THE GREATER INCLINATION THE TOUCHSTONE THE GREATER INCLINATION THE TOUCHSTONE BY EDITH WHARTON NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS 1914 MOFFITT - UGL THE GREATER INCLINATION COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER s SONS THE TOUCHSTONE COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER 8 SONS TABLE OF CONTENTS THE GREATER INCLINATION LiSRAI The Muse s Tragedy . . ..... \ r , II A Journey .......... 27 III The Pelican ...... 49 IV Souls Belated ........ 83 A Coward VI The Twilight of the God ....... 159 VII A Cup of Cold Water ........ 183 VIII The Portrait .... THE TOUCHSTONE 255 THE GREATER INCLINATION THE MUSE S TRAGEDY DANYERS afterwards liked to fancy that he had recognized Mrs. Anerton at once; but that, of course, was absurd, since he had seen no portrait of her she affected a strict anonymity, refusing even her photograph to the most privileged and from Mrs. Memorall, whom he revered and cul tivated as her friend, he had extracted but the one im pressionist phrase: "Oh, well, she s like one of those old prints where the lines have the value of color." He was almost certain, at all events, that he had been thinking of Mrs. Anerton as he sat over his breakfast in the empty hotel restaurant, and that, looking up on the approach of the lady who seated herself at the table near the window, he had said to himself, " That might be she." Ever since his Harvard days he was still young enough to think of them as immensely remote Dan- yers had dreamed of Mrs. Anerton, the Silvia of Vin cent Rendle s immortal sonnet-cycle, the Mrs. A. of the Life and Letters. Her name was enshrined in some of the noblest English verse of the nineteenth century and of all past or future centuries, as Danyers, from the stand-point of a maturer judgment, still believed. The first reading of certain poems of the Antinous, the THE MUSE S TRAGEDY Pia Tolomei, the Sonnets to Silvia, had been epochs in Danyers s growth, and the verse seemed to gain in mel lowness, in amplitude, in meaning as one brought to its interpretation more experience of life, a finer emotional sense. Where, in his boyhood, he had felt only the per fect, the almost austere beauty of form, the subtle in terplay of vowel-sounds, the rush and fulness of lyric emotion, he now thrilled to the close-packed signifi cance of each line, the allusiveness of each word his imagination lured hither and thither on fresh trails of thought, and perpetually spurred by the sense that, be yond what he had already discovered, more marvellous regions lay waiting to be explored. Danyers had writ ten, at college, the prize essay on Rendle s poetry (it chanced to be the moment of the great man s death); he had fashioned the fugitive verse of his own storm-and-stress period on the forms which Rendle had first given to English metre; and when two years later the Life and Letters appeared, and the Silvia of the sonnets took substance as Mrs. A., he had included in his worship of Rendle the woman who had inspired not only such divine verse but such playful, tender, incom parable prose. Danyers never forgot the day when Mrs. Memorall happened to mention that she knew Mrs. Anerton. He had known Mrs. Memorall for a year or more, and had somewhat contemptuously classified her as the kind of [2] THE MUSE S TRAGEDY woman who runs cheap excursions to celebrities; when one afternoon she remarked, as she put a second lump of sugar in his tea: "Is it right this time? You re almost as particular as Mary Anerton." "Mary Anerton?" "Yes, I never can remember how she likes her tea. Either it s lemon with sugar, or lemon without sugar, or cream without either, and whichever it is must be put into the cup before the tea is poured in; and if one hasn t remembered, one must begin all over again. I suppose it was Vincent Rendle s way of tak ing his tea and has become a sacred rite." "Do you know Mrs. Anerton?" cried Danyers, dis turbed by this careless familiarity with the habits of his divinity. " And did I once see Shelley plain? Mercy, yes! She and I were at school together she s an Ameri can, you know. We were at a pension near Tours for nearly a year; then she went back to New York, and I didn t see her again till after her marriage. She and Anerton spent a winter in Rome while my husband was attached to our Legation there, and she used to be with us a great deal." Mrs. Memorall smiled reminiscently. "It was the winter." "The winter they first met ?" "Precisely but unluckily I left Rome just before THE MUSE S TRAGEDY the meeting took place. Wasn t it too bad? I might have been in the Life and Letters. You know he mentions that stupid Madame Vodki, at whose house he first saw her." "And did you see much of her after that?" "Not during Rendle s life. You know she has lived in Europe almost entirely, and though I used to see her off and on when I went abroad, she was always so engrossed, so preoccupied, that one felt one wasn t wanted. The fact is, she cared only about his friends she separated herself gradually from all her own people. Now, of course, it s different; she s desper ately lonely; she s taken to writing to me now and then; and last year, when she heard I was going abroad, she asked me to meet her in Venice, and I spent a week with her there." "And Rendle?" Mrs. Memorall smiled and shook her head. "Oh, I never was allowed a peep at him; none of her old friends met him, except by accident. Ill-natured peo ple say that was the reason she kept him so long. If one happened in while he was there, he was hustled into Anerton s study, and the husband mounted guard till the inopportune visitor had departed. An- erton, you know, was really much more ridiculous about it than his wife. Mary was too clever to lose her head, or at least to show she d lost it but [*] THE MUSE S TRAGEDY Anerton couldn t conceal his pride in the conquest I ve seen Mary shiver when he spoke of Rendle as our poet. Rendle always had to have a certain seat at the dinner-table, away from the draught and not too near the fire, and a box of cigars that no one else was allowed to touch, and a writing-table of his own in Mary s sitting-room and Anerton was always tell ing one of the great man s idiosyncrasies: how he never would cut the ends of his cigars, though An erton himself had given him a gold cutter set with a star-sapphire, and how untidy his writing-table was, and how the house-maid had orders always to bring the waste-paper basket to her mistress before empty ing it, lest some immortal verse should be thrown into the dust-bin." "The Anertons never separated, did they?" "Separated? Bless you, no. He never would have left Rendle ! And besides, he was very fond of his wife." "And she?" "Oh, she saw he was the kind of man who was fated to make himself ridiculous, and she never in terfered with his natural tendencies." From Mrs. Memorall, Danyers further learned that Mrs. Anerton, whose husband had died some years before her poet, now divided her life between Rome, where she had a small apartment, and England, where [5] THE MUSE S TRAGEDY she occasionally went to stay with those of her friends who had been Rendle s. She had been engaged, for some time after his death, in editing some juvenilia which he had bequeathed to her care; but that task being accomplished, she had been left without defi nite occupation, and Mrs. Memorall, on the occasion of their last meeting, had found her listless and out of spirits. "She misses him too much her life is too empty. I told her so I told her she ought to marry." "Oh!" "Why not, pray? She s a young woman still what many people would call young," Mrs. Memorall inter jected, with a parenthetic glance at the mirror. "Why not accept the inevitable and begin over again? All the King s horses and all the King s men won t bring Rendle to life and besides, she didn t marry him when she had the chance." Danyers winced slightly at this rude fingering of his idol. Was it possible that Mrs. Memorall did not see what an anti-climax such a marriage would have been? Fancy Rendle "making an honest woman" of Silvia; for so society would have viewed it! How such a reparation would have vulgarized their past it would have been like "restoring" a masterpiece; and how exquisite must have been the perceptions of the woman who, in defiance of appearances, and perhaps of [6] THE MUSE S TRAGEDY her own secret inclination, chose to go down to pos terity as Silvia rather than as Mrs. Vincent Rendle! Mrs. Memorall, from this day forth, acquired an interest in Danyers s eyes. She was like a volume of unindexed and discursive memoirs, through which he patiently plodded in the hope of finding embedded amid layers of dusty twaddle some precious allusion to the subject of his thought. When, some months later, he brought out his first slim volume, in which the remodelled college essay on Rendle figured among a dozen somewhat overstudied "apprecia tions," he offered a copy to Mrs. Memorall; who surprised him, the next time they met, with the an nouncement that she had sent the book to Mrs. An- erton. Mrs. Anerton in due time wrote to thank her friend. Danyers was privileged to read the few lines in which, in terms that suggested the habit of "ac knowledging" similar tributes, she spoke of the au thor s " feeling and insight," and was "so glad of the opportunity," etc. He went away disappointed, with out clearly knowing what else he had expected. The following spring, when he went abroad, Mrs. Memorall oifered him letters to everybody, from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Louise Michel. She did not include Mrs. Anerton, however, and Danyers knew, from a previous conversation, that Silvia ob- [7] THE MUSE S TRAGEDY jected to people who " brought letters." He knew also that she travelled during the summer, and was unlikely to return to Rome before the term of his holiday should be reached, and the hope of meeting her was not included among his anticipations. The lady whose entrance broke upon his solitary repast in the restaurant of the Hotel Villa d Este had seated herself in such a way that her profile was detached against the window; and thus viewed, her domed forehead, small arched nose, and fastidi ous lip suggested a silhouette of Marie Antoinette. In the lady s dress and movements in the very turn of her wrist as she poured out her coffee Danyers thought he detected the same fastidious ness, the same air of tacitly excluding the obvious and unexceptional. Here was a woman who had been much bored and keenly interested. The waiter brought her a Secolo, and as she bent above it Danyers noticed that the hair rolled back from her forehead was turn ing gray; but her figure was straight and slender, and she had the invaluable gift of a girlish back. The rush of Anglo-Saxon travel had not set to ward the lakes, and with the exception of an Italian family or two, and a hump-backed youth with an abbe, Danyers and the lady had the marble halls of the Villa d Este to themselves. When he returned from his morning ramble among THE MUSE S TRAGEDY the hills he saw her sitting at one of the little tables at the edge of the lake. She was writing, and a heap of books and newspapers lay on the table at her side. That evening they met again in the garden. He had strolled out to smoke a last cigarette before dinner, and under the black vaulting of ilexes, near the steps leading down to the boat-landing, he found her lean ing on the parapet above the lake. At the sound of his approach she turned and looked at him. She had thrown a black lace scarf over her head, and in this sombre setting her face seemed thin and unhappy. He remembered afterwards that her eyes, as they met his, expressed not so much sorrow as profound discontent. To his surprise she stepped toward him with a detaining gesture. "Mr. Lewis Danyers, I believe?" He bowed. "I am Mrs. Anerton. I saw your name on the vis itors list and wished to thank you for an essay on Mr. Rendle s poetry or rather to tell you how much I appreciated it. The book was sent to me last winter by Mrs. Memorall." She spoke in even melancholy tones, as though the habit of perfunctory utterance had robbed her voice of more spontaneous accents; but her smile was charming. [9] THE MUSE S TRAGEDY They sat down on a stone bench under the ilexes, and she told him how much pleasure his essay had given her. She thought it the best in the book she was sure he had put more of himself into it than into any other; was she not right in conjecturing that he had been very deeply influenced by Mr. Rendle s poetry? Pour comprendre il faut aimer, and it seemed to her that, in some ways, he had penetrated the poet s inner meaning more completely than any other critic. There were certain problems, of course, that he had left untouched; certain aspects of that many-sided mind that he had perhaps failed to seize "But then you are young," she concluded gently, "and one could not wish you, as yet, the experience that a fuller understanding would imply." II SHE stayed a month at Villa d Este, and Danyers was with her daily. She showed an unaffected pleasure in his society; a pleasure so obviously founded on their common veneration of Rendle, that the young man could enjoy it without fear of fatuity. At first he was merely one more grain of frankincense on the altar of her insatiable divinity; but gradually a more per sonal note crept into their intercourse. If she still liked him only because he appreciated Rendle, she at least [10] THE MUSE S TRAGEDY perceptibly distinguished him from the herd of Rendle s appreciators. Her attitude toward the great man s memory struck Danyers as perfect. She neither proclaimed nor dis avowed her identity. She was frankly Silvia to those who knew and cared; but there was no trace of the Egeria in her pose. She spoke often of Rendle s books, but seldom of himself; there was no posthumous conju gality, no use of the possessive tense, in her abounding reminiscences. Of the master s intellectual life, of his habits of thought and work, she never wearied of talk ing. She knew the history of each poem ; by what scene or episode each image had been evoked; how many times the words in a certain line had been transposed; how long a certain adjective had been sought, and what had at last suggested it; she could even explain that one impenetrable line, the torment of critics, the joy of detractors, the last line of The Old Odysseus. Danyers felt that in talking of these things she was no mere echo of Rendle s thought. If her identity had appeared to be merged in his it was because they thought alike, not because he had thought for her. Pos terity is apt to regard the women w r hom poets have sung as chance pegs on which they hung their gar lands; but Mrs. Anerton s mind was like some fertile garden wherein, inevitably, Rendle s imagination had rooted itself and flowered. Danyers began to see how [11] THE MUSE S TRAGEDY many threads of his complex mental tissue the poet had owed to the blending of her temperament with his; in a certain sense Silvia had herself created the Sonnets to Silvia. To be the custodian of Rendle s inner self, the door, as it were, to the sanctuary, had at first seemed to Danyers so comprehensive a privilege that he had the sense, as his friendship with Mrs. Anerton advanced, of forcing his way into a life already crowded. What room was there, among such towering memories, for so small an actuality as his ? Quite suddenly, after this, he discovered that Mrs. Memorall knew better: his fortunate friend was bored as well as lonely. "You have had more than any other woman!" he had exclaimed to her one day; and her smile flashed a derisive light on his blunder. Fool that he was, not to have seen that she had not had enough! That she was young still do years count? tender, human, a woman ; that the living have need of the living. After that, when they climbed the alleys of the hanging park, resting in one of the little ruined tem ples, or watching, through a ripple of foliage, the re mote blue flash of the lake, they did not always talk of Rendle or of literature. She encouraged Danyers to speak of himself; to confide his ambitions to her; she asked him the questions which are the wise woman s substitute for advice. [12] THE MUSE S TRAGEDY "You must write/ she said, administering the most exquisite flattery that human lips could give. Of course he meant to write why not to do some thing great in his turn? His best, at least; with the resolve, at the outset, that his best should be the best. Nothing less seemed possible with that mandate in his ears. How she had divined him; lifted and disen tangled his groping ambitions; laid the awakening touch on his spirit with her creative Let there be light! It was his last day with her, and he was feeling very hopeless and happy. "You ought to write a book about him" she went on gently. Danyers started; he was beginning to dislike Ren- die s way of walking in unannounced. "You ought to do it," she insisted. "A complete in terpretation a summing-up of his style, his purpose, his theory of life and art. No one else could do it as well." He sat looking at her perplexedly. Suddenly dared he guess? "I couldn t do it without you," he faltered. "I could help you I would help you, of course." They sat silent, both looking at the lake. It was agreed, when they parted, that he should rejoin her six weeks later in Venice. There they were to talk about the book. [ "1 THE MUSE S TRAGEDY III Lago d lseo, August 14th. WHEN I said good-by to you yesterday I prom ised to come back to Venice in a week: I was to give you your answer then. I was not honest in saying that; I didn t mean to go back to Venice or to see you again. I was running away from you and I mean to keep on running ! If you won t, / must. Somebody must save you from marrying a disappointed woman of well, you say years don t count, and why should they, after all, since you are not to marry me ? That is what I dare not go back to say. You are not to marry me. We have had our month together in Venice (such a good month, was it not?) and now you are to go home and write a book any book but the one we didn t talk of! and I am to stay here, attitudinizing among my memories like a sort of female Tithonus. The dreariness of this enforced immortality ! But you shall know the truth. I care for you, or at least for your love, enough to owe you that. You thought it was because Vincent Rendle had loved me that there was so little hope for you. I had had what I wanted to the full; wasn t that what you said? It is just when a man begins to think he understands a woman that he may be sure [14] THE MUSE S TRAGEDY he doesn t! It is because Vincent Rendle didn t love me that there is no hope for you. I never had what I wanted, and never, never, never will I stoop to want ing anything else. Do you begin to understand ? It was all a sham then, you say ? No, it was all real as far as it went. You are young you haven t learned, as you will later, the thousand imperceptible signs by which one gropes one s way through the labyrinth of human nature; but didn t it strike you, sometimes, that I never told you any foolish little anecdotes about him ? His trick, for instance, of twirling a paper-knife round and round between his thumb and forefinger while he talked ; his mania for saving the backs of notes ; his greediness for wild strawberries, the little pungent Alpine ones ; his childish delight in acrobats and jugglers; his way of always calling me you dear you, every letter be gan I never told you a word of all that, did I ? Do you suppose I could have helped telling you, if he had loved me ? These little things would have been mine, then, a part of my life of our life they would have slipped out in spite of me (it s only your unhappy woman who is always reticent and dignified). But there never was any "our life ;" it was always "our lives" to the end. . . . If you knew what a relief it is to tell some one at last, you would bear with me, you would let me hurt [15] THE MUSE S TRAGEDY you ! I shall never be quite so lonely again, now that some one knows. Let me begin at the beginning. When I first met Vincent Rendle I was not twenty-five. That was twenty years ago. From that time until his death, five years ago, we were fast friends. He gave me fifteen years, perhaps the best fifteen years, of his life. The world, as you know, thinks that his greatest poems were writ ten during those years ; I am supposed to have "in spired" them, and in a sense I did. From the first, the intellectual sympathy between us was almost complete ; my mind must have been to him (I fancy) like some perfectly tuned instrument on which he was never tired of playing. Some one told me of his once saying of me that I "always understood ;" it is the only praise I ever heard of his giving me. I don t even know if he thought me pretty, though I hardly think my appear ance could have been disagreeable to him, for he hated to be with ugly people. At all events he fell into the way of spending more and more of his time with me. He liked our house; our ways suited him. He was nervous, irritable ; people bored him and yet he dis liked solitude. He took sanctuary with us. When we travelled he went with us ; in the winter he took rooms near us in Rome. In England or on the continent he was always with us for a good part of the year. In small ways I was able to help him in his work ; he grew de- [16] THE MUSE S TRAGEDY pendent on me. When we were apart he wrote to me continually he liked to have me share in all he was doing or thinking ; he was impatient for my criticism of every new book that interested him ; I was a part of his intellectual life. The pity of it was that I wanted to be something more. I was a young woman and I was in love with him not because he was Vincent Rendle, but just because he was himself! People began to talk, of course I was Vincent Ren- die s Mrs. Anerton; when the Sonnets to Silvia appeared, it was whispered that I was Silvia. Wherever he went, I was invited; people made up to me in the hope of getting to know him; when I was in London my door bell never stopped ringing. Elderly peeresses, aspiring hostesses, love-sick girls and struggling authors over whelmed me with their assiduities. I hugged my suc cess, for I knew what it meant they thought that Rendle was in love with me ! Do you know, at times, they almost made me think so too ? Oh, there was no phase of folly I didn t go through. You can t imagine the excuses a woman will invent for a man s not telling her that he loves her pitiable arguments that she would see through at a glance if any other woman used them! But all the while, deep down, I knew he had never cared. I should have known it if he had made love to me every day of his life. I could never guess whether he knew what people said about us he [17] THE MUSE S TRAGEDY listened so little to what people said ; and cared still less, when he heard. He was always quite honest and straightforward with me; he treated me as one man treats another; and yet at times I felt he must see that with me it was different. If he did see, he made no sign. Perhaps he never noticed I am sure he never meant to be cruel. He had never made love to me ; it was no fault of his if I wanted more than he could give me. The Sonnets to Silvia, you say ? But what are they ? A cosmic philosophy, not a love-poem; addressed to Woman, not to a woman ! But then, the letters? Ah, the letters! Well, I ll make a clean breast of it. You have noticed the breaks in the letters here and there, just as they seem to be on the point of growing a little warmer? The critics, you may remember, praised the editor for his commendable delicacy and good taste (so rare in these days !) in omit ting from the correspondence all personal allusions, all those details intimes which should be kept sacred from the public gaze. They referred, of course, to the as terisks in the letters to Mrs. A. Those letters I myself prepared for publication; that is to say, I copied them out for the editor, and eveiy now and then I put in a line of asterisks to make it appear that something had been left out. You understand? The asterisks were a sham there was nothing to leave out. No one but a woman could understand what I went [18] THE MUSE S TRAGEDY through during those years the moments of revolt, when I felt I must break away from it all, fling the truth in his face and never see him again; the in evitable reaction, when not to see him seemed the one unendurable thing, and I trembled lest a look or word of mine should disturb the poise of our friendship; the silly days when I hugged the delusion that he must love me, since everybody thought he did; the long pe riods of numbness, when I didn t seem to care whether he loved me or not. Between these wretched days came others when our intellectual accord was so per fect that I forgot everything else in the joy of feeling myself lifted up on the wings of his thought. Some times, then, the heavens seemed to be opened. . . . All this time he was so dear a friend! He had the genius of friendship, and he spent it all on me. Yes, you were right when you said that I have had more than any other woman. // faut de I adresse pour aimer, Pascal says; and I was so quiet, so cheerful, so frankly affectionate with him, that in all those years I am al most sure I never bored him. Could I have hoped as much if he had loved me ? You mustn t think of him, though, as having been tied to my skirts. He came and went as he pleased, and so did his fancies. There was a girl once (I am telling you everything), a lovely being who called his [19] THE MUSE S TRAGEDY poetry "deep" and gave him Lucile on his birthday. He followed her to Switzerland one summer, and all the time that he was dangling after her (a little too conspicuously, I always thought, for a Great Man), he was writing to me about his theory of vowel-combina tions or was it his experiments in English hexameter? The letters were dated from the very places where I knew they went and sat by waterfalls together and he thought out adjectives for her hair. He talked to me about it quite frankly afterwards. She was perfectly beautiful and it had been a pure delight to watch her; but she would talk, and her mind, he said, was "all elbows." And yet, the next year, when her marriage was announced, he went away alone, quite suddenly . . . and it was just afterwards that he published Loves Viaticum. Men are queer! After my husband died I am putting things crudely, you see I had a return of hope. It was be cause he loved me, I argued, that he had never spoken ; because he had always hoped some day to make me his wife; because he wanted to spare me the "reproach." Rubbish! I knew well enough, in my heart of hearts, that my one chance lay in the force of habit. He had grown used to me ; he was no longer young ; he dreaded new people and new ways ; il avail pris son pli. Would it not be easier to marry me ? I don t believe he ever thought of it. He wrote me [20] THE MUSE S TRAGEDY what people call "a beautiful letter;" he was kind, considerate, decently commiserating; then, after a few weeks, he slipped into his old way of coming in every afternoon, and our interminable talks began again just where they had left off. I heard later that people thought I had shown "such good taste" in not marrying him. So we jogged on for five years longer. Perhaps they were the best years, for I had given up hoping. Then he died. After his death this is curious there came to me a kind of mirage of love. All the books and articles written about him, all the reviews of the "Life," were full of discreet allusions to Silvia. I became again the Mrs. Anerton of the glorious days. Sentimental girls and dear lads like you turned pink when somebody whispered, "that was Silvia you were talking to." Idiots begged for my autograph publishers urged me to write my reminiscences of him critics consulted me about the reading of doubtful lines. And I knew that, to all these people, I was the woman Vincent Rendle had loved. After a while that fire went out too and I was left alone with my past. Alone quite alone; for he had never really been with me. The intellectual union counted for nothing now. It had been soul to soul, but never hand in hand, and there were no little things to remember him by. [21] THE MUSE S TRAGEDY Then there set in a kind of Arctic winter. I crawled into myself as into a snow-hut. I hated my solitude and yet dreaded any one who disturbed it. That phase, of course, passed like the others. I took up life again, and began to read the papers and con sider the cut of my gowns. But there was one ques tion that I could not be rid of, that haunted me night and day. Why had he never loved me ? Why had I been so much to him, and no more? Was I so ugly, so essentially unlovable, that though a man might cherish me as his mind s comrade, he could not care for me as a woman? I can t tell you how that question tortured me. It became an obsession. My poor friend, do you begin to see? I had to find out what some other man thought of me. Don t be too hard on me ! Listen first consider. When I first met Vincent Rendle I was a young woman, who had married early and led the quietest kind of life; I had had no "experiences." From the hour of our first meeting to the day of his death I never looked at any other man, and never noticed whether any other man looked at me. When he died, five years ago, I knew the extent of my powers no more than a baby. Was it too late to find out ? Should I never know why ? Forgive me forgive me. You are so young; it will be an episode, a mere "document," to you so soon! And, besides, it wasn t as deliberate, as cold-blooded [22] THE MUSE S TRAGEDY as these disjointed lines have made it appear. I didn t plan it, like a woman in a book. Life is so much more complex than any rendering of it can be. I liked you from the first I was drawn to you (you must have seen that) I wanted you to like me; it was not a mere psychological experiment. And yet in a sense it was that, too I must be honest. I had to have an answer to that question; it was a ghost that had to be laid. At first I was afraid oh, so much afraid that you cared for me only because I was Silvia, that you loved me because you thought Rendle had loved me. I be gan to think there was no escaping my destiny. How happy I was when I discovered that you were growing jealous of my past ; that you actually hated Rendle ! My heart beat like a girl s when you told me you meant to follow me to Venice. After our parting at Villa d Este my old doubts re asserted themselves. What did I know of your feeling for me, after all? Were you capable of analyzing it yourself? Was it not likely to be two-thirds vanity and curiosity, and one-third literary sentimentality? You might easily fancy that you cared for Mary Anerton when you were really in love with Silvia the heart is such a hypocrite ! Or you might be more calculating than I had supposed. Perhaps it was you who had been flattering my vanity in the hope (the pardonable hope !) [23] THE MUSE S TRAGEDY of turning me, after a decent interval, into a pretty little essay with a margin. When you arrived in Venice and we met again do you remember the music on the lagoon, that evening, from my balcony? I was so afraid you would begin to talk about the book the book, you remember, was your ostensible reason for coming. You never spoke of it, and I soon saw your one fear was / might do so might remind you of your object in being with me. Then I knew you cared for me ! yes, at that mo ment really cared ! We never mentioned the book once, did we, during that month in Venice ? I have read my letter over ; and now I wish that I had said this to you instead of writing it. I could have felt my way then, watching your face and seeing if you understood. But, no, I could not go back to Venice ; and I could not tell you (though I tried) while we were there together. I couldn t spoil that month my one month. It was so good, for once in my life, to get away from literature .... You will be angry with me at first but, alas ! not for long. W 7 hat I have done would have been cruel if I had been a younger woman ; as it is, the experiment will hurt no one but myself. And it will hurt me hor ribly (as much as, in your first anger, you may perhaps wish), because it has shown me, for the first time, all that I have missed .... A JOURNEY A JOURNEY A she lay in her berth, staring at the shadows overhead, the rush of the wheels was in her brain, driving her deeper and deeper into cir cles of wakeful lucidity. The sleeping-car had sunk into its night-silence. Through the wet window-pane she watched the sudden lights, the long stretches of hurrying blackness. Now and then she turned her head and looked through the opening in the hang ings at her husband s curtains across the aisle . . . She wondered restlessly if he wanted anything and if she could hear him if he called. His voice had grown very weak within the last months and it irri tated him when she did not hear. This irritability, this increasing childish petulance seemed to give ex pression to their imperceptible estrangement. Like two faces looking at one another through a sheet of glass they were close together, almost touching, but they could not hear or feel each other: the conduc tivity between them was broken. She, at least, had this sense of separation, and she fancied sometimes that she saw it reflected in the look with which he supplemented his failing words. Doubtless the fault was hers.. She was too impenetrably healthy to be touched by the irrelevancies of disease. Her self-re- [27] A JOURNEY proachful tenderness was tinged with the sense of his irrationality: she had a vague feeling that there was a purpose in his helpless tyrannies. The suddenness of the change had found her so unprepared. A year ago their pulses had beat to one robust measure; both had the same prodigal confidence in an exhaustless future. Now their energies no longer kept step: hers still bounded ahead of life, preempting unclaimed regions of hope and activity, while his lagged behind, vainly struggling to overtake her. When they married, she had such arrears of living to make up: her days had been as bare as the white washed school-room where she forced innutritious facts upon reluctant children. His coming had broken in on the slumber of circumstance, widening the present till it became the encloser of remotest chances. But im perceptibly the horizon narrowed. Life had a grudge against her: she was never to be allowed to spread her wings. At first the doctors had said that six weeks of mild air would set him right; but when he came back this assurance was explained as having of course included a winter in a dry climate. They gave up their pretty house, storing the wedding presents and new furniture, and went to Colorado. She had hated it there from the first. Nobody knew her or cared about her; there was no one to wonder at the good match she had made, [28] A JOURNEY or to envy her the new dresses and the visiting-cards which were still a surprise to her. And he kept grow ing worse. She felt herself beset with difficulties too evasive to be fought by so direct a temperament. She still loved him, of course; but he was gradually, unde- finably ceasing to be himself. The man she had married had been strong, active, gently masterful : the male whose pleasure it is clear a way through the mate rial obstructions of life ; but now it was she who was the protector, he who must be shielded from importu nities and given his drops or his beef-juice though the skies were falling. The routine of the sick-room be wildered her; this punctual administering of medicine seemed as idle as some uncomprehended religious mummery. There were moments, indeed, when warm gushes of pity swept away her instinctive resentment of his con dition, when she still found his old self in his eyes as they groped for each other through the dense medium of his weakness. But these moments had grown rare. Sometimes he frightened her : his sunken expressionless face seemed that of a stranger ; his voice was weak and hoarse ; his thin-lipped smile a mere muscular contrac tion. Her hand avoided his damp soft skin, which had lost the familiar roughness of health: she caught her self furtively watching him as she might have watched a strange animal. It frightened her to feel that this [29] A JOURNEY was the man she loved; there were hours when to tell him what she suffered seemed the one escape from her fears. But in general she judged herself more leniently, reflecting that she had perhaps been too long alone with him, and that she would feel differently when they were at home again, surrounded by her robust and buoyant family. How she had rejoiced when the doctors at last gave their consent to his going home! She knew, of course, what the decision meant; they both knew. It meant that he was to die ; but they dressed the truth in hopeful euphuisms, and at times, in the joy of preparation, she really forgot the purpose of their journey, and slipped into an eager allusion to next year s plans. At last the day of leaving came. She had a dreadful fear that they would never get away ; that somehow at the last moment he would fail her; that the doctors held one of their accustomed treacheries in reserve ; but nothing happened. They drove to the station, he was installed in a seat with a rug over his knees and a cushion at his back, and she hung out of the window waving unregretful farewells to the acquaintances she had really never liked till then. The first twenty-four hours had passed off well. He revived a little and it amused him to look out of the window and to observe the humours of the car. The second day he began to grow weary and to chafe under [SO] A JOURNEY the dispassionate stare of the freckled child with the lump of chewing-gum. She had to explain to the child s mother that her husband was too ill to be disturbed : a statement received by that lady with a resentment visi bly supported by the maternal sentiment of the whole car .... That night he slept badly and the next morning his temperature frightened her: she was sure he was grow ing worse. The day passed slowly, punctuated by the small irritations of travel. Watching his tired face, she traced in its contractions every rattle and jolt of the train, till her own body vibrated with sympathetic fatigue. She felt the others observing him too, and hovered restlessly between him and the line of inter rogative eyes. The freckled child hung about him like a fly; offers of candy and picture-books failed to dis lodge her: she twisted one leg around the other and watched him imperturbably. The porter, as he passed, lingered with vague proffers of help, probably inspired by philanthropic passengers swelling with the sense that "something ought to be done ;" and one nervous man in a skull-cap was audibly concerned as to the possible effect on his wife s health. The hours dragged on in a dreary inoccupation. Towards dusk she sat down beside him and he laid his hand on hers. The touch startled her. He seemed to be calling her from far off. She looked at him [31] A JOURNEY helplessly and his smile went through her like a phy sical pang. "Are you very tired?" she asked. "No, not very." "We ll be there soon now." "Yes, very soon." "This time to-morrow " He nodded and they sat silent. When she had put him to bed and crawled into her own berth she tried to cheer herself with the thought that in less than twenty- four hours they would be in New York. Her people would all be at the station to meet her she pictured their round unanxious faces pressing through the crowd. She only hoped they would not tell him too loudly that he was looking splendidly and would be all right in no time : the subtler sympathies developed by long contact with suffering were making her aware of a cer tain coarseness of texture in the family sensibilities. Suddenly she thought she heard him call. She parted the curtains and listened. No, it was only a man snor ing at the other end of the car. His snores had a greasy sound, as though they passed through tallow. She lay down and tried to sleep . . . Had she not heard him move ? She started up trembling . . . The silence frightened her more than any sound. He might not be able to make her hear he might be calling her now . . . What made her think of such things ? It [ 32 ]. A JOURNEY was merely the familiar tendency of an over-tired mind to fasten itself on the most intolerable chance within the range of its forebodings . . . Putting her head out, she listened; but she could not distinguish his breathing from that of the other pairs of lungs about her. She longed to get up and look at him, but she knew the impulse was a mere vent for her rest lessness, and the fear of disturbing him restrained her. . . . The regular movement of his curtain reassured her, she knew not why ; she remembered that he had wished her a cheerful good-night ; and the sheer inabil ity to endure her fears a moment longer made her put them from her with an effort of her whole sound tired body. She turned on her side and slept. She sat up stiffly, staring out at the dawn. The train was rushing through a region of bare hillocks huddled against a lifeless sky. It looked like the first day of creation. The air of the car was close, and she pushed up her window to let in the keen wind. Then she looked at her watch: it was seven o clock, and soon the people about her would be stirring. She slipped into her clothes, smoothed her dishevelled hair and crept to the dressing-room. When she had washed her face and adjusted her dress she felt more hopeful. It was always a struggle for her not to be cheerful in the morning. Her cheeks burned deliciously under the coarse towel and the wet hair about her temples broke into strong [33 1 A JOURNEY upward tendrils. Every inch of her was full of life and elasticity. And in ten hours they would be at home ! She stepped to her husband s berth : it was time for him to take his early glass of milk. The window-shade was down, and in the dusk of the curtained enclosure she could just see that he lay sideways, with his face away from her. She leaned over him and drew up the shade. As she did so she touched one of his hands. It felt cold . . . She bent closer, laying her hand on his arm and calling him by name. He did not move. She spoke again more loudly; she grasped his shoulder and gently shook it. He lay motionless. She caught hold of his hand again: it slipped from her limply, like a dead thing. A dead thing? ... Her breath caught. She must see his face. She leaned forward, and hurriedly, shrinkingly, with a sickening reluctance of the flesh, laid her hands on his shoulders and turned him over. His head fell back ; his face looked small and smooth ; he gazed at her with steady eyes. She remained motionless for a long time, holding him thus ; and they looked at each other. Suddenly she shrank back : the longing to scream, to call out, to fly from him, had almost overpowered her. But a strong hand arrested her. Good God ! If it were known that he was dead they would be put off the train at the next station [34] A JOURNEY In a terrifying flash of remembrance there arose be fore her a scene she had once witnessed in travelling, when a husband and wife, whose child had died in the train, had been thrust out at some chance station. She saw them standing on the platform with the child s body between them ; she had never forgotten the dazed look with which they followed the receding train. And this was what would happen to her. Within the next hour she might find herself on the platform of some strange station, alone with her husband s body. . . . Anything but that ! It was too horrible She quivered like a creature at bay. As she cowered there, she felt the train moving more slowly. It was coming then they were approaching a station ! She saw again the husband and wife standing on the lonely platform ; and with a violent gesture she drew down the shade to hide her husband s face. Feeling dizzy, she sank down on the edge of the berth, keeping away from his outstretched body, and pulling the curtains close, so that he and she were shut into a kind of sepulchral twilight. She tried to think. At all costs she must conceal the fact that he was dead. But how ? Her mind refused to act : she could not plan, combine. She could think of no way but to sit there, clutching the curtains, all day long . . . She heard the porter making up her bed; people were beginning to move about the car; the dressing- [35] A JOURNEY room door was being opened and shut. She tried to rouse herself. At length with a supreme effort she rose to her feet, stepping into the aisle of the car and drawing the curtains tight behind her. She no ticed that they still parted slightly with the motion of the car, and finding a pin in her dress she fast ened them together. Now she was safe. She looked round and saw the porter. She fancied he was watch ing her. "Ain t he awake yet?" he enquired. "No/ she faltered. "I got his milk all ready when he wants it. You know you told me to have it for him by seven." She nodded silently and crept into her seat. At half-past eight the train reached Buffalo. By this time the other passengers were dressed and the berths had been folded back for the day. The por ter, moving to and fro under his burden of sheets and pillows, glanced at her as he passed. At length he said: "Ain t he going to get up? You know we re ordered to make up the berths as early as we can." She turned cold with fear. They were just enter ing the station. " Oh, not yet," she stammered. " Not till he s had his milk. Won t you get it, please ? " "All right. Soon as we start again." [36] A JOURNEY When the train moved on he reappeared with the milk. She took it from him and sat vaguely looking at it : her brain moved slowly from one idea to an other, as though they were stepping-stones set far apart across a whirling flood. At length she became aware that the porter still hovered expectantly. ee Will I give it to him ? " he suggested. "Oh, no/ she cried, rising. "He he s asleep yet, [ think " She waited till the porter had passed on ; then she unpinned the curtains and slipped behind them. In the semi-obscurity her husband s face stared up at her like a marble mask with agate eyes. The eyes were dreadful. She put out her hand and drew down the lids. Then she remembered the glass of milk in her other hand : what was she to do with it ? She thought of raising the window and throwing it out; but to do so she would have to lean across his body and bring her face close to his. She decided to drink the milk. She returned to her seat with the empty glass and after a while the porter came back to get it. "When 11 I fold up his bed?" he asked. " Oh, not now not yet ; he s ill he s very ill. Can t you let him stay as he is ? The doctor wants him to lie down as much as possible." He scratched his head. "Well, if he s really sick A JOURNEY He took the empty glass and walked away, ex plaining to the passengers that the party behind the curtains was too sick to get up just yet. She found herself the centre of sympathetic eyes. A motherly woman with an intimate smile sat down beside her. " I m real sorry to hear your husband s sick. I ve had a remarkable amount of sickness in my family and maybe I could assist you. Can I take a look at him ? " "Oh, no no, please! He mustn t be disturbed." The lady accepted the rebuff indulgently. "Well, it s just as you say, of course, but you don t look to me as if you d had much experience in sick ness and I d have been glad to assist you. What do you generally do when your husband s taken this way?" "I I let him sleep." " Too much sleep ain t any too healthful either. Don t you give him any medicine ? " Y yes." te Don t you wake him to take it ? " "Yes." " When does he take the next dose ? " "Not for two hours The lady looked disappointed. " Well, if I was you I d try giving it oftener. That s what I do with my folks. [38] A JOURNEY After that many faces seemed to press upon her. The passengers were on their way to the dining-car, and she was conscious that as they passed down the aisle they glanced curiously at the closed curtains. One lantern-jawed man with prominent eyes stood still and tried to shoot his projecting glance through the division between the folds. The freckled child, returning from breakfast, waylaid the passers with a buttery clutch, saying in a loud whisper, " He s sick ; " and once the conductor came by, asking for tickets. She shrank into her corner and looked out of the window at the flying trees and houses, mean ingless hieroglyphs of an endlessly unrolled papyrus. Now and then the train stopped, and the new comers on entering the car stared in turn at the closed curtains. More and more people seemed to pass their faces began to blend fantastically with the im ages surging in her brain . . . Later in the day a fat man detached himself from the mist of faces. He had a creased stomach and soft pale lips. As he pressed himself into the seat facing her she noticed that he was dressed in black broad cloth, with a soiled white tie. " Husband s pretty bad this morning, is he ? " "Yes." " Dear, dear ! Now that s terribly distressing, ain t it?" An apostolic smile revealed his gold-filled teeth. [.89] A JOURNEY e< Of course you know there s no sech thing as sick ness. Ain t that a lovely thought ? Death itself is but a deloosion of our grosser senses. On y lay yourself open to the influx of the sperrit, submit yourself passively to the action of the divine force, and disease and dissolu tion will cease to exist for you. If you could indooce your husband to read this little pamphlet The faces about her again grew indistinct. She had a vague recollection of hearing the motherly lady and the parent of the freckled child ardently disputing the relative advantages of trying several medicines at once, or of taking each in turn ; the motherly lady maintain ing that the competitive system saved time ; the other objecting that you couldn t tell which remedy had ef fected the cure ; their voices went on and on, like bell- buoys droning through a fog . . . The porter came up now and then with questions that she did not un derstand, but that somehow she must have answered since he went away again without repeating them ; every two hours the motherly lady reminded her that her husband ought to have his drops ; people left the car and others replaced them . . . Her head was spinning and she tried to steady her self by clutching at her thoughts as they swept by, but they slipped away from her like bushes on the side of a sheer precipice down which she seemed to be falling. Suddenly her mind grew clear again and she [40] A JOURNEY found herself vividly picturing what would happen when the train reached New York. She shuddered as it occurred to her that he would be quite cold and that some one might perceive he had been dead since morning. She thought hurriedly: "If they see I am not sur prised they will suspect something. They will ask ques tions, and if I tell them the truth they won t believe me no one would believe me ! It will be terrible "- and she kept repeating to herself: "I must pretend I don t know. I must pretend I don t know. When they open the curtains I must go up to him quite naturally and then I must scream." . . . She had an idea that the scream would be very hard to do. Gradually new thoughts crowded upon her, vivid and urgent : she tried to separate and restrain them, but they beset her clamorously, like her school-children at the end of a hot day, when she was too tired to silence them. Her head grew confused, and she felt a sick fear of forgetting her part, of betraying herself by some un guarded word or look. "I must pretend I don t know," she went on mur muring. The words had lost their significance, but she repeated them mechanically, as though they had been a magic formula, until suddenly she heard herself say ing : " I can t remember, I can t remember ! " Her voice sounded very loud, and she looked about ] A JOURNEY her in terror; but no one seemed to notice that she had spoken. As she glanced down the car her eye caught the curtains of her husband s berth, and she began to ex amine the monotonous arabesques woven through their heavy folds. The pattern was intricate and difficult to trace ; she gazed fixedly at the curtains and as she did so the thick stuff grew transparent and through it she saw her husband s face his dead face. She struggled to avert her look, but her eyes refused to move and her head seemed to be held in a vice. At last, with an effort that left her weak and shaking, she turned away; but it was of no use ; close in front of her, small and smooth, was her husband s face. It seemed to be suspended in the air between her and the false braids of the woman who sat in front of her. With an uncontrollable gesture she stretched out her hand to push the face away, and suddenly she felt the touch of his smooth skin. She repressed a cry and half started from her seat. The woman with the false braids looked around, and feeling that she must justify her movement in some way she rose and lifted her travelling-bag from the opposite seat. She unlocked the bag and looked into it; but the first object her hand met was a small flask of her hus band s, thrust there at the last moment, in the haste of departure. She locked the bag and closed her eyes . . . his face was there again, hanging between her eye-balls [42] A JOURNEY and lids like a waxen mask against a red curtain . . . She roused herself with a shiver. Had she fainted or slept ? Hours seemed to have elapsed ; but it was still broad day, and the people about her were sitting in the same attitudes as before. A sudden sense of hunger made her aware that she had eaten nothing since morning. The thought of food filled her with disgust, but she dreaded a return of faintness, and remembering that she had some biscuits in her bag she took one out and ate it. The dry crumbs choked her, and she hastily swallowed a little brandy from her husband s flask. The burning sensation in her throat acted as a counter-irritant, momentarily reliev ing the dull ache of her nerves. Then she felt a gently- stealing warmth, as though a soft air fanned her, and the swarming fears relaxed their clutch, receding through the stillness that enclosed her, a stillness soothing as the spacious quietude of a summer day. She slept. Through her sleep she felt the impetuous rush of the train. It seemed to be life itself that was sweeping her ori with headlong inexorable force sweeping her into darkness and terror, and the awe of unknown days.- Now all at once everything was still not a sound, not a pulsation . . . She was dead in her turn, and lay beside him with smooth upstaring face. How quiet it was! and yet she heard feet coming, the feet of the [43] A JOURNEY men who were to carry them away . . . She could feel too she felt a sudden prolonged vibration, a series of hard shocks, and then another plunge into darkness : the darkness of death this time a black whirlwind on which they were both spinning like leaves, in wild uncoiling spirals, with millions and millions of the dead . . . She sprang up in terror. Her sleep must have lasted a long time, for the winter day had paled and the lights had been lit. The car was in confusion, and as she re gained her self-possession she saw that the passengers were gathering up their wraps and bags. The woman with the false braids had brought from the dressing- room a sickly ivy-plant in a bottle, and the Christian Scientist was reversing his cuffs. The porter passed down the aisle with his impartial brush. An impersonal figure with a gold-banded cap asked for her husband s ticket. A voice shouted "Baig-gage express!" and she heard the clicking of metal as the passengers handed over their checks. Presently her window was blocked by an expanse of sooty wall, and the train passed into the Harlem tunnel. The journey was over ; in a few minutes she would see her family pushing their joyous way through the throng at the station. Her heart dilated. The worst terror was past . . . [44] A JOURNEY "We d better get him up now, hadn t we?" asked the porter, touching her arm. He had her husband s hat in his hand and was medi tatively revolving it under his brush. She looked at the hat and tried to speak ; but sud denly the car grew dark. She flung up her arms, strug gling to catch at something, and fell face downward, striking her head against the dead man s berth. [45] THE PELICAN THE PELICAN SHE was very pretty when I first knew her, with the sweet straight nose and short upper lip of the cameo-brooch divinity, humanized by a dimple that flowered in her cheek whenever anything was said possessing the outward attributes of humor without its intrinsic quality. For the dear lady was providentially deficient in humor: the least hint of the real thing clouded her lovely eye like the hovering shadow of an algebraic problem. I don t think nature had meant her to be "intel lectual ; " but what can a poor thing do, whose hus band has died of drink when her baby is hardly six months old, and who finds her coral necklace and her grandfather s edition of the British Dramatists inadequate to the demands of the creditors? Her mother, the celebrated Irene Astarte Pratt, had written a poem in blank verse on "The Fall of Man;" one of her aunts was dean of a girls college ; another had translated Euripides with such a family, the poor child s fate was sealed in advance. The only way of pay ing her husband s debts and keeping the baby clothed was to be intellectual ; and, after some hesitation as to the form her mental activity was to take, it was unani mously decided that she was to give lectures. [49] THE PELICAN They began by being drawing-room lectures. The first time I saw her she was standing by the piano, against a flippant background of Dresden china and photographs, telling a roomful of women preoccu pied with their spring bonnets all she thought she knew about Greek art. The ladies assembled to hear her had given me to understand that she was "do ing it for the baby," and this fact, together with the shortness of her upper lip and the bewildering co-operation of her dimple, disposed me to listen leniently to her dissertation. Happily, at that time Greek art was still, if I may use the phrase, easily handled: it was as simple as walking down a mu seum-gallery lined with pleasant familiar Venuses and Apollos. All the later complications the archaic and archaistic conundrums ; the influences of Assyria and Asia Minor; the conflicting attributions and the wrangles of the erudite still slumbered in the bosom of the future "scientific critic." Greek art in those days began with Phidias and ended with the Apollo Belvedere ; and a child could travel from one to the other without danger of losing his way. Mrs. Amyot had two fatal gifts : a capacious but inaccurate memory, and an extraordinary fluency of speech. There was nothing she did not remember wrongly ; but her halting facts were swathed in so many layers of rhetoric that their infirmities were [50] THE PELICAN imperceptible to her friendly critics. Besides, she had been taught Greek by the aunt who had trans lated Euripides ; and the mere sound of the a/f and oig that she now and then not unskilfully let slip (correcting herself, of course, with a start, and indul gently mistranslating the phrase), struck awe to the hearts of ladies whose only " accomplishment " was French if you didn t speak too quickly. I had then but a momentary glimpse of Mrs. Amyot, but a few months later I came upon her again in the New England university town where the celebrated Irene Astarte Pratt lived on the sum mit of a local Parnassus, with lesser muses and col lege professors respectfully grouped on the lower ledges of the sacred declivity. Mrs. Amyot, who, after her husband s death, had returned to the ma ternal roof (even during her father s lifetime the roof had been distinctively maternal), Mrs. Amyot, thanks to her upper lip, her dimple and her Greek, Was already esconced in a snug hollow of the Par nassian slope. After the lecture was over it happened that I walked home with Mrs. Amyot. From the incensed glances of two or three learned gentlemen who were hovering on the door-step when we emerged, I inferred that Mrs. Amyot, at that period, did not often walk home alone ; but I doubt whether any of my discom- [51] THE PELICAN fited rivals, whatever his claims to favor, was ever treated to so ravishing a mixture of shyness and self- abandonment, of sham erudition and real teeth and hair, as it was my privilege to enjoy. Even at the open ing of her public career Mrs. Amyot had a tender eye for strangers, as possible links with successive centres of culture to which in due course the torch of Greek art might be handed on. She began by telling me that she had never been so frightened in her life. She knew, of course, how dread fully learned I was, and when, just as she was going to begin, her hostess had whispered to her that I was in the room, she had felt ready to sink through the floor. Then (with a flying dimple) she had remembered Em erson s line wasn t it Emerson s? that beauty is its own excuse for seeing, and that had made her feel a little more confident, since she was sure that no one saw beauty more vividly than she as a child she used to sit for hours gazing at an Etruscan vase on the book case in the library, while her sisters played with their dolls and if seeing beauty was the only excuse one needed for talking about it, why, she was sure I would make allowances and not be too critical and sarcastic, especially if, as she thought probable, I had heard of her having lost her poor husband, and how she had to do it for the baby. Being abundantly assured of my svmpathy on these [52] THE PELICAN points, she went on to say that she had always wanted so much to consult me about her lectures. Of course, one subject wasn t enough (this view of the limitations of Greek art as a "subject" gave me a startling idea of the rate at which a successful lecturer might exhaust the universe) ; she must find others ; she had not ven tured on any as yet, but she had thought of Tennyson didn t I love Tennyson ? She worshipped him so that she was sure she could help others to understand him ; or what did I think of a "course" on Raphael or Mi chelangelo or on the heroines of Shakespeare ? There were some fine steel-engravings of Raphael s Madonnas and of the Sistine ceiling in her mother s library, and she had seen Miss Cushman in several Shakespearian roles, so that on these subjects also she felt qualified to speak with authority. When we reached her mother s door she begged me to come in and talk the matter over ; she wanted me to see the baby she felt as though I should understand her better if I saw the baby and the dimple flashed through a tear. The fear of encountering the author of "The Fall of Man," combined with the opportune recollection of a dinner engagement, made me evade this appeal with the promise of returning on the morrow. On the mor row, I left too early to redeem my promise; and for several years afterwards I saw no more of Mrs. Amyot. [53] THE PELICAN My calling at that time took me at irregular intervals from one to another of our larger cities, and as Mrs. Amyot was also peripatetic it was inevitable that sooner or later we should cross each other s path. It was there fore without surprise that, one snowy afternoon in Bos ton, I learned from the lady with whom I chanced to be lunching that, as soon as the meal was over, I was to be taken to hear Mrs. Amyot lecture. "On Greek art ?" I suggested. "Oh, you ve heard her then? No, this is one of the series called Homes and Haunts of the Poets. Last week we had Wordsworth and the Lake Poets, to-day we are to have Goethe and Weimar. She is a wonderful creature all the women of her family are geniuses. You know, of course, that her mother was Irene Astarte Pratt, who wrote a poem on The Fall of Man ; N. P. Willis called her the female Milton of America. One of Mrs. Amyot s aunts has translated Eurip " "And is she as pretty as ever?" I irrelevantly inter posed. My hostess looked shocked. "She is excessively mod est and retiring. She says it is actual suffering for her to speak in public. You know she only does it for the baby." Punctually at the hour appointed, we took our seats in a lecture-hall full of strenuous females in ulsters. Mrs. Amyot was evidently a favorite with these aus- [54] THE PELICAN tere sisters, for every corner was crowded, and as we entered a pale usher with an educated mispronuncia tion was setting forth to several dejected applicants the impossibility of supplying them with seats. Our own were happily so near the front that when the curtains at the back of the platform parted, and Mrs. Amyot appeared, I was at once able to establish a comparison between the lady placidly dimpling to the applause of her public and the shrinking drawing-room orator of my earlier recollections. Mrs. Amyot was as pretty as ever, and there was the same curious discrepancy between the freshness of her aspect and the staleness of her theme, but something was gone of the blushing unsteadiness with which she had fired her first random shots at Greek art. It was not that the shots were less uncertain, but that she now had an air of assuming that, for her purpose, the bull s-eye was everywhere, so that there was no need to be flustered in taking aim. This assurance had so facilitated the flow of her eloquence that she seemed to be performing a trick analogous to that of the conjuror who pulls hundreds of yards of white paper out of his mouth. From a large assortment of stock adjectives she chose, with unerring deftness and rapidity, the one that taste and discrimination would most surely have re jected, fitting out her subject with a whole wardrobe of slop-shop epithets irrelevant in cut and size. To the [55] THE PELICAN invaluable knack of not disturbing the association of ideas in her audience, she added the gift of what may be called a confidential manner so that her fluent generalizations about Goethe and his place in literature (the lecture was, of course, manufactured out of Lewes s book) had the flavor of personal experience, of views sympathetically exchanged with her audience on the best way of knitting children s socks, or of putting up preserves for the winter. It was, I am sure, to this per sonal accent the moral equivalent of her dimple that Mrs. Amyot owed her prodigious, her irrational success. It was her art of transposing second-hand ideas into first-hand emotions that so endeared her to her feminine listeners. To any one not in search of "documents" Mrs. Am- yot s success was hardly of a kind to make her more interesting, and my curiosity flagged with the growing conviction that the "suffering" entailed on her by pub lic speaking was at most a retrospective pang. I was sure that she had reached the point of measuring and enjoying her effects, of deliberately manipulating her public ; and there must indeed have been a certain exhilaration in attaining results so considerable by means involving so little conscious effort. Mrs. Amyot s art was simply an extension of coquetry : she flirted with her audience. In this mood of enlightened skepticism I responded [56] THE PELICAN but languidly to my hostess s suggestion that I should go with her that evening to see Mrs. Amyot. The aunt who had translated Euripides was at home on Saturday evenings, and one met "thoughtful" people there, my hostess explained : it was one of the intellectual centres of Boston. My mood remained distinctly resentful of any connection between Mrs. Amyot and intellectu ality, and I declined to go; but the next day I met Mrs. Amyot in the street. She stopped me reproachfully. She had heard I was in Boston ; why had I not come last night ? She had been told that I was at her lecture, and it had fright ened her yes, really, almost as much as years ago in Hillbridge. She never could get over that stupid shy ness, and the whole business was as distasteful to her as ever ; but what could she do ? There was the baby he was a big boy now, and boys were so expensive ! But did I really think she had improved the least little bit? And why wouldn t I come home with her now, and see the boy, and tell her frankly what I had thought of the lecture ? She had plenty of flattery people were so kind, and every one knew that she did it for the baby but what she felt the need of was criticism, severe, discriminating criticism like mine oh, she knew that I was dreadfully discriminating ! I went home with her and saw the boy. In the early heat of her Tennyson-worship Mrs. Amyot had christ- [57] THE PELICAN ened him Lancelot, and he looked it. Perhaps, how ever, it was his black velvet dress and the exasperating length of his yellow curls, together with the fact of his having been taught to recite Browning to visitors, that raised to fever-heat the itching of my palms in his Infant-Samuel-like presence. I have since had reason to think that he would have preferred to be called Billy, and to hunt cats with the other boys in the block : his curls and his poetry were simply another outlet for Mrs. Amyot s irrepressible coquetry. But if Lancelot was not genuine, his mother s love for him was. It justified everything the lec tures mere for the baby, after all. I had not been ten minutes in the room before I was pledged to help Mrs. Amyot carry out her triumphant fraud. If she wanted to lecture on Plato she should Plato must take his chance like the rest of us ! There was no use, of course, in being "discriminating." I pre served sufficient reason to avoid that pitfall, but I suggested "subjects" and made lists of books for her with a fatuity that became more obvious as time attenuated the remembrance of her smile ; I even remember thinking that some men might have cut the knot by marrying her, but I handed over Plato as a hostage and escaped by the afternoon train. The next time I saw her was in New York, when [58] THE PELICAN she had become so fashionable that it was a part of the whole duty of woman to be seen at her lec tures. The lady who suggested that of course I ought to go and hear Mrs. Amyot, was not very clear about anything except that she was perfectly lovely, and had had a horrid husband, and was doing it to support her boy. The subject of the discourse (I think it was on Ruskin) was clearly of minor im portance, not only to my friend, but to the throng of well-dressed and absent-minded ladies who rustled in late, dropped their muffs and pocket-books, and undisguisedly lost themselves in the study of each other s apparel. They received Mrs. Amyot with warmth, but she evidently represented a social obli gation like going to church, rather than any more personal interest ; in fact, I suspect that every one of the ladies would have remained away, had they been sure that none of the others were coming. Whether Mrs. Amyot was disheartened by the lack of sympathy between herself and her hearers, or whether the sport of arousing it had become a task, she certainly imparted her platitudes with less con vincing warmth than of old. Her voice had the same confidential inflections, but it was like a voice repro duced by a gramophone : the real woman seemed far away. She had grown stouter without losing her dewy freshness, and her smart gown might have [59] THE PELICAN been taken to show either the potentialities of a settled income, or a politic concession to the taste of her hearers. As I listened I reproached myself for ever having suspected her of self-deception in saying that she took no pleasure in her work. I was sure now that she did it only for Lancelot, and judging from the size of her audience and the price of the tickets I concluded that Lancelot must be receiving a liberal education. I was living in New York that winter, and in the rotation of dinners I found myself one evening at Mrs. Amyot s side. The dimple came out at my greeting as punctually as a cuckoo in a Swiss clock, and I detected the same automatic quality in the tone in which she made her usual pretty demand for advice. She was like a musical-box charged with popular airs. They succeeded one another with breathless rapidity, but there was a moment after each when the cylinders scraped and whizzed. Mrs. Amyot, as I found when I called on her, was living in a sunny flat, with a sitting-room full of flow ers and a tea-table that had the air of expecting visitors. She owned that she had been ridiculously successful. It was delightful, of course, on Lancelot s account. Lancelot had been sent to the best school in the country, and if things went well and people didn t tire of his silly mother he was to go to Har- [60] THE PELICAN vard afterwards. During the next two or three years Mrs. Amyot kept her flat in New York, and radiated art and literature upon the suburbs. I saw her now and then, always stouter, better dressed, more suc cessful and more automatic : she had become a lec- turing-machine. I went abroad for a year or two and when I came back she had disappeared. I asked several people about her, but life had closed over her. She had been last heard of as lecturing still lecturing but no one seemed to know when or where. It was in Boston that I found her at last, forlornly swaying to the oscillations of an overhead strap in a crowded trolley-car. Her face had so changed that I lost myself in a startled reckoning of the time that had elapsed since our parting. She spoke to me shyly, as though aware of my hurried calculation, and con scious that in five years she ought not to have altered so much as to upset my notion of time. Then she seemed to set it down to her dress, for she nervously gathered her cloak over a gown that asked only to be concealed, and shrank into a seat behind the line of prehensile bipeds blocking the aisle of the car. It was perhaps because she so obviously avoided me that I felt for the first time that I might be of use to her; and when she left the car I made no excuse for following her. [61 ] THE PELICAN She said nothing of needing advice and did not ask me to walk home with her, concealing, as we talked, her transparent preoccupations under the guise of a sudden interest in all I had been doing since she had last seen me. Of what concerned her, I learned only that Lancelot was well and that for the present she was not lecturing she was tired and her doctor had ordered her to rest. On the doorstep of a shabby house she paused and held out her hand. She had been so glad to see me and perhaps if I were in Boston again the tired dimple, as it were, bowed me out and closed the door on the conclusion of the phrase. Two or three weeks later, at my club in New York, I found a letter from her. In it she owned that she was troubled, that of late she had been unsuccessful, and that, if I chanced to be coming back to Boston, and could spare her a little of that invaluable advice which . A few days later the advice was at her disposal. She told me frankly what had happened. Her public had grown tired of her. She had seen it coming on for some time, and was shrewd enough in detecting the causes. She had more rivals than formerly younger women, she admitted, with a smile that could still afford to be generous and then her audiences had grown more critical and consequently more exacting. Lecturing as she understood it used to be simple enough. You chose your topic Raphael, Shakespeare, [62] THE PELICAN Gothic Architecture, or some such big familiar "sub ject" and read up about it for a week or so at the Athenaeum or the Astor Library, and then told your audience what you had read. Now, it appeared, that simple process was no longer adequate. People had tired of familiar "subjects" ; it was the fashion to be interested in things that one hadn t always known about natural selection, animal magnetism, sociology and comparative folk-lore ; while, in literature, the demand had become equally difficult to meet, since Matthew Arnold had introduced the habit of study ing the "influence" of one author on another. She had tried lecturing on influences, and had done very well as long as the public was satisfied with the tra cing of such obvious influences as that of Turner on Ruskin, of Schiller on Goethe, of Shakespeare on English literature ; but such investigations had soon lost all charm for her too-sophisticated audiences, who now demanded either that the influence or the influ enced should be quite unknown, or that there should be no perceptible connection between the two. The zest of the performance lay in the measure of inge nuity with which the lecturer established a relation between two people who had probably never heard of each other, much less read each other s works. A pretty Miss Williams with red hair had, for instance, been lecturing with great success on the influence of [63] THE PELICAN the Rosicrucians upon the poetry of Keats, while some body else had given a " course " on the influence of St. Thomas Aquinas upon Professor Huxley. Mrs. Amyot, warmed by my participation in her distress,, went on to say that the growing demand for evolution was what most troubled her. Her grandfather had been a pillar of the Presbyterian ministry, and the idea of her lecturing on Darwin or Herbert Spencer was deeply shocking to her mother and aunts. In one sense the family had staked its literary as well as its spiritual hopes on the literal inspiration of Genesis : what became of " The Fall of Man " in the light of modern exegesis? The upshot of it was that she had ceased to lecture because she could no longer sell tickets enough to pay for the hire of a lecture-hall ; and as for the managers, they wouldn t look at her. She had tried her luck all through the Eastern States and as far south as Wash ington ; but it was of no use, and unless she could get hold of some new subjects or, better still, of some new audiences she must simply go out of the busi ness. That would mean the failure of all she had worked for, since Lancelot would have to leave Har vard. She paused, and wept some of the unbecoming tears that spring from real grief. Lancelot, it appeared, was to be a genius. He had passed his opening exami nations brilliantly ; he had " literary gifts"; he had writ- [64] THE PELICAN ten beautiful poetry, much of which his mother had copied out, in reverentially slanting characters, in a vel vet-bound volume which she drew from a locked drawer. Lancelot s verse struck me as nothing more alarming than growing-pains ; but it was not to learn this that she had summoned me. What she wanted was to be as sured that he was worth working for, an assurance which I managed to convey by the simple stratagem of remarking that the poems reminded me of Swin burne and so they did, as well as of Browning, Tennyson, Rossetti, and all the other poets who sup ply young authors with original inspirations. This point being established, it remained to be de cided by what means his mother was, in the French phrase, to pay herself the luxury of a poet. It was clear that this indulgence could be bought only with coun terfeit coin, and that the one way of helping Mrs. Amyot was to become a party to the circulation of such currency. My fetish of intellectual integrity went down like a ninepin before the appeal of a woman no longer yourg and distinctly foolish, but full of those dear contradictions and irrelevancies that will always make flesh and blood prevail against a syllogism. When I took leave of Mrs. Amyot I had promised her a dozen letters to Western universities and had half pledged myself to sketch out a lecture on the reconciliation of science and religion. [65] THE PELICAN In the West she achieved a success which for a year or more embittered my perusal of the morning papers. The fascination that lures the murderer back to the scene of his crime drew my eye to every paragraph cel ebrating Mrs. Amyot s last brilliant lecture on the influence of something upon somebody ; and her own letters she overwhelmed me with them spared me no detail of the entertainment given in her honor by the Palimpsest Club of Omaha or of her reception at the University of Leadville. The college professors were especially kind: she assured me that she had never before met with such discriminating sympathy. I winced at the adjective, which cast a sudden light on the vast machinery of fraud that I had set in mo tion. All over my native land, men of hitherto unblem ished integrity were conniving with me in urging their friends to go and hear Mrs. Amyot lecture on the re conciliation of science and religion ! My only hope was that, somewhere among the number of my accomplices, Mrs. Amyot might find one who would marry her in the defense of his convictions. None, apparently, resorted to such heroic measures ; for about two years later I was startled by the an nouncement that Mrs. Amyot was lecturing in Tren ton, New Jersey, on modern theosophy in the light of the Vedas. The following week she was at Newark, discussing Schopenhauer in the light of recent psychol- [66] THE PELICAN ogy. The week after that I was on the deck of an ocean steamer, reconsidering my share in Mrs. Amyot s triumphs with the impartiality with which one views an episode that is being left behind at the rate of twenty knots an hour. After all, I had been helping a mother to educate her son. The next ten years of my life were spent in Europe, and when I came home the recollection of Mrs. Amyot had become as inoffensive as one of those pathetic ghosts who are said to strive in vain to make them selves visible to the living. I did not even notice the fact that I no longer heard her spoken of; she had dropped like a dead leaf from the bough of memory. A year or two after my return I was condemned to one of the worst punishments a worker can undergo an enforced holiday. The doctors who pronounced the inhuman sentence decreed that it should be worked out in the South, and for a whole winter I carried my cough, my thermometer and my idleness from one fashionable orange-grove to another. In the vast and melancholy sea of my disoccupation I clutched like a drowning man at any human driftwood within reach. I took a critical and depreciatory interest in the coughs, the thermometers and the idleness of my fellow-suf ferers ; but to the healthy, the occupied, the transient I clung with undiscriminating enthusiasm. In no other way can I explain, as I look back on it, [67] THE PELICAN the importance I attached to the leisurely confidences of a new arrival with a brown beard who, tilted back at my side on a hotel veranda hung with roses, im parted to me one afternoon the simple annals of his past. There was nothing in the tale to kindle the most inflammable imagination, and though the man had a pleasant frank face and a voice differing agreeably from the shrill inflections of our fellow-lodgers, it is probable that under different conditions his discursive history of successful business ventures in a Western city would have affected me somewhat in the manner of a lullaby. Even at the time I was not sure I liked his agree able voice : it had a self-importance out of keeping with the humdrum nature of his story, as though a breeze engaged in shaking out a table-cloth should hare fancied itself inflating a banner. But this criticism may have been a mere mark of my own fastidiousness, for the man seemed a simple fellow, satisfied with his middling fortunes, and already (he was not much past thirty) deep-sunk in conjugal content. He had just started on an anecdote connected with the cutting of his eldest boy s teeth, when a lady I knew, returning from her late drive, paused before us for a moment in the twilight, with the smile which is the feminine equivalent of beads to savages. "Won t you take a ticket?" she said sweetly. [68] THE PELICAN Of course I would take a ticket but for what? I ventured to inquire. "Oh, that s so good of you for the lecture this evening. You needn t go, you know; we re none of us going ; most of us have been through it already at Aiken and at Saint Augustine and at Palm Beach. I ve given away my tickets to some new people who ve just come from the North, and some of us are going to send our maids, just to fill up the room." "And may I ask to whom you are going to pay this delicate attention?" "Oh, I thought you knew to poor Mrs. Amyot. She s been lecturing all over the South this winter; she s simply haunted me ever since I left New York - and we had six weeks of her at Bar Harbor last sum mer ! One has to take tickets, you know, because she s a widow and does it for her son to pay for his educa tion. She s so plucky and nice about it, and talks about him in such a touching unaffected way, that everybody is sorry for her, and we all simply ruin ourselves in tickets. I do hope that boy s nearly educated!" " Mrs. Amyot ? Mrs. Amyot ? " I repeated. " Is she still educating her son ? " " Oh, do you know about her ? Has she been at it long ? There s some comfort in that, for I suppose when the boy s provided for the poor thing will be able to take a rest and give us one!" 69] THE PELICAN She laughed and held out her hand. " Here s your ticket. Did you say tickets two ? Oh, thanks. Of course you needn t go." "But I mean to go. Mrs. Amyot is an old friend of mine." " Do you really ? That s awfully good of you. Per haps I 11 go too if I can persuade Charlie and the others to come. And I wonder" in a well-directed aside " if your friend ? " I telegraphed her under cover of the dusk that my friend was of too recent standing to be drawn into her charitable toils, and she masked her mistake under a rattle of friendly adjurations not to be late, and to be sure to keep a seat for her, as she had quite made up her mind to go even if Charlie and the others would n t. The flutter of her skirts subsided in the distance, and my neighbor, who had half turned away to light a cigar, made no effort to reopen the conversation. At length, fearing he might have overheard the allusion to himself, I ventured to ask if he were going to the lecture that evening. "Much obliged I have a ticket," he said abruptly. This struck me as in such bad taste that I made no answer ; and it was he who spoke next. "Did I understand you to say that you were an old friend of Mrs. Amyot s ? " THE PELICAN "I think I may claim to be, if it is the same Mrs. Amyot I had the pleasure of knowing many years ago. My Mrs. Amyot used to lecture too " To pay for her son s education ? " " I believe so." "Well see you later." He got up and walked into the house. In the hotel drawing-room that evening there was but a meagre sprinkling of guests, among whom I saw my brown-bearded friend sitting alone on a sofa, with his head against the wall. It could not have been curi osity to see Mrs. Amyot that had impelled him to attend the performance, for it would have been im possible for him, without changing his place, to com mand the improvised platform at the end of the room. When I looked at him he seemed lost in contemplation of the chandelier. The lady from whom I had bought my tickets flut tered in late, unattended by Charlie and the others, and assuring me that she would scream if we had the lecture on Ibsen she had heard it three times al ready that winter. A glance at the programme reas sured her: it informed us (in the lecturer s own slanting hand) that Mrs. Amyot was to lecture on the Cosmog ony. After a long pause, during which the small audience coughed and moved its chairs and showed signs of re- [.71], THE PELICAN gretting that it had come, the door opened, and Mrs. Amyot stepped upon the platform. Ah, poor lady ! Some one said " Hush ! ", the coughing and chair- shifting subsided, and she began. It was like looking at one s self early in the morning in a cracked mirror. I had no idea I had grown so old. As for Lancelot, he must have a beard. A beard ? The word struck me, and without knowing why I glanced across the room at my bearded friend on the sofa. Oddly enough he was looking at me, with a half-de fiant, half-sullen expression ; and as our glances crossed, and his fell, the conviction came to me that he was Lancelot. I don t remember a word of the lecture ; and yet there were enough of them to have filled a good-sized dictionary. The stream of Mrs. Amyot s eloquence had become a flood : one had the despairing sense that she had sprung a leak, and that until the plumber came there was nothing to be done about it. The plumber came at length, in the shape of a clock striking ten ; my companion, with a sigh of relief, drifted away in search of Charlie and the others ; the audience scattered with the precipitation of peo ple who had discharged a duty ; and, without surprise, I found the brown-bearded stranger at my elbow. We stood alone in the bare-floored room, under the flaring chandelier. [72] THE PELICAN " I think you told me this afternoon that you were an old friend of Mrs. Amy of s ? " he began awkwardly. I assented. " Will you come in and see her ? " "Now? I shall be very glad to, if" "She s ready ; she s expecting you," he interposed. He offered no further explanation, and I followed him in silence. He led me down the long corridor, and pushed open the door of a sitting-room. " Mother," he said, closing the door after we had entered, " here s the gentleman who says he used to know you." Mrs. Amyot, who sat in an easy-chair stirring a cup of bouillon, looked up with a start. She had evidently not seen me in the audience, and her son s description had failed to convey my identity. I saw a frightened look in her eyes ; then, like a frost flower on a window- pane, the dimple expanded on her wrinkled cheek, and she held out her hand. " I m so glad," she said, " so glad ! " She turned to her son, who stood watching us. " You must have told Lancelot all about me you ve known me so long ! " "I haven t had time to talk to your son since I knew he was your son," I explained. Her brow cleared. "Then you haven t had time to say anything very dreadful ? " she said with a laugh. [73] THE PELICAN "It is he who has been saying dreadful things," I returned, trying to fall in with her tone. I saw my mistake. " What things ? " she faltered. " Making me feel how old I am by telling me about his children." " My grandchildren ! " she exclaimed with a blush. " Well, if you choose to put it so." She laughed again, vaguely, and was silent. I hesi tated a moment and then put out my hand. "I see you are tired. I shouldn t have ventured to come in at this hour if your son " The son stepped between us. "Yes, I asked him to come," he said to his mother, in his clear self-asser tive voice. "I haven t told him anything yet; but you ve got to now. That s what I brought him for." His mother straightened herself, but I saw her eye waver. " Lancelot "she began. "Mr. Amyot," I said, turning to the young man, "if your mother will let me come back to-morrow, I shall be very glad He struck his hand hard against the table on which he was leaning. " No, sir ! It won t take long, but it s got to be said now." He moved nearer to his mother, and I saw his lip [74] THE PELICAN twitch under his beard. After all, he was younger and less sure of himself than I had fancied. " See here, mother," he went on, " there s some thing here that s got to be cleared up, and as you say this gentleman is an old friend of yours it had better be cleared up in his presence. Maybe he can help explain it and if he can t, it s got to be ex plained to him." Mrs. Amyot s lips moved, but she made no sound. She glanced at me helplessly and sat down. My early inclination to thrash Lancelot was beginning to reassert itself. I took up my hat and moved toward the door. " Mrs. Amyot is under no obligation to explain any thing whatever to me," I said curtly. " Well ! She s under an obligation to me, then to explain something in your presence." He turned to her again. "Do you know what the people in this hotel are saying ? Do you know what he thinks what they all think ? That you re doing this lecturing to support me to pay for my education! They say you go round telling them so. That s what they buy the tickets for they do it out of charity. Ask him if it is n t what they say ask him if they were n t joking about it on the piazza before dinner. The others think I m a little boy, but he s known you for years, and he must have known how old I was. He must have known it wasn t to pay for my education!" [75] THE PELICAN He stood before her with his hands clenched, the veins beating in his temples. She had grown very pale, and her cheeks looked hollow. When she spoke her voice had an odd click in it. " If if these ladies and gentlemen have been com ing to my lectures out of charity, I see nothing to be ashamed of in that " she faltered. " If they ve been coming out of charity to me," he retorted, "don t you see you ve been making me a party to a fraud? Isn t there any shame in that?" His forehead reddened. "Mother! Can t you see the shame of letting people think I was ad beat, who sponged on you for my keep? Let alone making us both the laughing-stock of every place you go to ! " " I never did that, Lancelot ! " "Did what?" " Made you a laughing-stock " He stepped close to her and caught her wrist. " Will you look me in the face and swear you never told people you were doing this lecturing business to support me ? " There was a long silence. He dropped her wrist and she lifted a limp handkerchief to her frightened eyes. "I did do it to support you to educate you" she sobbed. "We re not talking about what you did when I was a boy. Everybody who knows me knows I ve [76] THE PELICAN been a grateful son. Have I ever taken a penny from you since I left college ten years ago ? " " I never said you had ! How can you accuse your mother of such wickedness, Lancelot? " " Have you never told anybody in this hotel or anywhere else in the last ten years that you were lecturing to support me? Answer me that!" "How can you/ she wept, "before a stranger?" " Have n t you said such things about me to stran gers ? " he retorted. " Lancelot ! " "Well answer me, then. Say you haven t, mo ther!" His voice broke unexpectedly and he took her hand with a gentler touch. " I 11 believe any thing you tell me," he said almost humbly. She mistook his tone and raised her head with a rash clutch at dignity. " I think you d better ask this gentleman to ex cuse you first." "No, by God, I won t!" he cried. "This gentle man says he knows all about you and I mean him to know all about me too. I don t mean that he or any body else under this roof shall go on thinking for< another twenty-four hours that a cent of their money has ever gone into my pockets since I was old enough to shift for myself. And he sha n t leave this room till you ve made that clear to him." [77] THE PELICAN He stepped back as he spoke and put his shoul ders against the door. " My dear young gentleman," I said politely, " I shall leave this room exactly when I see fit to do so and that is now. I have already told you that Mrs. Amyot owes me no explanation of her conduct." "But I owe you an explanation of mine you and every one who has bought a single one of her lec ture tickets. Do you suppose a man who s been through what I went through while that woman was talking to you in the porch before dinner is going to hold his tongue, and not attempt to justify him self? No decent man is going to sit down under that sort of thing. It s enough to ruin his character. If you re my mother s friend, you owe it to me to hear what I ve got to say." He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. " Good God, mother ! " he burst out suddenly, "what did you do it for? Haven t you had every thing you wanted ever since I was able to pay for it? Haven t I paid you back every cent you spent on me when I was in college? Have I ever gone back on you since I was big enough to work ? " He turned to me with a laugh. " I thought she did it to amuse herself and because there was such a de mand for her lectures. Such a demand! That s what [78] THE PELICAN she always told me. When we asked her to come out and spend this winter with us in Minneapolis, she wrote back that she couldn t because she had engagements all through the south, and her man ager wouldn t let her off. That s the reason why I came all the way on here to see her. We thought she was the most popular lecturer in the United States, my wife and I did! We were awfully proud of it too, I can tell you." He dropped into a chair, still laughing. " How can you, Lancelot, how can you ! " His mother, forgetful of my presence, was clinging to him with tentative caresses. " When you did n t need the money any longer I spent it all on the children you know I did." "Yes, on lace christening dresses and life-size rock ing-horses with real manes ! The kind of thing chil dren can t do without." "Oh, Lancelot, Lancelot I loved them so! How can you believe such falsehoods about me ? " " What falsehoods about you ? " "That I ever told anybody such dreadful things?" He put her back gently, keeping his eyes on hers. "Did you never tell anybody in this house that you were lecturing to support your son ? " Her hands dropped from his shoulders and she flashed round on me in sudden anger. [79] THE PELICAN "I know what I think of people who call them selves friends and who come between a mother and her son ! " " Oh, mother, mother ! " he groaned. I went up to him and laid my hand on his shoulder. "My dear man," I said, "don t you see the use- lessness of prolonging this ? " "Yes, I do," he answered abruptly; and before I could forestall his movement he rose and walked out of the room. There was a long silence, measured by the lessen ing reverberations of his footsteps down the wooden floor of the corridor. When they ceased I approached Mrs. Amyot, who had sunk into her chair. I held out my hand and she took it without a trace of resentment on her ravaged face. " I sent his wife a seal-skin jacket at Christmas ! " she said, with the tears running down her cheeks. SOULS BELATED SOULS BELATED THEIR railway-carriage had been full when the train left Bologna ; but at the first sta tion beyond Milan their only remaining com panion a courtly person who ate garlic out of a car pet-bag had left his crumb-strewn seat with a bow. Lydia s eye regretfully followed the shiny broad cloth of his retreating back till it lost itself in the cloud of touts and cab-drivers hanging about the sta tion ; then she glanced across at Gannett and caught the same regret in his look. They were both sorry to be alone. " Par-ten-za !" shouted the guard. The train vibrated to a sudden slamming of doors ; a waiter ran along the platform with a tray of fossilized sandwiches ; a be lated porter flung a bundle of shawls and band-boxes into a third-class carriage ; the guard snapped out a brief Partenza ! which indicated the purely ornamental nature of his first shout ; and the train swung out of the station. The direction of the road had changed, and a shaft of sunlight struck across the dusty red velvet seats into Lydia s corner. Gannett did not notice it. He had returned to his Revue de Paris, and she had to rise and lower the shade of the farther window. Against [83] SOULS BELATED the vast horizon of their leisure such incidents stood out sharply. Having lowered the shade, Lydia sat down, leaving the length of the carriage between herself and Gan nett. At length he missed her and looked up. "I moved out of the sun/ she hastily explained. He looked at her curiously : the sun was beating on her through the shade. "Very well/ he said pleasantly ; adding, "You don t mind?" as he drew a cigarette-case from his pocket. It was a refreshing touch, relieving the tension of her spirit with the suggestion that, after all, if he could smoke ! The relief was only momentary. Her experience of smokers was limited (her husband had disapproved of the use of tobacco) but she knew from hearsay that men sometimes smoked to get away from things ; that a cigar might be the masculine equiva lent of darkened windows and a headache. Gannett, after a puff or two, returned to his review. It was just as she had foreseen ; he feared to speak as much as she did. It was one of the misfortunes of their situation that they were never busy enough to necessitate, or even to justify, the postponement of unpleasant discussions. If they avoided a question it was obviously, unconcealably because the question was disagreeable. They had unlimited leisure and an ac cumulation of mental energy to devote to any subject [84] SOULS BELATED that presented itself; new topics were in fact at a premium. Lydia sometimes had premonitions of a fam ine-stricken period when there would be nothing left to talk about, and she had already caught herself dol ing out piecemeal what, in the first prodigality of their confidences, she would have flung to him in a breath. Their silence therefore might simply mean that they had nothing to say ; but it was another disadvantage of their position that it allowed infinite opportunity for the classification of minute differences. Lydia had learned to distinguish between real and factitious silences ; and under Gannett s she now detected a hum of speech to which her own thoughts made breathless answer. How could it be otherwise, with that thing between them? She glanced up at the rack overhead. The thing was there, in her dressing-bag, symbolically sus pended over her head and his. He was thinking of it now, just as she was ; they had been thinking of it in unison ever since they had entered the train. While the carriage had held other travellers they had screened her from his thoughts ; but now that he and she were alone she knew exactly what was pass ing through his mind ; she could almost hear him asking himself what he should say to her. . . . The thing had come that morning, brought up to her in an innocent-looking envelope with the rest of theii 1 [85] SOULS BELATED letters, as they were leaving the hotel at Bologna. As she tore it open, she and Gannett were laughing over some ineptitude of the local guide-book they had been driven, of late, to make the most of such inci dental humors of travel. Even when she had unfolded the document she took it for some unimportant busi ness paper sent abroad for her signature, and her eye travelled inattentively over the curly Wher eases of the preamble until a word arrested her: Divorce. There it stood, an impassable barrier, between her husband ?> name and hers. She had been prepared for it, of course, as healthy people are said to be prepared for death, in the sense of knowing it must come without in the least expect ing that it will. She had known from the first that Tillotson meant to divorce her but what did it mat ter ? Nothing mattered, in those first days of supreme deliverance, but the fact that she was free ; and not so much (she had begun to be aware) that freedom had released her from Tillotson as that it had given her to Gannett. This discovery had not been agree able to her self-esteem. She had preferred to think that Tillotson had himself embodied all her reasons for leaving him ; and those he represented had seemed cogent enough to stand in no need of reinforcement. Yet she had not left him till she met Gannett. It was her love for Gannett that had made life with Tillotson [86] SOULS BELATED so poor and incomplete a business. If she had never, from the first, regarded her marriage as a full cancel ling of her claims upon life, she had at least, for a number of years, accepted it as a provisional compen sation, she had made it "do." Existence in the com modious Tillotson mansion in Fifth Avenue with Mrs. Tillotson senior commanding the approaches from the second-story front windows had been reduced to a series of purely automatic acts. The moral atmosphere of the Tillotson interior was as carefully screened and curtained as the house itself: Mrs. Tillotson senior dreaded ideas as much as a draught in her back. Prudent people liked an even temperature; and to do anything unexpected was as foolish as going out in the rain. One of the chief advantages of being rich was that one need not be exposed to unforeseen con tingencies : by the use of ordinary firmness and com mon sense one could make sure of doing exactly the same thing every day at the same hour. These doc trines, reverentially imbibed with his mother s milk, Tillotson (a model son who had never given his par ents an hour s anxiety) complacently expounded to his wife, testifying to his sense of their importance by the regularity with which he wore goloshes on damp days, his punctuality at meals, and his elaborate precautions against burglars and contagious diseases. Lydia, coming from a smaller town, and entering New [87] SOULS BELATED York life through the portals of the Tillotson mansion, had mechanically accepted this point of view as in separable from having a front pew in church and a parterre box at the opera. All the people who came to the house revolved in the same small circle of prejudices. It was the kind of society in which, after dinner, the ladies compared the exorbitant charges of their children s teachers, and agreed that, even with the new duties on French clothes, it was cheaper in the end to get everything from Worth ; while the husbands, over their cigars, lamented municipal cor ruption, and decided that the men to start a reform were those who had no private interests at stake. To Lydia this view of life had become a matter of course, just as lumbering about in her mother-in-law s landau had come to seem the only possible means of locomotion, and listening every Sunday to a fashion able Presbyterian divine the inevitable atonement for having thought oneself bored on the other six days of the week. Before she met Gannett her life had seemed merely dull : his coming made it appear like one of those dismal Cruikshank prints in which the people are all ugly and all engaged in occupations that are either vulgar or stupid. It was natural that Tillotson should be the chief sufferer from this readjustment of focus. Gannett s nearness had made her husband ridiculous, and a [88] SOULS BELATED part of the ridicule had been reflected on herself. Her tolerance laid her open to a suspicion of obtuse- ness from which she must, at all costs, clear herself in Gannett s eyes. She did not understand this until afterwards. At the time she fancied that she had merely reached the limits of endurance. In so large a charter of lib erties as the mere act of leaving Tillotson seemed to confer, the small question of divorce or no divorce did not count. It was when she saw that she had left her husband only to be with Gannett that she perceived the significance of anything affecting their relations. Her husband, in casting her off, had vir tually flung her at Gannett : it was thus that the world viewed it. The measure of alacrity with which Gannett would receive her would be the subject of curious speculation over afternoon-tea tables and in club corners. She knew what would be said she had heard it so often of others ! The recollection bathed her in misery. The men would probably back Gannett to "do the decent thing"; but the ladies eye-brows would emphasize the worthlessness of such enforced fidelity ; and after all, they would be right. She had put herself in a position where Gannett " owed " her something ; where, as a gentleman, he was bound to " stand the damage." The idea of accepting such com pensation had never crossed her mind ; the so-called [89] SOULS BELATED rehabilitation of such a marriage had always seemed to her the only real disgrace. What she dreaded was the necessity of having to explain herself; of having to combat his arguments ; of calculating, in spite of herself, the exact measure of insistence with which he pressed them. She knew not whether she most shrank from his insisting too much or too little. In such a case the nicest sense of proportion might be at fault ; and how easy to fall into the error of taking her resistance for a test of his sincerity! Whichever way she turned, an ironical implication confronted her : she had the exasperated sense of having walked into the trap of some stupid practical joke. Beneath all these preoccupations lurked the dread of what he was thinking. Sooner or later, of course, he would have to speak ; but that, in the meantime, he should think, even for a moment, that there was any use in speaking, seemed to her simply unendura ble. Her sensitiveness on this point was aggravated by another fear, as yet barely on the level of con sciousness ; the fear of unwillingly involving Gannett in the trammels of her dependence. To look upon him as the instrument of her liberation ; to resist in herself the least tendency to a wifely taking possession of his future ; had seemed to Lydia the one way of maintain ing the dignity of their relation. Her view had not changed, but she was aware of a growing inability to [90] SOULS BELATED keep her thoughts fixed on the essential point the point of parting with Gannett. It was easy to face as long as she kept it sufficiently far off: but what was this act of mental postponement but a gradual en croachment on his future ? What was needful was the courage to recognize the moment when, by some word or look, their voluntary fellowship should be transformed into a bondage the more wearing that it was based on none of those common obligations which make the most imperfect marriage in some sort a centre of gravity. When the porter, at the next station, threw the door open, Lydia drew back, making way for the hoped-for intruder; but none came, and the train took up its leisurely progress through the spring wheat-fields and budding copses. She now began to hope that Gannett would speak before the next station. She watched him furtively, half-disposed to return to the seat opposite his, but there was an artificiality about his absorption that restrained her. She had never before seen him read with so con spicuous an air of warding off interruption. What could he be thinking of? Why should he be afraid to speak ? Or was it her answer that he dreaded ? The train paused for the passing of an express, and he put down his book and leaned out of the window. Presently he turned to her with a smile. [91] SOULS BELATED (( There s a jolly old villa out here/ he said. His easy tone relieved her., and she smiled back at him as she crossed over to his corner. Beyond the embankment, through the opening in a mossy wall, she caught sight of the villa, with its broken balustrades, its stagnant fountains, and the stone satyr closing the perspective of a dusky grass-walk. "How should you like to live there?" he asked as the train moved on. " There ? " " In some such pace, I mean. One might do worse, don t you think so? There must be at least two cen turies of solitude under those yew-trees. Shouldn t you like it?" "I I don t know," she faltered. She knew now that he meant to speak. He lit another cigarette. "We shall have to live somewhere, you know/ he said as he bent above the match. Lydia tried to speak carelessly. " Je nen vois pas la necessite ! Why not live everywhere, as we have been doing ? " " But we can t travel forever, can we ? " "Oh, forever s a long word," she objected, picking up the review he had thrown aside. "For the rest of our lives then," he said, moving nearer. [92 J SOULS BELATED She made a slight gesture which caused his hand to slip from hers. " Why should we make plans ? I thought you agreed with me that it s pleasanter to drift." He looked at her hesitatingly. "It s been pleasant, certainly ; but I suppose I shall have to get at my work again some day. You know I haven t written a line since all this time/ he hastily emended. She flamed with sympathy and self-reproach. "Oh, if you mean that if you want to write of course we must settle down. How stupid of me not to have thought of it sooner! Where shall we go? Where do you think you could work best ? We ought n t to lose any more time." He hesitated again. "I had thought of a villa in these parts. It s quiet ; we should n t be bothered. Should you like it ? " " Of course I should like it." She paused and looked away. "But I thought I remember your telling me once that your best work had been done in a crowd in big cities. Why should you shut yourself up in a desert?" Gannett, for a moment, made no reply. At length he said, avoiding her eye as carefully as she avoided his : " It might be different now ; I can t tell, of course, till I try. A writer ought not to be dependent on his milieu; it s a mistake to humor oneself in that way; [93] SOULS BELATED and I thought that just at first you might prefer to be" She faced him. " To be what ? " "Well quiet. I mean " What do you mean by at first ? " she interrupted. He paused again. " I mean after we are married. " She thrust up her chin and turned toward the win dow. " Thank you ! " she tossed back at him. " Lydia ! " he exclaimed blankly ; and she felt in every fibre of her averted person that he had made the inconceivable, the unpardonable mistake of antici pating her acquiescence. The train rattled on and he groped for a third cigarette. Lydia remained silent. "I haven t offended you?" he ventured at length, in the tone of a man who feels his way. She shook her head with a sigh. "I thought you understood/ she moaned. Their eyes met and she moved back to his side. "Do you want to know how not to offend me? By taking it for granted, once for all, that you ve said your say on this odious question and that I ve said mine, and that we stand just where we did this morn ing before that that hateful paper came to spoil everything between us ! " "To spoil everything between us> What on earth do you mean? Aren t you glad to be free?" [94] SOULS BELATED " I was free before." "Not to marry me/ he suggested. " But I don t want to marry you ! " she cried. She saw that he turned pale. " I m obtuse, I sup pose/ he said slowly. " I confess I don t see what you re driving at. Are you tired of the whole busi ness ? Or was I simply a an excuse for getting away ? Perhaps you did n t care to travel alone ? Was that it? And now you want to chuck me?" His voice had grown harsh. "You owe me a straight answer, you know ; don t be tender-hearted ! " Her eyes swam as she leaned to him. "Don t you see it s because I care because I care so much? Oh, Ralph ! Can t you see how it would humiliate me ? Try to feel it as a woman would ! Don t you see the misery of being made your wife in this way? If I d known you as a girl that would have been a real marriage ! But now this vulgar fraud upon society arid upon a society we despised and laughed at this sneaking back into a position that we ve voluntarily forfeited : don t you see what a cheap compromise it is ? We neither of us believe in the abstract f sacred- ness of marriage ; we both know that no ceremony is needed to consecrate our love for each other ; what object can we have in marrying, except the secret fear of each that the other may escape, or the secret long ing to work our way back gradually oh, very gradu- [95] SOULS BELATED ally into the esteem of the people whose conven tional morality we have always ridiculed and hated? And the very fact that, after a decent interval, these same people would come and dine with us the wo men who talk about the indissolubility of marriage, and who would let me die in a gutter to-day because I am c leading a life of sin doesn t that disgust you more than their turning their backs on us now ? I can stand being cut by them, but I couldn t stand their coming to call and asking what I meant to do about visiting that unfortunate Mrs. So-and-so ! " She paused, and Gannett maintained a perplexed silence. "You judge things too theoretically," he said at length, slowly. "Life is made up of compromises." " The life we ran away from yes ! If we had been willing to accept them" she flushed "we might have gone on meeting each other at Mrs. Tillotson s dinners." He smiled slightly. "I didn t know that we ran away to found a new system of ethics. I supposed it was because we loved each other." " Life is complex, of course ; is n t it the very recog nition of that fact that separates us from the people who see it tout d une piece ? If they are right if mar riage is sacred in itself and the individual must always be sacrificed to the family then there can be no real marriage between us, since our our being together is [96] SOULS BELATED a protest against the sacrifice of the individual to the family." She interrupted herself with a laugh. "You ll say now that I m giving you a lecture on sociology ! Of course one acts as one can as one must, perhaps pulled by all sorts of invisible threads ; but at least one need n t pretend, for social advantages, to sub scribe to a creed that ignores the complexity of human motives that classifies people by arbitrary signs, and puts it in everybody s reach to be on Mrs. Tillotson s visiting-list. It may be necessary that the world should be ruled by conventions but if we believed in them, why did we break through them ? And if we don t be lieve in them, is it honest to take advantage of the protection they afford ? " Gannett hesitated. " One may believe in them or not ; but as long as they do rule the world it is only by taking advantage of their protection that one can find a modus vivendi" " Do outlaws need a modus Vivendi ? " He looked at her hopelessly. Nothing is more per plexing to man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions. She thought she had scored a point and followed it up passionately. " You do understand, don t you ? You see how the very thought of the thing humiliates me ! We are together to-day because we choose to be don t let us look any farther than that ! " She caught [97] SOULS BELATED his hands. "Promise me you 11 never speak of it again ; promise me you 11 never think of it even/ she implored, with a tearful prodigality of italics. Through what followed his protests, his arguments, his final unconvinced submission to her wishes she had a sense of his but half-discerning all that, for her, had made the moment so tumultuous. They had reached that memorable point in every heart-history when, for the first time, the man seems obtuse and the woman irrational. It was the abundance of his intentions that consoled her, on reflection, for what they lacked in quality. After all, it would have been worse, incalculably worse, to have detected any over- readiness to understand her. II WHEN the train at night-fall brought them to their journey s end at the edge of one of the lakes, Lydia was glad that they were not, as usual, to pass from one solitude to another. Their wanderings during the year had indeed been like the flight of outlaws : through Sicily, Dalmatia, Transylvania and Southern Italy they had persisted in their tacit avoid ance of their kind. Isolation, at first, had deepened the flavor of their happiness, as night intensifies the scent of certain flowers ; but in the new phase on which [98] SOULS BELATED they were entering, Lydia s chief wish was that they should be less abnormally exposed to the action of each other s thoughts. She shrank, nevertheless, as the brightly-looming bulk of the fashionable Anglo-American hotel on the water s brink began to radiate toward their advancing boat its vivid suggestion of social order, visitors lists, Church services, and the bland inquisition of the table- d hote. The mere fact that in a moment or two she must take her place on the hotel register as Mrs. Gannett seemed to weaken the springs of her resistance. They had meant to stay for a night only, on their way to a lofty village among the glaciers of Monte Rosa ; but after the first plunge into publicity, when they entered the dining-room, Lydia felt the relief of being lost in a crowd, of ceasing for a moment to be the centre of Gannett s scrutiny ; and in his face she caught the reflection of her feeling. After dinner, when she went upstairs, he strolled into the smoking- room, and an hour or two later, sitting in the darkness of her window, she heard his voice below and saw him walking up and down the terrace with a companion cigar at his side. When he came up he told her he had been talking to the hotel chaplain a very good sort of fellow. "Queer little microcosms, these hotels! Most of these people live here all summer and then migrate [99] SOULS BELATED to Italy or the Riviera. The English are the only people who can lead that kind of life with dignity those soft-voiced old ladies in Shetland shawls some how carry the British Empire under their caps. Civis Romanics sum. It s a curious study there might be some good things to work up here." He stood before her with the vivid preoccupied stare of the novelist on the trail of a "subject." With a relief that was half painful she noticed that, for the first time since they had been together, he was hardly aware of her presence. " Do you think you could write here ? " "Here? I don t know." His stare dropped. "After being out of things so long one s first impressions are bound to be tremendously vivid, you know. I see a dozen threads already that one might follow " He broke off with a touch of embarrassment. " Then follow them. We 11 stay," she said with sud den decision. " Stay here ? " He glanced at her in surprise, and then, walking to the window, looked out upon the dusky slumber of the garden. " Why not ? " she said at length, in a tone of veiled irritation. "The place is full of old cats in caps who gossip with the chaplain. Shall you like I mean, it would be different if " [ 100 ] SOULS BELATED She flamed up. "Do you suppose I care? It s none of their busi ness." "Of course not; but you won t get them to think so." " They may think what they please." He looked at her doubtfully. " It s for you to decide." "We ll stay/ she repeated. Gannett, before they met, had made himself known &g a successful writer of short stories and of a novel which had achieved the distinction of being widely discussed. The reviewers called him "promising," and Lydia now accused herself of having too long inter fered with the fulfilment of his promise. There was a special irony in the fact, since his passionate assur ances that only the stimulus of her companionship could bring out his latent faculty had almost given the dignity of a " vocation " to her course : there had been moments when she had felt unable to assume, before posterity, the responsibility of thwarting his career. And, after all, he had not written a line since they had been together: his first desire to write had come from renewed contact with the world! Was it all a mistake then? Must the most intelligent choice work more disastrously than the blundering combina tions of chance ? Or was there a still more humiliating [ 101 ] SOULS BELATED answer to her perplexities? His sudden impulse of activity so exactly coincided with her own wish to withdraw, for a time, from the range of his observa tion, that she wondered if he too were not seeking sanctuary from intolerable problems. " You must begin to-morrow ! " she cried, hiding a tremor under the laugh with which she added, "I wonder if there s any ink in the inkstand ? " Whatever else they had at the Hotel Bellosguardo, they had, as Miss Pinsent said, " a certain tone." It was to Lady Susan Condit that they owed this ines timable benefit; an advantage ranking in Miss Pin- sent s opinion above even the lawn tennis courts and the resident chaplain. It was the fact of Lady Susan s annual visit that made the hotel what it was. Miss Pinsent was certainly the last to underrate such a privilege: "It s so important, my dear, forming as we do a little family, that there should be some one to give the tone; and no one could do it better than Lady Susan an earl s daughter and a person of such determination. Dear Mrs. Ainger now who really ought, you know, when Lady Susan s away abso lutely refuses to assert herself." Miss Pinsent sniffed derisively. "A bishop s niece! my dear, I saw her once actually give in to some South Americans and before us all. She gave up her seat at table to oblige [ 102 ] SOULS BELATED them such a lack of dignity! Lady Susan spoke to her very plainly about it afterwards." Miss Pinsent glanced across the lake and adjusted her auburn front. "But of course I don t deny that the stand Lady Susan takes is not always easy to live up to for the rest of us, I mean. Monsieur Grossart, our good proprietor, finds it trying at times, I know he has said as much, privately, to Mrs. Ainger and me. After all, the poor man is not to blame for wanting to fill his hotel, is he ? And Lady Susan is so difficult so very difficult about new people. One might almost say that she disapproves of them beforehand, on prin ciple. And yet she s had warnings she very nearly made a dreadful mistake once with the Duchess of Levens, who dyed her hair and well, swore and smoked. One would have thought that might have been a lesson to Lady Susan." Miss Pinsent resumed her knitting with a sigh. "There are exceptions, of course. She took at once to you and Mr. Gannett it was quite remarkable, really. Oh, I don t mean that either of course not! It was perfectly natural we all thought you so charming and interesting from the first day we knew at once that Mr. Gannett was in tellectual, by the magazines you took in ; but you know what I mean. Lady Susan is so very well, I won t say prejudiced, as Mrs. Ainger does but so [ 108] SOULS BELATED prepared not to like new people, that her taking to you in that way was a surprise to us all, I confess." Miss Pinsent sent a significant glance down the long laurustinus alley from the other end of which two people a lady and gentleman were strolling to ward them through the smiling neglect of the garden. " In this case, of course, it s very different ; that I m willing to admit. Their looks are against them ; but, as Mrs. Ainger says, one can t exactly tell them so." "She s very handsome," Lydia ventured, with her eyes on the lady, who showed, under the dome of a vivid sunshade, the hour-glass figure and superlative coloring of a Christmas chromo. "That s the worst of it. She s too handsome." "Well, after all, she can t help that." " Other people manage to," said Miss Pinsent skep tically. "But isn t it rather unfair of Lady Susan con sidering that nothing is known about them?" " But, my dear, that s the very thing that s against them. It s infinitely worse than any actual knowledge." Lydia mentally agreed that, in the case of Mrs. Linton, it possibly might be. "I wonder why they came here?" she mused. " That s against them too. It s always a bad sign when loud people come to a quiet place. And they Ve [ 104 ] SOULS BELATED brought van-loads of boxes her maid told Mrs. Ainger s that they meant to stop indefinitely." " And Lady Susan actually turned her back on her in the salon ? " " My dear, she said it was for our sakes : that makes it so unanswerable ! But poor Grossart is in a way ! Thes Lintons have taken his most expensive suite, you know the yellow damask drawing-room above the portico and they have champagne with every meal!" They were silent as Mr. and Mrs. Linton sauntered by ; the lady with tempestuous brows and challenging chin ; the gentleman, a blond stripling, trailing after her, head downward, like a reluctant child dragged by his nurse. "What does your husband think of them, my dear?" Miss Pinsent whispered as they passed out of earshot. Lydia stooped to pick a violet in the border. "He hasn t told me." "Of your speaking to them, I mean. Would he approve of that? I know how very particular nice Americans are. I think your action might make a difference ; it would certainly carry weight with Lady Susan." " Dear Miss Pinsent, you flatter me ! " Lydia rose and gathered up her book and sun shade. [ 105 ] SOULS BELATED "Well, if you re asked for an opinion if Lady Susan asks you for one I think you ought to be pre pared," Miss Pinsent admonished her as she moved away. Ill T ADY SUSAN held her own. She ignored the Lin- JLy tons, and her little family, as Miss Pinsent phrased it, followed suit. Even Mrs. Ainger agreed that it was obligatory. If Lady Susan owed it to the others not to speak to the Lintons, the others clearly owed it to Lady Susan to back her up. It was generally found expedient, at the Hotel Bellosguardo, to adopt this form of reasoning. Whatever effect this combined action may have had upon the Lintons, it did not at least have that of driving them away. Monsieur Grossart, after a few days of suspense, had the satisfaction of seeing them settle down in his yellow damask premier with what looked like a permanent installation of palm-trees and silk sofa-cushions, and a gratifying continuance in the consumption of champagne. Mrs. Linton trailed her Doucet draperies up and down the garden with the same challenging air, while her husband, smoking innumerable cigarettes, dragged himself dejectedly in her wake ; but neither of them, after the first encoun ter with Lady Susan, made any attempt to extend [ 106 ] SOULS BELATED their acquaintance. They simply ignored their ignorers. As Miss Pinsent resentfully observed, they behaved exactly as though the hotel were empty. It was therefore a matter of surprise, as well as of displeasure, to Lydia, to find, on glancing up one day from her seat in the garden, that the shadow which had fallen across her book was that of the enigmatic Mrs. Linton. " I want to speak to you," that lady said, in a rich hard voice that seemed the audible expression of her gown and her complexion. Lydia started. She certainly did not want to speak to Mrs. Linton. " Shall I sit down here ? " the latter continued, fixing her intensely-shaded eyes on Lydia s face, " or are you afraid of being seen with me ?" "Afraid?" Lydia colored. "Sit down, please. What is it that you wish to say?" Mrs. Linton, with a smile, drew up a garden-chair and crossed one open-work ankle above the other. "I want you to tell me what my husband said to your husband last night." Lydia turned pale. "My husband to yours?" she faltered, staring at the other. "Didn t you know they were closeted together for hours in the smoking-room after you went upstairs? [ 107 ] SOULS BELATED My man didn t get to bed until nearly two o clock and when he did I couldn t get a word out of him. When he wants to be aggravating I 11 back him against anybody living ! " Her teeth and eyes flashed persuasively upon Lydia. "But you ll tell me what they were talking about, won t you? I know I can trust you you look so awfully kind. And it s for his own good. He s such a precious donkey and I m so afraid he s got into some beastly scrape or other. If he d only trust his own old woman ! But they re al ways writing to him and setting him against me. And I ve got nobody to turn to." She laid her hand on Lydia s with a rattle of bracelets. " You 11 help me, won t you ? " Lydia drew back from the smiling fierceness of her brows. "I m sorry but I don t think I understand. My husband has said nothing to me of of yours." The great black crescents above Mrs. Linton s eye? met angrily. "I say is that true?" she demanded. Lydia rose from her seat. "Oh, look here, I didn t mean that, you know you must n t take one up so ! Can t you see how rat tled I am?" Lydia saw that, in fact, her beautiful mouth was quivering beneath softened eyes. [ 108 ] SOULS BELATED "I m beside myself!" the splendid creature wailed, dropping into her seat. " I m so sorry/ Lydia repeated, forcing herself to speak kindly ; " but how can I help you ? " Mrs. Linton raised her head sharply. "By finding out there s a darling!" "Finding what out?" "What Trevenna told him." "Trevenna ?" Lydia echoed in bewilderment. Mrs. Linton clapped her hand to her mouth. "Oh, Lord there, it s out! What a fool I am! But I supposed of course you knew ; I supposed every body knew." She dried her eyes and bridled. "Didn t you know that he s Lord Trevenna ? I m Mrs. Cope." Lydia recognized the names. They had figured in a flamboyant elopement which had thrilled fashionable London some six months earlier. "Now you see how it is you understand, don t you ? " Mrs. Cope continued on a note of appeal. " I knew you would that s the reason I came to you. I suppose he felt the same thing about your husband ; he s not spoken to another soul in the place." Her face grew anxious again. " He s awfully sensitive, gen erally he feels our position, he says as if it wasn t my place to feel that ! But when he does get talking there s no knowing what he 11 say. I know he s been brooding over something lately, and I must find out [ 109] SOULS BELATED what it is it s to his interest that I should. I always tell him that I think only of his interest ; if he d only trust me! But he s been so odd lately I can t think what he s plotting. You will help me, dear?" Lydia, who had remained standing, looked away uncomfortably. "If you mean by finding out what Lord Trevenna has told my husband, I m afraid it s impossible." " Why impossible ? " "Because I infer that it was told in confidence." Mrs. Cope stared incredulously. "Well, what of that? Your husband looks such a dear any one can see he s awfully gone on you. What s to prevent your getting it out of him ? " Lydia flushed. " I m not a spy ! " she exclaimed. "A spy a spy? How dare you? " Mrs. Cope flamed out. "Oh, I don t mean that either! Don t be angry with me I m so miserable." She essayed a softer note. "Do you call that spying for one woman to help out another ? I do need help so dreadfully ! I m at my wits end with Trevenna, I am indeed. He s such a boy a mere baby, you know ; he s only two- and-twenty." She dropped her orbed lids. " He s younger than me only fancy ! a few months younger. I tell him he ought to listen to me as if I was his mother ; ought n t he now ? But he won t, he won t ! [ "0] SOULS BELATED All his people are at him, you see oh, I know their little game ! Trying to get him away from me before I can get my divorce that s what they re up to. At first he would n t listen to them ; he used to toss their letters over to me to read ; but now he reads them himself, and answers em too, I fancy ; he s al ways shut up in his room, writing. If I only knew what his plan is I could stop him fast enough he s such a simpleton. But he s dreadfully deep too at times I can t make him out. But I know he s told your husband everything I knew that last night the minute I laid eyes on him. And I must find out you must help me I ve got no one else to turn to!" She caught Lydia s fingers in a stormy pressure. "Say you ll help me you and your husband." Lydia tried to free herself. " What you ask is impossible ; you must see that it is. No one could interfere in in the way you ask." Mrs. Cope s clutch tightened. "You won t, then? You won t?" "Certainly not. Let me go, please." Mrs. Cope released her with a laugh. "Oh, go by all means pray don t let me detain you! Shall you go and tell Lady Susan Condit that there s a pair of us or shall I save you the trouble of enlightening her?" Lydia stood still in the middle of the path, seeing [in] SOULS BELATED her antagonist through a mist of terror. Mrs. Cope was still laughing. " Oh, I m not spiteful by nature, my dear ; but you re a little more than flesh and blood can stand! It s impossible, is it ? Let you go, indeed ! You re too good to be mixed up in my affairs, are you ? Why, you little fool, the first day I laid eyes on you I saw that you and I were both in the same box that s the reason I spoke to you." She stepped nearer, her smile dilating on Lydia like a lamp through a fog. "You can take your choice, you know; I always play fair. If you 11 tell I 11 promise not to. Now then, which is it to be?" Lydia, involuntarily, had begun to move away from the pelting storm of words ; but at this she turned and sat down again. " You may go," she said simply. " I shall stay here." IV SHE stayed there for a long time, in the hypnotized contemplation, not of Mrs. Cope s present, but of her own past. Gannett, early that morning, had gone off on a long walk he had fallen into the habit of taking these mountain-tramps with various fellow- lodgers ; but even had he been within reach she [ "2] SOULS BELATED could not have gone to him just then. She had to deal with herself first. She was surprised to find how, in the last months, she had lost the habit of introspection. Since their coming to the Hotel Bel- losguardo she and Gannett had tacitly avoided them selves and each other. She was aroused by the whistle of the three o clock steamboat as it neared the landing just beyond the hotel gates. Three o clock ! Then Gannett would soon be back he had told her to expect him before four. She rose hurriedly, her face averted from the inquisi torial fa9ade of the hotel. She could not see him just yet ; she could not go indoors. She slipped through one of the overgrown garden-alleys and climbed a steep path to the hills. It was dark when she opened their sitting-room door. Gannett was sitting on the window-ledge smok ing a cigarette. Cigarettes were now his chief resource : he had not written a line during the two months they had spent at the Hotel Bellosguardo. In that respect, it had turned out not to be the right milieu after all. He started up at Lydia s entrance. "Where have you been? I was getting anxious." She sat down in a chair near the door. " Up the mountain," she said wearily. "Alone?" "Yes." [ US] SOULS BELATED Gannett threw away his cigarette : the sound of her voice made him want to see her face. "Shall we have a little light?" he suggested. She made no answer and he lifted the globe from the lamp and put a match to the wick. Then he looked at her. "Anything wrong? You look done up." She sat glancing vaguely about the little sitting- room, dimly lit by the pallid-globed lamp, which left in twilight the outlines of the furniture, of his writing- table heaped with books and papers, of the tea-roses and jasmine drooping on the mantel-piece. How like home it had all grown how like home ! "Lydia, what is wrong?" he repeated. She moved away from him, feeling for her hat pins and turning to lay her hat and sunshade on the table. Suddenly she said: "That woman has been talking to me." Gannett stared. "That woman? What woman?" "Mrs. Linton Mrs. Cope." He gave a start of annoyance, still, as she perceived, not grasping the full import of her words. "The deuce! She told you?" "She told me everything." Gannett looked at her anxiously. SOULS BELATED "What impudence! I m so sorry that you should have been exposed to this, dear." " Exposed ! " Lydia laughed. Gannett s brow clouded and they looked away from each other. " Do you know why she told me ? She had the best of reasons. The first time she laid eyes on me she saw that we were both in the same box." Lydia ! " " So it was natural, of course, that she should turn to me in a difficulty." "What difficulty?" "It seems she has reason to think that Lord Tre- venna s people are trying to get him away from her before she gets her divorce " "Well?" " And she fancied he had been consulting with you last night as to as to the best way of escaping from her." Gannett stood up with an angry forehead. "Well what concern of yours was all this dirty business ? Why should she go to you ? " "Don t you see? It s so simple. I was to wheedle his secret out of you." "To oblige that woman?" " Yes ; or, if I was unwilling to oblige her, then to protect myself." [115] SOULS BELATED "To protect yourself? Against whom?" " Against her telling every one in the hotel that she and I are in the same box." "She threatened that?" "She left me the choice of telling it myself or of doing it for me." "The beast!" There was a long silence. Lydia had seated herself on the sofa, beyond the radius of the lamp, and he leaned against the window. His next question sur prised her. "When did this happen? At what time, I mean?" She looked at him vaguely. " I don t know after luncheon, I think. Yes, I remember ; it must have been at about three o clock." He stepped into the middle of the room and as he approached the light she saw that his brow had cleared. "Why do you ask?" she said. "Because when I came in, at about half-past three, the mail was just being distributed, and Mrs. Cope was waiting as usual to pounce on her letters ; you know she was always watching for the postman. She was standing so close to me that I could n t help see ing a big official-looking envelope that was handed to her. She tore it open, gave one look at the inside, and rushed off upstairs like a whirlwind, with the di- SOULS BELATED rector shouting after her that she had left all her other letters behind. I don t believe she ever thought of you again after that paper was put into her hand." "Why?" "Because she was too busy. I was sitting in the window, watching for you, when the five o clock boat left, and who should go on board, bag and baggage, valet and maid, dressing-bags and poodle, but Mrs. Cope and Trevenna. Just an hour and a half to pack up in! And you should have seen her when they started. She was radiant shaking hands with every body waving her handkerchief from the deck dis tributing bows and smiles like* an empress. If ever a woman got what she wanted just in the nick of time that woman did. She 11 be Lady Trevenna within a week, I 11 wager." "You think she has her divorce?" " I m sure of it. And she must have got it just after her talk with you." Lydia was silent. At length she said, with a kind of reluctance, " She was horribly angry when she left me. It would n t have taken long to tell Lady Susan Condit." "Lady Susan Condit has not been told." "How do you know?" " Because when I went downstairs half an hour ago I met Lady Susan on the way " [117] SOULS BELATED He stopped, half smiling. "Well?" "And she stopped to ask if I thought you would act as patroness to a charity concert she is getting up." In spite of themselves they both broke into a laugh. Lydia s ended in sobs and she sank down with her face hidden. Gannett bent over her, seeking her hands. "That vile woman I ought to have warned you to keep away from her ; I can t forgive myself ! But he spoke to me in confidence ; and I never dreamed well, it s all over now." Lydia lifted her head. "Not for me. It s only just beginning." "What do you mean?" She put him gently aside and moved in her turn to the window. Then she went on, with her face turned toward the shimmering blackness of the lake, " You see of course that it might happen again at any moment." "What?" "This this risk of being found out. And we could hardly count again on such a lucky combination of chances, could we?" He sat down with a groan. Still keeping her face toward the darkness, she said, "I want you to go and tell Lady Susan and the others." [118] SOULS BELATED Gannett, who had moved towards her, paused a few feet off. " Why do you wish me to do this ? " he said at length, with less surprise in his voice than she had been prepared for. " Because I ve behaved basely, abominably, since we came here : letting these people believe we were married lying with every breath I drew " Yes, I ve felt that too," Gannett exclaimed with sudden energy. The words shook her like a tempest : all her thoughts seemed to fall about her in ruins. " You you ve felt so ? " "Of course I have." He spoke with low- voiced vehemence. " Do you suppose I like playing the sneak any better than you do? It s damnable." He had dropped on the arm of a chair, and they stared at each other like blind people who suddenly see. ft But you have liked it here," she faltered. "Oh, I ve liked it I ve liked it." He moved im patiently. " Have n t you ? " " Yes," she burst out ; " that s the worst of it that s what I can t bear. I fancied it was for your sake that I insisted on staying because you thought you could write here ; and perhaps just at first that really was the reason. But afterwards I wanted to ["9] SOULS BELATED stay myself I loved it." She broke into a laugh. "Oh, do you see the full derision of it? These peo ple the very prototypes of the bores you took me away from, with the same fenced-in view of life, the same keep-off-the-grass morality, the same little cau tious virtues and the same little frightened vices well, I ve clung to them, I ve delighted in them, I ve done my best to please them. I ve toadied Lady Susan, I ve gossipped with Miss Pinsent, I ve pre tended to be shocked with Mrs. Ainger. Respecta bility ! It was the one thing in life that I was sure I didn t care about, and it s grown so precious to me that I ve stolen it because I couldn t get it in any other way." She moved across the room and returned to his side with another laugh. " I who used to fancy myself unconventional ! I must have been born with a card-case in my hand. You should have seen me with that poor woman in the garden. She came to me for help, poor creature, be cause she fancied that, having sinned, as they call it, I might feel some pity for others who had been tempted in the same way. Not I ! She did n t know me. Lady Susan would have been kinder, because Lady Susan wouldn t have been afraid. I hated the woman my one thought was not to be seen with her I could have killed her for guessing my secret. [ 120 ] SOULS BELATED The one thing that mattered to me at that moment was my standing with Lady Susan ! " Gannett did not speak. "And you you ve felt it too!" she broke out accusingly. " You ve enjoyed being with these peo ple as much as I have ; you ve let the chaplain talk to you by the hour about The Reign of Law and Professor Drummond. When they asked you to hand the plate in church I was watching you you wanted to accept" She stepped close, laying her hand on his arm. " Do you know, I begin to see what marriage is for. It s to keep people away from each other. Some times I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them children, duties, visits, bores, re lationsthe things that protect married people from each other. We ve been too close together that has been our sin. We ve seen the nakedness of each other s souls." She sank again on the sofa, hiding her face in her hands. Gannett stood above her perplexedly : he felt as though she were being swept away by some implaca ble current while he stood helpless on its bank. At length he said, "Lydia, don t think me a brute but don t you see yourself that it won t do ? " [121] SOULS BELATED "Yes, I see it won t do," she said without raising her head. His face cleared. " Then we 11 go to-morrow." " Go where ? " " To Paris ; to be married." For a long time she made no answer; then she asked slowly, "Would they have us here if we were married ? " " Have us here ? " " I mean Lady Susan and the others." " Have us here ? Of course they would." "Not if they knew at least, not unless they could pretend not to know." He made an impatient gesture. "We shouldn t come back here, of course; and other people needn t know no one need know." She sighed. "Then it s only another form of de ception and a meaner one. Don t you see that ? " " I see that we re not accountable to any Lady Susans on earth ! " " Then why are you ashamed of what we are doing here ? " " Because I m sick of pretending that you re my wife when you re not when you won t be." She looked at him sadly. " If I were your wife you d have to go on pretend- [ 122 ] SOULS BELATED ing. You d have to pretend that I d never been anything else. And our friends would have to pretend that they believed what you pretended." Gannett pulled off the sofa-tassel and flung it away. "You re impossible/ he groaned. " It s not I it s our being together that s impossi ble. I only want you to see that marriage won t help it." " What will help it then ? " She raised her head. " My leaving you." "Your leaving me?" He sat motionless, staring at the tassel which lay at the other end of the room. At length some impulse of retaliation for the pain she was inflicting made him say deliberately : " And where would you go if you left me ? " " Oh ! " she cried. He was at her side in an instant. "Lydia Lydia you know I didn t mean it; I couldn t mean it! But you ve driven me out of my senses; I don t know what I m saying. Can t you get out of this labyrinth of self-torture? It s destroying us both." "That s why I must leave you." " How easily you say it ! " He drew her hands down and made her face him. " You re very scrupulous about yourself and others. But have you thought of me? You have no right to leave me unless you ve ceased to care " [ 123] SOULS BELATED "It s because I care " " Then I have a right to be heard. If you love me you can t leave me." Her eyes defied him. "Why not?" He dropped her hands and rose from her side. " Can you ? " he said sadly. The hour was late and the lamp nickered and sank. She stood up with a shiver and turned toward the door of her room. AT daylight a sound in Lydia s room woke Gannett from a troubled sleep. He sat up and listened. She was moving about softly, as though fearful of disturbing him. He heard her push back one of the creaking shutters ; then there was a moment s silence, which seemed to indicate that she was waiting to see if the noise had roused him. Presently she began to move again. She had spent a sleepless night, probably, and was dressing to go down to the garden for a breath of air. Gannett rose also ; but some undefinable instinct made his move ments as cautious as hers. He stole to his window and looked out through the slats of the shutter. It had rained in the night and the dawn was gray and lifeless. The cloud-muffled hills across the lake [ 121 ] SOULS BELATED were reflected in its surface as in a tarnished mirror. In the garden, the birds were beginning to shake the drops from the motionless laurustinus-boughs. An immense pity for Lydia filled Gannett s soul. Her seeming intellectual independence had blinded him for a time to the feminine cast of her mind. He had never thought of her as a woman who wept and clung: there was a lucidity in her intuitions that made them appear to be the result of reasoning. Now he saw the cruelty he had committed in detaching her from the normal conditions of life; he felt, too, the insight with which she had hit upon the real cause of their suffering. Their life was "impossible," as she had said and its worst penalty was that it had made any other life impossible for them. Even had his love lessened, he was bound to her now by a hundred ties of pity and self-reproach ; and she, poor child ! must turn back to him as Latude returned to his cell . . . A new sound startled him : it was the stealthy clos ing of Lydia s door. He crept to his own and heard her footsteps passing down the corridor. Then he went back to the window and looked out. A minute or two later he saw her go down the steps of the porch and enter the garden. From his post of observation her face was invisible, but something about her appearance struck him. She wore a long [135] SOULS BELATED travelling cloak and under its folds he detected the outline of a bag or bundle. He drew a deep breath and stood watching her. She walked quickly down the laurustinus alley to ward the gate ; there she paused a moment,, glancing about the little shady square. The stone benches under the trees were empty, and she seemed to gather reso lution from the solitude about her, for she crossed the square to the steam-boat landing, and he saw her pause before the ticket-office at the head of the wharf. Now she was buying her ticket. Gannett turned his head a moment to look at the clock : the boat was due in five minutes. He had time to jump into his clothes and overtake her He made no attempt to move; an obscure reluc tance restrained him. If any thought emerged from the tumult of his sensations, it was that he must let her go if she wished it. He had spoken last night of his rights : what were they ? At the last issue, he and she were two separate beings, not made one by the miracle of common forbearances, duties, abnegations, but bound together in a noyade of passion that left them resisting yet clinging as they went down. After buying her ticket, Lydia had stood for a mo ment looking out across the lake ; then he saw her seat herself on one of the benches near the landing. He and she, at that moment, were both listening for [ 126] SOULS BELATED the same sound : the whistle of the boat as it rounded the nearest promontory. Gannett turned again to glance at the clock: the boat was due now. Where would she go ? What would her life be when she had left him ? She had no near relations and few friends. There was money enough . . . but she asked so much of life, in ways so complex and immaterial. He thought of her as walking bare-footed through a stony waste. No one would understand her no one would pity her and he, who did both, was powerless to come to her aid ... He saw that she had risen from the bench and walked toward the edge of the lake. She stood look ing in the direction from which the steamboat was to come ; then she turned to the ticket-office, doubt less to ask the cause of the delay. After that she went back to the bench and sat down with bent head. What was she thinking of? The whistle sounded; she started up, and Gannett involuntarily made a movement toward the door. But he turned back and continued to watch her. She stood motionless, her eyes on the trail of smoke that pre ceded the appearance of the boat. Then the little craft rounded the point, a dead-white object on the leaden water : a minute later it was puffing and backing at the wharf. The few passengers who were waiting two or [ 127] SOULS BELATED three peasants and a snuffy priest were clustered near the ticket-office. Lydia stood apart under the trees. The boat lay alongside now; the gang-plank was run out and the peasants went on board with their baskets of vegetables, followed by the priest. Still Lydia did not move. A bell began to ring querulously ; there was a shriek of steam, and some one must have called to her that she would be late, for she started forward, as though in answer to a summons. She moved waveringly, and at the edge of the wharf she paused. Gannett saw a sailor beckon to her; the bell rang again and she stepped upon the gang-plank. Half-way down the short incline to the deck she stopped again; then she turned and ran back to the land. The gang-plank was drawn in, the bell ceased to ring, and the boat backed out into the lake. Lydia, with slow steps, was walking toward the garden . . . As she approached the hotel she looked up furtively and Gannett drew back into the room. He sat down beside a table ; a Bradshaw lay at his elbow, and me chanically, without knowing what he did, he began looking out the trains to Paris . . . [ 128 J A COWARD A COWARD " "m If Y daughter Irene/ said Mrs. Carstyle (she I ^L / 1 made it rhyme with tureen), "has had no -^ * -A- social advantages ; but if Mr. Carstyle had chosen " she paused significantly and looked at the shabby sofa on the opposite side of the fire-place as though it had been Mr. Carstyle. Vibart was glad that it was not. Mrs. Carstyle was one of the women who make re finement vulgar. She invariably spoke of her husband as Mr. Carstyle and, though she had but one daughter, was always careful to designate the young lady by name. At luncheon she had talked a great deal of elevating influences and ideals, and had fluctuated be tween apologies for the overdone mutton and affected surprise that the bewildered maid-servant should have forgotten to serve the coffee and liqueurs as usual. Vibart was almost sorry that he had come. Miss Car- style was still beautiful almost as beautiful as when, two days earlier, against the leafy background of a June garden-party, he had seen her for the first time but her mother s expositions and elucidations cheap ened her beauty as sign-posts vulgarize a woodland solitude. Mrs. Carstyle s eye was perpetually plying between her daughter and Vibart, like an empty cab [131} A COWARD in quest of a fare. Miss Carstyle, the young man de cided, was the kind of girl whose surroundings rub off on her; or was it rather that Mrs. Carstyle s idiosyn crasies were of a nature to color every one within reach ? Vibart, looking across the table as this consola tory alternative occurred to him, was sure that they had not colored Mr. Carstyle ; but that, perhaps, was only because they had bleached him instead. Mr. Car- style was quite colorless ; it would have been impossi ble to guess his native tint. His wife s qualities, if they had affected him at all, had acted negatively. He did not apologize for the mutton, and he wandered off after luncheon without pretending to wait for the diurnal coffee and liqueurs ; while the few remarks that he had contributed to the conversation during the meal had not been in the direction of abstract conceptions of life. As he strayed away, with his vague oblique step, and the stoop that suggested the habit of dodging missiles, Vibart, who was still in the age of formulas, found himself wondering what life could be worth to a man who had evidently resigned himself to travelling with his back to the wind ; so that Mrs. Carstyle s allusion to her daughter s lack of advan tages (imparted while Irene searched the house for an undiscoverable cigarette) had an appositeness un intended by the speaker. " If Mr. Carstyle had chosen," that lady repeated, [ 132 ] A COWARD "we might have had our city home" (she never used so small a word as town) " and Ireen could have mixed in the society to which I myself was accustomed at her age." Her sigh pointed unmistakably to a past when young men had come to luncheon to see her. The sigh led Vibart to look at her, and the look led him to the unwelcome conclusion that Irene "took after " her mother. It was certainly not from the sap less paternal stock that the girl had drawn her warm bloom : Mrs. Carstyle had contributed the high lights to the picture. Mrs. Carstyle caught his look and appropriated it with the complacency of a vicarious beauty. She was quite aware of the value of her appearance as guaran teeing Irene s development into a fine woman. " But perhaps," she continued, taking up the thread of her explanation, "you have heard of Mr. Carstyle s extraordinary hallucination. Mr. Carstyle knows that I call it so as I tell him, it is the most charitable view to take." She looked coldly at the threadbare sofa and indul gently at the young man who filled a corner of it. " You may think it odd, Mr. Vibart, that I should take you into my confidence in this way after so short an acquaintance, but somehow I can t help regarding you as a friend already. I believe in those intuitive sympathies, don t you ? They have never misled me A COWARD her lids drooped retrospectively "and besides, I al ways tell Mr. Carstyle that on this point I will have no false pretences. Where truth is concerned I am in exorable, and I consider it my duty to let our friends know that our restricted way of living is due entirely to choice to Mr. Carstyle s choice. When I married Mr. Carstyle it was with the expectation of living in New York and of keeping my carriage ; and there is no reason for our not doing so there is no reason, Mr. Vibart, why my daughter Ireen should have been denied the intellectual advantages of foreign travel. I wish that to be understood. It is owing to her father s deliberate choice that Ireen and I have been impris oned in the narrow limits of Millbrook society. For myself I do not complain. If Mr. Carstyle chooses to place others before his wife it is not for his wife to repine. His course may be noble Quixotic; I do not allow myself to pronounce judgment on it, though oth ers have thought that in sacrificing his own family to strangers he was violating the most sacred obligations of domestic life. This is the opinion of my pastor and of other valued friends ; but, as I have always told them, for myself I make no claims. Where my daugh ter Ireen is concerned it is different It was a relief to Vibart when, at this point, Mrs. Carstyle s discharge of her duty was cut short by her daughter s reappearance. Irene had been unable to [184] A COWARD find a cigarette for Mr. Vibart, and her mother, with beaming irrelevance, suggested that in that case she had better show him the garden. The Carstyle house stood but a few yards back from the brick-paved Millbrook street, and the garden was a very small place, unless measured, as Mrs. Car- style probably intended that it should be, by the extent of her daughter s charms. These were so considerable that Vibart walked back and forward half a dozen times between the porch and the gate, before he discovered the limitations of the Carstyle domain. It was not till Irene had accused him of being sarcastic and had confided in him that " the girls " were furious with her for letting him talk to her so long at his aunt s garden-party, that he awoke to the exiguity of his surroundings ; and then it was with a touch of irritation that he noticed Mr. Carstyle s inconspicuous profile bent above a newspaper in one of the lower windows. Vibart had an idea that Mr. Carstyle, while ostensibly reading the paper, had kept count of the number of times that his daughter had led her com panion up and down between the syringa-bushes ; and for some undefinable reason he resented Mr. Carstyle s unperturbed observation more than his wife s zealous self-effacement. To a man who is trying to please a pretty girl there are moments when the proximity of an impartial spectator is more disconcerting than the [ 135] A COWARD most obvious connivance ; and something about Mr. Carstyle s expression conveyed his good-humored in difference to Irene s processes. When the garden-gate closed behind Vibart he had become aware that his preoccupation with the Carstyles had shifted its centre from the daughter to the father; but he was accustomed to such emotional surprises, and skilled in seizing any compensations they might offer. II THE Carstyles belonged to the all-the-year-round Millbrook of paper-mills, cable-cars, brick pave ments and church sociables, while Mrs. Vance, the aunt with whom Vibart lived, was an ornament of the summer colony whose big country-houses dotted the surrounding hills. Mrs. Vance had, however, no diffi culty in appeasing the curiosity which Mrs. Carstyle s enigmatic utterances had aroused in the young man. Mrs. Carstyle s relentless veracity vented itself mainly on the " summer people," as they were called : she did not propose that any one within ten miles of Mill- brook should keep a carriage without knowing that she was entitled to keep one too. Mrs. Vance remarked with a sigh that Mrs. Carstyle s annual demand to have her position understood came in as punctually as the taxes and the water-rates. [ 136] A COWARD " My dear, it s simply this : when Andrew Carstyle married her years ago Heaven knows why he did; he s one of the Albany Carstyles, you know, and she was a daughter of old Deacon Ash of South Millbrook well, when he married her he had a tidy little in come, and I suppose the bride expected to set up an establishment in New York and be hand-in-glove with the whole Carstyle clan. But whether he was ashamed of her from the first, or for some other un explained reason, he bought a country-place and set tled down here for life. For a few years they lived comfortably enough, and she had plenty of smart clothes, and drove about in a victoria calling on the summer people. Then, when the beautiful Irene was about ten years old, Mr. Carstyle s only brother died, and it turned out that he had made away with a lot of trust-property. It was a horrid business : over three hundred thousand dollars were gone, and of course most of it had belonged to widows and orphans. As soon as the facts were made known, Andrew Carstyle announced that he would pay back what his brother had stolen. He sold his country-place and his wife s carriage, and they moved to the little house they live in now. Mr. Carstyle s income is probably not as large as his wife would like to have it thought, and though I m told he puts aside a good part of it every year to pay off his brother s obligations, I fancy the debt won t [ 137] A COWARD be discharged for some time to come. To help things along he opened a law office he had studied law in his youth but though he is said to be clever I hear that he has very little to do. People are afraid of him : he s too dry and quiet. Nobody believes in a man who doesn t believe in himself, and Mr. Carstyle always seems to be winking at you through a slit in his professional manner. People don t like it his wife doesn t like it. I believe she would have accepted the sacrifice of the country-place and the carriage if he had struck an attitude and talked about doing his duty. It was his regarding the whole thing as a matter of course that exasperated her. What is the use of doing something difficult in a way that makes it look perfectly easy ? I feel sorry for Mrs. Carstyle. She s lost her house and her carriage, and she hasn t been allowed to be heroic." Vibart had listened attentively. " I wonderwhat Miss Carstyle thinks of it ?" he mused. Mrs. Vance looked at him with a tentative smile. " I wonder what you think of Miss Carstyle ? " she returned, His answer reassured her. " I think she takes after her mother/ he said. "Ah," cried his aunt cheerfully, "then I needn t write to your mother, and I can have Irene at all my parties !" Miss Carstyle was an important factor in the re- [ 138] A COWARD stricted social combinations of a Millbrook hostess. A local beauty is always a useful addition to a Saturday- to-Monday house-party, and the beautiful Irene was served up as a perennial novelty to the jaded guests of the summer colony. As Vibart s aunt remarked, she was perfect till she became playful, and she never became playful till the third day. Under these conditions, it was natural that Vibart should see a good deal of the young lady, and before he was aware of it he had drifted into the anomalous position of paying court to the daughter in order to ingratiate himself with the father. Miss Carstyle was beautiful, Vibart was young, and the days were long in his aunt s spacious and distinguished house ; but it was really the desire to know something more of Mr. Carstyle that led the young man to partake so often of that gentleman s overdone mutton. Vibart s imagi nation had been touched by the discovery that this little huddled-up man, instead of travelling with the wind, was persistently facing a domestic gale of con siderable velocity. That he should have paid off his brother s debt at one stroke was to the young man a conceivable feat ; but that he should go on methodi cally and uninterruptedly accumulating the needed amount, under the perpetual accusation of Irene s in adequate frocks and Mrs. Carstyle s apologies for the mutton, seemed to Vibart proof of unexampled heroism. [ 139] A COWARD Mr. Carstyle was as inaccessible as the average American parent, and led a life so detached from the preoccupations of his womankind that Vibart had some difficulty in fixing his attention. To Mr. Carstyle, Vibart was simply the inevitable young man who had been hanging about the house ever since Irene had left school ; and Vibart s efforts to differentiate himself from this enamored abstraction were hampered by Mrs. Carstyle s cheerful assumption that he was the young man, and by Irene s frank appropriation of his visits. In this extremity he suddenly observed a slight but significant change in the manner of the two ladies. Irene, instead of charging him with being sarcastic and horrid, and declaring herself unable to believe a word he said, began to receive his remarks with the impersonal smile which he had seen her accord to the married men of his aunt s house-parties ; while Mrs. Carstyle, talking over his head to an invisible but evi dently sympathetic and intelligent listener, debated the propriety of Irene s accepting an invitation to spend the month of August at Narragansett. When Vibart, rashly trespassing on the rights of this un seen oracle, remarked that a few weeks at the sea shore would make a delightful change for Miss Car- style, the ladies looked at him and then laughed. It was at this point that Vibart, for the first time, found himself observed by Mr. Carstyle. They were [ 140] A COWARD grouped about the debris of a luncheon which had ended precipitously with veal stew (Mrs. Carstyle ex plaining that poor cooks always failed with their sweet dish when there was company) and Mr. Carstyle, his hands thrust in his pockets, his lean baggy-coated shoulders pressed against his chair-back, sat contem plating his guest with a smile of unmistakable ap proval. When Vibart caught his eye the smile van ished, and Mr. Carstyle, dropping his glasses from the bridge of his thin nose, looked out of the window with the expression of a man determined to prove an alibi. But Vibart was sure of the smile : it had established, between his host and himself, a complicity which Mr. Carstyle s attempted evasion served only to confirm. On the strength of this incident Vibart, a few days later, called at Mr. Carstyle s office. Ostensibly, the young man had come to ask, on his aunt s behalf, some question on a point at issue between herself and the Millbrook telephone company ; but his pur pose in offering to perform the errand had been the hope of taking up his intercourse with Mr. Carstyle where that gentleman s smile had left it. Vibart was not disappointed. In a dingy office, with a single win dow looking out on a blank wall, he found Mr. Car- style, in an alpaca coat, reading Montaigne. It evidently did not occur to him that Vibart had come on business, and the warmth of his welcome gave [141] A COWARD the young man a sense of furnishing the last word in a conjugal argument in which, for once, Mr. Carstyle had come off triumphant. The legal question disposed of, Vibart reverted to Montaigne : had Mr. Carstyle seen young So-and-so s volume of essays? There was one on Montaigne that had a decided flavor : the point of view was curious. Vibart was surprised to find that Mr. Carstyle had heard of young So-and-so. Clever young men are given to thinking that their elders have never got beyond Macaulay ; but Mr. Carstyle seemed suffi ciently familiar with recent literature not to take it too seriously. He accepted Vibart s offer of young So- and-so s volume, admitting that his own library was not exactly up-to-date. Vibart went away musing. The next day he came back with the volume of essays. It seemed to be tacitly understood that he was to call at the office when he wished to see Mr. Carstyle, whose legal engagements did not seriously interfere with the pursuit of literature. For a week or ten days Mrs. Carstyle, in Vibart s presence, continued to take counsel with her unseen adviser on the subject of her daughter s visit to Nar- ragansett. Once or twice Irene dropped her imper sonal smile to tax Vibart with not caring whether she went or not ; and Mrs. Carstyle seized a moment of tete-a-tete to confide in him that the dear child hated [142] A COWARD the idea of leaving, and was going only because her friend Mrs. Higby would not let her off. Of course, if it had not been for Mr. Carstyle s peculiarities they would have had their own seaside home at Newport, probably : Mrs. Carstyle preferred the tone of Newport and Irene would not have been dependent on the charity of her friends ; but as it was, they must be thankful for small mercies, and Mrs. Higby was cer tainly very kind in her way, and had a charming social position for Narragansett. These confidences, however, were soon superseded by an exchange, between mother and daughter, of increasingly frequent allusions to the delights of Nar ragansett, the popularity of Mrs. Higby, and the jolli- ness of her house ; with an occasional reference on Mrs. Carstyle s part to the probability of Hewlett Bain s being there as usual hadn t Irene heard from Mrs. Higby that he was to be there ? Upon this note Miss Carstyle at length departed, leaving Vibart to the undisputed enjoyment of her father s company. Vibart had at no time a keen taste for the summer joys of Millbrook, and the family obligation which, for several months of the year, kept him at his aunt s side (Mrs. Vance was a childless widow and he filled the onerous post of favorite nephew) gave a sense of compulsion to the light occupations that chequered his leisure. Mrs. Vance, who fancied herself A COWARD lonely when he was away, was too much engaged with notes, telegrams and arriving and departing guests, to do more than breathlessly smile upon his presence, or implore him to take the dullest girl of the party for a drive (and would he go by way of Millbrook, like a dear, and stop at the market to ask why the lobsters had n t come ?) ; and the house itself, and the guests who came and went in it like people rushing through a railway-station, offered no points of repose to his thoughts. Some houses are companions in them selves : the walls, the book-shelves, the very chairs and tables, have the qualities of a sympathetic mind ; but Mrs. Vance s interior was as impersonal as the setting of a classic drama. These conditions made Vibart cultivate an assiduous exchange of books between himself and Mr. Carstyle. The young man went down almost daily to the little house in the town, where Mrs. Carstyle, who had now an air of receiving him in curl-papers, and of not al ways immediately distinguishing him from the piano- tuner, made no effort to detain him on his way to her husband s study. Ill NOW and then, at the close of one of Vibart s visits, Mr. Carstyle put on a mildewed Panama hat and accompanied the young man for a mile or two [ 144] A COWARD on his way home. The road to Mrs. Vance s lay through one of the most amiable suburbs of Millbrook, and Mr. Carstyle, walking with his slow uneager step, his hat pushed back, and his stick dragging behind him, seemed to take a philosophic pleasure in the aspect of the trim lawns and opulent gardens. Vibart could never induce his companion to prolong his walk as far as Mrs. Vance s drawing-room ; but one afternoon, when the distant hills lay blue beyond the twilight of overarching elms, the two men strolled on into the country past that lady s hospitable gate posts. It was a still day, the road was deserted, and every sound came sharply through the air. Mr. Carstyle was in the midst of a disquisition on Diderot, when he raised his head and stood still. "What s that?" he said. "Listen!" Vibart listened and heard a distant storm of hoof- beats. A moment later, a buggy drawn by a pair of trotters swung round the turn of the road. It was about thirty yards off, coming toward them at full speed. The man who drove was leaning forward with outstretched arms; beside him sat a girl. Suddenly Vibart saw Mr. Carstyle jump into the middle of the road, in front of the buggy. He stood there immovable, his arms extended, his legs apart, in an attitude of indomitable resistance. Almost at the [145] A COWARD same moment Vibart realized that the man in the buggy had his horses in hand. "They re not running!" Vibart shouted, springing into the road and catching Mr. Carstyle s alpaca sleeve. The older man looked around vaguely: he seemed dazed. " Come away, sir, come away ! " cried Vibart, grip ping his arm. The buggy swept past them, and Mr. Carstyle stood in the dust gazing after it. At length he drew out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. He was very pale and Vibart noticed that his hand shook. "That was a close call, sir, wasn t it? I suppose you thought they were running." "Yes," said Mr. Carstyle slowly, "I thought they were running." " It certainly looked like it for a minute. Let s sit down, shall we ? I feel rather breathless myself." Vibart saw that his friend could hardly stand. They seated themselves on a tree-trunk by the roadside, and Mr. Carstyle continued to wipe his forehead in silence. At length he turned to Vibart and said abruptly : " I made straight for the middle of the road, did n t I ? If there had been a runaway I should have stopped it?" Vibart looked at him in surprise. [146] A COWARD " You would have tried to, undoubtedly, unless I d had time to drag you away." Mr. Carstyle straightened his narrow shoulders. "There was no hesitation, at all events? I I showed no signs of avoiding it ? " " I should say not, sir ; it was I who funked it for you." Mr. Carstyle was silent : his head had dropped for ward and he looked like an old man. "It was just my cursed luck again!" he exclaimed suddenly in a loud voice. For a moment Vibart thought that he was wander ing ; but he raised his head and went on speaking in more natural tones. " I daresay I appeared ridiculous enough to you just now, eh? Perhaps you saw all along that the horses weren t running? Your eyes are younger than mine ; and then you re not always looking out for runaways, as I am. Do you know that in thirty years I ve never seen a runaway?" "You re fortunate," said Vibart, still bewildered. " Fortunate ? Good God, man, I ve prayed to see one : not a runaway especially, but any bad accident ; anything that endangered people s lives. There are accidents happening all the time all over the world ; why shouldn t I ever come across one? It s not for want of trying! At one time I used to haunt the [147] A COWARD theatres in the hope of a fire : fires in theatres ar* so apt to be fatal. Well, will you believe it ? I was in *he Brooklyn theatre the night before it burned down ; I left the old Madison Square Garden half an hour before the walls fell in. And it s the same way with street accidents I always miss them; I m always just too late. Last year there was a boy knocked down by a cable-car at our corner ; I got to my gate just as they were carrying him off on a stretcher. And so it goes. If anybody else had been walking along this road, those horses would have been running away. And there was a girl in the buggy, too a mere child ! " Mr. Carstyle s head sank again. " You re wondering what this means," he began after another pause. " I was a little confused for a moment I must have seemed incoherent." His voice cleared and he made an effort to straighten himself. " Well, I was a damned coward once and I ve been trying to live it down ever since." Vibart looked at him incredulously and Mr. Carstyle caught the look with a smile. " Why not ? Do I look like a Hercules ? " He held up his loose-skinned hand and shrunken wrist. "Not built for the part, certainly ; but that does n t count, of course. Man s unconquerable soul, and all the rest of it ... well, I was a coward every inch of me, body and soul." [148] A COWARD He paused and glanced up and down the road. There was no one in sight. "It happened when I was a young chap just out of college. I was travelling round the world with an other youngster of my own age and an older man Charles Meriton who has since made a name for him self. You may have heard of him." "Meriton, the archaeologist? The man who discov ered those ruined African cities the other day ? " " That s the man. He was a college tutor then, and my father, who had known him since he was a boy, and who had a very high opinion of him, had asked him to make the tour with us. We both my friend Collis and I had an immense admiration for Meriton. He was just the fellow to excite a boy s enthusiasm : cool, quick, imperturbable the kind of man whose hand is always on the hilt of action. His explorations had led him into all sorts of tight places, and he d shown an extraordinary combination of calculating patience and reckless courage. He never talked about his do ings ; we picked them up from various people on our journey. He d been everywhere, he knew everybody, and everybody had something stirring to tell about him. I daresay this account of the man sounds exag gerated ; perhaps it is ; I ve never seen him since ; but at that time he seemed to me a tremendous fellow a kind of scientific Ajax. He was a capital travelling- [ 149 ] A COWARD companion, at any rate : good-tempered, cheerful, easily amused, with none of the been-there-before superiority so irritating to youngsters. He made us feel as though it were all as new to him as to us : he never chilled our enthusiasms or took the bloom off our surprises. There was nobody else whose good opinion I cared as much about : he was the biggest thing in sight. "On the way home Collis broke down with diph theria. We were in the Mediterranean, cruising about the Sporades in a felucca. He was taken ill at Chios. The attack came on suddenly and we were afraid to run the risk of taking him back to Athens in the felucca. We established ourselves in the inn at Chios and there the poor fellow lay for weeks. Luckily there was a fairly good doctor on the island and we sent to Athens for a sister to help with the nursing. Poor Collis was desperately bad : the diphtheria was fol lowed by partial paralysis. The doctor assured us that the danger was past ; he would gradually regain the use of his limbs ; but his recovery would be slow. The sister encouraged us too she had seen such cases be fore ; and he certainly did improve a shade each day. Meriton and I had taken turns with the sister in nurs ing him, but after the paralysis had set in there was n t much to do, and there was nothing to prevent Meri- ton s leaving us for a day or two. He had received word from some place on the coast of Asia Minor that [ 150 ] A COWARD a remarkable tomb had been discovered somewhere in the interior ; he had not been willing to take us there, as the journey was not a particularly safe one ; but now that we were tied up at Chios there seemed no reason why he should n t go and take a look at the place. The expedition would not take more than three days ; Col- lis was convalescent ; the doctor and nurse assured us that there was no cause for uneasiness ; and so Meriton started off one evening at sunset. I walked down to the quay with him and saw him rowed off to the felucca. I would have given a good deal to be going with him ; the prospect of danger allured me. " You 11 see that Collis is never left alone, won t you ? he shouted back to me as the boat pulled out into the harbor; I remembered I rather resented the suggestion. " I walked back to the inn and went to bed : the nurse sat up with Collis at night. The next morning I relieved her at the usual hour. It was a sultry day with a queer coppery-looking sky ; the air was stifling. In the middle of the day the nurse came to take my place while I dined ; when I went back to Collis s room she said she would go out for a breath of air. " I sat down by Collis s bed and began to fan him with the fan the sister had been using. The heat made him uneasy and I turned him over in bed, for he was still helpless : the whole of his right side was numb. [151] A COWARD Presently he fell asleep and I went to the window and sat looking down on the hot deserted square, with a bunch of donkeys and their drivers asleep in the shade of the convent-wall across the way. I re member noticing the blue beads about the donkeys necks . . . Were you ever *in an earthquake? No? I d never been in one either. It s an indescribable sensation . . . there s a Day of Judgment feeling in the air. It began with the donkeys waking up and trembling ; I noticed that and thought it queer. Then the drivers jumped up I saw the terror in their faces. Then a roar ... I remember noticing a big black crack in the con vent- wall opposite a zig-zag crack, like a flash of lightning in a wood-cut ... I thought of that, too, at the time ; then all the bells in the place began to ring it made a fearful discord ... I saw people rushing across the square . . . the air was full of crashing noises. The floor went down under me in a sickening way and then jumped back and pitched me to the ceiling . . . but where was the ceiling? And the door? I said to myself: We re two stories up the stairs are just wide enough for one ... I gave one glance at Collis : he was lying in bed, wide awake, looking straight at me. I ran. Something struck me on the head as I bolted downstairs I kept on running. I suppose the knock I got dazed me, for I don t remember much of anything till I found myself [152] A COWARD In a vineyard a mile from the town. I was roused by the warm blood running down my nose and heard myself explaining to Meriton exactly how it had hap pened . . . "When I crawled back to the town they told me that all the houses near the inn were in ruins and that a dozen people had been killed. Collis was among them, of course. The ceiling had come down on him." Mr. Carstyle wiped his forehead. Vibart sat looking away from him. " Two days later Meriton came back. I began to tell him the story, but he interrupted me. " There was no one with him at the time, then? You d left him alone ? " No, he wasn t alone/ " Who was with him ? You said the sister was out. (< I was with him. " You were with him ? " I shall never forget Meriton s look. I believe I had meant to explain, to accuse myself, to shout out my agony of soul ; but I saw the uselessness of it. A door had been shut between us. Neither of us spoke an other word. He was very kind to me on the way home ; he looked after me in a motherly way that was a good deal harder to stand than his open con tempt. I saw the man was honestly trying to pity me; but it was no good he simply couldn t." [ 153] A COWARD Mr. Carstyle rose slowly, with a certain stiffness. " Shall we turn toward home ? Perhaps I m keep ing you." They walked on a few steps in silence ; then he spoke again. "That business altered my whole life. Of course I oughtn t to have allowed it to that was another form of cowardice. But I saw myself only with Meri- ton s eyes it is one of the worst miseries of youth that one is always trying to be somebody else. I had meant to be a Meriton I saw I d better go home and study law . . . "It s a childish fancy, a survival of the primitive savage, if you like ; but from that hour to this I ve hankered day and night for a chance to retrieve my self, to set myself right with the man I meant to be. I want to prove to that man that it was all an acci dent an unaccountable deviation from my normal in stincts ; that having once been a coward does n t mean that a man s cowardly . . . and I can t, I can t ! " Mr. Carstyle s tone had passed insensibly from agita tion to irony. He had got back to his usual objective stand-point. "Why, I m a perfect olive-branch," he concluded, with his dry indulgent laugh ; " the very babies stop crying at my approach I carry a sort of millennium about with me I d make my fortune as an agent of [ 154] A COWARD the Peace Society. I shall go to the grave leaving that other man unconvinced!" Vibart walked back- with him to Millbrook. On her doorstep they met Mrs. Carstyle, flushed and feath ered, with a card-case and dusty boots. " I don t ask you in," she said plaintively, to Vibart, " because I can t answer for the food this evening. My maid-of-all-work tells me that she s going to a ball which is more than I ve done in years ! And besides, it would be cruel to ask you to spend such a hot evening in our stuffy little house the air is so much cooler at Mrs. Vance s. Remember me to Mrs. Vance, please, and tell her how sorry I am that I can no longer include her in rny round of visits. When I had my carriage I saw the people I liked, but now that I have to walk, my social opportunities are more limited. I was not obliged to do my visiting on foot when I was younger, and my doctor tells me that to persons accustomed to a carriage no exercise is more injurious than walking." She glanced at her husband with a smile of unfor giving sweetness. " Fortunately," she concluded, " it agrees with Mr. Carstyle." [ 155 ] THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOD THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOD I A Newport drawing-room. Tapestries, flowers, bric-a-brac. Through the windows, a geranium-edged lawn, the cliffs and the sea. Isabel Warland sits reading. Lucius War- land enters in flannels and a yachting-cap. ISABEL. Back already ? Warland. The wind dropped it turned into a drifting race. Langham took me off the yacht on his launch. What time is it ? Two o clock ? Where s Mrs. Raynor? Isabel. On her way to New York. Warland. To New York? Isabel. Precisely. The boat must be just leaving; she started an hour ago and took Laura with her. In fact I m alone in the house that is, until this evening. Some people are coming then. Warland. But what in the world Isabel. Her aunt, Mrs. Griscom, has had a fit. She has them constantly. They re not serious at least they wouldn t be, if Mrs. Griscom were not so rich and childless. Naturally, under the circum stances, Marian feels a peculiar sympathy for her; her position is such a sad one ; there s positively no [159] THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOD one to care whether she lives or dies except her heirs. Of course they all rush to Newburgh whenever she has a fit. It s hard on Marian, for she lives the farthest away ; but she has come to an understanding with the housekeeper, who always telegraphs her first, so that she gets a start of several hours. She will be at Newburgh to-night at ten, and she has calculated that the others can t possibly arrive before midnight. Warland. You have a delightful way of putting things. I suppose you d talk of me like that. Isabel Oh, no. It s too humiliating to doubt one s husband s disinterestedness. Warland. I wish I had a rich aunt who had fits. Isabel. If I were wishing I should choose heart- disease. Warland. There s no doing anything without money or influence. Isabel (picking up her book). Have you heard from Washington ? Warland. Yes. That s what I was going to speak of when I asked for Mrs. Raynor. I wanted to bid her good-bye. Isabel. You re going? Warland. By the five train. Fagott has just wired me that the Ambassador will be in Washington on Monday. He hasn t named his secretaries yet, but there isn t much hope for me. He has a nephew [160] THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOD Isabel. They always have. Like the Popes. Warland. Well, I m going all the same. You ll explain to Mrs. Raynor if she gets back before I do? Are there to be people at dinner? I don t sup pose it matters. You can always pick up an extra man on a Saturday. Isabel. By the way, that reminds me that Marian left me a list of the people who are arriving this afternoon. My novel is so absorbing that I forgot to look at it. Where can it be? Ah, here Let me see: the Jack Merringtons, Adelaide Clinton, Ned Lender all from New York, by seven p. M. train. Lewis Darley to-night, by Fall River boat. John Oberville, from Boston at five P.M. Why, I didn t know Warland (excitedly). John Oberville? John Ober ville? Here? To-day at five o clock? Let me see let me look at the list. Are you sure you re not mistaken? Why, she never said a word! Why the deuce did n t you tell me ? Isabel. I did n t know. Warland. Oberville Oberville ! Isabel. Why, what difference does it make ? Warland. What difference? What difference? Don t look at me as if you did n t understand English ! Why, if Oberville s coming (a pause) Look here, Isabel, didn t you know him very well at one time? Isabel. Very well yes. [161] THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOD Warland. I thought so of course I remember now ; I heard all about it before I met you. Let me see didn t you and your mother spend a winter in Washington when he was Under-secretary of State? Isabel. That was before the deluge. Warland. I remember it all comes back to me. I used to hear it said that he admired you tremend ously; there was a report that you were engaged. Don t you remember ? Why, it was in all the papers. By Jove, Isabel, what a match that would have been ! Isabel. You are disinterested ! Warland. Well, I can t help thinking Isabel. That I paid you a handsome compliment ? Warland (preoccupied). Eh? Ah, yes exactly. What was I saying? Oh about the report of your engagement. (Playfully.) He was awfully gone on you, was n t he ? Isabel. It s not for me to diminish your triumph. Warland. By Jove, I can t think why Mrs. Raynor didn t tell me he was coming. A man like that one doesn t take him for granted, like the piano- tuner! I wonder I didn t see it in the papers. Isabel. Is he grown such a great man? Warland. Oberville ? Great? John Oberville? I ll tell you what he is the power behind the throne, the black Pope, the King-maker and all the rest of it. Don t you read the papers ? Of course I 11 never [162] THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOD get on if you won t interest yourself in politics. And to think you might have married that man ! Isabel. And got you your secretaryship ! Warland. Oberville has them all in the hollow of his hand. Isabel. Well, you 11 see him at five o clock. Warland. I don t suppose he s ever heard of me, worse luck ! ( A silence.) Isabel, look here. I never ask questions, do I ? But it was so long ago and Ober ville almost belongs to history he will one of these days at any rate. Just tell me did he want to marry you? Isabel. Since you answer for his immortality (after a pause) I was very much in love with him. Warland. Then of course he did. (Another pause.) But what in the world Isabel (musing). As you say, it was so long ago ; I don t see why I shouldn t tell you. There was a mar ried woman who had what is the correct expression? made sacrifices for him. There was only one sacrifice she objected to making and he didn t consider him self free. It sounds rather rococo, doesn t it? It was odd that she died the year after we were married. Warland. Whew! Isabel (following her own thoughts). I ve never seen him since ; it must be ten years ago. I m certainly thirty-two, and I was just twenty-two then. It s curi- [163] THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOD ous to talk of it. I had put it away so carefully. How it smells of camphor ! And what an old-fashioned cut it has ! (Rising.} Where s the list, Lucius ? You wanted to know if there were to be people at dinner to night Warland. Here it is but never mind. Isabel (silence) Isabel Isabel. Well? Warland. It s odd he never married. Isabel. The comparison is to my disadvantage. But then I met you. Warland. Don t be so confoundedly sarcastic. I won der how he 11 feel about seeing you. Oh, I don t mean any sentimental rot, of course . . . but you re an uncommonly agreeable woman. I daresay he ll be pleased to see you again ; you re fifty times more attractive than when I married you. Isabel. I wish your other investments had appre ciated at the same rate. Unfortunately my charms won t pay the butcher. Warland. Damn the butcher! Isabel. I happened to mention him because he s just written again ; but I might as well have said the baker or the candlestick-maker. The candlestick-maker I wonder what he is, by the way? He, must have more faith in human nature than the others, for I haven t heard from him yet. I wonder if there is a [164] THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOD Creditor s Polite Letter-writer which they all consult ; their style is so exactly alike. I advise you to pass through New York incognito on your way to Washing ton ; their attentions might be oppressive. Warland. Confoundedly oppressive. What a dog s life it is ! My poor Isabel Isabel. Don t pity me. I did n t marry you for a home. Warland (after a pause). What did you marry me for, if you cared for Oberville ? (Another pause.) Eh ? Isabel. Don t make me regret my confidence. Warland. I beg your pardon. Isabel. Oh, it was only a subterfuge to conceal the fact that I have no distinct recollection of my rea sons. The fact is, a girl s motives in marrying are like a passport apt to get mislaid. One is so sel dom asked for either. But mine certainly couldn t have been mercenary : I never heard a mother praise you to her daughters. Warland. No, I never was much of a match. Isabel You impugn my judgment. Warland. If I only had a head for business, now, I might have done something by this time. But I d sooner break stones in the road. Isabel. It must be very hard to get an opening in that profession. So many of my friends have aspired to it, and yet I never knew any one who actually did it. Warland. If I could only get the secretaryship. [165] THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOD How that kind of life would suit you ! It s as much for you that I want it Isabel. And almost as much for the butcher. Don t belittle the circle of your benevolence. (She walks across the room.) Three o clock already and Marian asked me to give orders about the carriages. Let me see Mr. Oberville is the first arrival ; if you 11 ring I will send word to the stable. I suppose you 11 stay now? Warland. Stay? Isabel. Not go to Washington. I thought you spoke as if he could help you. Warland. He could settle the whole thing in five minutes. The President can t refuse him anything. But he does n t know me ; he may have a candidate of his own. It s a pity you haven t seen him for so long and yet I don t know ; perhaps it s just as well. The others don t arrive till seven? It seems as if How long is he going to be here? Till to-morrow night, I suppose ? I wonder what he s come for. The Merring- tons will bore him to death, and Adelaide, of course, will be philandering with Lender. I wonder (a pause) if Darley likes boating. (Rings the bell.) Isabel. Boating? Warland. Oh, I was only thinking Where are the matches? One may smoke here, I suppose? (He looks at his wife.) If I were you I d put on that black gown [166] THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOD of yours to-night the one with the spangles. It s only that Fred Langham asked me to go over to Nar- ragansett in his launch to-morrow morning, and I was , thinking that I might take Darley; I always liked Darley. Isabel (to the footman who enters). Mrs. Raynor wishes the dog-cart sent to the station at five o clock to meet Mr. Oberville. Footman. Very good, m m. Shall I serve tea at the usual time, m m ? Isabel. Yes. That is, when Mr. Oberville arrives. Footman (going out). Very good, m m. War land (to Isabel, who is moving toward the door). Where are you going? Isabel. To my room now for a walk later. Warland. Later? It s past three already. Isabel. I ve no engagement this afternoon. Warland. Oh, I didn t know. (As she reaches the door.) You ll be back, I suppose? Isabel. I have no intention of eloping. Wirland. For tea, I mean? Isabel. I never take tea. f Warland shrugs his shoul ders.) [167] THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOD II The same drawing-room. Isabel enters from the lawn in hat and gloves. The tea-table is set out, and the footman just lighting the lamp under the kettle. ISABEL. You may take the tea-things away. I never take tea. Footman. Very good, m m. (He hesitates.) I under stood, m m, that Mr. Oberville was to have tea? Isabel. Mr. Oberville? But he was to arrive long ago ! What time is it ? Footman. Only a quarter past five, m m. Isabel. A quarter past five ? ( She goes up to the clock.) Surely you re mistaken? I thought it was long after six. (To herself.) I walked and walked I must have walked too fast . . . (To the Footman.) I m going out again. When Mr. Oberville arrives please give him his tea without waiting for me. I shall not be back till dinner-time. Footman. Very good, m m. Here are some letters, m m. Isabel (glancing at them with a movement of disgust). You may send them up to my room. Footman. I beg pardon, m m, but one is a note from Mme Fanfreluche, and the man who brought it is waiting for an answer. [168] THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOD Isabel. Didn t you tell him I was out? Footman. Yes, m m. But he said he had orders to wait till you came in. Isabel. Ah let me see. (She opens the note.) Ah, yes. (A pause.) Please say that I am on my way now to Mme Fanfreluche s to give her the answer in person. You may tell the man that I have already started. Do you understand? Already started. Footman. Yes, m m. Isabel. And wait. (With an effort.) You may tell me when the man has started. I shall wait here till then. Be sure you let me know. Footman. Yes, m m. (He goes out.) Isabel (sinking into a chair and hiding her face). Ah! (After a moment she rises, taking up her gloves and sun shade, and walks toward the window which opens on the lawn.) I m so tired. ( She hesitates and turns back into the room.) Where can I go to ? (She sits down again by the tea-table, and bends over the kettle. The clock strikes half -past Jive.) Isabel (picking up her sunshade, walks back to the win dow). If I must meet one of them . . . Oberville (speaking in the hall). Thanks. I 11 take tea first. (He enters the room, and pauses doubtfully on seeing Isabel.) Isabel (stepping towards him with a smile). It s not that I ve changed, of course, but only that I happened [169] THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOD to have my back to the light. Isn t that what you are going to say? Oberville. Mrs. Warland ! Isabel. So you really have become a great man ! They always remember people s names. Oberville. Were you afraid I was going to call you Isabel ? Isabel. Bravo ! Crescendo ! Oberville. But you have changed, all the same. Isabel. You must indeed have reached a dizzy emi nence, since you can indulge yourself by speaking the truth ! Oberville. It s your voice. I knew it at once, and yet it s different. Isabel. I hope it can still convey the pleasure I feel in seeing an old friend. ( She holds out her hand. He takes it.} You know, I suppose, that Mrs. Raynor is not here to receive you ? She was called away this morning very suddenly by her aunt s illness. Oberville. Yes. She left a note for me. (Absently.} I m sorry to hear of Mrs. Griscom s illness. Isabel. Oh, Mrs. Griscom s illnesses are less alarming than her recoveries. But I am forgetting to offer you any tea. ( She hands him a cup.) I remember you liked it very strong. Oberville. What else do you remember? Isabel. A number of equally useless things. My mind is a store-room of obsolete information. [170] THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOB Oberville. Why obsolete, since I am providing you ^dth a use for it? Isabel. At any rate, it s open to question whether it was worth storing for that length of time. Especially as there must have been others more fitted by op- 1 portunity to undertake the duty. Oberville. The duty? Isabel. Of remembering how you like your tea. Oberville (with a change of tone). Since you call it a duty I may remind you that it s one I have never asked any one else to perform. Isabel. As a duty ! But as a pleasure ? Oberville. Do you really want to know? Isabel. Oh, I don t require and charge you. Oberville. You dislike as much as ever having the i s dotted? Isabel. With a handwriting I know as well as yours I Oberville (recovering his lightness of manner ). Accom plished woman ! (He examines her approvingly.) I d no idea that you were here. I never was more surprised. Isabel. I hope you like being surprised. To my mind it s an overrated pleasure. Oberville. Is it ? I m sorry to hear that. Isabel. Why? Have you a surprise to dispose of? Oberville. I m not sure that I have n t. Isabel. Don t part with it too hastily. It may improve by being kept. [171] THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOD Oberville ( tentatively ). Does that mean that you don t want it? Isabel. Heaven forbid ! I want everything I can get. Oberville. And you get everything you want. At least you used to. Isabel. Let us talk of your surprise. Oberville. It s to be yours, you know. (A pause. He speaks gravely.) I find that I ve never got over having lost you. Isabel (also gravely). And is that a surprise to you too? Oberville. Honestly yes. I thought I d crammed my life full. I didn t know there was a cranny left anywhere. At first, you know, I stuffed in everything I could lay my hands on there was such a big void to fill. And after all I have n t filled it. I felt that the moment I saw you. (A pause.) I m talking stupidly. Isabel. It would be odious if you were eloquent. Oberville. What do you mean? Isabel. That s a question you never used to ask me. Oberville. Be merciful. Remember how little practise I ve had lately. Isabel. In what? Oberville. Never mind ! (He rises and walks arvay ; then comes back and stands in front of her.) What a fool I was to give you up ! Isabel. Oh, don t say that! I ve lived on it! [ m] THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOD Oberville. On my letting you go ? Isabel. On your letting everything go but the right. Oberville. Oh, hang the right! What is truth? We had the right to be happy ! Isabel (with rising emotion). I used to think so some times. Oberville. Did you ? Triple fool that I was ! Isabel. But you showed me Oberville. Why, good God, we belonged to each other and I let you go ! It s fabulous. I ve fought for things since that weren t worth a crooked sixpence ;, fought as well as other men. And you you I lost you because I could n t face a scene ! Hang it, suppose there d been a dozen scenes I might have survived them. Men have been known to. They re not neces sarily fatal. Isabel. A scene? Oberville. It s a form of fear that women don t un derstand. How you must have despised me ! Isabel. You were afraid of a scene? Oberville. I was a damned coward, Isabel. That s about the size of it. Isabel. Ah I had thought it so much larger! Oberville. What did you say? Isabel. I said that you have forgotten to drink your tea. It must be quite cold. [173] THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOD Oberville. Ah Isabel. Let me give you another cup. Oberville (collecting himself}. No no. This is perfect. Isabel. You haven t tasted it. Oberville (falling into her mood}. You always made it to perfection. Only you never gave me enough sugar. Isabel. I know better now. ( She puts another lump in his cup.) Oberville (drinks his tea, and then says, with an air of reproach}. Isn t all this chaff rather a waste of time between two old friends who have n t met for so many years ? Isabel (lightly}. Oh, it s only a hors d oeuvre the tuning of the instruments. I m out of practise too. Oberville. Let us come to the grand air, then. (Sits down near her.} Tell me about yourself. What are you doing ? Isabel. At this moment? You ll never guess. I m trying to remember you. Oberville. To remember me? Isabel. Until you came into the room just now my recollection of you was so vivid ; you were a living whole in my thoughts. Now I am engaged in gather ing up the fragments in laboriously reconstructing you .... Oberville. I have changed so much, then? Isabel. No, I don t believe that you *ve changed. It s [ m] THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOD only that I see you differently. Don t you know how hard it is to convince elderly people that the type of the evening paper is no smaller than when they were young ? Oberville. I ve shrunk then ? Isabel. You could n t have grown bigger. Oh, I m serious now ; you need n t prepare a smile. For years you were the tallest object on my horizon. I used to climb to the thought of you, as people who live in a flat country mount the church steeple for a view. It s wonderful how much I used to see from there ! And the air was so strong and pure! Oberville. And now? Isabel. Now I can fancy how delightful it must be to sit next to you at dinner. Oberville. You re unmerciful. Have I said anything to offend you ? Isabel. Of course not. How absurd! Oberville. I lost my head a little I forgot how long it is since we have met. When I saw you I forgot everything except what you had once been to me. (She is silent.} I thought you too generous to resent that. Perhaps I have overtaxed your generosity. (A pause.) Shall I confess it? When I first saw you I thought for a moment that you had remembered as I had. You see I can only excuse myself by saying something inexcusable. [175] THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOD Isabel (deliberately). Not inexcusable. Oberville. Not? Isabel. I had remembered. Oberville. Isabel! Isabel. But now Oberville. Ah, give me a moment before you unsay it! Isabel. I don t mean to unsay it. There s no use in repealing an obsolete law. That s the pity of it ! You say you lost me ten years ago. (A pause.) I never lost you till now. Oberville. Now? Isabel. Only this morning you were my supreme court of justice ; there was no appeal from your ver dict. Not an hour ago you decided a case for me against myself! And now . And the worst of it is that it s not because you ve changed. How do I know if you ve changed ? You have n t said a hun dred words to me. You haven t been an hour in the room. And the years must have enriched you I daresay you ve doubled your capital. You ve been in the thick of life, and the metal you re made of brightens with use. Success on some men looks like a borrowed coat ; it sits on you as though it had been made to order. I see all this ; I know it ; but I don t feel it. I don t feel anything . . . any where ... I m numb. (A pause.) Don t laugh, but [176] THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOD I really don t think I should know now if you came into the room unless I actually saw you. ( They are both silent.) Oberville (at length ). Then, to put the most merci ful interpretation upon your epigrams, your feeling for me was made out of poorer stuff than mine for you. Isabel. Perhaps it has had harder wear. Oberville. Or been less cared for? Isabel. If one has only one cloak one must wear it in all weathers. Oberville. Unless it is so beautiful and precious that one prefers to go cold and keep it under lock and key. Isabel. In the cedar-chest of indifference the key of which is usually lost. Oberville. Ah, Isabel, you re too pat! How much I preferred your hesitations. Isabel. My hesitations ? That reminds me how much your coming has simplified things. I feel as if I d had an auction sale of fallacies. Oberville. You speak in enigmas, and I have a notion that your riddles are the reverse of the sphinx s more dangerous to guess than to give up. And yet I used to find your thoughts such good reading. Isabel. One cares so little for the style in which one s praises are written. Oberville. You ve been praising me for the last ten minutes and I find your style detestable. I would [177] THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOD rather have you find fault with me like a friend than approve me like a dilettante. Isabel. A dilettante! The very word I wanted! Oberville. I am proud to have enriched so full a vocabulary. But I am still waiting for the word 1 want. (He grows serious.) Isabel, look in your heart give me the first word you find there. You ve no idea how much a beggar can buy with a penny! Isabel. It s empty, my poor friend, it s empty. Oberville. Beggars never say that to each other. Isabel. No ; never, unless it s true. Oberville (after another silence). Why do you look at me so curiously? Isabel. I m what was it you said ? Approving you as a dilettante. Don t be alarmed ; you can bear ex amination ; I don t see a crack anywhere. After all, it s a satisfaction to find that one s idol makes a handsome bibelot. Oberville (with an attempt at lightness). I was right then you re a collector? Isabel (modestly). One must make a beginning. I think I shall begin with you. (She smiles at him.) Posi tively, I must have you on my mantel-shelf ! ( She rises and looks at the clock.) But it s time to dress for dinner. (She holds out her hand to him and he kisses it. They look at each other, and it is clear that he does not quite under" stand, but is watching eagerly for his cue.) [ "8 ] THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOD War land (coming in}. Hullo, Isabel you re here after all? Isabel. And so is Mr. Oberville. ( She looks straight at Warland.) I stayed in on purpose to meet him. My husband (The two men bow.) Warland (effusively). So glad to meet you. My wife talks of you so often. She s been looking forward tre mendously to your visit. Oberville. It s a long time since I ve had the pleas ure of seeing Mrs. Warland. Isabel. But now we are going to make up for lost time. (As he goes to the door.) I claim you to-morrow for the whole day. Oberville bows and goes out. Isabel. Lucius ... I think you d better go to Wash ington, after all. (Musing.) Narragansett might do for the others, though. . . . Could n t you get Fred Lang- ham to ask all the rest of the party to go over there with him to-morrow morning ? I shall have a headache and stay at home. (He looks at her doubtfully.) Mr. Ober ville is a bad sailor. Warland advances demonstratively. Isabel (drawing back). It s time to go and dress. I think you said the black gown with spangles? [179] A CUP OF COLD WATER A CUP OF COLD WATER IT was three o clock in the morning, and the cotil lion was at its height, when Woburn left the over-heated splendor of the Gildermere ball room, and after a delay caused by the determination of the drowsy footman to give him a ready-made overcoat with an imitation astrachan collar in place of his own unimpeachable Poole garment, found him self breasting the icy solitude of the Fifth Avenue. He was still smiling, as he emerged from the awn ing, at his insistence in claiming his own overcoat: it illustrated, humorously enough, the invincible force of habit. As he faced the wind, however, he discerned a providence in his persistency, for his coat was fur- lined, and he had a cold voyage before him on the morrow. It had rained hard during the earlier part of the night, and the carriages waiting in triple line before the Gildermeres door were still domed by shining umbrellas, while the electric lamps extending down the avenue blinked Narcissus-like at their watery im ages in the hollows of the sidewalk. A dry blast had come out of the north, with pledge of frost before daylight, and to Woburn s shivering fancy the pools in the pavement seemed already stiffening into ice. He [ 183] A CUP OF COLD WATER turned up his coat-collar and stepped out rapidly, his hands deep in his coat-pockets. As he walked he glanced curiously up at the ladder- like door-steps which may well suggest to the future archaeologist that all the streets of New York were once canals ; at the spectral tracery of the trees about St. Luke s, the fretted mass of the Cathedral, and the mean vista of the long side-streets. The knowledge that he was perhaps looking at it all for the last time caused every detail to start out like a challenge to memory, and lit the brown-stone house-fronts with the glamor of sword-barred Edens. It was an odd impulse that had led him that night to the Gildermere ball ; but the same change in his condi tion which made him stare wonderingly at the houses in the Fifth Avenue gave the thrill of an exploit to the tame business of ball-going. Who would have imagined, Woburn mused, that such a situation as his would pos sess the priceless quality of sharpening the blunt edge of habit? It was certainly curious to reflect, as he leaned against the doorway of Mrs. Gildermere s ball-room, enveloped in the warm atmosphere of the accustomed, that twenty-four hours later the people brushing by him with looks of friendly recognition would start at the thought of having seen him and slur over the recollection of having taken his hand ! [184] A CUP OF COLD WATER And the girl he had gone there to see : what would she think of him? He knew well enough that her trenchant classifications of life admitted no overlapping of good and evil, made no allowance for that incalcul able interplay of motives that justifies the subtlest casuistry of compassion. Miss Talcott was too young to distinguish the intermediate tints of the moral spectrum ; and her judgments were further simplified by a peculiar concreteness of mind. Her bringing-up had fostered this tendency and she was surrounded by people who focussed life in the same way. To the girls in Miss Talcott s set, the attentions of a clever man who had to work for his living had the zest of a forbidden pleasure ; but to marry such a man would be as unpardonable as to have one s car riage seen at the door of a cheap dress-maker. Poverty might make a man fascinating; but a settled income was the best evidence of stability of character. If there were anything in heredity, how could a nice girl trust a man whose parents had been careless enough to leave him unprovided for? Neither Miss Talcott nor any of her friends could be charged with formulating these views ; but they were implicit in the slope of every white shoulder and in the ripple of every yard of imported tulle dappling the foreground of Mrs. Gildermere s ball-room. The ad vantages of line and colour in veiling the crudities of [ 185 ] A CUP OF COLD WATER a creed are obvious to emotional minds ; and besides, Woburn was conscious that it was to the cheerful materialism of their parents that the young girls he admired owed that fine distinction of outline in which their skilfully-rippled hair and skilfully-hung draperies cooperated with the slimness and erectness that came of participating in the most expensive sports, eating the most expensive food and breathing the most ex pensive air. Since the process which had produced them was so costly, how could they help being costly themselves ? Woburn was too logical to expect to give no more for a piece of old Sevres than for a bit of kitchen crockery; he had no faith in wonderful bar gains, and believed that one got in life just what one was willing to pay for. He had no mind to dispute the taste of those who preferred the rustic simplicity of the earthen crock; but his own fancy inclined to the piece of pate tendre which must be kept in a glass case and handled as delicately as a flower. It was not merely by the external grace of these drawing-room ornaments that Woburn s sensibilities were charmed. His imagination was touched by the curious exoticism of view resulting from such condi tions. He had always enjoyed listening to Miss Talcott even more than looking at her. Her ideas had the brilliant bloom and audacious irrelevance of those trop ical orchids which strike root in air. Miss Talcott s [186] A CUP OF COLD WATER opinions had no connection with the actual ; her very materialism had the grace of artificiality. Woburn had been enchanted once by seeing her helpless before a smoking lamp : she had been obliged to ring for a ser vant because she did not know how to put it out. Her supreme charm was the simplicity that comes of taking it for granted that people are born with car riages and country-places : it never occurred to her that such congenital attributes could be matter for self- consciousness, and she had none of the nouveau riche prudery which classes poverty with the nude in art and is not sure how to behave in the presence of either. The conditions of Woburn s own life had made him peculiarly susceptible to those forms of elegance which are the flower of ease. His father had lost a comfortable property through sheer inability to go over his agent s accounts ; and this disaster, coming at the outset of Woburn s school-days, had given a new bent to the family temperament. The father characteristically died when the effort of living might have made it possible to retrieve his fortunes ; and Woburn s mother and sister, embittered by this final evasion, settled down to a vindictive war with circumstances. They were the kind of women who think that it lightens the burden of life to throw over the amenities, as a reduced house keeper puts away her knick-knacks to make the dust- [187] A CUP OF COLD WATER ing easier. They fought mean conditions meanly; but Woburn, in his resentment of their attitude, did not allow for the suffering which had brought it about : his own tendency was to overcome difficulties by conciliation rather than by conflict. Such surround ings threw into vivid relief the charming figure of Miss Talcott. Woburn instinctively associated poverty with bad food, ugly furniture, complaints and recrimi nations : it was natural that he should be drawn to ward the luminous atmosphere where life was a series of peaceful and good-humored acts, unimpeded by petty obstacles. To spend one s time in such society gave one the illusion of unlimited credit; and also, unhappily, created the need for it. It was here in fact that Woburn s difficulties began. To marry Miss Talcott it was necessary to be a rich man : even to dine out in her set involved certain minor extravagances. Woburn had determined to marry her sooner or later ; and in the meanwhile to be with her as much as possible. As he stood leaning in the doorway of the Gilder- mere ball-room, watching her pass him in the waltz, he tried to remember how it had begun. First there had been the tailor s bill ; the fur-lined overcoat with cuffs and collar of Alaska sable had alone cost more than he had spent on his clothes for two or three years previously. Then there were theatre-tickets ; cab-fares ; [ 188] A CUP OF COLD WATER florist s bills ; tips to servants at the country-houses where he went because he knew that she was invited ; the Omar Khayyam bound by Sullivan that he sent her at Christmas ; the contributions to her pet chari ties ; the reckless purchases at fairs where she had a stall. His whole way of life had imperceptibly changed and his year s salary was gone before the second quar ter was due. He had invested the few thousand dollars which had been his portion of his father s shrunken estate : when his debts began to pile up, he took a flyer in stocks and after a few months of varying luck his little patri mony disappeared. Meanwhile his courtship was pro ceeding at an inverse ratio to his financial ventures. Miss Talcott was growing tender and he began to feel that the game was in his hands. The nearness of the goal exasperated him. She was not the girl to wait and he knew that it must be now or never. A friend lent him five thousand dollars on his personal note and he bought railway stocks on margin. They went up and he held them for a higher rise : they fluctu ated, dragged, dropped below the level at which he had bought, and slowly continued their uninterrupted descent. His broker called for more margin ; he could not respond and was sold out. What followed came about quite naturally. For several years he had been cashier in a well-known [ 189] A CUP OF COLD WATER banking-house. When the note he had given his friend became due it was obviously necessary to pay it and he used the firm s money for the purpose. To repay the money thus taken, he increased his debt to his employers and bought more stocks ; and on these operations he made a profit of ten thousand dollars. Miss Talcott rode in the Park, and he bought a smart hack for seven hundred, paid off his trades men, and went on speculating with the remainder of his profits. He made a little more, but failed to take advantage of the market and lost all that he had staked, including the amount taken from the firm. He increased his over-draft by another ten thousand and lost that; he over-drew a farther sum and lost again. Suddenly he woke to the fact that he owed his employers fifty thousand dollars and that the partners were to make their semi-annual inspection in two days. He realized then that within forty-eight hours what he had called borrowing would become theft. There was no time to be lost : he must clear out and start life over again somewhere else. The day that he reached this decision he was to have met Miss Talcott at dinner. He went to the dinner, but she did not ap pear : she had a headache, his hostess explained. Well, he was not to have a last look at her, after all ; better so, perhaps. He took leave early and on his way home [ W] A CUP OF COLD WATER stopped at a florist s and sent her a bunch of violets. The next morning he got a little note from her: the violets had done her head so much good she would tell him all about it that evening at the Gildermere ball. Woburn laughed and tossed the note into the fire. That evening he would be on board ship : the exami nation of the books was to take place the following morning at ten. Woburn went down to the bank as usual ; he did not want to do anything that might excite suspicion as to his plans, and from one or two questions which one of the partners had lately put to him he divined that he was being observed. At the bank the day passed uneventfully. He discharged his business with his accustomed care and went uptown at the usual hour. In the first flush of his successful speculations he had set up bachelor lodgings, moved by the tempta tion to get away from the dismal atmosphere of home, from his mother s struggles with the cook and his sis ter s curiosity about his letters. He had been influenced also by the wish for surroundings more adapted to his tastes. He wanted to be able to give little teas, to which Miss Talcott might come with a married friend. She came once or twice arid pronounced it all delight ful : she thought it so nice to have only a few Whistler etchings on the walls and the simplest crushed levant for all one s books. A CUP OF COLD WATER To these rooms Woburn returned on leaving the bank. His plans had taken definite shape. He had en gaged passage on a steamer sailing for Halifax early the next morning ; and there was nothing for him to do before going on board but to pack his clothes and tear up a few letters. He threw his clothes into a couple of portmanteaux, and when these had been called for by an expressman he emptied his pockets and counted up his ready money. He found that he possessed just fifty dollars and seventy-five cents ; but his passage to Halifax was paid, and once there he could pawn his watch and rings. This calculation com pleted, he unlocked his writing-table drawer and took out a handful of letters. They were notes from Miss Talcott. He read them over and threw them into the fire. On his table stood her photograph. He slipped it out of its frame and tossed it on top of the blazing letters. Having performed this rite, he got into his dress-clothes and went to a small French restaurant to dine. He had meant to go on board the steamer immedi ately after dinner ; but a sudden vision of introspective hours in a silent cabin made him call for the evening paper and run his eye over the list of theatres. It would be as easy to go on board at midnight as now. He selected a new vaudeville and listened to it with surprising freshness of interest ; but toward eleven [ 192] A CUP OF COLD WATER o clock he again began to dread the approaching ne cessity of going down to the steamer. There was some thing peculiarly unnerving in the idea of spending the rest of the night in a stifling cabin jammed against the side of a wharf. He left the theatre and strolled across to the Fifth Avenue. It was now nearly midnight and a stream of carriages poured up town from the opera and the theatres. As he stood on the corner watching the fa miliar spectacle it occurred to him that many of the people driving by him in smart broughams and C-spring landaus were on their way to the Gildermere ball. He remembered Miss Talcott s note of the morn ing and wondered if she were in one of the passing carriages ; she had spoken so confidently of meeting him at the ball. What if he should go and take a last look at her? There was really nothing to prevent it. He was not likely to run across any member of the firm : in Miss Talcott s set his social standing was good for another ten hours at least. He smiled in anticipa tion of her surprise at seeing him, and then reflected with a start that she would not be surprised at all. His meditations were cut short by a fall of sleety rain, and hailing a hansom he gave the driver Mrs. Gildermere s address. As he drove up the avenue he looked about him like a traveller in a strange city. The buildings which had [ 193] A CUP OF COLD WATER been so unobtrusively familiar stood out with sudden distinctness : he noticed a hundred details which had escaped his observation. The people on the sidewalks looked like strangers : he wondered where they were going and tried to picture the lives they led ; but his own relation to life had been so suddenly reversed that he found it impossible to recover his mental perspec tive. At one corner he saw a shabby man lurking in the shadow of the side street ; as the hansom passed, a policeman ordered him to move on. Farther on, Wo- burn noticed a woman crouching on the door-step of a handsome house. She had drawn a shawl over her head and was sunk in the apathy of despair or drink. A well- dressed couple paused to look at her. The electric globe at the corner lit up their faces, and Woburn saw the lady, who was young and pretty, turn away with a little grimace, drawing her companion after her. The desire to see Miss Talcott had driven Woburn to the Gildermeres ; but once in the ball-room he made no effort to find her. The people about him seemed more like strangers than those he had passed in the street. He stood in the doorway, studying the petty manoeuvres of the women and the resigned amen ities of their partners. Was it possible that these were his friends ? These mincing women, all paint and dye and whalebone, these apathetic men who looked as [ 19*] A CUP OF COLD WATER much alike as the figures that children cut out of a folded sheet of paper ? Was it to live among such pup pets that he had sold his soul ? What had any of these people done that was noble, exceptional, distinguished ? Who knew them by name even, except their trades men and the society reporters? Who were they, that they should sit in judgment on him? The bald man with the globular stomach, who stood at Mrs. Gildermere s elbow surveying the dan cers, was old Boylston, who had made his pile in wrecking railroads ; the smooth chap with glazed eyes, at whom a pretty girl smiled up so confidingly, was Collerton, the political lawyer, who had been mixed up to his own advantage in an ugly lobbying trans action ; near him stood Brice Lyndham, whose recent failure had ruined his friends and associates, but had not visibly affected the welfare of his large and ex pensive family. The slim fellow dancing with Miss Gildermere was Alec Vance, who lived on a salary of five thousand a year, but whose wife was such a good manager that they kept a brougham and victoria and always put in their season at Newport and their spring trip to Europe. The little ferret-faced youth in the corner was Regie Colby, who wrote the Entre-Nous paragraphs in the Social Searchlight : the women were charming to him and he got all the financial tips he wanted from their husbands and fathers. [195] A CUP OF COLD WATER And the women? Well, the women knew all about the men, and flattered them and married them and tried to catch them for their daughters. It was a domino-party at which the guests were forbidden to unmask, though they all saw through each other s disguises. And these were the people who, within twenty-four hours, would be agreeing that they had always felt there was something wrong about Woburn ! They would be extremely sorry for him, of course, poor devil ; but there are certain standards, after all what would society be without standards? His new friends, his future associates, were the suspicious-look ing man whom the policeman had ordered to move on, and the drunken woman asleep on the door-step. To these he was linked by the freemasonry of failure. Miss Talcott passed him on Collerton s arm : she was giving him one of the smiles of which Woburn had fancied himself sole owner. Collerton was a sharp fel low ; he must have made a lot in that last deal ; prob ably she would marry him. How much did she know about the transaction? She was a shrewd girl and her father was in Wall Street. If Woburn s luck had turned the other way she might have married him instead; and if he had confessed his sin to her one evening, as they drove home from the opera in their new brougham, she would have said that really it was [ 196] A CUP OF COLD WATER of no use to tell her, for she never could understand about business, but that she did entreat him in fu ture to be nicer to Regie Colby. Even now, if he made a big strike somewhere, and came back in ten years with a beard and a steam yacht, they would all deny that anything had been proved against him, and Mrs. Collerton might blush and remind him of their friendship. Well why not? Was not all morality based on a convention? What was the stanchest code of ethics but a trunk with a series of false bottoms? Now and then one had the illusion of getting down to absolute right or wrong, but it was only a false bottom a removable hypothesis with another false bottom underneath. There was no getting beyond the relative. The cotillion had begun. Miss Talcott sat nearly opposite him : she was dancing with young Boylston and giving him a Woburn-Collerton smile. So young Boylston was in the syndicate too ! Presently Woburn was aware that she had forgotten young Boylston and was glancing absently about the room. She was looking for some one, and meant the some one to know it : he knew that Lost-Chord look in her eyes. A new figure was being formed. The partners circled about the room and Miss Talcott s flying tulle drifted close to him as she passed. Then the favors were dis- .[ W ] A CUP OF COLD WATER tributed; white skirts wavered across the floor like thistle-down on summer air ; men rose from their seats and fresh couples filled the shining parquet. Miss Talcott, after taking from the basket a Legion of Honor in red enamel, surveyed the room for a mo ment ; then she made her way through the dancers and held out the favor to Woburn. He fastened it in his coat, and emerging from the crowd of men about the doorway, slipped his arm about her. Their eyes met ; hers were serious and a little sad. How fine and slender she was ! He noticed the little tendrils of hair about the pink convolution of her ear. Her waist was firm and yet elastic ; she breathed calmly and regu larly, as though dancing were her natural motion. She did not look at him again and neither of them spoke. When the music ceased they paused near her chair. Her partner was waiting for her and Woburn left her with a bow. He made his way down-stairs and out of the house. He was glad that he had not spoken to Miss Talcott. There had been a healing power in their silence. All bitterness had gone from him and he thought of her now quite simply, as the girl he loved. At Thirty-fifth Street he reflected that he had better jump into a car and go down to his steamer. Again there rose before him the repulsive vision of the dark cabin, with creaking noises overhead, and the cold [ W] A CUP OF COLD WATER wash of water against the pier: he thought he would stop in a cafe and take a drink. He turned into Broad way and entered a brightly-lit cafe ; but when he had taken his whisky and soda there seemed no reason for lingering. He had never been the kind of man who could escape difficulties in that way. Yet he was con scious that his will was weakening ; that he did not mean to go down to the steamer just yet. What did he mean to do ? He began to feel horribly tired and it occurred to him that a few hours sleep in a decent bed would make a new man of him. Why not go on board the next morning at daylight? He could not go back to his rooms, for on leaving the house he had taken the precaution of dropping his latch-key into his letter-box ; but he was in a neigh borhood of discreet hotels and he wandered on till he came to one which was known to offer a dispassionate hospitality to luggageless travellers in dress-clothes. II HE pushed open the swinging door and found himself in a long corridor with a tessellated floor, at the end of which, in a brightly-lit enclosure of plate-glass and mahogany, the night-clerk dozed over a copy of the Police Gazette. The air in the corri dor was rich in reminiscences of yesterday s dinners, [ 199] A CUP OF COLD WATER and a bronzed radiator poured a wave of dry heat into Woburn s face. The night-clerk, roused by the swinging of the door, sat watching Woburn s approach with the unexpectant eye of one who has full confidence in his capacity for digesting surprises. Not that there was anything sur prising in Woburn s appearance ; but the night-clerk s callers were given to such imaginative flights in ex plaining their luggageless arrival in the small hours of the morning, that he fared habitually on fictions which would have staggered a less experienced stomach. The night-clerk, whose unwrinkled bloom showed that he throve on this high-seasoned diet, had a fancy for clas sifying his applicants before they could frame their explanations. "This one s been locked out," he said to himself as he mustered Wobum. Having exercised his powers of divination with his accustomed accuracy he listened without stirring an eye-lid to Woburn s statement ; merely replying, when the latter asked the price of a room, "Two-fifty." "Very well," said Woburn, pushing the money un der the brass lattice, " I 11 go up at once ; and I want to be called at seven." To this the night-clerk proffered no reply, but stretching out his hand to press an electric button, re turned apathetically to the perusal of the Police Gazette. [ 200 ] A CUP OF COLD WATER His summons was answered by the appearance of a man in shirt-sleeves, whose rumpled head indicated that he had recently risen from some kind of makeshift repose ; to him the night-clerk tossed a key, with the brief comment, " Ninety-seven ; " and the man, after a sleepy glance at Woburn, turned on his heel and lounged toward the staircase at the back of the corridor. Woburn followed and they climbed three flights in silence. At each landing Woburn glanced down the long passage-way lit by a lowered gas-jet, with a double line of boots before the doors, waiting, like yesterday s deeds, to carry their owners so many miles farther on the morrow s destined road. On the third landing the man paused, and after examining the number on the key, turned to the left, and slouching past three or four doors, finally unlocked one and preceded Woburn into a room lit only by the upward gleam of the elec tric globes in the street below. The man felt in his pockets ; then he turned to Woburn. "Got a match?" he asked. Woburn politely offered him one, and he applied it to the gas-fixture which extended its jointed arm above an ash dressing-table with a blurred mirror fixed be tween two standards. Having performed this office with an air of detachment designed to make Woburn recog nize it as an act of supererogation, he turned without a word and vanished down the passage-way. [201 ] A CUP OF COLD WATER Woburn, after an indifferent glance about the room, which seemed to afford the amount of luxury generally obtainable for two dollars and a half in a fashionable quarter of New York, locked the door and sat down at the ink-stained writing-table in the window. Far below him lay the pallidly-lit depths of the forsaken thor oughfare. Now and then he heard the jingle of a horse- car and the ring of hoofs on the freezing pavement, or saw the lonely figure of a policeman eclipsing the illumination of the plate-glass windows on the opposite side of the street. He sat thus for a long time, his el bows on the table, his chin between his hands, till at length the contemplation of the abandoned side walks, above which the electric globes kept Stylites- like vigil, became intolerable to him, and he drew down the window-shade, and lit the gas-fixture beside the dressing-table. Then he took a cigar from his case, and held it to the flame. The passage from the stinging freshness of the night to the stale overheated atmosphere of the Haslemere Hotel had checked the preternaturally rapid working of his mind, and he was now scarcely conscious of thinking at all. His head was heavy, and he would have thrown himself on the bed had he not feared to oversleep the hour fixed for his departure. He thought it safest, instead, to seat himself once more by the Uble, in the most uncomfortable chair that he could [ 202 ] A CUP OF COLD WATER find, and smoke one cigar after another till the first sign of dawn should give an excuse for action. He had laid his watch on the table before him, and was gazing at the hour-hand, and trying to convince himself by so doing that he was still wide awake, when a noise in the adjoining room suddenly straightened him in his chair and banished all fear of sleep. There was no mistaking the nature of the noise ; it was that of a woman s sobs. The sobs were not loud, but the sound reached him distinctly through the frail door between the two rooms ; it expressed an utter abandonment to grief; not the cloud-burst of some passing emotion, but the slow down-pour of a whole heaven of sorrow. Woburn sat listening. There was nothing else to be done ; and at least his listening was a mute tribute to the trouble he was powerless to relieve. It roused, too s the drugged pulses of his own grief: he was touched by the chance propinquity of two alien sorrows in a great city throbbing with multifarious passions. It would have been more in keeping with the irony of life had he found himself next to a mother singing her child to sleep : there seemed a mute commiseration in the hand that had led him to such neighborhood. Gradually the sobs subsided, with pauses betokening an effort at self-control. At last they died off softly, like the intermittent drops that end a day of rain. [ 203 ] A CUP OF COLD WATER " Poor soul," Woburn mused, " she s got the better of it for the time. I wonder what it s all about ? " At the same moment he heard another sound that made him jump to his feet. It was a very low sound, but in that nocturnal silence which gives distinctness to the faintest noises, Woburn knew at once that he had heard the click of a pistol. " What is she up to now ? " he asked himself, with his eye on the door between the two rooms ; and the brightly -lit keyhole seemed to reply with a glance of intelligence. He turned out the gas and crept to the door, pressing his eye to the illuminated circle. After a moment or two of adjustment, during which he seemed to himself to be breathing like a steam- engine, he discerned a room like his own, with the same dressing-table flanked by gas-fixtures, and the same table in the window. This table was directly in his line of vision ; and beside it stood a woman with a small revolver in her hands. The lights being behind her, Woburn could only infer her youth from her slen der silhouette and the nimbus of fair hair defining her head. Her dress seemed dark and simple, and on a chair under one of the gas-jets lay a jacket edged with cheap fur and a small travelling-bag. He could not see the other end of the room, but something in her manner told him that she was alone. At length she put the revolver down and took up a letter that [ 204 ] A CUP OF COLD WATER lay on the table. She drew the letter from its envelope and read it over two or three times ; then she put it back, sealing the envelope, and placing it conspicu ously against the mirror of the dressing-table. There was so grave a significance in this dumb-show that Woburn felt sure that her next act would be to return to the table and take up the revolver; but he had not reckoned on the vanity of woman. After put ting the letter in place she still lingered at the mirror, standing a little sideways, so that he could now see her face, which was distinctly pretty, but of a small and unelastic mould, inadequate to the expression of the larger emotions. For some moments she continued to study herself with the expression of a child looking at a playmate who has been scolded ; then she turned to the table and lifted the revolver to her forehead. A sudden crash made her arm drop, and sent her darting backward to the opposite side of the room. Woburn had broken down the door, and stood torn and breathless in the breach. " Oh ! " she gasped, pressing closer to the wall. "Don t be frightened," he said; "I saw what you were going to do and I had to stop you." She looked at him for a moment in silence, and he saw the terrified flutter of her breast ; then she said, " No one can stop me for long. And besides, what right have you " [205] A CUP OF COLD WATER "Every one has the right to prevent a crime," he returned, the sound of the last word sending the blood to his forehead. " I deny it," she said passionately. " Every one who has tried to live and failed has the right to die." "Failed in what?" "In everything!" she replied. They stood looking at each other in silence. At length he advanced a few steps. "You ve no right to say you ve failed," he said, * while you have breath to try again." He drew the revolver from her hand. " Try again try again ? I tell you I ve tried seventy times seven !" "What have you tried?" She looked at him with a certain dignity. " I don t know," she said, " that you ve any right to question me or to be in this room at all " and sud denly she burst into tears. The discrepancy between her words and action struck the chord which, in a man s heart, always responds to the touch of feminine unreason. She dropped into the nearest chair, hiding her face in her hands, while Woburn watched the course of her weeping. At last she lifted her head, looking up between drenched lashes. [206] A CUP OF COLD WATER (t Please go away," she said in childish entreaty. "How can I?" he returned. "It s impossible that I should leave you in this state. Trust me let me help you. Tell me what has gone wrong, and let s see if there s no other way out of it." Woburn had a voice full of sensitive inflections, and it was now trembling with profoundest pity. Its note seemed to reassure the girl, for she said, with a begin ning of confidence in her own tones, " But I don t even know who you are." Woburn was silent : the words startled him. He moved nearer to her and went on in the same quiet ing tone. "I am a man who has suffered enough to want to help others. I don t want to know any more about you than will enable me to do what I can for you. I ve probably seen more of life than you have, and if you re willing to tell me your troubles perhaps together we may find a way out of them." She dried her eyes and glanced at the revolver. "That s the only way out," she said. "How do you know? Are you sure you ve tried every other ? " " Perfectly sure. I ve written and written, and hum bled myself like a slave before him, and she won t even let him answer my letters. Oh, but you don t un derstand" she broke off with a renewal of weeping. [ 207 ] A CUP OF COLD WATER " I begin to understand you re sorry for something you ve done ? " "Oh, I ve never denied that I ve never denied that I was wicked." "And you want the forgiveness of some one you care about ? " "My husband/ she whispered. "You ve done something to displease your hus band ? " " To displease him ? I ran away with another man ! " There was a dismal exultation in her tone, as though she were paying Woburn off for having underrated her offense. She had certainly surprised him ; at worst he had expected a quarrel over a rival, with a possible com plication of mother-in-law. He wondered how such helpless little feet could have taken so bold a step ; then he remembered that there is no audacity like that of weakness. He was wondering how to lead her to completer avowal when she added forlornly, " You see there s nothing else to do." Woburn took a turn in the room. It was certainly a narrower strait than he had foreseen, and he hardly knew how to answer; but the first flow of confession had eased her, and she went on without farther per suasion. [ 208 ] A CUP OF COLD WATER "I don t know how I could ever have done it; I must have been downright crazy. I did n t care much for Joe when I married him he wasn t exactly hand some, and girls think such a lot of that. But he just laid down and worshipped me, and I was getting fond of him in a way ; only the life was so dull. I d been used to a big city I come from Detroit and Hinks- ville is such a poky little place ; that s where we lived ; Joe is telegraph-operator on the railroad there. He d have been in a much bigger place now, if he had n t well, after all, he behaved perfectly splendidly about that. " I really was getting fond of him, and I believe I should have realized in time how good and noble and unselfish he was, if his mother had n t been always sit ting there and everlastingly telling me so. We learned in school about the Athenians hating some man who was always called just, and that s the way I felt about Joe. Whenever I did anything that wasn t quite right his mother would say how differently Joe would have done it. And she was forever telling me that Joe didn t approve of this and that and the other. When we were alone he approved of everything, but when his mother was round he d sit quiet and let her say he did n t. I knew he*d let me have my way afterwards, but somehow that didn t prevent my getting mad at the time. [ 209 ] A CUP OF COLD WATER "And then the evenings were so long, with Joe away, and Mrs. Glenn (that s his mother) sitting there like an image knitting socks for the heathen. The only caller we ever had was the Baptist minister, and he never took any more notice of me than if I d been a piece of furniture. I believe he was afraid to before Mrs. Glenn." She paused breathlessly, and the tears in her eyes were now of anger. "Well?" said Woburn gently. "Well then Arthur Hackett came along; he was travelling for a big publishing firm in Philadelphia. He was awfully handsome and as clever and sarcastic as anything. He used to lend me lots of novels and maga zines, and tell me all about society life in New York. All the girls were after him, and Alice Sprague, whose father is the richest man in Hinksville, fell desperately in love with him and carried on like a fool ; but he wouldn t take any notice of her. He never looked at anybody but me." Her face lit up with a reminiscent smile, and then clouded again. " I hate him now," she exclaimed, with a change of tone that startled Woburn. " I d like to kill him but he s killed me instead. " Well, he bewitched me so I did n t know what I was doing ; I was like somebody in a trance. When he wasn t there I didn t want to speak to anybody; I used to He in bed half the day just to get away from [210] A CUP OF COLD WATER folks ; I hated Joe and Hinksville and everything else. When he came back the days went like a flash ; we were together nearly all the time. I knew Joe s mother was spying on us, but I didn t care. And at last it seemed as if I could n t let him go away again without me ; so one evening he stopped at the back gate in a buggy, and we drove off together and caught the east ern express at River Bend. He promised to bring me to New York." She paused, and then added scornfully, "He didn t even do that!" Woburn had returned to his seat and was watching her attentively. It was curious to note how her passion was spending itself in words ; he saw that she would never kill herself while she had any one to talk to. "That was five months ago," she continued, "and we travelled all through the southern states, and stayed a little while near Philadelphia, where his business is. He did things real stylishly at first. Then he was sent to Albany, and we stayed a week at the Delavan House. One afternoon I went out to do some shopping, and when I came back he was gone. He had taken his trunk with him, and had n t left any address ; but in my travelling-bag I found a fifty-dollar bill, with a slip of paper on which he had written, No use coming after me ; I m married. We d been to gether less than four months, and I never saw him again. [211 ] A CUP OF COLD WATER " At first I could n t believe it. I stayed on, thinking it was a joke or that he d feel sorry for me and come back. But he never came and never wrote me a line. Then I began to hate him, and to see what a wicked fool I d been to leave Joe. I was so lonesome I thought I d go crazy. And I kept thinking how good and patient Joe had been, and how badly I d used him, and how lovely it would be to be back in the little parlor at Hinksville, even with Mrs. Glenn and the minister talking about free-will and predestination. So at last I wrote to Joe. I wrote him the humblest letters you ever read, one after another ; but I never got any answer. " Finally I found I d spent all my money, so I sold my watch and my rings Joe gave me a lovely tur quoise ring when we were married and came to New York. I felt ashamed to stay alone any longer in Al bany ; I was afraid that some of Arthur s friends, who had met me with him on the road, might come there and recognize me. After I got here I wrote to Susy Price, a great friend of mine who lives at Hinksville, and she answered at once, and told me just what I had expected that Joe was ready to forgive me and crazy to have me back, but that his mother wouldn t let him stir a step or write me a line, and that she and the minister were at him all day long, telling him how bad I was and what a sin it would be to forgive me. [212] A CUP OF COLD WATER I got Susy s letter two or three days ago, and after that I saw it was no use writing to Joe. He 11 never dare go against his mother and she watches him like a cat. I suppose I deserve it but he might have given me another chance ! I know he would if he could only see me." Her voice had dropped from anger to lamentation, and her tears again overflowed. Woburn looked at her with the pity one feels for a child who is suddenly confronted with the result of some unpremeditated naughtiness. " But why not go back to Hinksville," he suggested, ee if your husband is ready to forgive you ? You could go to your friend s house, and once your husband knows you are there you can easily persuade him to see you." " Perhaps I could Susy thinks I could. But I can t go back; I haven t got a cent left." " But surely you can borrow money ? Can t you ask your friend to forward you the amount of your fare ? " She shook her head. "Susy ain t well off; she couldn t raise five dollars, and it costs twenty-five to get back to Hinksville. And besides, what would become of me while I waited for the money ? They 11 turn me out of here to-morrow ; I haven t paid my last week s board, and I haven t got anything to give them ; my bag s empty ; I ve pawned everything." [213]. A CUP OF COLD WATER " And don t you know any one here who would lend you the money ? " " No ; not a soul. At least I do know one gentleman ; he s a friend of Arthur s, a Mr. Devine ; he was stay ing at Rochester when we were there. I met him in the street the other day, and I didn t mean to speak to him, but he came up to me, and said he knew all about Arthur and how meanly he had behaved, and he wanted to know if he couldn t help me I suppose he saw I was in trouble. He tried to persuade me to go and stay with his aunt, who has a lovely house right round here in Twenty-fourth Street ; he must be very rich, for he offered to lend me as much money as I wanted." "You didn t take it?" " No," she returned ; " I daresay he meant to be kind, but I did n t care to be beholden to any friend of Arthur s. He came here again yesterday, but I wouldn t see him, so he left a note giving me his aunt s address and saying she d have a room ready for me at any time." There was a long silence; she had dried her tears and sat looking at Woburn with eyes full of helpless reliance. "Well," he said at length, "you did right not to take that man s money ; but this is n t the only alter native," he added, pointing to the revolver. [214] A CUP OF COLD WATER " I don t know any other," she answered wearily. " I m not smart enough to get employment ; I can t make dresses or do type-writing, or any of the useful things they teach girls now; and besides, even if I could get work I couldn t stand the loneliness. I can never hold my head up again I can t bear the dis grace. If I can t go back to Joe I d rather be dead." " And if you go back to Joe it will be all right ? " Woburn suggested with a smile. " Oh," she cried, her whole face alight, " if I could only go back to Joe ! " They were both silent again ; Woburn sat with his hands in his pockets gazing at the floor. At length his silence seemed to rouse her to the unwontedness of the situation, and she rose from her seat, saying in a more constrained tone, " I don t know why I ve told you all this." "Because you believed that I would help you," Woburn answered, rising also; "and you were right; I m going to send you home." She colored vividly. " You told me I was right not to take Mr. Devine s money," she faltered. "Yes," he answered, "but did Mr. Devine want to send you home?" "He wanted me to wait at his aunt s a little while first and then write to Joe again." [215] A CUP OF COLD WATER "I don t I want you to start to-morrow morning; this morning, I mean. I 11 take you to the station and buy your ticket, and your husband can send me back the money." "Oh, I can t I can t you mustn t " she stam mered, reddening and paling. "Besides, they ll never let me leave here without paying." "How much do you owe?" "Fourteen dollars." " Very well ; I 11 pay that for you ; you can leave me your revolver as a pledge. But you must start by the first train; have you any idea at what time it leaves the Grand Central ? " "I think there s one at eight." He glanced at his watch. " In less than two hours, then ; it s after six now." She stood before him with fascinated eyes. "You must have a very strong will," she said. "When you talk like that you make me feel as if I had to do everything you say." "Well, you must," said Woburn lightly. "Man was made to be obeyed." " Oh, you re not like other men," she returned ; " I never heard a voice like yours ; it s so strong and kind. You must be a very good man ; you remind me of Joe ; I m sure you ve got just such a nature ; and Joe is the best man I ve ever seen." [216] A CUP OF COLD WATER Woburn made no reply, and she rambled on, with little pauses and fresh bursts of confidence. " Joe s a real hero, you know ; he did the most splendid thing you ever heard of. I think I began to tell you about it, but I did n t finish. I 11 tell you now. It happened just after we were married ; I was mad with him at the time, I m afraid, but now I see how splendid he was. He d been telegraph operator at Hinksville for four years and was hoping that he d get promoted to a bigger place ; but he was afraid to ask for a raise. Well, I was very sick with a bad attack of pneumonia and one night the doctor said he was n t sure whether he could pull me through. When they sent word to Joe at the telegraph office he could n t stand being away from me another minute. There was a poor consumptive boy always hanging round the station ; Joe had taught him how to operate, just to help him along; so he left him in the office and tore home for half an hour, knowing he could get back before the eastern express came along. "He had n t been gone five minutes when a freight- train ran off the rails about a mile up the track. It was a very still night, and the boy heard the smash and shouting, and knew something had happened. He could n t tell what it was, but the minute he heard it he sent a message over the wires like a flash, and caught the eastern express just as it was pulling out [ 217 ].. A CUP OF COLD WATER of the station above Hinksville. If he d hesitated a second, or made any mistake, the express would have come on, and the loss of life would have been fearful . The next day the Hinksville papers were full of Op erator Glenn s presence of mind; they all said he d be promoted. That was early in November and Joe didn t hear anything from the company till the first of January. Meanwhile the boy had gone home to his father s farm out in the country, and before Christmas he was dead. Well, on New Year s day Joe got a notice from the company saying that his pay was to be raised, and that he was to be promoted to a big junction near Detroit, in recognition of his presence of mind in stop ping the eastern express. It was just what we d both been pining for and I was nearly wild with joy ; but I noticed Joe did n t say much. He just telegraphed for leave, and the next day he went right up to Detroit and told the directors there what had really happened. When he came back he told us they d suspended him ; I cried every night for a week, and even his mother said he was a fool. After that we just lived on at Hinksville, and six months later the company took him back ; but I don t suppose they 11 ever promote him now." Her voice again trembled with facile emotion. " Was n t it beautiful of him ? Ain t he a real hero ? " she said. " And I m sure you d behave just like him ; A CUP OF COLD WATER you d be just as gentle about little things, and you d never move an inch about big ones. You d never do a mean action, but you d be sorry for people who did ; I can see it in your face ; that s why I trusted you right off." Woburn s eyes were fixed on the window ; he hardly seemed to hear her. At length he walked across the room and pulled up the shade. The electric lights were dissolving in the gray alembic of the dawn. A milk- cart rattled down the street and, like a witch return ing late from the Sabbath, a stray cat whisked into an area. So rose the appointed day. Woburn turned back, drawing from his pocket the roll of bills which he had thrust there with so different a purpose. He counted them out, and handed her fif teen dollars. " That will pay for your board, including your break fast this morning," he said. "We ll breakfast together presently if you like ; and meanwhile suppose we sit down and watch the sunrise. I have n t seen it for years." He pushed two chairs toward the window, and they sat down side by side. The light came gradually, with the icy reluctance of winter ; at last a red disk pushed itself above the opposite house-tops and a long cold gleam slanted across their window. They did not talk much ; there was a silencing awe in the spectacle. Presently Woburn rose and looked again at his watch. [219] A CUP OF COLD WATER "I must go and cover up my dress-coat/ he said, " and you had better put on your hat and jacket. We shall have to be starting in half an hour." As he turned away she laid her hand on his arm. "You haven t even told me your name/ she said. " No," he answered ; " but if you get safely back to Joe you can call me Providence." "But how am I to send you the money?" "Oh well, I ll write you a line in a day or two and give you my address ; I don t know myself what it will be ; I m a wanderer on the face of the earth." " But you must have my name if you mean to write to me." "Well, what is your name?" "Ruby Glenn. And I think I almost think you might send the letter right to Joe s send it to the Hinksville station." "Very well." "You promise?" " Of course I promise." He went back into his room, thinking how appropri ate it was that she should have an absurd name like Ruby. As he re-entered the room, where the gas sick ened in the daylight, it seemed to him that he was returning to some forgotten land ; he had passed, with the last few hours, into a wholly new phase of con sciousness. He put on his fur coat, turning up the [ 220 ] A CUP OF COLD WATER collar and crossing the lapels to hide his white tie. Then he put his cigar-case in his pocket, turned out the gas, and, picking up his hat and stick, walked back through the open doorway. Ruby Glenn had obediently prepared herself for departure and was standing before the mirror, patting her curls into place. Her eyes were still red, but she had the happy look of a child that has outslept its grief. On the floor he noticed the tattered fragments of the letter which, a few hours earlier, he had seen her place before the mirror. " Shall we go down now ? " he asked. ee Very well," she assented ; then, with a quick move ment, she stepped close to him, and putting her hands on his shoulders lifted her face to his. " I believe you re the best man I ever knew," she said, "the very best except Joe." She drew back blushing deeply, and unlocked the door which led into the passage-way. Woburn picked up her bag, which she had forgotten, and followed her out of the room. They passed a frowzy chambermaid, who stared at them with a yawn. Before the doors the row of boots still waited ; there was a faint new aroma of coffee mingling with the smell of vanished dinners, and a fresh blast of heat had begun to tingle through the radiators. In the unventilated coffee-room they found a waiter who had the melancholy air of being the last survivor [221] A CUP OF COLD WATER of an exterminated race, and who reluctantly brought them some tea made with water which had not boiled, and a supply of stale rolls and staler butter. On this meagre diet they fared in silence, Woburn occasionally glancing at his watch ; at length he rose, telling his companion to go and pay her bill while he called a hansom. After all, there was no use in economizing his remaining dollars. In a few moments she joined him under the por tico of the hotel. The hansom stood waiting and he sprang in after her, calling to the driver to take them to the Forty-second Street station. When they reached the station he found a seat for her and went to buy her ticket. There were several people ahead of him at the window, and when he had bought the ticket he found that it was time to put her in the train. She rose in answer to his glance, and to gether they walked down the long platform in the murky chill of the roofed-in air. He followed her into the railway carriage, making sure that she had her bag, and that the ticket was safe inside it ; then he held out his hand, in its pearl-coloured evening glove : he felt that the people in the other seats were staring at them. "Good-bye," he said. " Good-bye," she answered, flushing gratefully. " I 11 never forget never. And you will write, won t you? Promise ! " [222] A CUP OF COLD WATER " Of course, of course," he said, hastening from the carriage. He retraced his way along the platform, passed through the dismal waiting-room and stepped out into the early sunshine. On the sidewalk outside the station he hesitated awhile ; then he strolled slowly down Forty-second Street and, skirting the melancholy flank of the Reservoir, walked across Bryant Park. Finally he sat down on one of the benches near the Sixth Avenue and lit a cigar. The signs of life were multiplying around him ; he watched the cars roll by with their increasing freight of dingy toilers, the shop-girls hurrying to their work, the children trudging schoolward, their small vague noses red with cold, their satchels clasped in woollen- gloved hands. There is nothing very imposing in the first stirring of a great city s activities ; it is a slow reluctant process, like the waking of a heavy sleeper ; but to Woburn s mood the sight of that obscure re newal of humble duties was more moving than the spectacle of an army with banners. He sat for a long time, smoking the last cigar in his case, and murmuring to himself a line from Hamlet the saddest, he thought, in the play For every man hath business and desire. Suddenly an unpremeditated movement made him [228] A CUP OF COLD WATER feel the pressure of Ruby Glenn s revolver in his pocket ; it was like a devil s touch on his arm, and he sprang up hastily. In his other pocket there were just four dollars and fifty cents ; but that did n t matter now. He had no thought of flight. For a few minutes he loitered vaguely about the park ; then the cold drove him on again, and with the rapidity born of a sudden resolve he began to walk down the Fifth Avenue towards his lodgings. He brushed past a maid-servant who was washing the vestibule and ran up stairs to his room. A fire was burning in the grate and his books and photographs greeted him cheerfully from the walls ; the tranquil air of the whole room seemed to take it for granted that he meant to have his bath and breakfast and go down town as usual. He threw off his coat and pulled the revolver out of his pocket ; for some moments he held it curiously in his hand, bending over to examine it as Ruby Glenn had done ; then he laid it in the top drawer of a small cabi net, and locking the drawer threw the key into the fire. After that he went quietly about the usual business of his toilet. In taking off his dress-coat he noticed the Legion of Honor which Miss Talcott had given him at the ball. He pulled it out of his buttonhole and tossed it into the fire-place. When he had fin ished dressing he saw with surprise that it was nearly [224] A CUP OF COLD WATER ten o clock. Ruby Glenn was already two hours nearer home. Woburn stood looking about the room of which he had thought to take final leave the night before ; among the ashes beneath the grate he caught sight of a little white heap which symbolized to his fancy the remains of his brief correspondence with Miss Talcott. He roused himself from this unseasonable musing and with a final glance at the familiar setting of his past, turned to face the future which the last hours had prepared for him. He went down stairs and stepped out of doors, has tening down the street towards Broadway as though he were late for an appointment. Every now and then he encountered an acquaintance, whom he greeted with a nod and smile ; he carried his head high, and shunned no man s recognition. At length he reached the doors of a tall granite building honey-combed with windows. He mounted the steps of the portico, and passing through the double doors of plate-glass, crossed a vestibule floored with mosaic to another glass door on which was em blazoned the name of the firm. This door he also opened, entering a large room with wainscotted subdivisions, behind which appeared the stooping shoulders of a row of clerks. As Woburn crossed the threshold a gray-haired man [225] A CUP OF COLD WATER emerged from an inner office at the opposite end of the room. At sight of Woburn he stopped short. " Mr. Woburn ! " he exclaimed ; then he stepped nearer and added in a low tone : " I was requested to tell you when you came that the members of the firm are waiting ; will you step into the private office ? " [226] THE PORTRAIT THE PORTRAIT IT was at Mrs. Mellish s, one Sunday afternoon last spring. We were talking over George Lillo s por traits a collection of them was being shown at Durand-Ruel s and a pretty woman had emphatically declared: ee Nothing on earth would induce me to sit to him ! " There was a chorus of interrogations. <e Oh, because he makes people look so horrid ; the way one looks on board ship, or early in the morning, or when one s hair is out of curl and one knows it. I d so much rather be done by Mr. Cum- berton ! " Little Cumberton, the fashionable purveyor of rose- water pastels, stroked his moustache to hide a con scious smile. " Lillo is a genius that we must all admit," he said indulgently, as though condoning a friend s weakness ; "but he has an unfortunate temperament. He has been denied the gift so precious to an artist of perceiving the ideal. He sees only the defects of his sitters ; one might almost fancy that he takes a morbid pleasure in exaggerating their weak points, in painting them on their worst days ; but I honestly believe he can t help himself. His peculiar limitations prevent his [229] THE PORTRAIT seeing anything but the most prosaic side of human nature eet A primrose by the river s brim A yellow primrose is to him. And it is nothing more. " Cumberton looked round to surprise an order in the eye of the lady whose sentiments he had so deftly interpreted, but poetry always made her uncomforta ble, and her nomadic attention had strayed to other topics. His glance was tripped up by Mrs. Mellish. "Limitations? But, my dear man, it s because he hasn t any limitations, because he doesn t wear the portrait-painter s conventional blinders, that we re all so afraid of being painted by him. It s not because he sees only one aspect of his sitters, it s because he selects the real, the typical one, as instinctively as a detective collars a pick-pocket in a crowd. If there s nothing to paint no real person he paints nothing; look at the sumptuous emptiness of his portrait of Mrs. Guy Awdrey" ("Why," the pretty woman perplexedly interjected, "that s the only nice picture he ever did ! ") " If there s one positive trait in a nega tive whole he brings it out in spite of himself; if it is n t a nice trait, so much the worse for the sitter ; it is n t Lillo s fault : he s no more to blame than a mir ror. Your other painters do the surface he does the depths ; they paint the ripples on the pond, he drags [ 230 ] THE PORTRAIT the bottom. He makes flesh seem as fortuitous as clothes. When I look at his portraits of fine ladies in pearls and velvet I seem to see a little naked cowering wisp of a soul sitting beside the big splendid body, like a poor relation in the darkest corner of an opera-box. But look at his pictures of really great people how great they are ! There s plenty of ideal there. Take his Professor Clyde ; how clearly the man s history is written in those broad steady strokes of the brush : the hard work, the endless patience, the fearless imagination of the great savant ! Or the picture of Mr. Domfrey the man who has felt beauty without having the power to create it. The very brush-work expresses the difference between the two ; the crowding of nervous tentative lines, the subtler gradations of color, somehow convey a sugges tion of dilettantism. You feel what a delicate instru ment the man is, how every sense has been tuned to the finest responsiveness." Mrs. Mellish paused, blush ing a little at the echo of her own eloquence. "My advice is, don t let George Lillo paint you if you don t want to be found out or to find yourself out. That s why I ve never let him do me ; I m waiting for the day of judgment," she ended with a laugh. Every one but the pretty woman, whose eyes be trayed a quivering impatience to discuss clothes, had listened attentively to Mrs. Mellish. Lillo s presence in New York he had come over from Paris for the [231 ] THE PORTRAIT first time in twelve years, to arrange the exhibition of his pictures gave to the analysis of his methods as personal a flavor as though one had been furtively dis secting his domestic relations. The analogy, indeed, is not unapt ; for in Lillo s curiously detached existence it is difficult to figure any closer tie than that which unites him to his pictures. In this light, Mrs. Mellish s flushed harangue seemed not unfitted to the triviali ties of the tea hour, and some one almost at once car ried on the argument by saying : tf But according to your theoiy that the significance of his work depends on the significance of the sitter his portrait of Vard ought to be a master-piece ; and it s his biggest fail ure." Alonzo Yard s suicide he killed himself, strangely enough, the day that Lillo s pictures were first shown had made his portrait the chief feature of the ex hibition. It had been painted ten or twelve years earl ier, when the terrible " Boss " was at the height of his power ; and if ever man presented a type to stimulate such insight as Lillo s, that man was Vard ; yet the portrait was a failure. It was magnificently composed ; the technique was dazzling ; but the face had been well, expurgated. It was Vard as Cumberton might have painted him a common man trying to look at ease in a good coat. The picture had never before been exhibited, and there was a general outcry of disappoint- f 23% ] THE PORTRAIT ment. It wasn t only the critics and the artists who grumbled. Even the big public, which had gaped and shuddered at Vard, revelling in his genial villany, and enjoying in his death that succumbing to divine wrath which, as a spectacle, is next best to its successful de fiance even the public felt itself defrauded. What had the painter done with their hero ? Where was the big sneering domineering face that figured so convin cingly in political cartoons and patent-medicine adver tisements, on cigar-boxes and electioneering posters? They had admired the man for looking his part so boldly ; for showing the undisguised blackguard in every line of his coarse body and cruel face ; the pseudo-gentleman of Lillo s picture was a poor thing compared to the real Vard. It had been vaguely ex pected that the great boss s portrait would have the zest of an incriminating document, the scandalous at traction of secret memoirs ; and instead, it was as in sipid as an obituary. It was as though the artist had been in league with his sitter, had pledged himself to oppose to the lust for post-mortem "revelations" an impassable blank wall of negation. The public was resentful, the critics were aggrieved. Even Mrs. Mel- lish had to lay down her arms. " Yes, the portrait of Vard is a failure," she admitted, " and I ve never known why. If he d been an obscure elusfVe type of villain, one could understand Lillo s [ 233] THE PORTRAIT missing the mark for once; but with that face from the pit !" She turned at the announcement of a name which our discussion had drowned, and found herself shak ing hands with Lillo. The pretty woman started and put her hands to her curls ; Cumberton dropped a condescending eyelid (he never classed himself by recognizing degrees in the profession), and Mrs. Mellish, cheerfully aware that she had been overheard, said, as she made room for Lillo "I wish you d explain it." Lillo smoothed his beard and waited for a cup of tea. Then, "Would there be any failures," he said, " if one could explain them ? " " Ah, in some cases I can imagine it s impossible to seize the type or to say why one has missed it. Some people are like daguerreotypes; in certain lights one can t see them at all. But surely Vard was obvious enough. What I want to know is, what became of him? What did you do with him? How did you man age to shuffle him out of sight ? " " It was much easier than you think. I simply missed an opportunity " That a sign-painter would have seen ! " "Very likely. In fighting shy of the obvious one may miss the significant " " And when I got back from Paris," the pretty J THE PORTRAIT woman was heard to wail, "I found all the women here were wearing the very models I d brought home with me ! " Mrs. Hellish, as became a vigilant hostess, got up and shuffled her guests ; and the question of Yard s portrait was dropped. I left the house with Lillo ; and on the way down Fifth Avenue, after one of his long silences, he sud denly asked : "Is that what is generally said of my picture of Vard? I don t mean in the newspapers, but by the fellows who know?" I said it was. He drew a deep breath. "Well," he said, "it s good to know that when one tries to fail one can make such a complete success of it." "Tries to fail?" " Well, no ; that s not quite it, either ; I did n t want to make a failure of Yard s picture, but I did so deliberately, with my eyes open, all the same. It was what one might call a lucid failure." "But why?" " The why of it is rather complicated. I 11 tell you some time " He hesitated. "Come and dine with me at the club by and by, and I 11 tell you afterwards. It s a nice morsel for a psychologist." At dinner he said little ; but I did n t mind that. I [235] THE PORTRAIT had known him for years, and had always found some thing soothing and companionable in his long absten tions from speech. His silence was never unsocial; it was bland as a natural hush ; one felt one s self in cluded in it, not left out. He stroked his beard and gazed absently at me ; and when we had finished our coffee and liqueurs we strolled down to his studio. At the studio which was less draped, less posed, less consciously "artistic" than those of the smaller men he handed me a cigar, and fell to smoking be fore the fire. When he began to talk it was of indif ferent matters, and I had dismissed the hope of hearing more of Yard s portrait, when my eye lit on a photograph of the picture. I walked across the room to look at it, and Lillo presently followed with a light. "It certainly is a complete disguise," he muttered over my shoulder; then he turned away and stooped to a big portfolio propped against the wall. " Did you ever know Miss Vard ? " he asked, with his head in the portfolio ; and without waiting for my answer he handed me a crayon sketch of a girl s profile. I had never seen a crayon of Lillo s, and I lost sight of the sitter s personality in the interest aroused by this new aspect of the master s complex genius. The few lines faint, yet how decisive! flowered out of the rough paper with the lightness of opening petals. [ 236 ] THE PORTRAIT It was a mere hint of a picture, but vivid as some word that wakens long reverberations in the memory. I felt Lillo at my shoulder again. " You knew her, I suppose ? " I had to stop and think. Why, of course I d known her: a silent handsome girl, showy yet ineffective, whom I had seen without seeing the winter that society had capitulated to Vard. Still looking at the crayon, I tried to trace some connection between the Miss Vard I recalled and the grave young seraph of Lillo s sketch. Had the Vards bewitched him? By what masterstroke of suggestion had he been beguiled into drawing the terrible father as a barber s block, the commonplace daughter as this memorable creature? "You don t remember much about her? No, I sup pose not. She was a quiet girl and nobody noticed her much, even when " he paused with a smile "you were all asking Vard to dine." I winced. Yes, it was true we had all asked Vard to dine. It was some comfort to think that fate had made him expiate our weakness. Lillo put the sketch on the mantel-shelf and drew his arm-chair to the fire. "It s cold to-night. Take another cigar, old man; and some whiskey? There ought to be a bottle and some glasses in that cupboard behind you . . . help yourself ..." [237] THE PORTRAIT II A&OUT Yard s portrait? (he began.) Well, I ll tell you. It s a queer story, and most people would n t see anything in it. My enemies might say it was a roundabout way of explaining a failure ; but you know better than that. Mrs. Mellish was right. Between me and Vard there could be no question of failure. The man was made for me I felt that the first time I clapped eyes on him. I could hardly keep from asking him to sit to me on the spot ; but some how one couldn t ask favors of the fellow. I sat still and prayed he d come to me, though ; for I was look ing for something big for the next Salon. It was twelve years ago the last time I was out here and I was ravenous for an opportunity. I had the feeling do you writer-fellows have it too? that there was something tremendous in me if it could only be got out ; and I felt Vard was the Moses to strike the rock. There were vulgar reasons, too, that made me hunger for a victim. I d been grinding on obscurely for a good many years, without gold or glory, and the first thing of mine that had made a noise was my picture of Pepita, exhibited the year before. There d been a lot of talk about that, orders were beginning to come in, and I wanted to follow it up with a rousing big thing at the next Salon. Then the critics had been insinuating that I could do [ 238 ] THE PORTRAIT only Spanish things I suppose I had overdone the castanet business ; it s a nursery-disease we all go through and I wanted to show that I had plenty more shot in my locker. Don t you get up every morn ing meaning to prove you re equal to Balzac or Thack eray ? That s the way I felt then ; only give me a chance, I wanted to shout out to them ; and I saw at once i that Vard was my chance. I had come over from Paris in the autumn to paint Mrs. Clingsborough, and I met Vard and his daughter at one of the first dinners I went to. After that I could think of nothing but that man s head. What a type ! I raked up all the details of his scandalous history ; and there were enough to fill an encyclopaedia. The papers were full of him just then ; he was mud from head to foot ; it was about the time of the big viaduct steal, and irreproachable citizens were forming ineffectual leagues to put him down. And all the time one kept meeting him at dinners that was the beauty of it ! Once I re member seeing him next to the Bishop s wife ; I Ve got a little sketch of that duet somewhere . . . Well, he was simply magnificent, a born ruler; what a splendid condottiere he would have made, in gold armor, with a griffin grinning on his casque ! You remember those drawings of Leonardo s, where the knight s face and the outline of his helmet combine in one monstrous saurian profile ? He always reminded me of that . . . [ 239 ] THE PORTRAIT But how was I to get at him? One day it occurred to me to try talking to Miss Vard. She was a monosyl labic person, who didn t seem to see an inch beyond the last remark one had made ; but suddenly I found myself blurting out, " I wonder if you know how ex traordinarily pain table your father is ? " and you should have seen the change that came over her. Her eyes lit up and she looked well, as I ve tried to make her look there. (He glanced up at the sketch.) Yes, she said, was n t her father splendid, and did n t I think him one of the handsomest men I d ever seen ? That rather staggered me, I confess; I couldn t think her capable of joking on such a subject, yet it seemed impossible that she should be speaking seri ously. But she was. I knew it by the way she looked at Vard, who was sitting opposite, his wolfish profile thrown back, the shaggy locks tossed off his narrow high white forehead. The girl worshipped him. She went on to say how glad she was that I saw him as she did. So many artists admired only regular beauty, the stupid Greek type that was made to be done in marble ; but she d always fancied from what she d seen of my work she knew everything I d done, it appeared that I looked deeper, cared more for the way in which faces are modelled by temperament and circumstance; "and of course in that sense," she con cluded, "my father s face is beautiful." [ 240 ] THE PORTRAIT This was even more staggering; but one couldn t question her divine sincerity. I m afraid my one thought was to take advantage of it ; and I let her go on, perceiving that if I wanted to paint Vard all I had to do was to listen. She poured out her heart. It was a glorious thing for a girl, she said, wasn t it, to be associated with such a life as that ? She felt it so strongly, sometimes, that it oppressed her, made her shy and stupid. She was so afraid people would expect her to live up to him. But that was absurd, of course ; brilliant men so seldom had clever children. Still did I know? she would have been happier, much happier, if he had n t been in public life ; if he and she could have hidden themselves away somewhere, with their books and music, and she could have had it all to herself: his cleverness, his learning, his immense unbounded good ness. For no one knew how good he was ; no one but herself. Everybody recognized his cleverness, his bril liant abilities ; even his enemies had to admit his ex traordinary intellectual gifts, and hated him the worse, of course, for the admission ; but no one, no one could guess what he was at home. She had heard of great men who were always giving gala performances in public, but whose wives and daughters saw only the empty theatre, with the footlights out and the scenery stacked in the wings ; but with him it was just the [241] THE PORTRAIT other way : wonderful as he was in public, in society, she sometimes felt he wasn t doing himself justice he was so much more wonderful at home. It was like carrying a guilty secret about with her: his friends, his admirers, would never forgive her if they found out that he kept all his best things for her ! I don t quite know what I felt in listening to her. I was chiefly taken up with leading her on to the point I had in view ; but even through my personal preoccupation I remember being struck by the fact that, though she talked foolishly, she did n t talk like a fool. She was not stupid ; she was not obtuse ; one felt that her impassive surface was alive with delicate points of perception; and this fact, coupled with her crystalline frankness, flung me back on a startled re vision of my impressions of her father. He came out of the test more monstrous than ever, as an ugly image reflected in clear water is made uglier by the purity of the medium. Even then I felt a pang at the use to which fate had put the mountain-pool of Miss Yard s spirit, and an uneasy sense that my own reflection there was not one to linger over. It was odd that I should have scrupled to deceive, on one small point, a girl already so hugely cheated ; perhaps it was the completeness of her delusion that gave it the sanctity of a religious belief. At any rate, a distinct sense of discomfort tempered the satisfaction with which, a day [242] THE PORTRAIT or two later, I heard from her that her father had consented to give me a few sittings. I m afraid my scruples vanished when I got him before my easel. He was immense, and he was unex plored. From my point of view he d never been done before I was his Cortez. As he talked the wonder grew. His daughter came with him, and I began to think she was right in saying that he kept his best for her. It was n t that she drew him out, or guided the conversation ; but one had a sense of delicate vigilance, hardly more perceptible than one of those atmospheric influences that give the pulses a happier turn. She was a vivifying climate. I had meant to turn the talk to public affairs, but it slipped toward books and art, and I was faintly aware of its being kept there without undue pressure. Before long I saw the value of the diversion. It was easy enough to get at the political Vard : the other aspect was rarer and more instructive. His daughter had described him as a scholar. He was n t that, of course, in any intrinsic sense : like most men of. his type he had gulped his knowledge standing, as he had snatched his food from lunch- counters ; the wonder of it lay in his extraordinary power of assimilation. It was the strangest instance of a mind to which erudition had given force and fluency without culture ; his learning had not educated his perceptions: it was an implement serving to slash [243] THE PORTRAIT others rather than to polish himself. I have said that at first sight he was immense ; but as I studied him he began to lessen under my scrutiny. His depth was a false perspective painted on a wall. It was there that my difficulty lay : I had prepared too big a canvas for him. Intellectually his scope was considerable, but it was like the digital reach of a me diocre pianist it didn t make him a great musician. And morally he was n t bad enough ; his corruption was n t sufficiently imaginative to be interesting. It was not so much a means to an end as a kind of virtuosity practised for its own sake, like a highly-developed skill in cannoning billiard balls. After all, the point of view is what gives distinction to either vice or virtue : a morality with ground-glass windows is no duller than a narrow cynicism. His daughter s presence she always came with him gave unintentional emphasis to these conclu sions ; for where she was richest he was naked. She had a deep-rooted delicacy that drew color and per fume from the very centre of her being : his senti ments, good or bad, were as detachable as his cuffs. Thus her nearness, planned, as I guessed, with the tender intention of displaying, elucidating him, ot making him accessible in detail to my dazzled per ceptions this pious design in fact defeated itself. She made him appear at his best, but she cheapened that [244] THE PORTRAIT best by her proximity. For the man was vulgar to the core ; vulgar in spite of his force and magnitude ; thin, hollow, spectacular; a lath-and-plaster bogey Did she suspect it ? I think not then. He was wrapped in her impervious faith . . . The papers? Oh, their charges were set down to political rivalry ; and the only people she saw were his hangers-on, or the fashionable set who had taken him up for their amusement. Besides, she would never have found out in that way : at a direct accusation her resentment would have flamed up and smothered her judgment. If the truth came to her, it would come through knowing intimately some one different ; through how shall I put it? an imperceptible shifting of her centre of gravity. My besetting fear was that I could n t count on her obtuseness. She was n t what is called clever ; she left that to him ; but she was exquisitely good ; and now and then she had intuitive felicities that frightened me. Do I make you see her? We fellows can explain better with the brush ; I don t know how to mix my words or lay them on. She wasn t clever; but her heart thought that s all I can say . . . If she d been stupid it would have been easy enough : I could have painted him as he was. Could have ? I did brushed the face in one day from mem ory ; it was the very man ! I painted it out before she [245] THE PORTRAIT came : I could n t bear to have her see it. I had the feeling that I held her faith in him in my hands, carry ing it like a brittle object through a jostling mob ; a hair s-breadth swerve and it was in splinters. When she wasn t there I tried to reason myself out of these subtleties. My business was to paint Vard as he was if his daughter didn t mind his looks, why should I ? The opportunity was magnificent I knew that by the way his face had leapt out of the canvas at my first touch. It would have been a big thing. Before every sitting I swore to myself I d do it ; then she came, and sat near him, and I didn t. I knew that before long she d notice I was shirking the face. Vard himself took little interest in the por trait, but she watched me closely, and one day when the sitting was over she stayed behind and asked me when I meant to begin what she called "the like ness." I guessed from her tone that the embarrass ment was all on my side, or that if she felt any it was at having to touch a vulnerable point in my pride. Thus far the only doubt that troubled her was a distrust of my ability. Well, I put her off with any rot you please : told her she must trust me, must let me wait for the inspiration ; that some day the face would come ; I should see it suddenly feel it under my brush . . . The poor child believed me : you can make a woman believe almost anything she doesn t [246] THE PORTRAIT quite understand. She was abashed at her philistinism, and begged me not to tell her father he would make such fun of her! After that well, the sittings went on. Not many, of course ; Vard was too busy to give me much time. Still, I could have done him ten times over. Never had I found my formula with such ease, such assurance ; there were no hesitations, no obstructions the face was there, waiting for me ; at times it almost shaped itself on the canvas. Unfortunately Miss Vard was there too . . . All this time the papers were busy with the viaduct scandal. The outcry was getting louder. You remember the circumstances? One of Yard s associates Bard- well, wasn t it? threatened disclosures. The rival machine got hold of him, the Independents took him to their bosom, and the press shrieked for an investi gation. It was not the first storm Vard had weathered, and his face wore just the right shade of cool vigil ance ; he was n t the man to fall into the mistake of appearing too easy. His demeanor would have been superb if it had been inspired by a sense of his own strength ; but it struck me rather as based on contempt for his antagonists. Success is an inverted telescope through which one s enemies are apt to look too small and too remote. As for Miss Vard, her serenity was undiminished ; but I half-detected a defiance in her [247] THE PORTRAIT unruffled sweetness, and during the last sittings I had the factitious vivacity of a hostess who hears her best china crashing. One day it did crash : the head-lines of the morning papers shouted the catastrophe at me: "The Mon ster forced to disgorge Warrant out against Vard Bardwell the Boss s Boomerang" you know the kind of thing. When I had read the papers I threw them down and went out. As it happened,, Vard was to have given me a sitting that morning; but there would have been a certain irony in waiting for him. I wished I had finished the picture I wished I d never thought of painting it. I wanted to shake off the whole business, to put it out of my mind, if I could : I had the feeling I don t know if I can describe it that there was a kind of disloyalty to the poor girl in my even acknow ledging to myself that I knew what all the papers were howling from the housetops . . . I had walked for an hour when it suddenly occurred to me that Miss Vard might, after all, come to the studio at the appointed hour. Why should she ? I could conceive of no reason ; but the mere thought of what, if she did come, my absence would imply to her, sent me bolting back to Twelfth Street. It was a presenti ment, if you like, for she was there. As she rose to meet me a newspaper slipped from [248] THE PORTRAIT her hand : I d been fool enough, when I went out, to leave the damned things lying all over the place. I muttered some apology for being late, and she said reassuringly : " But my father s not here yet." "Your father ?" I could have kicked myself for the way I bungled it ! " He went out very early this morning, and left word that he would meet me here at the usual hour." She faced me, with an eye full of bright courage, across the newspaper lying between us. " He ought to be here in a moment now he s always so punctual. But my watch is a little fast, I think." She held it out to me almost gaily, and I was just pretending to compare it with mine, when there was a smart rap on the door and Vard stalked in. There was always a civic majesty in his gait, an air of having just stepped off his pedestal and of dissembling an ora tion in his umbrella ; and that day he surpassed him self. Miss Vard had turned pale at the knock ; but the mere sight of him replenished her veins, and if she now avoided my eye, it was in mere pity for my dis comfiture. I was in fact the only one of the three who did n t instantly " play up " ; but such virtuosity was inspiring, [ 249 ] THE PORTRAIT and by the time Vard had thrown off his coat and dropped into a senatorial pose, I M r as ready to pitch into my work. I swore I d do his face then and there ; do it as she saw it ; she sat close to him, and I had only to glance at her while I painted Vard himself was masterly : his talk rattled through my hesitations and embarrassments like a brisk north wester sweeping the dry leaves from its path. Even his daughter showed the sudden brilliance of a lamp from which the shade has been removed. We were all sur prisingly vivid it felt, somehow, as though we were being photographed by flash-light . . . It was the best sitting we d ever had but unfor tunately it did n t last more than ten minutes. It was Yard s secretary who interrupted us a slink ing chap called Cornley, who burst in, as white as sweetbread, with the face of a depositor who hears his bank has stopped payment. Miss Vard started up as he entered, but caught herself together and dropped back into her chair. Vard, who had taken out a cigarette, held the tip tranquilly to his fusee. "You re here, thank God!" Cornley cried. "There s no time to be lost, Mr. Vard. I ve got a carriage wait ing round the corner in Thirteenth Street Vard looked at the tip of his cigarette. " A carriage in Thirteenth Street ? My good fellow, my own brougham is at the door." [250] THE PORTRAIT " I know, I know but they re there too, sir ; or they will be, inside of a minute. For God s sake, Mr. Vard, don t trifle! There s a way out by Thirteenth Street, I tell you" " Bard well s myrmidons, eh ? " said Vard. " Help me on with my overcoat, Cornley, will you?" Cornley s teeth chattered. te Mr. Vard, your best friends . . . Miss Vard, won t you speak to your father ? " He turned to me hag gardly; "We can get out by the back way?" I nodded. Vard stood towering in some infernal way he seemed literally to rise to the situation one hand in the bosom of his coat, in the attitude of patriotism in bronze. I glanced at his daughter: she hung on him with a drowning look. Suddenly she straightened herself; there was something of Vard in the way she faced her fears a kind of primitive calm we drawing- room folk don t have. She stepped to him and laid her hand on his arm. The pause had n t lasted ten seconds. "Father" she said. Vard threw back his head and swept the studio with a sovereign eye. "The back way, Mr. Vard, the back way," Cornley whimpered. " For God s sake, sir, don t lose a minute." Vard transfixed his abject henchman. " I have never yet taken the back way," he eniin- [ 251 ] _ THE PORTRAIT ciated ; and, with a gesture matching the words, he turned to me and bowed. "I regret the disturbance" and he walked to the door. His daughter was at his side, alert, transfigured. "Stay here, my dear." " Never ! " They measured each other an instant ; then he drew her arm in his. She flung back one look at me a paean of victory and they passed out with Cornley at their heels. I wish I d finished the face then ; I believe I could have caught something of the look she had tried to make me see in him. Unluckily I was too excited to work that day or the next, and within the week the whole business came out. If the indictment wasn t a put-up job and on that I believe there were two opinions all that followed was. You remember the farcical trial, the packed jury, the compliant judge, the triumphant acquittal ? . . . It s a spectacle that always carries conviction to the voter : Vard was never more popular than after his "exoneration" . . . I didn t see Miss Vard for weeks. It was she who came to me at length ; came to the studio alone, one afternoon at dusk. She had what shall I say? a veiled manner; as though she had dropped a fine gauze between us. I waited for her to speak. She glanced about the room, admiring a hawthorn [ 252 ] THE PORTRAIT vase I had picked up at auction. Then, after a pause, she said : "You haven t finished the picture?" "Not quite," I said. She asked to see it, and I wheeled out the easel and threw the drapery back. "Oh," she murmured, "you haven t gone on with the face?" I shook my head. She looked down on her clasped hands and up at the picture ; not once at me. "You you re going to finish it?" "Of course," I cried, throwing the revived purpose into my voice. By God, I would finish it! The merest tinge of relief stole over her face, faint as the first thin chirp before daylight. " Is it so very difficult ? " she asked tentatively. "Not insuperably, I hope." She sat silent, her eyes on the picture. At length, with an effort, she brought out : " Shall you want more sittings ? " For a second I blundered between two conflicting conjectures ; then the truth came to me with a leap, and I cried out, "No, no more sittings !" She looked up at me then for the first time ; looked too soon, poor child ; for in the spreading light of re assurance that made her eyes like a rainy dawn, I saw, [253] THE PORTRAIT with terrible distinctness, the rout of her disbanded hopes. I knew that she knew . . . I finished the picture and sent it home within a week. I tried to make it what you see. Too late, you say? Yes for her; but not for me or for the public. If she could be made to feel, for a day longer, for an hour even, that her miserable secret was a se cret why, she d made it seem worth while to me to chuck my own ambitions for that . . . Lillo rose, and taking down the sketch stood looking at it in silence. After a while I ventured, "And Miss Vard ?" He opened the portfolio and put the sketch back, tying the strings with deliberation. Then, turning to relight his cigar at the lamp, he said: "She died last year, thank God." [254] THE TOUCHSTONE THE TOUCHSTONE PROFESSOR JOSLIN, who, as our readers are doubtless aware, is engaged in writing the life of Mrs. Aubyn, asks us to state that he will be greatly indebted to any of the "famous novelist s friends who will furnish him with information "concerning the period previous to her coming to England. Mrs. "Aubyn had so few intimate friends, and consequently so few "regular correspondents, that letters will be of special value. "Professor Joslin s address is 10 Augusta Gardens, Kensington, "and he begs us to say that he will promptly return any docu- "ments entrusted to him." GLENNARD dropped the Spectator and sat looking into the fire. The club was filling up, but he still had to himself the small inner room with its darkening outlook down the rain-streaked prospect of Fifth Avenue. It was all dull and dismal enough, yet a moment earlier his boredom had been perversely tinged by a sense of resentment at the thought that, as things were going, he might in time have to sur render even the despised privilege of boring himself within those particular four walls. It was not that he cared much for the club, but that the remote contingency of having to give it up stood to him, just then, perhaps by very reason of its insignificance and remoteness, for the symbol of his increasing abnegations; of that perpetual paring-off that [257] THE TOUCHSTONE was gradually reducing existence to the naked business of keeping himself alive. It was the futility of his multiplied shifts and privations that made them seem unworthy of a high attitude the sense that, however rapidly he elimi nated the superfluous, his cleared horizon was likely to offer no nearer view of the one prospect toward which he strained. To give up things hi order to marry the woman one loves is easier than to give them up without being brought appreciably nearer to such a conclusion. Through the open door he saw young Hollingsworth rise with a yawn from the ineffectual solace of a brandy-and- soda and transport his purposeless person to the window. Glennard measured his course with a contemptuous eye. It was so like Hollingsworth to get up and look out of the window just as it was growing too dark to see anything 1 There was a man rich enough to do what he pleased had he been capable of being pleased yet barred from all con ceivable achievement by his own impervious dulness; while, a few feet off, Glennard, who wanted only enough to keep a decent coat on his back and a roof over the head of the woman he loved Glennard, who had sweated, toiled, denied himself for the scant measure of opportunity that his zeal would have converted into a kingdom sat wretchedly calculating that, even when he had resigned from the club, and knocked off his cigars, and given up his Sundays out of town, he would still be no nearer to attainment. [258] THE TOUCHSTONE The Spectator had slipped to his feet, and as he picked it up his eye fell again on the paragraph addressed to the friends of Mrs. Aubyn. He had read it for the first time with a scarcely perceptible quickening of attention: her name had so long been public property that his eye passed it unseeingly, as the crowd in the street hurries without a glance by some familiar monument. "Information concerning the period previous to her coming to England. . . ." The words were an evocation. He saw her again as she had looked at their first meeting, the poor woman of genius with her long pale face and short sighted eyes, softened a little by the grace of youth and inexperience, but so incapable even then of any hold upon the pulses. When she spoke, indeed, she was wonderful, more wonderful, perhaps, than when later, to Glennard S fancy at least, the consciousness of memorable things ut tered seemed to take from even her most intimate speech the perfect bloom of privacy. It was in those earliest days, if ever, that he had come near loving her; though even then his sentiment had lived only in the intervals of its expres sion. Later, when to be loved by her had been a state to touch any man s imagination, the physical reluctance had, inexplicably, so overborne the intellectual attraction, that the last years had been, to both of them, an agony of con flicting impulses. Even now, if, in turning over old papers his hand lit on her letters, the touch filled him with inar ticulate misery. . . . f 2591 THE TOUCHSTONE "She bad so few intimate friends . . . that letters will be of special value." So few intimate friends ! For years she had had but one; one who in the last years had requited her wonderful pages, her tragic outpourings of love, hu mility and pardon, with the scant phrases by which a man evades the vulgarest of sentimental importunities. He had been a brute in spite of himself, and sometimes, now that the remembrance of her face had faded, and only her voice and words remained with him, he chafed at his own inadequacy, his stupid inability to rise to the height of her passion. His egoism was not of a kind to mirror its complacency in the adventure. To have been loved by the most brilliant woman of her day, and to have been in capable of loving her, seemed to him, in looking back, de risive evidence of his limitations; and his remorseful ten derness for her memory was complicated with a sense of irritation against her for having given him once for all the measure of his emotional capacity. It was not often, how ever, that he thus probed the past. The public, in taking possession of Mrs. Aubyn, had eased his shoulders of their burden. There was something fatuous in an attitude of sentimental apology toward a memory already classic: to reproach one s self for not having loved Margaret Aubyn was a good deal like being disturbed by an inability to admire the Venus of Milo. From her cold niche of fame she looked down ironically enough on his self-flagellations. . . . It was only when he came on something that belonged [ 260 ] THE TOUCHSTONE to her that he felt a sudden renewal of the old feeling, the strange dual impulse that drew him to her voice but drove him from her hand, so that even now, at sight of anything she had touched, his heart contracted painfully. It hap pened seldom nowadays. Her little presents, one by one, had disappeared from his room, and her letters, kept from some unacknowledged puerile vanity in the possession of such treasures, seldom came beneath his hand. . . . "Her letters will be of special value " Her letters ! Why, he must have hundreds of them enough to fill a volume. Sometimes it used to seem to him that they came with every post he used to avoid looking in his letter-box when he came home to his rooms but her writing seemed to spring out at him as he put his key in the door. He stood up and strolled into the other room. Hollings- worth, lounging away from the window, had joined him self to a languidly convivial group of men, to whom, in phrases as halting as though they struggled to define an ultimate idea, he was expounding the cursed nuisance of living in a hole with such a damned climate that one had to get out of it by February, with the contingent difficulty of there being no place to take one s yacht to in winter but that other played-out hole, the Riviera. From the out skirts of this group Glennard wandered to another, where a voice as different as possible from Hollingsworth s color less organ dominated another circle of languid listeners. "Come and hear Dinslow talk about his patent: admis- [261] THE TOUCHSTONE sion free, * one of the men sang out in a tone of mock resignation. Dinslow turned to Glennard the confident pugnacity of his smile. "Give it another six months and it 11 be talking about itself," he declared. "It s pretty nearly articulate now." "Can it say papa?" someone else inquired. Dinslow s smile broadened. "You 11 be deuced glad to say papa to it a year from now," he retorted. "It 11 be able to support even you in affluence. Look here, now, just let me explain to you " Glennard moved away impatiently. The men at the club all but those who were "in it" were proverbially "tired" of Dinslow s patent, and none more so than Glen nard, whose knowledge of its merits made it loom large in the depressing catalogue of lost opportunities. The rela tions between the two men had always been friendly, and Dinslow s urgent offers to "take him in on the ground floor" had of late intensified Glennard s sense of his own inability to meet good luck half-way. Some of the men who had paused to listen were already in evening clothes, others on their way home to dress; and Glennard, with an accus tomed twinge of humiliation, said to himself that if he lin gered among them it was in the miserable hope that one of the number might ask him to dine. Miss Trent had told him that she was to go to the opera that evening with her rich aunt; and if he should have the luck to pick up a din- THE TOUCHSTONE ner invitation he might join her there without extra outlay. He moved about the room, lingering here and there in a tentative affectation of interest; but though the men greeted him pleasantly, no one asked him to dine. Doubt less they were all engaged, these men who could afford to pay for their dinners, who did not have to hunt for invi tations as a beggar rummages for a crust in an ash-barrel ! But no as Hollingsworth left the lessening circle about the table, an admiring youth called out, "Holly, stop and dine!" Hollingsworth turned on him the crude countenance that looked like the wrong side of a more finished face. "Sorry I can t. I m in for a beastly banquet." Glennard threw himself into an arm-chair. Why go home in the rain to dress ? It was folly to take a cab to the opera, it was worse folly to go there at all. His perpetual meetings with Alexa Trent were as unfair to the girl as they were unnerving to himself. Since he could n t marry her, it was time to stand aside and give a better man the chance and his thought admitted the ironical implication that in the terms of expediency the phrase might stand for Hollingsworth. 263 THE TOUCHSTONE T T E dined alone and walked home to his rooms in the rain. As he turned into Fifth Avenue he caught the wet gleam of carriages on their way to the opera, and he took the first side street, in a moment of irritation against the petty restrictions that thwarted every impulse. It was ridiculous to give up the opera, not because one might pos sibly be bored there, but because one must pay for the experiment. In his sitting-room, the tacit connivance of the inanimate had centred the lamplight on a photograph of Alexa Trent, placed, in the obligatory silver frame, just where, as mem ory officiously reminded him, Margaret Aubyn s picture had long throned in its stead. Miss Trent s features cruelly justified the usurpation. She had the kind of beauty that comes of a happy accord of face and spirit. It is not given to many to have the lips and eyes of their rarest mood, and some women go through life behind a mask expressing only their anxiety about the butcher s bill or their inability to see a joke. With Miss Trent, face and mind had the same high serious contour. She looked like a throned Justice by some grave Florentine painter; and it seemed to Glennard that her most salient attribute, or that at least to which her conduct gave most consistent expression, was a kind of passionate justness the intuitive feminine justness that [264] THE TOUCHSTONE is so much rarer than a reasoned impartiality. Circum stances had tragically combined to develop this instinct into a conscious habit. She had seen more than most girls of the shabby side of life, of the perpetual tendency of want to cramp the noblest attitude. Poverty and misfortune had overhung her childhood, and she had none of the pretty delusions about life that are supposed to be the crowning grace of girlhood. This very competence, which gave her a touching reasonableness, made Glennard s situation more difficult than if he had aspired to a princess. Between them they asked so little they knew so well how to make that little do; but they understood also, and she especially did not for a moment let him forget, that without that little the future they dreamed of was impossible. The sight of her photograph quickened Glennard s exas peration. He was sick and ashamed of the part he was play ing. He had loved her now for two years, with the tranquil tenderness that gathers depth and volume as it nears ful filment; he knew that she would wait for him but the certitude was an added pang. There are times when the constancy of the woman one cannot marry is almost as trying as that of the woman one does not want to. Glennard turned up his reading-lamp and stirred the fire. He had a long evening before him, and he wanted to crowd out thought with action. He had brought some papers from his office and he spread them out on his table and squared himself to the task. . . . [265] THE TOUCHSTONE It must have been an hour later that he found himself automatically fitting a key into a locked drawer. He had no more notion than a somnambulist of the mental process that had led up to this action. He was just dimly aware of having pushed aside the papers and the heavy calf volumes that a moment before had bounded his horizon, and of laying in their place, without a trace of conscious volition, the parcel he had taken from the drawer. The letters were tied in packets of thirty or forty. There were a great many packets. On some of the envelopes the ink was fading; on others, which bore the English post mark, it was still fresh. She had been dead hardly three years, and she had written, at lengthening intervals, to the last. . . . He undid one of the early packets little notes written during their first acquaintance at Hillbridge. Glennard, on leaving college, had begun life in his uncle s law office in the old university town. It was there that, at the house of her father, Professor Forth, he had first met the young lady then chiefly distinguished for having, after two years of a conspicuously unhappy marriage, returned to the pro tection of the paternal roof. Mrs. Aubyn was at that time an eager and somewhat tragic young woman, of complex mind and undeveloped manners, whom her crude experience of matrimony had fitted out with a stock of generalizations that exploded like bombs in the academic air of Hillbridge. In her choice of [266] THE TOUCHSTONE a husband she had been fortunate enough, if the paradox be permitted, to light on one so signally gifted with the faculty of putting himself in the wrong that her leaving him had the dignity of a manifesto made her, as it were, the spokeswoman of outraged wifehood. In this light she was cherished by that dominant portion of Hillbridge so ciety which was least indulgent to conjugal differences, and which found a proportionate pleasure in being for once able to feast openly on a dish liberally seasoned with the outrageous. So much did this endear Mrs. Aubyn to the university ladies, that they were disposed from the first to allow her more latitude of speech and action than the ill- used wife was generally accorded in Hillbridge, where mis fortune was still regarded as a visitation designed to put people in their proper place and make them feel the superi ority of their neighbors. The young woman so privileged combined with a kind of personal shyness an intellectual audacity that was like a deflected impulse of coquetry : one felt that if she had been prettier she would have had emo tions instead of ideas. She was in fact even then what she had always remained: a genius capable of the acutest gen eralizations, but curiously undiscerning where her personal susceptibilities were concerned. Her psychology failed her just where it serves most women, and one felt that her brains would never be a guide to her heart. Of all this, however, Glennard thought little in the first year of their acquaintance. He was at an age when all the gifts and [267] THE TOUCHSTONE graces are but so much undiscriminated food to the raven ing egoism of youth. In seeking Mrs. Aubyn s company he was prompted by an intuitive taste for the best as a pledge of his own superiority. The sympathy of the cleverest woman in Hillbridge was balm to his craving for distinc tion; it was public confirmation of his secret sense that he was cut out for a bigger place. It must not be understood that Glennard was vain. Vanity contents itself with the coarsest diet; there is no palate so fastidious as that of self-distrust. To a youth of Glennard s aspirations the en couragement of a clever woman stood for the symbol of all success. Later, when he had begun to feel his way, to gain a foothold, he would not need such support; but it served to carry him lightly and easily over what is often a period of insecurity and discouragement. It would be unjust, however, to represent his interest in Mrs. Aubyn as a matter of calculation. It was as instinc tive as love, and it missed being love by just such a hair breadth deflection from the line of beauty as had deter mined the curve of Mrs. Aubyn s lips. When they met she had just published her first novel, and Glennard, who after ward had an ambitious man s impatience of distinguished women, was young enough to be dazzled by the semi-pub licity it gave her. It was the kind of book that makes elderly ladies lower their voices and call each other "my dear" when they furtively discuss it; and Glennard exulted in the superior knowledge of the world that enabled him [ 268 ] THE TOUCHSTONE to take as a matter of course sentiments over which the university shook its head. Still more delightful was it to hear Mrs. Aubyn waken the echoes of academic drawing- rooms with audacities surpassing those of her printed page. Her intellectual independence gave a touch of comrade ship to their intimacy, prolonging the illusion of college friendships based on a joyous interchange of heresies. Mrs. Aubyn and Glennard represented to each other the augur s wink behind the Hillbridge idol: they walked to gether in that light of young omniscience from which fate so curiously excludes one s elders. Husbands, who are notoriously inopportune, may even die inopportunely, and this was the revenge that Mr. Aubyn, some two years after her return to Hillbridge, took upon his injured wife. He died precisely at the mo ment when Glennard was beginning to criticise her. It was not that she bored him; she did what was infinitely worse she made him feel his inferiority. The sense of mental equality had been gratifying to his raw ambition; but as his self-knowledge defined itself, his understanding of her also increased; and if man is at times indirectly flattered by the moral superiority of woman, her mental ascendency is extenuated by no such oblique tribute to his powers. The attitude of looking up is a strain on the muscles; and it was becoming more and more Glennard s opinion that brains, in a woman, should be merely the obverse of beauty. To beauty Mrs. Aubyn could lay no claim; and [ 269 ] THE TOUCHSTONE while she had enough prettiness to exasperate him by her incapacity to make use of it, she seemed invincibly igno rant of any of the little artifices whereby women contrive to hide their defects and even to turn them into graces. Her dress never seemed a part of her; all her clothes had an impersonal air, as though they had belonged to some one else and been borrowed in an emergency that had somehow become chronic. She was conscious enough of her deficiencies to try to amend them by rash imitations of the most approved models; but no woman who does not dress well intuitively will ever do so by the light of reason, and Mrs. Aubyn s plagiarisms, to borrow a metaphor of her trade, somehow never seemed to be incorporated with the text. Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair. The fame that came to Mrs. Aubyn with her second book left Glennard s imagination un touched, or had at most the negative effect of removing her still farther from the circle of his contracting sympa thies. We are all the sport of time; and fate had so per versely ordered the chronology of Margaret Aubyn s ro mance that when her husband died Glennard felt as though he had lost a friend. It was not in his nature to be needlessly unkind; and though he was in the impregnable position of the man who has given a woman no more definable claim on him than that of letting her fancy that he loves her, he would not for [270] THE TOUCHSTONE the world have accentuated his advantage by any betrayal of indifference. During the first year of her widowhood their friendship dragged on with halting renewals of sentiment, becoming more and more a banquet of empty dishes from which the covers were never removed; then Glennard went to New York to live and exchanged the faded pleasures of intercourse for the comparative novelty of correspondence. Her letters, oddly enough, seemed at first to bring her nearer than her presence. She had adopted, and she suc cessfully maintained, a note as affectionately impersonal as his own; she wrote ardently of her work, she questioned him about his, she even bantered him on the inevitable pretty girl who was certain before long to divert the cur rent of his confidences. To Glennard, who was almost a stranger in New York, the sight of Mrs. Aubyn s writing was like a voice of reassurance in surroundings as yet insufficiently aware of him. His vanity found a retrospec tive enjoyment in the sentiment his heart had rejected, and this factitious emotion drove him once or twice to Hill- bridge, whence, after scenes of evasive tenderness, he re turned dissatisfied with himself and her. As he made room for himself in New York and peopled the space he had cleared with the sympathies at the disposal of agreeable and self-confident young men, it seemed to him natural to infer that Mrs. Aubyn had refurnished in the same manner the void he was not unwilling his departure should have left. But in the dissolution of sentimental partnerships it is [271] THE TOUCHSTONE seldom that both associates are able to withdraw their funds at the same time; and Glennard gradually learned that he stood for the venture on which Mrs. Aubyn had irretrievably staked her all. It was not the kind of figure he cared to cut. He had no fancy for leaving havoc in his wake and would have preferred to sow a quick growth of oblivion in the spaces wasted by his unconsidered inroads; but if he supplied the seed, it was clearly Mrs. Aubyn s business to see to the raising of the crop. Her attitude seemed indeed to throw his own reasonableness into dis- tincter relief; so that they might have stood for thrift and improvidence in an allegory of the affections. It was not that Mrs. Aubyn permitted herself to be a pensioner on his bounty. He knew she had no wish to keep herself alive on the small change of sentiment; she simply fed on her own funded passion, and the luxuries it allowed her made him, even then, dimly aware that she had the secret of an inexhaustible alchemy. Their relations remained thus negatively tender till she suddenly wrote him of her decision to go abroad to live. Her father had died, she had no near ties in Hillbridge, and London offered more scope than New York to her expanding personality. She was already famous, and her laurels were yet unharvested. For a moment the news roused Glennard to a jealous sense of lost opportunities. He wanted, at any rate, to reassert his power before she made the final effort of escape. THE TOUCHSTONE They had not met for over a year, but of course he could not let her sail without seeing her. She came to New York the day before her departure, and they spent its last hours together. Glennard had planned no course of action he simply meant to let himself drift. They both drifted, for a long time, down the languid current of reminiscence; she seemed to sit passive, letting him push his way back through the overgrown channels of the past. At length she reminded him that they must bring their explorations to an end. He rose to leave, and stood looking at her with the same uncertainty in his heart. He was tired of her already he was always tired of her yet he was not sure that he wanted her to go. "I may never see you again," he said, as though con fidently appealing to her compassion. Her look enveloped him. "And I shall see you always always!" "Why go then r" escaped him. "To be nearer you," she answered; and the words dis missed him like a closing door. The door was never to reopen; but through its narrow crack Glennard, as the years went on, became more and more conscious of an inextinguishable light directing its small ray toward the past which consumed so little of his own commemorative oil. The reproach was taken from this thought by Mrs. Aubyn s gradual translation into terms of universality. In becoming a personage she so nat- [ 273 ] THE TOUCHSTONE urally ceased to be a person that Glennard could almost look back to his explorations of her spirit as on a visit to some famous shrine, immortalized, but in a sense dese crated, by popular veneration. Her letters from London continued to come with the same tender punctuality; but the altered conditions of her life, the vistas of new relationships disclosed by every phrase, made her communications as impersonal as a piece of journalism. It was as though the state, the world, in deed, had taken her off his hands, assuming the mainte nance of a temperament that had long exhausted his slender store of reciprocity. In the retrospective light shed by the letters he was blinded to their specific meaning. He was not a man who concerned himself with literature, and they had been to him, at first, simply the extension of her brilliant talk, later the dreaded vehicle of a tragic importunity. He knew, of course, that they were wonderful; that, unlike the au thors who give their essence to the public and keep only a dry rind for their friends, Mrs. Aubyn had stored of her rarest vintage for this hidden sacrament of tenderness. Sometimes, indeed, he had been oppressed, humiliated almost, by the multiplicity of her allusions, the wide scope of her interests, her persistence in forcing her super abundance of thought and emotion into the shallow re ceptacle of his sympathy; but he had never thought of the letters objectively, as the production of a distinguished [274] THE TOUCHSTONE woman; had never measured the literary significance of her oppressive prodigality. He was almost frightened now at the wealth in his hands; the obligation of her love had never weighed on him like this gift of her imagination: it was as though he had accepted from her something to which even a reciprocal tenderness could not have justified his claim. He sat a long time staring at the scattered pages on his desk; and in the sudden realization of what they meant he could almost fancy some alchemistic process changing them to gold as he stared. He had the sense of not being alone in the room, of the presence of another self observing from without the stir ring of sub-conscious impulses that sent flushes of humilia tion to his forehead. At length he stood up, and with the gesture of a man who wishes to give outward expression to his purpose to establish, as it were, a moral alibi swept the letters into a heap and carried them toward the grate. But it would have taken too long to burn all the packets. He turned back to the table and one by one fitted the pages into their envelopes; then he tied up the letters and put them back into the locked drawer. 275 ] THE TOUCHSTONE III TT was one of the laws of Glennard s intercourse with Miss Trent that he always went to see her the day after he had resolved to give her up. There was a special charm about the moments thus snatched from the jaws of renunciation; and his sense of their significance was on this occasion so keen that he hardly noticed the added gravity of her welcome. His feeling for her had become so vital a part of him that her nearness had the quality of imperceptibly read justing his point of view, of making the jumbled phenom ena of experience fall at once into a rational perspective. In this redistribution of values the sombre retrospect of the previous evening shrank to a mere cloud on the edge of consciousness. Perhaps the only service an unloved woman can render the man she loves is to enhance and prolong his illusions about her rival. It was the fate of Margaret Aubyn s memory to serve as a foil to Miss Trent s presence, and never had the poor lady thrown her successor into more vivid relief. Miss Trent had the charm of still waters that are felt to be renewed by rapid currents. Her attention spread a tranquil surface to the demonstrations of others, and it was only in days of storm that one felt the pressure of the tides. This inscrutable composure was perhaps her chief [276] THE TOUCHSTONE grace in Glennard s eyes. Reserve, in some natures, implies merely the locking of empty rooms or the dissimulation of awkward encumbrances; but Miss Trent s reticence was f to Glennard like the closed door to the sanctuary, and his certainty of divining the hidden treasure made him content to remain outside in the happy expectancy of the neophyte. "You did n t come to the opera last night," she began, in the tone that seemed always rather to record a fact than to offer a reflection on it. He answered with a discouraged gesture. "What was the use ? We could n t have talked." "Not as well as here," she assented; adding, after a meditative pause, "As you did n t come I talked to Aunt Virginia instead." "Ah!" he returned, the fact being hardly striking enough to detach him from the contemplation of her hands, which had fallen, as was their wont, into an attitude full of plastic possibilities. One felt them to be hands that, moving only to some purpose, were capable of intervals of serene inaction. "We had a long talk," Miss Trent went on; and she waited again before adding, with the increased absence of stress that marked her graver communications, "Aunt Virginia wants me to go abroad with her." Glennard looked up with a start. "Abroad? When?" "Now next month. To be gone two years." He permitted himself a movement of tender derision. [ 2771 THE TOUCHSTONE "Does she really? Well, I want you to go abroad with me for any number of years. Which offer do you accept?" "Only one of them seems to require immediate consid eration," she returned with a smile. Glennard looked at her again. "You re not thinking of it?" Her gaze dropped and she unclasped her hands. Her movements were so rare that they might have been said to italicize her words. "Aunt Virginia talked to me very seriously. It will be a great relief to mother and the others to have me provided for in that way for two years. I must think of that, you know." She glanced down at her gown, which, under a renovated surface, dated back to the first days of Glennard s wooing. "I try not to cost much but I do." "Good Lord!" Glennard groaned. They sat silent till at length she gently took up the argu ment. "As the eldest, you know, I m bound to consider these things. Women are such a burden. Jim does what he can for mother, but with his own children to provide for it is n t very much. You see we re all poor together." "Your aunt is n t. She might help your mother." "She does in her own way." "Exactly that s the rich relation all over! You may be miserable in any way you like, but if you re to be happy, you must be so in her way and in her old gowns." "I could be very happy in Aunt Virginia s old gowns," Miss Trent interposed. [ 278] THE TOUCHSTONE "Abroad, you mean? * "I mean wherever I felt that I was helping. And my going abroad will help." "Of course I see that. And I see your considerateness in putting its advantages negatively." "Negatively?" "In dwelling simply on what the going will take you from, not on what it will bring you to. It means a lot to a woman, of course, to get away from a life like this." He summed up in a disparaging glance the background of in digent furniture. "The question is how you 11 like coming back to it." She seemed to accept the full consequences of his thought. "I only know I don t like leaving it." He flung back sombrely, "You don t even put it con ditionally then?" Her gaze deepened. "On what?" He stood up and walked across the room. Then he came back and paused before her. "On the alternative of marrying me." The slow color even her blushes seemed deliberate rose to her lower lids; her lips stirred, but the words re solved themselves into a smile and she waited. He took another turn, with the thwarted step of the man whose nervous exasperation escapes through his muscles. "And to think that in fifteen years I shall have a big practice!" [279] THE TOUCHSTONE Her eyes triumphed for him. "In less !" "The cursed irony of it ! What do I care for the man I shall be then ? It s slaving one s life away for a stranger !" He took her hands abruptly. "You 11 go to Cannes, I sup pose, or Monte Carlo ? I heard Hollingsworth say to-day that he meant to take his yacht over to the Mediter ranean " She released herself. "If you think that " "I don t. I almost wish I did. It would be easier, I mean. * He broke off incoherently. "I believe your Aunt Virginia does, though. She somehow connotes Hollingsworth and the Mediterranean." He caught her hands again. "Alexa if we could manage a little hole somewhere out of town?" "Could we?" she sighed, half yielding. "In one of those places where they make jokes about the mosquitoes," he pressed her. "Could you get on with one servant ? " "Could you get on without varnished boots?" "Promise me you won t go, then !" "What are you thinking of, Stephen?" "I don t know," he stammered, the question giving un expected form to his intention. "It s all in the air yet, of course; but I picked up a tip the other day " "You re not speculating?" she cried, with a kind of superstitious terror. "Lord, no. This is a sure thing I almost wish it was n t; [ 280] THE TOUCHSTONE I mean if I can work it " He had a sudden vision of the comprehensiveness of the temptation. If only he had been less sure of Dinslow ! His assurance gave the situation the base element of safety. "I don t understand you," she faltered. "Trust me, instead!" he adjured her with sudden energy; and turning on her abruptly, "If you go, you know, you go free," he concluded. She drew back, paling a little. "Why do you make it harder for me?" "To make it easier for myself," he retorted. IV ^ I ^HE next afternoon Glennard, leaving his office earlier than usual, turned, on his way home, into one of the public libraries. He had the place to himself at that closing hour, and the librarian was able to give an undivided attention to his tentative request for letters collections of letters. The librarian suggested Walpole. "I meant women women s letters." The librarian proffered Hannah More and Miss Mar- tineau. Glennard cursed his own inarticulateness. "I mean let ters to to some one person a man; their husband or " "Ah," said the inspired librarian, "Eloise and Abailard." [281] THE TOUCHSTONE "Well something a little nearer, perhaps," said Glen- nard, with lightness. "Did n t Merimee " "The lady s letters, in that case, were not published." "Of course not," said Glennard, vexed at his blunder. "There are George Sand s letters to Flaubert." "Ah!" Glennard hesitated. "Was she were they?" He chafed at his own ignorance of the sentimental by-paths of literature. "If you want love-letters, perhaps some of the French eighteenth-century correspondences might suit you bet ter Mile. Ai sse or Madame de Sabran " But Glennard insisted. "I want something modern English or American. I want to look something up," he lamely concluded. The librarian could only suggest George Eliot. "Well, give me some of the French things, then and I 11 have Merimee s letters. It was the woman who pub lished them, was n t it?" He caught up his armful, transferring it, on the door step, to a cab which carried him to his rooms. He dined alone, hurriedly, at a small restaurant near by, and re turned at once to his books. Late that night, as he undressed, he wondered what contemptible impulse had forced from him his last words to Alexa Trent. It was bad enough to interfere with the girl s chances by hanging about her to the obvious exclu sion of other men, but it was worse to seem to justify his [ 282 1 THE TOUCHSTONE weakness by dressing up the future in delusive ambiguities. He saw himself sinking from depth to depth of sentimental cowardice in his reluctance to renounce his hold on her; and it filled him with self-disgust to think that the high est feeling of which he supposed himself capable was blent with such base elements. His awakening was hardly cheered by the sight of her writing. He tore her note open and took in the few lines she seldom exceeded the first page with the lucidity of apprehension that is the forerunner of evil. "My aunt sails on Saturday and I must give her my answer the day after to-morrow. Please don t come till then I want to think the question over by myself. I know I ought to go. Won t you help me to be reasonable ? " It was settled, then. Well, he would help her to be rea sonable; he would n t stand in her way; he would let her go. For twc years he had been living some other, luckier man s life; the time had come when he must drop back into his own. He no longer tried to look ahead, to grope his way through the endless labyrinth of his material diffi culties; a sense of dull resignation closed in on him like a fog. "Hullo, Glennard !" a voice said, as an electric car, late that afternoon, dropped him at an uptown corner. He looked up and met the interrogative smile of Barton Flamel, who stood on the curbstone watching the retreat- THE TOUCHSTONE ing car with the eye of a man philosophic enough to re member that it will be followed by another. Glennard felt his usual impulse of pleasure at meeting Flamel; but it was not in this case curtailed by the reaction of contempt that habitually succeeded it. Probably even the few men who had known Flamel since his youth could have given no good reason for the vague mistrust that he inspired. Some people are judged by their actions, others by their ideas; and perhaps the shortest way of defining Flamel is to say that his well-known leniency of view was vaguely divined to include himself. Simple minds may have resented the discovery that his opinions were based on his perceptions; but there was certainly no more definite charge against him than that implied in the doubt as to how he would behave in an emergency, and his company was looked upon as one of those mildly unwholesome dis sipations to which the prudent may occasionally yield. It now offered itself to Glennard as an easy escape from the obsession of moral problems, which somehow could no more be worn in Flamel s presence than a surplice in the street. "Where are you going? To the club?" Flamel asked; adding, as the younger man assented, "Why not come to my studio instead ? You 11 see one bore instead of twenty." The apartment which Flamel described as his studio showed, as its one claim to the designation, a perennially empty easel, the rest of its space being filled with the evi- [ 284 1 THE TOUCHSTONE dences of a comprehensive dilettanteism. Against this background, which seemed the visible expression of its owner s intellectual tolerance, rows of fine books detached themselves with a prominence showing them to be Flamel s chief care. Glennard glanced with the eye of untrained curiosity at the lines of warm-toned morocco, while his host busied himself with the uncorking of Apollinaris. "You ve got a splendid lot of books," he said. "They re fairly decent," the other assented, in the curt tone of the collector who will not talk of his passion for fear of talking of nothing else; then, as Glennard, his hands in his pockets, began to stroll perfunctorily down the long line of bookcases "Some men," Flamel irresistibly added, "think of books merely as tools, others as tooling. I m between the two; there are days when I use them as scenery, other days when I want them as society; so that, as you see, my library represents a makeshift compromise between looks and brains, and the collectors look down on me almost as much as the students." Glennard, without answering, was mechanically taking one book after another from the shelves. His hands slipped curiously over the smooth covers and the noiseless sub sidence of opening pages. Suddenly he came on a thin volume of faded manuscript. "What s this ?" he asked with a listless sense of wonder. "Ah, you re at my manuscript shelf. I ve been going THE TOUCHSTONE in for that sort of thing lately." Flamel came up and looked over his shoulders. "That s a bit of Stendhal one of the Italian stories and here are some letters of Balzac to Madame Surville." Glennard took the book with sudden eagerness. "Who was Madame Surville?" "His sister." He was conscious that Flamel was looking at him with the smile that was like an interrogation point. "I did n t know you cared for this kind of thing." "I don t at least I ve never had the chance. Have you many collections of letters?" "Lord, no very few. I m just beginning, and most of the interesting ones are out of my reach. Here s a queer little collection, though the rarest thing I ve got half a dozen of Shelley s letters to Harriet Westbrook. I had a devil of a time getting them a lot of collectors were after them." Glennard, taking the volume from his hand, glanced with a kind of repugnance at the interleaving of yellow crisscrossed sheets. "She was the one who drowned herself, was n t she?" Flamel nodded. "I suppose that little episode adds about fifty per cent, to their value," he said meditatively. Glennard laid the book down. He wondered why he had joined Flamel. He was in no humor to be amused by the older man s talk, and a recrudescence of personal misery rose about him like an icy tide. [ 286] THE TOUCHSTONE "I believe I must take myself off," he said. "I *d for gotten an engagement." He turned to go; but almost at the same moment he was conscious of a duality of intention wherein his appar ent wish to leave revealed itself as a last effort of the will against the overmastering desire to stay and unbosom him self to Flamel. The older man, as though divining the conflict, laid a detaining pressure on his arm. "Won t the engagement keep? Sit down and try one of these cigars. I don t often have the luck of seeing you here." "I m rather driven just now," said Glennard vaguely. He found himself seated again, and Flamel had pushed to his side a low stand holding a bottle of Apollinaris and a decanter of cognac. Flamel, thrown back in his capacious arm-chair, sur veyed him through a cloud of smoke with the comfortable tolerance of the man to whom no inconsistencies need be explained. Connivance was implicit in the air. It was the kind of atmosphere in which the outrageous loses its edge. Glennard felt a gradual relaxing of his nerves. "I suppose one has to pay a lot for letters like that?" he heard himself asking, with a glance in the direction of the volume he had laid aside. "Oh, so-so depends on circumstances." Flamel viewed him thoughtfully. "Are you thinking of collecting ?" Glennard laughed. "Lord, no. The other way round." [287] THE TOUCHSTONE "Selling?" "Oh, I hardly know. I was thinking of a poor chap " Flamel filled the pause with a nod of interest. "A poor chap I used to know who died he died last year and who left me a lot of letters, letters he thought a great deal of he was fond of me and left em to me out right, with the idea, I suppose, that they might benefit me somehow I don t know I m not much up on such things " He reached his hand to the tall glass his host had filled. "A collection of autograph letters, eh ? Any big names ? " "Oh, only one name. They re all letters written to him by one person, you understand; a woman, in fact " "Oh, a woman," said Flamel negligently. Glennard was nettled by his obvious loss of interest. "I rather think they d attract a good deal of notice if they were published." Flamel still looked uninterested. "Love-letters, I sup pose?" "Oh, just the letters a woman would write to a man she knew well. They were tremendous friends, he and she." "And she wrote a clever letter?" "Clever? It was Margaret Aubyn." A great silence filled the room. It seemed to Glennard that the words had burst from him as blood gushes from a wound. "Great Scott!" said Flamel sitting up. "A collection [ 288 1 THE TOUCHSTONE of Margaret Aubyn s letters? Did you say you had them?" "They were left me by my friend." "I see. Was he well, no matter. You re to be congrat ulated, at any rate. What are you going to do with them ? " Glennard stood up with a sense of weariness in all his bones. "Oh, I don t know. I have n t thought much about it. I just happened to see that some fellow was writing her life" "Joslin; yes. You did n t think of giving them to him? * Glennard lounged across the room and stood staring up at a bronze Bacchus who drooped his garlanded head above the pediment of an Italian cabinet. "What ought I to do? You re just the fellow to advise me." He felt the blood in his cheek as he spoke. Flamel sat with meditative eye. "What do you want to do with them?" he asked. "I want to publish them," said Glennard, swinging round with sudden energy "If I can "If you can? They re yours, you say?" "They re mine fast enough. There s no one to prevent I mean there are no restrictions " he was arrested by the sense that these accumulated proofs of impunity might precisely stand as the strongest check on his action. "And Mrs. Aubyn had no family, I believe?" "No." "Then I don t see who s to interfere," said Flamel, studying his cigar-tip. THE TOUCHSTONE Glennard had turned his unseeing stare on an ecstatic Saint Catherine framed in tarnished gilding. "It s just this way," he began again, with an effort. "When letters are as personal as as these of my friend s. . . . Well, I don t mind telling you that the cash would make a heap of difference to me; such a lot that it rather obscures my judgment the fact is, if I could lay my hand on a few thousands now I could get into a big thing, and without appreciable risk; and I d like to know whether you think I d be justified under the circumstances. . . ." He paused with a dry throat. It seemed to him at the moment that it would be impossible for him ever to sink lower in his own estimation. He was in truth less ashamed of weighing the temptation than of submitting his scruples to a man like Flamel, and affecting to appeal to sentiments of delicacy on the absence of which he had consciously reckoned. But he had reached a point where each word seemed to compel another, as each wave in a stream is forced forward by the pressure behind it; and before Flamel could speak he had faltered out "You don t think people could say . . . could criticise the man. . . ." "But the man s dead, is n t he?" "He s dead yes; but can I assume the responsibility without " Flamel hesitated; and almost immediately Glennard s scruples gave way to irritation. If at this hour Flamel were to affect an inopportune reluctance ! [290] THE TOUCHSTONE The older man s answer reassured him. "Why need you assume any responsibility? Your name won t appear, of course; and as to your friend s, I don t see why his should either. He was n t a celebrity himself, I suppose?" "No, no." "Then the letters can be addressed to Mr. Blank. Does n t that make it all right ? " Glennard s hesitation revived. "For the public, yes. But I don t see that it alters the case for me. The question is, ought I to publish them at all ? " "Of course you ought to." Flamel spoke with invigor ating emphasis. "I doubt if you d be justified in keeping them back. Anything of Margaret Aubyn s is more or less public property by this time. She s too great for any one of us. I was only wondering how you could use them to the best advantage to yourself, I mean. How many are there?" "Oh, a lot; perhaps a hundred I haven t counted. There may be more. ..." " Gad ! What a haul ! When were they written ? " "I don t know that is they corresponded for years. What s the odds ? " He moved toward his hat with a vague impulse of flight. "It all counts," said Flamel imperturbably. "A long correspondence one, I mean, that covers a great deal of time is obviously worth more than if the same number of letters had been written within a year. At any rate, you [291] THE TOUCHSTONE won t give them to Joslin ? They d fill a book, would n t they?" "I suppose so. I don t know how much it takes to fill a book." "Not love-letters, you say?" "Why?" flashed from Glennard. "Oh, nothing only the big public is sentimental, and if they were why, you could get any money for Margaret Aubyn s love-letters." Glennard was silent. "Are the letters interesting in themselves ? I mean apart from the association with her name?" "I m no judge." Glennard took up his hat and thrust himself into his overcoat. "I dare say I sha n t do anything about it. And, Flamel you won t mention this to any one?" "Lord, no. Well, I congratulate you. You ve got a big thing." Flamel was smiling at him from the hearth. Glennard, on the threshold, forced a response to the smile, while he questioned with loitering indifference "Financially, eh?" "Rather; I should say so." Glennard s hand lingered on the knob. "How much should you say ? You know about such things." "Oh, I should have to see the letters; but I should say well, if you ve got enough to fill a book and they re fairly readable, and the book is brought out at the right [292] THE TOUCHSTONE time say ten thousand down from the publisher, and pos sibly one or two more in royalties. If you got the publishers bidding against each other you might do even better; but of course I m talking in the dark." "Of course," said Glennard, with sudden dizziness. His hand had slipped from the knob and he stood staring down at the exotic spirals of the Persian rug beneath his feet. "I d have to see the letters," Flamel repeated. "Of course you d have to see them. . . ." Glennard stammered; and, without turning, he flung over his shoulder an inarticulate " Good-bye. . . ." I A HE little house, as Glennard strolled up to it between the trees, seemed no more than a gay tent pitched against the sunshine. It had the crispness of a freshly starched summer gown, and the geraniums on the veranda bloomed as simultaneously as the flowers in a bonnet. The garden was prospering absurdly. Seed they had sown at random amid laughing counter-charges of incompe tence had shot up in fragrant defiance of their blunders. He smiled to see the clematis unfolding its punctual wings about the porch. The tiny lawn was smooth as a shaven cheek, and a crimson rambler mounted to the nursery window of a baby who never cried. A breeze shook the awning above the tea-table, and his wife, as he drew near, [ 293 ] THE TOUCHSTONE could be seen bending above a kettle that was just about to boil. So vividly did the whole scene suggest the painted bliss of a stage setting, that it would have been hardly sur prising to see her step forward among the flowers and trill out her virtuous happiness from the veranda rail. The stale heat of the long day in town, the dusty pro miscuity of the suburban train, were now but the requisite foil to an evening of scented breezes and tranquil talk. They had been married more than a year, and each home coming still reflected the freshness of their first day to gether. If, indeed, their happiness had a flaw, it was in resembling too closely the bright impermanence of their surroundings. Their love as yet was but the gay tent of holiday-makers. His wife looked up with a smile. The country life suited her, and her beauty had gained depth from a stillness in which certain faces might have grown opaque. "Are you very tired?" she asked, pouring his tea. "Just enough to enjoy this." He rose from the chair in which he had thrown himself and bent over the tray for his cream. "You ve had a visitor?" he commented, no ticing a half-empty cup beside her own. "Only Mr. Flamel," she said indifferently. "Flamel? Again?" She answered without show of surprise. "He left just now. His yacht is down at Laurel Bay and he borrowed a trap of the Dreshams to drive over here." [294] THE TOUCHSTONE Glennard made no comment, and she went on, leaning her head back against the cushions of her bamboo seat, "He wants us to go for a sail with him next Sunday." Glennard meditatively stirred his tea. He was trying to think of the most natural and unartificial thing to say, and his voice seemed to come from the outside, as though he were speaking behind a marionette. "Do you want to ?" "Just as you please," she said compliantly. No affecta tion of indifference could have been as baffling as her com pliance. Glennard, of late, was beginning to feel that the surface which, a year ago, he had taken for a sheet of clear glass, might, after all, be a mirror reflecting merely his own conception of what lay behind it. "Do you like Flamel?" he suddenly asked; to which, still engaged with her tea, she returned the feminine answer "I thought you did." "I do, of course," he agreed, vexed at his own incorrigi ble tendency to magnify Flamel s importance by hovering about the topic. "A sail would be rather jolly; let s go." She made no reply and he drew forth the rolled-up eve ning papers which he had thrust into his pocket on leaving the train. As he smoothed them out his own countenance seemed to undergo the same process. He ran his eye down the list of stocks, and Flamel s importunate personality re ceded behind the rows of figures pushing forward into notice like so many bearers of good news. Glennard s in vestments were flowering like his garden: the dryest shares [295] THE TOUCHSTONE blossomed into dividends and a golden harvest awaited his sickle. He glanced at his wife with the tranquil air of a man who digests good luck as naturally as the dry ground absorbs a shower. "Things are looking uncommonly well. I believe we shall be able to go to town for two or three months next winter if we can find something cheap." She smiled luxuriously : it was pleasant to be able to say, with an air of balancing relative advantages, "Really, on the baby s account I shall be almost sorry; but if we do go, there s Kate Erskine s house ... she 11 let us have it for almost nothing. . . ." "Well, write her about it," he recommended, his eye travelling on in search of the weather report. He had turned to the wrong page; and suddenly a line of black characters leapt out at him as from an ambush. "MARGARET AUBTN S LETTERS. "Two volumes. Out To-day. First Edition of five thousand "sold out before leaving the press. Second Edition ready next "week. The Book of the Year. . . ." He looked up stupidly. His wife still sat with her head thrown back, her pure profile detached against the cush ions. She was smiling a little over the prospect his last words had opened. Behind her head shivers of sun and shade ran across the striped awning. A row of maples and a privet hedge hid their neighbor s gables, giving them [ 296 ] THE TOUCHSTONE undivided possession of their leafy half-acre; and life, a moment before, had been like their plot of ground, shut off, hedged in from importunities, impenetrably his and hers. Now it seemed to him that every maple-leaf, every privet- bud, was a relentless human gaze, pressing close upon their privacy. It was as though they sat in a brightly lit room, uncurtained from a darkness full of hostile watchers. ... His wife still smiled; and her unconsciousness of danger seemed in some horrible way to put her beyond the reach of rescue. . . . He had not known that it would be like this. After the first odious weeks, spent in preparing the letters for pub lication, in submitting them to Flamel, and in negotiating with the publishers, the transaction had dropped out of his consciousness into that unvisited limbo to which we rele gate the deeds we would rather not have done but have no notion of undoing. From the moment he had obtained Miss Trent s promise not to sail with her aunt he had tried to imagine himself irrevocably committed. After that, he argued, his first duty was to her she had become his con science. The sum obtained from the publishers by FlamePs manipulations, and opportunely transferred to Dinslow s successful venture, already yielded a return which, com bined with Glennard s professional earnings, took the edge of compulsion from their way of living, making it appear the expression of a graceful preference for sim plicity. It was the mitigated poverty which can subscribe f 2971 THE TOUCHSTONE to a review or two and have a few flowers on the dinner- table. And already in a small way Glennard was beginning to feel the magnetic quality of prosperity. Clients who had passed his door in the hungry days sought it out now that it bore the name of a successful man. It was understood that a small inheritance, cleverly invested, was the source of his fortune; and there was a feeling that a man who could do so well for himself was likely to know how to turn over other people s money. But it was in the more intimate reward of his wife s happiness that Glennard tasted the full flavor of success. Coming out of conditions so narrow that those he offered her seemed spacious, she fitted into her new life without any of those manifest efforts at adjustment that are as sore to a husband s pride as the critical rearrangement of the bridal furniture. She had given him, instead, the deli cate pleasure of watching her expand like a sea-creature restored to its element, stretching out the atrophied ten tacles of girlish vanity and enjoyment to the rising tide of opportunity. And somehow in the windowless inner cell of his consciousness where self-criticism cowered Glen- nard s course seemed justified by its merely material suc cess. How could such a crop of innocent blessedness have sprung from tainted soil ? . . . Now he had the injured sense of a man entrapped into a disadvantageous bargain. He had not known it would be like this; and a dull anger gathered at his heart. Anger [ 298 ] THE TOUCHSTONE against whom ? Against his wife, for not knowing what he suffered ? Against Flamel, for being the unconscious instru ment of his wrong-doing ? Or against that mute memory to which his own act had suddenly given a voice of accusa tion? Yes, that was it; and his punishment henceforth would be the presence, the unescapable presence, of the woman he had so persistently evaded. She would always be there now. It was as though he had married her instead of the other. It was what she had always wanted to be with him and she had gained her point at last. . . . ^| He sprang up, as though in an impulse of flight. . , , The sudden movement lifted his wife s lids, and she asked, in the incurious voice of the woman whose life is enclosed in a magic circle of prosperity "Any news?" "No none " he said, roused to a sense of immediate peril. The papers lay scattered at his feet what if she were to see them ? He stretched his arm to gather them up, but his next thought showed him the futility of such con cealment. The same advertisement would appear every day, for weeks to come, in every newspaper; how could he prevent her seeing it ? He could not always be hiding the papers from her. . . . Well, and what if she did see it ? It would signify nothing to her; the chances were that she would never even read the book. ... As she ceased to be an element of fear in his calculations the distance between them seemed to lessen and he took her again, as it were, into the circle of his conjugal protection. . . . Yet a mo- f 2991 THE TOUCHSTONE ment before he had almost hated her! ... He laughed aloud at his senseless terrors. . . . He was off his balance, decidedly. . . . "What are you laughing at?" she asked. He explained, elaborately, that he was laughing at the recollection of an old woman in the train, an old woman with a lot of bundles, who could n t find her ticket. . . . But somehow, in the telling, the humor of the story seemed to evaporate, and he felt the conventionality of her smile. He glanced at his watch. "Is n t it time to dress?" She rose with serene reluctance. "It s a pity to go in. The garden looks so lovely." They lingered side by side, surveying their domain. There was not space in it, at this hour, for the shadow of the elm tree in the angle of the hedge: it crossed the lawn, cut the flower-border in two, and ran up the side of the house to the nursery window. She bent to flick a cater pillar from the honeysuckle; then, as they turned indoors, "If we mean to go on the yacht next Sunday," she sug gested, "ought n t you to let Mr. Flamel know?" Glennard s exasperation deflected suddenly. "Of course I shall let him know. You always seem to imply that I m going to do something rude to Flamel." The words reverberated through her silence; she had -a way of thus leaving one space in which to contemplate one s folly at arm s length. Glennard turned on his heel and went upstairs. As he dropped into a chair before his [ 300] THE TOUCHSTONE dressing-table, he said to himself that in the last hour he had sounded the depths of his humiliation, and that the lowest dregs of it, the very bottom-slime, was the hateful necessity of having always, as long as the two men lived, to be civil to Barton Flamel. VI I ^HE week in town had been sultry, and the men, in the Sunday emancipation of white flannel and duck, filled the deck chairs of the yacht with their outstretched apathy, following, through a mist of cigarette smoke, the flitting inconsequences of the women. The party was a small one Flamel had few intimate friends but com posed of more heterogeneous atoms than the little pools into which society usually runs. The reaction from the chief episode of his earlier life had bred in Glennard an uneasy distaste for any kind of personal saliency. Clever ness was useful in business; but in society it seemed to him as futile as the sham cascades formed by a stream that might have been used to drive a mill. He liked the collective point of view that goes with the civilized uniformity of dress clothes, and his wife s attitude implied the same pref erence; yet they found themselves slipping more and more into FlameFs intimacy. Alexa had once or twice said that she enjoyed meeting clever people; but her enjoyment took the negative form of a smiling receptivity; and Glennard [301 ] THE TOUCHSTONE felt a growing preference for the kind of people who have their thinking done for them by the community. Still, the deck of the yacht was a pleasant refuge from the heat on shore, and his wife s profile, serenely projected against the changing blue, lay on his retina like a cool hand on the nerves. He had never been more impressed by the kind of absoluteness that lifted her beauty above the transient effects of other women, making the most harmonious face seem an accidental collocation of features. The ladies who directly suggested this comparison were of a kind accustomed to take similar risks with more grat ifying results. Mrs. Armiger had in fact long been the tri umphant alternative of those who couldn t "see" Alexa Glennard s looks; and Mrs. Touchett s claims to consider ation were founded on that distribution of effects which is the wonder of those who admire a highly cultivated coun try. The third lady of the trio which Glennard s fancy had put te such unflattering uses was bound by circumstances to support the claims of the other two. This was Mrs. Dresham, the wife of the editor of the Radiator. Mrs. Dresham was a lady who had rescued herself from social obscurity by assuming the r61e of her husband s exponent and interpreter; and Dresham s leisure being devoted to the cultivation of remarkable women, his wife s attitude committed her to the public celebration of their remark- ableness. For the conceivable tedium of this duty, Mrs. Dresham was repaid by the fact that there were people [302] THE TOUCHSTONE who took her for a remarkable woman; and who in turn probably purchased similar distinction with the small change of her reflected importance. As to the other ladies of the party, they were simply the wives of some of the men the kind of women who expect to be talked to col lectively and to have their questions left unanswered. Mrs. Armiger, the latest embodiment of Dresham s in stinct for the remarkable, was an innocent beauty who for years had distilled dulness among a set of people now self- condemned by their inability to appreciate her. Under Dresham s tutelage she had developed into a "thoughtful woman," who read his leaders in the Radiator and bought the works he recommended. When a new book appeared, people wanted to know what Mrs. Armiger thought of it; and a young gentleman who had made a trip in Touraine had recently inscribed to her the wide-margined result of his explorations. Glennard, leaning back with his head against the rail and a slit of fugitive blue between his half-closed lids, vaguely wished she would n t spoil the afternoon by making people talk; though he reduced his annoyance to the min imum by not listening to what was said, there remained a latent irritation against the general futility of words. His wife s gift of silence seemed to him the most vivid commentary on the clumsiness of speech as a means of intercourse, and his eyes had turned to her in renewed appreciation of this finer faculty when Mrs. Armiger s [303] THE TOUCHSTONE voice abruptly brought home to him the underrated poten tialities of language. "You ve read them, of course, Mrs. Glennard?" he heard her ask: and, in reply to Alexa s vague interroga tion "Why, the Aubyn Letters it s the only book peo ple are talking of this week." Mrs. Dresham immediately saw her advantage. "You have n t read them ? How very extraordinary ! As Mrs. Armiger says, the book s in the air : one breathes it in like the influenza." Glennard sat motionless, watching his wife. "Perhaps it has n t reached the suburbs yet," she said with her unruffled smile. "Oh, do let me come to you, then!" Mrs. Touchett cried; "anything for a change of air! I m positively sick of the book and I can t put it down. Can t you sail us beyond its reach, Mr. Flamel?" Flamel shook his head. "Not even with this breeze. Literature travels faster than steam nowadays. And the worst of it is that we can t any of us give up reading: it s as insidious as a vice and as tiresome as a virtue." "I believe it is a vice, almost, to read such a book as the Letters" said Mrs. Touchett. "It s the woman s soul, absolutely torn up by the roots her whole self laid bare; and to a man who evidently did n t care; who could n t have cared. I don t mean to read another line: it s too much like listening at a keyhole." [ 304 1 THE TOUCHSTONE "But if she wanted it published?" "Wanted it? How do we know she did?" "Why, I heard she d left the letters to the man who ever he is with directions that they should be published after his death" "I don t believe it," Mrs. Touchett declared. "He s dead then, is he?" one of the men asked. "Why, you don t suppose if he were alive he could ever hold up his head again, with these letters being read by everybody ?" Mrs. Touchett protested. "It must have been horrible enough to know they d been written to him; but to publish them! No man could have done it and no woman could have told him to " "Oh, come, come," Dresham judicially interposed; "after all, they re not love-letters." "No that s the worst of it; they re unloved letters," Mrs. Touchett retorted. "Then, obviously, she need n t have written them; whereas the man, poor devil, could hardly help receiving them." "Perhaps he counted on the public to save him the trouble of reading them," said young Hartly, who was in the cynical stage. Mrs. Armiger turned her reproachful loveliness to Dresham. "From the way you defend him I believe you know who he is." Every one looked at Dresham, and his wife smiled with [305] THE TOUCHSTONE the superior air of the woman who is in her husband s professional secrets. Dresham shrugged his shoulders. "What have I said to defend him?" "You called him a poor devil you pitied him." "A man who could let Margaret Aubyn write to him in that way ? Of course I pity him." "Then you must know who he is," cried Mrs. Armiger with a triumphant air of penetration. Hartly and Flamel laughed and Dresham shook his head. "No one knows; not even the publishers; so they tell me at least." "So they tell you to tell us," Hartly astutely amended; and Mrs. Armiger added, with the appearance of carrying the argument a point farther, "But even if he s dead and she s dead, somebody must have given the letters to the publishers." "A little bird, probably," said Dresham, smiling indul gently on her deduction. "A little bird of prey then a vulture, I should say " another man interpolated. "Oh, I m not with you there," said Dresham easily. "Those letters belonged to the public." "How can any letters belong to the public that were n t written to the public ? " Mrs. Touchett interposed. "Well, these were, in a sense. A personality as big as Margaret Aubyn s belongs to the world. Such a mind is part of the general fund of thought. It s the penalty of [306] THE TOUCHSTONE greatness one becomes a monument historique. Posterity pays the cost of keeping one up, but on condition that one is always open to the public." "I don t see that that exonerates the man who gives up the keys of the sanctuary, as it were." "Who was he?" another voice inquired. "Who was he? Oh, nobody, I fancy the letter-box, the slit in the wall through which the letters passed to pos terity. . . ." "But she never meant them for posterity !" "A woman should n t write such letters if she does n t mean them to be published. ..." "She shouldn t write them to such a man!" Mrs. Touchett scornfully corrected. "I never keep letters," said Mrs. Armiger, under the obvious impression that she was contributing a valuable point to the discussion. There was a general laugh, and Flamel, who had not spoken, said lazily, "You women are too incurably sub jective. I venture to say that most men would see in those letters merely their immense literary value, their signifi cance as documents. The personal side does n t count where there s so much else." "Oh, we all know you haven t any principles," Mrs. Armiger declared; and Alexa Glennard, lifting an indolent smile, said: "I shall never write you a love-letter, Mr. Flamel." [307] THE TOUCHSTONE Glennard moved away impatiently. Such talk was as tedious as the buzzing of gnats. He wondered why his wife had wanted to drag him on such a senseless expedition. . . . He hated Flamel s crowd and what business had Flamel himself to interfere in that way, standing up for the publication of the letters as though Glennard needed his defence ? . . . Glennard turned his head and saw that Flamel had drawn a seat to Alexa s elbow and was speaking to her in a low tone. The other groups had scattered, straying in twos along the deck. It came over Glennard that he should never again be able to see Flamel speaking to his wife without the sense of sick mistrust that now loosened his joints. . . . Alexa, the next morning, over their early breakfast, surprised her husband by an unexpected request. "Will you bring me those letters from town ? " she asked. "What letters?" he said, putting down his cup. He felt himself as vulnerable as a man who is lunged at in the dark. "Mrs. Aubyn s. The book they were all talking about yesterday." Glennard, carefully measuring his second cup of tea, said with deliberation, "I did n t know you cared about that sort of thing." She was, in fact, not a great reader, and a new book sel dom reached her till it was, so to speak, on the home THE TOUCHSTONE stretch; but she replied with a gentle tenacity, "I think it would interest me because I read her life last year." "Her life? Where did you get that?" "Some one lent it to me when it came out Mr. Flamel, I think." His first impulse was to exclaim, "Why the devil do you borrow books of Flamel ? I can buy you all you want but he felt himself irresistibly forced into an attitude of smiling compliance. "Flamel always has the newest books going, has n t he ? You must be careful, by the way, about returning what he lends you. He s rather crotchety about his library." "Oh, I m always very careful," she said, with a touch of competence that struck him; and she added, as he caught up his hat: "Don t forget the letters." Why had she asked for the book ? Was her sudden wish to see it the result of some hint of Flamel s ? The thought turned Glennard sick, but he preserved sufficient lucidity to tell himself, a moment later, that his last hope of self- control would be lost if he yielded to the temptation of seeing a hidden purpose in everything she said and did. How much Flamel guessed, he had no means of divining; nor could he predicate, from what he knew of the man, to what use his inferences might be put. The very qualities that had made Flamel a useful adviser made him the most dangerous of accomplices. Glennard felt himself agrope among alien forces that his own act had set in motion. . . . [ 309 ] THE TOUCHSTONE Alexa was a woman of few requirements; but her wishes, even in trifles, had a definiteness that distinguished them from the fluid impulses of her kind. He knew that, having once asked for the book, she would not forget it; and he put aside, as an ineffectual expedient, his momentary idea of applying for it at the circulating library and telling her that all the copies were out. If the book was to be bought, it had better be bought at once. He left his office earlier than usual and turned in at the first bookshop on his way to the train. The show-window was stacked with conspicu ously lettered volumes. Margaret Aubyn flashed back at him in endless iteration. He plunged into the shop and came on a counter where the name repeated itself on row after row of bindings. It seemed to have driven the rest of literature to the back shelves. He caught up a copy, toss ing the money to an astonished clerk, who pursued him to the door with the unheeded offer to wrap up the vol umes. In the street he was seized with a sudden apprehension. What if he were to meet Flamel ? The thought was intol erable. He called a cab and drove straight to the station, where, amid the palm-leaf fans of a perspiring crowd, he waited a long half-hour for his train to start. He had thrust a volume in either pocket, and in the train he dared not draw them out; but the detested words leaped at him from the folds of the evening paper. The air seemed full of Margaret Aubyn s name; the motion of the [ 3101 THE TOUCHSTONE train set it dancing up and down on the page of a maga zine that a man in front of him was reading. . . . At the door he was told that Mrs. Glennard was still out, and he went upstairs to his room and dragged the books from his pocket. They lay on the table before him like live things that he feared to touch. ... At length he opened the first volume. A familiar letter sprang out at him, each word quickened by its glaring garb of type. The little broken phrases fled across the page like wounded animals in the open. ... It was a horrible sight ... a battue of helpless things driven savagely out of shelter. He had not known it would be like this. . . . He understood now that, at the moment of selling the letters, he had viewed the transaction solely as it affected himself: as an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise pre sentable record. He had scarcely considered the act in relation to Margaret Aubyn; for death, if it hallows, also makes innocuous. Glennard s God was a god of the living, of the immediate, the actual, the tangible; all his days he had lived in the presence of that god, heedless of the divinities who, below the surface of our deeds and passions, silently forge the fatal weapons of the dead. 311 ] THE TOUCHSTONE VH A KNOCK roused him, and looking up he saw his wife. He met her glance in silence, and she faltered out, "Are you ill?" The words restored his self-possession. "HI? Of course not. They told me you were out and I came upstairs." The books lay between them on the table; he wondered when she would see them. She lingered tentatively on the threshold, with the air of leaving his explanation on his hands. She was not the kind of woman who could be counted on to fortify an excuse by appearing to dispute it. "Where have you been?" Glennard asked, moving forward so that he obstructed her vision of the books. "I walked over to the Dreshams for tea." "I can t think what you see in those people," he said with a shrug; adding, uncontrollably "I suppose Flamel was there?" "No; he left on the yacht this morning." An answer so obstructing to the natural escape of his irritation left Glennard with no momentary resource but that of strolling impatiently to the window. As her eyes followed him they lit on the books. "Ah, you ve brought them ! I m so glad," she said. He answered over his shoulder, "For a woman who never reads you make the most astounding exceptions!" [312] THE TOUCHSTONE Her smile was an exasperating concession to the proba bility that it had been hot in town or that something had bothered him. "Do you mean it s not nice to want to read the book ?" she asked. "It was not nice to publish it, certainly; but after all, I m not responsible for that, am I?" She paused, and, as he made no answer, went on, still smiling, "I do read sometimes, you know; and I m very fond of Margaret Aubyn s books. I was reading Pomegranate Seed when we first met. Don t you remember ? It was then you told me all about her." Glennard had turned back into the room and stood staring at his wife. "All about her?" he repeated, and with the words remembrance came to him. He had found Miss Trent one afternoon with the novel in her hand, and moved by the lover s fatuous impulse to associate himself in some way with whatever fills the mind of the beloved, had broken through his habitual silence about the past. Rewarded by the consciousness of figuring impressively in Miss Trent s imagination, he had gone on from one anec dote to another, reviving dormant details of his old Hill- bridge life, and pasturing his vanity on the eagerness with which she listened to his reminiscences of a being already clothed in the impersonality of greatness. The incident had left no trace in his mind; but it sprang up now like an old enemy, the more dangerous for having been forgotten. The instinct of self-preservation some- [ 3131 THE TOUCHSTONE times the most perilous that man can exercise made him awkwardly declare: "Oh, I used to see her at people s houses, that was all;" and her silence as usual leaving room for a multiplication of blunders, he added, with in creased indifference, "I simply can t see what you can find to interest you in such a book." She seemed to consider this intently. "You ve read it, then?" "I glanced at it I never read such things." "Is it true that she did n t wish the letters to be pub lished?" Glennard felt the sudden dizziness of the mountaineer on a narrow ledge, and with it the sense that he was lost if he looked more than a step ahead. "I m sure I don t know," he said; then, summoning a smile, he passed his hand through her arm. "7 did n t have tea at the Dreshams , you know; won t you give me some now?" he suggested. That evening Glennard, under pretext of work to be done, shut himself into the small study opening off the drawing-room. As he gathered up his papers he said to his wife: "You re not going to sit indoors on such a night as this ? I 11 join you presently outside." But she had drawn her arm-chair to the lamp. "I want to look at my book," she said, taking up the first volume of the Letters. [3141 THE TOUCHSTONE Glennard, with a shrug, withdrew into the study. "I m going to shut the door; I want to be quiet," he ex plained from the threshold; and she nodded without lifting her eyes from the book. He sank into a chair, staring aimlessly at the outspread papers. How was he to work, while on the other side of the door she sat with that volume in her hand ? The door did not shut her out he saw her distinctly, felt her close to him in a contact as painful as the pressure on a bruise. The sensation was part of the general strangeness that made him feel like a man waking from a long sleep to find himself in an unknown country among people of alien tongue. We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habi tation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours. Of the points in his wife s character not in direct contact with his own, Glennard now discerned his ignorance; and the baffling sense of her remoteness was intensified by the discovery that, in one way, she was closer to him than ever before. As one may live for years in happy unconsciousness of the possession of a sensitive nerve, he had lived beside his wife unaware that her individuality had become a part of the texture of his life, ineradicable as some growth on a vital organ; and he now felt himself at once incapable of forecasting her judgment and powerless to evade its effects. To escape, the next morning, the confidences of the [ 315 1 THE TOUCHSTONE breakfast-table, he went to town earlier than usual. His wife, who read slowly, was given to talking over what she read, and at present his first object in life was to postpone the inevitable discussion of the letters. This instinct of protection, in the afternoon, on his way up town, guided him to the club in search of a man who might be per suaded to come out to the country to dine. The only man in the club was Flamel. Glennard, as he heard himself almost involuntarily pressing Flamel to come and dine, felt the full irony of the situation. To use Flamel as a shield against his wife s scru tiny was only a shade less humiliating than to reckon on his wife as a defence against Flamel. He felt a contradictory movement of annoyance at the latter s ready acceptance, and the two men drove in silence to the station. As they passed the bookstall in the waiting-room Flamel lingered a moment, and the eyes of both fell on Margaret Aubyn s name, conspicuously dis played above a counter stacked with the familiar volumes. "We shall be late, you know," Glennard remonstrated, pulling out his watch. "Go ahead," said Flamel imperturbably. "I want to get something " Glennard turned on his heel and walked down the plat form. Flamel rejoined him with an innocent-looking maga zine in his hand; but Glennard dared not even glance at the cover, lest it should show the syllables he feared. [ 316 1 THE TOUCHSTONE The train was full of people they knew, and they were kept apart till it dropped them at the little suburban sta tion. As they strolled up the shaded hill, Glennard talked volubly, pointing out the improvements in the neighbor hood, deploring the threatened approach of an electric rail way, and screening himself by a series of reflex adjust ments from the risk of any allusion to the Letters. Flamel suffered his discourse with the bland inattention that we accord to the affairs of some one else s suburb, and they reached the shelter of Alexa s tea-table without a per ceptible turn toward the dreaded topic. The dinner passed off safely. Flamel, always at his best in Alexa s presence, gave her the kind of attention which is like a becoming light thrown on the speaker s words: his answers seemed to bring out a latent significance in her phrases, as the sculptor draws his statue from the block. Glennard, under his wife s composure, detected a sensibility to this manoeuvre, and the discovery was like the lightning-flash across a nocturnal landscape. Thus far these momentary illuminations had served only to reveal the strangeness of the intervening country: each fresh observation seemed to increase the sum-total of his igno rance. Her simplicity of outline was more puzzling than a complex surface. One may conceivably work one s way through a labyrinth; but Alexa s candor was like a snow- covered plain, where, the road once lost, there are no land marks to travel by. [317] THE TOUCHSTONE Dinner over, they returned to the veranda, where a moon, rising behind the old elm, was combining with that complaisant tree a romantic enlargement of their borders. Glennard had forgotten the cigars. He went to his study to fetch them, and in passing through the drawing-room he saw the second volume of the Letters lying open on his wife s table. He picked up the book and looked at the date of the letter she had been reading. It was one of the last ... he knew the few lines by heart. He dropped the book and leaned against the wall. Why had he included that one among the others? Or was it possible that now they would all seem like that . . . ? Alexa s voice came suddenly out of the dusk. "May Touchett was right it is like listening at a keyhole. I wish I had n t read it !" Flamel returned, in the leisurely tone of the man whose phrases are punctuated by a cigarette, "It seems so to us, perhaps; but to another generation the book will be a classic." "Then it ought not to have been published till it had time to become a classic. It s horrible, it s degrading almost, to read the secrets of a woman one might have known." She added, in a lower tone, "Stephen did know her" "Did he?" came from Flamel. "He knew her very well, at Hillbridge, years ago. The book has made him feel dreadfully ... he would n t read [318] THE TOUCHSTONE it ... he did n t want me to read it. I did n t under stand at first, but now I can see how horribly disloyal it must seem to him. It s so much worse to surprise a friend s secrets than a stranger s." "Oh, Glennard s such a sensitive chap," Flamel said easily; and Alexa almost rebukingly rejoined, "If you d known her I m sure you d feel as he does. ..." Glennard stood motionless, overcome by the singular infelicity with which he had contrived to put Flamel in possession of the two points most damaging to his case: the fact that he had been a friend of Margaret Aubyn s and that he had concealed from Alexa his share in the publication of the letters. To a man of less than Flamel s astuteness it must now be clear to whom the letters were addressed; and the possibility once suggested, nothing could be easier than to confirm it by discreet research. An impulse of self-accusal drove Glennard to the window. Why not anticipate betrayal by telling his wife the truth in Flamel s presence? If the man had a drop of decent feeling in him, such a course would be the surest means of securing his silence; and above all, it would rid Glen nard of the necessity of defending himself against the per petual criticism of his wife s belief in him. . . . The impulse was strong enough to carry him to the window; but there a reaction of defiance set in. What had he done, after all, to need defence and explanation ? Both Dresham and Flamel had, in his hearing, declared the pub- [3191 THE TOUCHSTONE lication of the letters to be not only justifiable but obli gatory; and if the disinterestedness of Flamel s verdict might be questioned, Dresham s at least represented the impartial view of the man of letters. As to Alexa s words, they were simply the conventional utterance of the "nice" woman on a question already decided for her by other "nice" women. She had said the proper thing as mechan ically as she would have put on the appropriate gown or written the correct form of dinner invitation. Glennard had small faith in the abstract judgments of the other sex: he knew that half the women who were horrified by the publication of Mrs. Aubyn s letters would have betrayed her secrets without a scruple. The sudden lowering of his emotional pitch brought a proportionate relief. He told himself that now the worst was over and things would fall into perspective again. His wife and Flamel had turned to other topics, and coming out on the veranda, he handed the cigars to Flamel, saying cheerfully and yet he could have sworn they were the last words he meant to utter ! "Look here, old man, be fore you go down to Newport you must come out and spend a few days with us must n t he, Alexa?" [ 320 ] THE TOUCHSTONE VIII LENNARD, perhaps unconsciously, had counted on the continuance of this easier mood. He had always taken pride in a certain robustness of fibre that enabled him to harden himself against the inevitable, to convert his failures into the building materials of success. Though it did not even now occur to him that what he called the inevitable had hitherto been the alternative he happened to prefer, he was yet obscurely aware that his present difficulty was one not to be conjured by any affectation of indifference. Some griefs build the soul a spacious house, but in this misery of Glennard s he could not stand upright. It pressed against him at every turn. He told him self that this was because there was no escape from the visible evidences of his act. The Letters confronted him everywhere. People who had never opened a book dis cussed them with critical reservations; to have read them had become a social obligation in circles to which liter ature never penetrates except in a personal guise. Glennard did himself injustice. It was from the unex pected discovery of his own pettiness that he chiefly suffered. Our self-esteem is apt to be based on the hypo thetical great act we have never had occasion to perform; and even the most self-scrutinizing modesty credits itself negatively with a high standard of conduct. Glennard had [321] THE TOUCHSTONE never thought himself a hero; but he had been certain that he was incapable of baseness. We all like our wrong-doings to have a becoming cut, to be made to order, as it were; and Glennard found himself suddenly thrust into a garb of dishonor surely meant for a meaner figure. The immediate result of his first weeks of wretchedness was the resolve to go to town for the winter. He knew that such a course was just beyond the limit of prudence; but it was easy to allay the fears of Alexa, who, scrupu lously vigilant in the management of the household, pre served the American wife s usual aloofness from her hus band s business cares. Glennard felt that he could not trust himself to a winter s solitude with her. He had an unspeakable dread of her learning the truth about the let ters, yet could not be sure of steeling himself against the suicidal impulse of avowal. His very soul was parched for sympathy; he thirsted for a voice of pity and comprehen sion. But would his wife pity? Would she understand? Again he found himself brought up abruptly against his incredible ignorance of her nature. The fact that he knew well enough how she would behave in the ordinary emer gencies of life, that he could count, in such contingencies, on the kind of high courage and directness he had always divined in her, made him the more hopeless of her entering into the tortuous psychology of an act that he himself could no longer explain or understand. It would have been easier had she been more complex, more feminine if he [ 322 ] THE TOUCHSTONE could have counted on l>er imaginative sympathy or her moral obtuseness but he was sure of neither. He was sure of nothing but that, for a time, he must avoid her. Glen- nard could not rid himself of the delusion that by and by his action would cease to make its consequences felt. He would not have cared to own to himself that he counted on the dulling of his sensibilities: he preferred to indulge the vague hypothesis that extraneous circumstances would somehow efface the blot upon his conscience. In his worst moments of self-abasement he tried to find solace in the thought that Flamel had sanctioned his course. Flamel, at the outset, must have guessed to whom the letters were addressed; yet neither then nor afterward had he hesitated to advise their publication. This thought drew Glennard to him in fitful impulses of friendliness, from each of which there was a sharper reaction of distrust and aversion. When Flamel was not at the house, he missed the support of his tacit connivance; when he was there, his presence seemed the assertion of an intolerable claim. Early in the winter the Glennards took possession of the little house that was to cost them almost nothing. The change brought Glennard the relief of seeing less of his wife, and of being protected, in her presence, by the mul tiplied preoccupations of town life. Alexa, who could never appear hurried, showed the smiling abstraction of a pretty woman to whom the social side of married life has not lost its novelty. Glennard, with the recklessness of a man fresh [ 323 ] THE TOUCHSTONE from his first financial imprudence, encouraged her in such little extravagances as her good sense at first resisted. Since they had come to town, he argued, they might as well enjoy themselves. He took a sympathetic view of the necessity of new gowns, he gave her a set of furs at Christ mas, and before the New Year they had agreed on the necessity of adding a parlor-maid to their small establish ment. Providence the very next day hastened to justify this measure by placing on Glennard s breakfast-plate an en velope bearing the name of the publishers to whom he had sold Mrs. Aubyn s letters. It happened to be the only letter the early post had brought, and he glanced across the table at his wife, who had come down before him and had prob ably laid the envelope on his plate. She was not the woman to ask awkward questions, but he felt the conjecture of her glance, and he was debating whether to affect surprise at the receipt of the letter, or to pass it off as a business communication that had strayed to his house, when a check fell from the envelope. It was the royalty on the first edition of the letters. His first feeling was one of sim ple satisfaction. The money had come with such infernal opportuneness that he could not help welcoming it. Before long, too, there would be more; he knew the book was still selling far beyond the publishers previsions. He put the check in his pocket and left the room without looking at his wife. [334] THE TOUCHSTONE On the way to his office the habitual reaction set in. The money he had received was the first tangible reminder that he was living on the sale of his self-esteem. The thought of material benefit had been overshadowed by his sense of the intrinsic baseness of making the letters known: now he saw what an element of sordidness it added to the situation and how the fact that he needed the money, and must use it, pledged him more irrevocably than ever to the consequences of his act. It seemed to him, in that first hour of misery, that he had betrayed his friend anew. When, that afternoon, he reached home earlier than usual, Alexa s drawing-room was full of a gayety that over flowed to the stairs. Flamel, for a wonder, was not there; but Dresham and young Hartly, grouped about the tea- table, were receiving with resonant mirth a narrative delivered in the fluttered staccato that made Mrs. Ar- miger s conversation like the ejaculations of a startled aviary. She paused as Glennard entered, and he had time to notice that his wife, who was busied about the tea-tray, had not joined in the laughter of the men. "Oh, go on, go on," young Hartly rapturously groaned; and Mrs. Armiger met Glennard s inquiry with the dep recating cry that really she did n t see what there was to laugh at. "I m sure I feel more like crying. I don t know what I should have done if Alexa had n t been at home to give me a cup of tea. My nerves are in shreds yes, an- [ 325 1 THE TOUCHSTONE other, dear, please " and as Glennard looked his per plexity, she went on, after pondering on the selection of a second lump of sugar, "Why, I ve just come from the reading, you know the reading at the Waldorf." "I have n t been in town long enough to know any thing," said Glennard, taking the cup his wife handed him. "Who has been reading what?" "That lovely girl from the South Georgie Georgie What s-her-name Mrs. Dresham s protegee unless she s yours, Mr. Dresham ! Why, the big ball-room was packed, and all the women were crying like idiots it was the most harrowing thing I ever heard " "What did you hear?" Glennard asked; and his wife interposed: "Won t you have another bit of cake, Julia? Or, Stephen, ring for some hot toast, please." Her tone betrayed a polite weariness of the topic under discussion. Glennard turned to the bell, but Mrs. Armiger pursued him with her lovely amazement. "Why, the Aubyn Letters did n t you know about it? She read them so beautifully that it was quite horrible I should have fainted if there d been a man near enough to carry me out." Hartly s glee redoubled, and Dresham said jovially, "How like you women to raise a shriek over the book and then do all you can to encourage the blatant publicity of the readings!" Mrs. Armiger met him more than half-way on a torrent [326 ] THE TOUCHSTONE of self-accusal. "It was horrid; it was disgraceful. I told your wife we ought all to be ashamed of ourselves for going, and I think Alexa was quite right to refuse to take any tickets even if it was for a charity." "Oh," her hostess murmured indifferently, "with me charity begins at home. I can t afford emotional luxuries." "A charity? A charity?" Hartly exulted. "I hadn t seized the full beauty of it. Reading poor Margaret Au- byn s love-letters at the Waldorf before five hundred peo ple for a charity ! What charity, dear Mrs. Armiger?" "Why, the Home for Friendless Women " "It was well chosen," Dresham commented; and Hartly buried his mirth in the sofa cushions. When they were alone Glennard, still holding his un touched cup of tea, turned to his wife, who sat silently behind the kettle. "Who asked you to take a ticket for that reading?" "I don t know, really Kate Dresham, I fancy. It was she who got it up." "It s just the sort of damnable vulgarity she s capable of ! It s loathsome it s monstrous His wife, without looking up, answered gravely, "I thought so too. It was for that reason I did n t go. But you must remember that very few people feel about Mrs. Aubyn as you do Glennard managed to set down his cup with a steady [327] THE TOUCHSTONE hand, but the room swung round with him and he dropped into the nearest chair. "As I do?" he repeated. "I mean that very few people knew her when she lived in New York. To most of the women who went to the read ing she was a mere name, too remote to have any person ality. With me, of course, it was different " Glennard gave her a startled look. "Different? Why different?" "Since you were her friend " "Her friend!" He stood up. "You speak as if she had had only one the most famous woman of her day !" He moved vaguely about the room, bending down to look at some books on the table. "I hope," he added, "you did n t give that as a reason ? " "A reason?" "For not going. A woman who gives reasons for getting out of social obligations is sure to make herself unpopular or ridiculous." The words were uncalculated; but in an instant he saw that they had strangely bridged the distance between his wife and himself. He felt her close on him, like a panting foe; and her answer was a flash that showed the hand on the trigger. "I seem," she said from the threshold, "to have done both in giving my reason to you." The fact that they were dining out that evening made it easy for him to avoid Alexa till she came downstairs in [ 328 ] THE TOUCHSTONE her opera-cloak. Mrs. Touchett, who was going to the same dinner, had offered to call for her; and Glennard, refusing a precarious seat between the ladies draperies, followed on foot. The evening was interminable. The reading at the Waldorf, at which all the women had been present, had revived the discussion of the Avbyn Letters, and Glen nard, hearing his wife questioned as to her absence, felt himself miserably wishing that she had gone, rather than that her staying away should have been remarked. He was rapidly losing all sense of proportion where the Letters were concerned. He could no longer hear them mentioned without suspecting a purpose in the allusion; he even yielded himself for a moment to the extravagance of im agining that Mrs. Dresham, whom he disliked, had organ ized the reading in the hope of making him betray himself for he was already sure that Dresham had divined his share in the transaction. The attempt to keep a smooth surface on this inner tumult was as endless and unavailing as efforts made in a nightmare. He lost all sense of what he was saying to his neighbors; and once when he looked up his wife s glance struck him cold. She sat nearly opposite him, at Flamel s side, and it appeared to Glennard that they had built about them selves one of those airy barriers of talk behind which two people can say what they please. While the reading was discussed they were silent. Their silence seemed to Glen nard almost cynical it stripped the last disguise from [ 329] THE TOUCHSTONE their complicity. A throb of anger rose in him, but sud denly it fell, and he felt, with a curious sense of relief, that at bottom he no longer cared whether Flamel had told his wife or not. The assumption that Flamel knew about the letters had become a fact to Glennard; and it now seemed to him better that Alexa should know too. He was frightened at first by the discovery of his own indifference. The last barriers of his will seemed to be breaking down before a flood of moral lassitude. How could he continue to play his part, how keep his front to the enemy, with this poison of indifference stealing through his veins ? He tried to brace himself with the remembrance of his wife s scorn. He had not forgotten the note on which their conversation had closed. If he had ever wondered how she would receive the truth he wondered no longer she would despise him. But this lent a new insidiousness to his temptation, since her contempt would be a refuge from his own. He said to himself that, since he no longer cared for the consequences, he could at least acquit him self of speaking in self-defence. What he wanted now was not immunity but castigation : his wife s indignation might still reconcile him to himself. Therein lay his one hope of regeneration; her scorn was the moral antiseptic that he needed, her comprehension the one balm that could heal him. . . . When they left the dinner he was so afraid of speaking that he let her drive home alone, and went to the club with Flamel. [ 330 1 THE TOUCHSTONE IX T TE rose next morning with the resolve to know what Alexa thought of him. It was not anchoring in a haven but lying to in a storm he felt the need of a tem porary lull in the turmoil of his sensations. He came home late, for they were dining alone and he knew that they would have the evening together. When he followed her to the drawing-room after dinner he thought himself on the point of speaking; but as she handed him his coffee he said involuntarily: "I shall have to carry this off to the study; I ve got a lot of work to-night." Alone in the study he cursed his cowardice. What was it that had withheld him? A certain bright unapproach- ableness seemed to keep him at arm s length. She was not the kind of woman whose compassion could be circum vented; there was no chance of slipping past the outposts he would never take her by surprise. Well why not face her, then? What he shrank from could be no worse than what he was enduring. He had pushed back his chair and turned to go upstairs when a new expedient presented itself. What if, instead of telling her, he were to let her find out for herself and watch the effect of the discovery before speaking ? In this way he made over to chance the burden of the revelation. The idea had been suggested by the sight of the formula enclosing the publisher s check. He had deposited the [331 ] THE TOUCHSTONE money, but the notice accompanying it dropped from his note-case as he cleared his table for work. It was the for mula usual in such cases, and revealed clearly enough that he was the recipient of a royalty on Margaret Aubyn s letters. It would be impossible for Alexa to read it without understanding at once that the letters had been written to him and that he had sold them. He sat downstairs till he heard her ring for the parlor maid to put out the lights; then he went up to the drawing- room with a bundle of papers in his hand. Alexa was just rising from her seat, and the lamplight fell on the deep roll of hair that overhung her brow like the eaves of a temple. Her face had often the high secluded look of a shrine; and it was this touch of awe in her beauty that now made him feel himself on the brink of sacrilege. Lest the feeling should control him, he spoke at once. "I ve brought you a piece of work a lot of old bills and things that I want you to sort for me. Some are not worth keeping but you 11 be able to judge of that. There may be a letter or two among them nothing of much account; but I don t like to throw away the whole lot without having them looked over, and I have n t time to do it myself." He held out the papers, and she took them with a smile that seemed to recognize in the service he asked the tacit intention of making amends for the incident of the previous day. "Are you sure I shall know which to keep?" [ 332 ] THE TOUCHSTONE "Oh, quite sure," he answered easily; "and besides, none are of much importance." The next morning he invented an excuse for leaving the house without seeing her, and when he returned, just before dinner, he found a visitor s hat and stick in the hall. The visitor was Flamel, who was just taking leave. He had risen, but Alexa remained seated; and their attitude gave the impression of a colloquy that had pro longed itself beyond the limits of speech. Both turned a surprised eye on Glennard, and he had the sense of walk ing into a room grown suddenly empty, as though their thoughts were conspirators dispersed by his approach. He felt the clutch of his old fear. What if his wife had already sorted the papers and had told Flamel of her discovery? Well, it was no news to Flamel that Glennard was in re ceipt of a royalty on the Aubyn Letters. . . . A sudden resolve to know the worst made him lift his eyes to his wife as the door closed on Flamel. But Alexa had risen also, and bending over her writing-table, with her back to Glennard, was beginning to speak precipitately. "I m dining out to-night you don t mind my desert ing you ? Julia Armiger sent me word just now that she had an extra ticket for the last Ambrose concert. She told me to say how sorry she was that she had n t two, but I knew you would n t be sorry ! " She ended with a laugh that had the effect of being a strayed echo of Mrs. Armiger s; and before Glennard could speak she had added, with her [333 ] THE TOUCHSTONE hand on the door, "Mr. Flamel stayed so late that I ve hardly time to dress. The concert begins ridiculously early, and Julia dines at half -past seven." Glennard stood alone in the empty room that seemed somehow full of an ironical consciousness of what was happening. "She hates me," he murmured. "She hates me . . ." The next day was Sunday, and Glennard purposely lingered late in his room. When he came downstairs his wife was already seated at the breakfast-table. She lifted her usual smile to his entrance and they took shelter in the nearest topic, like wayfarers overtaken by a storm. While he listened to her account of the concert he began to think that, after all, she had not yet sorted the papers, and that her agitation of the previous day must be as cribed to another cause, in which perhaps he had but an indirect concern. He wondered it had never before oc curred to him that Flamel was the kind of man who might very well please a woman at his own expense, without need of fortuitous assistance. If this possibility cleared the outlook it did not brighten it. Glennard merely felt himself left alone with his baseness. Alexa left the breakfast-table before him, and when he went up to the drawing-room he found her dressed to go out. "Are n t you a little early for church?" he asked. [334] THE TOUCHSTONE She replied that, on the way there, she meant to stop a moment at her mother s; and while she drew on her gloves he fumbled among the knick-knacks on the mantelpiece for a match to light his cigarette. "Well, good-bye," she said, turning to go; and from the threshold she added: "By the way, I ve sorted the papers you gave me. Those that I thought you would like to keep are on your study table." She went downstairs and he heard the door close behind her. She had sorted the papers she knew, then she must know and she had made no sign ! Glennard, he hardly knew how, found himself once more in the study. On the table lay the packet he had given her. It was much smaller she had evidently gone over the papers with care, destroying the greater number. He loosened the elastic band and spread the remaining envelopes on his desk. The publisher s notice was among them. T TIS wife knew and she made no sign. Glennard found himself in the case of the seafarer who, closing his eyes at nightfall on a scene he thinks to put leagues behind him before day, wakes to a port-hole framing the same patch of shore. From the kind of exaltation to which his re solve had lifted him he dropped to an unreasoning apathy. [335] THE TOUCHSTONE His impulse of confession had acted as a drug to self-re proach. He had tried to shift a portion of his burden to his wife s shoulders; and now that she had tacitly refused to carry it, he felt the load too heavy to be taken up. A fortunate interval of hard work brought respite from this phase of sterile misery. He went West to argue an important case, won it, and came back to fresh preoccu pations. His own affairs were thriving enough to engross him in the pauses of his professional work, and for over two months he had little time to look himself in the face. Not unnaturally for he was as yet unskilled in the sub tleties of introspection he mistook his temporary insen sibility for a gradual revival of moral health. He told himself that he was recovering his sense of pro portion, getting to see things in their true light; and if he now thought of his rash appeal to his wife s sympathy it was as an act of folly from the consequences of which he had been saved by the providence that watches over mad men. He had little leisure to observe Alexa; but he con cluded that the common sense momentarily denied him had counselled her silent acceptance of the inevitable. If such a quality was a poor substitute for the passionate justness that had once seemed to distinguish her, he ac cepted the alternative as a part of that general lowering of the key that seems needful to the maintenance of the matrimonial duet. What woman ever retained her abstract sense of justice where another woman was concerned? [ 336 ] THE TOUCHSTONE Possibly the thought that he had profited by Mrs. Aubyn s tenderness was not wholly disagreeable to his wife. When the pressure of work began to lessen, and he found himself, in the lengthening afternoons, able to reach home somewhat earlier, he noticed that the little drawing-room was always full and that he and his wife seldom had an evening alone together. When he was tired, as often hap pened, she went out alone; the idea of giving up an en gagement to remain with him seemed not to occur to her. She had shown, as a girl, little fondness for society, nor had she seemed to regret it during the year they had spent in the country. He reflected, however, that he was sharing the common lot of husbands, who proverbially mistake the early ardors of housekeeping for a sign of set tled domesticity. Alexa, at any rate, was refuting his theory as inconsiderately as a seedling defeats the garden er s expectations. An undefinable change had come over her. In one sense it was a happy one, since she had grown, if not handsomer, at least more vivid and expressive; her beauty had become more communicable : it was as though she had learned the conscious exercise of intuitive attri butes and now used her effects with the discrimination of an artist skilled in values. To a dispassionate critic (as Glennard now rated himself) the art may at times have been a little too obvious. Her attempts at lightness lacked spontaneity, and she sometimes rasped him by laugh ing like Julia Armiger; but he had enough imagination to [ 337 ] THE TOUCHSTONE perceive that, in respect of his wife s social arts, a hus band necessarily sees the wrong side of the tapestry. In this ironical estimate of their relation Glennard found himself strangely relieved of all concern as to his wife s feelings for Flamel. From an Olympian pinnacle of indif ference he calmly surveyed their inoffensive antics. It was surprising how his cheapening of his wife put him at ease with himself. Far as he and she were from each other they had yet had, in a sense, the tacit nearness of complicity. Yes, they were accomplices; he could no more be jealous of her than she could despise him. The jealousy that would once have seemed a blur on her whiteness now appeared like a tribute to ideals in which he no longer believed. Glennard was little given to exploring the outskirts of literature. He always skipped the "literary notices" in the papers, and he had small leisure for the intermittent pleasures of the periodical. He had therefore no notion of the prolonged reverberations which the Aubyn Letters had awakened. When the book ceased to be talked about he supposed it had ceased to be read; and this apparent sub sidence of the agitation about it brought the reassuring sense that he had exaggerated its vitality. The conviction, if it did not ease his conscience, at least offered him the relative relief of obscurity; he felt like an offender taken down from the pillory and thrust into the soothing dark ness of a cell. But one evening, when Alexa had left him to go to a [338] THE TOUCHSTONE dance, he chanced to turn over the magazines on her table, and the copy of the Horoscope to which he settled down with his cigar confronted him, on its first page, with a portrait of Margaret Aubyn. It was a reproduction of the photograph that had stood so long on his desk. The desic cating air of memory had turned her into the mere abstrac tion of a woman, and this unexpected evocation seemed to bring her nearer than she had ever been in life. Was it because he understood her better ? He looked long into her eyes; little personal traits reached out to him like caresses the tired droop of her lids, her quick way of leaning forward as she spoke, the movements of her long expressive hands. All that was feminine in her, the quality he had always missed, stole toward him from her unreproachful gaze; and now that it was too late, life had developed in him the subtler perceptions which could detect it in even this poor semblance of herself. For a moment he found con solation in the thought that, at any cost, they had thus been brought together; then a sense of shame rushed over him. Face to face with her, he felt himself laid bare to the inmost fold of consciousness. The shame was deep, but it was a renovating anguish: he was like a man whom intol erable pain has roused from the creeping lethargy of death. . . . He rose next morning to as fresh a sense of life as though his hour of communion with Margaret Aubyn had been a more exquisite renewal of their earlier meetings. His waking thought was that he must see her again; and as f 3391 THE TOUCHSTONE consciousness affirmed itself he felt an intense fear of losing the sense of her nearness. But she was still close to him: her presence remained the one reality in a world of shad ows. All through his working hours he was re-living with incredible minuteness every incident of their obliterated past: as a man who has mastered the spirit of a foreign tongue turns with renewed wonder to the pages his youth has plodded over. In this lucidity of retrospection the most trivial detail had its meaning, and the joy of recovery was embittered to Glennard by the perception of all that he had missed. He had been pitiably, grotesquely stupid; and there was irony in the thought that, but for the crisis through which he was passing, he might have lived on in complacent ignorance of his loss. It was as though she had bought him with her blood. . . . That evening he and Alexa dined alone. After dinner he followed her to the drawing-room. He no longer felt the need of avoiding her; he was hardly conscious of her pres ence. After a few words they lapsed into silence, and he sat smoking with his eyes on the fire. It was not that he was unwilling to talk to her; he felt a curious desire to be as kind as possible; but he was always forgetting that she was there. Her full bright presence, through which the cur rents of life flowed so warmly, had grown as tenuous as a shadow, and he saw so far beyond her. Presently she rose and began to move about the room. [ 340 ] THE TOUCHSTONE She seemed to be looking for something, and he roused himself to ask what she wanted. "Only the last number of the Horoscope. I thought I d left it on this table." He said nothing, and she went on: "You have n t seen it?" "No," he returned coldly. The magazine was locked in his desk. His wife had moved to the mantelpiece. She stood facing him, and as he looked up he met her tentative gaze. "I was reading an article in it a review of Mrs. Aubyn s Letters," she added slowly, with her deep deliberate blush. Glennard stooped to toss his cigar into the fire. He felt a savage wish that she would not speak the other woman s name; nothing else seemed to matter. "You seem to do a lot of reading," he said. She still confronted him. "I was keeping this for you I thought it might interest you," she said with an air of gentle insistence. He stood up and turned away. He was sure she knew that he had taken the review, and he felt that he was beginning to hate her again. "I have n t time for such things," he said indifferently. As he moved to the door he heard her take a hurried step forward; then she paused, and sank without speaking into the chair from which he had Arisen. 341 ] THE TOUCHSTONE XI AS Glennard, in the raw February sunlight, mounted the road to the cemetery, he felt the beatitude that comes with an abrupt cessation of physical pain. He had reached the point where self-analysis ceases; the impulse that moved him was purely intuitive. He did not even seek a reason for it, beyond the obvious one that his desire to stand by Margaret Aubyn s grave was prompted by no attempt at a sentimental reparation, but rather by the need to affirm in some way the reality of the tie between them. The ironical promiscuity of death had brought Mrs. Aubyn back to share the hospitality of her husband s last lodging; but though Glennard knew she had been buried near New York he had never visited her grave. He was oppressed, as he now threaded the long avenues, by a chilling vision of her return. There was no family to follow her hearse; she had died alone, as she had lived; and the "distinguished mourners" who had formed the escort of the famous writer knew nothing of the woman they were committing to the grave. Glennard could not even remem ber at what season she had been buried; but his mood in dulged the fancy that it must have been on some such day of harsh sunlight, the incisive February brightness that gives perspicuity without warmth. The white avenues stretched before him interminably, lined with stereotyped [ 342 ] THE TOUCHSTONE emblems of affliction, as though all the platitudes ever uttered had been turned to marble and set up over the unresisting dead. Here and there, no doubt, a frigid urn or an insipid angel imprisoned some fine-fibred grief, as the most hackneyed words may become the vehicle of rare meanings; but for the most part the endless alignment of monuments seemed to embody those easy generalizations about death that do not disturb the repose of the living. Glennard s eye, as he followed the way pointed out to him, had instinctively sought some low mound with a quiet headstone. He had forgotten that the dead seldom plan their own houses, and with a pang he discovered the name he sought on the cyclopean base of a shaft rearing its aggressive height at the angle of two avenues. "How she would have hated it !" he murmured. A bench stood near and he seated himself. The monu ment rose before him like some pretentious uninhabited dwelling: he could not believe that Margaret Aubyn lay there. It was a Sunday morning, and black figures moved among the paths, placing flowers on the frost-bound hill ocks. Glennard noticed that the neighboring graves had been thus newly dressed, and he fancied a blind stir of expectancy through the sod, as though the bare mounds spread a parched surface to that commemorative rain. He rose presently and walked back to the entrance of the cemetery. Several greenhouses stood near the gates, and turning in at the first he asked for some flowers. [343] THE TOUCHSTONE "Anything in the emblematic line?" asked the anaemic man behind the dripping counter. Glennard shook his head. "Just cut flowers ? This way then." The florist unlocked a glass door and led him down a moist green aisle. The hot air was choked with the scent of white azaleas, white lilies, white lilacs; all the flowers were white: they were like a prolongation, a mystic efflorescence, of the long rows of marble tombstones, and their perfume seemed to cover an odor of decay. The rich atmosphere made Glennard dizzy. As he leaned in the doorway, waiting for the flowers, he had a penetrating sense of Margaret Aubyn s nearness not the imponderable presence of his inner vision, but a life that beat warm in his arms. . . . The sharp air caught him as he stepped out into it again. He walked back and scattered the flowers over the grave. The edges of the white petals shrivelled like burnt paper in the cold; and as he watched them the illusion of her nearness faded, shrank back frozen. xn / TT A HE motive of his visit to the cemetery remained unde fined save as a final effort of escape from his wife s inexpressive acceptance of his shame. It seemed to him that as long as he could keep himself alive to that shame he would not wholly have succumbed to its consequences. [344] THE TOUCHSTONE His chief fear was that he should become the creature of his act. His wife s indifference degraded him: it seemed to put him on a level with his dishonor. Margaret Aubyn would have abhorred the deed in proportion to her pity for the man. The sense of her potential pity drew him back to her. The one woman knew but did not understand; the Other, it sometimes seemed, understood without knowing. In its last disguise of retrospective remorse, his self-pity affected a desire for solitude and meditation. He lost him self in morbid musings, in futile visions of what life with Margaret Aubyn might have been. There were moments when, in the strange dislocation of his view, the wrong he had done her seemed a tie between them. "To indulge these emotions he fell into the habit, on Sunday afternoons, of solitary walks prolonged till after dusk. The days were lengthening, there was a touch of spring in the air, and his wanderings now usually led him to the Park and its outlying regions. One Sunday, tired of aimless locomotion, he took a cab at the Park gates and let it carry him out to the Riverside Drive. It was a gray afternoon streaked with east wind. Glennard s cab advanced slowly, and as he leaned back, gazing with absent intentness at the deserted paths that wound under bare boughs between grass banks of prema ture vividness, his attention was arrested by two figures walking ahead of him. This couple, who had the path to themselves, moved at an uneven pace, as though adapting [ 345 1 THE TOUCHSTONE their gait to a conversation marked by meditative inter vals. Now and then they paused, and in one of these pauses the lady, turning toward her companion, showed Glennard the outline of his wife s profile. The man was Flamel. The blood rushed to Glennard s forehead. He sat up with a jerk and pushed back the lid in the roof of the hansom; but when the cabman bent down he dropped into his seat without speaking. Then, becoming conscious of the prolonged interrogation of the lifted lid, he called out "Turn drive back anywhere I m in a hurry " As the cab swung round he caught a last glimpse of the two figures. They had not moved; Alexa, with bent head, stood listening. "My God, my God " he groaned. It was hideous it was abominable he could not under stand it. The woman was nothing to him less than noth ing yet the blood hummed in his ears and hung a cloud before him. He knew it was only the stirring of the primal instinct, that it had no more to do with his reasoning self than any reflex impulse of the body; but that merely low ered anguish to disgust. Yes, it was disgust he felt almost a physical nausea. The poisonous fumes of life were in his lungs. He was sick, unutterably sick. . . . He drove home and went to his room. They were giving a little dinner that night, and when he came down the guests were arriving. He looked at his wife: her beauty [346] THE TOUCHSTONE was extraordinary, but it seemed to him the beauty of a smooth sea along an unlit coast. She frightened him. He sat late in his study. He heard the parlormaid lock the front door; then his wife went upstairs and the lights were put out. His brain was like some great empty hall with an echo in it: one thought reverberated endlessly. ... At length he drew his chair to the table and began to write. He addressed an envelope and then slowly re-read what he had written. "My dear Flamel, " Many apologies for not sending you sooner the enclosed "check, which represents the customary percentage on the "sale of the Letters: " Trusting you will excuse the oversight, " Yours truly "Stephen Glennard." He let himself out of the darkened house and dropped the letter in the post-box at the corner. The next afternoon he was detained late at his office, and as he was preparing to leave he heard some one asking for him in the outer room. He seated himself again and Flamel was shown in. The two men, as Glennard pushed aside an obstructive [3471 THE TOUCHSTONE chair, had a moment to measure each other; then Flamel advanced, and drawing out his note-case, laid a slip of paper on the desk. "My dear fellow, what on earth does this mean?" Glennard recognized his check. "That I was remiss, simply. It ought to have gone to you before." Flamel s tone had been that of unaffected surprise, but at this his accent changed and he asked quickly: "On what ground?" Glennard had moved away from the desk and stood leaning against the calf-backed volumes of the bookcase. "On the ground that you sold Mrs. Aubyn s letters for me, and that I find the intermediary in such cases is entitled to a percentage on the sale." Flamel paused before answering. "You find, you say. It s a recent discovery?" "Obviously, from my not sending the check sooner. You see I m new to the business." "And since when have you discovered that there was any question of business, as far as I was concerned?" Glennard flushed and his voice rose slightly. "Are you reproaching me for not having remembered it sooner?" Flamel, who had spoken in the rapid repressed tone of a man on the verge of anger, stared a moment at this and then, in his natural voice, rejoined good-humoredly, "Upon my soul, I don t understand you !" [348] THE TOUCHSTONE The change of key seemed to disconcert Glennard. "It s simple enough," he muttered. "Simple enough your offering me money in return for a friendly service ? I don t know what your other friends expect!" "Some of my friends wouldn t have undertaken the job. Those who would have done so would probably have expected to be paid." He lifted his eyes to Flamel and the two men looked at each other. Flamel had turned white and his lips stirred, but he held his temperate note. "If you mean to imply that the job was not a nice one you lay yourself open to the retort that you proposed it. But for my part I ve never seen, I never shall see, any reason for not publishing the letters." "That s just it!" "What-?" "The certainty of your not seeing was what made me go to you. When a man s got stolen goods to pawn he does n t take them to the police-station." "Stolen?" Flamel echoed. "The letters were stolen?" Glennard burst into a laugh. "How much longer do you expect me to keep up that pretence about the letters? You know well enough they were written to me." Flamel looked at him in silence. "Were they?" he said at length. "I did n t know it." "And did n t suspect it, I suppose," Glennard sneered. [ 349 1 THE TOUCHSTONE The other Was again silent; then he said, "I may re mind you that, supposing I had felt any curiosity about the matter, I had no way of finding out that the letters were written to you. You never showed me the originals." "What does that prove ? There were fifty ways of finding out. It s the kind of thing one can easily do." Flamel glanced at him with contempt. "Our ideas prob ably differ as to what a man can easily do. It would not have been easy for me." Glennard s anger vented itself in the words uppermost in his thought. "It may, then, interest you to hear that my wife does know about the letters has known for some months. . . ." "Ah," said the other, slowly. Glennard saw that, in his blind clutch at a weapon, he had seized the one most apt to wound. Flamel s muscles were under control, but his face showed the undefinable change produced by the slow infiltration of poison. Every implication that the words contained had reached its mark; but Glennard felt that their obvious intent was lost in the anguish of what they suggested. He was sure now that Flamel would never have betrayed him; but the inference only made a wider outlet for his anger. He paused breath lessly for Flamel to speak. "If she knows it s not through me." It was what Glen nard had waited for. "Through you, by God? Who said it was through you? [ 350 1 THE TOUCHSTONE Do you suppose I leave it to you, or to anybody else, for that matter, to keep my wife informed of my actions? I did n t suppose even such egregious conceit as yours could delude a man to that degree!" Struggling for a foothold in the landslide of his dignity, he added in a steadier tone, "My wife learned the facts from me." Flamel received this in silence. The other s outbreak seemed to have restored his self-control, and when he spoke it was with a deliberation implying that his course was chosen. "In that case I understand still less " " Stillless?" "The meaning of this." He pointed to the check. "When you began to speak I supposed you had meant it as a bribe; now I can only infer it was intended as a random insult. In either case, here s my answer." He tore the slip of paper in two and tossed the fragments across the desk to Glennard. Then he turned and walked out of the office. Glennard dropped his head on his hands. If he had hoped to restore his self-respect by the simple expedient of assail ing Flamel s, the result had not justified his expectation. The blow he had struck had blunted the edge of his anger, and the unforeseen extent of the hurt inflicted did not alter the fact that his weapon had broken in his hands. He now saw that his rage against Flamel was only the last pro jection of a passionate self-disgust. This consciousness did not dull his dislike of the man; it simply made reprisals [3511 THE TOUCHSTONE ineffectual. Flamel s unwillingness to quarrel with him was the last stage of his abasement. In the light of this final humiliation his assumption of his wife s indifference struck him as hardly so fatuous as the sentimental resuscitation of his past. He had been living in a factitious world wherein his emotions were the syco phants of his vanity, and it was with instinctive relief that he felt its ruins crash about his head. It was nearly dark when he left his office, and he walked slowly homeward in the complete mental abeyance that follows on such a crisis. He was not aware that he was thinking of his wife; yet when he reached his own door he found that, in the involuntary readjustment of his vision, she had once more become the central point of con sciousness. xin ITT had never before occurred to him that she might, after all, have missed the purport of the document he had put in her way. What if, in her hurried inspection of the papers, she had passed it over as related to the private business of some client ? What, for instance, was to prevent her concluding that Glennard was the counsel of the un known person who had sold the Aubyn Letters? The sub ject was one not likely to fix her attention she was not a curious woman. f 3521 THE TOUCHSTONE Glennard at this point laid down his fork and glanced at her between the candle-shades. The alternative explana tion of her indifference was not slow in presenting itself. Her head had the same listening droop as when he had caught sight of her the day before in FlameFs company; the attitude revived the vividness of his impression. It was simple enough, after all. She had ceased to care for him because she cared for some one else. As he followed her upstairs he felt a sudden stirring of his dormant anger. His sentiments had lost their artificial complexity. He had already acquitted her of any conni vance in his baseness, and he felt only that he loved her and that she had escaped him. This was now, strangely enough, his dominant thought: the sense that he and she had passed through the fusion of love and had emerged from it as incommunicably apart as though the transmu tation had never taken place. Every other passion, he mused, left some mark upon the nature; but love passed like the flight of a ship across the waters. She dropped into her usual seat near the lamp, and he leaned against the chimney, moving about with an inat tentive hand the knick-knacks on the mantel. Suddenly he caught sight of her reflection in the mirror. She was looking at him. He turned and their eyes met. He moved across the room. "There s something that I want to say to you," he began. [353] THE TOUCHSTONE She held his gaze, but her color deepened. He noticed again, with a jealous pang, how her beauty had gained in warmth and meaning. It was as though a transparent cup had been filled with wine. He looked at her ironically. "I ve never prevented your seeing your friends here," he broke out. " Why do you meet Flamel in out-of-the-way places ? Nothing makes a woman so cheap " She rose abruptly and they faced each other a few feet apart. "What do you mean?" she asked. "I saw you with him last Sunday on the Riverside Drive," he went on, the utterance of the charge reviving his anger. "Ah," she murmured. She sank into her chair again and began to play with a paper-knife that lay on the table at her elbow. Her silence exasperated him. "Well?" he burst out. "Is that all you have to say?" "Do you wish me to explain?" she asked proudly. "Do you imply I have n t the right to?" "I imply nothing. I will tell you whatever you wish to know. I went for a walk with Mr. Flamel because he asked me to." "I did n t suppose you went uninvited. But there are certain things a sensible woman does n t do. She does n t slink about in out-of-the-way streets with men. Why could n t you have seen him here?" [354] THE TOUCHSTONE She hesitated. "Because he wanted to see me alone. * "Did he indeed? And may I ask if you gratify all his wishes with equal alacrity?" "I don t know that he has any others where I am con cerned." She paused again and then continued, in a voice that somehow had an under-note of warning, "He wished to bid me good-bye. He s going away." Glennard turned on her a startled glance. "Going away?" "He s going to Europe to-morrow. He goes for a long time. I supposed you knew." The last phrase revived his irritation. "You forget that I depend on you for my information about Flamel. He s your friend and not mine. In fact, I ve sometimes won dered at your going out of your way to be so civil to him when you must see plainly enough that I don t like him." Her answer to this was not immediate. She seemed to be choosing her words with care, not so much for her own sake as for his, and his exasperation was increased by the suspicion that she was trying to spare him. "He was your friend before he was mine. I never knew him till I was married. It was you who brought him to the house and who seemed to wish me to like him." Glennard gave a short laugh. The defence was feebler than he had expected: she was certainly not a clever woman. "Your deference to my wishes is really beautiful; but [ 3551 THE TOUCHSTONE it s not the first time in history that a man had made a mistake in introducing his friends to his wife. You must, at any rate, have seen since then that my enthusiasm had cooled; but so, perhaps, has your eagerness to oblige me." She met this with a silence that seemed to rob the taunt of half its efficacy. "Is that what you imply?" he pressed her. "No," she answered with sudden directness. "I noticed some time ago that you seemed to dislike him, but since then" "Well since then?" "I ve imagined that you had reasons for still wishing me to be civil to him, as you call it." "Ah," said Glennard with an effort at lightness; but his irony dropped, for something in her voice made him feel that he and she stood at last in that naked desert of apprehension where meaning skulks vainly behind speech. "And why did you imagine this?" The blood mounted to his forehead. "Because he told you that I was under obligations to him?" She turned pale. "Under obligations?" "Oh, don t let s beat about the bush. Didn t he tell you it was I who published Mrs. Aubyn s letters ? Answer me that." "No," she said; and after a moment which seemed given to the weighing of alternatives, she added: "No one told me." f 3561 THE TOUCHSTONE "You did n t know, then? * She seemed to speak with an effort. "Not until not until" "Till I gave you those papers to sort? * Her head sank. "You understood then?" "Yes." He looked at her immovable face. "Had you suspected before ? " was slowly wrung from him. "At times yes ." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Why? From anything that was said ?" There was a shade of pity in her glance. "No one said anything no one told me anything." She looked away from him. "It was your manner " "My manner?" "Whenever the book was mentioned. Things you said once or twice your irritation I can t explain." Glennard, unconsciously, had moved nearer. He breathed like a man who has been running. "You knew, then, you knew " he stammered. The avowal of her love for Flamel would have hurt him less, would have rendered her less remote. "You knew you knew " he repeated; and suddenly his anguish gathered voice. "My God !" he cried, "you suspected it first, you say and then you knew it this damnable, this accursed thing; you knew it months ago it s months since I put that paper in your way and yet you ve done nothing, you ve said nothing, [ 3571 THE TOUCHSTONE you *ve made no sign, you Ve lived alongside of me as if it had made no difference no difference in either of our lives. What are you made of, I wonder ? Don t you see the hideous ignominy of it ? Don t you see how you ve shared in my disgrace? Or have n t you any sense of shame?" He preserved sufficient lucidity, as the words poured from him, to see how fatally they invited her derision; but something told him they had both passed beyond the phase of obvious retaliations, and that if any chord in her responded it would not be that of scorn. He was right. She rose slowly and moved toward him. "Haven t you had enough without that?" she said in a strange voice of pity. He stared at her. "Enough?" "Of misery. . ." An iron band seemed loosened from his temples. "You saw then . . ? " he whispered. "Oh, God oh, God " she sobbed. She dropped beside him and hid her anguish against his knees. They clung thus in silence a long time, driven together down the same fierce blast of shame. When at length she lifted her face he averted his. Her scorn would have hurt him less than the tears on his hands. She spoke languidly, like a child emerging from a passion of weeping. "It was for the money ?" His lips shaped an assent. "That was the inheritance that we married on?" [358] THE TOUCHSTONE "Yes." She drew back and rose to her feet. He sat watching her as she wandered away from him. "You hate me," broke from him. She made no answer. "Say you hate me !" he persisted. "That would have been so simple," she answered with a strange smile. She dropped into a chair near the writing- table and rested a bowed forehead on her hand. "Was it much ?" she began at length. "Much ?" he returned vaguely. "The money." "The money?" That part of it seemed to count so little that for a moment he did not follow her thought. "It must be paid back," she insisted. "Can you do it?" "Oh, yes," he returned listlessly. "I can do it." "I would make any sacrifice for that !" she urged. He nodded. "Of course." He sat staring at her in dry- eyed self-contempt. "Do you count on its making much difference?" " Much difference ? " "In the way I feel or you feel about me?" She shook her head. "It s the least part of it," he groaned. "It s the only part we can repair." "Good heavens! If there were any reparation " He [ 3591 THE TOUCHSTONE rose quickly and crossed the space that divided them. "Why did you never speak?" "Have n t you answered that yourself?" "Answered it?" "Just now when you told me you did it for me." She paused a moment and then went on with a deepen ing note "I would have spoken if I could have helped you." "But you must have despised me." "I ve told you that would have been simpler." "But how could you go on like this hating the money ? " "I knew you d speak in time. I wanted you, first, to hate it as I did." He gazed at her with a kind of awe. "You re wonder ful," he murmured. "But you don t yet know the depths I Ve reached." She raised an entreating hand. "I don t want to !" "You re afraid, then, that you 11 hate me?" "No but that you 11 hate me. Let me understand with out your telling me." "You can t. It s too base. I thought you did n t care because you loved Flamel." She blushed deeply. "Don t don t " she warned him. "I have n t the right to, you mean?" "I mean that you 11 be sorry." He stood imploringly before her. "I want to say some thing worse something more outrageous. If you don t [ 360 ] THE TOUCHSTONE understand this you 11 be perfectly justified in ordering me out of the house." She answered him with a glance of divination. "I shall understand but you 11 be sorry." "I must take my chance of that." He moved away and tossed the books about the table. Then he swung round and faced her. "Does Flamel care for you?" he asked. Her flush deepened, but she still looked at him without anger. "What would be the use?" she said with a note of sadness. "Ah, I did n t ask that" he penitently murmured. "Well, then" To this adjuration he made no response beyond that of gazing at her with an eye which seemed now to view her as a mere factor in an immense redistribution of meanings. "I insulted Flamel to-day. I let him see that I suspected him of having told you. I hated him because he knew about the letters." He caught the spreading horror of her eyes, and for an instant he had to grapple with the new temptation they lit up. Then he said with an effort "Don t blame him he s impeccable. He helped me to get them published; but I lied to him too; I pretended they were written to another man ... a man who was dead. . ." She raised her arms in a gesture that seemed to ward off his blows. "You do despise me !" he insisted. [361] THE TOUCHSTONE "Ah, that poor woman that poor woman " he heard her murmur. "I spare no one, you see !" he triumphed over her. She kept her face hidden. "You do hate me, you do despise me!" he strangely exulted. "Be silent!" she commanded him; but he seemed no longer conscious of any check on his gathering purpose. "He cared for you he cared for you," he repeated, "and he never told you of the letters " She sprang to her feet. "How can you?" she flamed. "How dare you? That I" Glennard was ashy pale. "It s a weapon . . . like another. . ." "A scoundrel s!" He smiled wretchedly. "I should have used it in his place." "Stephen ! Stephen !" she cried, as though to drown the blasphemy on his lips. She swept to him with a rescuing gesture. "Don t say such things. I forbid you ! It degrades us both." He put her back with trembling hands. "Nothing that I say of myself can degrade you. We re on different levels." "I m on yours, wherever it is !" He lifted his head and their gaze flowed together. THE TOUCHSTONE XIV I ^HE great renewals take effect as imperceptibly as the first workings of spring. Glennard, though he felt himself brought nearer to his wife, was still, as it were, hardly within speaking distance. He was but labori ously acquiring the rudiments of a new language; and he had to grope for her through the dense fog of his humilia tion, the distorting vapor against which her personality loomed grotesque and mean. Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them. Love is the most impregnable refuge of self-esteem, and we hate the eye that reaches to our nakedness. If Glennard did not hate his wife it was slowly, sufferingly, that there was born in him that profounder passion which made his earlier feeling seem a mere commotion of the blood. He was like a child coming back to the sense of an enveloping presence: her nearness was a breast on which he leaned. They did not, at first, talk much together, and each- beat a devious track about the outskirts of the subject that lay between them like a haunted wood. But every word, every action, seemed to glance at it, to draw toward it, as though a fount of healing sprang in its poisoned shade. If only they might cut a way through the thicket to that restoring spring ! THE TOUCHSTONE Glennard, watching his wife with the intentness of a wanderer to whom no natural sign is negligeable, saw that she had taken temporary refuge in the purpose of re nouncing the money. If both, theoretically, owned the inefficacy of such amends, the woman s instinctive sub- jectiveness made her find relief in this crude form of pen ance. Glennard saw that she meant to live as frugally as possible till what she deemed their debt was discharged; and he prayed she might not discover how far-reaching, in its merely material sense, was the obligation she thus hoped to acquit. Her mind was fixed on the sum originally paid for the letters, and this he knew he could lay aside in a year or two. He was touched, meanwhile, by the spirit that made her discard the petty luxuries which she re garded as the sign of their bondage. Their shared renuncia tions drew her nearer to him, helped, in their evidence of her helplessness, to restore the full protecting stature of his love. And still they did not speak. It was several weeks later that, one afternoon by the drawing-room fire, she handed him a letter that she had been reading when he entered. "I ve heard from Mr. Flamel," she said. It was as though a latent presence had become visible to both. Glennard took the letter mechanically. "It s from Smyrna," she said. "Won t you read it?" He handed it back. "You can tell me about it his hand s so illegible." He wandered to the other end of the [364] THE TOUCHSTONE room and then turned and stood before her. "I ve been thinking of writing to Flamel," he said. She looked up. "There s one point," he continued slowly, "that I ought to clear up. I told him you d known about the letters all along; for a long time, at least; and I saw how it hurt him. It was just what I meant to do, of course; but I can t leave him to that false impression; I must write him." She received this without outward movement, but he saw that the depths were stirred. At length she returned in a hesitating tone, " Why do you call it a false impression ? I did know." "Yes, but I implied you did n t care." "Ah!" He still stood looking down on her. "Don t you want me to set that right ? " he pursued. She lifted her head and fixed him bravely. "It isn t necessary," she said. Glennard flushed with the shock of the retort; then, with a gesture of comprehension, "No," he said, "with you it could n t be; but I might still set myself right." She looked at him gently. "Don t I," she murmured, "do that?" "In being yourself merely? Alas, the rehabilitation s too complete ! You make me seem to myself even what I m not; what I can never be. I can t, at times, defend myself from the delusion; but I can at least enlighten others." [365] THE TOUCHSTONE The flood was loosened, and kneeling by her he caught her hands. "Don t you see that it s become an obsession with me ? That if I could strip myself down to the last lie only there d always be another one left under it ! and do penance naked in the market-place, I should at least have the relief of easing one anguish by another? Don t you see that the worst of my torture is the impossibility of such amends ? " Her hands lay in his without returning pressure. "Ah, poor woman, poor woman," he heard her sigh. "Don t pity her, pity me ! What have I done to her or to you, after all ? You re both inaccessible ! It was myself I sold." He took an abrupt turn away from her; then halted before her again. "How much longer," he burst out, "do you suppose you can stand it ? You ve been magnificent, you ve been inspired, but what s the use ? You can t wipe out the ignominy of it. It s miserable for you and it does her no good !" She lifted a vivid face. "That s the thought I can t bear!" she cried. "What thought?" "That it does her no good all you re feeling, all you re suffering. Can it be that it makes no difference?" He avoided her challenging glance. "What s done is done," he muttered. "Is it ever, quite, I wonder?" she mused. He made no [ 3661 THE TOUCHSTONE answer and they lapsed into one of the pauses that are a subterranean channel of communication. It was she who, after a while, began to speak, with a new suffusing diffidence that made him turn a roused eye on her. "Don t they say," she asked, feeling her way as in a kind of tender apprehensiveness, "that the early Chris tians, instead of pulling down the heathen temples the temples of the unclean gods purified them by turning them to their own uses ? I ve always thought one might do that with one s actions the actions one loathes but can t undo. One can make, I mean, a wrong the door to other wrongs or an impassable wall against them. . ." Her voice wavered on the word. "We can t always tear down the temples we ve built to the unclean gods, but we can put good spirits in the house of evil the spirits of mercy and shame and understanding, that might never have come to us if we had n t been in such great need. . ." She moved over to him and laid a hand on his. His head was bent and he did not change his attitude. She sat down beside him without speaking; but their silences were now fertile as rain-clouds they quickened the seeds of understanding. At length he looked up. "I don t know," he said, "what spirits have come to live in the house of evil that I built but you re there and that s enough. It s strange," he went on after another pause, "she wished the best for me [367] THE TOUCHSTONE so often, and now, at last, it s through her that it s come to me. But for her I should n t have known you it s through her that I ve found you. Sometimes do you know? that makes it hardest makes me most intoler able to myself. Can t you see that it s the worst thing I ve got to face ? I sometimes think I could have borne it bet ter if you had n t understood ! I took everything from her everything even to the poor shelter of loyalty she s trusted in the only thing I could have left her ! I took everything from her, I deceived her, I despoiled her, I destroyed her and she s given me you in return !" His wife s cry caught him up. "It is n t that she s given me to you it is that she s given you to yourself. * She leaned to him as though swept forward on a wave of pity. "Don t you see," she went on, as his eyes hung on her, "that that s the gift you can t escape from, the debt you re pledged to acquit ? Don t you see that you ve never before been what she thought you, and that now, so wonderfully, she s made you into the man she loved ? That s worth suffering for, worth dying for, to a woman that s the gift she would have wished to give !" "Ah," he cried, "but woe to him by whom it cometh. What did I ever give her?" "The happiness of giving," she said. THE END I" 3681 U.C. BEWCELEY LIBRARIES C D D b b 5 1 D 7