattle of that noisy train he was being whirled farther and farther 
 away from all those delicate charms. What if she were to be ill ? to 
 need him ? What if she were ill at this very moment ? What if the 
 mettlesome steeds of Unc Joshua were dashing in a mad run over those 
 wretchedly rough roads ? He could fancy her lying senseless in that 
 thick gloom, with just a thin stream of blood from her temple shining 
 out vividly. A cold sweat broke out on his own forehead. 
 
 " How far are we from Washington ?" he asked the porter, who 
 passed by at that moment. 
 
 " Be n Eleksandria n bout fift minutes," replied the man, making 
 quick flourishes over the back and arms of the opposite seat with a large 
 feather duster. 
 
 " Thanks," said Dering. 
 
 " Kin I git yah anything, suh ?" asked the porter, in tones which 
 meant, "Won t you give me something?" but which Dering was too 
 worried and restless to notice. 
 
 "No, thanks," he said, shortly, and then, as the man lingered, 
 thrust his head under the still lowered curtain and kept it there until 
 the porter had disappeared. 
 
 When they reached Washington, he took a hansom and drove 
 . directly to Wormley s, where the first thing he asked for, after securing 
 a room, was pen and paper. He got so nervous, however, after he had 
 written ten lines that he pushed everything aside, and, summoning a 
 waiter, ordered another hansom to be called in an hour. This interval 
 he devoted chiefly to a cold bath, which braced him up a good deal, 
 and to an excellent dinner. He then plunged into the cab, after the 
 impetuous fashion which distinguished him, ordering the bewildered 
 cabby to drive " Anywhere." 
 
 " Anywhere, sir ? How, sir ? How long, sir ?"
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD? 4 91 
 
 " Till I telJ you to stop." 
 
 " All right, sir. Cert n*y, sir. Ten o clock, sir. Dollar an hour, 
 sir." 
 
 " Yes, I know it is," grumpily. " And if you tiy to beat me for 
 more, you ll regret it." 
 
 " Yessir. All right, sir." 
 
 Off they started, clatter-clack, clatter-clack, b-r-r-r-r-r, clatter 
 clack, clatter-clack, clatter-clack, b-r-r-r-r-r-r, that inimitable sound 
 of wheels and horses feet on the asphalt which Dering usually found 
 so delightful. To-night it put him in a species of fever, and he sat 
 with his shoulders drawn up in a rebelliously surly attitude. It seemed 
 incomprehensible and unnatural that scarce one hundred miles away 
 the same soft rain was falling on those muddy Albemarle roads, blur 
 ring the graceful outline of the hills, and frosting Barbara s window- 
 panes. Here, in the biting glare of electric lights, the heavy foliage of 
 the trees took on a theatrical seeming ; they appeared like shapes cut 
 out of dingy green card-board. The figures of hurrying pedestrians 
 reflected downward in the rain-washed pavements, and the similarly 
 reproduced cabs with their steaming horses, reminded him of clever 
 Indian-ink sketches by French artists. Was it possible that only a few 
 hours ago Unc Joshua had been driving him along a primitive Vir 
 ginian turnpike, with Mr. Buzzy ensconced upon the front seat ? His 
 whole life of the past few months looked unreal to him in this wink 
 ing, blue-white glare. He could not analyze any of the feelings that 
 tormented him, being only conscious of a fierce lack, which once or 
 twice deceived him into thinking that he was physically hungry. In 
 the midst of these soaked and thronging streets, he was beset by an 
 intolerable sense of unimportance ; he had no acquaintances in Wash 
 ington, and knew very little of the town itself, else he would have 
 sought out some person, congenial or otherwise, with whom to pass 
 those dreary hours of enforced waiting. 
 
 He roused suddenly and glanced about him. They were passing 
 the White House, which looked in the electric waver like a large 
 Christmas-card ornamented with mica and with windows of isinglass 
 behind which lighted candles were being held. Broken gusts of chatter 
 and music alternated with the patter of the horses feet and the rumble 
 of wheels ; the trees more than ever resembled those of the foot-light 
 Arcadia, and through the pale sky overhead a glittering dust seemed 
 sifting, as though through a great sieve. He was depressed without 
 knowing why ; the very brightness and diversity of the passing scene 
 filled him with a sense of gloom ; and it was not until he had stopped 
 the cab a moment, to bestow five dollars on a hunchbacked lad, that 
 his spirits rose at all. These acts of unguided and munificent charity 
 were one of Dering s panaceas against the blues : he found it cheering 
 to remember the amazed expressions of gratitude, both facial and vocal, 
 that were turned upon him. 
 
 When he reached his hotel again, he once more attacked the 
 promised letter to Barbara. This was very up-hill work, as he did 
 not know what manner of missive she expected from him, and was, 
 moreover, wholly unused to writing love-letters. To begin it was im-
 
 492 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD1 
 
 possible. " My dear Barbara" looked too cold aud unnatural. " My 
 darling" was, under the circumstances, out of the question. He com 
 promised by starting off abruptly : " Have just arrived in Washington, 
 and find I cannot leave until 9.15 to-morrow morning." Here he 
 stopped and began to walk up and down the room, which was a large 
 one and adapted to this caged-beast order of exercise. It struck him 
 that thus far his letter was too telegraphic both in style and matter, and 
 at the same time a brilliant idea occurred to him. Why not telegraph, 
 merely, from Washington, and write from New York? He put this 
 plan into execution at once, and on the next morning Barbara received 
 the following message, which had originally been written in French, 
 but which, owing to the intricacies of Dering s handwriting and to 
 certain deficiencies in the education of the telegraph operator, reached 
 her in the state below recorded : 
 
 " Se malhoornse ma fail) tellemnt de mal que jetait malade pouvair 
 pat ecrire. Pe regrettig pat lee passe, ilyu trap di futilite. Rodedeus. 
 Toujooe at voue." 
 
 (No signature.) 
 
 She had been in such a nervous state all day, expecting momen 
 tarily the advent of that promised and lengthy bulletin, that the effect 
 of this unparalleled billet-doux was to throw her into fits of genuine if 
 somewhat frantic laughter. She screamed with merriment until large 
 tears rolled down her face and blotted the slip of yellow paper in her 
 hand ; then, the first sense of humor having passed, she became conscious 
 of a keen disappointment. She could not possibly hope for a letter 
 until three days had passed, and in the mean time her only solace would 
 be that mangled message on her lap. She gave the hopeless and help 
 less sigh of a woman who feels that she could make better love than 
 her lover, and threw herself back among the white furs on her sofa, 
 trying to imagine the words that he would say to her, rather than those 
 which he would write. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 Dering in the mean time had reached New York, and, after an 
 elaborate and regenerating toilet, was sauntering into the Manhattan 
 Club to lunch tMe-ti-ttte with his thoughts of Barbara. The Letter was 
 as yet unwritten, but he felt material for it accumulating in his mind. 
 
 As he entered the dining-room, he jostled against a man who was 
 also going in, and, turning to apologize, recognized an acquaintance 
 who made up in charm what he lacked in youth. He was a Bostonian 
 of the Bostonians, but this fact did not at all clash with his present 
 whereabouts, as Bostonians seem a species of social whale that have 
 to come up in New York to breathe. What did somewhat astound 
 Dering, however, was the fact that Mr. Everstone Bean poddy projxjsed 
 that they should lunch together, distinguished personages of a certain 
 age generally preferring to partake of youthful society and Little-Neck 
 clams at different times ; and it was with an almost overwhelmed sen 
 sation that Dering seated himself in the chair opposite to Mr. Bean-
 
 THE qUICK OJR THE DEAD* 493 
 
 poddy, at one of the small tables. This, by the way, was the gentleman 
 who had recommended him to select for a feminine friend a woman who 
 had kc awn some great sorrow, his reason for this advice being that, 
 having known grief personally, she would be less ready than most of 
 her sisters to inflict it on another. 
 
 " You re looking rather fagged," he now remarked, stretching his 
 fingers among the wineglasses, as though he were about to strike a chord 
 on some instrument and awaited the harmonious result with pleasure. 
 " Not recovered from race- week yet ?" 
 
 " I wasn t in town on race-week," said Dering, wondering if he 
 had better answer " Washington" or " Tuxedo" to the question that he 
 knew would follow, and vaguely curious as to the unusual mid-day 
 genialness of Mr. Bcanpoddy. 
 
 " Not in town, eh ? I must have a better look at you. You are a 
 remarkable young man. Was it from necessity or a sense of duty that 
 you absented yourself? And if you weren t in town, where were 
 you?" 
 
 Dering had formed his lips to pronounce the name of the Father 
 of his Country, when Mr. Beanpoddy interrupted him. 
 
 "Ah, I remember now," said he: "you ve been in Virginia. 
 Some one told me, some woman. You ve a cousin there, haven t 
 you? a cousin by marriage, young Pomfret s widow. Some one 
 told me she was a great beauty, another woman, too. It must be 
 true." He glanced up here, and saw that Dering was coloring 
 furiously. 
 
 " Ah ! so that s true, too," he continued, calmly. "Another woman 
 told me that. Your absence during race- week is quite accounted for. 
 Am I to condole with or congratulate you ?" 
 
 "Neither," said Dering, shortly, and then forced a laugh, feeling 
 that he had shown temper. 
 
 " Then I will congratulate you on not having to condole with you. 
 Your seedy appearance, however, is not yet accounted for." He waited 
 a moment or two, as if expecting a reply, and then went on : " In 
 spite of your expressive and laconic reply, my dear boy, I m afraid 
 that you re hard hit, down on your luck, so to speak. I remember 
 we had an interesting conversation on the subject of friendship between 
 the sexes, just before you left for Virginia. I am sure that you will 
 pardon my suspicions when you reflect on the exact correspondence of 
 Mrs. Valentine Pomfret s personality with a bit of advice that I gave 
 you. Let me add one thing. If any one were to ask me what I con 
 sidered grief, of any kind, most nearly to resemble, I would reply by 
 slightly misquoting the words of the Prince of Denmark, a mouse 
 trap. If you ask why, or if you will allow me to tell you why," 
 pursued Mr. Beanpoddy, in whom the matutinal vermouth cocktail 
 had begun to stir the spirit of epigram, " I will say that grief is always 
 a trap. We walk into it sometimes quite blindfold ; sometimes the 
 smell of the toasted cheese which it contains is too much foi us ; some 
 times we get nipped by trying to help some brother inous* out. But 
 it is always wiser, in the event of being caught, to content ourselves in 
 the fixed compartment with such of the cheese as remains, rather than
 
 494 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD? 
 
 to go whirling around in the revolving portion, rubbing out nose 
 against the wire, exhausting ourselves, and always ending where the 
 first evolution began. At least such is my experience." 
 
 And Mr. Beanpoddy, having delivered himself of this monologue, 
 leaned back in his chair, over the back of which he strapped his nap 
 kin, holding an end in either hand and looking genially at Dering. 
 The latter was making elaborate designs in his salt-cellar, and seemed 
 absent-minded. He generally gave Mr. Beanpoddy, whom he considered 
 a brilliant person, the whole of his attention ; but on this occasion he 
 had lost half of the other s harangue while adding to the material for 
 The Letter, and he had just composed a rather telling sentence when 
 the above-mentioned remark was addressed to him. 
 
 " That s my experience," repeated Mr. Beanpoddy. He lifted a 
 glass of Tokay, squaring his lips outward as it touched them and then 
 inward as he withdrew it, and pressing the corners of his mouth deli 
 cately with his napkin. 
 
 " Everything s a trap more or less," said Dering, pulling himself 
 together, and answering rather at random. 
 
 " Ah ! so you admit it ?" replied the other, smiling. " Now, I hope, 
 my dear fellow, that you don t consider all this tirade officious. The 
 milk of human kindness tinged with officiousness always reminds me 
 of the real fluid tinged with wild onion. It is doubtless just as real 
 and genuine an article, but certainly it is very unpalatable." 
 
 " How could I think you officious, Mr. Beanpoddy ?" asked Dering, 
 with some of the petulance of a child who is awakened in a strong 
 light. 
 
 Mr. Beanpoddy s brilliancy was bringing tears to his mind s eye, 
 and he could not ponder on his absent lady in a glare which disclosed 
 the very molecules that compose thought, as particles of dust are dis 
 closed by a sunbeam. " You are only too kind to take the trouble," he 
 added, earnestly. " I appreciate it, I do assure you." 
 
 " You are most tremendously in love," replied Mr. Beaupoddy. 
 
 He was silent a few moments, rousing himself suddenly. 
 
 " See here, my lad," he remarked : " can t you tell me something 
 about her ? Is she handsome ?" A nod from Dering. " Blonde or 
 dar " Another nod interrupted him. " Large or " 
 
 " She is very tall," said Dering. Then he turned desperately and 
 faced Mr. Beanpoddy point-blank. " I do love her with every inch of 
 me," he said. " It will seem absurd to you, of course, but I felt a sneak 
 until I had said it." 
 
 He hesitated, rather expecting that Mr. Beanpoddy would contradict 
 that statement concerning the absurdity of his (Dering s) condition of 
 mind ; but he did not. . He played with a long light-colored cigar in 
 his well-kept, very handsome hands, on which the veins were beginning 
 to appear in a species of bas-relief, and merely raised one of his eye 
 brows slightly. 
 
 " Such statements don t sound as incredible to old chaps like myself 
 as you youngsters imagine," he said, finally : " only it is like having 
 lost an arm, the sensation of hand and fingers remains with us, but 
 we can t grasp anything with them."
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD? 
 
 To this Dering made no reply. It struck him as a profoundly sad 
 remark, and yet he did not wish to take it too seriously, Mr. Bean{x*ldy 
 having a habit like that of an April sun, of smiling suddenly on gloom 
 which he had evoked. He here solved the difficulty by answering 
 himself. 
 
 " It is better to have one arm at twenty than all the fifty of Briareus 
 at fourscore," he remarked, with terse conviction, then added, witli his 
 delightful smile, which was bracketed between two curving dimples, 
 " If I had that number of hands, my dear boy, you may be sure they 
 would be held out to you, each with a separate blessing for you and 
 your sweetheart." His smile here became less genial and more con 
 densed as it were, having a quizzical compression that elongated the 
 dimples. 
 
 " All this is even more generous than it seems," he said, moving his 
 wineglass about, so that its gold flecks of light fell upon an old hoop- 
 ring of small diamonds set in iron, which he wore on his right 
 hand. 
 
 " I don t see how it could be," replied Dering, warmly. " My 
 tongue ties itself into knots whenever I really want to express myself. 
 
 " I had designs on you," interrupted Mr. Beanpoddy. " I thought 
 it would be very pleasant to have you for a great-nephew." 
 
 Dering once more colored furiously. 
 
 " It is I who should blush, my dear boy ; but then I don t kno\v . 
 Providence is considered a great and successful match-maker, eh ? Well, 
 you must ask me to your wedding. I wish I could attend in the office 
 of miracle- worker and turn the waters of Existence into wine for you. 
 However, Love is the god who is supposed to do that, although it s 
 generally the wine that is watered on such occasions nowadays. One 
 decants one s whole allotted life-portion of Perrier-Jouet on that mo 
 mentous morning, and the remainder is apt to become flat, or else our 
 Hebes trip in serving it." 
 
 " But if one doesn t decant it all ?" suggested Dering, shyly. 
 
 " Then the air gets compressed, and the bottles fly to pieces in one s 
 hands," replied Mr. Beanpoddy at once. " No, no, my dear fellow, we 
 cannot drink our wine and have it too, as runs the saying in regard to 
 the historical doughnut. If we can merely quench thirst with what in 
 left, we should be grateful." 
 
 " I think I d rather famish," said Dering, curtly. 
 
 " You think so now. You don t happen to be thirsty. Passion i 
 like the spiced feasts which used to be given by the Inquisition to cer 
 tain unfortunates who were doomed to be famished. I don t fancy such 
 individuals would have been very particular as to the excellence of any 
 liquor which might have been offered them. Ah, my dear boy, there 
 comes for us all a time when we echo the sentiments of the philosopher 
 who said, There s no such thing as bad whiskey. Some s better than 
 others, but it s all good. " 
 
 Dering had a dim idea that Mr. Beanpoddy was walking upon water 
 somewhat beyond his own depth, but which upbore him in obedience to 
 a certain mysterious power which he wielded. He had recourse to a 
 blunt mention of facts. 
 VOL. XLL 32
 
 496 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD? 
 
 " Whiskey doesn t get flat when it s decanted," he said. " We were 
 talking of champagne." 
 
 " A.h ! that s just it," was the bland rejoinder. " One would rather 
 drink unpleasantly fiery whiskey than unpleasantly flat champagne." 
 
 Deriug was beginning to feel irritated. " I think I d rather take 
 my chances with the compressed air," he said, pushing out his under lip 
 with a slightly obstinate look. 
 
 " I have known many who preferred to," replied Mr. Beanpoddy , 
 " but when a fragment of the glass of those figurative bottles flies in 
 one s mind s eye it affects one exactly as the bit of glass which flew into 
 the eye of the little girl in Andersen s story of the Snow Queen. It 
 froze her heart, you remember." 
 
 " Yes ; but, if you recall the rest of the story, her sweetheart thawed 
 it out." 
 
 Mr. Beanpoddy rose, and answered between the puffs with which he 
 lighted a fresh cigar from the stump of the other, 
 
 " Assuredly, my dear fellow ; but if you will go a little further you 
 will remember, also, that that feat was accomplished before marriage, 
 not after." 
 
 XV. 
 
 This conversation with Mr. Beanpoddy had on Dering an effect 
 irritating rather than depressing. He felt that his love had been pat 
 ronized, and to a man, especially to a young man, it is infinitely more 
 disagreeable to have his state of mind patronized than to be patronized 
 himself. 
 
 Then, too, for the first time during their friendship, Mr. Beanpoddy s 
 brilliancy had seemed insufficient, and when he thought of its radiance 
 as having been turned upon Barbara he felt as though some one had 
 turned an electric light upon a star. The distinguished Bostonian s 
 similes seemed to him far-fetched, and his cynicism somewhat mere 
 tricious. A remark here occurred to Dering, which he wondered if he 
 would have strength of mind enough to make to Mr. Beanpoddy when 
 they next met. He fancied himself saying, quietly, " At least, Mr. 
 Beanpoddy, there is one thing in which you do believe, that is, in 
 your unbelief." 
 
 For one fact, however, he had to thank that charming pessimist, 
 namely, for the indignantly rebellious mood which he had aroused, and 
 which made The Letter a comparatively easy task. He tore up the 
 stilted first two pages, which he had twice copied, and wrote the follow 
 ing words, in a species of panic lest they should escape him before 
 recorded : 
 
 " 1 will not begin this letter. I cannot know how you would 
 
 have me begin it. I don t even know whether you expect a conven 
 tional note now. I do not think you dream of the frightful self-control 
 I have had to exercise over myself during the last two weeks. I am 
 glad you do not know. I can only say, over and over, I love you. I 
 love you. Perhaps you will think it your duty to throw this in the fire 
 when you read those words. But for God s sake don t be afraid of my
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEADt 497 
 
 ever forcing my love on you. I have told you, and I mean it, that 
 everything shall be just as you say : I will write every week, or I will 
 stop writing altogether, precisely as you may command. It is horrible 
 here in this great whirl of life. Everything jars on me, or else I am 
 out of tune with everything. I went to the play last night, and one 
 of the actresses reminded me of you : her hair was just that rich, brown- 
 red color ; and I could see your very gesture. Strange to say, she had 
 some of the tones in your dear voice, so that when I heard them my 
 heart seemed to jump into my mouth like a hot coal. The foot-lights 
 became a yellow blur. I was standing with you in that frozen field ; 
 I held you in my arms, in my arms ; I felt your heart on me ; I felt 
 you, you, you. If this hurts you, forgive me. Remember, I do not 
 know much about women, or how to handle them, as it were, and you 
 are the first for whom I have ever had even a passing fancy ; that is, 
 in the high sense of the word, of course. God forbid I should pose 
 to you as an Admirable Crichton ! Whenever 1 think of those other 
 disturbing fancies that have starred my life with their little poisonous 
 blossoms, I think of you as a dear gardener, who has cut out a great 
 square of the sod on which they grew, tossed it aside, and, in the bare, 
 torn space which it left, has planted a strong, straight, vigorous young 
 tree, my love for you, dear. 
 
 " I am writing this at the Club, sitting here by myself. Some 
 rounders have just rolled down-stairs, after one of them had stuck his 
 head in here and muttered to the rest, G d ! Man in that room all 
 <done / I have had a rather hard day of it, and feel worn out, mind 
 and body : so forgive this horrible scrawl. Your answer to this will 
 tell me what to do. Yours, 
 
 "J. D." 
 
 When Barbara received this letter, she was seated at a small piano 
 which had lately been placed in her room, playing that richly sombre sec 
 ond movement of Chopin s Thirteenth Nocturne. Martha Ellen placed 
 the envelope before her on the music-rack, and it fell down between 
 her hands, making a slight discord. She withdrew her fingers from 
 the chords which had been the delight of her husband, and opened 
 Bering s letter ; then, having half drawn the closely-written sheets from 
 the envelope, thrust them back, held them for a moment between her 
 open palms, and went over in front of the wood fire. 
 
 Her heart was beating heavily, and when she again withdrew tht 
 *tiff leaves they rattled against each other in her eager grasp. Once 
 more she put them away from her, then with a quick movement turned 
 to the signature. A certain shade, delicate but distinct, passed over 
 her face, and she pressed her under lip outward and then close above 
 her upper, in a gesture expressive of conviction slightly tinged with 
 disappointment. A few moments afterwards she read the whole letter. 
 
 Its effect upon her was contradictory, and consisted of a series of 
 varying shocks rather than of any positive impression. Its opening 
 went to her heart : she felt her throat swell as she read it. This sen 
 tence rather chilled her, however : " I will write every week, or I will 
 stop writing altogether, as you may command."
 
 498 THE qUICK OR THE DEAD* 
 
 " He doesn t love me ; he doesn t love me," she said, addressing the 
 fire, and with a repetition of that unpleasantly convinced movement of 
 her under lip. Again she read on, only to receive a still greater jar a 
 few sentences further. An actress had reminded him of. her ! a 
 
 painted thing, with a sing-song voice and Ah ! but here : the 
 
 voice also resembled hers; the hair, "just that rich, brown- red color." 
 She put the letter down on the white fur rug beside her, and buried 
 her face in the seat of a chair near by. If a woman has handsome 
 hair, she likes to think that its tint has never been precisely reproduced 
 in the locks of any other woman, especially in those of a " leading 
 lady," who probably wears an auburn wig ! 
 
 What followed proved a slight compensation, however. The fact of 
 the foot-lights having become a " yellow blur" was sufficient evidence 
 that he had been thinking intensely of her, even while noting these 
 points of resemblance in that red-haired person on the stage. And 
 when he said that he held her in his arms, in his arms, and felt her 
 heart on him, and felt her, her, Jier, the boyish iterance and vehe 
 mence of it thrilled and startled her. 
 
 She found herself smiling, her breath coming quickly. She lifted 
 the paper nearer to her face. 
 
 Then came that charming, dainty bit of allegory in which he likened 
 her to a dear gardener, and his love for her to a vigorous young tree. 
 
 Again she put down the letter and hid her face. She took it up 
 again, touched, softened, delighted, only to receive a third jolt, as it 
 were, against the brusque and hurried sentences with which it closed. 
 She could see those rollicking dudes lurching down-stairs, and hear the 
 drunken tones of amaze in which one of them had exclaimed, " G d ! 
 Man in that room all alone!" 
 
 Poor Barbara, who was thoroughly morbid, overstrained, and over 
 excited, kneeled up, took the great chair into her embrace, and broke 
 into a passion of sobs. They did not last very long, and ended in a 
 fit of laughter, which was rather mirthless, although not at all hysteri 
 cal. This in turn was replaced by a deep frown. 
 
 She got to her feet, leaving the letter upon the rug, and walked up 
 and down the large room, striking her hands lightly together, now be 
 hind her, now in front of her. She stopped mechanic-ally after a while, 
 and took her Bible from a low table, opening it at random in that 
 fashion which had become second nature to her. The verse upon which 
 she put her finger ran as follows : " And I will give them one heart 
 and one way, that they may fear me forever, for the good of them, and 
 of their children after them." She turned hastily to another place : 
 " An end is come : the end is come. It watcheth for thee : behold, it is 
 come." The Bible slipped from her loosened hold upon the floor, and 
 she sank to her knees beside it, pressing her joined hands into her lap 
 and looking at the open book in front of her. 
 
 "It watches for me," she said, whisperingly. "An end is come: 
 it watches for me, it watches. He watches me ; he looks at me. He 
 smiles to himself. I wonder if I m going crazy? I seem to be watch 
 ing myself from some high place; I seem to be outside of myself; I 
 am as apart from myself as my gown is. Oh ! if I had only one
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD 1 499 
 
 soul to 8})eak to, to help me ! no, uot to help me, only to be sorry 
 with me ! She turned, still on her knees, and reached for Bering s 
 prayer-book, opening it at this verse : " Mine eyes long sore for thy 
 word, saying, Oh, when wilt thou comfort me?" 
 
 " That is it ! that is it !" she cried, trembling. " When wilt thou 
 com fort me? I cannot bear it ! I cannot ! I cannot ! But I must. 
 What can I do ? I can t get away from it, from myself, from the 
 
 memorias Oh, the memories ! This place is haunted. I will go 
 
 away. No : what am I saying ? I came her for that ; I came here to 
 be haunted. Oh, Val, help me ! help me ! My God, give him back 
 to me ! give him back to me ! give him back to me ! I will pay for it. 
 Oh, it was cruel it seemed cruel ! We tried to be -good ; we tried to 
 help others, and to be unselfish, and to think of your will in every 
 thing I must be crazy. I will go out ; I will go out into tiie 
 
 air." 
 
 As she walked along the red roads, which were lightly powdered 
 with snow, she found an idea grow in her mind until it had become a 
 resolve, and twenty minutes later she knocked at the door of a small 
 frame cottage which bore the sonorous title of "The Rectory." A 
 child opened it for her, a pretty thing in a brown woollen frock and 
 white pinafore, who looked up at the tall, black-draped figure through 
 her light-brown curls, which she pulled over her face with one hand. 
 
 " May I come in ? Is Mr. Trehune at home ?" said Barbara. 
 
 The child sidled about, swinging the door from side to side, and 
 muttered something indistinctly. 
 
 "It s very cold," pursued Barbara, with her smile. "Mayn t I 
 come into the hall ?" 
 
 " Yes !" burst forth the child, as though a small fire-cracker had 
 exploded in her mouth. 
 
 Barbara stepped inside, out of reach of the bitter wind, and just as 
 she did so Mr. Trehune himself came to the door of his study. 
 
 " Nell, you rogue " he began, stopping short at sight of Barbara. 
 
 " Oh ! may I speak to you a few moments, Mr. Trehune ?" she said, 
 moving forward. " I m Barbara Pomfret. I am very unhappy. I 
 thought you might say something to me." 
 
 Trehune, who was a young man, blushed frantically, the color show 
 ing even through his light hair, which was cropped so close as to be of 
 a silver tone. 
 
 He was tall and well put up, and had a broad, squarely-cut face, in 
 which the mouth was the best feature, although his eyes, of a dark blue, 
 were fine in spite of the lashes being silvery like his hair and brows. 
 He made an awkward bow which suggested the presence of a rusty 
 hinge in the small of his back, and opened the door of his study. On 
 the rug before the fire were three more children, each one younger than 
 the little girl who had opened the door. All wore brown woollen frocks 
 and white pinafores, and, as their father re-entered, began a clamor like 
 that of a nest of birds about to be fed. This ceased abruptly as they 
 caught sight of Barbara. 
 
 " I m afraid I m interrupting you," she said, nervously. 
 
 "Ob, not the least, not the least," he assured her ; and catching up
 
 500 THE QUICK OR THE DEAvl 
 
 the children, one on his shoulders, one under each arm, with Nell fol 
 lowing, he went out by another door. 
 
 XVI. 
 
 When he came back he found his unexpected visitor walking up 
 and down his little room. She turned and came instantly towards him. 
 
 " Don t be afraid, please," she said, with a smile which he though* 
 strange : " I cry very seldom, and never before people ; but something 
 told me you could help me." 
 
 " I will try my bast," he said, seriously, and they sat down on 
 opposite sides of a small table which was covered with a red-and-white 
 damask cloth. Barbara stretched out her arms upon it, and rested one 
 hand on the back of the other, interlacing the fingers. 
 
 " I am so unhappy !" she said, again. " Perhaps tortured is a 
 better word. Yes, I am tortured. May I say things to you just as 
 they come in my mind ?" 
 
 " Indeed you may," said Trehune, gently. If he had not known 
 who she was, he would certainly have thought her unbalanced, to say 
 the least. 
 
 " Then tell me, do you expect to meet your wife in heaven ? Do 
 you think she will know you? Do you think she knows about you 
 now ? Do you think she watches you ?" 
 
 Poor Trehune had turned terribly pale, and sat staring at Barbara 
 as though she had plunged a knife into him and was amusing herself 
 by twisting it about. Dering had entertained a similar thought of her 
 on one occasion. 
 
 " Do you ? Do you ?" said Barbara. " Do you think she loves you 
 now? Or, if she loves you, do you think it is just as a spirit might, 
 just as a guardian angel might? Do you think she would care if 
 if you were to love some one else ?" 
 
 He opened his lips to reply, but no sound escaped them. 
 
 " Do you think she would care, as a living woman would care, if 
 you were to marry again? Do you think God would let her know? 
 Do you think it would be a sin? Do you think it would be a sin ? 
 Do you think it would hurt her? Do you think she would have a 
 i contempt for you ?" 
 
 He let his arms drop heavily on the table, and, putting his head 
 down on them, grasped at his short hair with both hands. 
 
 " I have hurt you," said Barbara, stupefiedly. " 1 came to you 
 because I was hurt, and I have only hurt you. I am so sorry ! Let 
 me go. I only torture people : they cannot help me." 
 
 " No, don t go," Trehune managed to gasp. He got up and went 
 to the window, where he remained for some moments. Barbara sat 
 moveless, staring down at her locked hands, which still rested on the 
 table before her. 
 
 He returned presently, and resumed his seat, the only sign of emo 
 tion being a slight twitching of his deeply-curved upper lip. 
 
 " I I think I can answer you now," he said, in a low voice. 
 " Will you ask me your questions once more?"
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEADf 501 
 
 " No, no," replied Barbara. " I was desperate. I did not see how 
 selfish it all was. You must forgive me. Please forgive me. I don t 
 think I am quite myself. I don t think I would have hurt you so if 
 I had been quite myself." 
 
 " I understand ; I understand perfectly," said Trehune. " I will 
 do anything in my power for you. You asked me if I thought I 
 should meet my wife in heaven ?" 
 
 " Yes," said Barbara. She leaned towards him, ceasing to breathe, 
 and with eyes that devoured his face. 
 
 His answer came at once, concise, distinct, assured. 
 
 " I do believe that," he replied. 
 
 " You you mean you think you will recognize her ?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " As your wife ?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " As your ivife f 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " And she will recognize you, of course ?" 
 
 " Of course." 
 
 " But suppose you live to be an old, old man?" 
 
 " That is with God." 
 
 " Do you think you will love each other as you did on earth ?" 
 
 " More." 
 
 " No, but do you think you will love each other as you did then ? M 
 
 " No, but more." 
 
 " More ? More ?" she said, impatiently. " Wasn t it enough ? 
 What could you want more?" 
 
 " Nothing !" he cried, with sudden passion, starting to his feet ; 
 then the dull look came back upon his face, and he dropped listlessly 
 into his chair. 
 
 " I wish I knew how to talk to you," he said, almost piteously. 
 
 "But do you think she watches you? Do you think that?" pui- 
 sued Barbara. 
 
 " I think she is near me very often," he answered, softly. 
 
 Barbara cast a hurried glance over her shoulder. " And you think 
 you can wound her, can pain her, by your actions ?" 
 
 " I think it likely," he said, with some doubt. " But I don t know. 
 God may keep all such bitterness from those he has taken to himself. 
 I try never to do what I think would have wounded her." 
 
 " Ah, that is it ! that is it !" cried Barbara. " Then you are sure 
 you are sure that you will see her again ? her hair, her eyes, her smile, 
 herself? all again, just as she was, just as you remember her, just as 
 she was when she was your wife ? She will have the same ways, the 
 same gestures of head and hand? She will speak in the same voice? 
 You will touch her ; you will feel her ; she will be your own again ; 
 you will take her in your arms ; she will love you ; you will have 
 her? " She broke off, suffocated with her rapid breathing. 
 
 Poor Trehune was staring in front of him, his face ghastly pale, hia 
 forehead drenched with perspiration. It was like being dragged back 
 wards through a hell which he had once traversed.
 
 502 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD1 
 
 " Oh," exclaimed Barbara, in a heart-broken voice, " I am making 
 you suffer too much ! I will go. Indeed you had better let me go." 
 
 " I don t mind suffering if I can help you," he stammered. " What 
 is it that troubles you most ? Do you doubt all these things that you 
 have been asking me?" 
 
 Her answer stupefied him. 
 
 " I almost want to," she said, in a low voice, keeping her eyes 
 on him. " Is that a sin ?" 
 
 " You want to ?" said Trehune. 
 
 " I don t know. Sometimes I think I do. I don t know. Don t 
 you think it is far, far worse for a woman to marry a second time than 
 for a man ?" 
 
 " So much depends," began the poor young fellow, helplessly. 
 " There is no sin in either case " 
 
 " But we could never be sure that they wouldn t feel a contempt 
 for us : could we ?" 
 
 " That doesn t seem natural to me." 
 
 "What doesn t?" 
 
 "That any one whom we have loved, and who is in heaven, at 
 peace, at rest, could feel scorn for those on earth who love them." 
 
 " Ah, yes, for those who love them ; yes. But if one stops loving 
 them, if one loves some one else better : what then ? And afterwards 
 suppose oh," she panted on, with whitening face, " suppose the other 
 died too, before you did, and went there, and they they discussed 
 you, talked you over to each other : what then ? Could you stand 
 that ? Could any one stand that without going mad ? Mr. Trehune, 
 do you think I can be going mad? I have such terrible thoughts." 
 
 "I think you are very morbid," he said, seriously. "And you 
 look feverish. Are you sure you are well ? Was it not imprudent in 
 you to come out in this bitter wind ?" 
 
 " My head was burning so," she answered, " I felt as if the cold 
 would help me. And then I could not seem to breathe in the house : 
 there seemed something watching, watching, all the time. Oh, I am 
 so unhappy ! I am so unhappy !" 
 
 " I wish to God I could help you," he said. " Is there no way ? 
 Can t you tell me something of what is troubling you?" 
 
 " I thought I could," she whispered, " but I can t, I can t. I 
 will have to go. I have distressed you enough. But you don t think 
 they would scorn us, then ?" 
 
 " No, indeed I do not." 
 
 " You are sure ? You are utterly sure ?" 
 
 " Absolutely sure." 
 
 " And you think that perhaps God will not let our actions pain 
 them ?" 
 
 " I think it most likely." 
 
 " And you really think that they would not have contempt for us f 
 
 Trehune lifted his eyes and looked full at her for the first time. 
 
 " We might have it for ourselves," he said, slowly. 
 
 She began to shiver from head to foot. Her teeth chattered so that 
 she could scarcely speak.
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEADf 503 
 
 " Then you think it is wrong to marry again ?" 
 
 " It would be wrong for me. I do not say that it would be wrong 
 for you." 
 
 " Why do you think it would be wrong for you ?" 
 
 Again the passion in him broke forth : 
 
 " Because I would be a co\vardly hound to marry another woman, 
 with my heart in the grave of one who has been all to me that earth 
 can ever be. That is why !" 
 
 She laid her face against her outstretched arm and was silent for 
 some moments. Finally she said, in a weak voice, 
 
 " You think it is impossible that you should ever love again ?" 
 
 " I am sure of it," he replied, almost with violence. 
 
 u I was sure of it, once," she said, gently. 
 
 There came another silence, which she again broke : 
 
 " Are you never lonely ? Do you never yearn for a closer human 
 love and sympathy than you have now ?" she asked him. 
 
 " Yes, but I glory in thinking that what I am enduring is all for 
 her sake, and that some day we will smile over it together." 
 
 " You are very, very certain," said Barbara, wistfully. " It all 
 seems so far so desolately cold and far to me. It is like trying to 
 warm one s hands at a star. And then you have your children, her 
 children. They must be like her in one way or another. They speak 
 to you with her voice ; they look at you with her eyes. I never had 
 a child, you know. Look : if you were to meet another woman just 
 like her in every way, in every line of form and face, in every gesture, 
 in every trick of voice and smile, a woman who was even lovelier 
 than she had been, would you love her ?" 
 
 " That is impossible," replied Trehune. 
 
 " Never say anything is impossible," said Barbara, sharply, " you 
 who believe in heaven and the meeting of wives and husbands. No, 
 forgive me : I am in such pain, I am so unhappy. Then you prefer 
 to lead a life of absolute loneliness and heart-hunger to defrauding her 
 of even one thought?" 
 
 " Yes," said Trehune. 
 
 " Then you are a wonderful man," she said, in a tired voice. " 1 
 believe you ; but it is wonderful, it is wonderful." 
 
 She stood up, drawing further on her long gloves, and taking her 
 muff from the table. 
 
 " You have much to forgive me," she said, " and I have much to 
 thank you for. I do thank you with all my heart. If you would 
 send the little one called Nell over to Rosemary sometimes, it would be 
 very good of you. I have a doll s house that belonged to me as a little 
 girl, and I understand children : I never bore them. You know I 
 think grown people bore children far oftener than children bore them : 
 don t you ?" 
 
 " I will bring her to-morrow," answered Trehune, " if you will let 
 me come to inquire how you are. Won t you let me walk home with 
 you ?" 
 
 " No, no, thank you very much. I would rather be alone. Do 
 you think Nell would kiss me if you brought her in here? No, never
 
 504 TEE qUICK OR TJJf. DEADt 
 
 mind : I look so tall and big in all this black, I might frighten her 
 1 will wait until I have the doll s house as a background. Good-night 
 You have been so good to me. I will not forget, ever." 
 
 She stepped out into the late and bitter afternoon, and he saw her 
 long black veil borne out on the high wind, like a sombre pennon, as 
 she walked across the frozen fields. 
 
 XVII. 
 
 It was on the evening of her interview with Trehune that Barbara 
 wrote Dering the following letter : 
 
 " Do not think that I write to you in coldness. Do not think that 
 you have all the suffering. I tell you I have sounded the blackest 
 depths of the waters of Marah, and my feet have sunk into the mud 
 at their bottom. I do not seem able to feel. I do not suffer while I 
 write : I only know that I have suffered. I hope I may always have 
 this stone in my breast instead of a heart. I am cowed utterly. I 
 shrink from grief with every fibre of soul and body. I shrink from 
 giving it to any one else ; but I must, I must ! Oh, my dear, you will 
 see that I am right, that this is the only way it all could end. You 
 could not respect me; I could not respect myself; I would be always 
 haunted by the feeling that you had a secret contempt for me. And 
 you would have, you would have. After the first freshness of it all 
 was over, you would begin to think, If I die, I wonder who this 
 woman will marry? You would look at your friends and think, 
 Perhaps he will be her husband some day/ or, Perhaps that other 
 one. We could not look forward to meeting after death. Why, think 
 of the mockery of it ! the hideous, hideous horror of it ! Heaven, did 
 I say ? Could there be a more absolute hell ? It is my idea of hell. 
 My dear, my dear, it is better that you should try to forget me. Or 
 no ! I cannot say that ; I cannot honestly wish it. Oh, God ! yester 
 day I was afraid I was going mad, to-day I almost wish that I were. 
 Oh, how unnecessarily cruel all this seems ! I try so hard to be good, 
 and to see a reason for it, but I cannot ! I cannot ! I can only crouch, 
 and cry, with poor David, All thy billows and waves have gone over 
 me. And yet it seems even worse than that. Sometimes it comes 
 over me like an awful earth-wave, crushing, stifling, with no crisp 
 coolness as of water, which refreshes even while it drowns. The color 
 and warmth are gone from life for me ; only the beauty of form 
 remains, as in the cold naked grace of a statue. You will thank me 
 for this some day ; and when that day comes oh, God ! I will pray 
 for death even more frantically than I do now. If I could only make 
 you understand ! If I could only bring you to some comprehension 
 of what I am enduring ! Dear, be good to me, be gentle. You 
 must go out of my life, you rmist! It would bring you only sorrow. 
 I know how morbid all this will seem to you ; I know how you will 
 try to convince me. But do not try : only help me ; only be good to 
 me. Oh, if you only knew how I suffer ! Dear, I pray God to be 
 always with you, to love you, to keep you ; and I pray him to 
 teach you to understand and feel grateful to BARBARA."
 
 THE qUJCK OR THE DEADf 505 
 
 This letter, which had been misplaced by his man, was handed to 
 Dering as he was getting into a cab on his way to look in at a bachelor 
 dinner given by one of his friends. He put it in his breast unopened, 
 smiling at this piece of sentiment, but pleased nevertheless every time 
 that the stiff paper made itself felt against his flesh. 
 
 As it was three o clock P.M. when he entered on the scene of the 
 feast, he was not unprepared for the reception which greeted him, and 
 bore with equanimity the process of being tripped up and sat upon by 
 three hilarious "dudes," who afterwards stood him upon a silver tray 
 and marched solemnly around the room, singing snatches from " Hai 
 rigan and Hart s" last masterpiece. Dering, who was jolly and ab 
 solutely good-tempered through it all, had a strange feeling that Bar 
 bara s letter was being desecrated, and made his escape as soon as 
 possible, after assisting at a bombardment of a picture of Washington 
 with jam tarts. He was a little astonished, on thinking it over during 
 the drive back to his club, that the whole performance had bored him 
 rather. He had awakened suddenly, like a man from a rapturous 
 dream which had overtaken him on some humming summer noon 
 while perusing the last masterpiece in the way of witty French romance, 
 had awakened drowsy, still thrilling from those vague yet blood- 
 quicking experiences, to take up the dropped thread of his story, and, 
 behold ! Atropos or some as clever shear-clacker had snipped the twist ! 
 The dream had spoiled the reality. The bitten place in the forbidden 
 fruit had become brown, leathery, unpalatable. Wasps were nibbling 
 it, an ant or two scuttled over its sleek skin. In his dream the fruit 
 was gold as his love s hair, and sweet as honey through and through. 
 What he took into his mouth grew again as fair, as luscious in its 
 accustomed place, before he had swallowed the first morsel. There 
 were flowers and fruit on the same branch, Spring and Summer akiss 
 in the same season, desire and fulfilment ever smiling into each other s 
 untired eyes, their right hands clasped, the other two free among the 
 leaves of that wonderful tree which grows in the blessed garden and 
 which is called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. But 
 we must drink down the sword-flame of the angel who guards it, to 
 enter and eat of its fruit, so being born again ; having died of fire, and 
 from fire having sprung again. 
 
 By the time that he reached the club, Dering had persuaded him 
 self that the letter against his heart contained a summons from Bar 
 bara to return at once to Virginia. He then opened and read it. 
 When he had taken in the last word, " Barbara," he went and deliber 
 ately lighted two or three extra gas-burners, and in this blaze of light 
 sat down to think. An ugly, snarling expression came over his face, 
 a sort of grin of savage distaste and pain, and he began to catch his 
 breath nervously with a hoarse sound that was neither sobbing nor 
 laughter, but akin to both. He sat there, without moving, for some 
 two hours, then deliberately undressed, got into a cold bath, and went 
 to bed. In three minutes he was sleeping heavily, from sheer exhaus 
 tion, his face, haggard with pain, turned full to the glare of the lighted 
 burners. 
 
 The next day Barbara received this telegram :
 
 506 THE QUICK OR THE DEADt 
 
 " Letter received. Will answer it in a few days. Hope you are 
 better. "J. D." 
 
 And it was on the day after that she read in the Herald the follow 
 ing notice: 
 
 "A most serious and possibly fatal accident occurred to-day on 
 Broadway. A portion of some scaffolding fell upon the head and 
 shoulders of Mr. John Dering, bruising and cutting him severely. He 
 was at once taken to his club, having no residence in town, but is re 
 ported dangerously ill, and his mother, who is now at Cannes for her 
 health, has been cabled for." 
 
 Barbara rang at once for Rameses. 
 
 " I want a man to go immediately with this telegram," she said, in 
 a clear, slightly loud voice, signing the wire as she spoke. It ran to 
 this effect : 
 
 " Shall I come to you ? Can leave this afternoon s train. 
 
 "B." 
 
 After some agonizing hours of suspense, she received this answer . 
 
 " It was my cousin who was hurt. Fortunately, got your telegram 
 while I was there. Thanks so much. I write at once. 
 
 "J. D." 
 
 " Wait !" cried Barbara to Rameses, who was leaving the room. 
 " This must go too. Send some one else. They must go now, this 
 moment, before it gets too dark." 
 
 She snatched up a bit of paper, and wrote, with scrawling eager 
 ness, 
 
 " Then come to me I" (No signature.) 
 
 She sat down to the piano and played a wild, whirling waltz of 
 Chopin, stopping now and then to laugh hysterically with her cheek 
 against her hands on the music-rack. She paced the room, singing 
 snatches of frenzied Polish folk-songs. Her color rose, and her heavy 
 hair, loosening from its ridgy coil, swung far below her waist. She 
 smiled looking down as the hair-pins fell on the carpet in her swaying 
 walk. 
 
 " They say one s sweetheart thinks of one when one s hair-pins fall 
 out," she said, aloud. 
 
 Suddenly she paused, and stood still in the centre of the great 
 room. Only her glittering eyes laughed from her grave face. Then 
 her lids dropjred ; she seemed to grow into marble, as Galatea grew 
 from marble into flesh. 
 
 After a while she rang the bell again for Rameses : " I wish my 
 things taken out of this room, everything. You can put them in the 
 little room over the west wing, where I used to stay, years ago. Begin 
 now."
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD? 507 
 
 When this devastation was complete, and not even her dressing- 
 gown remained to give an air of individuality to the little brass bed, 
 she turned and sent that long, slow gaze about her which she had 
 bestowed on the room and its contents during the evening of her arrival. 
 
 She shivered, holding a shoulder in either hand and pressing her 
 crossed arms closely to her. 
 
 " It looks like a corpse that has been robbed," she said, whis- 
 peringly, and pausing between each word. " It looks horrible ! It 
 looks horrible, horrible !" 
 
 She then went out into the hall, and returned with the same mass 
 of white satin and tulle beside which she had watched on that bitter 
 night, not long ago, closing and locking the door after her. The day 
 had been spring-like, and there had been no fire lighted in the large fire 
 place, but she seemed to be suddenly chilly, for she went and kneeled 
 down upon the hearth, taking some splinters of dry wood which lay in 
 a wicker basket near by, and placing them as though for kindling. As 
 she did this, she glanced restlessly over her shoulder once or twice, 
 then rose, and, lifting the mass of drapery, laid it upon the blazing bits 
 of wood. It caught smoulderingly in one or two places, scorched and 
 shrivelled, but died out in those clustering sparks which children delight 
 to call " people going into church." Then, stooping forward, she blew 
 upon it after the manner of Rameses ; but this produced no effect, 
 beyond making her eyes smart with the smoke-puffs which rushed out 
 into her face. She became excited, nervous, pouring a box of matches 
 out into the dimly-gleaming folds and throwing a lighted match among 
 them. Still they only smouldered dully ; whereupon she began to look 
 eagerly around for paper of any kind. 
 
 Every available scrap was thrust into the fireplace, and the fresh 
 bits of light-wood which she began to place here and there burned 
 cheerily. Still the thick satin only curled and shrivelled like a thing 
 in pain. 
 
 Barbara pulled open the doors of her desk, and seized upon any 
 inflammable thing which came to hand ; and it was at this moment that 
 her eye fell upon a large, brass-bound box of oak which stood far under 
 the low table. She dragged it out, panting in her excitement and sus 
 pense. It was full of letters, yellowish in tone and addressed in faded 
 brown ink, and as she looked at them a strange expression came into 
 her face, an expression of grief, of fright, of resolve. 
 
 She took a great mass of them in her arms and approached the iirt, 
 afterwards .tearing them from their envelopes and crumpling them so 
 that they would ignite more quickly. 
 
 " All at once, all at once !" she kept whispering to herself, with the 
 insistent iterance of a person in delirium. She went back and forth 
 to the heavy box seven or eight times. There was a great blaze now in 
 the throat of the wide chimney ; the light tulle whizzed in flakes of fire 
 up its black maw, and the satin began to flame in places and to rise and 
 faJl with the heat, as though panting with a weird life. 
 
 " All at once, all at once, everything, everything !" whispered 
 Barbara, as though to encourage it. She kneeled and looked on with 
 d intended eyes, pushing every now and then another letter among the
 
 508 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD! 
 
 writhing folds. Lastly she took the miniature which she always wore 
 from her throat, and laid it face down upon the mass. 
 
 " Good-by," she said, in a clear voice, moving backward to the door, 
 but keeping her eyes upon that strangely- warmed hearth-stone. 
 
 " Good-by, good-by, good-by," she kept repeating, in an expres 
 sionless tone. She unlocked the door, withdrew the key, and, passing 
 out, relocked it on the other side. 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 Dering s reply came early the next morning : 
 
 " Expect me to-morrow via Charlottes ville." (No signature.) 
 
 Late in the afternoon Barbara put on her girlhood s walking-dress, 
 and, taking Rameses with her, started off for a walk, or, rather one 
 should say, a run. She flew over the frozen ground, laughing, stum 
 bling, catching her feet in knotted brambles. Poor Martha Ellen, whose 
 hand she grasped, panted along as best she might, also laughing hys 
 terically, the yellowish glow in the west catching the exhausted roll of 
 her white eye-globes. 
 
 " I feel like a little girl, Rameses !" said Barbara. 
 
 " You sut n y kin run like one !" replied Rameses. 
 
 " Yes, I can run ! I can run !" gasped her mistress, merrily. " Why 
 do you drag so ? Here s the hill where we used to go blackberrying 
 when we were children. We used to wear pink tissue-paper court trains 
 and paint our faces with poke-berries : don t you remember? Tra-la- 
 la I tra-la-la ! Keep up, keep up, you monkey ! You re dragging 
 me back all the time ! Ugh ! it s cold ! Do you ever wish you were 
 a little girl again, Ramie ?" 
 
 Poor Rameses was past replying. 
 
 A rich purple-blue dusk had sunk down over the land, and the gleam 
 of the frozen ice-pond in a far field shone desolately forth from tangled 
 patches of orange-colored wild grass. They could hardly see the tone 
 of the dark-red soil beneath their feet. 
 
 " Faster ! faster, you goblin !" urged Barbara ; but Rameses, des 
 perate with fatigue, snatched away her hand, and her mistress dashed 
 on without her. 
 
 She came in about half an hour later, flushed, brilliant, to find the 
 small room over the west wing glittering with wax candles, and the 
 curtains, of old green silk splashed with large cabbage-roses, drawn 
 over the narrow windows. Throwing her dog-whip and gloves on the 
 bed, she went whistling out into the narrow corridor that led to this 
 room, and, with a candle on the floor, searched in some closets which 
 lined the walls on either side. She went back and forth, carrying sev 
 eral armfuls of different fabrics to her room and tossing them on chairs 
 and sofa. 
 
 This room was delightful, small, square, with a low ceiling orna 
 mented in white plaster-work, its walls wainscoted in oak within three 
 feet of the ceiling, wherefrom hung old stone engravings, washily tinted,
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEADt 509 
 
 of girls and rabbits, girls arid doves, girls and kittens in baskets, girls 
 and young partridges, all dressed in scant white gowns, their unique 
 figures apparently held together with difficulty by tight bands of bright- 
 blue ribbon. A low toilet-table of French gilt, with a large mirror 
 framed in gilt grapes and Cupids, stood between the two windows, and 
 the six candles in the sconces on either side sent clear cross-lights upon 
 the face and form of Barbara, as she stood before it, twisting up the long 
 masses of her hair into a half-curled knot at the back of her fine head. 
 
 In twenty minutes Dering would arrive. Her windows overlooked 
 the gravelled carriage-drive, and the first sound of wheels would reach 
 her ears. She selected from the many dresses on the sofa one of rich, 
 peach-bloom-colored Indian silk, a sort of tea-gown, half loose, half 
 tight, through whose folds the lines of her full figure appeared and dis 
 appeared with every movement. From her fingers she slipped every 
 ring, holding up her long hands and shaking them about to make them 
 whiter. The wide sleeves fell back, showing her arms, which were 
 smooth as those of a child warm with sleep. She laughed and kissed 
 them, first one, then the other, still shaking her hands lightly above 
 her head. 
 
 Then came a sound of wheels. In a moment she was out in tht 
 darkness of the narrow corridor. She felt as though the floor rose be 
 neath her feet and pressed her against the slanting roof. She could 
 scarcely breathe, and the air seemed stifling. In a sort of panic she 
 reached the great hall, and shrunk down shivering in a corner of the 
 stairway, where she could hear Dering s voice in the hall, the greetings 
 and exclamations of Miss Fridiswig, and the whimpering of the grey 
 hounds. She waited there until she heard him close the door of his 
 room, when she rose and half-way descended the stairs, rushing back 
 again to her coigne of vantage as she heard some one approaching. 
 The two greyhounds found her out, and crouched down beside her, 
 licking at her handsome bare throat and ringless hands, while the sleet 
 rattled intermittently against the small panes in a narrow window just 
 over her head, and she could hear Dering moving about in his room, 
 which was near the foot of the stairs. Presently she stole down and 
 into a long apartment on the opposite side of the hall. It was hung 
 in yellow silk, and its polished oak floor was strewn with rugs in dull 
 blues and orange tones on a white ground. There were many low 
 lounging-chairs, and divans heaped with differently-colored cushions, 
 and the light of the wood fire licked the glaze on much very beautiful 
 china. She threw herself into a drift of crimson pillows, and let her 
 hands fall palm to palm between her knees, brooding upon the broken 
 fire, whose lilac flames palpitated over a bed of gold-veined coals. 
 
 It was not long before the door opened to admit Dering, who 
 entered, closing it carefully behind him, and approached the fire with 
 palms outstretched. 
 
 " You must be nearly frozen," said Barbara, with originality. 
 
 " Yes, I am," admitted Dering, also with a strong flavor of the 
 same element. 
 
 " Have you had some tea ? I ordered some to be arranged for you 
 in the dining-room."
 
 510 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD* 
 
 " Yes, thanks. I have had several cups. Miss Fridiswig kindly 
 poured them out for me." 
 
 " Is it quite warm enough in here for you ?" 
 
 " Oh, quite, thanks. It s wonderfu] how you keep this old house 
 so comfortable." 
 
 " Yes, isn t it ? But it is quite comfortable, I think. One can t 
 say that of many Virginia country houses. Do sit down. You look 
 as though you were just going away." 
 
 " I m not, however." 
 
 "Then sit down. You make me nervous. It must be dreadfully 
 stormy in New York, isn t it?" 
 
 " Very. You know it s snowing now outside." 
 
 " Sleeting, isn t it ?" 
 
 " Both, I think." 
 
 Suddenly Dering turned, leaning over the arm of his chair, and 
 resting both hands on the arm of hers. She could see his lips quiver 
 ing, and the dilation of fiery eyes and nostrils. 
 
 " Barbara, you sent for me," he said. 
 
 " Yes, I did," she answered, not shrinking, with her eyes full on 
 his. 
 
 "What for?" he went on. 
 
 " For this !" she said, in a whisper more stirring than any tone 
 of voice, and, throwing herself on her knees in front of him, held out 
 to him her bare and beautiful arms. 
 
 " Hush ! Wait," said Dering : " let me think. Don t move : 
 let me think." He drew away from her, breathing brokenly, with an 
 expression of keen pain on his face, and they crouched thus for some 
 moments, gazing at each other like two tigers about to spring. 
 
 All at once he stooped forward, and, standing erect, lifted her from 
 her feet upon his breast. 
 
 " You love me ? you love me, then, my tigress ?" 
 
 "I love you." 
 
 " You are sure of yourself? You are sure of yourself?" 
 
 " Yes, yes." 
 
 " No, you are not sure ; you cannot be. After that letter, good 
 God ! that damnable letter ! how can / be sure, after that letter ?" 
 
 " But I am sure ; J am sure." 
 
 " You are changed, you mean. You may change again. How can 
 
 I tell ? No ! I see it as clearly Here ! listen, you wild thing ! 
 
 take your hand from my mouth. Ah, you tigress ! you tigress ! 
 No. Here stop ! listen ! listen. You read that thing in the 
 Herald about Jack Dering, and you thought at first that it was 
 
 me, and your pity got the better of No ! stop, I say ! You ve 
 
 got to listen. There, I m sorry if I hurt you, but you must listen. 
 How beautiful you are ! what hair ! what eyes ! what lips ! But I 
 will speak, do you hear ? I am stronger than you ; I am your 
 master : I will speak. It was pity " 
 
 " Jock ! kiss me !" 
 
 " It was pity. You were sorry for that cruel letter. You were " 
 
 "Jock! kiss me!"
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD? 51 1 
 
 " You thought you would atone. Oh, I know some few things 
 about women. There, you must keep still until I finish. I want you 
 to understand that I loathe your pity, I abominate it ! Is that plain 
 enough ? I would rather " 
 
 " Jock ! kiss me !" 
 
 " I would rather go away this moment, and never see you again in 
 this world or the next, than compromise on pity ! I tell you I " 
 
 " Kiss me !" 
 
 " I would rather " 
 
 " Kiss me !" 
 
 " I would rather see you belong to some one else than " 
 
 " Kiss me ! Kiss me !" 
 
 " Than take one iota. less love than I give. I }> 
 
 " Ah, kiss me, Jock !" 
 
 " I will have my love returned in full, in full, do you under 
 stand ? I am as proud as the devil, and unless you " 
 
 " I love you more than anything I have ever dreamed of, more 
 than anything in earth or heaven, more than anything alive or dead, 
 or dead ! You understand ? Now kiss me !" 
 
 He released her pliant waist and lifted her face to him with both 
 hands. 
 
 XIX. 
 
 After this interview followed a week of delight such as is sometimes 
 granted to two mortals, one of whom obtains a love long fought for, one 
 of whom yields to a love long fought against. Into the winter of their 
 discontent had stolen a mood as warmly exquisite as were the spring 
 like days which interrupted the actual winter weather, and which invei 
 gled the lilac-buds into swelling forth prematurely, and filled the tops of 
 the horse-chestnuts and peach-trees with fragile, rose-hued blossoms. 
 
 Barbara ceased altogether from that morbid habit of analysis which 
 is the curse of our century, and gave herself without questioning into 
 the outstretched arms of her sudden happiness. These nowadays ana 
 lysts remiud me of nothing so much as were a man who hears a bird 
 sing on the branch of a fruit-tree in flower to go out and break away 
 the branch, hoping to get a nearer view of the singer. The bird flies, 
 and the blossoms are never fruit. The man has the fact, the dead, 
 fruitless branch, in his hand, but that which made its beauty, the blos 
 soms scattered, and the sweet-voiced, wing&l thing, are beyond the reach 
 of his scalpel. 
 
 Dering, who had wooed one woman, found that he had won twenty. 
 To-day she was a girl in her teens hanging lier head beneath the first 
 kisses of her first lover, to-morrow she was a laughing witch who 
 wanted neither kisses nor lover, only a sympathetic comrade who would 
 appreciate her vagaries, which were sometimes most unexpected, bu< 
 always charming. One morning she would come to him grave-eyed, 
 subdued, to speak with a certain awe of their future together, the same 
 afternoon she would forbid any allusion save to the present, and in the 
 evening tolerate no mention of either, demanding Othello-like anecdotes 
 over which she would become breathless and excited, kneeling beside 
 VOL. XLI. 33
 
 512 THE QUICK OR THE DEADt 
 
 him and looking up with eyes gloriously dark. Her variety of beauty 
 bewildered him. Her very coloring, and the shade of her hair, ap 
 peared to change with each mood and costume, so that one day he 
 seemed affianced to an Eastern houri languid in rich embroideries 
 among many cushions, and the next followed a modern Atalanta 
 through the brown vistas of her familiar woods, lie never kne\? 
 whether his caresses would be repulsed or accepted, whether his re 
 marks would be received with tears or with laughter, whether she 
 would comprehend divinely his half-spoken thoughts or wilfully mis 
 construe his most carefully worded expressions. 
 
 Barbara "was in a state of the most feverish exhilaration. She 
 scarcely slept. When she was alone she sang or whistled like a boy, 
 to drown the voices which clamored within her. When she was par 
 ticularly sleepless, she read books which Dering had marked, or wrote 
 long notes to him, which Ilameses placed on his pillow before he awoke, 
 and which he answered before dressing. 
 
 The reaction came, however, although she fought doggedly against 
 it, and would not admit its presence even when it gripped hei by the 
 heart-strings. Naturally enough, it was occasioned by a sudden recogni 
 zance of the likeness between Dering and her husband. As the just- 
 accepted lover developed into the lover at his ease, gestures, expressions, 
 and habits thrust upon her with pitiless exactitude the memory of her 
 first wooing. All this impressed her with that novelty which is some 
 times attendant upon an old fact suddenly mentioned to another person. 
 He had for her the identical love- words to which her virginal heart had 
 thrilled in the days gone; his carcases were the same ; his half-laughing, 
 half-serious allusions to himself as a married man, even his kisses, 
 and his tempestuous way of lifting her from her feet upon his breast. 
 And yet he himself he the man, the individual was absolutely 
 different, more masterful, more imperious, more intolerant of many 
 things. She felt like the assistant in a murder, whose accomplice ad 
 dressed her always, with ghastly mockery, in the tones and manner 
 of their victim. She could not escape ; there was no possible way of 
 egress from this labyrinth into which she had wandered with open eyes, 
 for the clue had dropped from her hands when she raised them to clasp 
 the throat of her new lover. 
 
 One morning, as he was romping with the greyhounds upon the 
 lawn, waiting for her to appear, she rushed out towards him, her hair 
 half loose in the soft wind, which smelled of young leaves and the 
 wool of some sheep that were cropping the withered grass under the 
 acacias. Her face was pulsing with color, her eyes bright and eager as 
 those of a dog that foresees a walk. 
 
 " I have such an idea !" she cried, taking his arm into her ungloved 
 hands and pressing against his side. " We have never been on a straw- 
 stack together. Let us go. Let us run all the way. There is such 
 a beauty in the mill-field ! And it has been dry and warm so long, it 
 will be so nice to slide upon. It is so pretty there ; and we can hear 
 the mill-wheel : Aunt Caroline is having some flour ground for brown- 
 bread to-day." 
 
 They ran, laughipg and tea-sing one another like two children, along
 
 THE qUICK OR THE DEAD1 513 
 
 the broad red road that curved beyond the back of the house, overhung 
 by great catalpa and black-walnut trees, and hemmed in by an unusu 
 ally eccentric snake fence. The hills showed a faint green bloom here 
 and there along their sides, and the young apple-trees in the new or 
 chard held out now and then a silvery small leaf. They reached the 
 straw-stack, and began to scramble up, arriving at the top panting and 
 covered with dust and bits of straw. She sank into the arms which he 
 held out for her, and, pressing down the collar of his silk shirt, rested 
 her wordless lips in the hollow at the base of his strong throat. 
 
 " I love you, I love you," said each, clinging to the other; and 
 then she settled contentedly down, with her head against his knees, 
 and let one of the greyhound pups curl up between her languid, out 
 stretched arms. 
 
 " Suppose Mr. Beanpoddy could see you now !" she said, after some 
 moments of this delicious inertia, " or some of your dude friends ! I 
 would like to see the puppies attack their spatts. Do you suppose auy- 
 tliing ever srnelled quite as nice as a straw-stack?" 
 
 " Yes, your hair does. AV r hat do you put on it?" 
 
 " Soap and water." 
 
 " Oh, Barbara ! do you want me to believe all this is only due to 
 Pears and your cistern ?" 
 
 " Indeed, indeed I don t perfume my hair, Jock. I think it s so 
 "ulgar. I hope it doesn t smell like that !" 
 
 "Like what?" 
 
 " As though it were all horrid and Lubin s-Extracty." 
 
 " That is as original a compound verb as the one Punch s little gin 
 made use of a year ago." 
 
 "Oh, yes, I know, the one about Liebig s-Extract-of-Beefing it. 
 Jock, I think it would be so charming to slide down here together." 
 
 "Do you? Well " 
 
 They l>egan their descent, first sedately, then in a whirling rusn 
 which landed them under an avalanche of loose straw. 
 
 " Isn t it fun !" she gasped, as they climbed up again. 
 
 " Your hair s down. Lord ! how long it is ! I could tie you to 
 me with it. Look here." 
 
 He divided the heavy masses and drew them about his throat, then 
 released her, horrified at the sudden whiteness of her face. 
 
 " Barbara ! what s the matter?" 
 
 "Nothing, I, nothing, nothing at all." 
 
 " That s absolute nonsense, my dear. Y r ou know you really can t 
 
 put me off in that absurd way. Barbara " He paused, a sudden 
 
 look of intelligence creeping over his face. "See here, Barbara: I ve 
 thought something once or twice. Are you trying to fancy that I m 
 Valentine Pomfret?" 
 
 At this she turned on him a look so full of reproach, anguish, and 
 entreaty that he was frozen with a sense of his brutality. 
 
 " Barbara, forgive me !" he said, reaching out for her; but she held 
 him away, with her open hand. 
 
 " It was so cruel !" she managed to whisper at last, with chattering 
 teeth.
 
 514 THE QUICK OR THE DEADt 
 
 " My God ! I know it was ! Can you forgive me ?" 
 
 She withdrew her hand, and began pressing it with short convulsive 
 movements upon the other. 
 
 " Can t you forgive me ?" said poor Dering. 
 
 Still she sat wordless, her handsome throat swelling with some 
 repressed feeling. 
 
 " I I have tried to think that," she said, after a while. 
 
 Der ing s face changed. 
 
 " You have ?" he said, in a low voice. 
 
 " Yes, but I could not. I found I " She stopped a mo 
 ment, and then went on, looking steadily at him, " I found I did not 
 want to." 
 
 " Barbara !" 
 
 " I did not want to think of you as any one else. I did not want 
 any one else. I wanted you." She paused again, adding, in a whisper, 
 " I want you." 
 
 lie took her in his arms, and she felt the great throbs of his heart 
 against her face. 
 
 " I want you ! I want you !" she went on, incoherently, " forever, 
 forever, forever ! Only you ! Oh, Jock, if you if you die, 
 you know I will be true to you? Hush! don t answer. How can 
 you know ? My God ! how can you know ?" 
 
 " I do know," said Dering, stoutly, braced by the belief which 
 sustains every lover, the belief that the woman who loves him loves 
 him more, and better, and differently from the way in which she has 
 ever loved or ever will love any man again. 
 
 " I do know, my darling," he repeated ; but she sobbed on, clinging 
 to him : " No, no ! you cannot ! you cannot ! And I I can never 
 prove it to you !" 
 
 " I would not have a proof. I do not want one. I would not 
 accept it if you could give it to me. I wish I could make you under 
 stand how thoroughly I comprehend all your struggles and feelings. 
 But you must not think that you only suffer." 
 
 " It is because I grieve you that I suffer," she replied, still hiding 
 her face. " All the little pleasure that I have given you cannot pay for 
 the pain. You think I don t know that ; but, oh, I do ! I do !" 
 
 " You only give me pain when you speak in this way," said Dering, 
 caressing her bowed head. " You only give me pain when you think 
 that you are anything but a joy, a blessing to me, the very light of 
 my life. I not only love you, I actually adore you I Why, I swore 
 once that, no matter what a woman was to me, I would never kiss her 
 feet ; and look here ! and here !" And, before she could prevent him, 
 he had stooped and pressed his lips, now on one foot, now on the other ; 
 then, kneeling up, he kissed her dress, her knees, her waist, her arms, 
 while she bent over him, panting, intoxicated, half reassured. 
 
 It was in some such way that nearly all their misunderstandings 
 ended. 
 
 XX. 
 
 It was quite late on an afternoon of the next week that a sudden 
 heavy shower overtook them while out riding. As they were near the
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD? 51 5 
 
 pretty, Gothic church of the neighborhood, they fastened their horses 
 and took shelter within its doors, which they found open. After about 
 twenty minutes of ceaseless downpour, Dering insisted on remounting 
 his horse and riding back to Rosemary for a trap of some kind, and thus 
 Barbara was left to a possible hour of rather dreary waiting. She became 
 tired of her post on an old oak settle near the open doors, and wandered 
 up into the organ-loft. It was gray with cobwebs and littered with 
 melancholy bits of bread soaked in strychnine, which had been left there 
 for the delectation of the rats. She found the organ unlocked, and thought 
 she would see if she could get the sexton to pump for her, so went cau 
 tiously down the crooked and dusty stairway, wondering at the sudden 
 darkness which enveloped it, to find the church doors closed. Her heart 
 leaped violently, then settled into heavy beating, and, looking back into 
 the darkening church, she felt with both hands for the fastening. It 
 was secure, and from the outside. Barbara, who had from her childhood 
 entertained an especial horror of being locked into even a bright and 
 daylighted room, felt a cold horror, as strong as it was unreasoning, creep 
 up within her. She ran hurriedly out into the aisle of the church, which 
 was not so gloomy as that little passage near the door, and stood still, 
 with her hand on the back of one of the pews, trying to think what she 
 had best do. It was not long before she remembered that through the 
 vestry-room she might make her escape, and, hurrying forward, found 
 the entrance to it also locked. 
 
 The rain was now falling more heavily than ever, and sheets of bluish 
 lightning threw into pale relief the tall windows, with their lead-framed 
 panes of glass, showed her the large black letters on the three white 
 marble tablets over the altar, but failed to penetrate the arches of the 
 vaulted roof, from which the gloorn seemed to hang like dust-clogged 
 cobwebs. 
 
 " I will be quite quiet, I will be quite collected," she said to herself. 
 " I will go in my pew and sit down. Perhaps I will fall asleep, and 
 then Jock will come and laugh at me, and we will have such a gay, 
 cosey drive home together." There were other thoughts which came 
 huddling about her, whimpering for admittance, and which, when re 
 fused, threatened with ugly grins and cries of rage. "I will be quite 
 quiet, quite calm," she repeated, this time aloud. " I will take this 
 prayer-book in my hands and kneel down, and then I will count a 
 hundred ; and by that time Jock will come." She kneeled down, rest 
 ing her forehead on the large, old-fashioned prayer-book, and listening 
 to the gushing of the rain from the sloping roof. 
 
 The lightning increased, grew sharper in its darts, and was now 
 followed by low thunder. All at once a noise attracted her, a rat 
 tling at the church doors. Starting up, she ran down the long aisle, 
 dragging over a foot-bench in her haste, but undeterred by its echoing 
 crash. 
 
 " It s me it s Barbara, Jock. Open, quick !" 
 
 A renewed rattling was her only answer, followed by a long, plain 
 tive whine from the dog outside that was scratching for admittance. 
 This unexpected reply so startled her that she could not repress a 
 broken cry, and rushed back again into the Ixxly of the church, invol-
 
 516 THE QUICK OR THE DEADt 
 
 untarily lifting her hands to her ears as she ran. A beseeching and 
 heart-broken howl from the lonely dog followed her, its quavering Call 
 absorbed in a ponderous roll of thunder which jarred along under her 
 feet. Then came a heavier rush of rain, and the sound of a wind 
 rousing itself along the sodden leaf-carpet outside. Only the general 
 outlines of the reading-desks and the great tablets were now to be dis 
 cerned, save in the flickers of lightning which seemed to soak with 
 an unnatural gleam all objects upon which they fell. Again the dog 
 howled, and again the thunder drowned its long note. 
 
 " He is nearly here now," said Barbara, who was again seated in 
 her own pew. "He is just driving through Machnnk Creek. Now he 
 is coming up the long hill. Now lie has turned into the lane. Now he 
 is coming into the church-yard. Now " 
 
 She was here startled by the baffled dog, who leaped up at the win 
 dow near which she was sitting, hung by its paws on the ledge for a 
 moment, and then dropped winning back .upon the ground without. 
 The sight of that dark head and those clutching paws horrified her 
 inexpressibly, and she rushed and crouched down on the altar steps, 
 trembling in every fibre. The next lightning-flare that swept the 
 church fixed the great letters on the white tablets upon her inner lids, 
 and thrust upon her a memory against which she had been fighting 
 ever since finding herself locked in, and which coursed backward 
 through her veins as though ice-water had been injected into them. 
 
 The last time that she had followed the outlines of those sombre 
 characters, she had been standing l>efore this altar as a bride. She 
 could see the whole scene as distinctly as though she were at the very 
 moment playing her part in it, could see the kindly, earnest face of 
 the minister who had married them, even to a wart upon one of his 
 nostrils, and a curious habit he had of drawing his large chin into folds, 
 could see her father s face, with its anxious expression and softly- 
 curling gray hair, through which the morning light shone whitely, and 
 which contrasted so well with his fresh and wind-reddened skin, saw 
 her husband s hand as it held her own (she had not looked at his face 
 during the ceremony), saw the little rip in one of her lace flounces, 
 where it had caught in the carriage door, heard the voice of the man 
 who had been her husband, a voice rich and earnest and unusual, 
 " I Valentine take thee Barbara to my wedded wife, to have and to 
 hold, from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, 
 in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish till death us do part." 
 Ah ! she heard more. She felt him lean to her when they had stepped 
 into the carriage and were out of sight and hearing of all others, felt 
 the very breath of his words against her cheek : 
 
 " Death will not part us, Barbara. We will laugh in his face, my 
 Barbara, my wife, my Barbara, my brave girl. What is Death to 
 Love? It will l>e only a little, lonely waiting for whichever of us 
 goes first. lie cannot part us, sweetheart; he cannot part us." 
 
 She thought she heard his voice close at her ear : 
 
 " Death cannot part us, Barbara." 
 
 "Now he is coming through the double gate," she said, aloud. 
 " Now he s driving very fast over that good bit of road. Now he s
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD 9 ^ A 
 
 turning into the Greysons field. Now he is coming up the church 
 hill. Now he is turning in at the gate." 
 
 The dog under the window howled again, and again the voice at 
 her ear seemed to say, as though to cheer her, 
 
 " Death cannot part us, Barbara." 
 
 She kneeled up, grasping the altar rail with both hands, and making 
 a tremendous effort at self-control. " Dear God, please take care of 
 me, and bless me, and be good to me," she said, in the childish voice 
 which came to her whenever she was suffering. " I have not done 
 any one any harm. I have tried to be good. Please ask Val to for 
 give me. lie does not care for me as a wife any longer. Please ask 
 him to think of me kindly. Please make him think of me kindly. 
 Please make him forget about me. Please, if I have done wrong, 
 forgive me. Don t let these thoughts come to me any more, and let 
 Jock come soon. And don t let me have to wait here very long. And 
 please be good to me, and show me how to be good." She was ram 
 bling on, comforted by the mere sound of the words which she uttered, 
 but when she paused to take breath she heard more distinctly than ever 
 those words, " Death cannot part us, Barbara." 
 
 " Oh, please, Val ! oh, please, Val !" she began, piteously. " Oh, 
 God, don t let him be angry with me, for Christ s sake ! Oh, Val, 
 it was so lonely ! / would forgive yon. I would want you to be 
 happy. We will all love each other in heaven, in a different way. 
 It was so lonely, oh, it was so lonely ! You don t know how I 
 missed everything : I had to drink my tea all alone, and it was so 
 dreadful in the dark nights; and I thought of you, and thought of 
 you, until my heart seemed bursting. You don t know how I longed 
 for you, Val. I used to pray you to come to me, you must have 
 heard me, and you never came until now, until now when it seems 
 so dreadful. I wish you would ask God to let me die. I wish you 
 
 would try not to hate me, Val. He looked so like you no, that 
 
 isn t honest, because afterwards I No ! no ! Don t say it any 
 
 more, Val ! don t say it any more! I will be good. Will you take 
 neback? Oh, Val, Val ! I cannot do it! I cannot marry any one 
 else! I m not such a bad woman as you think ! I can t do that. I 
 couldn t help wanting to, but I can help doing it, I can help doing it. 
 If you will only come to me sometimes ! It was so lonely ! I m 
 afraid of the dark. I missed you so, I was so lonely, all the time, 
 all the time ! I won t marry him, Val. If you ll only forgive me and 
 take me back no, if you ll only forgive me I ll do it if you ll only 
 forgive me. Indeed I will ! Indeed I will ! Please, Val, don t think 
 I really meant to marry him. I never really meant to marry him. I 
 thought I did, but I couldn t have in the bottom of my heart. Oh, I 
 was so wicked even to think of it ! But you remember how I felt at 
 first. Oh, I hated myself! I hated myself! I tried so hard oh, I 
 did try, I did try. It was because he looked like you at first. He 
 looked so like you, I thought it was you at first ; I thought you had 
 come back. I have been so wicked ! so wicked ! But I will stop. 
 I will be good. Please, Val ! please, Val ! Please, God, don t let him 
 laugh at me. Oh, Val, don t laugh at me ! "
 
 518 THE QUICK OR THE DEADt 
 
 When Bering at first stooped over her, as she lay, face down, along 
 the altar steps, he thought that she was dead. 
 
 XXI. 
 
 Barbara was unconscious for several hours, and when she at last 
 came to her senses her first rational wish was to see Dering. Although 
 it was then midnight, she insisted upon being helped into the room 
 where she had received him on the evening of his arrival, her rich hair 
 hanging down over her dressing-gown of white silk, and straying here 
 and there among the bluish-gray fur with which it was trimmed, like 
 thin veins of fire through curling ashes. Her face was very pale, her 
 eyes dark, wide, with unflickering lids spread above them as though 
 held in place by the slightly-lifted eyebrows. Dering came and knelt 
 gently and dumbly beside her, attempting to lift the loosened hands 
 which lay along her lap. She withdrew them slowly, and clasped them 
 together below her breast. 
 
 " Perhaps I worry you," he said, alarmed at the dreadful unvary- 
 ingness of her attitude and expression. " Suppose we don t try to talk 
 to-night?" 
 
 " We must talk to-night," she said, dully. 
 
 " But, dearest, we can say everything just as well to-morrow. Let 
 me help you up-stairs." 
 
 " There won t be any to-morrow," she answered, still in the same 
 dull voice. 
 
 Dering tried again to take her hands. " My poor darling ! what an 
 awful shock you must have had !" 
 
 " It was very dreadful," she said. 
 
 " My poor love ! I know it was ! Won t you give me your hands, 
 darling ? I want to hold them and warm them. You look so cold !" 
 
 " Yes, that is it : I am so cold. Wait : you may have one of my 
 
 hands, the left one. Wait a minute, until I find " she was 
 
 groping with tremulous fingers in the breast of her gown. " Here it 
 is," she said, finally, and held out to him her open palm, on which lay 
 a plain gold ring. 
 
 "What is it? What is this? What must I do?" said Dering, 
 startled. " What ring is it ?" 
 
 " I want you to put it on. It is my wedding-ring." 
 
 " Barbara ! Good God ! my dear girl, what do you mean ? I m 
 afraid you are awfully ill. Let me call some one. For God s sake, do, 
 there s a good child !" 
 
 She motioned him to come back. " Don t call any one. I am not 
 ill. I know exactly what I am doing. That is my wedding-ring. I 
 took it off. You must put it on again ; you must !" she said, with th,e 
 first note of a rising excitement in her voice. 
 
 Dering was very white, and he set his teeth until his ears sang. 
 
 " I think you very ill," he answered, at length, in a controlled voice. 
 " I do not know what you mean." 
 
 "But I do!" she cried, half rising; "I do! God has told me: 
 he told me in those awful hours in the church, when you did not 
 come to me ! when you did not come to me !"
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEADt 519 
 
 " I came as soon as I could. It was pitch-dark, and the roads 
 like rivers. Barbara, you break my heart when you speak to me like 
 this !" 
 
 She looked at him, relapsing once more into her first stolidity of 
 voice and manner : 
 
 " Hearts don t break. That is what you would call a * a chest 
 nut. " She did not smile, and continued to look seriously up at him, 
 the ring still lying on her relaxed palm. He had a horrible revulsion 
 of feeling, and felt his mouth beginning to twist into that strangely 
 distorted grin which characterized him in moments of violent emotion. 
 He turned away, pretending to arrange a fold in one of the rugs. 
 
 " It strikes me as almost coarse, the use of such an expression at 
 such a time," he said, finally, in rather a hard voice. 
 
 " Does it ? Does it ?" she said, a little curiously. " You know I 
 told you I was coarse once " 
 
 " Barbara !" was all that he could roply. 
 
 " I do think I have been honest," she went on. " I told you word 
 for word how I felt about Val, how I could not forget him. I told 
 you how he haunted me. I told you we could never be happy. 
 Women cannot forget, even if they want to, at least, not women like 
 me. I think I must be an awful thing, an unnatural thing. I some 
 times wonder if God made me for an experiment: only that couldn t 
 be if he knows everything beforehand, could it? No, please don t 
 stop me ; I feel as if I could say it all now, better than I ever could 
 again. I saw everything this evening in the church. I was so fright 
 ened ! He spoke to me. I know what I must do. I see how wicked 
 I have been. I have been coarse : it is wicked for a woman to be coarse. 
 I don t see how you could have wanted me. I was his I was his first 
 I was his wife. I couldn t be your wife too. I couldn t forget. I 
 burned up my wedding-dress and his picture, but something made me 
 keep my ring. I know now what made me keep it. I have been very 
 wicked. I know you will hate me, you look at me so horribly. 
 Somehow I am not afraid : I will never be afraid of anything again ; 
 I will never be " 
 
 Dering leaned over, seized her firmly by the wrists, and pulled her 
 to her feet. Her wedding-ring struck sharply on the polished floor 
 between them. 
 
 " If you are not mad," he said, slowly, "you are the most unutter 
 ably cruel creature I ever imagined." But his words seemed not to 
 impress her. She swayed about in his fierce hold, peering from side to 
 side for the fallen ring. 
 
 "I must not lose that! It s all I have," she said. "Won t you 
 let me go, just until I find it ?" 
 
 lie threw her from him with an inarticulate cry, all the more savage 
 for being smothered. lie felt at that moment that he did hate her, and 
 the firelight on her long red hair seemed a baleful and odious thing as 
 it glistened and moved, with the lithe curves of her figure, while she 
 crawled about, looking for her lost ring. 
 
 " I can t find it!" she said at last, gazing helplessly up at him, and 
 kneeling back on her heels, with her hands twisted nervously together
 
 520 THE QUICK OR TEE DEAD 1 
 
 between her knees. " That s gone too ! I haven t anything left i 1 
 think God might let me die !" 
 
 " Perhaps he thinks you might change your mind after you wtre 
 dead," suggested Dering, savagely. 
 
 But her only answer was to go on groping helplessly about, rour 
 muring from time to time, " I can t find it! I can t find it! and it s all 
 I have !" 
 
 " Barbara," he said, after some moments of silent waiting, " I wish 
 to understand you thoroughly. You wish me to go away? You wish 
 everything to be ended between us?" 
 
 " I don t wish anything," she answered, shaking her head with 
 brows drawn piteously upward. " I am only trying to do what is 
 right." 
 
 " Do you think it is right to ruin a man s whole life through sheer 
 morbidness?" 
 
 " Oh, you don t know how I feel ! You can t know how I feel ! 
 He said death could not separate us ; and it can t ! Why, I have been 
 his wife, his wife!" 
 
 "Don t you suppose I know that?" said Dering, fiercely. "How 
 many times do you suppose that has come to me? Good God! are 
 women human, I wonder?" 
 
 " 1 meant to do right," she faltered, great tears springing to her 
 eyes. " You don t know how dreadful it is to remember that you have 
 been one man s wife, when you are thinking of being another s. I 
 think God has been very cruel to me. Oh, he has ! he has !" 
 
 "And what do you think he has been to me?" said Dering, grin 
 ning; then, with a strong motion of his arm, as though flinging some 
 thing hampering from him, "No! I ll be d d if I ll shift it all on 
 
 Providence ! What do you think you have been to me?" 
 
 " A curse," she whispered, nodding her head sagaciously in a way 
 that struck him as horrible. " Yes, I know I ve been a curse to you. 
 But I ve never been your wife; and then men forget. You are so 
 young. Just think how dreadful it would have been for me to marry 
 you, and then for you to have found out this!" 
 
 " Yes, I think it would have been rather unpleasant," he admitted. 
 Great drops stood on his forehead and under his eyes, but his voice 
 and manner were very quiet. 
 
 "You see, everything can be worse," she said. "When people 
 used to say that, it sounded so meaningless to me, as if it were rant; 
 but it is so true. If I had married you it would have been ten thou 
 sand times worse." 
 
 " And yet you said you loved me !" he burst forth, in a sort of rage, 
 
 "And 1 d id! I did! You don t think I didn t?" she said, 
 pausing in her re-begun search, with a species of dull surprise. "I 
 did love you." 
 
 "Did you, indeed?" said Dering, harshly. "It seems there are 
 some things women can get over, after all. I suppose a man must die 
 and haunt them to be remembered." 
 
 " But you do believe I loved you? You do believe that?" 
 
 "I did believe it," he said, with rough emphasis.
 
 THE QUICK OR THE DEAD f 521 
 
 "But don t you believe it now?" she said, anxiously. "I don t 
 feel anything now, but I know I loved you. Indeed, indeed, I m not 
 so bad as you think; and I must have loved you, to act as I did : it all 
 proves that I did. I can t help not doing it now; I can t help not 
 being sorry, or glad, or frightened, or anything, now. You know I 
 wrote you once in a letter that I didn t feel anything. But I know I 
 loved you." 
 
 " 1 believe you are srazy," said Dering, in a strangled voice. 
 
 " I wish I thought so," she said, plaintively ; " but I know I m 
 not. I m just stunned now, because I have been on such a terrible 
 strain for so long, but ray mind is as clear as cool. I see everything ; 
 I see just how it would all have been ; and I see how you are obliged 
 to hate me at first. I would if I were you. You can t help it. I 
 don t feel angry with you because you hate me : it would be unnatural 
 if you did not ; and then it will keep it from hurting you so. I would 
 a great deal rather have you hate me than hurt you." 
 
 " Would you?" said Dering. 
 
 " Yes, I would, I would. You don t believe it, but I would." 
 
 "It is hard to believe some things," was his reply. "I think, 
 if you will be good enough to lend me a trap, that I will drive to 
 Charlottesville." 
 
 "To-night?" she said, pausing again to look at him. 
 
 " Yes, to-night. Perhaps you can understand a feeling (hat I have 
 against sleeping another night in this house." 
 
 " It s because I m in it," she said, sadly. "I don t blame yon. ] 
 don t blame you in the least." 
 
 " That is very good of you," he remarked, acridly. " Can I hope 
 your generosity will extend to the loan I have just asked for?" 
 
 " You are really going to-night?" 
 
 " If you will kindly lend me a trap and horse, and some one to 
 open gates." 
 
 " You can order what you wish," she said, slowly. 
 
 "Thanks," he replied. " I suppose I may shake your hand?" 
 
 She held it out to him silently. 
 
 " Good-by," he said ; then, after a pause, " good-by, Barbara." 
 
 " Good-by," she answered, looking down at their clasped hands. 
 
 "Good-by," he said, once more; once more she answered him, still 
 keeping her eyes on their hands, which now fell apart silently, lie 
 went to the door, and passed out, only to re-enter stumblingly, to catch 
 her to him, to bruise her face and throat with short, hard kisses. 
 
 " I love you !" he said, in a voice of terrible anguish. " I am a 
 coward : I love you in spite of everything ! Oh, Barbara, Barbara, 
 you will 1)6 so sorry for this to-morrow, when I am beyond your reach, 
 when you know that I have gone forever! For I won t come back 
 after this: I will never come back. Barbara, think of it all ! think 
 of our l>cautifu] hours together, of my kisses, of the way you have 
 clung to me, of the way you have kissed my hair, my eyes, my 
 throat, as I kiss yours now !" 
 
 lie almost hurt her in his desperate eagerness, but he might as well 
 have tried to rouse response in a corpse. She lay in his arms panting,
 
 522 TRE QUICK OR THE DEAD1 
 
 but listless, and the eyes that she lifted to him were full of a certain 
 timid pleading and dwelt upon him through great tears. 
 
 " I try to feel sorry, and I only feel sorry because I am not really 
 sorry," she said, tiredly. " I know you are going, and that I loved 
 you, and I try so hard to be sorry ; but I can only think how nice it 
 will be to go to bed and go to sleep. I am so tired ! I don t think I 
 will ever cry again, except because I can t cry. Oh, it all sounds so 
 silly ! but please try to understand." 
 
 "Good-by," he said, hoarsely, just touching her soft hair with 
 strong but trembling fingers. " Give me your lips this once." 
 
 She lifted her mouth, but his passionate kiss left her parted lips as 
 piteously expressionless as ever. " I can t do it ! I can t feel anything ! 
 I try so hard !" 
 
 He knelt suddenly at her feet, and lifted her hands to his thick 
 curls. 
 
 " Say, { God be with you, Jock, " he whispered, stammering. 
 
 She said it very sweetly, in a clear, earnest voice, as though anxious 
 to please him : " God be with you, Jock." 
 
 " And with you," he said, giving one heavy sob. 
 
 Pie held her for a moment tightly about her knees, then went, 
 closing the door after him with careful softness. 
 
 As he left the room, she fell once more to looking for the lost ring, 
 found it at last underneath the fender, and, blowing the ashes from it, 
 slipped it upon her finger as Dering drove from the door. 
 
 THE SKD.
 
 WESTERN INVESTMENTS FOR EASTERN CAPITAL. 523 
 
 WESTERN INVESTMENTS FOR EASTERN CAPITAL. 
 
 PUBLIC attention is at present directed to Western mortgagee as a 
 means of relief to Eastern people who have long suffered from the 
 prevailing low rates of interest and the difficulty of obtaining investments 
 at once safe and fairly remunerative. The cause of the awakened at 
 tention paid to this class of securities is found in the condition of the 
 money-lending market East and West. A great disparity exists in the 
 rate of interest which can be obtained in the two sections for money 
 lent upon equally good mortgage security. In the large cities of the 
 Atlantic seaboard persons living on incomes derived from fortunes 
 invested with conservative prudence prudence either voluntary or im 
 posed by law, as in the case of trustees have been suffering real hard 
 ship, both from the constant lowering of the rate of interest and from 
 the fact of a portion of every estate lying idle, awaiting investment. 
 
 The principle which regulates this is a familiar one in business,- 
 supply and demand. Borrowers, desiring to obtain money upon first- 
 class real estate, in any one of the large cities of the East, go to one 
 after another of the trust companies, or other aggregations of capital. 
 The eager demand for good mortgages enables better and better terms 
 to be exacted from each successive plethoric lender. Down goes the 
 rate of interest, six per cent., five and a half, five, four and a half, 
 and even four, if the security be especially desirable and the money 
 lenders overloaded with idle money. Finally, the impossibility of 
 obtaining an adequate supply of safe mortgages, even at these low rates, 
 compels financial institutions and trustees to put their funds to an 
 excessive degree into Government, State, and City bonds. Hence the 
 extraordinary demand for this class of securities has caused them to 
 rise to such a premium that, while paying from three and a half to six 
 per cent, on their par value, they in many instances net only from two 
 and a half to three and a quarter per cent, on their cost. The Eastern 
 investor thus finds it impossible to lend his funds for a fair return un 
 less he venture into shady securities, where he can command a higher 
 return, not for the use of his money, but for the risk of its Toss. 
 Just how to pick one s way between the desert of low interest and the 
 sea of bad investment is the problem daily confronting every prudent 
 person with money to invest. 
 
 But, if he were to shut himself up for twenty-four hours in a lux 
 urious drawing-room car and, travelling toward the setting sun, alight 
 in a prosperous county town, an entirely different state of things would 
 be observed. Instead of too much money and too few good mortgages, 
 the exact contrary is the case. Mortgages upon the best real -estate 
 security are offered to the local bank, but the bank has loaned ite funds 
 to the farmers to move their crops, to the tradesmen to lay in their 
 season s stock, to the thousand-and-one temporary borrowers in a grow 
 ing country requiring money for a short period and willing to pay liber 
 ally for it. The mortgage is hawked about from place to place j the
 
 524 WESTERN INVESTMENTS FOR EASTERN CAPITAL, 
 
 rate of interest rises as the difficulty of procuring money increases ; six, 
 six and a half, seven, seven and a half, eight, nine, and even ten per 
 cent, is finally demanded. That a borrower can afford to pay such rates 
 for money and yet thrive seems difficult to believe, unless one is informed 
 as to the profits derived from the various Western industries. A recent 
 careful authority has said that the profits of grain-, sheep-, and cattle- 
 raising the chief industries beyond the Missouri are enormous. The 
 average is not infrequently twenty-five percent, on wheat, fifty per cent, 
 on sheep, and on cattle a great return, varying with the circumstances. 
 It is easy to see how high rates can be paid for money in order to pro 
 cure and improve land which will yield such results. 
 
 It therefore appears that those having money to lend are enabled, 
 by a few hours rail way -journey, to command perhaps twice as much 
 for the loan of their capital, and upon security equally good, pro 
 vided they know in the West as well as in the East how to distinguish 
 between good and bad. Many persons have made fortunes, and not a 
 few corporations have grown rich and powerful, by this obvious course 
 of lending where lenders are few and borrowers plenty. 
 
 But the number of persons who can afford the leisure and expense 
 of making such trips whose capital to be lent is large enough to war 
 rant such expeditions, whose intelligence and energy are equal to the 
 undertaking must always be limited, and hence the disparity between 
 the rates East and West continues. To bring the Eastern lender within 
 reach of the Western borrower and to be compensated for the trouble 
 out of the difference in the prevailing rates of interest the new invest 
 ment companies have sprung up. Briefly stated, their function is to 
 take the Eastern lender s money to the Western borrower, to obtain 
 the local knowledge necessary for its safe investment, to manage the 
 details, and to give the lender the advantages of the higher rates, after 
 deducting a modest proportion thereof as compensation. To this has 
 Ixjen added a system of guaranteeing, of which more hereafter. 
 
 The plan is but the application of an old idea to the requirements 
 of a new country. Mortgages, themselves, are of great antiquity. 
 The Ivoman pledge of land as security differed but little from our com 
 mon mortgage, while the Grecian was chiefly different in the manner 
 of jvrjH tuating the evidence of existence of the mortgage: in lieu of a 
 recorder s office a stone was set in a corner of the mortgaged field, with 
 the amount loaned and the name of the lender graven upon it. The 
 English common-law mortgage, brought by our own ancestors to this 
 country and bearing a close resemblance to the antique model, has 
 existed practically without change since the earliest beginning of 
 common law. The writers upon finance uniformly dilate upon the 
 stability of land as security, but point out the disadvantage which at 
 tends it in that it is not readily negotiable and in the formalities and 
 expense of its transfer, both as security and, subsequently if necessary, 
 as satisfaction for debt. To convert the unwieldy real estate into com 
 mercially negotiable security, like stock, without losing its stability as 
 a security, is the problem to which land-mortgage companies devote 
 thoir ingenuity. The idea appeared in a crude state in the fanciful 
 schemes of John Law, whose proposition for a paper- money inflation by
 
 WESTERN INVESTMENTS FOR EASTERN CAPITAL. 525 
 
 the government, based upon the landed property of England, captivated 
 the impecunious country squires of the then House of Commons. But 
 to a Berlin merchant, Biiring, belongs the credit, in 1770, of perfect 
 ing that brilliant financial system which, under the name of " Credit 
 Fonder," has spread over the whole of Europe during the past century, 
 with some changes of detail in various centuries. It is not the purpose 
 of this paper to discuss these details : suffice it to say that in France, 
 whore it was introduced by M. Wolowsky about fifty years ago, the 
 credit fonder has attained its most gigantic proportions and its greatest 
 success. In England the system has scarcely been introduced, and 
 such companies as exist for bringing borrower and lender together have 
 not yet arrived at the stage of development which is the unique feature 
 of the true credit fonder, viz., the issuing of negotiable bonds based 
 upon landed security. This well-tested financial system has been im 
 ported to America; and it is here, in a country where the money is 
 more unevenly distributed and the population more widely .separated 
 geographically than in any country of Europe, that, modified and 
 adapted to its particular work, it seems destined to accomplish its 
 greatest results. 
 
 As hinted above, the recent investment companies have perfected a 
 guaranteeing system partially modelled upon the European plan. In 
 stead of transferring each Western mortgage to a particular Eastern 
 investor, the mortgages are brought to the East and deposited, en masse, 
 with another corporation, a trust company, to be held in trust for 
 the Eastern investors, who are given bonds called debenture bonds 
 secured upon the whole block of mortgages thus held by the trustee. 
 The advantages of this arrangement are obvious. If interest upon a 
 mortgage prove difficult to collect, and if foreclosure, delay without 
 interest, and perhaps loss of capital, be the result, the whole of the in 
 convenience and loss falls not upon the unfortunate individual holder 
 of that particular mortgage, but uj>on the combined capital of the in 
 vestors. A small percentage of foreclosures involving losses, or, in 
 some cases, gains, will always occur, but loss or gain will be a matter 
 of small moment to the investors when combined. 
 
 The debentures are either five or six per cent, bonds. That rep 
 resents the cost of money to the company. It is then lent in the 
 West at an average of perhaps seven per cent., although this rate 
 di tiers widely with comparatively trifling changes of locality and is de 
 pendent upon the facilities of access and the degree of notoriety the 
 section enjoys in the East. It must be remembered that to advertise 
 or " puff" a Western locality is a well-recognized field for public co 
 operation, and plans for doing so effectually are as carefully and frankly 
 discussed as municipal improvements. But, aside from this local in 
 fluence, it is observable that the rate has steadily declined of recent 
 years, while the rate in the East will be stiffened by the Western drain. 
 Thus the tendency of the new companies is to equalize the rates be 
 tween East and West, a great public benefit. 
 
 The method of transacting business varies with the company. The 
 usual course is to take from the borrower a mortgage to secure the pay 
 ment of two notes, one note for the amount of the principal, with the
 
 526 WESTERN INVESTMENTS FOR EASTERN CAPITAL. 
 
 interest at the same percentage as that at which the company gets the 
 money from the Eastern investors (say five per cent.), and the other 
 note for the extra interest, computed for the entire term. This lattei 
 note represents the company s profit, the difference between the rates 
 of interest in the East and in the West. 
 
 It will readily be seen that to procure a million dollars at five per 
 cent, in the East and to lend it in the West for seven per cent, for three 
 years a profit of six per cent, in three years, or sixty thousand dol 
 lars is a very lucrative business. It is natural that such a business 
 should attract capitalists, and that its apparent simplicity should be 
 misleading to some. Nothing would seem to be required but to com 
 mand sufficient confidence to obtain the money in the East and adequate 
 agencies to distribute it in the West. No supposition, however, could 
 be more erroneous. The most intimate knowledge of the locality, the 
 most experienced and honest agents and lawyers, and the utmost con 
 servatism even with these precautions, are necessary to lend money safely 
 in the West. The values are more recently established than in the 
 East. There is much discounting of the future, a tendency to base 
 calculations of present value upon hopeful anticipation of future in 
 crease. The next few years are looked to for as great a proportionate 
 increase as the last, which market! the birth of a new place. A child 
 upon seeing, for the first time, a mushroom grown to the height of 
 several inches during its first night s existence, might be led to suppose 
 that in a few days it would become a prominent feature in the land 
 scape. Similarly, in a town which, springing into existence ten years 
 ago, has doubled its population each five years and quadrupled the as 
 sessed valuations of its property in the same period, the people Ixjcome 
 infected with a propensity to exaggerate the probable future growth. 
 Deceived by brief experience, biassed by local patriotism, and interested 
 in enhancing the reputed value of their own belongings, the hopes of 
 the future become the fictitious effigy of the present. It requires many 
 years to convince the inhabitants that the town has its own rank, be 
 yond which it will grow but slowly. The memory of the shock caused 
 by the collapse of the city of Indianapolis after the insane era of infla 
 tion known as the " Indianapolis boom" even yet furnishes the text for 
 conservative utterances in the West. If the company rely upon the 
 opinion of resident appraisers, even when honest and faithful, these 
 considerations should temper the confidence reposed in their judgment. 
 And if the appraisers be not actuated by a strong sense of duty to their 
 employer, the wish to favor a neighbor at the exj)ense of a foreign cor 
 poration, or the desire to enhance the value of property owned by the 
 appraisers themselves, will tend to lessen the accuracy of their estimates. 
 
 To insure the least possible bias, well-managed companies take great 
 care in the selection of agents, both as to their honesty and also as to 
 their freedom from local prejudice, and, in order to add the inducement 
 of self-interest, treat them liberally and subject them to great responsi 
 bility. But beyond this some checks are necessary to guard against the 
 weakness of human nature. One check consists of a careful scrutiny 
 at intervals by officers from the East, if possible not by the mortgage 
 company; but by the trust company with whom the mortgages are
 
 WESTERN INVESTMENTS FOR EASTERN CAPITAL. 527 
 
 deposited in trust. By far the most effective check, however, consists 
 of an accumulation of data relating to the country in which the loans 
 are to be made, which will enable principal officers to stop careless 
 lending by sub-agents. These data, consisting of maps and notes made 
 by agents travelling over the section in buggies, showing the water 
 courses, the character of the land, whether low or high, wet or dry, 
 stony or fertile, the yield per acre of the neighboring cultivated land, 
 and, to some extent, the nationality of the settlers (there being a great 
 difference in the thriftiness of the nationalities), are indispensable to a 
 sound management of the business. Their preparation involves no 
 little outlay, but when once completed they constitute a " plant" which 
 is as necessary as machinery to a manufacturer. By spreading this 
 information on carefully-prepared maps, showing all these particulars, 
 and indicating the value of the land per acre at each change of topog 
 raphy or physical conditions, the superior officers are enabled to exercise 
 a most intelligent supervision of the work of subordinates. In the 
 early attempts at transacting this business, a quarter of a century ago, 
 there were several disastrous failures where bonds had been sold in the 
 East which were supposed to be secured by carefully-selected mortgages 
 in the West, but which were found to be of the wildest character, 
 through lack of organization, and impositions and mistakes of agents. 
 With the modern companies foreclosures are very infrequent, and, even 
 where they occur, the result has usually been that the land brought 
 more than the mortgage, an actual profit. Well-managed concerns 
 find foreclosure necessary only as to about one per cent, of the aggregate 
 money invested in mortgages, and the net result even of this small 
 number of foreclosures is not a loss. 
 
 But meagre published statistics are obtainable on the subject. In 
 the report of a special committee of the Connecticut Legislature, made 
 in 1878, upon the condition and management of life-insurance com 
 panies (which lend largely in the West on mortgages), the results of 
 six companies are given, which commenced loaning in the West at 
 various periods, the earliest being 1851. The total amount loaned by 
 all was sixty-eight millions, of which forty-six millions were outstand 
 ing at the date of the report. The gains by foreclosure had been nine 
 thousand dollars, while the losses had been but six thousand. It is 
 obvious that to insure against such infrequent losses for a Irigh premium 
 is a paying business. And that is practically what the modern guaran 
 teeing mortgage companies do, insure against losses, in addition to 
 managing the details of loaning the money. 
 
 These corporations are subjected to another danger besides that of 
 reckless lending, and that is the peculiarity of the laws of certain 
 Western States! It seems at first glance a little paradoxical that the 
 sections of the country most in need of capital the South and West 
 should, in a general course of legislation, discriminate against foreign 
 and Eastern money. It might be expected that a growing country, 
 needing capital, would do all in its power to render it secure, and thus 
 invite that most timid and mercurial of economic forces. This would 
 be the more broad-minded policy ; but, perhaps from a tendency to cater 
 tc the majority (most of whom are already borrowers in fear of cred- 
 VOL. XLI. 34
 
 528 WESTERN INVESTMENTS FOR EASTERN CAPITAL. 
 
 itors), laws have been passed in some States which, in restraining the 
 influx of Eastern capital to be lent upon mortgage, have had as much 
 effect as the similarly planned preferred-creditors laws have had in 
 keeping out Eastern merchants. In the case of mortgages this tendency 
 of the legislatuie is chiefly manifested in the equity of redemption, 
 a time given to a defaulting mortgagor, whose land has been sold, 
 within which he may come forward and pay up principal and interest 
 and get his land back, during which period the title of the foreclosing 
 mortgagee is incomplete and subject to be defeated by the redemption 
 of the mortgagor. The effect of this is, of course, bad. The company 
 loaning the money, in case of default, forecloses, but does not then 
 become possessed of a clear title that can at once be sold if a buyer be 
 found, but of an incomplete title, which may be divested by the former 
 owner coming forward with the amount of the debt. It is curious to 
 note how the folly of these laws increases as the States considered are 
 farther from the centres of capital and therefore of sound financial 
 theories. In most of the middle Western States the objectionable 
 features are reduced to a minimum : the purchaser at the sale goes 
 into immediate possession, and is only subject to be divested within 
 twelve months, during which period the debt carries interest. 
 
 In the States lying somewhat farther West the status of the buyer 
 is the same as in those last mentioned, but the time is extended to two 
 years. In some of the far Western States, however, the height of the 
 folly of these laws is reached, and results in virtual prohibition of 
 money-lending by prudent companies. The extraordinary provision is 
 inserted that, after default, the debtor instead of the creditor remains 
 in possession of the land during the period of the equity of redemp 
 tion, which is two years. And it has been decided in more than one 
 of these States that no language can be employed in the instrument 
 which shall constitute a waiver of this provision. The practical effect 
 of such a law is that adventurers take up new land from the govern 
 ment, borrow on it, default upon the interest, remain in possession two 
 years, deriving the benefits of the crops, and decamp with their movable 
 effects to fresh fields in order to repeat the transaction. Competent 
 local lawyers, selected and visited at intervals by home lawyers, are 
 required to guard against these and other legal dangers. 
 
 The time has come to urge the legislatures to legalize the invest 
 ment, under proper supervision of the courts, of trust funds in this 
 class of securities. In many States the courts are already permitted to 
 authorize trust companies (where there are such of undoubted responsi 
 bility and open to inspection by officers of the court) to act as trustees, 
 executors, guardians, and in several fiduciary capacities. There can be 
 no good reason why the legislatures, if the subject be carefully laid 
 before them and explained to their committees, should not permit these 
 investments and thus provide an outlet for idle trust funds. The ob 
 jection to allowing trustees to invest in mortgages beyond the jurisdic 
 tion of the courts is, of course, a sound one, but in the case of debenture 
 bonds which are guaranteed by a home company within the control of 
 the court and additionally secured by Western mortgages, the objection 
 that the investment is out of the jurisdiction of the court fails, while
 
 VERZENAY. 529 
 
 the double security of the guarantee and the real estate furnishes the 
 best practical argument in favor of such an innovation. 
 
 No one who has had any experience in managing Eastern invest 
 ments in the West can fail to be struck by the richness of the field for 
 lending, the demand, safety, and high interest which capital enjoys, 
 nor by the apathy or ignorance which induces the mass of Eastern 
 persons to content themselves with starvation rates in their immediate 
 localities. Like all financial operations, the Western mortgage business 
 requires care, experience, and discretion. When conducted with these 
 safeguards, it affords the public a secure and remunerative means of 
 making investment, and to the companies a profitable revenue. 
 
 Thomas Learning. 
 
 VEEZENAY. 
 
 VERZENAY, pink Yerzenay ! 
 At Brighton, friendless by the sea, 
 Tell me true words that I shall say 
 To passionate Venus, good for me. 
 
 Surely not yet dost thou forget 
 
 The waving summer of thy prime, 
 When those dark eyes thy clusters met, 
 And long white feet on thee were set, 
 Till delicate veins thy red life wet.: 
 Filling thee up with will to climb 
 And fire us of a colder time ! 
 
 O Verzenay, pink Verzenay, 
 Thy life I think will live for aye ! 
 Some thought thou bringest me to-day 
 
 Misty and glorious of old times : 
 As in a dream my soul-feet stray 
 
 On dew-damp ways in greener climes. 
 
 O Venus ! I behold an eye 
 
 That once could glow as fierce as tliine ; 
 A bubbling pulse that beat as high 
 
 As thine own veins made big with wine. 
 
 Ah, less and less no sweet caress 
 
 With thy lithe handmaids brightens them ; 
 
 But still thy path my feet shall press, 
 Thy head shall wed my auadem ! 
 
 Of old I dreamed a horn should sound ; 
 
 My pulse sustain a fairy child ; 
 And I should find the fated ground 
 
 And wake the princess in the wild.
 
 530 VERZENAY. 
 
 Then I should meet the giant grim, 
 And slay him winning mighty fame ; 
 
 The world should hear my victor hymn 
 And marvel at my noble name ! 
 
 My voice grows weak to wind the horn ; 
 
 The sleeping princess still doth sleep ; 
 And darkening o er the glimmering morn 
 
 The shadows of the night-tide creep ! 
 
 Nathless, I met the giant grim 
 
 The cold earth. Chill my veins as lead ; 
 
 My hair is thin ; mine eyes are dim ; 
 The fight is lost ; the song is dead ! 
 
 Yet, goddess, by the ceaseless sea 
 At Brighton, still I worship thee, 
 Lonely and old at twenty-three ! 
 The immortal marvel of thy lips, 
 Thy fierce black eyes and awful hips, 
 Shine seldom through my hope s eclipse ! 
 Make glad my bosom with thy smile, 
 For long I seek thy vine-dark isle 
 At Avalon, o er many a mile ! 
 Yon crescent curves o er western groves, 
 But farther, west the round sun roves 
 To light the night of other loves : 
 And I again have prayed in vain, 
 Yet nevermore shall I complain ! 
 
 O sparkling life ! quick Verzenay ! 
 Thy soul-sparks on the wan lips play 
 Of one whose spirit wanes to-day ! 
 At twenty-three I m forty-six, 
 At Brighton, by the moaning sea. 
 What shall I be at thirty-three ? 
 No doubt I shall be sixty-six 
 Nigh Hades on the gloomy Styx ! 
 
 Well, hearken, sparkling Verzenay, 
 And thank thee for the tire to-day ! 
 And shining Venus, flushed as wine, 
 Albeit I know no love of thine, 
 Even though thy proud eyes seek for me, 
 x Thou shalt not see a quailing knee, 
 Though I shall sail Styx sombre sea 
 To-day, sad Heart, at twenty-three ! 
 
 Daniel L, Datuwn.
 
 SOME DAYS WITH AMELIE RIVES. 531 
 
 SOME DAYS WITH AMELIE RIVES. 
 
 171 VERY one now knows the story of how "A Brother to Dragons 
 JjJ was offered to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly by one some 
 where designated " as a visiting friend," how he accepted it at once, with 
 the enthusiastic remark, " The man who wrote this will never do any 
 thing stronger," how it was published anonymously and won instant 
 appreciation, and how the public was soon after surprised to learn that 
 a young girl living in a Virginia country house was the author of 
 this vivid and picturesque and passiouate tale. Perhaps the "visit 
 ing friend" whispered it to others, the name of Ame lie Rives. At all 
 events, it was very shortly signed to a free, strong, stirring sonnet in 
 the Century. Several mouths later appeared in Lippinoott " The Farrier 
 Lass o Piping Pebworth," which was perhaps more widely and more 
 generously criticised than any short story of recent fiction. In quick 
 succession followed "Nurse Crumpet s Story," a divinely passionate 
 poem called " Grief and Faith," and the strongly imaginative " Story 
 of Arnon." 
 
 Miss Ame lie Hives is the grand-daughter of William Cabell Rivea, 
 the Congressman, Senator, and Minister-Plenipotentiary to France of 
 the earlier half of the present century. It was during the reign of 
 Louis Philippe that the birth of Mr. Rives s eldest daughter was the 
 occasion of a graceful compliment from the French queen in the be 
 stowal of her name upon the little lady. This Amelie, whose life opened 
 in the romance of court life, and who bore always the prestige of a 
 queen s name, proved a woman of decided character and talent, and her 
 gifts a faint shadowing of those to be possessed by a namesake yet 
 unborn were cruelly curtailed by her death in 1874, when she was 
 drowned with her family on the ill-fated Ville du Havre. 
 
 Colonel Alfred Landon Hives, the father of Ame lie Rives, wa& 
 also born in Paris, and can boast of Lafayette as a godfather. He was 
 educated chiefly in Paris, graduated at the Ecole Polytechnique with 
 distinguished honor, and adopted civil engineering as his profession. 
 In 1861 he was married to Miss Macmurdo, a grand-daughter of Bishop 
 Moore, of Virginia, and a noted beauty. To them was born in 1863, 
 in the town of Richmond, Virginia, the now famous Amelie Rives. 
 Colonel Rives s profession entailed a somewhat wandering life, there 
 fore the early years of the little Ame lie were chiefly passed at the old 
 home of her grandfather, Castle Hill, in Albemarle County, Virginia. 
 She was a favorite companion of the grave statesman until his death, 
 when the baby had grown to be a solemn-faced little creature of four. 
 Colonel Rives continued to make Castle Hill his home for two years 
 longer, and in that time the child contracted an almost passionate love 
 for the beautiful old homestead, which did not until some years later 
 become the property of its present owner. Her eyes seemed never 
 rested unless they gazed out on the rolling meadows beyond the lawn 
 gate or revelled in the sunset colors behind the crest of the charming
 
 532 SOME DAY S WITH AMELIE RIVES. 
 
 hills at the back of the house. It was a great wrench to leave thra 
 home for the new one in Mobile, Alabama ; and, though she grew to 
 be fondly attached to the quaint Southern town, making of its trop 
 ical growth, the blue waters of its perfect bay, its Southern skies and 
 winds and bird-notes, the Italy of her imagination, yet the long visits 
 to Virginia from early spring to the lingering days of autumn were the 
 times of her greatest joy. 
 
 Like most imaginative children, Ame lie was morbidly sensitive. 
 Her fancies did not suit the children of every-day life ; they misunder 
 stood and somewhat dreaded her; while she, yearning with all the 
 strength of childish passion (and in later life passion may be different, 
 but not stronger) for love and appreciation, keenly felt its lack, and, 
 thrown upon herself for her best pleasures, found the highest. 
 
 Before she could write a sentence she had begun to draw, feeling 
 her way patiently through difficulty and ignorance, until it suddenly 
 dawned upon her family that she possessed unusual talent. At an in 
 credibly early age she became an omnivorous reader, going always in 
 stinctively to the highest. Shakespeare was soon her daily and intimate 
 friend and companion. There is now, among the exquisite Editions dt 
 luxe that are constantly sent to the Shakespearian scholar, a battered, 
 well-thumbed, clearly-printed volume of the Master s complete works. 
 It has broad white margins pencilled over in a hand varying from the 
 first childish scribbliugs to the formed, distinct, characteristic writing 
 of the woman. These comments always show thought, and are often 
 luminous. It is a short step from reading to writing, and this step 
 AinSlie quickly took. 
 
 It now became a serious matter to coax, borrow, or procure in any 
 way paper to contain her imaginings. She dashed recklessly into story, 
 drama, poem, always showing vivid imagination, and a sort of un 
 trammelled strength, as one can readily believe after reading the sonnet 
 in the Centwy Magazine already alluded to, which was written at the 
 age of fifteen. Joined to this maturity was a fund of humor, super 
 stition, and fancy, all of which made her a wonderful and enchanting 
 child to older heads, though she was never comprehended or greatly 
 loved by her child-friends. There is a pretty story told of her tying 
 the legs of katydids to curling maple-leaves by means of her mother s 
 embroidery-silk, throwing herself upon the grass, face downward, and, 
 after sending the katydids scuttling off with their burden, praying 
 that God would send them back with a real fairy in the leaf. This 
 yearning to behold "a real fairy" seems at this period to have been 
 the overweening desire of her soul. There is another picture of herself 
 and her Fidus Achates sitting in the dim twilit woods at the back of 
 the house. One can hear the future author of " Nurse Crumpet tells 
 the Story," and the intense tragedy of " Herod and Mariarnne," yet 
 unpublished, ask, in wistful tones, " Do you think if I drank a whole 
 cupful of warm bubbly blood, that I would see a real fairy ?" can pic 
 ture the horrified face of the little friend, and can catch her answer after 
 a pause of terror, " No, but I am sure it will make you very very ill." 
 We wonder if the yearning desire for the unattainable would have car 
 ried the dauntless little soul as far as this blood-thirsty experiment?
 
 SOME DAYS WITH AMELIE RIVES. 533 
 
 At one time she endured many pangs because of the eternal ex 
 clusion of the devil from Paradise, beseeching earnestly that he might 
 be forgiven. And this strange child confessed herself afraid of noth 
 ing on earth so much as the bloody marks on the ceiling of her bed 
 room, made by a bird that had fluttered in, beating his head against 
 the ceiling as he flew, and leaving its mark of death. The child im 
 agined the blood to have been made by the finger of the apparition in 
 Scott s " Betrothed." 
 
 She never went to school, but had governesses, who guided rather 
 than taught. AVith a mind so eager for knowledge, there was little fear 
 of idleness. 
 
 Some one, in writing of Miss Rives, says, " She has dipped her pen 
 in herself;" and so she has, but always of herself in Virginia. An 
 exquisite little essay appeared, and was lost, last summer, in the columns 
 of Harper s Bazar. It was on " The Lack of Humor in Great Hero 
 ines," and opens with a sunny glimpse of lawn and trees and sky, 
 vvith the writer lying along the " lush grass." One can often fancy her 
 so in the long delicious idle days of summer. At another time she 
 unconsciously depicts herself amid the fresh wet days of autumn, in a 
 poem entitled " A Mood." No one knowing her could fail to recog 
 nize the " bright hair s flag," and the fresh drenched glow of the eager 
 face. 
 
 Miss Rives s prowess in horsemanship has been much commented 
 on. As a matter of fact, she is an excellent horsewoman, though not, as 
 the papers would have us believe, in the habit of jumping five-barred 
 gates as a frequent amusement. One can see her nearly every day in 
 the autumn and early winter sending her large bay " Usurper" along 
 the picturesque roads that surround Castle Hill. 
 
 She paints with the same instinctive power with which she writes, 
 struggling on with undaunted courage through the distracting mazes 
 of color. As with her writing, she bides her time until fate carry her 
 abroad, saying always, " It is genius to wait." By the way, " Fate" is 
 a word never used by Miss Rives. She has been blessed from early 
 childhood with the most unquestioning love and belief in the Maker 
 of all things. 
 
 In the face of scurrilous paragraphs, which have hinted at every 
 kind of belief, including disbelief, it is but just to say that Miss Rives 
 acknowledges and reverences to the utmost the God who has so lavishly 
 endued her with great gifts. 
 
 Perhaps it is trite to say that every home is stamped by the indi 
 vidualities of its occupants, but surely it is unusual to see an old home 
 stead with its associations, legends, and architecture restamped by the 
 personality of a young girl. 
 
 Now the room formerly known as the " west wing" is shown as 
 " Roden s, the one that Virginia died in." What has been called the 
 " south chamber" for over a hundred years is now boasted of as the 
 room where Virginia spun in the company of her unique pets. So 
 with the " drawing-room," its pictures with their jewel-like effect, the 
 old piano where Roden found the country-girl striking chords to see 
 where the keys stuck, the dining-room where the heart-sick girl
 
 534 SOME DAYS WITH AMELIE RIVES. 
 
 served that dainty meal to Roden and his sweetheart, when, overcome 
 by love and passion, she burst out into, " I won t wait on her !" On 
 my first introduction to this temple of hospitality and plenty, as I 
 entered, and my host following shut the door, I was haunted by the 
 thought of Virginia s love-wounded eyes, and fancied I heard in the 
 drawing of the porti&re the swish of the girl s short skirts as Roden, 
 amazed but cool, calmly closed the door. 
 
 There is another room, still more interesting, filled with the per 
 sonality of an imaginative mind. It is, as Hawthorne writes of his 
 own, a haunted chamber. Let us turn to his words. " Here," he says, 
 " I have written many tales, many that have been burned to ashes, 
 many that doubtless deserved the same fate. This claims to be called 
 a haunted chamber, for thousands upon thousands of visions have ap 
 peared to me in it. If ever I should have a biographer, he ought to 
 make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much 
 of my lonely youth was wasted here, and here my mind arid character 
 were formed." It is meet, therefore, that those interested in Miss 
 Hives, who believe in her future greatness, should have a glimpse of 
 the home where her wonderful stories were born, where the vague, 
 beautiful dreams of childhood and girlhood, conceived in the hot-house 
 of solitude, have blossomed out so generously into leaf and flower. 
 
 The white walls of this girlish, bower-like study are scattered over 
 with delicate blue flowers, unobtrusively assisting the effect of many 
 bold sketches in oil and charcoal, as well as two magnificent sea-views 
 by Alexander Harrison. Amelie Rives s strong love of the sea is one 
 of her most pronounced characteristics. One, a long narrow strip of 
 sky and sea, where the waves break and curl in cringing eddies upon 
 the beach, is full of luminous violet light, and through wave and foam 
 and cloud flushes the after-glow of the sun. In full serene and golden 
 beauty, poised half-way in the sky, the moon pours forth her beams 
 clear to the foreground, apparently to one s feet. It fills one in studying 
 it with the grand and assured conviction that in nature there can be no 
 conflict, that there is " one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon," 
 and that each augments the other. The second painting, perhaps more 
 powerful in its simplicity of color and swinging action, is a glimpse of 
 the ocean by night, as though, looking from a port-hole far out on the 
 deep, one should gaze forth and feel the depth and color and mystery 
 of the sea, covered with its pall of night. Another glance, and you 
 catch the swell of the water, its silver light and upward-heaving wave, 
 and even the angelic light far off where meet sea and sky cannot stay 
 you from your berth and a horizontal posture. 
 
 The tall, slenderly-panelled mantel is crowded with rare bric-a-brac. 
 Over this is draped a richly-wrought blue silk and cloth-of-gold " Abba," 
 sent to Miss Rives direct from Persia. Next, in charming contrast, 
 hangs a mass of white satin and tattered silver tissue like clustered cob 
 webs, through which is thrust and crossed a pair of tarnished swords 
 drawn from their scabbards. This is a little touch of womanly senti 
 ment, and, unlike the cobwebs which the tissue resembles, is a pleasant 
 reminder of a foreign country and splendid scenes. The crumpled, 
 snining masses are the remains of the first court dress worn by Mrs.
 
 SOME DAYS WITH AMELIE RIVES. 535 
 
 William Cabell Rives, and the swords once clanked at the side of our 
 former minister at the gay court of France. 
 
 The windows, draped in lightly-embroidered muslin and India silk 
 of an indescribable sea-blue tone, brightened with bands of silver open 
 work, look out upon the lawn described in " Virginia" as having been 
 possibly fashioned by the " careless step of a mighty Titaness among 
 the flowers and shrubbery." The charming brass bed, with its quaint 
 canopy, is hung in silk and muslin to match the windows, and some 
 beautiful pieces of enamelled white and brass furniture, designed by 
 Miss Hives, give an air of bright cheerfulness which is accentuated by 
 the soft white fur rugs which lie about the gray-blue of the carpet. 
 
 One cannot be literary and orderly, and it follows that the large 
 table of carved oak, supported on the wings of four sphinxes couchant, 
 is quite covered with books, papers, proofs, pens, ornamental and 
 useful, in fact, all the paraphernalia that bespeak eager and constant 
 work. In unique contrast to this is the dainty toilet-table, with linen 
 cover sprinkled with blue forget-me-nots, its large mirror framed in 
 carved white holly and china painted with peach-blossoms, its ivory- 
 backed brushes, etc., etc. 
 
 One would think that many tables and a private secretary were 
 needed to keep pace with the correspondence which is growing to be a 
 distinct burden to the young author. One wonders, for the hundredth 
 time, why people who apparently lose their minds when they take up a 
 pen should persist in needlessly wielding it. Every author is gratified 
 by words of appreciation, even helpful suggestion, be the source ever so 
 unknown. But why, we ask, because she writes for the public, should 
 an inoffensive creature be compelled to tolerate such communications as 
 the following? 
 
 " Miss RIVES, I do not like Virginia of Virginia at all. If 
 you were writing for money I could understand its publication, but, as 
 you are not, I consider it an unworthy descent from your former pub 
 lications. I send you my good wishes for the New Year, in spite of the 
 fact that you have not answered my last letter of several months ago. 
 
 " Yours, very truly, 
 
 There are many anxious inquirers, one lady wishing to know what 
 foundation Miss Rives had for the assertion that Queen Victoria ab 
 solved the Albcmarle pippin from duty. She was roused to this keen 
 anxiety by an English gentleman who argued that it was " nonsense." 
 Miss Rives sent a polite rejoinder to the effect that she regretted she 
 had only the word of another " English gentleman" for the statement, 
 and that she could see no greater nonsense in so gracious an act of Eng 
 land s present queen than in that of a past one who tyrannically dictated 
 the height of the ruffs of her subjects. 
 
 The very brief period of my stay at " Castle Hill" was happily 
 rounded off the evening before my leaving by a memorable walk with 
 Miss Rives and her father. It was cold, still weather, and we started 
 off in the last-falling flakes of a snow-sprinkle in company with two
 
 536 SOME DAYS WITH AMELIE RIVES. 
 
 fine dogs, a most human collie and a Bordelaix dog, a cross between 
 blood-hound and bull-dog, a faithful, rather heavy animal, savage 
 enough for his mistress to carry with her a stout dog-whip. Our 
 destination was the ice-house, where ice was being hauled ; and very 
 pleasant it was to watch two negroes in the great blue wagon shovelling 
 in smooth flat cakes of ice, delicious to city ears the crunching of ice 
 on ice as it fell in its bed of sawdust and was broken and firmly packed 
 by other negroes in the ice-house with heavy iron sledges. Here a brace 
 of greyhounds joined us, by name Tweedledum and Tweedledee, 
 diminished, of course, into " Dum" and " Dee." These pretty creatures 
 bounded about, laying their muddy paws recklessly over their mistress, 
 and enlivened by their pranks the walk to the pond. Here we left 
 Colonel Rives discoursing with the overseer on the ice question, and 
 walked briskly over the gray, wire-grass-grown fields through tall 
 bunches of broom. My eyes were on the soft misty down of the 
 mountain before us, my mind deep in absorbing conversation, when we 
 suddenly missed the dogs, to find them flying after the sheep in the 
 meadow down by the pond. Miss Rives whistled and called back the 
 collie and Turc, but Dum and Dee, being unbroken pups, were worm 
 ing in and out of the huddled sheep, darting off after frightened run 
 aways. Miss Rives took an abrupt leave of me, and dashed over the 
 fields in her mud-stained corduroy skirt, tan gaiters, and sturdy por 
 poise-hide boots, hallooing for the greyhounds and keeping the other 
 dogs to heel. She caught Dum, after lie had killed a sheep, and, hold 
 ing him to the ground, lashed him until her arm dropped. What a 
 picture she made, with the crouching ^ yelping hound, her face swept 
 with color from brow to chin, the dark blue of her Tarn o Shanter 
 crushing the short brown-gold curls against her forehead ! I stood in 
 idle admiration, mournfully regretting my ability to secure the picture, 
 with its setting of a gray winter day, for the benefit of all lovers of 
 the beautiful. 
 
 Meanwhile, Colonel Rives tore about the fields, waving his hat 
 frantically before him, shouting at the recreant Dee and ineffectually 
 endeavoring to corner her. Dee loped off cheerfully with a lamb in 
 her mouth, followed full chase by the top-booted, weather-stained, burly 
 overseer, who finally frightened the dog into dropping her half-dead 
 prey, and brought her in triumph to her mistress for castigation. 
 
 It was all very picturesque, but returning homeward after the 
 excitement Colonel Rives remarked, with prosaic soberness, that the 
 walk had cost him just fifteen dollars. For him the adventure was 
 dearly bought. For me it remains a delightful picture, a finishing 
 touch to the charming impressions I gathered of this Southern girl, so 
 ambitious that no height seems too great for her climbing, so careless 
 of what the world of society holds dear, that she is happier in the open 
 meadows with her dogs, in her room alone with her imaginings, in the 
 society of those dearest to her, than in any brilliant gathering which die 
 might adorn. 
 
 J. D. Hurrell.
 
 WITH GAUGE j SWALLOW. 637 
 
 WITH GAUGE & SWALLOW* 
 
 NO. IV. THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT. 
 
 " OUKRILL," said Mr. Gauge, coming into the office one day at 
 
 J3 lunch-time when we three, Minton, Burrill, and myself, were 
 
 sitting round the little enclosure in which stood the old man s desk, 
 
 " can you lay your hands on the papers in Ainsworth vs. Ainsworth ?" 
 
 Mr. Gauge s voice always had a touch of tenderness in it when he 
 spoke to the old clerk. 
 
 " Ainsworth again ? Ainsworth ? Of course I can. The first 
 word I ever wrote in this office it was at this very desk, too was the 
 caption of that case. And, begging your pardon, sir, for saying it, 
 though it has paid well enough, first and last, I wish it had never 
 come into the office at all. Is there any particular paper you want, 
 sir ?" 
 
 "Bring them all, Burrill," answered the Senior, with a smile. 
 " Perhaps I shall be able to get rid of the whole lot at once." 
 
 " I hope you will, sir ; I hope you will," muttered the old man, as 
 he took his cane and stumped across the office to the cases where the 
 files are kept. 
 
 " Failing, isn t he ?" said the lawyer, as he watched the old man s 
 unsteady movements. " He always did have a spite against the case, 
 however." 
 
 He seated himself and talked to Mr. Minton while waiting for 
 Burrill s return. 
 
 " Here they are," said that worthy, producing a great file of papers, 
 placing them on edge and carefully dusting them before untying the 
 package. "What will you have, sir? I hope there is nothing more 
 to be done in the matter?" 
 
 "Well, yes, there is; and, as I ve got to run over the papers, I 
 may as well tell the whole story to Minton as I go along. We ve had 
 a hard morning, and can afford a little longer nooning* than usual. 
 I ll have my luncheon brought here, and we will look over the papers 
 as we eat." 
 
 " I d a deal rather pitch them into the fire, sir," said Burrill, dog 
 gedly. " It s the only thing in the office that never seemed exactly 
 square." 
 
 " Pshaw, Burrill !" said Mr. Gauge ; " it g not often I tell a story 
 so let me have those two first letters and start at the beginning, like a 
 bill in Equity. These are the ones," he added, as Burrill laid before 
 him two old and yellow papers carefully folded and endorsed. The 
 one, I could see, was in a lady s fine Italian hand ; the other in the 
 clear, firm writing of one whom I judged to be a lawyer, despite its 
 legibility. 
 
 * Copyright, 1888, by E. K. TOCBOJUS.
 
 638 WITH GAUGE # SWALLOW 
 
 "Just read them, won t you, Mr. Fountain? you seem to be the 
 only one who has his mouth at liberty. The lady s first, please." 
 
 I had finished my lunch sooner than the others, and his had just 
 been brought in. 
 
 So I read : 
 
 " MR. THEOPHILUS GAUGE : 
 
 " DEAR SIR, A daughter of John Codman desires your assistance. 
 
 " Respectfully, 
 
 " LTJELLA AINSWORTH." 
 
 The other, to the same address, read as follows : 
 
 " DEAR SIR, Enclosed you will find a line from a client who is 
 desirous that you should appear with me in a matter in which she is 
 concerned. She is well able to pay a reasonable honorarium, and I am 
 instructed, should you be willing to accept a retainer, to request you to 
 draw on me at sight through Libbey & Co., of Richmond, who will 
 take pleasure in honoring your order. I would advise that you leave 
 the further consideration of the amount you will charge for your ser 
 vices until we have had opportunity to consult. Allow me to say 
 that I most heartily second my client s importunity, and hope to have 
 the honor of appearing in a case of some interest with one so well and 
 favorably known to our bar. 
 
 " Very respectfully, 
 
 " Your obedient servant, 
 
 " EDWIN R. BUFORI. 
 
 " P.S. I ought perhaps to have informed you as to the character 
 of the litigation in which your assistance is desired. The case is an 
 issue of devisavit vel non, involving the title to a considerable estate. 
 The question turns on the validity of a holograph will discovered 
 nearly a year after the alleged testator s death, in a desk which had 
 been in possession of his wife, in whose favor it is drawn, since his 
 disappearance, for the fact of death, though not contested, is not sus 
 ceptible of explicit proof. The case, under our statute, is not without 
 difficulty, though I by no means share the anxiety felt by the pro 
 ponent. As she has a considerable estate in her own right, there is no 
 reason why she should not enjoy that security which she has scriptural 
 authority for expecting from a multitude of counsellors. 
 
 " The issue will come on for trial during the Fall Term of our Su 
 perior Court, which sits on the sixth Monday after the first Monday in 
 September. Should it suit your pleasure to accept, I should advise 
 that you reach here not later than the second day of the term, and 
 earlier if consistent with other engagements. 
 
 "E. R. B." 
 
 rt These letters," said Mr. Gauge, reflectively, " which came in one 
 envelope, constituted my entire mail one day in July, 1854. I was a 
 young attorney then, with a comfortable den in The Swamp, and a
 
 WITH GAUGE $ SWALLOW. 539 
 
 fair enough outlook for the future, but I still got my mail at the l Gen 
 eral Deliver)^ and went for it myself. I had a snug little list of clients 
 who paid me a moderate sum each year to advise them about their busi 
 ness and appear for them whenever they had need of an attorney in court. 
 I had held a brief in several important cases, and had led in one notable 
 trial with a famous name associated with me. Yet I did not get as many 
 letters then as my youngest daughter does now. So I had plenty of time 
 to read these, and I read them over a good many times that day, though 
 I started home fully an hour earlier than usual on account of them. 
 
 " To be employed in a case standing for trial in another State, and 
 especially in a Southern State, was a very gratifying event. I had never 
 been out of the State on professional business, and I regarded it as a 
 great honor to hold such a retainer. Even hundred-dollar fees had 
 not been abundant in my practice. I had received one of a thousand, 
 but its fellow had not yet made its appearance. But this retainer 
 meant more than money to me then. I should have signified my ac 
 ceptance by return mail but for two reasons : I thought it would not 
 be prudent to appear too eager, and I wanted also to take advice on the 
 matter. 
 
 " I used to talk all important cases over with Emily that is my 
 wife s name in those days. She was the only partner I had, you see, 
 and I must admit that I made very few mistakes in following her 
 advice. I carried the letters home and read them to her that night. 
 There were tears of pleasure in the good woman s eyes when she fully 
 realized their import. You will understand this better when I tell 
 you the reason a young lawyer hardly able to earn a living was spoken 
 of in such complimentary terms by a practitioner who, for aught I knew, 
 might be double my age, in another and remote State. 
 
 " Three years before, John Codman had come to my office one morn 
 ing, placed a fifty-dollar bill on my table, and asked me to take steps to 
 sue out a writ of habeas corpus for a negro a fugitive from slavery 
 who was confined in the Tombs to await the conclusion of formalities 
 for his return to the possession of his master. The vessel on which he 
 was to be shipped would sail in a few hours, and no time could be lost. 
 I knew John Codman to be an active and leading spirit among the Abo 
 litionists. My father had kept a station on the Underground Railroad, 
 and in my youth I had more than once been employed as a medium of 
 communication between Codman in New York and the country parson 
 age to which the human wares that came to his hands were consigned. 
 To this fact, I doubt not, I owed my selection for this important task. 
 In those days it was no easy matter to get lawyers of established repute 
 to take up the case of a fugitive slave. Of course the one most nearly 
 concerned was never able to pay a reasonable fee for such services, and 
 the attorney undertaking it was very likely to be boycotted by his other 
 clients. At that time, and, indeed, up to the very outbreak of the 
 civil war, the business-men of New York were by a large majority 
 pro-slavery in their sentiments. A great portion of our trade was with 
 the South, and to be an Abolitionist was to be looked upon as the 
 enemy of the city s prosperity. But all this time, however, the senti 
 ment of hostility to slavery was crystallizing in the popular mind, and
 
 540 WITH GAUGE f SWALLOW. 
 
 the Abolitionists were growing bolder in the assertion of their peculiar 
 views. 
 
 " I did not dream of hesitating, though I thought it probable I 
 might lose some of my best clients. Hardly stopping to pocket the 
 fee, I began the preparation of the papers from memoranda furnished 
 by Mr. Codman, and before the slave could be smuggled on board the 
 steamer the writ of habeas corpus was served on those having him in 
 custody, in spite of the efforts of the police to prevent it. In fact, I 
 not only procured the writ, but served it myself, and when night came 
 had some visible bruises to show for my temerity. The hearing was 
 set for the next morning. The attempt at reclamation had become 
 known throughout the city, and a mob gathered about the City Hall, 
 threatening all manner of evil against the instigators of the movement 
 to deprive the master of his property, which was then considered just 
 about as disreputable as horse-stealing is now held to be in Montana. 
 Fortunately, the Abolitionists of that day, if not lavish of funds, were 
 of indomitable spirit, and did not hesitate to expose themselves to vio 
 lence in the cause of personal liberty. 
 
 " I have seldom been in such a notable company as marched with 
 me through the howling mob that morning. I had a black eye, it is 
 true, but among my body-guard were many whose names are now 
 written among the stars, ministers, merchants, the most renowned of 
 journalists, and, best of all, one of the most notable of my own pro 
 fession, who said, as he linked his arm with mine, 
 
 " I have entered an appearance with you in this matter, and have 
 come to sit beside you, not to take any of the credit of the case, but to 
 help you if you need it, and to see that you are not overmatched by 
 numbers. 
 
 " He was as good as his word, too. 
 
 " As we went up the steps we met the man whom I regarded as my 
 best client. He had not only given me his own business, but had in 
 duced others to give me theirs. He was in a terrible passion. Shaking 
 his fist in my face, he exclaimed, 
 
 " If you go on with this business, sir, you must give up mine. 
 
 " It is a bad time to attempt to coerce a lawyer when he is sore 
 from being hauled over the cobble-stones in serving a writ and the case 
 is about to be called which he believes will give him some revenge for 
 what he has suffered. There is as much human nature to the acre 
 in the profession as I have ever seen anywhere ; and a man is like a 
 bull in that he doesn t scare worth a cent when his blood is up. 
 
 " I was never much of a bully, and not accustomed to lose my 
 temper, at least away from home. I was able-bodied, however, and 
 the day before had shown that I could use the arm of flesh in an emer 
 gency. My client s tones and fists were too much for my equanimity. 
 
 " Go to with your business, I cried, but get out of my way, 
 
 or I will knock you down ! 
 
 " I should have done it, too. It was a foolish speech, but, despite 
 its profanity, the distinguished company with me endorsed it heartily. 
 It was only another instance of substance being more important than 
 form. The matter got wind through their approval, especially that
 
 WITH GAUOE $ SWALLOW. 541 
 
 of the journalist, who gave it a prominent place in his account of the 
 proceedings. 
 
 " As you are aware, the application was successful, the court holding 
 that the master had forfeited his right to compel the slave s return to 
 service by having voluntarily brought him into a free State. I received 
 a great deal more credit than I deserved for the part I had taken, and 
 when I had reached my office that night I found a check for a thou 
 sand dollars awaiting my arrival as a general retainer from the heaviest 
 house in the country in the particular line of my irate client. I lost 
 some business, but gained more, and I have always looked upon this 
 case as the real foundation of my success. 
 
 " I naturally looked for wholesale abuse on the part of Southern 
 journals for the course I had taken, and in this I was not disappointed. 
 Very much to my surprise, however, I received numerous letters from 
 members of the Southern bar, commending my fidelity to my client s 
 interest, and promising to remember it whenever they had business re 
 quiring attention in the city. Among these was one from Mr. Bu- 
 ford, who was a practitioner of some eminence in his State. Though 
 he was a slave-holder himself, he said, he recognized the fact that the 
 law was the measure of all right, and if a man chose to take his negro 
 to a State where slavery was forbidden, he ought not to complain if he 
 suffered Joss. As to my course, he said, it was an attorney s business 
 to see that his client had the benefit of the law, whether he was a white 
 man or a nigger, and if any one obstructed him in that duty he ought 
 to fight. I need not say that this letter gave me great pleasure ; and 
 now my generous correspondent and the daughter of my old friend 
 united in inviting me to appear in a case in which the one was engaged 
 as counsel and the other concerned as client. 
 
 " This was the first time I had been called to go outside the State 
 on professional business, and I was very nervous about appearing before 
 a strange court. During the three mouths that intervened I made a 
 most exhaustive study of every question that can arise on the issue of 
 devisavit vel ?ion, but more especially of the more limited field of holo 
 graph and other exceptional testamentary forms. It is not too much to 
 say that when I finally started for the county of North Carolina in 
 which the issue was to be tried, I knew all there was to be learned 
 from books on the subject of nuncupative wills. 
 
 " I arrived a few days before the opening of the term, and found 
 my associate to be a man at least a dozen years older than myself, of 
 slender form, with a calm blue eye, quiet almost reserved manner, and 
 with nothing about him to indicate the heartiness which he had dis 
 played in his letters to me. There was no lack of cordiality in his 
 welcome, but I felt at once that his appreciation had been won by the 
 faithfulness with which I had served my client, rather than from any 
 sympathy with the results of my action. This discovery was something 
 of a shock, since I was at that time one of those absurd sentimentalists 
 who expect men reared under the most divergent influences to show 
 the same moral inclinations. He was a brave man, and a lawyer who 
 had more than once risked his life for a client, and had a natural ad 
 miration for one who did likewise. As for the negro, he had no sym-
 
 542 WITH GAUGE $ SWALLOW. 
 
 pathy with the opinions or prejudices of Northern sentimentalists in 
 regard to his rights or his wrongs. Such rights as the law gave, 
 whether to slave or freeman, he would willingly aid to enforce ; but 
 beyond that he did not go. 
 
 " This is the account he gave me, in clear cool tones and in the 
 most lucid and succinct manner, of the case we had to try. I knew 
 very little of his standing at the bar, but he had not uttered a dozen 
 sentences before I was fully satisfied of three things : first, that he 
 could not be for any considerable period a member of any bar without 
 being one of the leaders of it ; second, that he was profoundly inter 
 ested in this case, and especially in our client ; and, third, that he re 
 garded with a feeling very close to resentment her persistent demand 
 that I should hold a retainer in the case. I knew also that I should 
 have great difficulty in overcoming this feeling. He was not a man 
 accessible to flattery, nor one who would in any manner aid me in 
 securing his good will. He would be polite, gracious, and communica 
 tive as to the facts ; he would inform me fully of what had been done, 
 and of the line of action proposed by our opponents ; but of his own 
 views and speculations he would say nothing. The way to his esteem 
 lay wholly through his head. 
 
 " Luella Codman eight years before had made her appearance in 
 Earlshire County as the wife of Major Matthew Ainsworth, ^ gentle 
 man of liberal education, of fair estate, and of a numerous and some 
 what aristocratic family. "Whence she came, what were her antecedents, 
 or who were her relatives, no one knew. Mr. Ainsworth had met her 
 in a South Carolina family where she was employed as governess. 
 Fascinated by her beauty and attainments, he asked no questions, but 
 was told that she was an orphan without living relatives and had no 
 friends she cared to remember. She was known at that time as Miss 
 Luella Robards. 
 
 "The major s family were not long in seeking to penetrate the 
 mystery of her past ; but if there was any she guarded it well. Mr. 
 Buford was not even aware of the contents of the note he had for 
 warded to me, and I did not feel called upon to enlighten him as to 
 her relation to Codman, who, by the way, had died soon after bringing 
 me the case on which my notoriety if not my reputation as a lawyer 
 was based. My associate evidently expected me to shed some light 
 upon the early life of our client ; but I contented myself with remark 
 ing that I did not remember to have ever met her. 
 
 " Major Ainsworth would have been entirely happy in his domestic 
 relations but for the stubborn refusal of his wife to accompany him to 
 any place of public resort. In the county she was a belle of ac 
 knowledged pre-eminence, but out of it she never stirred. She did 
 not claim any fondness for domestic vocations, but very soon assumed 
 with her husband s full assent the management of his estate, very 
 greatly to the advantage of his exchequer. The acreage in cultivation 
 more rapidly extended, improved methods were adopted, and new 
 economies inaugurated. Year by year more land was purchased and 
 title taken in her name, the major boastfully asserting that it represented 
 her earnings. One thing was noticeable : no slave was permitted to till
 
 WITH GAUGE $ SWALLOW. 543 
 
 the lands thus acquired, which were cultivated under her supervision 
 either by croppers or hirelings/ white people who worked on shares 
 or for wages. Yet all prospered, so that after six years the major 
 came to be looked upon as one of the wealthiest men in the region. 
 Withal, his wife was a woman of spirit, of varied acquirements, a 
 dashing horsewoman, and a practised shot. Her devotion to her hus 
 band was notable and unwavering. To say that she was blind to his 
 faults or fault, rather, since he had but one would not express the 
 half of it. She demanded that every one else should be blind too. 
 A man who happened to make an allusion to his inebriety in her pres 
 ence was compelled to apologize at the muzzle of her pistol. The 
 result was the entire reformation of her husband, whose infatuation for 
 her was redoubled by this fact. There was but one fly in the precious 
 ointment of his domestic life : he was convinced that his wife had a 
 secret which gave her great unhappiness, anil he determined to discover 
 its nature and remove her sorrow. Unfortunately, he kept this purpose 
 from her. He thought her sorrow was in some manner connected with 
 her past life, but had not the least suspicion that it could be anything 
 discreditable to her. 
 
 " He communicated his purpose to Mr. Buford, who tried to 
 dissuade him from it, but in vain. He had somehow gotten a clue 
 to her past, which he determined to follow, and, having made a will 
 devising everything to his wife, he went North and after a few months 
 wholly disappeared. He was supposed to have been on a steamer that 
 was lost on Lake Michigan about that time, but of this there was no 
 positive proof. He was known to have been in Chicago the week tafore, 
 and had an engagement in New York the week after, which was never 
 filled. More than three years had elapsed since his disappearance. 
 His wife had remained in possession of his estate, because it was gen 
 erally understood that a will had been made in her favor. After a 
 while it was noised about that there was no will ; and it was only 
 when steps were taken by the heirs to have an administrator appointed 
 that the will then in controversy was offered for probate. 
 
 " The rumor that she intended to remove the slaves to a free State 
 and give them their liberty no doubt hastened the action of the heirs, 
 such a rumor being, as Mr. Buford remarked, regarded as little less than 
 a declaration of war itself. How the rumor arose he was unable to 
 conceive. That she had such a purpose he did not doubt. A peculiar 
 ity of her nature seemed to be an instinctive and ineradicable aversion 
 to this institution, which was manifested more by what she did not say 
 than by any words she was ever known to utter. While she no doubt 
 entertained this feeling, he thought her the last person in the world to 
 have given any hint of her design. But for some investments she had 
 made, he would never have suspected it himself. In short, I gathered 
 from him that our client was not one who asked advice as to what she 
 should do, but simply required a lawyer s aid to carry her designs into 
 effect or protect her against encroachments from others. 
 
 " I was quite prepared, therefore, as our conversation progressed, to 
 learn that the story of the will was a curious one. 
 
 " As I have told you/ said Mr. Buford, I had drawn Major 
 VOL. XL!. 35
 
 544 WITH GAUGE $ SWALLOW. 
 
 Ainsworth s will, according to bis instructions, some little time before 
 his departure, and it was witnessed by two of my neighbors. When 
 it came to be generally believed that he was dead, his wife sent for me 
 to come to her house and requested me to act as her legal advisor. She 
 did not share the general belief in her husband s death, but gave no 
 reason for disbelieving, and remarked that she had thought it best not 
 to say so to any one else, and had only manifested her incredulity by 
 declining to wear mourning or join in the request for funeral services 
 in his memory. 
 
 " These facts would probably have attracted little attention in * 
 Northern community, continued Mr. Buford, with just the hint of a 
 sneer in his calm even tones and clear blue eyes, but with our country 
 people a funeral is the most important event of life, and mourning a 
 formality the omission of which is an evidence of immeasurable 
 depravity. 
 
 " I found the premises in the most perfect order. The master s 
 absence had made no difference with its condition, as indeed there was 
 no reason why it should. Within the house everything showed the 
 most scrupulous regard for his memory. His saddles, spurs, whips, 
 and guns were scattered about the room adjoining her bedchamber, 
 which had been the one he occupied, just as he had left them. This 
 room she permitted no one else to enter, dusting and arranging it with 
 her own hands. The only alteration she had made was to hang her 
 husband s portrait above his desk. This latter she informed me that 
 she had opened but once or twice since his departure, when it became 
 necessary to procure some papers from it. The key had always been 
 kept in her room, hanging at the side of her own little desk, of which 
 she had always exclusive control. The door from the major s room 
 into the " living-" or sitting-room had been closed ever since his de 
 parture, so that the only means of access to it lay through the wife s 
 room. This had always been customary during his absence. In a 
 double drawer of this desk I found the will. It was the one I had 
 drawn and witnessed by my neighbors. I glanced it over, noting these 
 facts, but did not read it carefully. The other compartment of the 
 drawer was filled, as a cursory examination revealed, with bundles of 
 receipts, bills of lading, returns from his factors, and other matters of 
 like character. 
 
 " I advised an immediate probate of the will, but she seemed dis 
 inclined to accept the suggestion. From that time her business has 
 passed through my hands and I have been her constant adviser. I 
 must admit that she has been a model client, listening patiently to my 
 suggestions, but always deciding for herself. 
 
 " { When the heirs began to move for the appointment of an admin 
 istrator, I wrote to her that it was time the will was offered for pro 
 bate. In response she came and informed me that on going to get the 
 will it was nowhere to be found. She declared that she had not seen 
 it nor indeed opened the desk at all since we had seen it together. She 
 averred also, much to my surprise, that she had never read the will, 
 and knew nothing of its provisions beyond the fact that her husband 
 had informed her that he had made a will in her favor. I had no copy
 
 WITH GAUGE j SWALLOW. 545 
 
 oi it, and so could not set it up as a lost testament. Though I vaguely 
 remembered its provisions, I could not repnxluce its language, which 
 was peculiar, and to me in some respects obscure, in the parts dictated 
 by the husband. There was nothing to be done, except to set forth 
 these facts in an affidavit and ask a continuance of the petition for an 
 administrator until further search should be made for the lost instru 
 ment. This was the more readily granted as it was universally con 
 ceded that the estate was in good hands, the court only enjoining her 
 from removing any of the slaves from its jurisdiction and requiring her 
 to make report of the personalty. 
 
 " Some weeks afterwards Mrs. Ainsworth came to my .office, and, 
 after making some inquiries as to what was necessary to constitute a 
 will, produced several sheets of paper fastened together in a manner 
 somewhat peculiar to her husband, by turning down the upper left- 
 hand corner and sticking a pin through the folded part. These 
 sheets were numbered at the top, each page signed at the bottom, dated 
 a few days after the will I had drawn, and were all in the unmistakable 
 handwriting of the testator. This handwriting, it may be remarked, 
 was the most striking I remember ever to have seen, the contracted 
 letters almost as long as the extended ones, and the whole utterly with 
 out shade. He usually wrote on unruled paper, yet the lines were as 
 straight as if laid off with a rule. Where Matt Ainsworth acquired 
 this most difficult and almost illegible hand nobody knew ; that he was 
 very proud of it every one in this region was well aware. 
 
 " The provisions of this remarkable testament were identical, so 
 far as I could recall them, with the one I had drawn. Mrs. Ainsworth s 
 story of its discovery was that her husband appeared to her in a dream 
 and directed her to search in the left-hand portion of the drawer in 
 which the other will had been deposited. There, under the bundles of 
 receipts and other memoranda of the business of passing previous 
 years, she had found the sheets she had brought to me. 
 
 " This is the will we have to defend. There is no doubt about ite 
 being of later date than the one which was abstracted from the desk, 
 of which no trace has been found. How and by whom it was taken is 
 a mystery. I was inclined to suspect our client, but am at a loss foi 
 a motive at least a probable motive for such an act. On the other 
 hand, it will be difficult to supply a motive for this will. It is all 
 right in form. Ainsworth could have taken no better way to make it 
 incontestable. There has been talk about its being a forgery, and they 
 may attempt some such tactics on the trial. This will not be dangerous. 
 The chief difficulty will be to account for its existence at all, and to 
 show that it was found with the decedent s valuable papers as the statute 
 requires. For this Mrs. Ainsworth is our only witness ; and I confess I 
 am afraid of the result. 
 
 " May not Mr. Ainsworth have feared the loss of the attested will 
 and provided this as a safeguard ? I asked. 
 
 " t That, of course, is the hypothesis we must adopt, he answered, 
 quietly. * Does it not seem to you rather strained ? 
 
 " Perhaps ; but what other reason could there have been ? I un 
 derstand you to say the provisions of the two were the same ?
 
 546 WITH GAUGE j- SWALLOW. 
 
 " So far as I can remember, they contained identically the same be 
 quests. Yet I am positive there is a difference in the phraseology which 
 would prevent me from testifying that they were identical. You un 
 derstand? 
 
 " You will not be a witness, then ? 
 
 " Not unless " our friends the enemy" put me on the stand. 
 
 " There was a flash in his steel-blue eyes that augured ill for them 
 if they did. 
 
 " What was the difference you refer to ? 
 
 " The will I drew described the principal devisee simply as his 
 wife, Luella Robards Ainsworth. In the holograph she is described 
 as " Luella Ainsworth, once known as Luella Robards, esteemed and 
 loved as my faithful wife." 
 
 " My associate eyed me keenly as he repeated these words. He 
 evidently expected me to make some deduction which he hesitated to 
 put into words. 
 
 " * It seems to be a somewhat fuller description, I said, after a 
 moment s thought. 
 
 " f Fuller ! he repeated, with an added suaveness in his silvery 
 tones, which I learned afterwards always marked a peculiarly annihi 
 lating thrust at the man who happened to be at his mercy. c Does it not 
 occur to you that it is a totally different description ? 
 
 " How so? I asked. 
 
 " " My dear wife Luella," etc., and " Luella," etc., " esteemed as 
 a wife" 
 
 " His eyes were half closed, and the words fell from his lips in soft 
 musical accents, with an indescribable emphasis on the contrasted terms. 
 I started in surprise as I grasped his meaning. This smooth-mannered 
 man was one whose steel-blue eye caught everything and whose subtle 
 brain permitted not even the slightest change of phraseology to pas 
 unnoticed. 
 
 " And you think ? I asked. 
 
 " I think, he interrupted, with a peculiar meaning in his tone, 
 t that under the holograph our client Luella would take whatever cog 
 nomen she is legally entitled to wear. Is not that your opinion ? 
 
 " There was a grave irony in his tone that was indescribably amus 
 ing, and I answered with a hearty laugh, but said nothing. He smiled 
 pleasantly, and I could see by the look in his eyes that both my laugh 
 and my silence had been well-timed. He evidently thought I knew 
 more than I chose to tell and was not likely to be betrayed into indis 
 creet speculation. 
 
 " On Monday the court sat. It was an old-time court-house, dating 
 back almost to the Revolution. The judge s bench ran across the gable 
 well up towards the ceiling, and was approached by a winding stairway 
 at each end. The bar sat within a semicircular railing in front, flanked 
 on one side by the clerk s desk, on the other by the jury-box. Every 
 lawyer as he entered made a profound obeisance to the judge, which 
 was gravely acknowledged by that dignitary. Mr. Buford introduced 
 me first to the court and then to each member of the bar. The latter 
 were a splendid company of gentlemen, courteous, unaffected, and of
 
 WITH GAUGE f SWALLOW. 647 
 
 marked individuality of character. I soon found myself at home 
 among them, despite the strange surroundings. The carved wooden 
 seats that ran around the enclosure in which the bar sat, the floor 
 covered with saw-dust, boxes half a yard square filled with the same 
 and used as spittoons, the bucket of water standing upon the stove with 
 a gourd floating on its surface, the people crowding behind the bar, 
 unseated except a few on the wooden bench that ran around the side, 
 the judge peering down from his perch just below the ceiling, the 
 curious juxtaposition of order and disorder, courtesy and grime, seemed 
 very odd to me, but I soon found myself at home with the bright keen 
 intellects of the bar. I knew Mr. Buford was watching me, and was 
 conscious that he was gratified at the impression I made upon his 
 brethren. He was no doubt afraid that I might put on airs, which is 
 so frequent a fault with the city lawyer of the North when he con 
 descends to enlighten the purlieus of the country court-house. To such 
 assumption the Southern bar are especially sensitive, as well they may 
 be, since it is doubtful if the bar of any Northern city can compare 
 in thoroughness of preparation, or depth and variety of attainment, 
 with the average Southern practitioners. I was spared from giving 
 offence by a sincere admiration for the skill and learning displayed 
 in the conduct of the business of the court. I can honestly say I never 
 saw as many cases disposed of with so little fuss in any other court I 
 ever attended. 
 
 " During that day I examined the will on file in the clerk s office, 
 and took a copy. The issue had been transferred to the Superior Court 
 for trial by the judge and a jury. I met our client, too, and was cer 
 tainly much impressed by her appearance. She was a slight woman, 
 somewhere about thirty, or perhaps thirty-five, with gray eyes which 
 seemed ever to be filled with a calm surprise, and a mouth rather wide 
 but having lips so full and so finely curved that one easily forgot its 
 offence against perfect symmetry. She said little, met every one s 
 glances, and, without making any appeal, inclined one unconsciously in 
 her favor. Assuring her of the pleasure I felt in serving a daughter 
 of John Codman, she replied, with quiet confidence, as her great eyes 
 <ook me in from top to toe, 
 
 " He was a good judge of a man. 
 
 " That was all, and, though her look seemed to confirm her father s 
 judgment, I never felt less flattered in my life. There was none of the 
 air of compliment about it. It was simply a statement that I was 
 engaged for service, not from sentiment. 
 
 " I do not know why I should have felt piqued by this reply, but I 
 certainly did. I could see that it attracted Mr. JBuford s attention, and 
 he glanced at me with a look of quiet inquiry, as if taking stock of my 
 value. It was evident that he was surprised to see us meet as entire 
 strangers and to learn that in retaining me she had been controlled by 
 judgment rather than impulse. 
 
 " Little was said about the case. The trial was set for Thursday 
 morning, and when Mr. Buford said, inquiringly, I suppose we arc 
 ready? I noticed that her face took on a thoughtful look and her 
 mouth assumed a firmer expression as she replied,
 
 548 WITH GAUGE SWALLOW. 
 
 * l So far as I know, we are. 
 
 " An hour later a note written in a light nervous hand was brought, 
 asking me to dine with Mrs. Ainsworth the next evening, if conve 
 nient. I handed it to Mr. Buford. 
 
 " W T ell/ said he, with a smile, you will go, of course? 
 
 " * I think not/ I answered. 
 
 " Why ? She evidently desires to consult with you before the 
 trial. 
 
 " Probably ; but I have possessed myself of your views ; I could 
 learn nothing more of value; and it is not well that we should enter 
 upon the trial with conflicting hypotheses or a half-independent plan 
 of action. 
 
 " But perhaps she desires to consult you upon other matters, to 
 talk of her father, whom you seem to have known. 
 
 " That can wait. 
 
 " The matter was not mentioned again, and we had no more conver 
 sation upon the case. During the next two days I consulted our wit 
 nesses and briefed their evidence, so that by the time the case was called 
 I felt that I thoroughly understood its strength and weakness. 
 
 " I had already learned that my associate was one of the most noted 
 and successful trial-lawyers of the State. Perhaps the fact that I never 
 excelled in this direction and never hoped to has enabled me to appre 
 ciate this attribute all the more highly in others. When the judge 
 called Ainsworth vs. Ainsworth at ten o clock on Thursday morning, 
 Mr. Buford was at once transformed from the smiling easy companion 
 into the alert and eager gladiator. 
 
 " That is our case, Mr. Gauge/ he said, in a tone that betrayed his 
 delight in the coming conflict. 
 
 " We took our places opposite the jury-box, our client next to Mr. 
 Buford, while I sat in a chair at the end of the table, so that she had 
 a counsellor on either hand, while it was yet easy for us to consult to 
 gether by merely leaning forward across the corner of the table. Our 
 opponents sat at my left, directly in front of Mr. Buford, who made it 
 a rule never to fight an enemy except at point-blank range. Our wit 
 nesses were called and answered, and we announced that the proponent 
 was ready to proceed. The counsel for the contestants did the same ; 
 the jury was impanelled, and Mr. Buford opened with one of the most 
 lucid and masterly statements I ever heard. Our witnesses were there 
 and sworn, and my associate said, 
 
 " Our first piece of evidence, if your honor please, will be the 
 alleged holograph itself. Will you let me have it, Mr. Clerk ? 
 
 " It is among the papers/ said that functionary, pointing to the 
 bundle on our table. 
 
 " * I think not/ said Mr. Buford, running over the file. 
 
 " Then the clerk came and examined the papers carefully, turning 
 inquiringly to the counsel for the contestants when he failed to find 
 the required document. 
 
 " None of as have it/ said the senior of our opponents, with 
 urbane placidity. 
 
 "Then the clerk made further search among the papers in hia
 
 WITH GAUGE $ SWALLOW. 549 
 
 pockets, and was rebuked by the court for leaving such an important 
 document among the ordinary files. 
 
 " You had better introduce a copy and proceed, said the judge. 
 The original will probably turn up before the evidence is all in. 
 
 " The defendants, of course, objected, and Mr. Buford seemed for 
 once at a loss what to do. 
 
 " If your honor please he began, with some hesitation. 
 
 " I reached across and touched his hand. He bent towards me, 
 and I said, 
 
 " I have a copy which I took the trouble to verify. 
 
 " A look of relief came into his eyes, but not a muscle of his calm, 
 colorless face betrayed his feeling. 
 
 " That is what I was about to ask permission to do, he con 
 tinued, without change of tone. Will your honor swear the clerk ? 
 
 " This was done, and, having proved by the clerk and his deputy 
 that a paper-writing purporting to be the last will and testameut of 
 Matthew Ainsworth had been duly filed, and the copy I produced 
 having been duly verified, we asked leave to set it up as a lost will. 
 
 " The defendant s counsel again objected, but the court permitted us 
 to proceed. The witnesses on both sides had examined the original, and 
 all but one or two pronounced it wholly in the testator s handwriting. 
 These, not without apparent misgiving, inclined to a contrary opinion. 
 The chief controversy was as to the place where it was found, the 
 time of finding, and the disappearance of the former will. The ex 
 amination of the proponent was very severe. 
 
 " She was asked in regard to her past life, and frankly admitted 
 that she had quarrelled with her father while yet a school-girl, had run 
 away from home, and had assumed the name of Robards to prevent 
 detection. She had supported herself by teaching in various localities, 
 and had finally come South and taught in several families before meet 
 ing Mr. Ainsworth. Her past had not been an easy or a pleasant one, 
 and she disliked anything that reminded her of it. She had been very 
 happy with her husband. Their tastes had not always been the same, 
 but she had derived th** utmost enjoyment from co-operating with him 
 and carrying out his purposes. She thought no one would question 
 that she had been of use to him ; and for her part she found it impos 
 sible to realize that he was dead: in fact, she could not help thinking 
 of him as alive. She had received several letters from him after his 
 departure, but no communications by mail since the accident to the 
 steamer. The last was from Chicago. She had them all, if they 
 wished to examine them. She had not shown them to her counsel, 
 not supposing it necessary. Her husband had frequently expressed an 
 intention to remove to the North. He was ambitious to engage in the 
 struggle for wealth at the West. In his last letter he had declared his 
 intention to free his slaves, provide for their future, and, with what 
 might be left of his estate, engage in business in Chicago. She had 
 never encouraged this purpose. She was quite contented to live as 
 they had done, not feeling like encouraging him to exchange a cer 
 tainty for an uncertainty. In regard to the loss of the will she knew 
 nothing. She had seen it for a moment, in my hands or those of the
 
 650 WITH GAUGE 4- SWALLOW. 
 
 deputy clerk, on Monday of the term. We were reading, at least one 
 was reading, comparing it with a copy, she thought. She could not 
 remember which had the will. She had not seen it since. In reply to 
 a question, she said she thought her husband relied greatly upon her 
 judgment : she did not recollect that he had ever neglected her advice 
 in any important matter. 
 
 " On the whole, her testimony and demeanor were simply perfect. 
 She disarmed every prejudice, and exhibited the utmost frankness. So 
 fine a combination of shrewdness and candor I had never seen. She 
 seemed to have divined exactly what would benefit her case, and set it 
 forth in the most artless and natural manner imaginable. I felt I had 
 wronged her by my suspicion, and would have found it difficult to ex 
 press my admiration for her. Mr. Buford did not attempt to conceal 
 his. She did not hesitate, nor involve herself in any inconsistency. 
 The result was that the court held with us as to the sufficiency of the 
 depository, the only question in the case which I argued, and the 
 jury decided in our favor all the facts necessary to support the holo 
 graph. 
 
 " The next day I visited our client, took her instructions as to certain 
 matters of business, and, with several others, passed the night at her 
 house, whence it had been arranged that a hunting-party should start 
 on the morrow. I was at first given one of the great front rooms, but 
 after the other guests began to arrive was asked by the hostess herself 
 if I would be willing to occupy a chamber which was just above that 
 known as her husband s room, which Mr. Buford had described to 
 me. She explained, with apparent candor, that no one had occupied it 
 since her husband s disappearance, and she did not like to give it to a 
 stranger. 
 
 (t The room I was to occupy was in a part of the great country- 
 house which had been added to the original structure by, the recent 
 owner after his marriage. It was somewhat more ornate than the older 
 portion, but by no means as well constructed. The floor, as was cus 
 tomary in that region, was uncarpeted, and there were yawning crevices 
 beneath the base-boards, especially at the rear, caused by the sinking 
 of the foundation, and also about the hearth in front of the fireplace. 
 
 " We had a very pleasant evening, the hostess and some ladies of 
 the remoter branches of her husband s family who adhered to her 
 cause apparently because of her devotion to his memory, but in fact 
 because the setting aside of the will would benefit others rather than 
 themselves contributing not a little to our enjoyment. Mr. Buford 
 arrived during the evening, and, to my surprise, was assigned with 
 another gentleman to the room I had at first occupied. 
 
 " It was not late when we retired, for the horn was to sound early in 
 the morning. I fell asleep at once, and slept quietly until awakened by 
 voices in the room below, one apparently that of a man, the other un 
 mistakably that of a woman. I did not mean to listen ; indeed, there 
 was no need to do so to learn that the latter was unquestionably the 
 voice of my client. She spoke without any restraint, clearly and dis 
 tinctly, so clearly, indeed, that I first thought she must be in the room 
 where I was. The man s voice was curiously rnuftled and indistinct.
 
 WITH GAUGE 4- SWALLOW. 551 
 
 I was sure it was not one I knew, and I became strangely confused as I 
 thought I might be acting the spy upon a midnight meeting of a char 
 acter by no means creditable to the parties or listeners. Then it flashed 
 upon me that this woman whom I had all along distrusted had placed 
 me here in order that I might be a witness for her and against her par 
 amour. This I thought was the reason she spoke so loud, while her 
 companion took such pains to muffle his tones. 
 
 " I was not allowed any opportunity to doubt the character of the 
 clandestine meeting to which I was an unwilling listener. Her conver 
 sation was plentifully garnished with words of extravagant endearment. 
 There was laughter, too, the sweet contented laughter of a loving 
 woman, the man did not laugh, and kisses ! You may guess how 
 I flushed with shame as I heard them. I do not know that I was sur 
 prised, hardly anything this woman could have done would have sur 
 prised me, but I was mortified beyond expression at the thought that 
 she had made a fool of me. Which one of my companions of the mor 
 row was it that she was making the victim of her wiles ? I did not 
 know, and determined that I would not. Just as I reached this con 
 clusion, she addressed him by name. Somehow the name seemed famil 
 iar, but I could not recall which of her guests would answer to it. I 
 soon became aware that she was telling her companion about the trial. 
 She spoke of me with plain, cool commendation, as one who thought 
 of the right thing at the right time/ told him what instructions she 
 had given me, and asked his approval. Everything had happened, she 
 said, just as her companion had predicted. She then asked his wishes in 
 regard to other matters, and finally, before I had time to overcome my 
 confusion, I heard her pleading with him not to go. She called him 
 dear/ beloved/ husband/ and implored him in the most impassioned 
 tones to remain. Then I heard her begging him to forgive her for 
 some wrong she had done him ; again she called him by name, his 
 Christian name, Matthew ! How tenderly and reverently she uttered 
 it! 
 
 " Oh, Matthew Matthew Ainsworth, if you knew how I lovt* 
 you, how truly I have always loved you, you would never leave 
 me, you would never have left me ! 
 
 " Good heavens ! I thought, ( it is her husband, the man whose 
 will was yesterday sustained by the court ! Yet if he were alive it 
 could not be his will. 
 
 " The position in which I now found myself was hardly less dis 
 creditable than that in which I thought myself placed by witnessing 
 an illicit amour. What was my duty? I was of counsel and had 
 been instrumental in procuring a curious result, the probate of a 
 living man s will ! Of course there was an appeal, and the wrong 
 might yet be prevented ; but what sort of a position would I be placed 
 in if I attempted it ? Would I ever be believed ? Besides that, cui 
 bono f If the testator and his devisee saw fit to play such a game, why 
 should I object ? They undoubtedly had their reasons for it. At least 
 it was their business, and not mine. The lady was my client, and, 
 though what had been done was contrary to all legal morality, yet, as 
 QO one had any right to complain at a husband and wife playing such a
 
 552 WITH GAUGE $ SWALLOW. 
 
 game with \\hat was their own, I concluded to say nothing about it, but 
 be careful that this strange woman, with her great wondering eyes, did 
 not get me into any worse difficulty. I had agreed to undertake certain 
 matters for her, nothing less than the purchase of lands in Ohio on 
 which to settle the slaves she was to free. There could be no harm in 
 this. Yet I resolved even in this to be very careful, and to decline all 
 further business. You see, I was pretty cautious even then." 
 
 A smile went round the little group at the allusion to what was 
 sometimes regarded as his special failing. 
 
 " I had intended to remain at Edgewood for several days, but this 
 incident made me anxious to leave as soon as possible. The arrival 
 of the mail the next day after the morning run gave me the oppor 
 tunity. I was not much of a horseman, but I was reared in the coun 
 try and had learned as a boy to stay on a horse. I had borne myself 
 well enough in the hunt to merit the commendation of those who were 
 experienced, and could therefore quit without imputation. There was 
 to be a deer-hunt in the afternoon. After glancing over my letters, I 
 announced that I must leave the next morning. After the failure of 
 various efforts to induce me to change my determination, my hostess 
 said that as I would have to leave early, and she wished to consult with 
 me upon business, she would interpose her veto against my going on 
 the hunt and ask me to give her the afternoon. 
 
 " So it was that after the noonday meal I was ushered into the room 
 her husband had occupied and given a great leather-bottomed rocker on 
 one side of a smouldering fire, on which the hickory ashes lay heaped 
 and white. The morning had been chill, and the hint of artificial 
 warmth that filled the room was very grateful. My hostess sat on the 
 other side of the hearth, near her husband s desk. She was certainly 
 one of the most attractive women I have ever met. The only thing 
 that seemed odd about her was that she held nothing in her hands. 
 They did not even caress each other. I do not remember any other 
 woman whom I have ever known to sit down for a consultation without 
 something to occupy her hands while she gave her mind to business. 
 
 " I was curious to know why I had heard so plainly what had gone 
 on in this room the night before, and almost before seating myself was 
 exploring the ceiling to discover the cause. It was not difficult to per 
 ceive the reason. The room was ceiled with the clear heart-pine of that 
 region, but around the sides was a pretentious cornice, from the brackets 
 of which hung pictures, trophies of the chase, and other relics of the 
 departed. It was evident that the bungling carpenter had only run the 
 ceiling-boards out under the edge of the cornice, leaving the open space 
 behind to act in connection with the cracks below the base-boards in the 
 room above as an ever-ready speaking-tube between the two. In a sense 
 it was a very delightful room. There was in it that air of masculine 
 domination which marked it as a man s especial realm, while the evi 
 dences of a woman s presence were sufficiently numerous to show that 
 it had long been subject to joint occupancy. I saw at a glance the 
 secret of my client s power over her husband. She had subordinated 
 herself wholly to his interest and happiness. The room had been built 
 opening off the bedchamber as a boudoir for her ; she had made it a
 
 WITH GAUGE f SWALLOW. 55 j 
 
 smoking- and lounging-room for him, counting herself only as one of 
 its movable attractions. 
 
 " She noticed my scrutiny, and said, with a smile, but without any 
 trace of embarrassment, 
 
 " Did you hear anything unusual last night ? 
 
 " I admitted with a shrug that perhaps my rest had not been undis 
 turbed. 
 
 " I can understand/ she replied, with a quiet dignity, that it must 
 seem very strange to you. I do not understand it myself, and, as I 
 thought I ought to have advice upon the matter, I concluded to trust 
 you rather than Mr. Buford ; not that I lack confidence in him, but 
 somehow I would rather not speak of the matter to one living here. 
 If you heard what occurred here last night/ she continued, as if stating 
 the most ordinary event, you are already aware that Matthew my 
 husband visited me ; and I may say to you that he comes every night, 
 is as pleasant and natural as ever, but I cannot induce him to sit down 
 or stay. He is tender and loving, but seems grieved at something I 
 have done. For a while I locked the door, but every night he came 
 and tapped on the window as he used to do when he came home late. 
 So now I leave the door open, and he comes and goes at will. He has 
 advised me in all this matter. I did not wish to do it, because I could 
 not swear I thought him dead, you see; but others think so, and he 
 gets terribly angry if I speak of betraying him. So, too, I could not 
 say I had received no letters from him since his supposed death. You 
 noticed that I merely said that I had had no communication with him 
 by mail since that time. Why, I get letters from him almost every 
 night. He brings one, and I find it on the desk in the morning. Here 
 they are/ she said, taking up a package from the desk. There is one 
 T received this morning. You see I am doing just what he advises. 
 
 " She handed me an open letter as she spoke. I started with sur 
 prise. It was undoubtedly the same handwriting as the will. I had 
 seen other specimens of Mr. Ainsworth s writing, too, and could not 
 mistake it. It counselled the most implicit confidence in my judgment 
 and directed her to follow rny advice in all things. I could not but 
 smile at the reasons given for this : they were sound enough, but by no 
 means such as my vanity would have dictated. 
 
 " Well/ she asked, with a smile, what shall I do ? You see I 
 am put in your charge with no more discretion than if I were a baby. 
 I don t understand it. It is not like Matthew to do so ; but I suppose 
 he has his reasons, and I have never failed to comply with any wish of 
 his. 
 
 " I did not know what to make of the woman or her story. 
 
 " * Will you let me see his letters ? I asked. 
 
 <{ Certainly/ she replied. * There they are. You will find some 
 love in them, perhaps, but you will excuse that. Matthew has never 
 ceased to be a lover. 
 
 " There were tears in her eyes as she spoke. 
 
 " And now may I go and think ? I asked, with the letters in my 
 hand. 
 
 " You may stay and think/ she rejoined, with a smile. I will go.
 
 554 WITH &AUQE 4 SWALLOW. 
 
 " She rose as she spoke, but still hesitated. She had taken a hand 
 kerchief from her pocket to wipe her eyes, and now stood wadding it 
 up and picking it apart as she said, 
 
 " l He has told me to trust you implicitly and tell you everything. 
 I suppose I ought to do it ; but it is very hard. I shall have to tell 
 you what I never told him, but what he seems to have found out. I 
 was married before I met him ; and my husband is still alive ! 
 
 " She cast down her eyes and grew deathly pale as she spoke these 
 words. 
 
 " But you were divorced ? I said. 
 
 " She shook her head, but did not answer. While I stood stupefied 
 with amazement, she stepped silently backward into her own room, and 
 I heard the bolt shot into its place as the door closed. 
 
 " The fact which she had stated seemed a solution of the whole 
 mystery. The devoted husband, having discovered that his marriage 
 was void, had become anxious only to extricate the woman he loved 
 from her perilous position, and for that purpose had devised all that 
 had seemed so unnatural and mysterious. The letters confirmed this 
 impression. They advised her day by day and step by step. He had 
 renounced his place as her husband, but did not seek to hide his love. 
 He evidently trusted me, and desired me to help him care for and save 
 from peril and disgrace the woman he loved. 
 
 " A tender regard for this great self-sacrificing nature awoke in my 
 heart as I read the letters. Could I help him ? I reviewed the situa 
 tion. I could not make myself a party to a fraud ; but was this fraud ? 
 I could not quite understand why he should take the course he had, 
 but he had an unquestioned right to do as he saw fit. I decided to do 
 as he wished. At the same time, I had an irrepressible desire to see 
 this wonderful man. I thought I could help him more effectively if I 
 could talk with him face to face a few minutes. I wondered where he 
 kept himself concealed in this neighborhood where he was so well 
 known. His presence, of course, accounted for one of the missing 
 wills, perhaps for both. Well, I would help him in his own way. 
 
 " When I had reached this conclusion, I tapped on her door. After 
 a moment she entered, her face flushed, but composed and tranquil. 
 For the first time, I felt a real sympathy for her. 
 
 " * You must have suffered greatly/ I said. 
 
 " She drew a long breath, as if relieved from suspense. f Words 
 cannot express what I have endured. 
 
 " Your husband, Robards ? 
 
 " That is his middle name, she said, in a tone as hard as steel. 
 l( He is a villain/ she added, the most infamous villain that ever lived F 
 
 " Can nothing be done with him ? 
 
 " She shook her head. 
 
 " Does he know where you are ? 
 
 " He thinks me dead. You see, I was drowned, and an inquest 
 held over me/ she answered, after I escaped from him. That is the 
 word, escaped. I meant to die, and would have died but for my 
 daughter. Somebody did die and was buried in my stead. There is 
 the account of it.
 
 WITH GAUGE $ SWALLOW. 555 
 
 "Sh handed me a newspaper slip as she spoke, containing an 
 account of a celebrated disappearance the horror of which I well re 
 membered. 
 
 " You see I am mad as well as dead/ she added, bitterly. 
 
 " And your daughter ? I asked. 
 
 " The woman in whose care I left her no doubt believed the ac 
 count of my death. Before I dared communicate with her, she too dis 
 appeared. I have tried to find her, but cannot. Oh, my child ! my 
 child ! 
 
 " I pitied the woman all the more that she did not stoop to rail 
 against her husband or excuse herself. She told what was absolutely 
 necessary to tell, offering no apology or explanation. She was not 
 thinking of herself or me, but only of the man she loved and the child 
 she had lost. 
 
 " And how much of this did you tell your husband, Ainsworth, 
 I mean ? 
 
 " Not one word/ she replied, positively. 
 
 " Very well/ I said. I will do what I can/ 
 
 " She crossed to the door that led into the sitting-room, opened it, 
 and I passed out. 
 
 " That night I again heard the conversation in the room below. It 
 occurred to me that I might as well have an interview with my un 
 known client and tell him a thing or two. So I slipped on my clothes 
 and stole carefully down the stairs. As I expected, I found the sitting- 
 room unlocked, and, turning the knob, I looked in. I have seen a 
 good many curious thiiigs, but what I saw that night surprised me 
 more than anything else it has been my fortune to meet with. 
 
 " The room was brilliantly lighted. At the desk sat Mrs. Ainsworth, 
 clad in a white wrapper, her face aglow with happiness, chattering away 
 to a portrait of her husband that stood before her and answering herself 
 in a voice so changed that it was no wonder I had not recognized it. 
 While I stood with the door ajar, transfixed with wonder at what I 
 saw, she ceased to talk and began to write. Satisfied of her condition, 
 a new question arose in my mind. Did she write the letters I have 
 read ? and, if so, who wrote the will ? 
 
 "Slipping into the room, I closed the door and stepped forward 
 until I could see over her shoulder. One glance was enough : it was 
 the exact counterpart of her husband s handwriting ! After watching 
 her a few moments, I stole back to bed, more puzzled than ever. People 
 did not talk so glibly about spiritual influence then as they do now, but 
 I must confess that something of the kind occurred to me as the only 
 explanation of the riddles I had seen. After all. it was only a woman s 
 love and a woman s woe working on a woman s conscience, a conscience 
 keener than a Damascus blade in sleep and duller than a Bushman s 
 cleaver when awake. This was my conclusion as I fell asleep. 
 
 " I am going to advise Mrs. Ainsworth to go North very soon/ E 
 said to Mr. Buford as I met him the next morning. 
 
 " And I should advise you to go at once/ was his placid reply. 
 " I m going, of course/ I said, lightly ; ( but why should you 
 advise it ?
 
 556 WITH GAUGE f SWALLOW. 
 
 " I understand you were seen couiing from a lady s room last 
 night, he answered, icily. 
 
 " I think I hardly flushed at this insinuation. And is this the 
 reason you advise my going ? 
 
 " Certainly. 
 
 " < Then I will stay. 
 
 " ( As you please, was his careless reply. 
 
 " Mr. Buford, I said, I don t kuow much about your code of 
 honor, but I do know that common decency requires that a man should 
 not run away and leave a woman to suffer detraction unjustly on his 
 account. Nothing has ever passed between this woman and myself 
 that every one is not welcome to know. I wish I could tell you all I 
 have learned ; but I am bound in honor not to do so. What occurred 
 last night was this. I heard, as I thought, two voices in the room 
 below. I had reason to suspect that something was wrong. I went 
 down and looked in. What I saw was a woman worshipping her hus 
 band s portrait in her sleep, laughing at it, talking at it as if alive, 
 as she really believes him to be. I shall advise her to go North by 
 water from Richmond, because if this thing keeps up she will surely 
 die. She must have fresh surroundings, new associations. 
 
 " Is this true? asked Buford, keenly. 
 
 " Every word. 
 
 " I am glad to believe it, he replied, with dignity, and beg your 
 pardon for my unjust remark. I am the only one who knows what 
 happened. 
 
 " And you ? I asked, with sudden suspicion. 
 
 " I heartily approve your plan, sir, was the reply." 
 
 " What became of her ?" asked Miuton, when the Senior paused. 
 
 "Oh, she disposed of the estate, came North, emancipated the 
 slaves, and invested the remnant of the proceeds in Chicago real estate. 
 I did most of her business for several years, always against Burrill s 
 protest. You see, she used to send me letters from her husband, ad 
 vising the most unexpected transactions, which always turned out well. 
 At first she no doubt believed that he was alive and that these letters 
 were veritable messages from him. She made no effort to verify this 
 belief, but just waited for him to proclaim himself openly. At length 
 I ventured to tell her what I knew. The shock was very great. She 
 put on mourning, and her beautiful brown hair soon became gray. 
 Still the letters continued. She did not lose any faith in their verity, 
 but counted them as ghostly communications from the man she mourned 
 as dead. Her hand, she said, was guided by his spirit. She attested 
 her sincerity by making good to the contestants what they had lost by 
 the will. It is amazing how accurate these mysterious prognostications 
 were. She obeyed them in everything, and prospered wonderfully 
 under spiritual guidance." 
 
 " Spiritual !" echoed Burrill, with a sneer. 
 
 " Burrill never would believe in their celestial origin," said the 
 Senior, with a significant smile, " and never touched the papers except 
 by my express command. For years I did almost all the work myself, 
 just to save his prejudices."
 
 WITH GAUGE # SWALLOW. 557 
 
 "I ve 110 fancy for the devil s billet-doux," said Burrill, with a 
 shrug. 
 
 " Did you ever learn what became of her husband ?" I asked. 
 
 "Which one?" 
 
 " I meant Ainsworth," I replied, " though the other was really her 
 husband, I suppose." 
 
 " Yes, undoubtedly. She was neither Ainsworth s wife nor legatee. 
 Her husband died a few years after, without any suspicion that his wife 
 was still alive." 
 
 " I suppose no one ever learned what really became of Ainsworth ?" 
 said Miuton, reflectively. 
 
 " Pie died the other day, and, as I am the custodian of his will, I 
 have just been summoned to produce it in Chicago. I shall have to 
 send some one, as I cannot leave the city for a week or more." 
 
 " Not me, sir !" said Burrell, excitedly pushing the papers away 
 from him. " I ve had enough of the devil s business. I thought you 
 dropped the whole thing long ago." 
 
 " So I did," said the Senior, with a laugh ; " but one day, about the 
 beginning of the civil war, a man came in and inquired for me. As 
 it happened, I was the only one in the office. He wore a uniform, 
 said lie was under orders to go to the front, and wanted to execute his 
 will. It was already drawn, he said, but he would like me to see that 
 it was in due form and have it properly attested. I opened the paper 
 he handed me, and was horrified to recognize the familiar handwriting 
 of the ghostly missives. Turning to the signature, I saw the name 
 Matthew Ainsworth. He refused to answer any questions, but, seeing 
 in whose favor the instrument was drawn, I told him all I knew about 
 the woman he had thought his wife. I shall never forget the light that 
 came into his face as he realized the devotion of the woman he loved 
 to his memory. Quick ! he exclaimed ; the witnesses ! Then, look 
 ing at his watch, he declared that he had still time to see her before his 
 leave expired if he caught the next train. I called a couple of friends 
 from an adjoining office, saw the will attested, and left with him for 
 Chicago an hour afterwards. They were married on our arrival. It 
 was a great shock for her to learn that the man she had dreamed of as 
 watching over her from the spirit-world had in truth been doggedly 
 working and prospering in the same city, quite unconscious of her 
 presence near him. Yes, he had made a slight change of name : he 
 was called Ensworth instead of Ainsworth. It was by what she said 
 in her sleep that he first obtained an inkling as to the secrets of her 
 previous life, and when he found the evil incurable he just took him 
 self out of the way, never expecting to see her again, but loving her 
 just as much as ever. After that we hail no business from her until 
 this morning I was summoned to produce the will. As it happens, I 
 cannot go, and Burrill won t : so I think you must, Mr. Minton." The 
 Senior turned inquiringly towards him as he spoke. 
 
 "Just as you say, replied Minton, nonchalantly beginning to put 
 his desk in order. " I suppose there is no time to lose ?" 
 
 "Well, no," answered the Senior, deliberately, "though there is no 
 special haste. Of course there will have to be a commission to take
 
 558 FATHER S CHILD. 
 
 testimony before the will can be admitted to probate, and you may 
 have to remain there several weeks. Why not take your wife along 
 and have a good time ?" 
 
 " I should like to do that," said Minton, his face lighting up with 
 pleasure. 
 
 " All right. Here is a check for expenses," said Mr. Gauge. 
 " You may as well use it all." 
 
 Minton seemed about to protest, but the Senior said, laughingly, 
 
 " It won t hurt you, and she can afford it. Send a message to 
 your wife, and get off as soon as you can." 
 
 " I ll do it," said Mr. Minton, as he put on his coat and went out. 
 
 " He s a good fellow," said the Senior, watching his retreating figure, 
 " a good fellow, and I m sorry to lose him." 
 
 " Lose him !" ejaculated Burrill. 
 
 Mr. Gauge laughed, and laid a telegram on the desk before the old 
 clerk : 
 
 " Send Minton with will. Have him bring wife. Draft by mail. 
 
 "LUELLA ENSWORTH." 
 
 " Put it with the papers and seal them up," said the Senior, as he 
 started for his own room. " Ainsworth vs. Ainsworth is finally closed." 
 
 " I don t know about that," muttered Burrill, as he tied up the 
 package. " What do you suppose the old cat means, ordering Minton 
 and his wife sent to her by express, like a couple of packages she has 
 bought and paid for ? Didn t the old man do it neatly, though ?" he 
 added, with sudden appreciation of the skill the Senior had shown 
 in complying with the request. " Oh, he s sharp ! He never makes 
 mistakes in anything, big or little !" 
 
 Albion W. Towgce. 
 
 FATHER S CHILD. 
 
 MY little girl to-night with childish glee, 
 Although her months had numbered not twoscore, 
 Escaped her nurse, and, at my study door, 
 With tiny fingers rapping, spoke to me : 
 Though faint her words, I heard them tremblingly 
 Fall from her lips, as if the darkness bore 
 Its weight upon her : " Father s child." No more 
 I waited for, but straightway willingly 
 I brought the sweet intruder into light 
 With happy laughter. Even so some night, 
 When, from the nursing earth escaped and free, 
 
 My soul shall try in her first infant flight 
 To seek God s chamber, these two words shall be 
 Those that will make Him ope His door to me. 
 
 R.T.W. Dute, Jr.
 
 THE ENDOWMENT OF GENIUS. 559 
 
 THE ENDOWMENT OF GENIUS. 
 
 FOR many years I have entertained an idea which I supposed was 
 wholly original, and which, when I arrive at great wealth, I shall 
 wish to make concrete and practical. The fact that people generally 
 would be likely to consider it fantastic and impracticable will partly 
 account for the silence I have so long shrouded it in. But there are 
 really, as I find, very few original ideas in the world, perhaps not 
 any that are wholly original. The soil of thought, in fact, has been 
 so thoroughly ploughed and pulverized, it was hardly worth while to 
 have entertained the notion that any private thought or scheme has 
 not had a previous, or simultaneous, lodgment in some other brain. 
 As I find at last that I am not likely to be a millionaire, and the 
 thought I had kept so long sequestered has dawned partially to another 
 writer, there will be no harm now in making this disclosure. 
 
 My idea was that it would be a good thing if some man of wealth 
 who is casting about for some worthy object on which to bestow a few 
 surplus thousands should remember that in this country, and in all 
 others where civilization prevails, there are a certain few whom nature 
 has set apart for special work which the best equipped of all the multi 
 tude besides can never undertake or help in doing. All the millionaires 
 in Europe could not, for instance, have written Coleridge s poem of 
 " The Ancient Mariner," or Shelley s " Ode to a Skylark," or Keata s 
 " Ode to a Grecian Urn." 
 
 Neither could they, or the educated class itself, or the kings and 
 generals of the world, have done the work which fell to Robert Burns. 
 But the men of wealth could have made this work easier ; they could 
 have prevented Otway from starving and Goldsmith from being pinched 
 and bitten by wolfish poverty. How gladly they would now do this if 
 these men were now alive and struggling, and it were well known that 
 moderate financial help would not only save them from direct hard 
 ships, but would make them capable of doing more of their best work ! 
 
 I have drawn my names from those of the poets craft, but I do 
 not mean to say that they are the only men of genius. There are great 
 scientists, and great artists, and great physicists, and great physiologists, 
 and great inventors, and great explorers, who might well be helped by 
 some system of financial endowment. Of course the help should be 
 given under some understood system or rule, which should not be mere 
 personal patronage, or have an almsy flavor, though it might be wholly 
 done for one person who is a proved genius by one other person who 
 is a man of wealth and willingness. Why should it l>e considered 
 more ridiculous to endow a man than to endow the university chair a 
 man occupies? or than to endow a university itself? 
 
 The latter is done freely, and the professor who draws his salary, 
 
 and the pupils who receive more cheaply their tuition, by reason of such 
 
 endowments, do not feel pauperized by their benefits. Why, then, 
 
 should a man who is doing special work for the world in a larger sense 
 
 VOL. XLL 36
 
 560 THE ENDOWMENT OF GENIUS. 
 
 than any university be loath to accept his living so as to be free to 
 pursue it ? Or why should a millionaire of true perceptions and be 
 nevolent impulses not delight just as much to endow a genius when he 
 is sure he has found one, as to make any other provision of beneficence? 
 
 The man of genius, to pursue his work fitly, needs a perfect ab 
 straction from merely material cares. If he could make money easily, 
 he has as Agassiz had no time to do so, and generally he lacks the 
 faculty to do so. The problem of his life is a double one. It is both 
 ideal and practical. He wishes to drive the horses of the sun, but the 
 road-cart or farm-cart consumes all his time. If his dealings in the 
 sky or with Pegasus were purely a private matter, like the rich man s 
 yacht or horses or hounds, we could well enough afford to let him 
 alone. But he is working his celestial aims for satisfactions and results 
 that belong to, and will go directly for the benefit of, the whole human 
 race. There is no work that any millionaire can possibly leave behind, 
 no single enterprise that even a government can further, that will bear 
 a moment s comparison in its importance with the legacy Wordsworth, 
 say, or Raphael, has contributed to the world. 
 
 It would be no extravagance to say that the measure of culture and 
 human benefit that has flowed to mankind already from that one artist, 
 Raphael, is beyond computation in figures or words. But the stream 
 of influence is nowise lessened by what has been given from it, but will 
 go on to the end of time. No one suspected when he was at work, four 
 hundred years ago, what a force had come into the world, and no one 
 can imagine how many others of analogous benefit might have come, 
 but were crushed by the material impediments of practical life. 
 
 With the great multitude of men who have no highly unique and 
 special vocation life is mainly a struggle for material place and power, 
 or for the comfortable necessaries of existence. Even this is hard 
 enough but, when our few of finer mould are compelled to add this 
 struggle to the one necessary to their chosen pursuit, it is no wonder so 
 many " mute inglorious Miltons" fall by the way. Ought there not, 
 then, to be some method applied, whereby the same care can be be 
 stowed upon a grand man that we would bestow upon a rare treasure 
 of some other sort? We cannot secure the great man s arrival; but 
 when he has come we can show that we know him and appreciate him, 
 as the bees know and appreciate the one who is, of all others, most 
 valuable to the hive. When "Dexter" was it not? was found draw 
 ing a clay-cart, and the signs of speed in him were unmistakable, what 
 a world of excitement there was ! No harness was too fine, no stable 
 too good for him. He had valets to attend his most delicate wants, 
 watchers by night and by day. I do not say there was the slightest 
 inappropriateness in this. I merely ask if the man of wonderful pos 
 sibilities is not of as much account, and deserving of as much care, as 
 the wonderful horse. 
 
 The great man, or man of genius, will forego yachts and palaces 
 and the muniments of wealth, though he could enjoy them. What he 
 needs at once and mainly is that sure provision which shall give him 
 subsistence and leave him free from worldly toil and worry, as a pre 
 requisite to prosecuting his work. If some millionaire could see this,
 
 THE ENDOWMENT OF GENIUS. 5(jj 
 
 who is willing to further the interests of society by some moderate 
 donation only, he could set some one struggling genius free, and not 
 only do immense good thereby, but he could set also a brilliant example 
 towards well-doing it) others of his class. 
 
 A writer in the Ncition who, not long ago, simply anticipated my 
 idea in part, says, in pleading for "the endowment of private research," 
 that no one can doubt that " mental power is a great endowment. 
 Huxley has well said that any country would find it greatly to its 
 profit to spend a hundred thousand dollars in first finding a Faraday, 
 and then putting him in a position in which he could do the greatest 
 possible amount of work. A man of genius is so valuable a product 
 that he ought to be secured at all cost ; to be kept like a queen-bee in 
 a hot-house, fed upon happiness, and stimulated in every way to the 
 greatest possible activity. To expose him to the same harsh treatment 
 which is good for the hod-carrier and the bricklayer is to indulge in a 
 reckless waste of the means of a country s greatness." Again he says, 
 " The waste of water-power at Niagara is as nothing compared with 
 the waste of brain-power which results from compelling a man of ex 
 ceptional qualifications to earn his own living." 
 
 Now, it may be hard to start a Maecenas-guild of the kind I recom 
 mend, and which this writer has struck the entering-wedge towards pro 
 viding; but it should not be impossible. There is no objection to it 
 that cannot be urged against any other form of public beneficence. If 
 there should be a mistake made sometimes in selecting your man of 
 genius, there are often fearful mistakes made in bestowing funds to 
 other endowments. A considerable part of the money which goes, with 
 the best of motives, to endow existing churches, results simply in making 
 lazy and penurious Christians in the localities so favored. It is a fact, 
 too, with every good scheme that it may miscarry now and then. But 
 let us not abandon a good idea because it requires delicacy and circum 
 spection in its embodiment. For fraud seems to have the faculty of 
 masking itself everywhere, and nowhere as successfully as where the 
 cause is a superlatively good one. 
 
 The " waste of water-{xnver at Niagara" may be deemed a somewhat 
 striking figure, but it is none too expressive. Nothing can be too ex 
 pressive to show how our superlative mind-power, or power of genius, is 
 wasted. One of the men capable of doing the finest literary work done 
 in this country goes into a financial bedlam year after year to make his 
 living, and does it. But he must work, too, when others sleep, to do 
 the tasks that he was specially ordained for, tasks for which all time 
 is far too brief. Another is using his life up by hack-work at a news 
 paper-desk, whose name, in spite of this and of ill health, is close linked 
 with the best literature of this country. A certain inventor whom I 
 knew and he was among the most famous almost starved himself 
 and family for years, and more than once pawned his wife s shawl for a 
 baking of flour, so that he could go on with his experiments. But this 
 list is too long to tell. Others who might be named are now wasting 
 the most precious time in the world to do the tasks which a hod-carrier 
 can do, and which a moderate financial endowment would release them 
 from to the immediate furtherance of their divinely appointed work.
 
 562 THE ENDOWMENT OF GENIUS. 
 
 We do not use rosewood and mahogany to make our hoe-handles 
 and ploughs of, but we do set our finest brains to, or force them into, 
 tasks that are an inexcusable and lavish waste and a bereavement to 
 the world. Suppose Shakespeare, for instance, had not happened to be 
 thrifty. He might have died holding horses at the door of the theatre, 
 and the world would have lost what the failure of Columbus to dis 
 cover America if he had failed is a weak parallel to represent. Who 
 can estimate how many Hamlets and Othellos, even as the case was with 
 Shakespeare, may have been left unwritten by the assumption on his 
 part of coarse and worldly tasks which were necessary to make the pot 
 boil, and to secure the coveted home at Stratfor$tt How pathetic to 
 remember that a great author wrote one of his most charming and 
 classical works, in headlong haste, to obtain the sum necessary to defray 
 his mother s funeral expenses ! If Charles Lamb could have been 
 saved from the direful drudgery of his long and dreary clerkship, what 
 a measureless fund of new and additional delights he might have be 
 queathed to the world ! A million men might have filled his place at 
 the India House ; but who, besides himself, could have produced the 
 least one of his unique and incomparable essays? Perhaps even Foe 
 would have done more with a fair endowment, and not have left the 
 world a lamentable mind-wreck and piteous example. In an age when 
 science has brought material economies into high prominence by every 
 device and invention, must we sit down calmly and say that there is no 
 way to prevent the most precious material in the world from appalling 
 waste and destruction ? Surely there ought to be some provision where 
 by such stupendous calamities may be made impossible, or a little less 
 possible ; for no doubt they have always taken place, only, when they 
 do, we do not always know it. The iceberg strikes the ship, and it 
 never comes to port. Against the iceberg, to be sure, there is no remedy, 
 but to the obstacles that beset the man of genius a thousand purses in 
 every large community could easily apply the extinguisher. 
 
 But the controller of a purse must first see this ; as the deserving 
 recipient of an endowment, by the very nature of the case, can make 
 no sign. He will go on with his work imperfectly, or give it up in 
 despair. So far as he is concerned, even in this case, no favor need be 
 asked. But the cause of civilization and of mankind is closely bound 
 up with the life and work of this one man s mind in a way that mere 
 millions of money do not begin to represent. Can we afford that the 
 treasure so enclosed shall be either impaired or lost ? What greater glory 
 can a Avealthy man desire than to have been Maecenas when Virgil 
 lived? What greater task can he set himself to-day than to yield up 
 a sum insignificant to him, in order that some other Virgil may make 
 human life better for twenty, or for endless, centuries to come ? 
 
 Joel JBenton.
 
 OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP. 
 
 OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP 
 
 WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. 
 
 C. R. R. asks, " What is the meaning of Printers 1 i?" 
 
 Pi or Pie, a printers term used to designate a mass of confused or ovei- 
 thrown types, and plausibly derived from the Pica or Pie, the Romish Ordinal 
 or Service Book which gave its name to the type known as Pica, and of which 
 the preface to the English Book of Common Prayer complains that " the number 
 and hardness of the rules called the pie was the cause that to turn the book 
 only was so hard and intricate a matter that many times there was more business 
 to find out what should be read than to read it when it was found out." 
 
 C. G. asks, "Who, or what, is Rabagas ? The word is much used in 
 O Connor s Life of ParuelF as an epithet of scorn and disgust." 
 
 Rabagas is the hero and title of a five-act comedy by Victorien Sardou, first 
 produced at the Vaudeville in Paris, February, 1872. The satire is directed 
 against Gambetta and Einile Ollivier, the hero being a compound of both. The 
 scene is laid in Monaco. Rabagas, a demagogue who flatters the passions of the 
 multitude, but only wants to get into power to gratify his snobbish love of rank, 
 is won over by cheap bribes and flattery to the side of the Duke, against whom he 
 has plotted, becomes prime minister, and when the insurrection breaks out gives 
 the order to shoot and imprison his old associates. Then comes a change in his 
 fortunes: the Duke needs him no longer, the people hiss him. He is ousted 
 from office, and leaves the stage with these words : " Adieu ; I go to the only 
 country where talents like mine are appreciated, to France." The comedy, 
 which is one of Sardou s masterpieces, was tumultuously received. " You may 
 imagine," says an eye-witness in a letter to the New York Nation, "you may 
 imagine the mixed feelings of a French audience before such an exhibition : the 
 Bonapartists have taken the theatre of the Vaudeville for their head -quarters, 
 and they cheer for ten minutes such phrases as this : Quand une soci6t6 est 
 pourrie, 1 avocat s y met. There is a comical account of the insurrection of 
 Monaco, where one government is formed in a red room, another in a green 
 room, another in a yellow room, and the green, red, and yellow government* 
 successively proscribe each other. This transparent allusion to the scenes in the 
 H6tel de Ville on the 4th September, the 31st October, and the 18th March was 
 cheered with fury. So far, those who hiss are in the minority, and the sergenta- 
 de-ville, whose comrades were killed under the Commune, and whose wives were 
 fleeing for their lives at that period, show an energy in the repression of hisses 
 which is not very surprising." 
 
 C. G. also asks, " What is the difference between a member and an oflidtr 
 of the French Academy? I have the impression that to be made an offititr of 
 the Academy is a very inferior distinction as compared with that of being a full 
 Academician." Can any of our readers answer him ?
 
 564 OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP. 
 
 THE Boston Post throws a little additional light upon a matter that has been 
 under discussion in this department. " We note in the Monthly Gossip, " it 
 says, " a question as to the long-sought Spanish drama El Embozado, men 
 tioned by Medwin to Irving on the strength of his bad memory, and afterward 
 repeated from this source ad nauseam by unscholarly writers who should have 
 known better. There is no doubt that the correspondent is right, though he is 
 not half positive enough in identifying this mythical drama with the well-known 
 Purgatory of St. Patrick, by Calderon, in which, if he will consult it, he will 
 find El Embozado is a character. This is the play that Shelley read and which 
 Medwin misremembered and so perplexed Irving and half a score of writers after 
 him." 
 
 Lippincott s MONTHLY GOSSIP, I have been greatly interested in your de 
 partment of the magazine, and in talking over some items of its contents the 
 other day with a friend, we drifted into mention of Tennyson s " Princess." 
 
 My friend, who is a great reader, asked, " From whom did Tennyson get his 
 idea of that poem?" and asseverated he had found a very distinct outline of the 
 " Princess" in another author of note. 
 
 Now, I cannot trace this, and my friend provokingly tells me, "Look till 
 you do." But, having done what I could, so far, I apply to you for help, and 
 am greatly Your debtor, 
 
 C. F. ESTBRIDQB. 
 
 Your friend may have been thinking of the following passage in the last 
 chapter of Johnson s " Rasselas :" " The Princess thought that of all sublunary 
 things knowledge was the best. She desired first to learn all sciences, and then 
 proposed to found a college of learned women, in which she would preside ; that 
 by conversing with the old and educating the young she might divide her time 
 between the acquisition and communication of wisdom and raise up for the next 
 age models of prudence and patterns of piety." But the idea of a university 
 with " prudes for proctors, dowagers for cleans," is at least as old as Margaret, 
 Duchess of Newcastle s " A Female Academy," which she published in a volume 
 with twenty other " Comedies" in 1662, but which was never acted. This volume 
 is not obtainable in any library to which the Gossip has access. It would be 
 interesting to know whether a copy can be found in any American library, so 
 that a comparison might be instituted between Tennyson and the Duchess. 
 
 J. U. M. is informed that the novel and the play "La Dame aux Cam61ias" 
 were both from the pen of Dumas fils, the novel being written first in 184S. The 
 elder Dumas was opposed to its dramatization, but when the author had been 
 shown the manuscript of a coarse melodrama, founded on his novel, he at once 
 set to work on his own version. Theatre after theatre rejected it, however, and 
 it was not till February 2, 1852, that it appeared at the Vaudeville in Paris, to 
 run for a hundred nights or more. J. U. M. s letter was received so late that hia 
 other question will have to remain unanswered until next month. 
 
 THE ONE HUNDRED PRIZE QUESTION S. 
 
 THE series of questions for the best and fullest solutions to which prizes 
 amounting to one hundred and seventy-five dollars were offered in our February 
 number is continued in the following tlwenty questions :
 
 BOOK-TALK. 565 
 
 41. What event is celebrated in Longfellow s "Hymn of the Moravian 
 Nuns" ? 
 
 42. Whence the expression " eating crow" ? 
 
 43. Who was the original of Rebecca in " Ivanhoe" ? 
 
 44. Whence the proverb " Blood is thicker than water" ? 
 
 45. What city was destroyed by silence ? 
 
 46. Whence the expression " It suits to a T" ? 
 
 47. Who was the original Blue-Beard ? 
 
 48. Whence the phrase " A tempest in a teapot"? 
 
 49. What is the origin of the name Mephistopheles ? 
 
 50. Whence the expression " Dolce far niente" ? 
 
 51. Where is Adam s Peak, and what legends cluster round itT 
 
 52. What was the name of the " simple village maiden" whom the " Lord 
 of Burleigh" married? 
 
 53. What was the legend of the Seven Golden Cities ? 
 
 54. Who was Herne the Hunter? 
 
 55. What is the origin of the weather-cock ? 
 
 56. Whence the phrase " Good wine needs no bush" T 
 
 57. What is the origin of Harlequin? 
 
 58. Whence the expression " A little bird told me" ? 
 
 59. What is a baker s dozen, and how did it originate? 
 
 60. Whence the proverb " A rolling stone gathers no moss" ? 
 
 The Gossip regrets that an error crept into the first list of questions. Num 
 ber 20, instead of reading, " What is the ceremony of Blessing the Pyx ?" should 
 read, 
 
 No. 20. What is the ceremony of the Trial of the Pyx ? 
 
 In answer to many inquiries, the Gossip would respectfully advise his corre 
 spondents that no fuller information can be vouchsafed to competitors than ia 
 already given in the questions themselves. To enter into a private correspond 
 ence with any one of them would manifestly be unfair to the others. 
 
 BOOK-TALK. 
 
 rE self-styled realistic novelists in America are fond of proclaiming them 
 selves the advance-guard of a continuous literary movement which has 
 culminated in "Daisy Miller" and "Silas Laphara." This is as it should be. 
 The amiable delusion of all intellectual leaders is that to them has been 
 intrusted the saying of the final and clinching word. But they lose sight of 
 the great principle of action and reaction by which man s efforts are directed. 
 The course of human thought runs in cycles. If one generation is poetical, im 
 aginative, idealistic, the next is prosaic, critical, realistic; and vice vena. The 
 age of great things done carelessly is followed by the age of small things done 
 carefully; and vice versa. One generation considers the matter, the other the 
 manner; one the value of the thing itself, the other the elegance of the setting.
 
 566 BOOK-TALK. 
 
 An age of earnest and serious purpose is preceded as well as followed by an age 
 of mockery or frivolity, an age of poetry by one of prose. The extravagant 
 idealism of the early Spanish romances was succeeded by the humorous realism 
 of " Don Quixote" and the picaresque novels. The careless strength and 
 grandeur of the Elizabethan poets finds its contrast in the airy nothings, the 
 elaborate felicities, of the Queen Anne men. The sonorous voices of the early 
 Victorians have given place to the limpid tones of the later Victorians, Of 
 course the general truth is but crudely indicated here. The classifications are 
 not precise. A pioneer like Keats may appear before the reaction has set in, a 
 veteran like Browning may survive to become the prophet of a new reaction. 
 America has proved no exception to this general law. The literature which 
 began with Washington Irving and other pleasant imitators of Addison, Steele, 
 and Goldsmith soon broadened and deepened into the romance of Hawthorne, 
 the philosophy of Emerson, the poetry of Walt Whitman, and is now reverting 
 to its former tendencies in the elegant trifling of Howells and James. There 
 are signs in the air that a new reaction will soon set in, or mayhap has already 
 begun. But what will be the final outcome of the struggle, and whether, when 
 Earth is wan and her cities have no sound nor tread, the Last Man shall stand 
 amid the skeletons of nations with a romance or a realistic novel with Haw 
 thorne or Howells in his hand, these, indeed, are questions not lightly to be 
 answered. 
 
 Evolution means progress, and where the vulgar eye sees only in the recur 
 rence of similar phenomena the return of the wheels of being to the old groove, 
 a deeper philosophical insight recognizes an infinitesimal gain at each new revo 
 lution. No great movement has been unmixed good. Every reaction frees the 
 human mind from a small portion of the error that accompanied the original 
 movement, while the error in the reaction calls in turn for elimination by a 
 similar process. 
 
 Every thinking man has within him the possibility of becoming either an 
 idealist or a realist, and not so much his own volition as the accident of birth 
 and environment shall decide the question for him. Faust, whom Goethe makes 
 the type of the aspiring nature in man, says of himself, 
 
 Two souls, alaa ! reside within my breast, 
 
 And each withdraws from, and repels, its brother. 
 
 One with tenacious organs holds in love 
 
 And clinging lust the world in its embraces ; 
 
 The other strongly sweeps his dust above 
 
 Into the high ancestral spaces. 
 
 Every thinking man at the outset of his career, at least, is conscious of this 
 twofold soul. But whichever soul external forces may elect that he develop will 
 be developed at the expense of the other. For " each withdraws from, and repels, 
 its brother." Only by concentrating his energies within the mental and moral 
 limitations of either one or the other can he hope to do any efficient work. To 
 very few intellects, to here and there a Goethe or an Emerson, is it given to be 
 at once symmetrical and strong. Most men purchase symmetry at the expense 
 ot strength, or strength at the expense of symmetry. For the intellectual leader 
 strength is the prime requisite; he must sacrifice symmetry; he must be content 
 to be a half man. If he becomes an idealist, he will hate and dislike the real ; if
 
 BOOK-TALK. 567 
 
 a realist, he will hate and dislike the ideal. Abstractly speaking, his hatred will 
 be wrong. But the measure of our hatred is the measure of our love. A good 
 hater is a more doughty warrior than an amiable pococurante. For the sake 
 of the intense love which enables a great man to do his work, we pardon that 
 hatred for all objects external to his range of vision by which he walls in his love 
 and keeps it strong and deep. The fruits of love endure, they are brought forth 
 in light and knowledge ; the fruits of hatred perish, they are produced in darkness 
 and ignorance. 
 
 A stern contempt for the simpler humanities of life has ever been the note 
 of the idealist. He enshrouds himself in his own virtue, his stomach revolts at 
 cakes and ale. We who dwell within earshot of the market, who live and move 
 and have our being amid the Philistines, are repelled by the haughty language 
 in which Plato, Schiller, Milton, or Carlyle speaks of the common folk whom 
 we love and marry, whom we invite to our fireside, who are our brethren, our 
 friends, our acquaintances, mayhap our taskmasters. We are repelled; yet in 
 our saner moments we recognize that it is this haughtiness of attitude which 
 keeps the poet and the seer unspotted from the world and enables them to do the 
 thinking that shall purify the world. " It is not that we love to be alone," says 
 Thoreau, " but that we love to soar ; the company grows thinner and thinner till 
 there is none at all. It is either the tribune on the plain, a sermon on the mount, 
 or a very private ecstasy still higher up. We are none the less to aim at the 
 summits, though the multitude does not ascend there." The saying has its truth, 
 but not the whole truth. The ecstasy on the heights is excellent, but the sermon 
 on the mount, the tribune on the plain, are likewise excellent. It is noble to soar, 
 it is noble also to descend that we may meet. The message which the saint in 
 his ecstasy has wrested from the infinite must be interpreted to the hundreds on 
 the mount, to the thousands on the plain, otherwise it is of no worth. Doubtless 
 it will be shorn of some part of its glory at each successive transmission, but if 
 only a single ray reaches the multitude they are to that extent bettered. To that 
 extent the saint has not lived and suffered in vain. 
 
 All religion, philosophy, art, heroism, is the attempt of the individual to 
 make intelligible to some other soul in concrete moral, in uttered word, in 
 carven stone, in acted deed that vision of the perfect which suffuses his being. 
 If he considered the masses and strove to reach them, the magnitude of his task 
 would overwhelm him, his tongue would cleave to his mouth, his hand would 
 lose its cunning. But he scorns the masses as Philistines, children of darkness, 
 unregenerate sinners, and his very scorn nerves him to fashion his revelation in 
 some form that will appeal to the chosen few, the elect whom alone he deems 
 it his mission to save. He does not know, it is as well he should not know, that 
 these few in the course of the seasons will enlighten the many. 
 
 Let us vary the metaphor. The great thinker scales the mountain-side, and 
 delves deep into its caverns for the ore of truth. What cares he that the un 
 thinking multitude are surging and wrangling at its base? what cares he though 
 he have only strength to bear his precious burden to the surface? There at the 
 surface it will be seen and recognized at its value by the one or two strenuous 
 spirits who have followed in his truces. That thought heartens him to his task. 
 But his followers have also their appointed task. Theira it is to bear the nugget
 
 568 BOOK-TALK. 
 
 down into the market where it shall eventually be cleansed of all dross, be rent 
 into fragments, and pass into the common currency. 
 
 Thought* that great hearts ODce broke for, w 
 
 Breathe cheaply in the common air. 
 The dust we trample heedlessly 
 
 Throbbed once in saints and heroes rare, 
 Who perished, opening for their race 
 New pathways to the commonplace. 
 
 The oracle has its interpreters. Buddha has his prophets, Goethe his com 
 mentators, Shakespeare his Gervinus, Kant his Cousin. Cousin and Gervinua, 
 commentator, prophet, and interpreter, each in his own way is doing work as 
 urgent as that of his master. Macaulay has been somewhat sneeringly called 
 an ambassador from the educated few to the uneducated many. The sneer is in 
 fact his highest applause, the curse is a blessing. We reverence the discoverei, 
 but the pioneer, the settler, the colonist, the citizen, who succeed him form each 
 an indispensable link in a mighty chain. Nature looks with equal eye on all. 
 
 This, then, is the history of all intellectual progress. The man who lives on 
 the higher plane of his own being, who with mighty efforts has surmounted com 
 monplaces, traditions, and conventions (surmounted, not skirted their base), and 
 who has strength enough to carry his intelligence a furlong further into chaos, 
 to snatch from the formless and the void the thought that shall revolutionize 
 society in the coming generations, rarely has strength enough also to mould it 
 into the logical and verbal perfection which will appeal to all educated and 
 thinking men. Hence the obscurity that is complained of in a Browning, a 
 Whitman, even an Emerson. But other men struggling towards the same goal, 
 who have had their steps directed and their pathway smoothed by the original 
 explorer, can use their untaxed energies in giving form and symmetry to the new 
 truth. These men may even have more strength and use it more tellingly than 
 the men who live on what we have called the higher plane. Tennyson is a greater 
 poet than Whitman, though Whitman s chief concern is with the idea, and 
 Tennyson s with forms of expression. The discoverer of the felicitous word is 
 as original as the discoverer of the new idea, and may be the greater man of 
 the two. 
 
 Nature, indeed, refuses to be classified, she laughs at scientific precision. You 
 cannot draw lines through the rainbow, and say here yellow begins and green ends. 
 The same difficulty attends any effort to distinguish sharply idealist from realist. 
 Hitherto we have been endeavoring in a broad and general way to indicate the 
 progress of the idea in the great creative period, the idealistic period. To fall 
 back upon Thoreau s figure, the idealistic is that period when the ecstatic vision 
 is revealed and interpreted to the hundreds on the mount. But its mission is 
 not yet ended, the thousands on the plain must be reached, the idea must become 
 a part of the heritage of man. The thoughts that great hearts have broken for 
 must be breathed cheaply in the common air, else the great hearts have broken 
 in vain. Saints and heroes rare have perished in vain unless they have succeeded 
 in opening for their race 
 
 New pathways to the commonplace. 
 
 Therefore the creative period is followed by the critical, the assimilative, the 
 realistic period, when the idea is dissected and analyzed by the critic ; played
 
 BOOK-TALK. 559 
 
 upon by the kaleidoscopic fancy of the humorist and the artist in words; sneered 
 at by the cynic ; discussed, angrily and doubtfully at first, but later with wiser 
 apprehension, by the Philistine, until at last its benign influence permeates 
 everywhere. 
 
 On the realist the necessity of limiting himself, of sacrificing symmetry to 
 strength, presses as heavily as on the idealist. He must ignore the higher 
 reaches of the intelligence, he must take no share in the newer gospels, he must 
 shut out the future and accept the present. What we call the ideal is in fact a 
 dim prophetic picture of the future. When the future comes it will not be ex 
 actly like any man s ideal. Yet at present the ideal is the nearest approach we 
 can make towards picturing the future. It looms up from the mist with uncertain 
 outlines as the goal for our attainment, and the wisest cannot determine if it be 
 a mirage or no. The realist wants firmer and more tangible truth : he finds it 
 in the present, in the world of custom around us. 
 
 While the idealist is busy with the transcendental, the uncommon, the mys 
 terious, the fantastic, the exceptional in nature (knowing that by her exceptions 
 nature proves her rules), with morbid anatomy, with psychological problems, 
 with the higher emotions and passions, with shapes of supernal beauty that 
 represent to his fancy what humanity ought to be, and with heroic and romantic 
 actions that represent what it ought to do, the realist prefers to deal with man 
 and nature in their wonted moods, to take humanity as it is, to describe what it 
 does. He accepts the conventions, proprieties, manners of the present as some 
 thing fixed .and absolute. Words harden into things for him. He scouts at the 
 notion that great men should be a law to themselves, forgetting that it is because 
 great men of old did break through the conventions and traditions of their time 
 that we have any religion, any code of morals at all. He accepts the results of 
 great thinking in the past, but only when they have become part of the mental 
 equipment of all educated men, when custom has sanctioned them. Macaulay 
 sees in the orphic sayings of Kant, Carlyle, and Emerson a deliberate attempt 
 at being unintelligible. Howells, who comes later, accepts Carlyle and Emerson, 
 but rejects Browning. 
 
 It may at first sight seem odd to rank Macaulay among the realists. Yet 
 the realists of to-day are the legitimate posterity of Macaulay and Thackeray. 
 Howells, indeed, has claimed descent from George Eliot and Hawthorne, but 
 George Eliot is one of those rare spirits who refuse to be classified and from 
 whom realist and idealist alike may learn. Hawthorne is as distinctly an idealist 
 as Tennyson ; to the modern Americans he has imparted only certain graces of 
 style. Thackeray has defined his own mental position in Pendennis, who had 
 reached "a belief qualified with scorn in all things extant:" (cf. Emerson, who 
 in his own pithy way sums up Thackeray s philosophy thus : " We must renounce 
 ideals and accept London.") Macaulay s hospitality towards things extant has 
 no dash of scorn. His attitude is that of the comfortable British Philistine 
 accepting current faiths, current traditions, without inquiring into their basis. 
 The better fashion of the moment represents abstract truth to him. He has 
 no court of appeal at which to reverse the judgments of the past. There is 
 something very characteristic in his favorite trick of comparing with each other 
 ths famous men of literature or history and according to each his precise share 
 of glory, as if the sliding scale of his own time were unalterable. And as in this
 
 570 HOOK-TALK. 
 
 way he husbanded the energy that might have been utilized in examining into 
 premises, he could devote all his powers to expounding and (in the better sense) 
 vulgarizing conclusions. 
 
 And this is the mission of the realist. He suppresses that soul within him 
 which would soar into the high ancestral spaces, he develops that soul which 
 
 With tenacious organs holds in love 
 
 And clinging lust the world in its embraces. 
 
 It is the latter soul Howells has cultivated most assiduously, withdrawing from 
 and repelling that other soul which found expression in many of his youthful 
 poems, played fitfully about " A Foregone Conclusion," and flared up for a 
 moment, just before its final extinction, in " The Undiscovered Country." His 
 hate, too, is the measure of his love. He distrusts the ideal as heartily as the 
 idealist distrusts the real. The author of " The Pilot s Story" is found in his 
 maturer age speaking in these terms of poetry : " There are black moments when, 
 honestly between ourselves and the reader, the spectacle of any mature lady or 
 gentleman proposing to put his or her thoughts and feelings into rhymes affects 
 us much as the sight of some respected person might if we met him jigging or 
 caracoling down the street instead of modestly walking." To be sure, one must 
 not take this jesting too seriously. Yet it seems the sort of jest that conceals 
 the sincere word. And at all events it aptly illustrates the prevailing mood of 
 the realist, the impulse to look upon his fellows from the stand-point of clothes 
 and manners. Paterfamilias, honest, respectable, humdrum, that is the true 
 man to the realist. Paterfamilias s proper speech is prose, just as his proper 
 movement is a walk. Yet there is something beneath the conventional man in 
 the tailor-made clothes which at times will out, and in rhythmic words, in 
 rhythmic movements, he somehow seems to express a higher and truer and even 
 a more real self. Society is but a thin crust of custom laid over volcanic passions. 
 " O Heaven !" says Teufelsdrockh in " Sartor Resartus," " it is awful to consider 
 that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him ; but are, in very deed, 
 Ghosts ! These Limbs, whence had we them ; this stormy Force ; this life-blood 
 with its burning Passion? They are dust and shadow ; a Shadow-system gathered 
 round our ME; wherein, through some moments or years, the Divine Essence is 
 to be revealed in the Flesh." So speaks the idealist. He looks at man from 
 within, the realist, from without. The shadow-system is Howells s concern. 
 Paterfamilias, with his whiskers, his clothes, his prayer-book, and his small talk, 
 represents the real man to him, not the awful Divine Essence beneath the sim 
 ulacrum, which but for the accident of birth, the specious phenomena of time 
 and space, might have taken on some totally different simulacrum, might have 
 been clothed in the flesh of Mussulman, Hindoo, or Cannibal, and still been the 
 same ME. 
 
 The realist is, in fact, another symptom of the prevailing agnosticism. He, 
 too, aims to confine himself within the limits of the knowable. Paterfamilias 
 may be a simulacrum, yet it is his features that the photographing sun binds 
 upon cunningly prepared paper, hit traits that we most readily discuss and de 
 fine in the arbitrary collocation of sounds which we call language. Paterfamilias, 
 the photograph, language, these things our senses testify to, and the agnostic 
 accepts no other testimony. Here, to be sure, is a measure of truth. Yet, after
 
 BOOK-TALK. 571 
 
 all, these things, will they be to-morrow as they are to-day ? Will language 
 and the photograph report the same Paterfamilias? nay, will it be the same 
 language and the same photograph ? Let us trust that all will have developed 
 into higher things, that as progress has been the law of the past it will be the 
 law of the future. Idealism is an effort towards the future, it is the salient 
 energy ; realism, as Emerson says of conservatism, the pause on the last move 
 ment. 
 
 Yet the pause, too, is right. We must take breath, we must allow our fellows 
 to catch up with us. Progress means not the progress of the individual, but of 
 the race. Differentiation is a temporary expedient ; the aim of nature is solidarity. 
 To borrow two ugly words from Herbert Spencer, we proceed from a crass homo 
 geneity, through heterogeneity, to a fully-developed homogeneity. Man, who 
 began in lawless democracy, could only through the successive stages of oligar 
 chies, despotisms, monarchies, reach the highly-organized democracy whose 
 promise we see to-day. 
 
 God is a democrat ; he loves the child of the idea no better than he does 
 the Philistine. The realist s love for the Philistine places him, by so much, 
 nearer to God. Moses by wrath and haughtiness forfeited to Joshua the 
 privilege of leading the people into the promised land. The realist is the 
 modern Joshua. He estimates himself more humbly than the idealist. His own 
 preferences are less likely to represent general principles to him. If he does not 
 like cakes and ale, he at least has no scorn for his brother who does. " Ah ! poor 
 Real Life which I love," cries Howells, in his earliest novel " Their Wedding 
 Journey," " can I make others share the delight I find in thy foolish and insipid 
 face ?" Howells s dislike of the ideal largely arises from its intellectual phari- 
 aeeism, its uucharitableness to common folk, its glorification of genius into an 
 aristocracy that can do no wrong. " We do not despair," says the Editor s Study, 
 " of the day when the poor honest herd of humankind shall give universal utter 
 ance to the universal instinct, and shall hold selfish power in politics, in art, in 
 religion, for the devil that it is; when neither its crazy pride nor its amusing 
 vanity shall be flattered by the puissance of the geniuses who have forgotten 
 their duty to the common weakness and have abused it to their own glory. In 
 that day we shall shudder at many monsters of passion, of self-indulgence, of 
 heartlessness, whom we still more or less openly adore for their genius, and shall 
 account no man worshipful whom we do not feel and know to be good." Else 
 where the Study rejoices that " the penetrating spirit of democracy has found its 
 expression in the very quality of literature ; the old oligarchic republic of letters 
 ifl passing; already we have glimpses of the Commune." And still again the 
 owner of the Study exhorts us to consider the view of a correspondent who looked 
 upon novel-reading as an amusement, like horse-racing or card-playing, for 
 which he had no time when he entered upon the serious business of life, and 
 " not to dismiss it with high literary scorn as that of some Boeotian dull to the 
 beauty of art," which indeed is the lordly manner of the Idealist. " Refuse 
 it as we may, it is still the feeling of the vast majority of people for whom life 
 is earnest, and who find only a distorted and misleading likeness of it in our 
 books. We may fold ourselves in our gowns and close the doors of our studies, 
 and affect to despise this rude voice ; but we cannot shut it out." To Matthew 
 Arnold, for example, the voices of the vast majority are as sounding brass, only 
 the remnant are worth considering.
 
 572 BOOK-TALK. 
 
 East and West are contraries, yet in order to go north the ship must tack 
 first to the east and then to the west. The East cries, " Lo, here is the way!" 
 and the West cries, " Lo, here is the way I" but the mariner knows that he can 
 not give implicit credence to either, though he must yield a half-faith to both. 
 And as he follows the north star by sailing first to the east and then to the west, 
 so man travels his appointed path, through continuous action and reaction, from 
 radicalism to conservatism, from idealism to realism, with the net result of 
 keeping on the straight line of truth. 
 
 A curious contrast suggests itself between mile Zola s "La Terre" (G. 
 Oharpentier, Paris) and Harold Frederic s " Seth s Brother s Wife" (Scribners). 
 Both are " realistic" novels. Both are studies of country life, one in France and 
 the other in America. Zola s picture is literally the naked truth ; in Frederic s 
 the truth is veiled and clothed in the conventional garb which the American 
 novelist is obliged to assume. It is doubtful whether the average morality of the 
 American peasantry is superior to that of the French. But no American novelist 
 would be allowed to dwell upon this phase of our country life. We need not 
 now discuss whether this is or is not for the best. The startling thing is that 
 with all Zola s frankness, his nastiness, if you will, indeed, with all his exagger 
 ation, for Zola does give unnecessary prominence to mere wickedness, the 
 country life he pictures is not so repellent, so raw, so depressingly coarse and 
 ugly, as the country life of Mr. Frederic s novel. Partly, of course, this is owing 
 to the fact that Zola is a great genius, and Frederic only a man of considerable 
 talent (a genius cannot help coloring his work with the high lights of his own 
 imagination), but in far greater measure it is due to the fact which Hawthorne 
 often commented upon, that our country is as yet too young and too crude to 
 afford a lodgment for the romantic or the poetical. Life outside of our great 
 cities is crass, unformed, uncouth : the picturesque element can only be added by 
 time. Mr. Frederic has given us a truthful sketch. But we infinitely prefer 
 Zola. And if you want to contrast American with French country life you 
 should obtain not Zola in the original, but Zola in George D. Cox s translation 
 (Petersons), which leaves out the nastiness, with no serious detriment to an ex 
 ceptionally strong and powerful piece of fiction. 
 
 A very curious book, entitled "It is the Law," has been written by T. E. 
 Willson. A young gentleman who is uncertain whether he is in love with a mar 
 ried woman or his own aunt, but overwhelms them both with caresses, an uncle 
 who marries his niece when she is only twelve and beguiles the honey-moon by 
 telling her unclean stories, gentlemen with two wives, each of whom is the only 
 legal wife within the boundaries of different States, gentlemen with three wives, 
 ladies with two husbands, and ladies with three husbands, all in the same delight 
 ful predicament, and all continually weaving themselves into the woof of each 
 other s lives, form such a curious net-work of adultery and incest, within the 
 limits of lawful wedlock, that the reader finds it difficult to keep the thread of 
 the story, especially as the novel, though clever in parts, is thrown together 
 hastily and inartistically. The evident aim of the author has been to call at 
 tention to the shameful condition of our marriage and divorce laws, and, by in 
 ference, to urge the necessity of Federal intervention.
 
 CURRENT NOTES. 573 
 
 CUKKENT NOTES. 
 
 IT is time that respectable merchants combined with consumers for the sup 
 pression of all gift, prize, and lottery schemes in connection with the sale of 
 articles of merchandise. These schemes are not only demoralizing to legitimate 
 business and to the morals of the community, but in the extent to which they 
 are being carried in the sale of articles of food have become a source of great 
 danger to the public health. They are, no matter in what form they appear, 
 nothing more nor less than devices to swindle honest and unsuspecting people. 
 
 It is gratifying to learn that in some instances the officers of the law have 
 taken hold of the matter. In New York, and also in Chicago, parties who in 
 this way offered gifts to purchasers of their packages have recently been arrested 
 upon indictments for lottery swindling. The latest candidates, both for public 
 execration and criminal prosecution, are the manufacturers of the alum baking 
 powders, who are, both by means of gifts and lottery tickets, disposing of large 
 quantities of their corrosively poisonous compounds, which are so well known 
 to be detrimental to health that no housekeeper will admit them to her kitchen 
 knowingly. This form of swindle is not only being peddled from house to house, 
 but, under the promise of large profits to be realized, the manufacturers are in 
 trenching themselves behind the counters of many grocers by getting them to 
 offer the alum goods with the gifts or lottery tickets attached, thereby shifting 
 the liability to prosecution, in part, upon other and perhaps innocent parties. 
 Every grocer or dealer, for instance, who sells or offers for sale any of the prize 
 or lottery baking powders is a criminal in the eye of the law, and liable, upon 
 conviction, to fine and imprisonment, while those who sell the gift goods are, 
 morally, as responsible, for they are offering an inducement, or prize, to house 
 keepers to use a food that contains a corrosive poison. This is a predicament in 
 which it is not possible that merchants will care to place themselves when they 
 come to think seriously of the matter. 
 
 It must be borne in mind that every one of these gift or prize baking pow 
 ders are alum baking powders. These powders cost less than four cents a pound 
 to produce ; the gift or prize costs but a few cents more. They are sold at the 
 price of a first-class baking powder, so that the swindle, in a commercial sense, 
 is enormous. But the chief iniquity of the business consists in selling, as pre 
 sumably wholesome, an article of a positively injurious character, and by means 
 of gifta or bribes inducing servants or unsuspecting housekeepers to purchase 
 and use it in our daily food. 
 
 There should be some prompt method of reaching these dangerous practices 
 and punishing the parties engaged in their promotion. If the present laws are 
 not ample, we commend the matter to the consideration of our State Board of 
 Health for recommendation of such additional legislation as shall be effective 
 for the protection of the public. 
 
 " A MISS is as good as a mile," a proverb which in ita present form is non 
 sense, is therefore conjectured to have been originally " An inch of a miss is 
 as good as a mile," corresponding to the German " Almost never killed a fly"
 
 574 CURRENT NOTES. 
 
 (Bcinahc bringt keine Mucke um), the Danish " Ail-but saved many a man" 
 (Nasr hielper mangen Mand} and " Almost kills no man" (Ncerved tlaaer ingen 
 Mand ihicl), and, indeed, to the old English " Almost was never hanged." But 
 it ia not impossible that the proverb originally stood " Amis is as good as 
 Amile," these being the names of two legendary soldiers of Charlemagne, titular 
 heroes of a famous chanson de geste, who were as like one another as the two 
 Dromioa of Shakespeare, who took up each other s quarrels, and who after 
 being adopted into the traditions of the Church as martyrs might be invoked 
 indifferently. 
 
 HORSFORD S ACID PHOSPHATE IMPROVES NUTRITION. Dr. A. Trau, Phil 
 adelphia, says, " It promotes digestion, and improves general nutrition of the 
 nervous system." 
 
 "A FEATHER in his cap," an expression signifying honor, distinction, arose 
 from the custom prevalent among the ancient Syrians and perpetuated to this 
 day among the various savage or semi-civilized tribes of Asia and America of 
 adding a new feather to their head-gear for every enemy slain. In the days of 
 chivalry the maiden knight received his casque featherless and won his plumes 
 as he had won his spurs. In a manuscript written by Richard Hansard in 1598 
 and preserved in the British Museum, it is said of the Hungarians, " It hath been 
 an antient custom among them that none shoulde wear a fether but he who had 
 killed a Turk, to whom onlie yt was lawful to shew the number of fethers in his 
 cappo." In Scotland and Wales it is still customary for the sportsman who kills 
 the first woodcock to pluck out a feather and stick it in his cap. 
 
 HORSFORD S ACID PHOSPHATE IN NERVOUS DEBILITY. Dr. W. J. Burt, 
 Austin, Texas, says, " I used it in a case of nervous debility, and very great im 
 provement followed/ 
 
 AN interesting experiment will be tried in Lippincott s for May, which will 
 be a No-Name number, contributed to by some of the most popular writers in 
 America, whose names will be divulged in a future number. 
 
 HORSFORD S ACID PHOSPHATE THE BEST RESTORER. Dr. T. C. Smith, 
 Charlotte, North Carolina, says, "It is an invaluable nerve-tonic, aud the best 
 restorer when the energies flag and the spirits droop." 
 
 EVERY one knows that cocoa is an excellent tonic. Taken in the morning, 
 at breakfast, it has no equal for nutrition and strengthening qualities ; but it can 
 be taken with advantage at any time. It is especially recommended for nursing 
 mothers, to whom its benefits are invaluable. Unfortunately, cocoa is sometimes 
 mixed with starch, arrow-root, or sugar, and thus loses a great part of its special 
 properties ; hence great care should be taken to procure the best in the market. 
 Baker s Breakfast Cocoa and Chocolate preparations have long been the standard 
 of excellence, and are guaranteed absolutely pure. 
 
 HORSFORD S ACID PHOSPHATE IMPORTANT. Dr. T. C. Smith, Charlotte, 
 North Carolina, says, "I attach to it the highest importance, not only as sm 
 agreeable cooling drink, but as a therapeutic agent of well-defined and specific 
 value."
 
 DATE DUE 
 
 GAYLORD 
 
 PRINTED IN U S A
 
 000 819 172