09900K* PACIFIC AVftNUB 10 BEACH. CALfP. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE BY EDGAR FAWCETT AUTHOR OF "THE HOUSE AT HIGH BRIDGE," "SOCIAL SILHOUETTES, "TINKLING CYMBALS," "THE CONFESSIONS OF CLAUD," "AN AMBITIOUS WOMAN," " RUTHERFORD," ETC. BOSTON TICKNOR AND COMPANY 2U UTremont Stmi 1888 COPYRIGHT, 1887, BY B. T. BUSH AND SON, AND 1888, BY TIC KNOB AND COMPANY. All Rights Reserved. ELECTROTYPED BY C. J. PETERS & SON, BOSTON. U.S.A. 2T0 mg Jrfentr, J. V. FBI CHARD, I AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATE THIS CHRONICLE OF CONTEMPORAKY LIFE. 2061844 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. i. THE funeral was over. Olivia had got home from Greenwood about an hour ago. The house was still, now, as the dead burden that had so lately been borne from it. After a while the girl had stolen to a window and looked out at the nude, creaking trees in Wash- ington Square, and the black blotches made on the pavements by the drying rain. May had come in raw and petulant, this year ; the morning had begun show- ery and savage with gusts, but toward afternoon a fitful sun had pierced transient fissures in the bluish rolling clouds. Olivia soon withdrew from the window and pulled down its shade again, with a sense of having violated one of the dreary formulas of usage on such occasions by lifting it at all. Her sorrow, that would have been anguish a few years ago, was now inseparable from a grateful relief. For months her father had suffered harshly ; her own tireless nursing of him had taught her to be more of a woman than her maidenly blue eyes, the pink, fresh curves of her face and the sunny floss of hair over her forehead at all plainly showed ; for Olivia had the kind of looks that a care- less gazer can easily pronounce as commonplace as 7 8 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. they are pretty. It was only when you gave her a little observant heed that you saw how her youth had sweetly misrepresented her, and how her evident nine- teen years or so had cast about the real womanly potency of her demeanor an undue girlish glamour. She dropped into an easy-chair, after darkening the window at which she had committed her late rather reckless indiscretion ; and just as she fell into the list- less posture which the tufted seat induced, a lady appeared within the room. The new-comer went straight to Olivia and took her hand. The girl scarcely moved, looking up at her companion with a sad, placid smile, and at the same time allowing her extended hand to be patted in the most softly sympathetic way. "It was a dreadfully cold funeral, wasn't it?" Olivia said, with an intonation that seemed half to imply soliloquy. " Cold?" returned the lady, who was her aunt, Mrs. Ottarson, the sister of her mother, dead years ago. " Of course it was cold, with all those stuck-up folks going to it ! Gracious me ! There wasn't one of 'em, Olivia, that went to Greenwood for any reason on earth except because he was a Van Rensselaer." Olivia gave a little weary shake of the head. " I am a Van Rensselaer, too, Aunt Thyrza,"she said, still smiling. " Who said you wasn't ? " cried the lady, clasping tighter the hand that she held and patting it with added zest. "That's just what I mean. But they didn't care a bit about it all. They only went be- cause they're clannish, and thought it was respectable to flock round one of their own blood like that." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 9 " Yes, I suppose you're right." " I think I kind o' scared 'em," pursued Mrs. Ottar- son, with her leaping staccato laugh that one might believe no solemnity short of her own burial could quite destroy. "I'm different from anybody they're accustomed to see. I ain't what's the word? swell. To be swell you've got to put on airs, and I never could do that. Whenever I tried I always felt as if somebody was giggling and making faces at me behind my back." " I doubt if you ever did try," said Olivia. " It's altogether too artificial a part for any one to play who has your natural honesty." " Oh, pooh ! I ain't half the saint you seem to think me," said Mrs. Ottarson, putting her head side- ways, and rolling her handsome black eyes at Olivia, in mock mutiny and challenge. " If you had been a saint," Olivia answered, with the smile that has such a light of pathos in it when the face from which it gleams does not turn a whit less sombre, " I should not have liked you half as well as I do." Mrs. Ottarson stooped and kissed her. " I'm glad, then, that I'm a sinner instead," she exclaimed jo- vially. And now she sat down beside Olivia, still retaining her hand. One might think that aunt and niece had never been more dissimilar than these two. It would have seemed as absurd not to concede that Mrs. Ottarson was vulgar as to declare that the peony is not gaudy. She had a face as dark as a gypsy's, which had per- haps been seemly enough before it became touched by those merciless lines and wrinkles that might col- 10 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. lectively be termed one of Time's many war charts ; for alas ! the old campaigner never shows himself more destructive than when he uses the human countenance for a map of his future hostile inten- tions ! Mrs. Ottarson's figure, however, was admi- rably youthful. It seemed almost buxomly to refute the fifty years which her swart, self-reliant, amiable face asserted. She clad it in attire that clung to its arches and slopes with a nice flexibility of adhesion. She was what we must have pronounced a stylish woman ; she would have liked to be thought " stylish ; " she would never have held it the half- vagabond word it has grown. To-day she wore mourning for the husband of her dead sister ; it was jauntily patterned and shot through with fur- tive purples in the way of embellishment. It was quite too ornamental to be called mourning at all ; but then Mrs. Ottarson placed a deep faith in orna- ment. All that was sterling about her lay somehow beneath the surface. Continually misjudged as flip- pant and superficial, she managed to keep healthfully beating a heart of great tenderness and sincerity under her befurbelowed bodices. It is not meant that those who knew her well misunderstood her native kindness and charity. Only the indifferent gaze failed to detect either, and most certainly Olivia Van Rensse- laer's was not of this tendency. Olivia had always heard her late father mention Mrs. Ottarson, if he mentioned her at all, with a half-repressed sneer. A good many years of Hous- ton Van Rensselaer's life with his daughter had been lived abroad. The wide basement-house, with its dormer windows, its spider-like iron stoop-trellises OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 11 and its antique Colonial doorway, had been visited by him four or five times during the past twelve or fif- teen years. He brought Olivia across the ocean with him whenever such visits were paid to his native land. The little girl delighted in these trips ; she held it rare fun to be taken to America, and the elm-trees and poplars verging South Washington Square would rise afterward through her retrospec- tive visions of New York during the humdrum dis- ciplines of her pension oversea. On such occasions Olivia was always permitted to see her aunt. She did not know then that Mrs. Ottarson kept a board- ing-house somewhere up-town, and that the appear- ance of this lady at all in South Washington Square was solely a tribute paid by her punctilious parent to the memory of his deceased wife. He had loved that wife loyally ; he was Houston Van Rensselaer, and when he had married her, a blooming girl of nineteen, all his relations had held up their hands at the odious and impolitic match. The bridegroom had not been of democratic views. He possessed many of those New World prejudices regarding " family " and "birth" which are at the present time a source of irony for European comment. He considered his stock exceedingly important ; he had quite as much veneration for it as the aristocracies of trans- atlantic countries had ignorance of it. But he had, nevertheless, married a Miss Jenks. He had privately looked upon his marriage as a very imprudent and even ridiculous step. But he had taken the step because love, with a hymeneal torch grasped in its rosy hand, had too potently lured him toward what lay beyond. Miss Jenks had been poor. Her people 12 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. dwelt in Macdougal Street, only a step from the Van Rensselaer home in which he had been reared as a boy. The Jenkses were a race which his own kindred roundly affirmed to be of " low extraction." If they had had money it might have made a striking differ- ence; for there is one point about our American pa- trician in which he may be relied upon never to differ from that foreign model whereof he stands nearly always the patient imitator: he is invariably ap- peased by what he rates a misalliance when it is a true mariage cFargent. But the Jenkses were not only poor ; they were destitute of the least caste ; the father and his two daughters, in wholesome domestic conspiracy, managed to make the combined profits of carpentry and dressmaking yield them a fairly thrifty income. They had not even education, ran the wail of the Auchinclosses and the Satterthwaites, both families being near relatives of Mr. Van Rensselaer. It was all quite too horrible. "We shall not visit her," rose the austere feminine chorus. " We are extremely sorry ; but Houston has brought it upon himself. No, we shall not visit her." And the Auchinclosses and Satterthwaites did not. Mr. Van Rensselaer had no intention that they should at least, not for a considerable time to come. He married his young wife in the quietest way. The wedding took place in the back parlor of the little Macdougal Street house. The season was early June, and the windows were open, so that you could see the interior of Mr. Abner Jenks's carpenter-shop, which was reached by a short alley at the side of the house proper. But some big pink roses were blowing in an intermediate court-yard OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 13 between walls of mellow brickwork that gleamed richer because of the summer blue above it, and a bird was singing from a cage not far away. The blitheness of that bird's matins would not have led you to dream that anything so dreadful was going on a little distance below them as the nuptials of a true- blooded Knickerbocker with the daughter of a car- penter. Inside it seemed a little sadder. Red- handed, shining-faced and somewhat moist-eyed as well, Abner Jenks stood watching his daughter. Thyrza, the bride's sister, made no effort to keep back her tears. She disapproved the marriage quite as much from her point of view as did the Auchinclosses and Satterthwaites from theirs; she thought Houston Van Rensselaer a stiff, sour person, and she trembled at the severities of tutelage to which Rosalie must be hereafter subjected. For the rest, Rosalie herself looked appositely contented. Her awkward veil, her ill-fitting gown, and the general air of commonness about her entire bridal gear, did not prevent her from being, nevertheless, an extremely lovely bride. It was the smallest of weddings. No kin of Houston Van Rensselaer's had been bidden to it; he had merely asked his business-partner, Mr. Spencer Delaplaine, to act as his best man. Mr. Delaplaine was seven or eight years the senior of his friend ; he had then reached perhaps his fortieth year, but Thyrza fancied that he must be older, his aquiline face, his light, gray, shrewd eyes and his spare, tall, neatly-garbed figure somehow combined to express so much serene worldly experi- ence. He observed the minister perform the cere- 14 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. mony with an air of composure that narrowly missed betraying the disgust it concealed. This union appeared to him a piece of the purest folly. The banking-house of Delaplaine and Van Rensselaer was still somewhat new in Wall Street. There was every reason to fear that such an insane step might be detrimental as regarded its future prosperity. Mr. Delaplaine had always prided himself on being a per- sonage of the highest position ; a short time ago he had taken pleasure in the reflection that even his mer- cantile life was to be elevated by association with one whose descent not only rivalled but surpassed his own. And now Houston must go and do this headlong, sen- timental thing ! He, who could have walked connu- bially up the aisle of Trinity Church or Grace Church with Miss Van Peekskill, the heiress, worth three hundred thousand, if a dime, in her own unrestricted right ! Houston Van Rensselaer's first act, after marrying Rosalie Jenks, was to separate her inflexibly from her father and sister. He took her abroad within the next fortnight, and remained there with her five good years. His name still continued over the doorway of the banking-house, which throve capably with Delaplaine as its active working partner. People said that he would never bring Mrs. Van Rensselaer back until he had educated her so that she could hold her own as veritable grande dame among those whom his matri- monial escapade had horrified. Meanwhile Abner Jenks, the carpenter, died, and Thyrza, his other daughter, married a worthless, plausible scamp named Ottarson, who drank himself to death three years later. But Mrs. Ottarson, full of pluck and energy, OLIVIA LELAPLAINE. 15 succeeded in making herself the head of an establish- ment for boarders, and in securing thereby an easy, if not a plethoric annuity. When Mrs. Van Rensselaer returned to New York with her husband, she bore the traces of a most telling change. Her girlish loveliness had completely van- ished; she was pale, tired-looking, timidly reserved, and no more like her former merry, spontaneous self than is a lily with its cut stalk kept in a vase for many hours like the balmy-chaliced bloom that drank nur- ture from its vital root. She had wedded into a world that had chilled and wilted her. Houston Van Rensselaer was still, in his stately, high-bred way, a fond husband. But he had made her breathe the air of perpetual disappointment, and she showed the result with a pathetic plainness of disclosure. Proudly and undemonstratively her husband waited the acknowledgment of his return. He issued no cards of invitation to the house in South Washington Square. If he had done so the polite summons would no doubt have been heeded. Curiosity could ill have withstood the temptation of opportunity when it be- came a question of seeing how forceful had been the alterative of those five educational years. But Hous- ton Van Rensselaer merely said to Delaplaine, his friend and partner : " They know that we are at home. Let them come if they choose. Letitia Auchincloss used to be a woman fond of talking about her duty. As my elder sister, she might rank it her duty to call upon my wife." The Auchinclosses and the Satterthwaites met in august council to consider this most exacting question. The feminine head of either family had been a Van 16 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. Rensselaer; they were Houston's sisters, and each had been considered in the days of her virginity to have made a match that was notably brilliant. Letitia Auchincloss and Augusta Satterthwaite were women near of an age, and both were among the few undis- puted leaders of social New York. The result of the council was that no unsolicited visit should be paid upon the wife of their brother. The lse majeste of such a proceeding was not to be lightly esteemed. But Thyrza Ottarson did not remain away from her sister. It was a meeting that Mrs. Ottarson never forgot; and years afterwards, when she and her niece became the good friends that we have already seen them, she described the meeting to Olivia in her volatile and colloquially homespun manner: " There was your ma, my dear, and there was me. I can see it all just as plain this minute as if it was no more'n yesterday. Your pa'd met me in the hall, and gone into the libr'y down stairs. ' She expects you,' says your pa. 'She'll be down soon.' An' then I guess he saw I felt queer, so he said something 'bout seein' to the furnace, as it was growin' chilly, or some such kind o' humbugging thing as that, to get himself out of the room, and went. An' then I heard a step near the other door, and the door opened, and there was your ma. Well, as I told you, 'Livia, I stood an' she stood. It seemed's if the sight of her jus' scooped all the breath right out o' my chest. She was so altered that I felt like screech in' to her: 'You ain't my Rose ; you can't be, and you ain't ! ' But I knew all the while that she was, and this made it harder to bear. They'd turned her into a high-toned, first-class lady ; no mistake about that, 'Livia. But it had just OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 17 pulled all the shine out of her eyes and all the pink out of her cheeks." Houston Van Rensselaer took his wife to Europe again. Only one person knew in how haughty and disdainful a state of temper he had recrossed the ocean, and that person was his partner, Spencer Dela- plaine. He had found out that the banking-house was in a finely flourishing condition ; there were unantici- pated thousands placed to his credit. "I mean to show some of these American snobs here," he said to his single confidant, " how Parisian society will receive my wife." "But, Houston," urged his partner, "you should remember that you didn't make the least formal an- nouncement of your return." " That has nothing to do with the affair," replied Van Rensselaer unpropitiatedly. " At least it has not so far as my blood relations are concerned." "But your blood relations " began Spencer Dela- plaine. "I understand," shot in the other, cutting him short, " New York isn't quite the universe yet, Spen- cer. The next time that I bring my wife back to her native country, I'll warrant you that the de haut en bas attitude will be hers to assume." But Rosalie Van Rensselaer soon had crossed the Atlantic for the third and last time in her young and by no means cloudless life. Five more years were still allotted her, and these she passed amid fashion and luxury in Paris and various watering-places of Europe. She and her husband became much discussed both by foreigners and resident Americans. It un- doubtedly reached the ears of the Auchinclosses and 18 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. the Satterthwaites that she had become a decided somebody on the other side of the ocean. They heard of the balls and fetes which she gave and attended; of the royal patronage which lifted her several prominent inches above her most aspiring countrywomen ; of the elegance and originality that marked her costumes ; of this or that princely Highness who had graced her costly entertainments ; and at last, suddenly, they heard of her death. She had died in giving birth to a daughter, the only child she had borne during the ten years that had succeeded her marriage. Whatever grief Houston Van Rensselaer may have felt, he shrouded from publicity by the most guarded seclusion. When he once more took steamer for America little Olivia was five years old. His relations flocked to meet him, then, with their sympathetic welcomings. He re- ceived them courteously but frigidly. But there was, nevertheless, a distinct reconciliation. Till Olivia had reached her eighteenth year he had kept up a series of occasional visits to New York, making Paris his real place of abode. It was affirmed that these trips were taken purely for financial reasons; and then again such reports were stoutly contradicted. What did Spencer Delaplaine want him for? He had long ago become a mere silent partner in the banking-house. He still lived handsomely abroad, it was true ; but the business had gone on prospering under Delaplaine's keen and able superintendence. The last time that Van Rensselaer came home he came a sick and death-threatened man. It was then that Olivia's aunt, Mrs. Ottarson, revealed how much depth of humane goodness may co-exist with the OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 19 most disorderly syntax. Olivia had till now shrunk from her as from a personality offensively unpolished, and there was no dilettante daintiness, either, in Olivia's composition. Perhaps if there had been she would not, even now, have so indulgently overlooked all her aunt's glaring solecisms. As it was, to remem- ber the dogged fortitude of Mrs. Ottarson's late minis- O trations at her father's bedside was to love her in spite of every barrier that breeding could interpose. Nature seemed to have dowered her with the sleepless eye, the unechoing step, the feathery touch and the clairvoyant perception of the instinctive nurse. Van Rensselaer had been subject to periods of intense pain ; and as if by a satirical punishment wreaked upon his former pride, the woman whom he had pro- fessed himself while in health as hardly capable of enduring, now became the chief agent of alleviation for his physical torments. The dying man could not understand the wherefore of it all himself ; but so it was ; that very random bluntness of speech which had formerly set his teeth on edge in Thyrza Ottarson, touched his tingling nerves now with a cheery sincer- ity of intonation. When a sick-room has grown the ante-chamber of a certain dark king, it is wonderful how class-distinctions tend to shrivel away in its atmosphere; for the grim royalty that waits a new courtier somewhere off in the shadow beyond, appears to be throwing a continuous intangible sarcasm upon all grades of earthly rank. Through those weary weeks of self-forgetful surveillance the boarding estab- lishment naturally missed its proprietress. Neglect took the place of attention, and several vacant rooms were the result. But on Olivia's remonstrance, Mrs. 20 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. Ottarson simply put an arm round her niece's neck, and sai< 1 : "Now, 'Livia, you jus' be still. I mean to stick right here, if every soul in the house leaves it. There's others in plenty, the minute I choose to advertise for 'em. La, sakes, yes! Besides, dear, it can't be very long, now, before we see some change in your poor pa, one way or another." And it was not long. During their kinsman's ill- ness the Auchinclosses, the Satterthwaites, and people whose relationship was much more distant than theirs, behaved duteously enough. And when all was over, and Brown, the corpulent sexton of Grace Church, came to conduct the funeral, which took place in the old Washington Square mansion, it was admirable to see what a throng pressed through the antique front doorway on that inclement May morning. There were the De Lancey Van Rensselaers, whom one knew on the instant by their red hair and freckles; and the Suydam Van Rensselaers, who all had arched noses which they held as though a breath from their family vault up at Spuytenduyvil had passed alarm- ingly near their nostrils; and the Brinkerhoff Van Rensselaers, who really were heads of their line but bore themselves with such jovial simplicity that they might have been Smiths from nowhere. All these, and many more, came to the funeral, but Olivia had been quite right in calling it cold. No one had seemed really to care. And why should any one have cared, for that matter? Even her father's late partner, Spencer Delaplaine, had only seen the dead man at intervals during a space of nearly thirty years. He had been markedly attentive all through the ill- OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 21 ness ; he had called again and again personally to inquire concerning the state of the invalid ; he had both sent and brought Olivia envelopes full of bank- notes, which she had accepted as her fathei-'s and her own rightful due, without a hint of more than digni- fied' civility as she did so. He had struck the girl as an elderly gentleman (for his age must have been undoubtedly sixty) with just the loveless demeanor and the dry, semi-ironical repose that you might have expected from one who had passed so long a term of preferred bachelorhood. It had evidently been pre- ferred, Olivia told herself more than once during their conversations together. He was a gentleman ; you could see that by a glance; and then, of course, he had had, and he still had, a good deal of money, just as her papa had had, and still had. There was a smouldering memento of the beau in him, too; he must have been gallant and winsome before he grew so lean and gaunt, with those yellow, hard ridges, like folds of parchment, just where the collar met his throat, and that little limp of one spare leg, which he said was his old foe, the gout. He had sent a superb souvenir in the way of flowers that morning lilies and violets blended. Others had sent like tributes, but none was half as beautiful as Mr. Delaplaine's. Olivia mentioned this gift as she now sat with her aunt in the still house and "talked it all over." The weeks of certainty that her father's agony must end in death had left her not only pardonably but most explainably resigned ; loss had come with an infinite relief, and youth was already speeding, for this reason, the merciful consolatory work which sooner or later reaches all such pain. 22 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. "I whispered a few words of thanks to Mr. Dela- plaine this morning, Aunt Thyrza," she said, "for those lovely flowers. It seemed almost rude of me not to do so. But I somehow fancied he looked shocked that I should remember even to thank him at such a time." "I guess he thought it was awful," replied Mrs. Ottarson. "I guess, 'Li via, that's he's a man who's always drilled himself by rule in ev'rything, whether it's been grief or business, and 's got his real feelings just about down to an oyster's. . . . My ! to think how he's changed since your poor dear ma was mar- ried ! I can see him then, just as distinct! He was pale and thin, even then not my style o' man a bit; I always fancied a man with some flesh about him, and a look as if he eat his three square meals a day you know what I mean?" "Oh, yes," murmured Olivia. She had long since grown to translate Mrs. Ottarson's coarseness, fondly and forgivingly, into a more cultured idiom. The mental process was not difficult now; affection had indeed made it singularly facile. " But, my! " continued her aunt, " he's so dried up, ain't he ? He was 'ristocratic then, an' I guess a good many girls in the upper class where he's always moved must have took to him if he'd only wanted them to." " I suppose he never did want them to," smiled Olivia, "and now he's lost every chance." " Well, I should say so ! Still, with his money I reckon there's some that just would. You can't tell. It's such a world ! 'Livia, when I think that there's people in it as different as me and your aunt Letitia OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 23 Auchincloss, f r instance, I can scarcely b'lieve what I see i " "You don't like Aunt Letitia," said Olivia, shaking her head, dreamily, with another smile. "Well, nei- ther do I." " She was mad to-day," went on Mrs. Ottarson, with a kind of sudden guttural tone and a significant tight- ening of the lips. " Oh, I could see she was, and so was her sister your aunt Augusta Satterthwaite. They expected to go in the same carriage with you. An' they would 'a gone if they hadn't seen you and I stick so close together. They took the next carriage the minute they saw I wasn't goin' to leave you. Oh, that was it! They looked at you, but you didn't see 'em ; you was cry in' under your veil, poor deary. But I saw 'em. An' I jus' give your aunt Letitia one look. She turned away, and nudged her sister after I gave it." Here Mrs. Ottarson laughed with the glee of scorn, but it was not a laugh that jarred upon Olivia in the least; she knew too well the infinite good in the heart it welled from. " Wy, Livvy, they think me, those two aunts o' yours, reg'lar scum o' the earth yes, they do ! " " No, no ; I hope not ; I am sure not ! " said Olivia, reaching out a hand and clasping with it one of the speaker's. She would doubtless have said more, but just then a ring at the lower hall-door made herself and her companion start a little. " That's them, now, I guess," exclaimed Mrs. Ottar- son, as she rose. " Or, no ; p'haps it's 7ra." " They ? He ? " asked Olivia, also rising. Whom do you mean ? " " Your aunts, or else Mr. Delaplaine. They've got 24 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. to come back before long, you know ; it wouldn't be decent if they didn't ? " "It wouldn't be conventional," said Olivia; "I'm afraid a good deal of decency means just that, with certain people." Mrs. Ottarson went out into the hall and leaned over the banisters cautiously. "It's your two aunts, dear," she at length informed her niece. "I will see them up here," said Olivia. "Tell Susan to show them up, please." The big drawing-room in which Olivia stood as she thus spoke was full of antiquated and cumbrous effects. The heavy mahogany doors beamed like glass; the marble-topped "centre-table," as it used to be called, had the nether parts of dolphins for its ornate legs, and bore upon its veiny slab a porphyry card-receiver, and a large tarnished copy of Lord Byron's poems. On the massively carved mantel rose a basket of clammy-looking wax-flowers, with a glass case over them, reconciled, as it might be said, to its pedestal, by an ellipse of dense scarlet chenille. Still farther above the fire-place hung one of those portraits in oil which must always painfully remind the impres- sionable American of his immature country. The ceiling was florid with execrable frescoes, and both groined and corniced with ponderous gilded plaster- work. Here and there you saw a rug, a stool, a fall of decorative stuff, that betrayed the more modern spirit of appointment. But as a rule the visits of the Van Rensselaers to South Washington Square had been temporary sojourns, with all their family splen- dor, as it were, left abroad to speedily lure them back again. It would be hard to tell how many times OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 25 Houston Van Rensselaer had looked at the portrait over the fire-place and the case of wax-flowers just below it, and uttered "damnable!" But he somehow never actually had time to remove either. As it seemed to him, he was always either coming home to this country or going away from it. And then, finally, he had come home to die. It is so often just like that with the most diligent or dilatory of mortals. If the lists of the deeds, good or bad, that we have been intending to accomplish, could be put into our coffins after death, they might often make a scroll of somewhat uncouth bulk for the calculations of the undertaker. " I'll run upstairs after I've told Susan that you'll see 'em here," said Mrs. Ottarson. " No, no," swiftly objected Olivia, " I want you to stay with me, Aunt Thyrza." "Stay with you, 'Livia! Mercy me! and be snubbed by 'em to their hearts' content? I guess not ! " Mrs. Ottarson was hurrying off. Olivia darted after. " Aunt Thyrza ! " she exclaimed. The lady, hearing her reproachful voice, instantly turned and faced her. "How could you think I would let them do anything of that sort?" Olivia pursued, with an indignant little flash. " Stay ! please stay ! " she went on, with her tones promptly altered to pleading. " I I shall feel so lonely with them just at this time, unless you are near ! " She suddenly flung both arms about Mrs. Ottarson's neck, and let her soft young lips rest for a moment on her companion's cheek. " You've been so good ! Please don't leave me now ! " " Very well," acquiesced Mrs. Ottarson. She gave 26 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. a laugh with an unwonteclly hoarse note in it, as she returned her niece's kiss. "I'll stay, then, Liv, no matter what they do to me." She drew back and tossed her head defiantly; as she did so a faintly tearful light gleamed from her black eyes. " I'd put myself out a lot more'n that to do you a good turn ! " she exclaimed. "But you must let me fight 'em if they try any o' their impudent nonsense over me!" Olivia's acceding nod followed so rapidly that her aunt had only to turn again, partially descend the staircase, and meet Susan, the maid-servant, midway in her ascent. " They have come to gener me with their tire- some condolences," thought Olivia, standing, a sweet, mournful-robed figure, at the threshold of the old- fashioned drawing-room. "They have come to vex me with their expressions of stupid, insincere sym- pathy. How I wish it was all over and done with!" But Olivia was mistaken. Her aunts had come to acquit themselves in quite a different way. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 27 II. OLIVIA shook hands composedly with Mrs. Auchin- closs and Mrs. Satterthwaite, as these two ladies pres- ently entered the drawing-room where she awaited them. Mrs. Ottarson stood a good deal in the back- ground. But Olivia very soon veered about in the direction of the latter, and said with a self-possession assuredly rare in a girl of her years and her foreign rearing : "Let me present you to my aunt Thyrza, Mrs. Auchincloss, and Mrs. Satterthwaite my other aunt, you know ; my mother's sister." There was a brief but dead silence as Mrs. Ottarson came forward. Bows were exchanged, all three of them as repressed and lifeless as salutations of this purely ceremonial sort could be made. And then the four sank into chairs, Mrs. Ottarson still keeping a little in the background. Mrs. Satterthwaite broke the pause that ensued. She was a person qualified to break pauses ; she had the art of saying nothing when nothing was expected to be said, and of delivering it with just the requisite air of responsibility. "This drawing-room has so familiar a look; has it not, Letitia ? " Mrs. Auchincloss lifted a pair of tortoise-shell eye- glasses by means of their long rectangular handle, and held them to her eyes while she gazed all 27 28 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. about her with a kind of majestic finicality. She had managed to avoid letting her cool gray eye, however, light even for a second upon Mrs. Ottnr- son ; and her sister had indeed done the same. " Yes, yes, Augusta, very familiar. We used to play here as children, you remember . . . here in this very room." "I was married in this room," said Mrs. Satter- thwaite to Olivia. " And your poor papa, my dear, was one of my groomsmen." "I knew it was a very old house," murmured Olivia, " but " And then she stopped short, coloring, very regretful of the inopportune speech. But Mrs. Auchincloss and her sister were women of the world trained to their finger-tips. They swiftly saw that Olivia had lapsed into one of those infelicitous phrases for which her youth must supply the ready excuse. "Ah, sister!" softly exclaimed Mrs. Auchincloss, with just the dim smile of partial amusement that seemed to suit the sober occasion, "Olivia is per- fectly right. The house is very old, and we are growing shockingly old as well." Mrs. Satterthwaite nodded. She was never quite as exquisitely receptive as her sister to all the nicest requisitions of deportment ; she had even said and done rude things, it was avowed of her by her ene- mies, for so great a lady. Still, she answered with just a shade less of amiability than she might have shown, and with a touch of that rather cynical humor for which she and the especial set in which she chose to move were occasionally quoted : " Dear Letitia, I think we've an advantage over the OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 29 house we were almost born in ; we're not quite so much out of repair, don't you know?" This little glint of wit struck Mrs. Auchincloss as ill-timed ; she did not even pay it the notice of a smile." But Olivia did, and quickly afterwards she said, glad to find a new theme of talk : " The house is out of repair. If poor papa had lived a little longer he would have done a great deal for it, I am sure. That is, unless he had concluded to move farther up-town. For we meant to stay in New York this time." "I think he would have concluded to move," said Mrs. Auchincloss, in her modulated, flute-like tones. " South Washington Square is no longer what it was." " It is getting to be really dreadful, you know, my dear," said Mrs. Sattei'thwaite. "Dreadful?" faltered Olivia, with an involuntary look at Mrs. Ottarson. "It isn't as uppish as it was," declared Mrs. Ottarson, chiefly addressing her niece. She had no intention of remaining silent ; /silence, under any circumstances, had never stood high among either her virtues or her graces. >> " At least, that's what they tell me. You see, 'Livia, Thompson Street's close by, an' it's pretty much filled with colored folks; and then there's some other queer neighbor- hoods nearer still, and I guess some of 'em are really awful, 'specially after dark. And I see there's one or two lager-beer saloons an' billiard-halls crep' in on this very block. It's a shame, but it's so. The city will push up-town, what's best of it. Wy, my! it's funny to see how the respectable class do go gal- lopin' away from the lower end." 30 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. She finished this little series of remarks with a com- plete understanding that both of Olivia's guests would receive it chillingly. She was prepared for their drooped eyelids and the furtive glance that passed between them. They thought her beneath them ; of course they did. She didn't care for that, though. She wasn't going to be "put down." She hadn't wanted to stay in the room ; she had done so only on "'Livia's" account. But now that she had staid, she wouldn't sit with her tongue between her teeth, like a fool. She had never done it since she was born, and she guessed it was pretty late in the day for a woman of her age to begin. "Ah, well," said Olivia, shaking her head regret- fully, " I suppose that is the way with all large cities, Aunt Thyrza ; they outgrow themselves and leave a kind of living past behind them. It is so with Paris, I'm sure. Still, what I hear about this being an undesirable quarter surprises me." (Here she looked at her two other kinswomen.) "I've been out so little since poor papa was first taken ill and that, you know, was very soon after we got home." " But you can't be attached to the house, can you, my dear Olivia?" said Mrs. Auchincloss, in her suave, cooing tones. "You have really lived here so little," supple* mented Mrs. Satterthwaite. "But it it somehow means New York to me," stammered Olivia. "When here I have not once lived anywhere else." "Oh, never you mind, 'Livia," now broke in Mrs. Ottarson. "A person that's got your means can find OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 31 other houses just as comftable and a good sight styl- isher. I presume, ladies, you 'gree with me?" The last sentence was lightly thrown, as it were, at Mrs. Auchineloss and her sister. It cannot be said to have taken them by surprise ; very little had ever done that. But it made them both decide rather rapidly to show its deliverer a freezing disregard. $ In all the aristocratic circles of Christendom there are women whom you could not more keenly insult than by telling them they were not ladies, and yet who unhesitatingly violate, in just this bloodless fash- ion, the sweet and sane laws on which they would base half their own title to superior respect. .,$ But in the case of Mrs. Auchineloss and Mrs. Sat- terthwaite the provocation to be crushingly uncivil was not solely engendered by contact with a fellow- creature held less cultured than themselves. I do not deny their capability of dealing discountenance for that and no more cogent reason. Still, they had another greivance, just now, and one which had long before loomed to them grimly formidable. Their brother's marriage had always affected them as a most execrable and even disgraceful proceeding. They had been young wives when he had contracted it ; they had thought it a shame then and they had continued to think it so ever since. Of course the position Olivia's mother had secured abroad was pal- liating to their distress; but the connection remained. They could not exactly have defined to you just what they meant by the "connection," now that Abner Jenks was dead and the Macdougal Street carpen- ter-shop had vanished agreeably from its previous detested site. They must have explained their pal- 32 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. pable antipathy to the surviving ignominy of the whole affair by reference to Mrs. Ottarson. There were no other Jenks relatives whom they knew of. But they knew of her ; they had forever kept her in mind as a potential bugbear. She was a trial, so to speak, that might befall them any day in the week, any week in the month. They both stood before the eyes of " society " in the colors of a magnificent assumption. Naturally the misstep of their brother was no social secret. But his madness had now be- come a matter of the past ; his ill-born spouse was dead ; time had in a sense dimmed that blot on the Van Rensselaer 'scutcheon. Meanwhile they rose tout en deliors to the world in which they shone as rulers. Every concomitant of their mundane lives had for years helped to swell the prestige of their splendid exclusiveness. Their husbands, their children, their households, their servants, their entertainments, their equipages, their gowns, their very bonnets and boots, had all contributed honorably, effectively, enviably and modishly to the brilliancy of their urban elan. And yet that woman, who could declare herself a kind of sister-in-law, was keeping a boarding-house in the same town with themselves. They could not forget her; she haunted them. Once she had got into the papers through a lawsuit between herself and an abusive, insolent lodger. They had read the accounts of her prosecution with guilty dread ; she was the rose- leaf under their mattresses, and when one sleeps on down, one probably pays the penalty of such nice accommodation to a degree undreamed of by those who stretch contented limbs on life's commoner pallets of repose. We read of princesses and duch- OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 33 esses who pass their time in perfumed ease, without pausing to think now and then that our own so-named republican land can parallel these useless feminine types. Still there was a disparity between the sis- ters in their separate modes of asserting and preserv- ing pre-eminence, and one worthy of the chronicler's record. Mrs. Archibald Auchincloss had never prided her- self on being a beauty. But now, when past middle life, she was tall, blonde, symmetrical, and of that vis- age and complexion to which the fading wear of time brings a false attractiveness. Those who had never met her when she was a plain young woman now took it for granted that she was a prettily dilapidated elderly one ; for age became her, and its stealthy ravages left only what seemed the memento of a face that might easily have once been beautiful. It must be allowed that she grew old with an extreme grace- fulness. She had married unexceptionably well even for a Van Rensselaer. Her husband was a lawyer of such prominence that his intimacy with a certain President now out of office had made his appoint- ment to the Secretaryship of State seem at one time highly probable. As it was, he remained a personage of much distinction. He had never even joined any New York club but the Centennial, a club that assumed to be literary, artistic and intellectual, and to treat with great scorn the Metropolitan, the Gram- ercy and all other contemporaneous bodies of a like character. Mrs. Auchincloss had borne her husband two children, a son and a daughter, both still unmar- ried. She always declared that she was not by any means a fashionable woman ; her church and her 34 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. church duties trenched too greatly on her time for gay dissipations. And yet she kept upon her visiting- book an eye of the closest attention. Her rigid con- servatisms would have no concern with " new people." It was for this reason that she had pleaded the demands of her religion when asked to permit her name to be placed among those of the lady patron- esses of the Assembly balls. She could not endure the idea of associating herself with the nobodies of yesterday turned the nabobs of to-day. She went to the Patriarchs and the Assemblies and the Cotillions, with her svelte figure magnificently apparelled, and her big, renowned pearls casting the lustre of delicate illusion over a neck no worse for such adornment. She took her daughter, Madeleine, to these and other festivities, but it was somehow an accepted fact that this young lady could not be made acquainted with everybody. Of course no presentations were de- clined ; that would have been a piece of lamentable manners ; but there are variations of welcome, all the way from one d, bras ouverts to one of the lifted eye- brows and the pursed lips. In brief, Mrs. Auchincloss was that rarity of rarities, a leader who maintained supreme ascendency by refusing to lead. Mrs. Satterthwaite lived in much greater splendor, occupied a larger house, and having considerably more wealth to spend, spent it with unrestricted extrava- gance. Her husband, Bleecker Satterthwaite, was one of the few thoroughly indolent men of fashion whom the possession of from four to five millions cannot succeed in making either a drunkard or a gamester. Satterthwaite thought his brother-in-law, Auchincloss, an unspeakable bore and prig. He did OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 35 not belong to the Centennial Club not he; it was quite too full of those seedy fellows like artists and authors to please his taste. He was a member of the Metropolitan and Gramercy (and devilish respectable clubs he thought them, too! ) besides the Jockey Club and Coaching Club, in whose annual, slavishly Anglo- maniacal parade he drove regularly each May. The Satterthwaite progeny numbered five, three daughters and two sons. Their great Fifth Avenue mansion had been the scene of successive lavish and sumpt- uous entertainments ever since the eldest girl, Emme- line, had come out in society, and that was four years ago. Each year they had given one ball, with dinners and dances weeks before and after. It would be impossible for any family to live in a greater whirl of fashion. Even their youngest child, little Lulu, aged ten, belonged to a dancing-class from which she would return as late as nine o'clock in the evening, O' laden with flowers and favors from her juvenile Ger- mans. Mrs. Satterthwaite was a leader who led in good earnest. She had no "church duties," like her sister. She would have been horrified if you had called her irreligious ; she thought it abominable form not to go to church as often as one could. As for " new people," she accepted them unhesitatingly whenever they were really lances and went about to places. If they were not, and did not go, and wanted her to help them, she would have a talk with her hus- band on the subject and debate cold-bloodedly the question of their wealth and the possibility of their not casting disrepute on the Satterthwaite endorse- ment. She was still young enough or estimated herself so to dance at assemblages where there was 36 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. not too overwhelming a horde of fresh debutantes. She was still held to be passably nice-looking, too, and gossip had not spared her its covert innuendo while never touching her with the unsheathed sting of its accusation. All in all, the two sistei'S mutually disapproved of each other. But it was a rather peace- ful contest, in which either family joined and in which the Auchinclosses gained a silent perpetual victory. The Satterthwaites knew very well that they had a remarkably good tone ; but somehow the Auchin- closses, who gave no large balls, and one dinner party to their five, had distinctively a better tone. No open enmity existed, and yet there was a certain bitter feel- ing on both sides. As regarded this abhorred relationship of Mrs. Ottarson's, however, they met on warmly congenial grounds. The sisters, in discussion together, had called her "that horrible boarding-house woman" and the fact that she had nursed their brother in his dying: / O hours had been to them a misery over which they could mourn in faultlessly congenial unison. " I presume, ladies, you agree with me," delivered from so unpleasant a source as that of Mrs. Ottarson, decided them in showing their most glacial uncon- cern. They liked Olivia; they considered her excel- lent style for so young a girl, and were prepared to help her and stand by her as one of their blood and race. They were deeply sorry that it had become necessary to bear her a certain very miserable piece of tidings. They had concluded, however, that she must be summarily though discreetly told, and there- fore the presence of Mrs. Ottarson doubtless kindled the animosity which surely needed no additional fuel. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 37 Olivia saw the premeditated impertinence of their demeanor. She did not intend that it should hurt her aunt Thyrza by any prolonged sanction. " Oh, yes," she soon said, " I am certain that I can find other quarters, if this dear old house should prove unsatis- factory. Why should I not do so ? " Mrs. Auchincloss stole a glance at her sister. This kind of self-possession rang more like that of the typical American girl than of the demoiselle reared as Olivia had been among European surroundings. But they had yet to learn how Ameiican their niece had man- aged to keep herself, despite a life-time spent so largely abroad. Mrs. Auchincloss coughed rather meaningly at this point. " My dear Olivia,'' she said, " you touch upon a matter that interests both your aunt Augusta and myself." Then she coughed again, lower than before, and proceeded : " I must say something to you now which would perhaps seem a little brusque unless unless the full necessity of its disclosure were kept in mind. Your aunt Augusta and I have desired to speak with you alone. We have thought it necessary to do so. We have " Here Mrs. Ottarson rose precipitately and brist- lingly. "Alone, eh?" she broke forth. "W'y, there can't be the least objection to that. I'll retire, 'Livia." She was close at her niece's side now, and her cheeks had taken a little flush that matched the excited glit- tering of her eyes. The next instant Olivia had risen too. She caught her aunt's arm and exhorted very persuasively: "I beg that you will remain ! I prefer you to hear what- ever is said." 38 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. " Olivia ! " broke from the lips of her two other relatives, and not only in spontaneous exclamation, but with an inflection of equal dismay on the part of both. " Mrs. Ottarson Aunt Thyrza would be sure to hear what you told me, whether you told it me alone or in her company. She is my dear friend, and I am more grateful to her than my heart can express." The girl stood with one arm about Mrs. Ottarson's waist now, and one hand clasping hers. In her black dross, and with her wistful face and bright hair, she made a picture of clinging tenderness and trust. But it was a picture that apparently failed to charm the two ladies who sat fronting it. Mrs, Auchincloss never permitted herself to be angry. She looked upon the loss of one's temper as though it were something not wholly unlike the loss of one's conscience. She always smiled when she con- sidered herself justified in showing indignation ; it was part of her self-disciplining creed to do so ; and besides a smile broke up and softened certain hard, tense-looking lines that would show themselves at periods of mental disturbance on either side of her slim, pink nose, slanting downward to the region of her thin and rather frosty lips. "Either I am mistaken, my dear," she said, "or your gratitude is just now somewhat of a drawback to your civility." Here Mrs. Satterthwaite gave a little shrug of the shoulders and a satirical titter of laughter. Mrs. Ottarson's face flushed deeper, till two spots of color bloomed quite richly in the olive dusk of either cheek ; you saw what a comely young creature she must have been when her reprobate of a husband had fooled her into marrying him years ago. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 39 " I guess you are mistaken," declared Mrs. Ottarson, gazing straight at the superb eldest daughter of the Van Rensselaer dynasty. "'Livia don't want to be uncivil, ma'am. But if you'll excuse my sayin' so, it looks a good deal more as if you wanted to be. I jnean to me. You understand." Mrs. Auchincloss fluttered her eyelids and turned with a gently despairing expression toward her sister, as much as to ask, " How shall I deal with this barba- rian?" But immediately afterward Mrs. Ottarson went on : " I'd ever so much rather leave this room. I haven't got any curiosity to hear what you ladies are a-goin' to say. But I'll stay if 'Livia wishes I should. I staid when her father was sick to death for jus' that reason she wished me to. I hadn't got as good a right to nurse him, an' help him die easy, as you two very el'gant folks had. But somehow or other I must say it you wasn't on hand when you might 'a been. You're his blood, and I ain't; I s'pose I'm what you'd call no blood at all. But you didn't step up when the time came. You called, an' you sent calve's-foot jelly, an' grapes, an' things, and you looked mel'nc'olly when you heard how bad he was, an' said ' oh,' an' ' ah,' an' that was 'bout the whole o' what you did do. I s'pose you ladies know your duty; I ain't tellin' you what it ought to be. But my duty was near my dead sister's child, an' I just stuck there. An' if I stick there now 'cause she asks me, I'd thank you to remember that it is on that account an' no other. Our spWes, yours an' mine, are pretty wide apart. I do' want to move in yours any more 'n you want, I guess, to belong to iiriue. But I ain't to be sat on, for all that." 40 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. " Aunt Thyrza ! " cried Olivia, at this point, with a very plain distress in her mien and voice, " it's of no use to be angry. Sit down here beside me." She put both arms about Mrs. Ottarson while she thus spoke, and pushed the lady into a chair near the one from which she herself had lately risen. Then she took a seat close at her side. " Nobody has thought of treat- ing you rudely." Her blue eyes were swimming in tears now, as she turned toward her two visitors. "Aunt Letitia, Aunt Augusta," she went on, tremu- lously, " please blame me for everything. I know you didn't mean to show this dear, kind friend of mine the least impoliteness. I know . . ." And then Olivia paused. Mrs. Auchincloss's face, in its serene austerity, smote her, for it had quite for- gotten its formulated smile ; and on the face of Mrs. Satterthwaite, plumper, a trifle redder than her sister's, and never without its claim to a kind of blemished but assertive charm, had appeared the signs of languid, sneering amusement. "All this is really so very extraordinary," Mrs. Satterthwaite now laughed, touching her long gloves with either hand, as if to see that they were still blamelessly adjusted. "Extraordinary?" echoed her sister, and speaking as if the words burnt her lips a little. " It is prepos- terous ! " In a certain way they were both quite right. If to be angry is to be wrong, Mrs. Ottarson had wretch- edly committed herself. Mrs. Auchincloss had the power to defend her cause if she could be conceived of as deigning to do so by the announcement that she had taken the only admissible means of seeking a OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 41 private talk with her niece. Mrs. Ottarson's attack was really the accumulated spleen of years and not half or a quarter of ^it yet, either. She knew that these women had scorned her sister and loathed the tie which bound her to their brother. There had never been any circumstance relating to this Van Rens- selaer marriage that had not wakened either her regret or her detestation, except one. That was Olivia. As she looked now into the girl's worried, moistened eyes, a thrill of repentance passed through her. "I was mad," she whispered. " I kind o' lost my head. She made me, 'Livia. I'll try not to again. But you better let me leave. I'll just wait f you upstairs." " No ; stay," said Olivia, also whispering. There was something in the countenances of her two guests O O now that filled her with dread to remain alone beside them. It would not have been so at all times; she had inherent coolness, nerve, and courage, in ample share ; but to-day her young soul had been brought downward into that valley of the shadow whose gloom must ever prove as keenly the repugnance of youth as it is sometimes the refuge and relief of age. " My dear child," began Mrs. Auchincloss, with a douceur that seemed (as a witty Englishman once re- marked of a contemporary's geniality) to be enam- elled on iron, "we shall perhaps take a much wiser course, your aunt Augusta and I, if we say nothing whatever on the subject we had decided to discuss. For myself, Olivia, I confess that I have possibly been too hasty in alluding to it at all. And now let me ask your pardon for doing so." It somehow did not appear as if Mrs. Auchincloss were asking Olivia's pardon, or that of any one else, while she thus spoke ; her last sen- 42 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. tence implied nothing but the most superficial cere- mony of phrasing. " It is an important question ; but let it pass for the present." Here Mrs. Satterthwaite rose, a little bustlingly and imperiously, while her black draperies (in all respects the kind of mourning which decorous millinery would exact from a bereaved sister) disposed themselves to advantage about her neat-moulded person. " Yes," said that lady ; " let it pass for the present. We will come and see you some other time, my dear, when you are less engaged with your rather explosive acquaintance there." " Augusta ! " murmured Mrs. Auchincloss, with great dignity, and a chiding intonation. " I'm not an acquaintance, if you please," sped from Mrs. Ottarson, even while Olivia was pressing her hand as if in dumb entreaty to curb all irate repartee. " I'm her mother's sister, an' quite as much her aunt as you are. I'm a Jenks, or was, an' so was you a Van Rens- selaer. You mustn't forget, though, that a Jenks once married a Van Rensselaer. I dare say you'd like to, ma'am, but you'll excuse me for remind in' you that you mustn't. I ain't here as an acquaintance ; I'm here as a blood-relation, just as you are." Mrs. Satterthwaite looked at Mrs. Ottarson with a plain curl of the lip now. She had not her sister's equipoise. She had lost her temper a good many times in her life, and she lost it then. " What an insupportable person you are ! " she said, with a drawl and a sneer. "You succeed in doing one thing, and very successfully. You make me regret more than I ever have regretted (and that is saying con- siderable) that a Jenks did marry a Van Rensselaer." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 43 r Olivia flung both arms round Mrs. Ottarson's neck. " Don't don't answer, Aunt Tliyrza ! " she cried sup- plicatingly. And Mrs. Ottarson did not. "All right, 'Livia," she whispered. "Oh, pooh! she don't rile me half as much as the other. I don't mind spunk half as much as I do that s'castical, up-in- the-clouds talk. I guess I can sit still ; I guess I can ; I'll try, any way, for your sake. It'll be hard, but I'll jus' grit my teeth an' try!" Mrs. Auchincloss had now risen. Both ladies went toward the door, as if in act of departure. Olivia gave Mrs. Ottarson one final pressure of the hand, and then rose herself. "Are you going?" she said flurriedly. "You you spoke, Aunt Letitia, of of something impor- tant. I I hope it does not concern poor papa, in any manner." " My dear," said Mrs. Auchincloss, " it concerns only yourself, now." "Myself?" repeated Olivia. "How?" Mrs. Auchincloss gave a sort of despairing sigh. "We meant to put it all to you as gently as possible. We meant, my dear, to tell you that we would always be your helpers, your supporters, as far as we were able. We only thought of mentioning it, on this most sorrowful of days, because Mr. Delaplaine, your father's late partner, urged and advised us to do so." " I wouldn't say anything more, if I were you, just now, Letitia," struck in Mrs. Satterthwaite, with a haughty sidelong glance at Mrs. Ottarson, who still remained seated. Mrs. Ottarson had heard everything thus far. She returned Mrs. Satterthwaite's glance with one that was 44 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. comically hostile, because she so instantly dropped her black, enkindled eyes after giving it, as if in forcedly penitent recollection of her promise to Olivia. And then she heard Mrs. Auchincloss continue speaking with her niece, but could make out nothing of what that lady said, for the reason that the latter spoke in so low a tone. The converse seemed to last quite a while ; occasionally Mrs. Satterthwaite would put in a word, but her voice was equally inaudible. Mrs. Ottarson made no attempt to listen. Her anger had died, as it always did die, rapidly. But her curi- osity was now aflame. She sat wondering what this mysteiious converse meant. But she would have lost a finger rather than show the slightest sign of any- thing but placid indifference to its progress or sig- nificance. Presently the ladies withdrew from Olivia. Thus far she had not seen her niece's face ; but now, as Mrs. Auchincloss and Mrs. Satterthwaite swept quietly across the threshold of the drawing-room, Olivia turned and hurried in her own direction. In an instant she saw how terribly pale the girl had grown. " 'Livia ! " she cried, starting up from her chair. " What is it ? What have they said to you ? " But Olivia, too evidently, could not answer in the desired way. " Oh, Aunt Thyrza," she exclaimed, " it is too horrible ! " And then with a white, forlorn, stricken look, she flung herself upon the breast of her companion, bursting into a torrent of woful sobs. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 45 m. IT was some little time before Olivia regained her self-control. Meanwhile Mrs. Ottarson had drawn her to a sofa and had used upon her arts of so volu- bly and naturally soothing a sort that if her wretched- ness had not been severe as it was, the girl might have broken into laughter at some of the endearing diminu- tives by which she now heard herself addressed. When her tears had ceased to flow she sat with quiv- ering underlip and stared straight before her. She seemed to be asking some silent question of the future's very silence. Mrs. Ottarson, stirred more by this mood than by the stormier one, at length showed her own suspenseful alarm. " My sakes alive, 'Livia ! if you don't jus' want to drive me clean out o' my seven senses you'll let me know what is the matter." And then Olivia gave a start, turning again to her aunt, " I must have frightened you so, Aunt Thyrza," she said tremulously. "It was selfish of me. I should recollect how your nerves and strength have been tried far more than mine, with those many nights of watching." " O, bosh," said Mrs. Ottarson, roughly intolerant of being over-valued. "I'm as strong as a horse, and never had a nerve in my life. Now do tell me what the trouble is. It's something those two said, of course." 46 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. "Yes," answered Olivia. There was a little more silence, and then she impet- uously cried : " Think of it, Aunt Thyrza ! Papa has left nothing or it's even less than that ! Mr. Dela- plaine had for years been warning him, they say, that he was over-spending his income. And finally his partner had written him a letter, very direct and plain, which brought us back to America for the last time. I recollect the letter. It came to us last August when we were at Zermatt. It made papa almost ill ; his dis- ease was beginning then, and he could no longer bear a shock without showing it. He said it was not the letter, but I always had my doubts. In October we crossed again, coming to this house as usual. There was a very long interview, I cleai'ly recall, between Mr. Delaplaine and my father on the first evening after our arrival ; but I am nearly sure there was no quarrel. Still a coldness, I think, sprang up between them from that time. And I suspected so little what the real difficulty was! Through three months or so, until he was taken ill, papa went very often to his office in Wall Street. Sometimes he would look miserably weary and disturbed when he came back. Everything was lost, Aunt Thyrza everything! And I never dreamed he was in the midst of such misfortune. I believe this will be my chief sorrow hereafter that he suffered so without my knowing it. Of course, just now, it almost takes my breath away to think of myself of what I am going to do of the little I actually can do. It has come so suddenly. They assure me there is nothing left papa has spent it all. He kept over-drawing and over-drawing. He never had the least regard for money I had often noticed OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 47 that in him. My aunts say that for years he continued to answer Mr. Delaplaine in the most hopeful terms. He had spent great sums while mamma was alive ; he had thrown thousands away. But he insisted that the success of the banking-house would hereafter mend his fortunes. Then he began to borrow of his partner. All might have gone well, even then, if he had not taken to gambling." "Gambling?" echoed Mrs. Ottarson. Her idea of a man who gambles was essentially a New York one. She swiftly had a vision of personages with dyed black moustaches and exorbitant gold watch- chains, who haunted the stoops of certain semi-repu- table hotels, who drove in "sulkies" behind fast trotting-horses, who hung about the gilded bar-room of the old St. Nicholas, on what was once central Broadway, and who prowled at night to clandestine gaming-dens in the gloom of Crosby Street and similar uncanny purlieus, where they swindled credulous vic- tims at poker or faro. " Gambling ! " she repeated. "Oh, no, 'Livia. It can't be true of your father, dear ! He was always too high-toned for that kind o' thing!" Olivia gave a dreary smile. " So many gentlemen gamble abroad," she said, "and papa did it. It all comes back to me now. I was with him for several weeks, three years ago, at Monaco and Monte Cai-lo. I never thought it even strange, then, that he should play; hundreds of others played, his friends and ac- quaintances. But I realize now that it was a vice with him." She drooped her head, for an instant, and pressed both hands against her eyes. They were quite tearless eyes when she again revealed them, but they 48 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. shone with a dry, hard light from her sweet, pale face. " Oh, there is no use, Aunt Thyrza," she went on, " of my disguising the truth to myself. Aunt Letitia and Aunt Augusta came with a kindly enough motive. You don't like them neither do I. But they meant to prepare me for the very worst as gently as they could. Perhaps they'd have done it more gently still, if you hadn't . . . But never mind. Don't think that I blame you, for I do not. Mr. Delaplaine is corning to see me this evening, and they would have me meet him with some knowledge of what he would say. They were quite right; give them their due, Aunt Thyrza.'' "And he's a rich man, ain't he, 'Livia?" " Oh, I suppose so. Papa is in his debt for I don't know how much." " Well, he won't mind that now, of course. He'll make some proposal about . . . settling matters ; of course he will. He'll tell you just how things are, and then " Olivia gave an interrupting laugh, so sharp and bitter that it sounded like the travesty of mirth. "And then?" she exclaimed. "What then, if you please? This very house we are in belongs to him, my aunts say. How can there be any settling of matters? If he chooses to help me for a little while until I've something to do for my own living, that is his own affair. But to accept permanent help from him or from anybody!" Here Olivia rose, and a great pride, at work in her young spirit, gave new firmness to the line of her delicate lips. "As long as my health lasts I shall never be a burden like that." She shivered suddenly, as though a rush of cold air had struck her, and looked to right and left with the OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 49 mixed bewilderment and rebellion of a bird that for the first time finds itself caged. That new, captive sense was upon her that feeling of having been abruptly tripped into a pitfall by destiny which may rouse just such an involuntary gesture of would-be escape. " Oh," she burst forth, " how can I ever get familiar with the change of it all! Aunt Thyrza, I think I know something, now, of the way people feel in an earthquake. The one support goes to pieces that they've forgotten even to trust ; trusting it has grown like breathing. I never could conceive of my- self as poor, somehow. I've pitied others often enough, but there seemed always a great gulf between their calamity and my secure state. Want and I seemed not born to meet in this world. Ah, how differently it has turned out ! " "If I only had a home fit for one like you are to come to it ! " Mrs. Ottarson sighed. " But I'm 'fraid things would never suit you, 'Livia, up there to my boarding- house." Here a very perturbed frown appeared on the speaker's forehead. "La's a-mercy me! What can you do for a livin', dear? You ain't handy at your needle, much ; besides, that's a dog's life. And teachin'? Well, that isn't much better, I guess." "That must be my fate, I suppose," said Olivia, solemnly. "I shall have to teach. Some of those fine relations of mine ought to assist me, there. If it were only giving French lessons! I'm sure I could do that ; I know the language so thoroughly ; it would be strange if I didn't. Just before I left boarding-school, one of the principal teachers said to me that there was no difference between my accent and that of the French pupils." 50 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. Never was the marvellous buoyancy of the youthful mind and heart more abundantly evidenced than now. Indeed, it would sometimes seem as if youth and health, when once fairly commingled, might make a talisman wherewith to resist the fiercest assaults of disaster. Already Olivia's eyes harbored a gleeful sparkle as she slipped back to the side of her aunt. " I can't bear to hear you talk so ! " cried the latter. " Th' idea, 'Livia, of you teachin' ! W'y, the Auchin- closses and Satterthwaites, an' all the rest of 'em, ought to feel proud " "I know what you're going to say," broke in Olivia, and not with the meekest of tones. " And I pray you'll not even suggest it." . " Well, then, there's Mr. Delaplaine, deary. He was always a friend o' your pa's, bein' his pardner. He ought to do something. Oh, I guess he will." " I don't know what he will have it in his power to do, Aunt Thyrza." " Oh, in these cases I dare say there's pretty much always some money sort o' layin' 'round. I mean something might be his takin's or your pa's leavin's, whichever way he chose to fix it." Olivia looked at her aunt as though this rather curi- ous view indicated a subtlety of monetary arrange- ment quite baffling to her own perceptions. "If Mr. Delaplaine offered to give me any money," she said, " I should refuse it ; for that would mean simply charity, and I will not live on anybody's char- ity except my own." She meant the words with such a splendid sincerity, then ! Already the first unnerved and stunned sensation had passed, with her. The world had not tamed her yet, and she even felt OLIVIA DELAPLAISE. 51 at this early hour a faint thrill of that challenge to its taming tendencies which few but the really strong natures ever feel. Olivia had been thought a marvel of determination and character while at school. It was indeed strange to see how her American brain and temperament told there. Not that she was un- conventional. The niceties and elegancies, in her case, had rather to be nourished than acquired. Her poor dead mother may have been the daughter of a carpenter, but she had died between costlier panellings than Abner Jenks would have known how to con- struct, and all the child's infancy had drifted through experiences clement and soothing as the most faithful attendance could make them. From whatever source the money came whether from the gaming-tables of European watering-places or from the indulgent con- cession of Spencer Delaplaine's coffers, Olivia had been reared by its magical assistance with as much quiet fastidiousness as though she had been a little princess of the blood. But some hereditary trait of independence and self- reliance had early revealed itself as her dower. At the pension she was never like the other girls; she would sometimes laughingly say to her teachers that the lack of reserve and repose for which they chided her was a result of certain influences exerted by her first governess, who had been an American lady hotly resenting an enforced expatriation. But this lady, who adored her own country and never had enough scorn to pour upon what she denounced as the shame- ful restrictions and repressions brought to bear upon all foreign damsels, could not have done more than encourage and vivify in Olivia attributes which 52 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. merely waited the summons of her tuition and coun- sel. Those repeated visits to New York with her father had strenuously influenced, as well, the mould- ing of a personality destined for what alien censors of etiquette esteemed over-assertive and even un- maidenly. Olivia had always insisted upon the un- manageable posture of having personal opinions. She revolted against any compulsory retirement into back- grounds. There had never been the least use in tell- ing her that she spoke with too loud a tone, that she was guilty of indecorous enthusiasms, that she violated this or that dictum of recognized restraint. For seven or eight years before her final trip to America she had resented the slightest slur cast upon the country which she exulted in calling her own. She inflexibly championized the United States,^and not seldom with an ardor that roused enmity and dislike in her classmates. It would be hard to explain what this proclivity meant if heredity were not really at the root of it. Her father's distinct patriotism may have largely helped its development. There is often a kind of odd pathos in the love cherished for their native land by exiled Americans who have deliberately concluded to dwell elsewhere. Houston Van Rensselaer not seldom talked in a loving strain about the superior govern- ment and institutions of " the other side " which his close preferred proximity to the Arc de Triomphe or to the Nelson monument in Trafalgar Square might have caused a bloodless listener to condemn as rather triflingly sentimental. No doubt Olivia, from the most plastic periods of her childhood, had been im- pressed by just this inconsistent fervor of discourse. OLIVIA DELAPLA1NE. 53 But whether or no her father and the chronicled Europe-hating governess both proved, in a measure, sti'ong incident forces upon her younger life, it is certain that her Americanism continued permanent and paramount. Altogether, she was by no means unpopular among her classmates. She had the gift of swaying them by her advice or suggestion, and just before she left for these shores, crowned with no mean academic honors, both instructors and co-disciples equally conceded of her that she bore the mental birth-mark of a vivid though perhaps dangerous origi- nality. She was a girl of whom those who knew her best, in her days of pupilage, and at the same time cared most for her welfare, would prophesy not a few of the future miseries that one's own error and weakness will engender. She had a monitory conscience enough ; her moral atmosphere was visited by no misleading twilights ; wrong was detestable to her from every abstract mode of regarding it. But there had been occasions in her brief life when the imp of the per- verse had successfully prevailed with her. By esca- pades of mischievous audacity she had made the tranquil pension quake to its very centime ; but these contumacious freaks had always ended in moods of passionate repentance, and in eager ascetic craving for punishment more rigorous than that which she re- ceived. " She has in her the stuff for a true devote" would muse Madame Z , her principal instructress, who was herself a fervent Catholic. " If she once gained the mastery over those wicked inclinations, there would be a penitential surrender of self that means just the right state of soul for the real zealot." 54 OLIVIA DELAPLAINK But Olivia lacked what is called the religious disposi- tion. She would never have made an exemplary nun, any more than she would have made a confirmed scoffer. Reverence was as little a part of her being as impiety. The dubious and questioning bent of this remarkable century had not escaped her expanding intellect, since all the orthodoxy of her boarding- school encompassment had been constantly antago- nized, so to speak, by long talks during vacations with her father, never a man to treat deferentially the "accepted" theologic codes. "I sometimes think, papa," Olivia had said to him during one of their con- versations, " that I must have had a thoroughly evil person for an ancestor. He or she belonged either to mamma's people or to yours ; I can't, of course, even speculate on that point. But I've had the conviction that there's some such reason for my occasional bad seizures." Houston Van Rensselaer laughed at this theory as something prettily droll in a girl of sixteen. He had judged what Ids daughter had remorsefully con- fided to him as her diablerie to be the amusing com- punction of an over-sensitive young casuist. He forgot how much her very mannerisms of speech had been borrowed from his own carelessly clever way of putting things, and he was wholly ignorant of how unconsciously but accurately she reproduced many of his indolent, daring views when once more reinstated among guardians whom these could not fail to shock. "I've no doubt, my dear," he had answered, "that you could go back on both sides to all sorts of repro- bates, male and female. But it's quite idle to think OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 55 about that. When you get older, you'll wake up to the fact of how blen elevee you really are. Then it will be high time to Aveigh the advisability of never forsaking your present standard." " But, papa, you don't understand," Olivia had ob- jected. " I'm not speaking of what I've been taught. I mean a kind of headstrong wish, now and then', to do what I've been taught is awfully wrong." Her father laughed away this protest as the merest bagatelle of -hair-splitting scrupulosity. " Girls of your age," he told his daughter, " often get morbidly moral. It never does much harm, I suppose. It's like the stir of the sap in the virgin bud. They fancy them- selves possible sinners because they begin to realize what a sinful world they've been born into. If a snow-flake, dropping from the sky into a dirty city, like this huge Paris we're in at present, could think and speak, I've no doubt it would express itself very much as you are doing now." But Olivia was not at all satisfied with this light dismissal of her confession. She insisted on gauging her own faultiness at just what she estimated its true range of demerit. There were times when she grew to consider her acknowledged demon as a very trac- table persecutor; he would lie so pleasantly dormant for days at a time. It was not that her wrong-doing ever greatly passed the bounds of roguery and prank- someness, though it was not always exempt from the ire and spite of vengeful intention. What troubled Olivia about her own peccadilloes had far less to do with an exaggeration of their importance than with the fact that she committed them while cleai'ly con- scious of just what dagger-points of coming remorse 56 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. she was sharpening for herself by the process. " There comes a kind of vogue-la-galre feeling with me," she once explained to a fellow-scholar. " I resist it, and then well, then I don't resist it, and that's all. But I could if I wanted ; there's always this painful arri&re pensee : I could and I didn't." "But do you really try with all your might and main, Olivia?" asked her companion, who was a tall, lithe, overgrown lily of an English girl, with a face like St. Cecilia's, and big brown, pleading eyes. "I do till the last moment," said Olivia dryly. " It's that last moment that makes me knock under," she added, with a rueful shake of the head, having borrowed unawai-e one of her father's pet phrases. Absolute " young-ladyhood " dropped the mantle of dignity over her before she left the pension, and mis- chief of every sort became a diversion vetoed by pride. Olivia would now and then have a chilly little presentiment lest the vicious part of her composition were not so successfully tranquillized as it seemed. If the demon ever should rise again, he would have other weightier misdeeds to concern himself with than schoolgirlish capers. " Well," Olivia meditated once, not long after she had been graduated into freedom and leisure, "I can only hope that now I am old and grown-up, I shall be lucky enough to escape tempta- tion. Without temptation as an assailant, it would be pretty hard for a girl like me, I should say, not to keep her self-respect unblemished." Later on, this question of temptation assumed for her a strange and gloomy attractiveness. Her father had rarely exercised any heedful supervision over her reading. During the intervals of relaxation from OLIVIA DELAPLAIXE. 57 study he had not precisely let her read what she chose, but he had been much less restrictive on this point than many less loving parents might have proved. And now, when her stay at the seminary was ended, he conceded a still wider latitude of choice. It was then that she found herself selecting books (whenever she could light on them) which dealt with the careers of those who had disappointed high ex- pectations entertained by their friends and admirers, who had forsaken their own ideals of conduct either feebly or wantonly, who had fallen from grace, who had bartered for a mess of pottage the golden birth- right allotted by circumstance. She incessantly put herself in the places of these unfortunate human fail- ures. "How would I have behaved," she ceaselessly asked herself, " if I had been situated just as this or that character was ? " The world that she was to dwell in, and that she hoped to shine in, spread before her like a delightful un ventured country before a traveller who has just reached it along not a few wearisome preparatory leagues. She wanted to live her life duteously and nobly. She had said this again and again to her half- amused, half-admiring father during the last healthful ' ~ O months of his existence ; she had said it more than once, while he lay ill in Washington Square, to the aunt whose unforeseen kindliness and fortitude had waked in her such a warmth of thankful love. Mrs. Ottarson had thought it just such a desire and resolve as a girl of her fine calibre would be visited by. But Olivia had not at all meant it in that way. She soon decided that her aunt Thyrza was incapable of follow- ing her lines of reflection and analysis. The fears 58 OLIVIA VELAPLAINE. that she perpetually fostered regarding herself would have seemed ludicrous to a nature at once as strong and as simple as Mrs. Ottarson's. She would have thought this whole matter of self-distrust quite as nonsensical as Van Rensselaer had done ; but she would have lacked her brother-in-law's acumen and mental training in the discussion of it. And so, during those dreary days that preceded her father's death, while she watched for the shadow that had entered the still old house to gradually grow blacker and more portentous, Olivia fell to brooding upon all the chances which might await her of wisely, honorably and capably husbanding what was truest, sweetest and most wholesome in her own discerned individuality. And it was now, when the dolorous task which engaged her made this introspective office take a more appropriate coloring, that she assured herself how fecund were the opportunities within her reach. She would be rich ; she was what a good many of her countrypeople would insist upon calling an aristocrat by birth ; she had been carefully educa- ted ; she could not fail of holding an influential position. How would she use these rare advantages ? Ah, how preciously could she use them ! The types already presented to her by Mrs. Auchincloss and Mrs. Satterthwaite were despicable for their narrow- ness and egotism. Would not she do more and be more than these two servile devotees of sham and aiTogance had done and been? The sudden blow that had fallen upon her produced a disarray far stronger in meaning than that mere ebullition of hopeful vivacity with which we have last seen her rally under so distressing a threat. Mrs. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 59 Ottavson's bluff and homely sympathies were welcome because of their invaluably genuine quality. But after an hour or two Olivia fled even from those, and locked herself in her own room upstairs, to try, as she told her aunt, if she could not get a little sleep before Mr. Delaplaine called upon her. She got no sleep, how- ever, and courted none. She lay down, and the rest of body composed her quivering nerves, perhaps, while she grew almost unexplainably anxious to hear what her father's late partner would really have to say. Her aunts had told her that he felt the greatest hesita- tion about personally mentioning to her the subject of her dead parent's financial ruin. But it had somehow been one of the traditions of her childhood that he was an exceedingly able person. Her father had always led her to believe this, and her first thrill of irreverent disrespect for him had occurred during those meetings of theirs after the miserable days of death- bed anxiety had begun, when his frigid self-continence, his impenetrable stolidity had repelled and disillu- sioned her. Still, she now forlornly argued, he might come with the suggestion of some grateful and memo- rable expedient. Why not? He might have recog- nized that in spite of shattered patrimony, she was not one of those who would accept the tame concilia- tion, the galling peace-treaty of a proffered assistance. There might be likelihood that he would arrive equipped, as it were, with some proposition at once uncondescending and feasible. " It will not be fair to let you remain here after to-night," Olivia told Mrs. Ottarson, while they were seated at dinner, that same evening, in the large, bleak dining-room below stairs. 60 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. "Oh, you jus' hush, 'Livia," retorted her aunt; "I'll stay 's long 's ever I want to ; there ! 'Taint a soul's business but mine ; 'taint even yours." "It's your boarders' business," murmured Olivia, looking round at thi'ee more family portraits, all of them with colorless faces that gleamed from a density of dark paint, and all bordered by tarnished gilt frames hardly a finger wide. " I hate to think of your goodness bringing any loss to you. I fear it has done so already. But, aunt," the girl went on, "I will promise, if you go to-morrow, to go with you. Yes, I will promise to go." "An' stay?" faltered Mrs. Ottarson. Nothing could have given her greater delight, now that the tremendous change in her niece's prospects had pre- sented itself, than to retain Olivia under her protec- tion till death (or only marriage, perhaps) dissolved this desirable arrangement. " You don't mean to stay, do you, 'Livia?" " For a little while," said the girl, smiling. " Until I can begin my fight with fortune, you know." Her smile had the light of tears in it ; at least, Mrs. Ottarson saw it thus. But she shrugged her plump shoulders, and tried to speak cheerfully. " Well, if you should go into any such fight, dear, an' get regular beat at it, y' know, there'll always be me, openin' my arms to take you in." . . . Here Mrs. Ottarson gave a most spirited start, dropping both knife and fork on her plate with a resonant clash. " W'y, 'Liv i a!" she slowly gasped, staring across the little round table at which they sat opposite one another. " Th' idea of my not thinkin' of 't 'fore now ! Th'i deal" OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 61 "Well?" said Olivia. She perfectly understood that this violent yet unsolved consternation on her aunt's part meant no trivial fancy. A concept of moment must underlie it, or she would never have dedicated to it so asthmatic an intonation or so be- wildered a grimace. " Well, Aunt Thyrza, what dis- covery have you made ? " " Discov'ry, 'Livia ? W'y, it's just bursted on me! 'Xcuse the word 'bursted'; it isn't extra s'lect, I know ; but I can't help it." "I don't object to it," said Olivia. She felt confi- dent enough that there was to be no groaning of a mountain over the birth of a mouse. She knew how unexplosively her friend could act when firmness and serenity were required of her, and she had the fullest certainty that no trifling disclosure, at this hour of her own mingled bereavement and perplexity, would be invested with idle pretensions. " But I should like to know," she proceeded, "why you are so im- mensely concerned without a minute's warning really I should." " Well, dear, you shall know." Mrs. Ottarson now spoke with an emphatic deliberation. " It's this. There's Ida Strang. You've often heard me talk 'bout Ida. 'Course you have." "Ida Strang? Oh, yes. I've seen her, too, once or twice. She came here to speak with you about matters that related to " " My establishment," broke in Mrs. Ottarson. She looked round to see if the waitress had left the dining- room, and found that this was the case. If she and her niece had not been alone together, she would have preferred that Bridget should hear the word " estab- 62 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. lishment" instead of " boarding-house." But she satisfied herself that Bridget was gone a fact whose weight had until now quite escaped her consideration. " Or my boardin'-house, if you please," she added lightly, as if ashamed of her recent obvious feint. "Yes, I rec'lect you have seen Ida. Well, as I've told you, she's a kind of upper help, an' yet she holds herself higher than any help I've got, by a good sight. She 'tends to things I can't 'tend to. She sees that the girls fix the rooms jus' so, an' she mends a little, an' she keep an eye on the bed-clo'es an' piller-cases, an' she stays in an' kind o' bosses things when I go t' market, an' oh, dear, 'Livia, I can't begin to 'numer- ate what that girl does do. But mind, she ain't really help, nor never was. Her folks are very genteel ; they live East ; it ain't far from Boston. She always eats her meals with me. She's been good as gold while I've been away. She 'pears to suit splendid. Of course the boarders 's missed my cfeserts. But they've et what Ida an' Cook together could knock up f'r 'em, an' no grumblin' that Pve heard of. Oh, Ida 'd 'a told me if there had been. An' now she's goin' to be married. Yes, I got her letter yesterday. If 't 'a come 't any other time I'd 'a been in a fluster 'bout it. But yesterday ! Why, you, know ! . . . She'd first met him East. He's got a place here in a clothin' store, ready-made, but first-class of its kind. They're goin' to live in a flat, somewheres up- town, an' . . . well, it all 'mounts to this Ida's got to go." Here the solemnity of Mrs. Ottarson's face became tragic. "'Livia!" she exclaimed, in a voice that rang with the deepest and truest feeling, "I'm givin' Ida Strang twenty dollars a month, Of course OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 63 that means board, an' well, I was goin' to speak 'bout her appetite, but now 's no time f that kind o' talk; is it? Still, eat! I never did see a girl that put away like . . . But, oh, 'Livia, if any one had told me this mornin' I should be makin' such a pro- posal t' you, I'd 'a laughed in their face f'r a fool o' the first water. An' yet you say you will get your own livin', an' you say yes, you have said that you love y'r aunt Thyrzy, faults an' all, an' w'y isn't it better t' come to me like that than t' go as gov'ness in some stuck-up family that would chuckle behind your back jus' t' see one o' your kind brought down. 'T isn't bein' a servant, 'Livia, mind. Don't look like that ! 's if you wanted t' scold me. I'll take it all back if it bothers you. I'll " "You sha'n't take a word of it back, you darling!" cried Olivia, as she sprang from her chair, rounded the slio-ht curve of the dining-table, and threw both O O ' arms about her aunt's neck. " I'll go to you gladly that way ! I'll take Ida Strang's place with all my heart. If you made me your servant, I shouldn't care, so long as you paid me my wages for honest work ! " "'Livia! Don't!" " Yes, I will ! You know I'm proud, aunt, but I'd hate myself if I dreamed of being proud to you ! " She kissed her aunt's olive cheek again and again, and her tears began to flow as she did so, and no doubt they mixed with Mrs. Ottarson's, which had surely started too. " I'll meet Mr. Delaplaine (when he comes this evening), oh, so bravely now ! After all you've done for papa and me, I should hate myself if I thought there was the least shame in earning my living in your house and at your side ! " 64 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. Here Olivia drew backward from her aunt, who was still seated. She let a hand remain on either of that lady's shoulders. " Oh," cried the girl, with untold thankfulness in her breaking voice, " you've you've taken such a load from me ! I'll stay with you always ! I'll be Ida Strang I'll try very hard to be more I I will, truly ! " " Pooh ! " cried Mrs. Ottarson, springing from her chair and snatching Olivia again to her breast. " 'S if you, my dead sister's only child, couldn't be a million times more ! I jus' guess you could ! " OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 65 IV. MR. SPENCER DELAPLAINE made his appearance at about eight o'clock that same evening. Olivia was in perfect readiness to receive him. She looked pale as she entered the spacious, uncompanionable drawing- room, which had the doleful feature of somehow never seeming as if it were thoroughly lighted, no matter how many of the gas-jets in its cumbrous chandelier were made to shoot forth flame from the pinkish tulip-like shades. Perhaps the girl's black robe caused her to appear paler than she really was, but it brought out, at the same time, a cameo-like refinement of profile which might otherwise have eluded the more listless gaze. Mr. Delaplaine's gaze did not show any listless sign as he shook hands with her, gray and cold though his eye gleamed to the rather timid glance that now met it. Olivia had her opening speech, as it were, prepared. She felt so reassured and placidly exultant since the recent conference with her aunt that possibly no real timidity possessed her ; and certainly she revealed none, as she now said, sinking into a chair while her visitor reseated himself : "The flowers you sent this morning were very beautiful, Mr. Delaplaine ! Poor papa always loved flowers. It was most kind and thoughtful of you to send him such charming ones." Mr. Delaplaine had dropped his eyes toward the car- pet. He gave a little husky cough, and then said : 66 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. "Oh ah yes. I'm glad they pleased yon. Those observances help, in their way, at such sad times." " Indeed they do ! " Olivia replied, with an earnest- ness abrupt as it was undisguised. "I hear that in Ne\v York some people dislike flowers at funerals. But I can't think why. Can you? " He lifted his eyes again, and drew out a pair of gold-rimmed glasses, rubbing them with a white silk handkerchief before he put them on, and speaking before he had finished this brief preparatory process. " Oh, people hate the humbug that is so apt to go with the custom." "The humbug?" repeated Olivia, opening her blue eyes in a tender amazement. "Yes. The crosses and wreaths and things that come from Heaven knows whom, and are sometimes almost an impudence, considering the comparative strangers who send them." He shifted in his seat, crossed his legs with a quick, nervous motion, and leaned backward a little. The glasses that now shone above his aquiline bend of nose became him ; they gave him a more senile air, and yet one in per- fect keeping with his high bald forehead, the little bushes of grayish hair at each temple, and the shoul- ders just stooping enough to show what a flexible, martial sort of figure they had once less weakly sur- mounted. "But of course," he went on, "you would not be apt to have any such experiences, Miss Olivia; you have met, naturally, so few New Yorkers." "And they try to get into the good graces of peo- ple by sending flowers to their dead," murmured Olivia, musingly. " Well, if there were anything OLIVIA DEL A PLAINS. 67 sincere about such an attempt," she decided, with a gentle little touch of positiveness, " I should say that it was a very human and even lovely way of expressing sympathy." "But there lay the trouble," said Mr. Delaplaine, with a crisp, smileless little laugh. "It was very often quite the reverse of sincere. Some member of a conspicuous Xew York family died of a family whose future kettledrums, dinners or balls certain energetic strugglers wanted to attend, and lo, the most costly floral emblems, with cards attached, would appear on the day of the funeral. Such offerings couldn't very well be returned to the senders, but being accepted, a kind of obligation was accepted with them ; and so, in many instances, an abusive system of social pushing grew out of the practice. Then somebody set the fashion of append- ing to the death-notices in newspapers 'It is par- ticularly requested that no flowers be sent.' This kind of a thing was of course a clincher. It effect- ually headed off the wariest tacticians. And then came the droll part of the innovation." " The droll part ! " echoed Olivia, in sad surprise. "Yes; everything .has its funny side, you know. I recall several cases in which that little addendum was made to the death-notice of relatives where very few flowers would have been sent by anybody under any circumstances ; and yet there it was, staring you in the face, just the same. They thought it the right thing to do, and they did it. They wanted the inter- ment to be comme il faut. After all, there's only a slight step from wishing to live that way and to be put into the grave so." 68 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. The cynic undercurrent in these words hurt Olivia. " There's only the difference between life and death ! " she said. " And that is such a wide one." " It must be to you, at your age." "I believe it is to everybody!" she affirmed most seriously. "Ah, that's because you're still young. You wouldn't be young and in good health if you didn't cling to life." Olivia made a negative gesture. " I have seen old people who clung to life," she said. Mr. Delaplaine smiled. "You mean they were afraid," he answered, with a languid mutter. "Awed, perhaps," she said, as if half assenting. " Oh, it's the same thing. They call it awe, but it's only fear. And fear takes many forms. Religion is often' one of them." He laughed his low yet sharp laugh again, which was not unlike the faint tinkle wrought by meeting metals. "Not the right sort of religion ! " exclaimed Olivia. o o " The right sort ? My dear Miss Olivia, who that is devout does not feel sure he possesses that ? It's an affair o,f temperament and sentiment. I'm not quar- relling with it wherever it exists. I should as soon think of quarrelling with the mercury in a thermom- eter." He began to smooth one of his knees with the fingers of one hand, whose pink well-tended nails the light struck, giving out from them dim, pearly flashes. Everything about his person bespoke the most careful nicety; his evening dress was the perfection of sub- dued taste; his linen was spotless; he wore but one ring, with an antique stone set in it, of far more value than it looked. "I take things as I find them," he OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 69 continued placidly, " and I find them best to endure when they are taken that way." His composed face underwent a slight change of expression, now ; the furtive blending of fatigue and satire seemed to die from it and leave a deepened gravity behind. "I al- ways did that with your poor father. But I grant, now, that it might have been wiser if I had spoken more plainly and harshly to him when he was so care- lessly shutting his eyes to your future. . . . You Bee, I assume that your aunts have made a certain state of affairs more or less clear to you." Olivia had dropped her head during these last two or three sentences. But she raised it as the speaker's collected voice died away. "Yes," she answered, with a direct glance straight at her companion. " They have told me that I have nothing that all has gone during papa's life- time." He nodded slowly and confirmingly while she watched him. " Yes that is but too true. I sup- pose it shocked you. But you seem to have borne it with philosophy. I feared you would not. I'm glad to see that you do." She had astonished him, but he was not one to let her perceive that. He sat observing her with much intentness, now ; she could not see how keen his gray eyes were behind the lucid but obscuring lenses they 'wore. "It has been a great blow for me," she replied, tremors coming into her voice but no hint of tears ensuing. " I'm not over it yet ; I shall feel it for many a long day. And why should I not ? It alters my whole life ; it changes me from an independent 70 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. being to an enslaved one. For poverty is slavery I'm quite old enough to have learned that." " You're right," he said ; " and there's no slavery so bitter as that which has once tasted freedom. . . . I used rather direct speech to your father. Twice I went over and saw him in Paris while you were at your boarding-school. Each time I went prepared for an altercation, and each time he welcomed me so cordially and made me have such an agreeable sojourn in the enchanting city that I sailed home again feeling as if I'd left something behind me ; I suppose it was my scolding. Still, he heard from me expressions of opinion regarding which he couldn't have been greatly in doubt. But they never made any difference with him. Of course he could not have gone on borrowing much longer ..." "And he borrowed a great deal, did he not?" the girl broke in here, with her cheeks turning paler. Debt seemed to her something so onerous, danger- ous, disgraceful. "No; only a few thousands. I think there are outstanding sums that will cover the whole liability when his affairs are finally settled." "Oh, I am very glad to hear that!" declared Olivia, a bloom stealing back to her cheeks. The rich liquid sparkle that secret excitement had lent her blue eyes contrasted captivatingly with this damask tint; cer- tain evenings in spring, when the first glitter of stars tremulously begins above the rose-hued west, with fresh winds fragrant from new leaves and grasses, bear a lovely mystic analogy, in light and color, to just such pure young faces as Olivia's now appeared. " She's a wonderfully sweet-looking creature," Spencer OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 71 Delaplaine said to his own thoughts. " I have always held her to be so, but just now I feel more certain of it than ever." "My poor child," he said aloud, "don't bother yourself about any indebtedness. Of course I made my loans with my eyes open ..." " But that is no excuse for me," struck in Olivia. " No excuse whatever." "No excuse?" he repeated, leaning foward in his chair and playing with the slim gold cord of his eye- glasses. "I don't understand." " The debt, I mean, is the same, if any should re- main, after his affairs as you yourself have put it are finally settled." "The debt is the same?" he once more repeated, and with undisguised bewilderment. " Yes, I mean, it will be my debt. At least, I shall look on it so. I suppose the law would not, but that will be of no consequence to me. Whatever it turns out that papa owed you I shall continue to owe you." He leaned back in his chair again. He was smiling, O O' and the lines made by his lips at this moment had for Olivia an effect almost sardonically cruel. " You ! " he exclaimed. " You ! Delightful ! " The girl felt herself crimsoning with annoyance. At the same time her spirit rose. "Ah," she softly cried, with a ring of rebuke in her tones that was womanlike enough to make, for at least that brief interval, her tender age seem incredible, "I cannot allow you, sir, to receive in sarcasm what I advance very seriously. If I am poor now I may not always be. To recognize the debt will not, I am well aware, 72 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. be to discharge it. But I intend to discharge it if I can ; I shall always bear in mind that I I have in- herited it." He had ceased to smile. He had begun to rock the uppermost of his crossed legs in a deliberate manner that implied both diversion and condescension for the alert sensibilities of her who watched him. And his next words caused her to start and bite her lips, they so humiliutingly confirmed her expectations. " Do you know, you simply fascinate me by your originality your naturalness? That is rather a strong bit of enthusiasm for me, my dear Miss Olivia. I usually deal in the sober grays both of statement and emotion. I've never had many enthu- siasms in my life don't look indignant at me be- cause I haven't. I couldn't help it. I must have been born on a foggy morning, when there was a raw, lazy east wind that didn't promise the slightest ray of sun for certainly twenty-four hours. But I'm not so benighted that I can't appreciate intensity in others. I said you were original, and I meant it. You're just the sort of daughter your father might have had ; he was original in many ways ; I remember once telling him that he was a free-thinking nonconformist in a shell of conventionalism. He frowned and didn't like it ; so few of us like to hear anything that approaches being the real truth about ourselves. I've no doubt you will resent being told that you amuse me exceed- ingly. You can't see why you should. Of course you can't. If you did, my poor young lady, you wouldn't be half as amusing as you are. . . . You assert can- didly and innocently that you have inherited your father's debt to me, whatever may prove its amount. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 73 And you make this assertion only a very short time after learning that you have not a dollar in the world. Your confidence in the possibilities of your own opu- lent future is what so particularly charms me. It has the very dew of maidenhood upon it, if you'll pardon such a poetic burst from an old fellow as steeped in cold prose as I am. Some day, thirty or forty years from now when you are steeped in cold prose, too you'll be able to comprehend all this much better than now." Two bright spots were burning in Olivia's cheeks as he ended, but otherwise she bore herself calmly. "You turn what I have said into quiet ridicule, Mr. Delaplaine," she responded. " It may seem to you very entertaining; it is to me without the flavor of comedy you detect in it. But I am not quite so helpless, even now, as you judge me. I have a kind friend in my aunt Thyrza, Mrs. Ottarson indeed an invaluable friend. I am going to begin at once earn- ing my own living with her." " Good heavens, my dear child ! You can't mean that you are going into that boarding-house they say she keeps ! And what on earth do you propose doing there ? " "Getting honest employment." He took off his glasses again and began to polish them ruminatively. " Did the ... er ... the lady herself propose this to you?" " I induced her to propose it." " Ah . . . indeed ? And you intend to be a sort of upper servant there ? Is that the idea?" " I should say it was. Except that Aunt Thyrza is so fond of me as probably to become the most indul- 74 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. gent of mistresses. But I sha'n't let her indulge me too much ; I shall constantly oppose that." "But your other aunts . . . Mrs. Auchincloss and Mrs. Satterthwaite ? They assure me they are will- ing . . ." " To support me ? I have so understood. It is very kind of them. But I prefer to support my- self." There was a silence. Mr. Delaplaine readjusted his glasses above the somewhat severe curve of his nose. "You say that Mrs. Ottarson is your dear friend. She has undoubtedly nursed your father in a very capable way. I surmise that she must have made a most comforting associate for you in the sick-room, and your having become fond of her is not at all remarkable. But, my child, to go and live with her is quite a different thing. It is worse than burying yourself alive ; for to bury oneself suggests at least silence, and you will have about you, instead of silence, a clatter of vulgarity which the American boarding-house can alone perpetrate." "Very possibly I shall. But I shall be busy. You mind little troubles petites mis&res like that so much less when you are busy." She saw the icy smile edge his lips as he replied loiteringly: "What shall you do? Darn towels? Dole forth the tea and sugar? Keep the mice out of the strawberry jam ? Haggle with the grocer and battle with the butcher? You were simply not brought up for such a life, and you may as well real- ize it now as a year from now when retraction is too late." " Retraction ? " said Olivia, lifting her brows. " You OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 75 refer to my seeking the Auchincloss or Satterthwaite protection, after all." A dolorous little laugh fell from her, at this point. " There must be a good deal of haggling with the grocer and battling with the butcher before I do so." "You don't like those ladies, then?" " I don't like the plan of living with them ! " " It is not unusual in New York for people to try rather hard to cross their thresholds. How have they displeased you?" " Not at all. I hope that we shall always be bonnes connaissances, but . . ." "My dear, don't for an instant imagine that you will be," interrupted Mr. Delaplaine, lifting both hands for an instant and then letting them fall, " pro- vided you sink so low as to live with that dreadful Mrs. Ottarson." Olivia's eyes flashed. "You presume to tell me it is sinking low ! " she began. " Now will you be kind enough to hear me tell you " "Nothing rude, I hope?" he again broke in. He was tranquillity itself ; he could no more have become angry with her than with a June rose, bending and swaying in the wind, because one of its tiny thorns had made a spiteful lunge at his flesh. " I don't deserve to have you call me names, or anything of that sort. My dear young lady, I don't presume to tell you it is sinking low, or that Mrs. Ottarson is a dreadful person. I was merely making an imaginary quotation, as it were. I am positive that this is just what your aunts would say. Of course it is no con- cern of mine, except in so far as you are the child of an old friend." 76 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. "Forgive me if I misunderstood you," said Olivia, softening. "I know that Aunt Letitia and Aunt Augusta hold Mrs. Ottarson in great disfavor. She doesn't outwardly meet their approval, and so they never stop to consider what a heart of gold she has." " Oh, I'm perfectly willing to admit that it's a heart of gold," he briskly returned. He had set himself to beating a little tattoo with the finger-tips of one hand on the marble-topped table near which he sat. "But hearts of gold have the misfortune to be invisible." "Hers is not at least not to me. I have seen it more than once for weeks past. She has shown it to me." "Ah, Miss Olivia, are you entirely sure that it's eighteen carat ? Pardon my atrocious flippancy. I sha'n't dare to go on if you wither me with another of those indignant looks that you gave me a little while ago. And you ought to be merciful; you ought to recollect how time has withered me already." The banter in his voice was mockery itself to his listener; yet she felt it to be so discriminated, so modified, that her resentment of it could only make her appear ridiculous. " Candidly," she said, " I would rather you would not go on, Mr. Delaplaine in the strain you have adopted." She saw his gray eyebrows elevate themselves over his luminous glasses. "Bless me! what strain ? I've been admiring your championship of somebody you're fond of. I'm a good deal afraid of you when you look so tempestuous, but that doesn't prevent me from admiring you, all the same. We're very apt to be impressed that way by performances we're incapa- OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 77 ble of ourselves. I don't believe I've ever been so honestly angry as you just were, in all my life. I may have scowled and wanted to strike somebody ; that's only the common, coarse style of procedure, with the raw Adam in it, the selfish personal thrill of retaliation. But your anger had a nice little touch of sublimity. If my nerves were a trifle stronger I should be tempted to beg that you would do it again ; for, upon my word, it's deucedly I should say mag- nificently becoming ! " All this was delivered with so much measured, inscrutable repose of utterance that Olivia lost power to judge whether it were really meant for satire or sincerity. But if the latter, it stung her none the less keenly. " It appears," she said, with the bitterness of uncon- cealed reproach, " that I must come back to my own country and undergo a great misfortune here, only to discover how lightly my unhappiness is looked upon. I am not sure whether you wish to jest with me or no." And now she rose, standing placid and sorrow- ful, in the large, cheerless room. "But it seems to me that you do wish to jest. This may be no more than your habitual mode of treating every subject in life, petty or the opposite. But it is not my mode, and this evening, of all others, I am averse to playing a part with which I have no sympathy. . . . Thei-e- fore you must excuse me for saying that I would rather not remain here with you any longer. Let us talk together, if you will, at some other time. You know what this day has been to me. ... As for the course I shall take hereafter, I think I have fully explained that. I love Aunt Thyrza dearly, and I 78 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. am going to live with her you know on what terras." He had risen by the time that she finished speaking. " So, I am dismissed," he said grimly. She gave a slight smile, inclining her head with a grace that she did not dream of. " Only for to-night. I am tired distraite, if you will. I ..." He took several steps toward her. As she raised her eyes to his face she discerned a new look upon it. His glasses dropped, and he caught them by their thin chain, swaying them to and fro while he now spoke. " Olivia," he said, " I hope you're not too tired for one thing." She stared at him questioningly, and he drew still nearer. "Well?" she queried. If he had been some one else she might have con- cluded that he was embarrassed ; but embarrassment and he had no appreciable relations in the conception she had thus far formed of him. "There's a means of saving yourself from stooping like this," he began. He still swung his glasses, and he glanced down at them fitfully while he continued to address her, scanning her face for an instant and then averting his gaze. " For it is stooping, and you'll be horribly sorry you did it. As for the means I mentioned it's here; it's I, myself. I offer it." She had not the faintest perception of his true meaning. "Thanks, no," she said. "You are kind to propose it. Please don't think me ungrateful. But I can't accept. I should be miserable if I did." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 79 " You don't understand me," he replied, looking at her very steadily. " Oh, yes, I do. It's to be your protegee, your " "Not at all, if you please. . . . Olivia, it's to be something much much nearer than that." He took her hand, and she let him take it. She still had no idea what he meant. Her girlish thoughts had al- ready swiftly shaped the question " What can I be nearer to him than his protegee than the daughter of his old partner, adopted by him?" He still held her hand, fondling it. This revelation of tenderness in him was quite unforeseen to her ; she had a qualm of self-rebuke for having pronounced him so thoroughly mundane and hardened. " Ah ! " she exclaimed, smiling. " You mean that I shall take in your household some such place as that which I have agreed to take in Aunt Thyrza's ! " He clasped her hand still tighter. " That isn't at all my meaning," he said. "No?" she murmured, wonderingly. What could it be, then, if it was not that ? He evidently wished to help her ; it was unmistakable that he so wished. His eyes had almost an amiable light in their greenish- gray pupils ; that indolent, derisive method of speak- ing had left him that suggestion of being a person who treated life, death and the human soul as if they were a compound, yet forceless joke, a trinity of triv- iality. " No," he said, seeming to echo her own monosyl- lable, while he watched the sweet, bold interrogation in her guileless eyes. " That is not my meaning. Can't you guess what it is?" His tones had become almost musical ; they were so unlike those in which he 80 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. was wont to speak, that for an instant the odd fancy crossed her as to the possibility of his having employed some whimsical trick of elocution. " Try to guess," he went on. " Try." "But I have tried," she returned, shaking her head hopelessly. " Try again," he persisted. "Is he really making sport of me?" Olivia asked herself. The child is never quite dead, in a girl of her years, and for a little interval she was beset by that displeasure a child will feel when suspecting the presence of raillery in others. But no, she soon con- cluded ; such a supposition was unjust; and then, almost immediately, she exclaimed : "I really am not equal to anymore guessing, Mr. Delaplaine. You say that you would like me to be nearer than your protegee, and yet that you are not asking me to take any salaried position. . . ." " Ah, it's a salaried position, in its way. There's a very handsome allowance attached to it. I shouldn't dream of supposing you'd take it, my dear, except for that saving clause, as it were. ... I see that I shall have to blurt the truth right out. But it's wofully discouraging. . . ." " What is discouraging ? " asked Olivia. She looked alarmed, now ; perhaps the first ray of real divination was entering her mind. "That you should not guess without my telling you," he said. . . . And here he sought to retain her hand, while she made a little effort to draw it away. After that effort she let him keep it. Her eyes were full of doubt and her brow had clouded. She was not at all sure, yet ; but it seemed to her as if each fresh minute rendered her more sure. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 81 "How should this be discouraging?" she faltered. " It makes me fear that you've no conception of me in the character I'd like to assume ... as your hus- band, I mean, Olivia." She snatched her hand away from him then, recoil- ing several paces. " My husband you ! " The words broke from her unawares. In another second she had regretted them, but it was too late for her to dispel the effect of repulsion, even of repug- nance, which they must have produced. "Am I so horribly old?" he asked. "A little past sixty ? Is that so very old ? It seems Methuselah- like to you, I don't doubt, because you are so young." Olivia had drooped her head ; her cheeks were burn- ing so that they gave her actual pain. "You must forgive me," she stammered, " if if I seemed to show you that I I thought you were too too old. It has taken me greatly by surprise. I I was com- pletely unprepared for it." A little silence followed. To the girl it was truly agonizing. In all her life she had never known such crucial embarrassment as now. Spencer Delaplaine in a trice, as it were, had roused her pity where before he had evoked merely her tepid and indifferent dis- taste. He had in a manner bored her ; he now promptly became interesting. It must be so frightful, Olivia had hurriedly told herself, to want to marry any one, and waken the mildly horrified sensations he had just wakened in her, simply because you asked the matrimonial question. "Please do not think this proposal of mine," she heard him say, "the result of any suddenly-formed 82 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. resolve. It is very remote from being so, I assure you. Ever since you came back for the last time and that is months ago I have been sensible of a ... a deepening attachment. This sort of visitation comes to only a few men as late in life as it has come to me. I had reached an age when I was justified in expecting that it would never come. What mortal can have lived as long as I have lived without more than one so-called affair of the heart ? But I speak as white truth, Olivia, as was ever spoken by human lips, Avhen I affirm that you are the first woman I ever saw whom I longed to make my wife." She raised her head and showed what seemed to herself her blazing face. But it was only a face dyed with a brilliance excitement had lit there, and fairer now to him who saw it (fair as he had already silently estimated it) than it had ever glowed before. " You have paid me an honor," she said, catching her breath, and putting one hand clingingly just above her bosom, as women will do when they are in straits of agitation. "I thank you for the honor. It springs, I am sure, from the warmest generosity. I I shall never forget it I shall never forget that you gave me the privilege of declining it." " Ah," he cried, with an imperious rigor in his voice that made her start back from him alarmedly " there's not a trace of generosity about my conduct ! " He appeared to marvel, a second later, at his own betrayal of something so intimately similar to passion ; he stood with a kind of self-astonished look in his eyes and with a hand pressed against one temple, as though he were asking himself in his own worldly- wise vernacular what the devil he meant by such OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 83 queer behavior. And when next he spoke it was with all his old control. " I had but one motive," he said, " in asking you to be my wife. I'm fond of you. I love you. I want to marry you for that reason, and for none other in the world." Olivia clasped both hands together as she stood facing him. "I don't love you!" she exclaimed, using the naked fact because her poor disturbed wits could just then seize upon no other. " I don't love you, and I never could." "I'm perfectly aware of that," he began, seeming to present himself before her, as the words fell from him, in precisely the same attitude of well-bred aplomb by which she had long since measured his individuality. " I don't expect you to love me. I'm not such a fool. But I " Here Olivia stopped him, with both uplifted hands. " No, no," she cried, beseechingly and yet forbid- dingly. Then a new thought appeared to strike her. But as it did so she plainly shuddered ; and then, as if feeling that she had been rudely merciless in thus betraying aversion, she stretched forth one hand to him. Instantly afterward, however, she withdrew her hand. He had meanwhile advanced toward her as if to clasp it. ... With precipitation, and with the sound of a re- pressed sob, she now turned from him, hurrying to the doorway and leaving him alone in the solemn, dull, ugly drawing-room. He did not quit the house for some little time after 84 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. that. He had folded his arms and was staring down at the uncouth scroll-work of the carpet. . . . But at last he roused himself and went downstairs to the lower hall, where he had left his hat and coat. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 85 V. OLIVIA heard the front door clang as she stood in one of the upper rooms beside Mrs. Ottarson. " There he's gone ! " she said. " 'Livia, you look so scared an' funny ! " exclaimed her aunt. "For mercy's sake, what did happen ?" "I'll tell you," said Olivia. And with a burst of real hysterical laughter and a preliminary gasp or two, she began the narrative. . . . Spencer Delaplaine walked quietly up-town from Washington Square. His gouty ailment had not discommoded him quite so much as usual, of late. Otherwise his health was nearly as good at a little past sixty as it had been all those years ago, when he stood beside his friend Houston Van Rensselaer in the little Macdougal Street house and saw him commit the absolutely tragical faux pas of marrying Rosalie Jenks. Delaplaine had always lived well, but with discretion. He used to say that if it were true every man at the age of forty was either a fool or his own physician, then he intended to take enough care of himself to . prove an exceptional case : he would not be a fool, and he would be much too healthy for the need of his own medical services. Excess was not so distasteful to him as that the fine clarity of his common-sense forever taught him its peril. If he had been less selfish he might have ended disasti'ously as a drunkard, or met some like fate, born of his own trespassing 86 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. indulgences ; for he had many traits belonging to the confirmed voluptuary, yet did not possess the head- long and improvident ones too often uppermost in such a nature. The evil jvas with Delaplaine never sufficient for the day in such matters ; he could not rid himself of the to-morrow, with its attendant pros- tration, inertia, penance. He had serenely calculated that just so much pleasure of a certain physical kind would be safe for him, and no more. Prudence reared her defensive paling at this boundary, and he never passed beyond it. The world accepted his reluctance as excellent decorum ; it was in reality one of those valiant exhibitions of egotism which are lucky enough to lie within strict conventional limits. He had always been an inordinately selfish man, and he had contrived never to let his selfishness tran- spire. Long ago he would have broken all connection with Houston Van Rensselaer if it would have repaid him to do so. But there was a magic of caste about "Delaplaine and Van Rensselaer" which mere "De- laplaine and Company " would never have been able to preserve. His own people, the Delaplaines, were all dead now, except a few cousins, whom he ignored as tiresome, and not of the class to which he belonged. He secretly laughed at there being any such class whatever in a republic whose very existence was a protest against all aristocratic principles. But what did he care for the inconsistencies and self-contradic- tions of the foolish throngs about him? His object was to ride securely on the topmost crest of the wave, success. He could not understand how any rational being could endorse any other system of philosophy. But he was by no means a shallow and uureflective OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 87 egotist ; false, and indeed disrespectful, judgment of his aims and tenets would spring from such a belief regarding him. He had not only studied men thor- oughly, and pronounced them for the most part fools, with a sprinkling of intellectual zealots and enthusi- asts; lie had also studied books, guided by an early education, fairly complete when we consider that he had been graduated from such an institution as was Columbia College nearly a half century ago. A mem- ber of fashionable clubs, a diner-out, a conceded sup- porter of social dignities and formalities, he had nevertheless found not a little leisure through entire freedom from those vices that give the jaded palate, the fatigued brain, or the rebuking digestion to read with zest, lucidity and mental satisfaction. He had followed most carefully what is called the modern movement in thought. He had marked many a pas- sage in Mr. Herbert Spencer's great series of works ; he had become so interested in the purely mathemati- cal portion of the " Psychology " that he had set him- self to the study of higher mathematics in order that no page of this wonderful work should remain dark to him. He delighted in the hypothesis of Darwin and its powerfully convincing deductions ; he had no more doubt that the intelligent ape was our primeval parent than he had assurance as to' the mythic origin of Adnm and Eve. He took regularly, and perused searchingly, the Popular Science Monthly, and kept wary watch, as well, upon the English Nineteenth Century and Fortnightly Review. He prided himself upon being an exact thinker, and abhorred metaphysics, which he contemptuously classed with poetry as among the solid stumblin<r-bloeks to civilization. 88 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. The writings of Emerson impressed him, when in particular moods, but he always covertly resented the spells of that unique sorcerer, whom he looked on as "spoiled" by the influences of an overgrown imag- ination. He had been fascinated by the essays of so supreme an idealist and moralist, but rebelled against the very charm they exerted. " They're fine," he had once declared aloud, late at night, amid the silence of his library, after having yielded himself for an hour or so to the piercing qualities of their epigram; "but they're bricks without mortar ; the ideas in them don't hang together. No wonder they've begotten so many gushing transcendentalists ! " Mentally furnished as he was with all that is best in the scientific discovery and speculation of this unpar- alleled century, he had still reaped from his voluntary and even fond studies nothing except the most bar- ren materialism. The splendid standard of conduct pointed to by Herbert Spencer's priceless philosophy had not stirred in him a pulse' of admiration. All that Huxley or Buckle or Lecky had taught him had been a deference to the brain-powers that could thus tear the husk of superstition and humbug from preg- nant, irrefutable truth. It was all very well for a few men to live up to humanitarian theories, if so dis- posed. It was right ; he admitted that it was right. But now, at sixty or thereabouts, he would probably have only ten or fifteen years more to live, and he meant to pass through those years in comfortable ob- servance of accepted formulas. He had made a Will, bequeathing all his large fortune to well-known and trusted charities. That concession (surprising as it would prove for the poor cousins who had already OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 89 fixed expectant eyes upon his money) he was willing to grant the enlightenment of the time. But there his altruism stopped short. He was the kind of agnostic who might have supplied unnumbered texts for denun- ciators of reigning rationalism. The glorious future possibilities that evolution offers to our race had failed spiritually to move him. What has been called the "new religion " struck him as being full of practical wisdom apart from its exalted philanthropy. But he still remained an unruffled idolater of self. He some- times inwardly wondered that the men with whom he talked in Wall Street or at the club did not guess of what irresponsive marble he was made. He often suspected that some of the women, least frivolous and hollow, did guess ; but then he usually chose, if permissible, the company of women in whose fair bosoms no hearts beat for the loftier ethical needs. He had long ago assured himself that all except hand- some women were repellent to him. Unless theii' lineaments pleased him, their conversation irritated him. It was different, of course, with great female personages like Mrs. Auchincloss and Mrs. Satter- thvvaite. They were not merely women ; they were majestic portresses at a palatial gateway ; give a woman distinction, prerogative, and plainness or ma- turity can be endured in her. That was why marriage had such a ghastly side to it ; two people swore at the altar that they would calmly watch one another decay. Delaplaine had congratulated himself again and again that he had permanently escaped the making of so foolish a vow. As it was, he had gone along through this vale of tears, he felt inclined to think, at a very prosperous pace, and he meant to take the rest of the 90 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. journey in equal comfort. He might have done a great deal more good than he had done; but there would have been the concomitant trouble in doing the good and that he chose to avoid. Besides, if he spent his money that way, it would cease to roll up like a gigantic pecuniary snowball. And he wanted it so to roll up. There was far less of avarice in this de- sire than of inflexible ambition. Wealth meant such domination, precedence, and supremacy nowadays; the having it in great quantities implied a vast deal more than the spending it in comparatively small ones. A blunder that above all others Delaplaine never wanted to commit was the revelation of his own real bloodless nature to those with whom he associated. He had no friends, and desired none ; he held all friendship to be wrought of sentimentality a mere frangible air-bridge swung between the two massive and calculable passions, hate and love. But he had hosts of acquaintances, and these he was quite willing to let believe him remarkably cold, though not abnor- mally so. When they laughed at his astute or shrewd sayings about men and things, it pleased him to have them laugh. But the draughts of penetrative com- ment he drew for them must not be too bitter; he liked at least a tincture of sunshine to blend with the waters, so that they should not taste too acridly of the dark earthy cistern whence they had been taken. He liked to bear the reputation of a rather caustic wit, but it did not at all suit him to rend that inner veil which concealed his unrelenting pessimism, his con- tempt for the spirit of righteous Jaw filmed over by politic obedience to its letter, his inveterate distrust of OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 91 mortality at large, his innate faith as to the void noth- ingness which lay behind our whole sublunar scheme. He clung very stoutly to the outward seeming of daily behavior. We were all mere puppets ; the entire ter- restrial proceeding was farcical as a Punchinello-show; but, meanwhile, being in and of the show, he pro- posed that he should play there as one of those pup- pets which make a victorious bow to the spectators at the fall of the pretty miniature curtain. Such arid chaff as this he had reaped from contact with the most fecund and stimulating minds of an epoch like the present. They, the lineal heirs of Locke and Bacon, of Spinoza and Comte, had taught him only the big- otry of self-worship ! But aggravating and pitiful as it may sound, he had passed years of sleek content- ment with his garner of scoff and lip-service, his har- vest of despair and hypocrisy. "No one knows much about me," he had more than once triumphantly med- itated, "except that I am a flourishing banker, say rather sharp things now and then, drop into my pew at Grace Church every other Sunday or so, have the entree to all the best houses in town, and generally de- port myself like a gentleman. If I live fifteen years longer and I ought to live twenty, considering the care I've taken of myself it will be going down hill all that time. This infernal gout is sure to grow worse as I grow older, and each attack nowadays, I find, lays me up for a longer period. But what of that? I shall have had more sweet juice from the orange of life, and less of the harsh tang its rind can mingle there, than nine-tenths of even the fortunate fruit-gatherers. I'll go to my grave as one man out of ten thousand goes bah! it would be truer to say 92 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. twenty! My plot is bought in Woodlawn, and the order for, a handsome monument in the middle of it is snugly appended to my charitable Will. All that re- mains for me, now, is to slide as gracefully and becom- ingly out of the nonsensical worry and fluster as I've acquitted myself respectably and commendably while one of its participants." So ran the reflections of this confident manipulator with destiny, and so they continued to run, till a special day, not long before the beginning of these pages that faithfully expose them, brought him a novel and unanticipated experience. One name may stand for this experience. It was Olivia Van Rensselaer. He had made jest, at first, of his own curious emo- tional flutter. More than once, in former days, he had seriously entertained the idea of marriage, but had dismissed it before the least compromising step had been taken. In one instance the lady had been young, of radiant beauty, and the possessor of a copi- ous fortune. If report spoke fact she had been devot- edly attached to Spencer Delaplaine. But all this had happened when he was just turning forty, and perhaps as brilliantly eligible as any man in the metropolis. He had cautiously reviewed the advantages and draw- backs, then, of a union with so delectable a bride, and had affirmed the latter to preponderate. It would all be very distinguished and noteworthy, he concluded, but it would most dictatorially interfere with the comforts of bachelorhood. He could not see the use in contracting new ties. Family ties, above all others, were mere sugared pills. A so-called pleasant respon- sibility was none the less burdensome because you OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 93 tried to persuade yourself that you were not bowing your back under it. No ; lie would stay single. An eminent marriage would be of no consequence to a man like himself. Let the real stragglers mount on that kind of stepping-stone; he liad gone up too high for the necessity of any such assistance. Now, having met Olivia two or three times after her final return, and when the illness of his partner had made direct intercourse between himself and her a requisite occurrence, his own possible marriage dawned upon him in a totally new light. Since he had been fifty it had indeed not dawned upon him at all ; it had been relegated to that limbo of unconcern where lay not a few abandoned projects in similar desuetude. But the presence of Olivia, the light of her blue eyes, the appealing melody of her voice, the indefin- able allurement of her chaste simplicity, had touched fibres in his being that he had long ago deemed either to be dead or never actually living. He had aired some grossly pungent opinions upon the love of the sexes, in former hours, when his tongue tripped more glib at smart jeux cTesprit than now ; but he had never spoken half the contemptuous innuendo that slept hidden behind these open disparagements. Of all the calamities that could befall him he had failed to prophesy any positive seizure by a sentiment. But here, he soon realized, was malady of more poignant bane. If it did not closely resemble a passion, then all his past acute observation of his fellow creatures amounted to little. And at his age ! Pah ! it was clear burlesque ! To his keen dismay he found himself deriding it 94 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. with the laughter Mephistopheles might have inaudibly bestowed on the infatuation of Faust. And yet, by some puzzling enigma of circumstance, lie enacted both these roles in the strangely unexpected drama. It was in vain that he called upon all the grimmest resources of a humor at no time genial. He likened himself with no avail to a gouty and superannuated Romeo. Self-scorn would not serve him. The sun in Olivia's tresses beamed to him no less vividly; nor did the elusive dimple in her roseleaf of a cheek obey less flexibly her awaited smile. He was in love at last he, who had asserted love to be a folly of the senses, rampant in youth and extinct a decade or two after it. The very bodily preservation in which he had exulted, now cohf routed him as a jeering excuse for his fond transport ; this delightful malady would never have presumed to at- tack him, at his age, if he had not gone on judiciously husbanding enough prime vitality for its maintenance. There were two or three women in New York society whom for some time it had amused him to make the recipients of his loyal, though harmless gallantries. Mrs. Satterthwaite was one of these. He would be sure, a few years ago, either to seat himself in her box at the opera during some portion of the evening, or to hover near it if it were too full for entrance as those old boxes in the horseshoe of the Academy of Music were easily rendered. At many a ball, reception or dinner, lie would exchange with her words of gayety, gossip, or a certain sort of flirtation in whose art he was the supplest of adepts, and she was very far from inefficient. The world knew him as one of Mrs. Satterthwaite's unfailing devotees; and OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 95 matrons of her years, even when they are the chdte- laines of superb establishments and give banquets where the wines defy detraction, are rarely troubled by a plethora of devotees. After a rather prolonged battle with the new feelings that possessed him, Dela- plaine determined to seek the advice of Mrs. Satter- thwaite. He selected a particular evening when he was almost confident she would be at home, and he went early in order to anticipate other visitors. But almost the first ray that shot from her steely eyes weakened his resolution. And when her smile came, seeming to give her lips a cruel curl that he had never noticed until now, he abandoned his purpose alto- gether. How that smile would change into pitiless ironic laughter if she knew the truth ! And what a fool he had been to dream of telling her ! " I'll put the Atlantic between me and that girl ! " he swore to himself, later in the evening. " This is just the season for the Riviera, and I've never seen half enough of it." But he did not go to the Riviera. He stayed in New York, and felt the clutch of this astounding pas- sion tighten about his heart, and so tell him that a heart was really there. His self-humiliation was, meanwhile, proportionate to his enchantment. Dur- ing the interviews that he held with Olivia previous to that final meeting which has been described in detail, he battled silently against the impulse to disclose his secret, as though it involved rank disgrace. Like nearly all in whom love of self is paramount, he was acutely sensitive to ridicule. There is no doubt that he underwent severe suffering while he pictured the amazement, quickly succeeded by repulsion, which his amatory confession might cause. He mutely groaned 96 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. beneath the curse of his gray hairs and wrinkles as perhaps few of his sex have ever groaned before. And here was just the girl to show him, with all the unvar- nished frankness of maidenhood, how delicious an old fool he had made of himself ! Still, all this time his worldliness was counselling hope to him. Old as he was, he was not too old to marry a blooming young bride. Men had done it before, when their purses were as well-lined as his own. There was no young suitor in the field, either, and that counted for much. Then, if her father died (as die he must, said the doctors), she would be left to face the intelligence of his past ruinous disbursements. In her alarm, her bewilderment, why should she not grasp at the first strong hand of help proffered her? He found himself ardently wishing that she were a few years older, and that he yet cared for her as he did now. She would be sure not to hesitate then. No full-grown woman, who had outlived the early roman- tic quivers and illusions, ever did hesitate to marry where lay her best vantage of wealth and position. They were all alike ; the lover with the languishing eyes and the slim bank account was sent off begging, and the plain-featured or elderly wooer with the fat income carried his point. Oh, yes, he had seen it work like this a hundred times. But Olivia was not a full-grown woman ; there seemed to rise the dreaded impediment. That devilish romanticism which per- petually went with girls of her age might put up a barrier as powerful as if she were some demoiselle of the sang azur and he merely the American gentleman of means that he rated himself. He had chosen to let his friend, Mrs. Satter- OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 97 thwaite, and her ultra-patrician sister, be the emissa- ries who should' first impart the unpalatable tidings. That was unquestionably the neater plan. He would appear a little later as we are aware that he did appear. He had not been at all sure that he would then make to Olivia the disclosure he longed to make. No palpitating lover of one-and-twenty could have been more uncertain as to the exact moment favorable for " speaking out " than this grizzly veteran of untold tact and duplicity. But the time had arrived when Olivia had announncd to him her intention of earning her own livelihood and with that abominable per- son, Mrs. Ottarson ! He had met the girl's affirmation with a little rush of cynicism at first; that had been irreversible with him ; he could no more have helped it than he could have helped his baldness or his attenu- ation. But afterward the chance for unreserved avowal had seemed to lie just here. It hardly ap- peared conceivable that Olivia would prefer paid ser- vitude under Mi's. Ottarson to driving in her own O carriage as Mrs. Spencer Delaplaine. That she had treated him precisely as she had done he did not think at all surprising. It would have been highly improbable that such a girl should do anything else. A week perhaps even a day might change her rnood, her point of view. Besides, that unutter- able Mrs. Ottarson, with all her villanies against the Queen's English, was not qxiite dunce enough to advise the discountenancing of a match like this. And yet, who could tell? The woman might be one of those who read the Weekly Wake-Me-Up, or some similar harrowing sheet, where they printed stories of how Luella wedded the penniless young painter and 98 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. drew herself up to her full height, and smiled haughtily, when his wealthy but wrinkled rival begged for her lily hand. He would not by any means retire from the contest. He would simply silence his guns and watch the ene- my's movements as best he might. Thus he decided, that same evening, as he crossed the big, lonely, dusky square, and moved up along the lower portion of Fifth Avenue. It is always quiet here, with no rattle of omnibus- wheels or jingle of car-bells. Delaplaine's residence was not far away, in West Tenth Street. He owned and occupied a rather spacious house there ; he had done so for years, not liking to dine regularly at his club, bachelor though he was. There were too few men of the very first grade, he had long ago made up his mind, Avho lived in this way on our side of the ocean. Besides, he dined out a great deal all through the season, and he liked to return those dinners in kind, with the mark on them of his own menage and his own chef. Occasionally he would give an evening reception, at which every appointment was perfect, with some reigning lady of fashion to welcome the guests in his company. The year that Emmeline Sat- terthwaite came out he issued cards for a brilliant ball in her honor a signal of such profound civility to the young lady's mamma and herself that envy seized the weapon of gossip, as it so often does when it can find one within reach. It asserted that "Of course the ball was beautiful, and a success, and all that, but then one couldn't refrain from asking whether it wn&just in the nicest taste or no." Delaplaine and Mrs. Satter- thwaite heard some of these affectionate hints, and laughed together over them. The lady herself was OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 99 not at all bored, but not half so much amused as she would have liked to be. She was too many rungs of the social ladder above nearly all these jealous beings to care for whatever spiteful pellets they might fling from ambush. But the ball had conferred great joy upon her for one conspicuous reason : the Auchin- closses had never had a like honor bestowed on their Madeleine ; and they would have thought it an unde- niable honor. Severely as Letitia Auchincloss " weeded " her list, she had never dreamed of suppos- ing that her brother's partner could hold any but an honorable place there. Delaplaine ascended the soft-carpeted stairs of his commodious home to-night, and felt what a rich frame it would make for the living picture which he was bent upon surrounding by it. And she was of the Van Rensselaer blood, too. If he had believed in a Providence, he would have been strongly inclined to thank it for that agreeable fact. The entire mansion w.as already most suitably prepared for the entrance of a bride. The drawing-rooms were a nonpareil of ele- gance and comfort. The upper chambers, divided one from another by silken porti&res, needed no fresh grace of decoration. Costly paintings and engravings lined every wall, for Delaplaine loved Art, as many men of just his temperament do ; he had purchased a Bouguereau and a Gerome, a Toulmouche and a De Jonghe, and a little Meissonier at some huge price. No Corot, however, was to be found in his dwelling ; he considered Corot a humbug, and Daubigny, Rous- seau, Dupre, humbugs as well. They were quite too idealistic to gratify him. He execrated artists who strove to paint the unpaintable. There was enough 100 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. reality to put on canvas ; why strive to put impossi- ble dreams there ? His great tufted easy-chair was waiting for him in his library at the rear of the house, on its second story. The lamp of Japanese bronze on his reading-table beamed to him its old suave welcome behind a rosy shade. A genial flame writhed and sparkled from two burly logs on the low hearth, with its gleaming and- irons and its glassy tilework. A valet was within easy call. To touch the little silver bell on the book- loaded table and summon him was no more difficult than to reach out a hand and take up the last copy of a noted English review, and find out what new Ameri- can author it had vented its insular spleen upon. " She would like all this," he said to himself, sur- veying the apartment, with its low book-cases, its precious bits of sculpture and bric-a-brac picked up abroad, its prostrate gorgeousness of Turkish rugs, its tapestries, its tasteful and luxurious air of faultless bien etre. At the same time he recalled the exquisite arrangement of other rooms, visited perhaps but once a foi-tnight or still more seldom, yet always kept in the most irreproachable order by.a body of trained servants. His entire establishment was an ornate monumental tribute to his own selfishness. He lit a cigar. He never smoked more than two cigars during the twenty-four hours ; one after dining and one a little before bed-time. As he sank into the big cushioned chair and puffed forth the first blue clouds from a Cuban tobacco imported by himself, he faintly repeated, half aloud, the reflection which had before been a silent one : " She would like all this." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 101 He meant that she should not only like it, but marry to get it. He had not by any means done with Olivia Van Rensselaer yet. Indeed, the longer that he sat musing and smoking there in his library, the more convinced he felt that now the ice had been once fairly broken, the true line of action had begun. Meanwhile, at this same hour, Olivia was saying, very earnestly yet sedately, to Mrs. Ottarson : " I don't think it possible that he really could care for me an old man like that. Do you, Aunt Thyrza?" " Oh, I s'pose so ! " cried Mrs. Ottarson, in her galvanic style; " they sometimes do, 'Livia. But it's too awful to think of you goin' that way ! Mercy sakes ! I don't see how you kep' a straight face. I couldn't, 'f I'd been twenty years 'r so younger, and he'd said it to me." " It would have been dreadful to laugh," answered Olivia. " It would have been insulting, you know." " Oh, yes. Of course it would." . . . Mrs. Ottarson wore a meditative look for a moment. "'Livia," she presently murmured, all the celerity and levity gone from her tones, " I dare say there's plenty that would call it an el'gant thing f you. There's mothers that would almost drag a girl o' theirs to the altar if she got such a chance o' goin' there. Oh, yes. I know this world, if any one does." Here she paused again, and a curious, drawn, pei-plexed, irritated look showed itself about the corners of her mouth. " I mus' say, 'Livia, that I would like t' see you his widoic" " Oh, Aunt Thyrza ! " "I'd like if you'd been all through the hateful part of it an' come to the part worth havin'." " Oh, Aunt Thyrza," still pleaded the girl ; " don't ! " 102 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. "I can't help it when I think o' that sumpshus house o' his there in Tenth Street, an' the carriage I've seen him ridin' along the Fifth Av'nu' in. Nobody dis'proves of 't more'n I do when 't comes to a girl downright sellin'' herself. No, indeed! But when I think o' that carriage, 'Livia, with two men up on the box in bottle-green liv'ry, and nobody inside but just him, w'y, 't seems to me 't if some girl wasn't han- kerin' partic'lar after young comp'ny, she might kind o' jus' shut her eyes an' take the jump ! " Olivia broke into a laugh, but at the same time she went up to her aunt and playfully put one hand over the lady's mouth, as if to forbid further volubility in at least a single direction. "I'm not going to shut my eyes and take any such jump," she exclaimed. " And I know very well that you wouldn't either wish or advise it. ... But what I propose, with your permission, to do very soon, Aunt Thyrza, is to move myself and my few posses- sions out of this house. Your people need you I'm certain of it. Before very long I hope to make them feel as if they needed me too. I only hope I can get on half as well there as Ida Strang did. It's just as if she left you to give me a chance, but I shall never leave you for any such reason as hers. I intend never to marry, Aunt Thyrza, as long as I live. . . . Perhaps we can manage to start for Twenty-Third Street by to-morrow afternoon. Don't you believe it will be possible? I want to go as soon as that. If my aunts come again, or if he should come, I want them to find me there with you. That will simply settle every- thing. Now let us try if we can't get away by to- morrow ! " OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 103 VI. THEY did try, and succeeded. That next day, with its hurry of packing, cost Olivia a good many pangs. But she consoled herself somewhat by thinking that possibly, if the day were less busy, she would have had time to suffer much more poignantly. Not the least of her trials came in the discharge of her French maid, a girl to whom she had become attached while abroad, and to whom the necessity of imparting full reasons for their sudden separation was trying enough. In the hasty collection of all those possessions to which she knew that she had a personal right, Olivia came inevitably upon not a few tokens that brimmed her eyes with filial tears. The bitter thought was al- ready at work within her soul that the father she mourned had treated her with heedless cruelty. She strove against the distressing influences of such a re- flection, however, and in a spirit of courage no less dutiful than pathetic, we have heard her tell Mrs. Ottarson that she believed it would form her chief sorrow hereafter, in thinking of her father, to recall how he must have suffered when monetary perplexi- ties assailed him. But now, already, she could feel the impulse of reproach and blame cloud and mar for her the tender brightness of his memory. Her clear com- prehension of moral obliquity, whenever and wherever met, compelled her to pass condemning judgment upon his actions. And she disliked to have his image 104 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. in succeeding time rise before her with this blur across it of unconquerable resentment. It would be so un- happy a thing to go on seeking excuses for him, and perhaps never lighting on one that was truly adequate ! He had so long been her ideal of gentlemen that it was like putting out the sacred tripod-flames in a tem- ple to discontinue accrediting him with virtue above the reach of condonation ! She had, as yet, no conception of how mordant were to be the changes in her life. Eager to avoid dependence where a girl of weaker parts would have al- most thankfully grasped the chance of securing it, she had wholly miscalculated her own strength to enter among surroundings new in the sense of an unimag- ined novelty. The dismissal of her French maid was but a faintly unpleasant pi'elude to graver sacrifices. Stepping, the self-supposed heiress of a large property, down from a home which but yesterday she had looked on as inalienably her own, into a boarding- house full of people with whose types and charactei-- istics she was entirely unacquainted and quickly prepared to disagree, meant a great deal more than fancy at its ablest flight could have informed her. It needed considerable effort for Mrs. Ottarson and her- self to get away from the Washington Square resi- dence, in the meaning of an absolute and final departure, before about half-past three o'clock that afternoon. But they accomplished the feat, and Olivia left with a certainty that she should find her baggage deposited at the abode of her aunt some time before she herself arrived there. It was one of those thoroughly prosaic red-brick, high-stooped houses in the west portion of Twenty- OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 105 Third Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, for which that momentous locality deserves anything but celebrating mention ! There is probably no large city within the present ken of those versed in the topography of such progression, that has grown as un- picturesquely as New York has done. For years it increased the number of its streets with, an attention to quiet ugliness of outline that gave no promise of the lovely Central Park destined as a sort of metro- politan repentance for past misdeeds. From North River to East the hideous avenues have swept, one after another, across town. Smartness of exterior has now and then ci'opped out in the brown-stone front and the plate-glass window-pane, but except for the expression of a certain high-stepping, dapper gentility, there is not much relief from prevalent uncouthness anywhere between Waverley Place and Fifty-Seventh Street. Here the true architectural fire leaps into creditable blaze, and a half-suburban stroll up through Harlem, and even beyond it, will easily make us ready to prophesy how beautiful, how imperial a city New York may one day become, when all the eyes that now mark the domain of its growing grandeur have long ago been sightless ! Mrs. Ottarson's boarding-house might just as well have been either of its next-door neighbors, for any outward individuality presented by it. But inside, it was probably cleaner than a good many of its fellow boarding-houses. Its proprietress endeavored to keep it so, and not without fair success. But the dinginess, the shabbiness, the wear and tear, the out-at-elbows and down-at-the-heel look of nearly everything, she would have found it hard enough to rectify. She had 106 OLIVIA DELAPLAIXE. always managed to hold her own with her boarders, while never attempting to overawe them by the slight- est assumption of undue majesty ; it was extraordinary how skilfully she contrived to steer between austerity on the one hand and over-humility on the other. Such a position as hers it is not easy to assert and maintain ; but she had done both for a number of years with excellent success. Her boarders were for the most part fond of her, and three or four of them had followed her to these ampler quarters from a nar- row and much inferior house in Greenwich Avenue. Others were the result of her improved facilities of ac- commodation, and one or two of these latter she re- garded with pride as the living evidence of her rise in the world. The day of her home-coming was indeed an eventful day for the boarders. Hearing that it was near and probable, they had " clubbed together," as they called the operation, and purchased a water- pitcher of sufficient splendor to glare down the' idea of its not being silver, though in reality but " warranted " plate whatever that epithet may mean. Considering that every boarder in the house would most probably make use of this pitcher quite as often as Mrs. Ottarson would do, there was an apparent lack of self-forgetfulness in the nature of the gift that might wickedly have tempted a humor- ist. It was to be formally presented at the first din- ner over which their returned landlady (who had so nobly devoted herself to the dying hours of an aristo- cratic brother-in-law) should hereafter preside. " Here's your room, 'Livia," said Mrs. Ottarson, after she and her niece had ascended two flights of stairs together, and entered a well-furnished, thor- OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 107 onghly comfortable-looking chamber in the rear of the house. "It's southern exposure, you know, an' there's a fire-place f'r a fire whenever you want one. I'm so glad, dear, that I can see my way to lettin' you have it. It was Mr. Ab'nethy's an' I'm glad he went while I was to your poor pa's. He's one o' the mos* tryin' boarders, Mr. Ab'nethy, I've ever had since I've been in this line o' liviri'. Towels! He used seven a day! He was English, an' had a tub that he flounced round in so ev'ry mornin' it woke Miss Pank, who's got the hall bedroom jus' next to this (you see, I've stuffed up all the cracks o' the door), an' brought on her neural- lerga that she gets bein' a gov'ness, poor thing; she can only afford me eight dollars a week though she pays it ev'ry Saturday so reg'lar! An' then Ab'- nethy's airs! Why, I pride myself on givin' hearty breakfasts to 's many as wants 'em ; but he called him. self an inv'lid, an' yet he'd ring his bell 's late as 'leven o'clock over-night to find out w'ether ther 'd be grid- dle-cakes or not the next mornin'. An' eggs ! Wy, if an egg was too yeller to suit him he'd say 't was green, an' if 't wasn't yeller enough he 'd say there was the commencement of a chicken in it, an' . . ." "Does Ida Strang have as large a room as this?" asked Olivia, while she looked about her, uncon- sciously breaking in upon the details of Mr. Aber- nethy's peculiarities. " Oh, about" answered Mrs. Ottarson, suddenly, at her wit's end for a beneficent and pacifying falsehood. "Let's see . . . hers hasn't got jus' the same closet 'commodations, p'rhaps, but I guess yours an' hers would pretty much tally. Wy do you ask t/tat } 'Livia ? " 108 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. " Oh, nothing," was the reply. This apartment struck Olivia as being rather beyond the deserts of her new position and prospective salary. But she knew so little concerning such matters; it was easy enough to deceive her. Mrs. Ottarson meanwhile hurried on, with great hidden desire to change the subject: "You'll come to dinner, 'Livia ? you needn't if you don't feel 'xactly up to it. You can have it here jus' 's well 's not. Now, do tell me w'ich you'd rather do." "Oh, I'll appear at dinner," said Olivia. She glanced at her trunks, already deposited in the room. "I shall unpack a little, and then I shall be quite ready. Dinner is at six o'clock, isn't it ? " Mrs. Ottarson's boarders dined in the basement. When she first took possession of the house she had pondered the question of whether it would be prefer- able to have one large table in this room or small ones scattered about. The latter arrangement was more advisable from the standpoint of pure fashion, but there was a sociability in the former for which no amount of elegance could compensate. " Oh, it's tonier to have 'em I allow that" Mrs. Ottarson had said of the small tables to a friend who coun- selled her adoption of them. " But I've been so 'cus- tomed, somehow, t' look on my boarders 's if they were friends an' relations. B'sides, I like to sit at the head o' my own table an' do the soup-helpin' an' the carvin'. There's something kind o' human about that ; but I can't see as there is when the lady o' the house takes her victuals off somewheres alone an' leaves her boarders to sep'rate in comp'nies, one OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 109 table pnttin' on airs, to the next an' another gos- sipin' about 'em both." There was not a single vacant seat at the long table this evening, by a quarter past six o'clock. Such a full attendance was rare in the extreme. Even young Tredgett, who worked so hard " down town " and would often appear as late as seven, or possibly a quarter past, giving Ann and Bridget the trouble of keeping three or four plates hot for him (and, it must be added, now and then smelling of something very like whiskey cocktails, in a manner that suggested more pleasurable detaining causes than those of a mercantile character) even young Tredgett man- aged to be present on this highly memorable occasion. Olivia had slipped into the place which Mrs. Ottarson had provided, on her own right. The girl had sup- posed that her presence would hardly be more than just noticed ; but here she speedily found herself to be quite wrong. This was the aristocratic niece at whose father's death-bed their landlady had been performing her ministrant offices. Only yesterday morning the society column in the N~ew York As- teroid had mentioned his death, and added feelingly that it would throw some of our first families into mourning. Of course Olivia must not merely be stared at, but pulled to pieces in a visual sense by the little soulless corporation of the dinner-table. She soon became sorry that she had not dined up- stairs in her own room, after all. Still, the general growing babble of conversation served her, before long, like a friendly agent. If not forgotten by the small community all about her, she was at least tem- porarily ignored. She had asked her aunt to present 110 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. her to nobody for that evening, and Mrs. Ottarson, readily perceptive and congenial as to the motive of such request, had freely granted it. Meanwhile she listened, with sensations in which alarm had begun to play a stealthy part. Her aunt's errors and short- comings, both of grammar and taste, had weeks ago ceased to disconcert her; they were the mistakes of one whose heart was nobility and fidelity, however deep a few flaws of the surface might seem to a casual eye. But thus far her acquaintanceship with Mrs. Ottarson had stood for the girl's one encounter with meagre and feeble human culture. What she now listened to would not, \mder different circumstances, have proved uninteresting ; she was naturally fond of watching various bents or oddities in the dispositions and temperaments of her fellows ; to shrink from an attentive scrutiny of the unrefined lay wholly outside of her antipathies. She might have enjoyed listening and observing at present with the zest that all novelty of this description brings to a healthy and robust young mind, were it not for the furtive but insistent thought that she had undertaken to dwell among these people and accept them as her future companions and associates. The talk had grown merrily jocose. A certain Mr. Spillington was speaking a good deal, by this time, and his pleasantries provoked great applausive mirth. He was one of the important boarders ; he and his wife paid thirty-five dollars a week for a second-story room. He was a large, portly man, with nebulous, bulging, flaxen whiskers, and a prominent nose that shone with a waxy pinkness above his wide, ever- smiling lips. He held a position of superintendence OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. Ill in a noted Eighth Avenue dry-goods emporium, not far away. Some of the ladies who now sat at meat with him had received the honor of his most impres- sive civilities when "shopping" within his august radius. He had a little, pale, narrow-chested wife at his side, who thought him a prince of wits and a flower of manliness, and whom he could have taken in his arms and tossed like a baby without the least muscular effort. She pretended to be shocked at nearly everything he said, but kept her eyes inces- santly rolling to left and right whenever he aired his humorous powers, for the evident purpose of ascer- taining what risible havoc they created. Now and then she would exclaim, in a tenuous, piping treble : " Sam, do stop ! " But there was a world of shy, covert pride in this remonstrance, which had become as habitual with the poor, devotedly uxorious lady as the sleepy trill of a sick bird to its more vigorous and songful mate. " Oh, yes, we've been kicking up our heels here in a tremendous way while you've been gone, Mrs. Ottar- son," Mr. Spillington was sonorously exclaiming. He had a bass voice of untold capacity, and he now made this organ felt in its full volume. "Drowle, don't you remember that night I got you so drunk on lager- beer that you opened one of the parlor windows and called in an organ-grinder to give us a Virginia-reel?" This flight of invention was hailed with noisy laugh- ter. The young gentleman thus daringly addressed would soon be ordained as a minister, and the scandal- ous fiction caused blushes to bathe his timid, beardless face. " I guess I don't remember," he burst forth, with a 112 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. nervous titter, the moment that silence had been re- stored, " and I guess you don't, either." This was not strong as repartee. Everybody saw that Mr. Drowle was painfully embarrassed. Miss Pank, the visiting governess, who sat next him, leaned her head in his direction till one of her pendent front curls (which it had been spitefully said of her that she wore in defiance of the reigning mode because there O O was a large amber wart on one of her cheeks, close to the ear) almost dipped its hyacinthine end into the gravy on her neighbor's plate. "There's such a thing, I think, as carrying jokes a little too far," whispered Miss Pank, and the soon- to-be Reverend Mr. Drowle shot her a grateful glance over one of his burning cheeks. " Mercy sakes ! " now hurried Mrs. Ottarson ; " you don't s'pose, Mr. Spillington, that I'm goin' to b'lieve' you left poor Mr. Drowle ''nough beer to get intoxi- cated on ? Not you, sir ! I've seen you toss off too many pitcherf uls to be gammoned that way." There was a certain Mr. Sti'uthers, who had given a wild guffaw of delight at the end of Mr. Spilling- ton's last speech, and he gave another wild guffaw now. He was much pitted with small-pox, and had beady black eyes and the slimmest of necks, with an " Adam's-apple " that looked like a ligneous excres- cence on a slender tree. Every time that he gave his hilarious laugh, the "Adam's-apple" would take a little upward bound, as though it were some sort of curious machine for measuring the degrees of humor reached by any occupant of Mrs. Ottarson's boarding- house. A plump, cherubic maiden, with a mouth like a OLIVIA DELAPLAINE 113 rosebud and two dimples looking like tiny bees that had come to sip honey from so tempting a flower, sat next to Mr. Struthers. This was his betrothed, Serena Sugby, the daughter of the well-known author- ess, Aurelia Sugby, who detested the jocund Mr. Spillington, and prided herself on having more than once disastrously worsted him in a battle of tongues. Serena, a very lambkin of pranksomeness beside her dignified and almost funereal mother, lifted one fat little hand and began to slap her laughter-convulsed lover between his shoulder-blades. " Serena ! " remonstrated her mother, in severest undertone, " when will you learn the simplest rudi- ments of lady-like deportment?" And then, while Serena giggled penitently and smoothed her canary- colored bang, Mrs. Sugby exchanged a glance of mutual disgust across the table with her friend, Miss Pank. " Oh, yes, yes," continued Mr. Spillington, rumina- tive and incorrigible ; " we've had some famous old times, Mrs. Ottarson, while we've been running the house ourselves. I suppose I'd better not say any- thing about the surprise-party we gave Mrs. Sugby, one night, in her own room." " Sam, do stop ! " twittered his wife, rolling her eyes to this side and that, as if determined on seeing just who appreciatively laughed and who did not. Mrs. Aurelia Sugby stiffened herself. She abomi- nated Mi\ Spillington, but she had always regarded him as a person to be " put down " without much difficulty. She was the well-known Aurelia Sugby, author of "Beryline, the Babe of Sorrow;" "Bertha, or the Bride of an Afternoon ; " " Teresa, the Type- 114 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. writing Girl," and many other fictional works of an astounding popularity, as the editors of the weekly journals in which they had run serially for the delight of innumerable avid readers, could plainly testify. She bore no resemblance whatever to her blonde, mettlesome little daughter. She was dark, emaci- ated, with a lantern jaw and a thin-lipped, disputa- tious mouth. She had a great opinion of herself. The editor of the New York Fireside Friend had made a contract with her to furnish him two con- tinued stories a year, one sprightly sketch (" with plenty of love in it") every week, and a fortnightly poem " thrown in," for a remarkably handsome annual sum. The poem was to be as much as possible like that piece of lyrical work which she had once written, and made such an immense hit by writing, entitled " Only the Baby's Empty Shoe." She had followed up this classic stroke of success by "Only a Mother's Tear," "Only a Cradle Void," and "Only a Wee White Sock ; " but somehow none of these latter cre- ations had achieved the wide vogue of the first. Her verse was said to touch the popular heart, and like certain other verse of the same reputed efficacy, it was quite remorseless in rhyming "sound " with "brown," or "slumber" with "under." But the popular heart had beaten no less responsively to it on that account. Bold Mr. Spillington was not to be dismayed. In previous conflicts with Mrs. Sugby he had always pre- served his temper, which is considerably more than she had done. For this reason, if for no other, he had believed himself repeatedly to have been the victor. He now said, with his broadest smile, looking at Mrs. Ottarson : OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 115 " Oh, it was a very fine affair very, indeed. It was a masquerade." Up darted Mr. Struthers's " Adam's-apple," and a roar left his lips, followed by a choking sound. His fiancee^ forgetful of all past injunctions, gleefully lifted her clenched rosy fist, and pounded him five or six times on the back, as though the performance were great sport, and at the same time a matter of distinct duty. Her mother was too absorbed for the usual ad- monitory " Serena ! " this time. She was indeed bent upon the overthrow of the audacious Mr. Spillington. " Ah ? " she said, with a sepulchral blandness. " A masquerade in my apartment, sir ? And, pray, what sort of a masquerade ? " This was precisely the opportunity by which Mr. Spillington's diabolic fun-poking was balefully stimu- lated. As he prepared to answer, Mrs. Ottarson struck in, with joviality, but with a vocal note of seri- ousness also : " Now jus' look here, Sam Spillington (you limb, you !), stop this tomfool'ry ! Try your nonsense on somebody that enjoys it. Do 's I tell you ! " "Mrs. Sugby seemed to enjoy it very much," as- serted Mr. Spillington, as he gave one of his big, vapory whiskers a swift twirling stroke. " That is, if you mean our surprise-masquerade. The costumes were all so well-chosen. You've heard of Charles Dickens parties, of course. This was an Aurelia J. Sugby party. We all dressed like characters from our esteemed friend's favorite works of fiction. Struthers, there, he went as Del Monte, the heavy Spanish vil- lain in ... what is the name of that most exciting romance? And Drowle, poor fellow, he was Claribel, 116 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. the Sewing-Macbine Girl. His figure was just slender enough to suit the female get-up, and then we curled his hair, and parted it in the middle, so that. ..." But Mr. Spillington's voice was now drowned by tumultuous peals of laughter. Olivia sat and won- dered what they had heard to plunge them in such ecstasies of mirth. She felt, on her own side, merely the discordant condemnation of one who sees the shafts fly from an insolent personality, reckless how deep they pierce. She had not been prepossessed by Mrs. Aurelia Sugby; few people ever were. But she now became conscious of a kind of sympathy with that lady's grimness and acidity, as the latter, having waited for a pause in the prevailing clamor, somewhat hoarsely said : *' You exhibit, sir, a most exact familiarity with my published works, truly ! " " Oh, yes," exclaimed Mr. Spillington, with that temerity by which the over-indulged humorist will tell how dizzying an elixir applause can brew him, " I as- sure you, madam, that I read the Blood-and- Thunder Gazette every Saturday night." " Sam, do stop ! " bleated his wife. . . . But her roll- ing eyes could now detect few signs of amusement on the various faces they swept. Mr. Spillington, like all jokers who serve the capricious approval of the min- ute, had for once over-shot his mark. His last sally had fallen pointlessly flat. Mrs. Sugby's admiring readers were not in the minority this evening. It was well enough playfully to antagonize her, but to hurl scorn at her luminous talent was quite another posture. Even Mr. Struthers, oblivious of his guffaw, refrained from a smile, and if the up-springing of his " Adam's- OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 117 apple " was to be calculated on as an indication of Mr. Spillington's triumph or defeat, its fixity now conveyed but a single sombre meaning. Mrs. Sugby's field of attack was ready for the mar- shalling of her forces. She made no delay ; her sober eyes kindled with an uncompromising spark, and the smile that touched her lips had the gleam in it of a naked blade. " I do not write for the journal you have mentioned, sir," she said, amid the silence which had ensued. " I haven't ever even perused that periodical, as I'm aware of. I presume you find time to do so, sir, but if you'll allow me to express myself free on that point, I think it would be much more suitable if you perused, instead, a book on the manners of good society." " How scorchingly sarcastic ! " whispered Miss Pank to Mr. Drowle, as a stillness followed these inimical words. Mr. Spillington did not appear to think so, however. " Are you the author of such a book, madam ? " he in- quired. " I didn't know you went into good society." Here he gave a voluminous cough, and added, as soon as its accompanying throat spasm would permit : " That is ... a ... of course, in your writings, I should say. I supposed you confined yourself mostly to low life." Even the amiable Serena had by this time become incensed. " LOAV life ! " she exclaimed, looking at her mother, as though shocked by a charge so grievous. "Why, ma, your Coralie Talbot Montmorency in ' Bertha, or the Bride of an Afternoon,' is one of the greatest heiresses in England." " My dear," said her mother, throwing a glance of 118 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. untold contumely upon Mr. Spillington, " the gentle- man doesn't read my works. He hasn't time. He's too busy among the other man-milliners and counter- jumpers at Bigsbee and Company's, in Eighth Avenue." Abusiveness could hardly go further than this. But so far Mrs. Sugby had, nevertheless, won the day. The suppressed murmur that greeted her bludgeon- flinging sentence was one chiefly of approbation. She had defended her intellectual offspring, the treasured produce of her brain-labor. More than one lady or gentleman present had flushed over the perils of Bery- line or of Bertha. But Mrs. Ottarson here dashed in between the com- batants. She showed herself the most belligerent of peace-makers. Her black eyes flashed savagely at Mr. Spillington. "You're served jus' right!" she cried. " You began it all, an' you've only got your dues." Then to Mrs. Sugby : " But don't you say 'nother word, ma'am. We've had 'nough wranglin', I guess, for one evening." Then, finally, to both : " If either of you does begin again, Pll up 'n leave the room, an' take my niece, here, along with me. A pretty piece of goin's-on for my first night home and her first 'pear- ance 't my table ! " Olivia, coloring, bit her lip. This allusion to herself fired in her a new pride, and made an inward voice sound to her, as if saying that she had no place among men and women stamped with such coarseness as she had already witnessed here. But self-reproach quickly overcame that impetuous little secret vaunt ; it seemed like disloyalty to the aunt who had saved her from a far worse indignity that of becoming a pensioner, a OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 119 dependent, a recipient of doled-out alms from others. The greater and worthier pride in her sped to destroy the lesser and meaner one. But still she remained keenly discomforted. It rushed through her anxious mind, while the battle be- tween Mrs. Sugby and Mr. Spillington threatened at any instant to break the bounds of their landlady's au- thoritative reprimand : " How can I endure living among people like this ? Are not their world and my world thousands of miles apart ? What would poor papa say if he could know now that I have drifted into these surroundings ? And how can I bear myself among them ? Even if I go on, with as much bravery and control as I can possibly muster, shall I not in the end make the dreariest fail- ure of it all ? " Meanwhile, whether betokening an enforced armis- tice, or only the ominous calm that precedes a more desperate engagement, there had fallen over, the entire dinner-table that lull which is so much more significant when it comes after the flurry and turmoil of a heated skirmish. 120 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. VII. BUT Mrs. Ottarson had carried her point. With a rather embarrassed giggle, which bespoke coercive surrender, Mr. Spillington subsided beneath the last scathing coup de grace of Mrs. Sugby. A buzz of talk now succeeded, from whose complex web could no doubt have been unravelled many different opinions concerning the recent passage-at-arms. But the gen- eral decision went against Mr. Spillington. " Your husband will have to apologize to Mrs. Sugby," said a certain Mrs. Disosway, who sat next to the wife of Mr. Spillington and now addressed that lady. Mrs. Disosway abhorred the late assailant of the celebrated authoress ; he was always cracking his inane jokes at somebody's expense ; he had once pre- sumed to crack one of them at hers. She was a sort of concert-singer and had been an operatic prima donna before that, and he had asked her, one day, when she spoke with fervor of how deep and fond were her hopes of heaven, whether she expected to meet her lost voice there. This was a view of celes- tial benignancy which Mrs. Disosway had not felt at all inclined to take. She did not by any means regard her vocal proficiency in the light of a departed bless- ing. She was a stout, sallow woman, with an apocry- phal look about the lustrous black of her fancifully dis- posed tresses, and a pair of eyebrows that had the appearance of having been ruthlessly burnt off at their OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 121 roots, leaving only two pale, smoke-colored arches to contrast with the copious coiffure above them. She was undoubtedly very decayed and artificial to con- template, and it did not require much imagination on the part of any one who cai-efully observed her to decide that perhaps an organ of the most worn and precarious quality might lie below her tallowy and sagging lips. ~~ O L "My husband will have to apologize?" appealed Mrs. Spill'mgton, with her wan face drawn into lines of the most incredulous disdain. " Dear me ! I'd like to know why ! " " Oh, I'll tell you why," retoi'ted Mrs. Disosway, grandly, " if you really would like to know. He spoke most insultingly to Mrs. Sugby." " Pshaw ! " fumed Mrs. Spillington. " I guess you don't know my Sam, if you think he'd bemean himself like that, when it was only a joke, and she understood it was only one. . . . And to insinuate that my Sam was a man-milliner and a counter-jumper ! She might better apologize ! " " She didn't insinuate it at all," said Mrs. Disosway. " She stated it, in just so many words, Mrs. Spil- lington." "Yes, she did" struck in a gentleman with a dense fall of long iron-gray hair that surged quite imparted from a bloodless face, and who sat on Mrs. Disosway's other side. He was a spiritualist, and his ardent faith in the materializations wrought by Katy Convoy, the last mediumistic idol of the hour, had been smitten by the jeers of Mr. Spillington. "It seems to me, ma'am, begging your pardon, that I never saw any- body as well laid out as your husband was a few 122 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. minutes ago. And you may tell him that, with my compliments." Mrs. Spillington showed two rows of large and not flawless teeth, which her small, wilted face, with its unhealthy tints, did not make less unfortunate as the kind of disclosure brought about by her bantering and twitting smile. " Oh, I guess I won't tell my Sam anything with your compliments, Mr. Smear. If there's any talk about laying anybody out you might recollect what quick work he once made with your ghosts and spirits and things." Mrs. Disosway and Mr. Smear put their heads to- gether in low laughter of vast irony. " Quick work ! " whispered Mrs. Disosway in the large ear of her companion, with its big cartilaginous flange, that kept the torrent of gray locks from breaking bounds and inundating the clean-shorn, bluish cheek. "Oh, to think, Mr. Smear, of that midget trifling so with the great truths of Eliphalet K. Tomlinson and Cynthia Jarvis Duryea, as we know them! Isn't it too pitiful?" Mr. Smear looked as if he thought it was quite too pitiful. Mrs. Disosway had "assisted" at several seances held by both the just-named mediums, in Mr. Smear's company, and she had also heard Mrs. Cynthia Jarvis Duryea in a trance-lecture. The ex- prima-donna thought it really unfortunate that Mr. Smear, on such occasions, should wear that gray shawl, fastened at one shoulder by that tarnished- looking buckle, instead of the more conventional over- coat. Still, his acquaintance had been a source of such comfort to her ! Had he not been the means of opening her soul to the marvels of spiritualism and of OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 123 bringing her into contact with her deceased second husband ? The late Mr. Disosway had not, it is true, proved a model spouse; still, communications from him in a dark room under conditions of a truly awful solemnity, had cast an idealizing glamour over the hard fact of his having conducted himself like a reprobate for several years previous to his entrance into the summer land. But Mr. Spillington, like all persons who volunteer amusement of a mercilessly disrespectful kind, had se- cured adherents and supporters. There were toes under Mrs. Ottarson's mahogany, this evening, on which the coltish hoof of his so-termed humor had not yet trod- den. Hence a certain share of the loquacious bustle that now prevailed was not adverse to him ; it excused him on the ground of *' not meaning anything but his fun, you know," and of " only wanting to wake us all up." Mrs. Ottarson, having laid the tempest, tried to diffuse forgetfulness of its ended rage. Of necessity, her efforts were restricted to a minor audience, and it is possible that overheard semi-tones of criticism might have spurred the quieted contestants into a fresh duel of wits, had not the arrival of dessert brought with it the time for presenting that fond testimonial of the silver-plated pitcher which was to terminate this ex- ceptional repast. It was a most unsuitable hour for such presentation. Mr. Spillington, as the only inmate of the boarding house who possessed the least oratorio talent, had been chosen to offer the gift, with some kind of apt accom- panying speech. Meanwhile the pitcher itself had been placed in charge of a Mrs. Tingle, a little wiry lady, with a tiny pair of glasses forever on her tiny 124 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. near-sighted eyes, and a gown that always looked as if it were about actually to touch the floor, but never did so, swinging nimbly clear of any such contact with an oscillation that suggested unforsaken crino- line. Mrs. Tingle had a passion for economy, and it was agony for her to hear of any article having been purchased at a dime lower than she could herself obtain it elsewhere. Hence, when the question of the pitcher arose, she sturdily fought against its being procured up-town. She knew a shop in Maiden Lane where you could get plated ware so cheap that it was a positive sin not to go there. She had got her own water-pitcher there ; you could see it engirt with bric-a-brac on the adjustable bedstead in her apart- ment, when that harmless incarnation of domestic hypocrisy was trying to pass itself off as the most undeceitful of side-boards. She had carried her point, and a pitcher almost the duplicate of her own had been found in Maiden Lane. As the servants were beginning to pass round the oranges, Mr. Spillington made a sign to her, and she slipped away from the table, hurrying upstairs. She had been a good deal flustered by the late disturbance, thinking it in horri- ble taste on both sides, but having a partisan feeling of indulgence for Mr. Spillington, whom she con- sidered such a "comical, funning gentleman," and "the life of the house." When she had regained her seat, with a very tell-tale bulge in the shawl that she had thrown over her slim shoulders, Mrs. Ottarson, whose attention had been roused by her xinwonted proceedings, would probably have addressed her con- cerning them, if Mr. Spillington, sensationally clearing his throat, had not now risen. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 125 He commenced an address to Mrs. Ottarson, in which rhetoric was called upon for her most flowery and prismatic tributes. He spoke of their landlady's beaming visage having dawned once more upon the expectant gaze of her boarders like a long-clouded sun through envious but relenting vapors. He com- pared her genial spirits to the blandness of a spring morning, and her matronly charms of person to the mellow richness of a midsummer afternoon. At this stage in the complimentary harangue, his wife's eyes rolled from one face to another with a magnificent pride in the sonorous periods of her lord. Once or twice the poor little lady's lips moved as though she were about to utter her time-honored remonstrance of " Sam, do stop ! " But she was saved from the dire un fitness of such ejaculation by an opportune access of common-sense, and went on rolling her eyes instead of indulging in the old playful comment. And now Mr. Spillington waxed still more picturesque, blending pathos with his florid imageries. Mrs. Ottarson, the well-beloved custodian of their daily comforts, had gracefully, and almost at a moment's notice, exchanged the horn of hospitable plenty, whose contents had been so freely poured upon these, her admiring friends for the ... for the (he cleared his throat a great deal just here, as even the noblest orators will occa- sionally do when they find themselves in the presence of a dangerously inexact metaphor) for the . . . ahem ! sombre apparel of the sick-nurse, and the ... er ... gloom of the ... er ... chamber of ... er ... dissolution. "Death" seemed a rather strong word to use before Olivia, and "dissolution" answered de- cidedly better. And then Mr. Spillington turned 126 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. toward Mrs. Tingle, who was only a short distance away from him, and who instantly handed up the pitcher she had been concealing, which was passed onward until it reached the spokesman's grasp. " Accept, my dear Mrs. Ottarson," he now said, lifting the pitcher in both hands as though he were about to consecrate it by some impressive ceremonial, " this in- sufficient and yet warmly affectionate proof of our . . ." But here occurred a sudden most unforeseen inter- ruption. It was made by Mrs. Tingle. She probably meant to whisper, but what she accomplished was nearer to a plaintive scream. " Oh, dear ! " she broke forth, " I've made a mis- take. I'm so near-sighted, and and my room was dim. Yes, I I've made a mistake." Mr. Spillington, with the pitcher still raised aloft in an attitude that seemed to him particularly fine as an idea and was majestic enough to be called sacerdo- tal as a performance, here turned somewhat scowl- ingly to the agitated speaker. " A mistake ? " he said, in low, gruff voice. " What do you mean, ma'am?" Seeing that every eye was now turned upon her, Mrs. Tingle palpably shivered. She drooped her eyes, and then raised them again with an expression of acute despair. " The pitcher,' she gasped. " Don't ! It it isn't it" "Isn't it?" cried several voices in amazed concert. "No," stammered Mrs. Tingle. Agitation always produced in her the painfnl effect of completely depressing her lower lip, till it dropped below her under teeth in flaccid limpness. "I mean it's the wrong pitcher! It's it's my old one, and not her new one ! Oh, I'm so sorry." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 127 There was a momentary silence, and then came a roar of laughter. But all the while Mr. Spillington preserved his consequential posture, and when calm was restored he said severely to Mrs. Tingle : " Oh very well, madam. Then your blunder will compel me to present this pitcher, so to speak, by proxy for the other that's all. ... Be sure," he added, while he now gave the piece of plated ware into Mrs. Ottar- son's outstretched hands, " that you don't allow your- self to be bamboozled out of the pitcher that really belongs to you." And then they all roared again except Aurelia Sugby, and a very few others. Mrs. Sugby would not have done more than smile now, no matter what had been the terms of her acquaintance- ship with Mr. Spillington ; for slang was deeply dis- tressing to her, whenever and wherever lighted on, and she rejoiced in making her newsboys, her boot- blacks, her street waifs and even her thieves and des- peradoes talk with an elegance and correctness of diction that might stingingly reproach certain other contemporary novelists for their over-realistic methods. Olivia, when it was all over," and she had left the dinner-table for that most pleasurable privacy which her own room afforded, felt as if she had been violat- ing the requisitions of retirement due her deep mourn- ing, and had witnessed a theatrical display in the teeth of opposite inclinations. An environment like this, as she clearly realized, must hereafter bristle with vexatious trials. But she meant to be most brave, and to hide as well as she possibly could from her aunt's detection the very effort of fortitude that she exerted. On next meeting Mrs. Ottarson, she per- mitted no semblance of complaint or of adverse criti- 128 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. cism to evidence the weightsome discouragement that oppressed her. And the next few days of residence in Twenty-Third Street had the effect of brightening her gloomy outlook. Inexperience prevented her from comprehending how light, and in a manner nominal, were the duties assigned her. She soon dis- covered herself possessed of a far more liberal leisure than she "supposed would be at all compatible with her new position. But the tact of Mrs. Ottarson in con- cealing just to what real extent Ida Strang's discon- tinued employments had been made like those of a comparative sinecure, quite evaded Olivia's untrained discernment. She failed to suspect that very little in the way of household aid was asked of her, and that this very little had been dexterously adapted to her novitiate as a bread-winner. Still, the people whom she must now not merely meet and know, but meet and know on conditions of thorough equality, incessantly dealt her wounds as sharp as they were unconscious. No high-strung daintiness had to do with her inward revolt against them. It was simply, as she more than once told her own thoughts, that she felt dedassee and ill at ease among them. In education she was the superior of most of them, and where others were as mentally cultured as herself, their errors from the line of man- nerly usage to which she had conformed for so long without even recognizing her own implanted acqui- escence, were a source of continual aversion. She began to perceive that there were innumerable devia- tions from the code of good breeding with which she had never before met the rough-and-ready means of acquainting her own antipathies. She had had until OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 129 now no lucid idea of how many different ways there were of not being a gentleman or a gentlewoman. That she should have gone to live with Mrs. Ott ar- son had struck her other two aunts, when they first heard of it, as an act grossly unpardonable. Olivia had found time to write each of the ladies a civil little note, saying that she had preferred this course to any other which might be recommended. Mrs. Satterthwaite, a half-hour after receiving the news that her brother's child would become a species of upper servant in a boarding-house, jumped into her carriage, accompanied by her eldest daughter, Emme. line, and had herself driven to the home of her sister, Mrs. Auchincloss. The latter received her kindred with a mournful smile ; she was holding in her hand her own letter from Olivia, recently received. And then, a little later, while the sisters were lamenting together, Madeleine Auchincloss came into the room and joined her cousin, Emmeline. These two young ladies cordially disliked one an- other. Though they were nearly of the same age, Emmeline had been out four seasons and Madeleine only two. Madeleine was jealous of her cousin for being the sort of personally attractive girl who would have shone as an indubitable belle even if she were not a Satterthwaite; whereas Madeleine, with her thinnish figure and dark, small-featured face, would never have shone the least in the world as a belle if she had not been an Auchincloss besides. Emmeline was large, and had been irreverently called (perhaps from the springy, mercurial style of her walk and of her step in the dance) " bouncing." But she had the low, broad brow, the lustrous eyes, the brilliant smile, 130 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. and the full, deep bosom of a young Roman girl. Men were sure to flock about her wherever she went, and her cold, daring, imperious air both fascinated and repelled. She thought Madeleine " slow," prud- ish and affected, just as Miss Auchincloss thought her "fast," romping and indecorous. But Emmeline was jealous of her cousin for the atmosphere of extreme propriety and selectness always floating about her like some rare scent impossible to secure. The Satter- thwaite name was talismanic in society, but the Auchincloss name was a degree or two more so, and Madeleine appeared forever to be covertly pluming herself on this delicate yet distinct grade of ascend- ency. Emmeline always had a sense of being objected to when in her cousin's company, and at such times Madeleine felt that her own placid bienseance was an object of intangible satire. Since they had been little girls together, these relations, influenced only by their respective ages, had endured between them, and it was safe to assert that they would be modified or destroyed by no fresh force but that resulting from the future rise or fall which marriage would effect for either. Madeleine had long ago resolved never to marry unless she gave her slender, milky little hand to a man of much greater wealth than her own and a position quite on a level with that of the Auchin- closses. Emmeline had resolved to marry as well as she could, but she had reached that cooler state of matrimonial exploration Avhen the loftier peaks begin to loom a trifle insurmountable and the lesser ones offer chances consolatory if not inspiriting. " You are looking so very well," said Madeleine to her cousin, in the calm, smooth voice which was OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 131 almost a counterfeit of her mother's, and while the two elder ladies were holding converse but a short distance away. "You always manage to keep your fine color, my dear ; don't you ? " Emmeline had never cared to have her color re- marked ; Madeleine knew it, and the other was well aware that Madeleine did know it. Miss Satterthwaite put her handsome, firm-throated head a little on one side, and answered with a note or two of laughter : " I don't manage ; good health manages for me. It's a source of immense vanity to me, my perfect health ; I'm always enchanted to be complimented on it ... Do you still have your wretched headaches, my dear Lina?" " We are so quiet now, since poor uncle's death," said Madeleine, with a faint, flickering smile. " That makes a difference with me, don't you know? . . . By the way, Lily Ten Eyck told me that she saw yon out, somewhere, quite recently . . . where was it? She also told me that . . . but I forget." Emmeline shook her head in serene negation. " Saw me! Why, there's nothing going on so late as this, you know. Lily is always imagining things. Besides, uncle's death has the same effect on us, naturally, as on your family. Of course, there are still dinners. But we refuse them, just as you do." " I remember, now," said Madeleine, with dove-like gentleness. " It was at the new exhibition of the Academy of Design ; it was last night, I believe." Emmeline started, and laughed somewhat nervously. "Was Lily Ten Eyck there?" she Hurriedly ques- tioned. Then growing composed again, she continued: " I went, but mamma did not." 132 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. "Ah! you went?" said Madeleine. Those three quiet words conveyed a volume of soft reproach. She had had no move regard for her dead uncle than for any one whose demise had lately been chronicled in the newspapers ; but " a death in the family " meant a sacred obligation to refrain from everything that resembled festivity and especially when that death concerned a Van Rensselaer, for which name (not- withstanding the misalliance that had begotten her cousin Olivia) she entertained deep reverence. " Yes, I went," declared Emmeline, with a sudden show of that empire sur soi-meme for which she had already become noted among friends and foes. " Mamma did not go, however." " Surely not ! " murmured Madeleine. "The Plunketts took me," said Emmeline, thor- oughly composed now. " The . . . Plunketts ? " queried Madeleine, with a sudden titter. " Excuse me, but it's such an odd name ! " And she tittered again. "Yes," said Emmeline, "it is, rather, isn't it? They're very nice people; you wouldn't be likely to know them, however . . . they're fond of art and books and such matters." (Emmeline had probably read twenty books herself in the past four years, and those were novels of a not very elevated type.) " I have met people of that sort," said Madeleine, a little stiffly. "They didn't have extraordinary names, as far as I can recollect, but I found them very nice, notwithstanding. They were all men, though. Papa brought them from the Centennial Club." Here Emmeline laughed a little. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE, 133 " Oh, you mean the club that papa thinks so dread- fully rowdy?" "Rowdy?" echoed Madeleine. "Did your father really say that?" "Why, yes, my dear; I heard him say it to your father's face. Wasn't it perfectly atrocious of him ? " " Papa thinks his club, the Metropolitan, full of the most objectionable members," Madeleine now said. " Oh, I suppose that's true enough," answered Ern- meline; "but then you know, my dear, they're not shabby and Bohemian members, like painters and writers." "Are the Plunketts shabby and Bohemian?" asked Madeleine, in her very sweetest tones. " Oh, no ... The eldest son, Arthur Plunkett, goes out sometimes in society. I dare say you have seen him." "Never, to my knowledge," said Madeleine coldly. A vague, self-conscious touch about her cousin's reply had made her wonder if there could be any chance of Emmeline taking up, at a future day, with some such person as this Arthur Plunkett. " And you are very good friends, you and he?" she added. " Passably good friends. His mother has quiet little dinners, that rest one after the big whirl of things." "Oh, I see," said Madeleine, leaning her small head, with its bands of glossy dark hair, a little backward, and giving to her upper lip the faintest curl. "You mean that they are people at the outskirts who are trying to push themselves farther in. I think it is so very good of you to treat such people civilly. I con- fess that I never can." 134 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. "Ah, my dear," returned Emrneline, looking pen- sively down at the smai't freshness of her semi- mourning apparel ; " I am afraid it will never do for you and me to hold ourselves so much above the outsiders hereafter." " Hereafter?" questioned Madeleine, with the curl of her lip increasing. " Why, pray, what do you mean ? " " Oh, I refer to this absurd action on Cousin Olivia's part. Of course you've learned of it, as your mother has been notified." And just then Mrs. Auchincloss was heard, softly exclaiming: "It seems as if that unpleasant woman must have tempted her to do it. And yet Olivia writes that she does it of her own free will." " Very well, then," retorted Mrs. Satterthwaite, with the clear nip of spite in her accent ; " Olivia shall take the consequences as far as Bleecker and myself and the children are concerned. I know it's wretched form to disown your relations ; but we are not going to follow the girl there. If she comes to us, that is another matter." "I suppose we ought to remember who she is," said Mrs. Auchincloss, with a musing shake of the head. "It appears to me, Aunt Letitia," exclaimed Emme- line, " that she has taken pains to remind us she's the niece of Mrs. Ottarson." "Yes, I know, my dear," responded Mrs. Auchin- closs, who thought her sister's eldest daughter shock- ingly forward, even for a girl in her fourth season, and gave almost daily thanks that her Madeleine had not that curt American way; "but blood is blood, and we, who come from a very old and honorable race, cannot afford to forget this." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 135 "I don't forget it," said Emraeline, tossing her prettily bonneted head. " But Olivia's behavior makes me very sorry indeed that Uncle Houston forgot it a good many years ago." Mrs. Auchincloss gave her sister a look that seemed to say : " Shall you not rebuke this unmannerly pert- ness?" But Mrs. Satterthwaite did not rebuke it. She merely remarked, with a careless glance in her daughter's direction : " Oh, that's one of the ancient bygones, Em. There's no use of raking it up nowa- days." "I'm not, mamma," said Emmeline. "It's Olivia who is raking it up and very disagreeably, I should say " "What a loud, rude, married style that girl, Em- meline, has!" declared Mrs. Auchincloss, after the Satterthwaites had departed. " We must always bear in mind, Madeleine, that as a family we are entirely ourselves, and quite distinctly, separated from all other branches of it." " Of course, mamma," assented Madeleine, who had heard this kind of pronunciamiento, in various modes of utterance, almost from her cradle. " But do you think of going to see Olivia, really, after the way she has conducted herself? Do you actually think of go- ing to see her, mamma, in that house?" Mrs. Auchincloss heaved a sigh. " My dear Made- leine," she answered, " I have not yet clearly made up my mind. I must consuh) with your father. There are duties in life which we must not shirk. Olivia is very young. If I do go it will be an ordeal. Per- haps I ought to go. I will reflect, and as I said, I 136 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. will talk it all over with your father. His advice will of course be precious to me, as it always is. In any case, we will not jump to conclusions, after the style of the Satterthwaites." Madeleine went up to her mother and kissed her on one of her chilly little cheeks as if she were going through some long-revered domestic rite. " You will certainly do what is proper, mamma," she said ; " you never fail to do that." "Thank you, my dear," replied Mrs. Auchincloss, accepting the kiss, but not returning it. ... Three or four evenings later, Mrs. Satterthwaite, in her showy and almost gorgeous Fifth Avenue draw- ing-room was the recipient of a visit from her old and valued friend, Mr. Spencer Delaplaine. "How good of you!" she said, as she shook hands with him. "You needn't tell me that your horrid gout is worse. I know about its being so." Delaplaine made a sad little motion. " I suppose you saw me limp as I came in," he answered. "Oh, not that. Suydarn Desbrosses told you'd spoken of it at the club the other evening. I was so sorry for you! Take a more comfortable chair do!" " No, thanks. This is a Sleepy Hollow for comfort. All your chairs always are. I am a trifle under the weather." . He looked about him, as if some other occupant of the great room might be discoverable amid its rich assortment of sofas, fauteuils and screens. He rubbed a hand, against one of his knees as he went on speaking. "Yes, my devil has broken loose again. But the doctor is doing everything to quiet him. You stare at me as if you thought I ought OLIVIA DELAPLAINK 137 to be home in bed. Well, I shan't attempt to contra- dict you if that is your opinion." "Pshaw, I've seen you when you looked better," said Mrs. Satterthwaite, who did not recall ever having seen him when he looked worse. "But you're not seriously ill. It's very plain to me that you're not, Spencer." "Not yet," he returned grimly. "As it is," he went on, fixing a regard upon her that she, who knew him so well, instantly knew to betoken some matter of moment, " I should not have ventured out at all this evening." "Perhaps you're right there, inhospitable though it may sound in me. I never recollect such a ghastly May ; do you ? " "Oh, there's never any May in this country. I thought you'd learned that long ago." "We occasionally get a few hours of sunshine, though, and a wind not altogether easterly. I've known nice days when the Coaching Club paraded, for instance." "Yes which it didn't deserve to have. Provi- dence should conspire, every year, with the American Eagle to drench it through for being such a piece of Anglomaniacal brummagem." "Oli, don't!" Mrs. Satterthwaite pleaded; "you make me think of what might have happened to my Emmeline. She was invited to go next Thursday in Tom Forsythe's coach. She was to have the box seat, poor girl ! " "And isn't she going?" "Oh, dear, no. Houston was her own blood-uncle, you know. One must draw a line somewhere, as I 138 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. told Em. And that reminds me, Spencer Have you heard of Olivia's delightful caper ? " "You mean her going to live with her maternal aunt?" "'Maternal aunt 'has a highly misleading sound," said Mrs. Satterthwaite, with a bitter smile. " It puts that dire Mrs. Ott arson in quite too respectable a light." She looked extremely wrathful now ; she bit her lip, folded her arms for a few seconds, and leaned back in her chair, watching her companion between half-shut eyelids. "Olivia is old enough to know better, and my side of the family, from Bleecker to little Lulu, shall give her to understand that we think so. Why, Letitia and I both said to her the day we told her about the state of her father's affairs, that our homes would be hers from now till she mar- ried ! And then to prefer that woman's house ! And they say that a foreign education has a refining influ- ence ! My Elaine, you remember, was crazy to go abroad with Lucy Van Ness when she was sent there to school a few years ago. I'm glad enough, now, that I kept her at home." There was a silence. Delaplaine was slowly smooth- ing his lame knee again. His keen gray eyes were downcast while he did so, but he now lifted them to Mrs. Satterthwaite's face as he said : "It was about Olivia that I came here to speak with you. Indeed, if it had not been for her I would not have come, I can assure you ; for I am ill very ill, and at this moment " He paused abruptly. He had grown strangely pale, and his lips twitched as if from some fierce attack of pain. Mrs. Satterthwaite sprang to her feet in sharp alarm. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 139 VIII. " No, no ; it is nothing," he said, in answer to her anxious look. Already, during a few seconds, his cheeks had won a less ghastly tint, and the signs of distress had fled from his mouth and eyes. " I'm bet- ter. . . . The doctor warned me I might have one or two visitations like these confound" them ! I ought not to have come out to-night ; my hateful malady must be nursed for some little time, or it will get beyond the powers of nursing." He took her hand, pressing it, and watching her solicitous face with a smile that was nearer to being tender than any like expression she had seen there more than once or twice in all her long acquaintance with him. " Sit down again, I beg, and listen to me. I've something that I want to tell you." She obeyed him, but wheeled her chair closer to his before she again seated herself. "I knew you had some important thing to say," she answered, leaning forward and fixing her gaze upon him very earnestly. "I somehow saw it in your face when I first met you." "I didn't know I carried my heart on my sleeve like that." " Your heart ! you haven't I mean you've always tried to make people believe you hadn't one." He set bis lips rather sourly together, and shook his gray head. "I sha'n't have one long, if this gout con- 140 OLIVIA VELAPLAINE. eludes to fly to it. ... But that doesn't concern the present question." "Well, and pray what is the present question? It's so odd, don't you know, my good friend, to find you very deeply interested in any" He made a gesture of mock sober contradiction, and began to put on his eyeglasses. " That kind of talk, when I have been interested in you for a century ! " " A century ! How scorching of you! " "Not to a woman like yourself a woman who has managed to have so pretty a quarrel with time that she couldn't grow old if she tried." "Oh, I like that much better. You pass a sly powder-puff across my wrinkles." " I haven't yet perceived them. You manage to hide them till their existence, like that of your faults, becomes a myth to your many admirers." She laughed. This dexterity of compliment was a kind of balm to her, as it is to all women of her age, and her persistence in the evasion of life's larger and stronger appeals. "But what is your great secret? I'm dying of curiosity to learn it." He looked once more about the room, with its shadowy corners, where the gloss of satin tapestry or the drowsy lustre of bronzes, or the pale gleam of marble, was to be richly glimpsed. " Where is every- body to-night ? " he inquired. " Oh, don't be afraid of listeners. Emmeline and Elaine have gone to a sewing-class. Very dreadful of them, isn't it, considering ? But they would go, and I only hope there isn't the least bit of a German after- ward. The Schenectadys, who chaperoned them, vowed it was to be nothing but tea and con versa- OLIVIA LELAPLAINE. 141 tion. . . . Bleecker's playing cards at the club, I sup- pose. He usually is, at this hour if he isn't doing worse. And as for young Aspinwall well, he's got his latch-key at last, after fighting his father about it all winter, and I don't know where he is ; I dare say he's smoking cigarettes in the cafe at Delmonico's, instead of studying for his next Columbia examina- tion, which takes place rather soon. . . . Peyster, the dear stupid boy, and Lulu, the strange little vixen, are both asleep in bed. Lulu danced herself almost sick this afternoon at a child's affair the Stuyvesant Smiths gave ; she begged so hard that I let her go ; for how can a child like that be expected to feel sad about the death of an uncle whom she's scarcely seen ? . . . There, Spencer, you have a full account of just how the entire family are occupied at present, so far as I'm able to inform you. . . . Come, let me hear your secret." " It will surprise you very much," he said, slowly and with an unwonted air of implicitly meaning each word. "Perhaps you'll be inclined to ask yourself whether this last illness of mine hasn't put me a little out of my head." " It's a very wise and prudent head," she replied ; " at least I've always found it so." "Ah, what if I should tell you that I had lost it or that it had been turned ? " Their eyes met, and he went on: "I tried to stop Olivia from going to live at her aunt Ottarson's the other day. I tried to stop her by asking her to come and live with me. ... As my wife, I mean." "Ah! " exclaimed Mrs. Satterthwaite, looking as if she were powerless to speak another word. 142 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. " She would not come," Delaplaine pursued, staring straight before him, now. " But I think she can be prevailed upon to come. I think you can help me in prevailing upon her. You've always stood my friend, as I've stood yours. I am afraid I can't act for myself very capably during the next week or so. . . ." There was a pause, and as yet Mrs. Satterthwaite did not seem to have recovered from her amazement ; her startled eyes were riveted upon Delaplaine's visage, while about the corners of her mouth lurked an in- credulous expression that seemed to belie the conster- nation above it; she looked, indeed, as though she were prepared at a moment's warning to be informed that this whole queer bit of tidings meant nothing less trivial than a mere humorous deception. " I want you to help me, if you will," Delaplaine soon continued, "I am nearly sure that you can, and importantly, too. I don't mean that you can quicken or even touch in the girl any impulse of sentiment. But if you speak with discretion you may appeal to her reason yes, her reason alone, Augusta. I de- spair of your doing anything else. For that matter, how can I fitly use the word 'despair,' which signifies an ended hope? And I have never had a ray of hope. You must understand that." "Despair? .... hope?" she exclaimed. "Good heavens, Spencer Delaplaine ! Do you actually mean that you, at your time of life, care for the girl in that way?" "I mean that I am in love with her," he responded. And then, after having spoken these few words in what sounded to their listener like a voice borrowed from another being (she had been so long accustomed OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 143 to the lambent play of his ironies over almost every conceivable subject!) he employed a tone much more familiar to her, and added, with the tart, laconic, gelid phrasing that she had heard hundreds of times before : "Yes, I'm downright in love at last. It's sad but it's true. I'm in love, gray hair, baldness, wrinkles, worldly experience, sixty odd years and gout, all included." She was about to break into a laugh as he thus ter- minated his droll confession. But something re- strained her from doing so. She was to a great extent a scoffer like himself. If he had been almost anybody else among the many men whom she knew, and had made an admission at once so unexpected and so incongruous, she would not have spared him the mischievous cut-and-thrust of her amusement. But as it was, she contented herself with this quiet answer, while she stretched forth one hand until it rested lightly yet decisively on his arm : "I'll help you of course, I will, in any manner that you think best. Just tell me how you would like me to act, and I will promise faithfully to follow your instructions." Meanwhile it shot through her brain : What a god- send for Olivia, and what a happy stroke for us! She changes " Van Rensselaer " for " Delaplaine " not at all a bad change. And she changes that horri- ble boarding-house for an establishment any woman in the country might be pi-oud of. She shall marry him, if I've the power to show her how great a fool she would be in refusing him ! . . . Mrs. Auchincloss had meanwhile consulted with her husband on the question of paying a visit to Olivia in 144 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. the foolish retreat which that rash young girl had chosen. She had permitted Madeleine and her brother, Chichester, to be present at the discussion, and had selected the hour of dessert for commencing it, after the coffee had been served and the butler had been dismissed. It was one of those evenings when the Auchin- closses dined en famille. They had so solid and pro- found a respect for one another that occasions like the present, happening two or three times every week, were looked upon as refreshing and priceless relaxa- tions from the ritualistic worry of social duty. The whole Auchincloss family might be said to accept every event of life either in this light or in no other that was worth the smallest real consideration. They moved all four of them (a most august quadrilateral !), in the sole unswerving and punctilious groove of duty. Mr. Archibald Auchincloss, as head of the great house and a lawyer of unimpeachable standing, had long ago secured the reputation of making duty his inflexi- ble watchword. How, as a lawyer of any standing whatever, he had managed to reconcile his ideals with his practical operations, is a question which melts away from the art of the annalist into that reverend obscurity known as this gentleman's well-ordered and irreproachable conscience. But he effected such a truce without the least apparent difficulty. Of his wife's dutiful proclivities we have already enjoyed a glimpse. Madeleine, their only daughter, bowed to her own private little lar of duty with the calm fervor of a nun to her crucifix. Chichester, who was not very much older than his cousin, Aspinwall Satter- thwaite, had long been a pride and a gladness to both OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 145 his parents. He had gone to Harvard, not Columbia, and had been graduated three or four from the head of his class. Yon could not have induced him to sit and smoke cigarettes in the cafe of Delmonico's, after the fashion of his cousin. For that matter, he never smoked at all, secretly detesting the practice, in common with his father. He was now one of the most creditable disciples of the Columbia Law School, and looked forward with eager joy to being made at some future time a member of that unsullied legal house, Chichester, Auchincloss and Gibbes. There were some people who thought the heir of the Auchin- closs family an insupportable young prig; his cousin, Aspinwall, was one of these ; the latter always puffed his cigarette-smoke a little more recklessly through his nose, and assumed a larger amount of swagger, profanity and piercing knowledge of the whole vain and worthless female sex, whenever Chichester and he encountered one another. In consequence Chichester would speak of his cousin with shudders, at home, as the very worst type of " dude " the " dude " that rolls a vicious eyeball toward unlawful pleasures. Aspinwall, on the other hand, would mention lazily to his father having met " that confounded young ass of a Chichester," and having ached to kick him. Either young kinsman doubtless exaggerated the faults of the other, but it is possible that a great deal of perti- nent and veracious criticism lurked beneath their mutual disesteem. "Of course Olivia has done a miserably foolish thing," Mrs. Auchincloss now said, looking across the table at her husband's clean-shorn, statuesque face, with its big, curvilinear nose and its square-molded jaw. 146 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. " But the great point is that we might pardon it be- cause of her youth.'' "Yes," said Mr. Auchincloss, as though he were thinking of the pros and cons in some professional " case." " Youth certainly is an excuse for such acts of rashness. It may not have occurred to Olivia how direct a slur she was casting upon you and her Aunt Augusta, since you had both expressed your willing- ness to protect her." Chichester coughed deliberately. "I can't under- tand," he said, " how she is less to be blamed for the affront because she is still under twenty years old. I would not have done any such thing as that when I was nineteen, and I am sure Madeleine would not, either." " We have had peculiar advantages of home-train- ing," said Madeleine, in her precise, demure way. " We have been taught what duty means, Chichey, thanks to mamma and papa." "My dear child!" said Mrs. Auchincloss, giving Madeleine the most benign of motherly smiles. And then she glanced at her husband, as if to say : " What a rich reward we are reaping for our parental devo- tions of the past ? " " Even duty has its limitations, however," remarked Chichester, very much as though he were stating that the square of the hypothenuse of a right-angled tri- angle was equal to the sum of the squares of its other two sides. "True, my son," applauded his father. "But to err generously from the restrictions of a dutiful stand- ard is often to show a humane and ... a ... er . . . commendable mercy." He gave forth this plati- OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 147 tude as though it were a bit of wisdom ripe with the meditation of years. " Oh, certainly, sir," acknowledged Chichester, who considered his father one of the leading minds of the time. " I suppose mamma means to forgive Olivia and go to see her in those objectionable surroundings. I don't think I coftld do so, urrder the circumstances; but then I do not lay claim to mamma's truly Christian spirit." He looked, while speaking these words with his orderly, measured manner of saying everything, as though he possessed no spirit whatever except one of a petit maitre in all the conventionalisms (not to name the bigotries) of polite conduct. He still had a boyish appearance, with only those pimply premonitions on lips and chin which betoken the coming virile growth there; but his face was in every feature a living reproduction of his father's, notwithstanding its imma- ture expression. And surely there was no one beneath the visiting moon whom he would have preferred to resemble more than this very father, upon whose countenance he sometimes gazed as though it were a magic mirror, showing him his own future physiognomy improved by mellowing manhood. Being entirely satisfied with himself, Chichester was no less satisfied with his father. He could not perceive how any career could be more delightfully distinguished than that of Mr. Archibald Auchincloss. To marry aristocratically, to acquire fortune and reputation at the bar, to accept fashion and patronize talent, to avoid all vulgar ex- tremes, and never to leave one conservative strong- hold until you could slip safely from it into another 148 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. capable of protecting you against the horrid pest of the unorthodox and the radical ; having done things like these, or going on brilliantly doing them from year to year, was Chichester Auchincloss's idea of a noble and profitable life. It all meant "duty" to him, and there was no more sacred word than that in his gilt-edged dictionary, from which a great deal of naughty verbiage had been exiled. His mother's Christian spirit triumphed in its an- gelic desire to pardon Olivia. Mrs. Auchincloss was indeed on the point of ordering her carriage, two or three days later, and having herself driven to the abominated doorway of Mrs. Ottarson, when her sister Augusta appeared, brimming with the most unexpected news. "I hope, my dear Letitia," said Mrs. Satterthwaite, after she had made her first astonishing announcement, "that you will keep this a profound secret even from Archibald." "Oh, certainly," agreed Mrs. Auchincloss. It had speedily become her intention, however, to tell her husband all about it ; and Mrs. Satterthwaite, proud of Delaplaine's intimacy with herself, privately wanted Mr. Auchincloss as well as his wife to know of the confidence the banker had reposed in her. For Spencer Delaplaine held just that unassailable place in society toward which the Auchinclosses loved to show homage. He had been a person of importance when hundreds of the present regnant dignitaries were struggling to mass together the dollars which had paid for their subsequent "positions." Mrs. Auchin- closs remembered him as one of the leading beaux, more than twenty years back, at the old Fourteenth OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 149 Street Delmonico Assemblies, or, a little more re- cently, at those most enjoyable "Cheap and Hungry" dancing classes, in Dodworth's Hall, on Fifth Avenue and Twenty-Sixth Street. Of course a Delaplaine was not a Van Rensselaer no, nor even a Ten Eyck, nor yet a Van Peekskill. She even recollected hearing, a long time ago, when there had been some talk of Spencer Delaplaine going into partnership with her brother, that there had never existed any family of that name to speak of, and that this gentleman (the ambitious, clever, and moderately well-off) only de- served to rank as the first of his line. But years and events had so multiplied since then! No one ever presumed to hint, at this late hour, that the wealthy proprietor, dwelling in West Tenth Street so luxuri- ously and entertaining with so much blended grace and discrimination, was not born to the rare and fine name which he now held. It is notably true of New York that some of her present social leaders are those whose early youth was a strife to win what they now wear as if it were hereditary ermine. "This would make an admirable match for Olivia admirable?" Mrs. Auchincloss now proceeded, as it were, to muse aloud. "There is no drawback but age . . . none whatever." " I should call that more of a drawback for him" said Mrs. Satterthwaite, with the cold, hard, loud- voiced manner to which her sister objected as being painfully underbred and which she thought on the in- crease, lately, because Augusta would choose her friends from among so many new people. "Very few men of his age decide to marry at all ; still fewer, when they are also men of much means. As he offers 150 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. to make a handsome settlement on Olivia, I should say that she has everything her own way or nearly so provided she takes him." Mrs. Auchincloss drooped her eyes. "I hate to invest anything so ... so holy as mar riage, Augusta, with views like these." Mrs. Satterthwaite gave a stealthy smile of amuse ment ; she knew her sister so well! "Oh," she said, primly, "then you think it's our duty to dissuade Olivia from the marriage?" The other lady started. " Dissuade Olivia ? " she faltered. " Oh, no ! I I mean, my dear sister, that it would not be fair to the girl if we did not let her clearly see all the ... er ... the mere worldly advantages which would result from such a marriage. And I am nearly sure that Archibald will sanction this mode of regarding the matter, when " "Oh, but you mustn't tell Archibald," struck in Mrs. Satterthwaite. " Ah . . . yes ; I remember." "And now, my dear Letitia," Mrs. Satterthwaite went on, "since you have these feelings, and since mine agree with them, we had best pay Olivia a visit. I think we shall somehow be safer if we go together ; there's no telling about the barbaric be- havior of that Ottarson woman ; it may break out at any moment." " We will not ask for her," said Mrs. AuchinclosSj "and perhaps by this means we shall be able to get it through her head that we do not wish to see her." They went that very day, and saw only Olivia. As they drove together to the Twenty-Third Street OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 151 boarding-house, Mrs. Satterthwaite informed her sis- ter of Delaplaiue's illness. He had not left his home for some little time, now. The doctors did not yet think it a dangerous attack, but it might become dan- gerous at very short notice. "It will be advisable, I think, to tell Olivia this," said Mrs. Auchincloss meditatively. They did tell her. After Olivia appeared before them, entering the shabby parlor, with its air of being lounge'd in, romped in and generally both used and abused, they met her with no rebukes whatever. They sat and talked quietly with her in tones that she could not help feeling were like music beside the shrill and harsh organs of speech to which she had been listening of late. While they thus spoke, a smell of cookery, pungent as the broiling pork-chop or the browning potato can render it, filled all the lower portion of the house ; for it chanced to be lunch-time at Mrs. Ottarson's, and as we know, her meals were expected to feed many mouths. As Olivia now ob- served her aunts, it was to remark what figures of ele- gance and distinction they both looked; that smell from below-stairs had somehow accentuated their own delicate aroma of gentility. The boarders were descending to luncheon from their various upper rooms, and presently the peacock-like voice of Mrs. Spillington was heard, as if it called from the middle of the outside staircase to some one above : " Oh! . . . I presume I must have left my red worsted shawl laying across the back of your rock- ing-chair. Will you just bring it down when you come, please ? " Mrs. Auchincloss and Mrs. Satterthwaite seemed 152 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. like two ladies who had never worn red worsted shawls in their lives and had never been called upon, for that matter, to inflict their nerves with the kinds of people who do wear them. It was of course easier to talk with Olivia on the subject of Mr. Delaplaine's offer now that it had been made to the girl in person a few days before. But, notwithstanding this fact, it was still by no means easy. Olivia soon flushed and grew sadly embarrassed. "I I would so much rather not speak about that affair," she said, biting her lips. " I told Mr. Dela- plaine that it it wouldn't be possible." She now looked from one to the other of her aunts, with her eyes widening a little and a wave of surprise begin- ning to sweep over her face. " Oh," she exclaimed, putting her hands together with what had half the semblance of a tender supplication, " if you've thought that you could persuade me to take any such step as this, I beg that you will at once receive my positive answer. It is no, no ; it's a hundred noes, if you like," with a roguishly obstinate sparkle showing in her blue eyes, which were then beaming above cheeks that shame had hurriedly reddened. The two sisters exchanged glances. " My dear," said Mrs. Auchincloss, with her suave, trainante voice, " I think Mr. Delaplaine should make you very happy as his wife. Very happy, indeed." " Very ? " iterated Mrs. Satterthwaite more briskly. " Pray don't suppose that he is thought to be an old man, here in New York society. He has always lived a most exemplary life ; he has taken great care of himself ; aud now, when men of half his age find themselves broken down, he is full of youth OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 153 absolute youth." The recollection that this belauded lad of sixty was just now a severe sufferer from gout had wholly escaped the speaker, who went energeti- cally on : " And then, my dear, his exquisite little palace in West Tenth Street, and the perfect air of everything connected with it ! Ah ! what a charm- ing frame for so pretty a picture as yourself ! " " But there is another side a far more . . . more moral side to the question," now exclaimed Mrs. Auchincloss, " which your Aunt Augusta, my dear, seems to overlook." Olivia burst out laughing. "A moral side!" she ejaculated, and then her face quickly grew serious again, as though she had heard something it were sacrilege to make light of. " I don't see how such a mere buying-and-selljng marriage as this," she said, "can possibly be spoken of as having a moral side." Mrs. Auchincloss grew a little pinker in each cheek, and her small head moved somewhat farther back on the support of her slender neck. "Oh, my dear/" she reproached offendedly. "As if I could recom- mend what you call a buying-and-selling marriage ! No, indeed, Olivia! I was thinking of the really beautiful protection which he would bestow on you, now that your poor father is gone, and you are left so unexpectedly without a home of your own. And then his having been your papa's friend and partner that gives the Avhole matter so engaging a little touch of romance ! " "I see no touch of romance," said Olivia, as her mouth hardened. " I see no touch at all except a commercial one." " My dear ! " cried Mrs. Auchincloss. 154 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. " I'm sorry to shock you, Aunt Letitia, but that is the only view I can take of the whole proposition. I saw a good deal of this kind of marrying while I was abroad or rather I heard of a good deal. But I never became in the least used to it, I assure you. And I must also state, if you've no objection, that you are the first person whom I have ever heard make even the faintest attempt to invest it with anything resem- bling sentiment." Mrs. Auchincloss was about to offer some reply, but Mrs. Satterthwaite spoke before she had time. " Mr. Delaplaine," said the latter lady, " hasn't expected you to look at it from any sentimental point of view. He instructed me to say that he would very gladly settle three hundred thousand dollars on you, Olivia, the day that you and he are married." This monetary disclosure affected the girl like a piece of sheer brutality. . . . Her two aunts left her, that afternoon, without having accomplished the least satisfactory results. It was only a few hours later that Mrs. Ottarson keenly irritated Olivia by a speech in which her niece failed to recognize just the desired amount of sympa- thetic repugnance for-this anomalous marriage. "Upon my word, Aunt Thyrza," cried the girl, almost flaring up at her prized friend and kinswoman, "I'm half tempted to believe that you doitt think Mrs. Auchincloss and Mrs. Satterthwaite ought to be ashamed of themselves to endorse such a proceeding! " " Well," came the answer, given with uncharacter- istic delay, " I can't really say, 'Livia, that they're t' blame 't all. You see, they know jus' how splendid you'd be fixed, deary, 'f you did consent, and " OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 155 Olivia hurried from the room, in high annoyance. It made her feel so alone and deserted by everybody, when even her Aunt Thyrza began to share these pro- saically hard-grained opinions. Still, she knew that in her case only the warmest personal love inspired them. There was, at least, comforting afterthought in this reflection. Aunt Thyrza was incapable of any save affectionate motives toward her. It was about eleven o'clock that same evening, and just as Olivia was on the verge of retiring for the night, that she sought Mrs. Ottarson once more. She held a note in her hand, hastily written by Mrs. Sat- terthwaite, and despatched thither by a messenger. "He he is very ill," she stammered. "They fear he is dying. Isn't it dreadful ? And so sudden ! Neither of my aunts even spoke of his being ill while they were here this afternoon." " Who on earth do you mean, 'Livia ? " asked Mrs. Ottarson, staring at her niece. "Who's Ae?" " Mr. Delaplaine," answered Olivia, showing the note she had just received. " Think of it ! The doc- tors say there is hardly more than a hope for his life. He may not live even two days longer?" 156 OLIVIA DELAPLAIXE. IX. OLIVJA'S aunts had purposely refrained from men- tioning to her the illness of Mr. Delaplaine. They had decided that such information could carry with it no force of inducement. Besides gout was such a volatile sort of complaint ; it pounced upon you to-day and darted away from you to-morrow. In a short time Mr. Delaplaine might be well, and able to con- tinue whatever work they, the coadjutors in his cause, might successfully have started. But Olivia's reception of their advances had been worse than merely unfavorable. She would not marry her late father's partner, as she bluntly but rather picturesquely said, though he should promise to clothe her in cloth-of-gold and to hang her all over with diamonds. Mrs. Auchincloss's most dexterous quib- bles and Jesuitries were effete as implements for un- dermining a prejudice like Olivia's, founded upon youth, health and nature, and similar to the enclasping outgrowth of all three. As for Mrs. Satterthwaite, she left the house considerably more hopeful than her sister. "Only give him another chance or two," she said, with an oracular nod, as the carriage rolled away, through that section of Twenty-Third Street where the boarding-houses are, so to speak, epidemic. " He's an extremely attractive man, is Spencer, and I don't OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 157 believe many girls could resist him, even at his pres- ent age, if he really made up his mind that they must surrender." "I knew you always thought him remarkably fasci- nating," replied Mrs. Auchincloss. There had been those bitter little breezes of scandal in other days, and perhaps the elder lady had now made some stealthy allusion to the fact of their having once blown. Still, if this were the case, she gave her very insinuation a sort of non-committal harmlessness by immediately adding: "But don't you think he caw plead his own cause in a little while ? Is this last attack so serious a one, after all ? " " I am afraid it's the worst he has ever had," said Mrs. Satterthwaite, "and he has had two or three rather bad ones. I sent to his house early this morn- ing to inquire how he was, and the answer came that he had passed a painful night." That evening at dinner the Satterthwaite family freely discussed Mr. Delaplaine's offer of marriage to Olivia. Mrs. Satterthwaite had neither the conscience nor the temperament of one who keeps a secret well ; she had found herself unable to refrain from "just tell- ing Emmeline," after holding a rather long talk with her husband on the subject of their friend's infatuation. Emmeline had soon afterward found her sister, Elaine* and with a little scream of excitement had seized the latter by each of her shoulders, exclaiming : " Oh, such a piece of news ! Mamma says I musn't breathe it yet ; but I can't help letting you know what it is. Elly ..." And after that, in a very short time, nearly the whole Satterthwaite household proper had become aware of it, and before the dinner-hour this 158 OLIVIA LELAPLAINE. same day one of the French maids had succinctly and exhaustively conveyed it to one of the footmen. The Satterthwaites always talked in the most un- restricted manner before their servants. " Oh, d it," Bleecker Satterthwaite had once said, with that mix- ture of a yawn and a sneer which his son Aspinwall had tried zealously to imitate eyer since the great territory of dudedom had found in him one of its most loyal denizens, " if our servants like listening, let them listen. It's about the only real pastime they have that and pilfering the sherry or the cigars. There are certain acts of mischief that I expect from a servant in my employ ; but what I can not and will not stand is their having the impudence to allow me to find them out." Sentiments of this kind had more than once wakened a disgusted shudder in Archibald Auchincloss ; but then between the large-nosed, judicial, moralistic law- yer and his red-haired, red-moustached, jaunty, world- worn, devil-may-care brother-in-law lay a big, tossing channel of uncongeniality. The Satterthwaite dinner had nearly reached its completion, but the two youngest members of the family, Peyster, aged twelve, and Lulu, aged ten, had been detained by the gayeties of an afternoon dan- cing-class, and had not yet appeared. Their continued absence had just been referred to by their mother; and Elaine, who would have been pretty in a placid, creamy style if her eyes had not had so much languid superciliousness in them, had drawlingly said: "It's a perfect luxury to have those two children away. I always dread the evenings when we dine alone and they don't have to stay upstairs." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 159 "You'd belter hurry, then, El," said her father, reaching out for an olive, "Lulu will be coining down for good and sending you to the background, as sure as you're born." "I declare," pouted Elaine, "it makes one nervous the way you and mamma are forever talking marriage to us girls. Doesn't it you, Em ? " "No; not a bit," said Einmeline, cracking an al- mond too thoroughly, and then hunting for its edible fragments amid the chaos of tawny shells on her plate. "It the worst comes to the worst I can always get somebody. So can you, Elly. Marriage is a good deal like the German, ./find. No girl, if she plays her cards right, need go home from a ball without a partner. There's always somebody you can hint to at the very last minute, even if you've snubbed him for twenty evenings before, and who'll be willing to dance with you if you only hint hard enough. My last minute hasn't come, though, when it's a question of marrying. And if it had . . . why, look at Olivia." Aspinwall here giggled. He sat superb in evening- dress, with collar so high that you could scarcely imagine his wearing it without much physical pain, and so glossy and stiff-looking that it appeared to be made from some new material, like a snow-white tin. "'Pon my word, Em," scoffed her brother, "I like your conceit. I wonder what Spencer Delaplaine would say if he heard you underrate him like that. For my part, I don't see how Olivia could do much better or how any girl could." "Neither do I," declared Elaine, who prided her- self on regarding marriage with a freezing philosophy in whose air the most hardy spray of sentiment needs 160 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. must perish. "And what an idiot she'll be if she doesn't take him ! " " There's only one objection to it all," mused Em- meline, as she cracked another almond. "What is that?" said her mother, a little sharply. If any one in their most undomestic of domestic circles ever became guilty of stupid sentimentality it was sure to be Emrneline. But the daughter of Mrs. Satterthwaite agreeably disappointed her, this time, as she now went on, between her spasms of squirrel-like munching. "I don't know why, but there's always something about a young widow that isn't precisely good style. Yes, young widows are somehow vulgar. Their mourning is so apt to give them a fast look." Elaine replied with a recognizing nod. " I under- stand that feeling," she said ; " I've had it myself about young widows, without just being able to explain it." "Oh, children/" cried Mrs. Satterthwaite, throwing back her head in laughter. " What will you say next ? " " I shouldn't be surprised," said Mr. Satterthwaite, "if Delaplaine lived twenty years yet. He can count on his fingers every cocktail he ever drank before din- ner, no doubt; and he never drew into his lungs those vile cigarettes that Aspy's killing himself with." "It's a pleasant way of dying," smiled Aspinwall, above the pale acclivity of collar. " Oh, of course Olivia will," exclaimed Elaine, as though the improbability of a permanently negative side of the question had just struck her in a fresh convincing light. " Common-sense will come to her rescue." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 161 "She hasn't much common-sense," said Emineline. "Just see how she behaved in going ." " Em ! " broke in her mother chidingly ; and Emme- line stopped short. There was, after all, a rien ne ta plus to the topics which the Satterthwaites aired before their servants. They did not desire that quite everything should be heedlessly spoken of. It was well enough that their majestic, white-cravatted butler and his decorous, white-cravatted assistant should hear them say gos- sipy, daring, heartless, or even ill-bred things ; but it was wholly another affair that these functionaries should learn a syllable from their employers' own lips about that horrible Mrs. Ottarson. The Satter- thwaites certainly lived with a quiet commingled ease and splendor which few of the " new people " whom Mrs. Auchincloss tabooed could effectually have imi- tated, even in these days of plentiful upholsterers and eager caterers. Their money was very probably at the root of all their tastefulness, but they had the art of spending it, somehow, as if it were drawn from no brand-new pocket-book. And yet there was the tone of a certain hard, crude Americanism about their household which might have taxed the severest con- demnation of foreign critics. They lived in the midst of beautiful statues, tapestries and pictures ; they ate off glittering silver and costly china; on every side of them was refinement, grace, elegance, dignity ; and yet as personalities, characters, human beings, they all seemed to delight in a sort of mechanical, dispassion- ate, semi-wooden indifference. Almost the only thing which any of them appeared to do with much real earnestness was to ridicule the people forming his or 162 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. her acquaintance. It should not be forgotten how- ever, that out-of-door sports roused them. Tobog- ganing and skating at Tuxedo during the recent winter had pricked the younger members of the family into a positive enthusiasm. The girls would sometimes drive their father out while in town, and at Newport they incessantly drove with merely a coachman at the rear of the vehicle. Down to little Lulu they were all devotedly fond of horseflesh. Aspinwall was a noted polo-player, and his younger brother, Peyster, only twelve years old, longed for that hour when the paternal veto should be with- drawn from a clipped pony and a mallet. Lulu and Peyster came into the room soon after- ward, and were at once rather tartly reprimanded by their mother for being so late home from the dancing- class. They need not have stayed so long, ran the maternal expostulation; they knew perfectly well the hour for dinner, and that to-day was one of their days to dine with the family. Mamma announced that she had a great mind, as it was, to make them both dine upstairs. Meanwhile the two men-servants were waiting on O them, there in the big, stately, ornate dining-room, as if they had been a little prince and princess. Pey- ster was an awkward, sluggish-looking boy, with a pair of salient, fan-shaped ears; but Lulu had a bewitching, elfin little face that seemed to be set within the centre of a golden cloud of hair as the disc of the sunflower is set midmost its yellow leaves. "I know it was dreadfully wrong of us to stay so late," Lulu said, taking a cautious spoonful of the hot OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 163 soup which had just been handed her; "but oh, I was having such a glorious time ! " o o "Now, she kep' me," blurted Peyster, who swal- lowed his soup like a young ploughboy, and with whom the word "now" was ubiquitous in his dis- course, like the "yap" of Homeric text. "Now, I wanted to come sooner. Ask Fran9oise if I didn't. Now, it ain't fair to blame me. Is it, Lulu." " Oh, how tiresome you are, Peystey ! " exclaimed Lulu, with the manner of a girl twice her years. Em- meline, Elaine and their parents exchanged glances as the quaint, old-young little creature continued : "Please have the goodness to let me explain to mamma." " Go ahead," sanctioned Peyster, stolidly, putting the point of his spoon into his mouth, although he had been told a hundred times that he must not com- mit this illicit act. The whole family, including young Peyster, thought little Lulu capital fun. Her precocity was a source of endless entertainment to them, but their feelings ap- peared definitely to stop just there. They never petted Lulu, or showed her the least spark of tender- ness. But then tenderness, or the slightest exhibition of anything that resembled it, had no place whatever among any of their home relationships. None of them ever seemed to have time enough for a revelation of brotherly, sisterly, or even conjugal fondness, provided he or she had the faintest desire to indulge it. They all appeared to be rather fairly pleased with one an- other, not to be by any means bored with one another, to like one another's society moderately well when noth- ing of a more exciting quality offered ; and there it 1G4 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. stopped. Affection was a word of obsolete meaning with them. Emmeline had given signs of possessing a certain warmth and sensibility that corresponded to it, but long ago these had been discountenanced and slighted by her kindred. " You see, mamma," re-commenced Lulu, " I had a perfectly splendid partner for the German Charlton Van Dam. He is awfully old, you know he's four- teen and a half, and he never dances with any girl under eleven ; he makes a point of it. To-day every- body was surprised when he asked me. And we danced second couple Beekman Van Horn led, and oh, it was all just too lovely! I was taken out twelve times. Carrie Livingston, who danced next us with Willie Winthrop, said ten. But she told a story, and she knew she told it. She was jealous of Charity Oh, what do you think? He asked me to call him Charity f I laughed, and I said: 'Oh, no, sir; I guess I won't do anything so bold as that. 1 And he said, ' What makes you think it bold ? ' And I said, ' Why, you seemed to think it so the other day when you snubbed Lily Van Vechten for calling you Charity.' And he got just as red as ever he could get, and says he, 'Lily Van Vechten and Miss Lulu Satterthwaite are two very different persons.' And oh, during the German he was just too sweet, and I had to wait till it was over, because if I hadn't I know he'd have been angry, arid would never have asked me again." " All of which I think a rather lame excuse, Lulu," said her mother. " It's getting worse and worse, the way that children like you imitate the manners of their elders. I don't know where it will stop. If OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 165 Charity Van Dam is a conceited little boy (and his mother told me a few days ago that he was getting so conceited she didn't know what to do with him) that is no reason why you shouldn't find plenty of other partners." " Now, I always get partners," here asserted Pey- ster, having finished his soup and begun to attack his fish. "And (now) I don't beg for 'em, either. Only (now) I fight shy of the old girls that put on fearful airs, and (now) think themselves to be such mighty big swells." "Oh, Peystey's contented with any sort of trash!" exclaimed Lulu, tossing her head, with its fleece of nebulous gold, in fine disdain. They all laughed at this, and Elaine said, soon after- ward, in her frigidly critical way, to her little sister: "Lulu, you're thinking of these matters quite too soon. They'll give you heartburnings enough when you get older." She turned to her mother : " Mam- ma, you must make that child go to bed earlier and have less excitement. She's dark rings round her eyes at this moment." "Perhaps they're engagement rings; coming events cast their shadows before," said Aspinwall, who prided himself on smartness of this nature, and had won, by reason of it, the repute of being witty among a little band of rosebud maidens whom it plunged into gig- gling ecstasies. " So much excitement is killing to the child," said Emmeline, but in a lazy tone, as if she rather thought her statement open to contradiction. "I'm no longer a child," bristled Lulu, quite haugh- tily. " Some girls of my age are children, it's true. 166 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. But I'm extremely advanced; I heard mamma say so to Mrs. Arcularius, the other day at school, and of course it's true ; everybody thinks it of me. I don't kno\v how many times I've been complimented on it during the past few months." " Lord Scarletcoat says that he hasn't seen any children since he has been in America," said Elaine, " and I'm almost inclined to think he's right." Lulu made a wry face. " I should like to have Lord Scarletcoat presented to me" she said, with that look as of a wise little fairy which so often overspread her features. "7" could show him a great many children. Poor Peystey, there, for instance. Why, I sometimes think Peystey doesn't know enough to come in when it rains." " You knoic enough," said her father, " but I think that in most cases you'd rather stay out and have the fun of getting wet." "That depends on who staid out with me," mur- mured Lulu, drooping her eyes and shaking her nim- bu.--clad head. " If it were only Charity Van Dam I think I could stand a good deal of wetting, papa, and not feel it." This created more laughter, in which Mrs. Satter- thwaite did not join ; for just a minute or two pre- vious a note had been brought her, which she was now intently reading. Her face presently wore a most troubled look as she said across the table to her hus- band : " Ddaplaine's a good deal worse." " You don't mean it," was the answer. " Seriously ill ? " " They're afraid so." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 167 " Who writes ? " "That young Adrian his secretary, or valet, or whatever he calls him. Don't you remember whom I mean ? " " No ; but that's of no consequence. What is it that he writes ? " "He sends word, at Delaplaine's dictation, that pneumonia is feared, and a bad night is expected much worse than last night was." "Pneumonia, and at Mr. Delaplaine's age?" broke in Lulu, as if she spoke to her own thoughts. " That certainly is serious." There was irresistible comedy in these grave words as the tiny child uttered them, and they were quickly answered by a burst of laughter to which possibly the servants contributed their involuntary share. "Lulu!" exclaimed Emmeline. "I declare there's something about you positively uncanny, at times. You make me afraid of you, with that queer-looking little face of yours under its fluffy hair as if you knew ten times more than you've any business to know." The little face looked, indeed, as if some feverish, unwholesome influence might be at work in the frail body below it. Two touches of color nearly always burned vivid in its cheeks, and its hazel eyes had con- stantly that dry sparkle which betokens in a child of Lulu's years an overplus of perilous mental activity. There are some children to whom surroundings of continual gayety are like the effects of a daily nervine. Mrs. Satterthwaite would have been offended and wounded if any one had told her that she was bring- ing up her little daughter with the most imprudent 168 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. disregard of a nervous system curiously sensitive and an intellect exceptionally premature. She was really not bringing up Lulu at all, but letting the clever, wayward, brightly-gifted creature breathe just the luxurious, fashionable atmosphere on which Emmeline and Elaine had flourished well enough in their juve- nile clays. Often for a full twenty-four hours she would not even see Lulu at all. But she had perfect trust in the French bonne who was appointed to guard the child. Of course Fran9oise would instantly notify her if there should be anything the matter with Lulu. But Franoise never brought any ill-reports of a sani- tary kind. Sometimes the nurse would come to her with sad tales of Lulu's rebellion and contumacy. Then a maternal scolding would occur, severe or light, as the derelict behavior demanded. But no bodily ailment was ever spoken of, and Mrs. Arcularius, prin- cipal of the very select school where Lulu had lately been enrolled as a pupil, had no accounts to render except of the dear pet's highly amusing speeches and her occasional mischievous proclivities. Mrs. Arcu- larius was that kind of school-disciplinarian who never bored the parents of her scholars (especially when they were persons of great social importance like the Satterthwaites) by depressing tales about either the moral or physical condition of their offspring. She was a lady who had long ago found this course of action militant against her widely-conceded vogue as a successful instructress of aristocratic younger New York. A short time after dinner, that same evening, and while her husband was smoking a cigar and playing a game of billiards downstairs in the billiard-room with OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 169 his son, Aspinwnll, Mrs. Satterthwaite, cloaked and bonneted, sought her easy-going lord, and said : " Bleecker, I'm going to see Delaplaine. I suppose there's no impropriety in it, as he's so ill. But of course you can go too, if you like." "Thanks, Augusta. I don't think I will go." He stood with his cigar between two fingers and his back against the billiard-table, while Aspinwall, who was bored at being interrupted in the game, had dropped, with a simulation of dreary exhaustion, upon one of the lounges that lined the apartment. "I've an en- gagement at half-past nine and " (he took out his watch, giving it a glance) "it's not long from that time now." "Oh, very well," said Mrs. Satterthwaite. She did not ask what the engagement was. She had expected to find her husband unwilling to go with her. If he had expressed a desire to do so she would have been somewhat annoyed. She had no concern whatever with his engagements. He might go or come as he chose. Pie was the father of her children, but she had never loved him as a wife should love a husband. She had married him because he was Bleecker Satter- thwaite and a "catch." The engagement to which he had referred might or might not concern an infi- delity. It caused her no thrill of jealousy to think on this unsavory conjugal subject. She did not want to gener herself with Bleecker's private affairs. Every man had them, and so long as he kept himself out of a scandal publique she was perfectly contented that he should follow in the beaten footsteps of all the other men who resembled him. She entered her coupe a little later, and had herself 170 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE, driven to the house of Spencer Delaplaine. In a short time after crossing the threshold of the Tenth Street house, she stood at Delaplaine's bedside. The sick man received her with a cordial clasp of the hand. He looked ill ; his face was nearly colorless. " It's you, Augusta ?" he faintly said. "How good of you to come ! " " Not good at all, my friend," said Mrs. Satter- thwaite. " And so you're not as well as when we last saw each other?" "No. The fact is I'm pretty ill. Dr. Clancey and Dr. Robeson have just been here together. I don't think they're at all sure that I am going to pull through. It's this right lung now, with the other threatened." Mi-s. Satterthwaite had by this time seated herself near the bed. " You must not dream of giving up," she exclaimed. "There is so much in that not giv- ing up. Have you a nurse ? " "Adrian has gone to fetch a nurse. Meanwhile I've one of my servants; she's there in the next room. But I want to speak with you before Adrian comes back." Mrs. Satterthwaite had a chilled, nervous feeling, now. She dreaded lest she should be made the recipient of something funereally moribund, and she was not at all the sort of woman to whom any confi- dence of this character would be endurable even on grounds of charity. To be intimate with Spencer Delaplaine while a flourishing and popular millionaire was a decidedly different position from that of sitting at his bedside and hearing him breathe forth some farewell charge OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 171 that would have about it the very odor of the grave. She had never precisely believed Delaplaine's story that this handsome young Adrian was no closer to him than being the son of a distant relative who had died as a clerk in his employ ; it might prove (why not?) a horrible little history that would bring the two into much nearer relations. Besides Augusta Satterthwaite was not the woman to "put herself out " in any way whatever for a friend. If it came to a question of whether or no she cared to have friends at all, she might, under cover of secrecy, have con- fessed to you that successful, accomplished or fasci- nating acquaintances continually stood for her in the place of them. She was prepared to make no amica- ble sacrifices, and she demanded none from others. What so many critics have condemned as the super- ficiality of social life pleased and satisfied her. She wanted nothing truer or deeper. Nor did she wish it to appear, after the way of her sister, that she wanted anything truer or deeper. In her callous worldliness, at least she was not hypocritical. She now keenly regretted having come this evening. It might turn out a visit with odiously compromising results ; for she could not in decency refuse to grant him almost whatever he might ask, provided he asked it as a dying man. There were things one might hate most heartily to do, but having the courage to risk its getting abroad that one had refused them was chal- lenging a still stronger disinclination. " What is it you would like to say, Spencer,' " she asked, and without the least ring in her voice of the selfish anxiety she felt. He was silent for some time, staring, as it seemed, 172 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE, at one of the rare engravings which lined the walls of his charmingly tasteful chamber. A clock on the O r velvet-draped mantel ticked audibly in the stillness, and shaped, with its brisk, sharp vibrations, imaginary words of foreboding to her who sat and waited there at the bedside. Her relief was excessive when she at length heard Delaplaine answer : " I want to speak to you about . . . Olivia." "Olivia?" she repeated, trying not to let him see how glad that one name had made her. There were no unpleasant revelations that he could utter concera- ing her niece ; she was well enough aware of his in- ability here. But he might say, on the other hand, what it would prove very welcome to learn. He might say that he had altered his will (or had had one drawn up for the first time) in favor of his old part- ner's only child. Then Olivia would perhaps dis- continue casting shame upon her father's people by dwelling with that horrid aunt on her mother's side, and the abased Van Rensselaer standard would be reared again from the dust. "Yes," Delaplaine went on, very slowly at first. " You've seen her by this time, I suppose, and you've done as well as you could." " Oh, yes ; I've done my best." " Well, what was your best ? " " I'm sorry to tell you it was a failure." "Failure?" He gave a low laugh as he repeated the word. But the rattle that went with this laugh showed the congested state of his lungs, and set him coughing in a wheezy, senile, though not violent way. " She wouldn't marry me, eh ? " he at length went on. " I thought not I feared not. She OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 173 hushed you right up, I suppose, and wouldn't hear of it." "Yes." " She grew angry, eh ? " "Yes and it became plain, also, that she was deeply wounded. Finally, she refused to listen, and I thought she would be rude enough to leave the room. No doubt she would have done so, too, if the whole question of the marriage had not been abandoned." Another silence now followed, and Mrs. Satter- thwaite began to assure herself that her friend had no dying act of beneficence to perform toward Olivia. He had merely wanted a report of his ambassadress's proceedings. As for his dying at all, now that his watcher had become moi*e used to the dim light in which his face had first dawned upon her, she began to have solid doubts of any such demise. Of course pneumonia must go hard with one of his years. But then, on the other hand, why should there not be an excellent chance that he might recover and marry her niece yet ? Meanwhile it was very nice to reflect that on his recovery he would certainly bear in mind her own friendly endeavor, not to speak of visits like the present one. (Twenty horse-power could not have dragged her near him if it had been anything catching, like typhoid or scarlet fever; but then he need never dream of this.) Possibly, at the opening of next season, he might give a ball for Elaine, just as he had given one for Emmeline. And in that case how very fit and chic it would look for Elaine to receive at the side of her young cousin, Mrs. Spencer Delaplaine, n&e Van Rensselaer ! She had time for these musings amid the pause 174 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. which had followed her last sentence addressed to the invalid. But they did not require many seconds. The pleasurable tingle of the egotist takes no longer than the philanthropist's most heroic one. "If I should get well, Augusta," the sick man pres- ently said, " I should want to have that girl for my wife, just the same." Mrs. Satterthwaite bowed. " So I should imagine," she acceded. " But I have been thinking. . . ." Here he came to a dead stop, letting his voice fall suddenly. " You mean that you may not get well ? Oh, don't allow your mind to brood upon that subject in the least. I must say that so far you've disappointed me very agreeably. You don't seem to be half as ill as I first thought you." A sparkle crept into his dull eyes as he fixed them on her over-bending face. " Suppose she were to come here and . . . and bid me good-bye. Her father's old friend, you know. I don't believe she'd refuse it, do you?" "Refuse it? No; how could she? You mean. . ." "Oh, I mean a genuine death-bed farewell. Don't fancy that I don't. I admit I'm not yet past hope, but that doesn't prevent me from being very sick very sick indeed with internal gout and pneumonia in complication. . . . Well, now, suppose Olivia came here to-morrow and found me a little worse . . . we'll say not exactly dying yet, but nearer to it than I am to-night, and . . . and a proposition were made to her . . .?" "A proposition? Yes? Well? What proposi- tion?" OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 175 The sparkle in those gray eyes of his, which she had so often seen lit by the crafty, algid humor peculiar to the man, grew more keen now as he murmured : " A proposition of marriage." " Marriage ? " He stared up at her from the white pillow. " Can't you guess, Augusta, what I'm driving at ? " he said. " No," she answered, with a blank look. "Then I'll tell you." . . . And long before she left him he had given her a thorough explanation. Once or twice she repressed a shudder while she lis- tened, for it all struck her as not merely novel, but even ghastly as well. 176 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. X. THE note which Olivia received that same evening had been written by Mrs. Satterthwaite herself at the residence of Delaplairie. It conveyed the tidings that the latter was exceedingly ill, but it bore no request that Olivia should pay a visit on the friend of her dead father. The next morning, however, by about eleven o'clock, came a second note. As Olivia read this the blood rushed to her face and her eyes filled with tears. It also was written by Mrs. Satterthwaite, and ran as follows: No. West Tenth Street, May, 188. MY DEAR OLIVIA : I have just been holding a very sad talk with poor Mr. Delaplaine. The doctors think there is still less hope of his living now, as the pneumonic symptoms are worse instead of better. This morning he has been in great pain, and yet he would hold a few words with me, and they have been words which have had you for their subject. Mr. Delaplaine feels that his end has almost come. He had made a will several years ago, leaving all his fortune to charities of vari- ous kinds. But now he has determined to alter the will in your favor. He says that there is no earthly reason why he should not do this act of helpfulness to the child of his oldest and dearest friend. His few distant relations will not suffer from the change of the plan, for in any case they would not have received a dollar of his money. Mr. Delaplaine begs that you will come to him, at the above address, by two o'clock this afternoon. I will be here to meet you. My dear child, al- though I am losing a devoted friend in Spencer Delaplaiue, I OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 177 cannot but congratulate you because of the immense windfall of good luck that promises to become yours. My loss will be your gain, but is it not thus in all the events of life ? Pray do not refuse to come. But I know that I need not make this petition of you, Olivia, since your natural humanity will not permit you to remain away. Your loving aunt, AUGUSTA SATTERTHWAITE. Mrs. Satterthwaite had seen one of the attending physicians privately just before she wrote this note to her niece. Dr. Clancey was a man of extraordinary medical position, and he gave an opinion of Dela- plaine's case as unhesitating as it was discouraging. He apprehended a failure of the heart in his patient, though the lungs might resist even the severe con- gestion burdening them. They were remarkably strong lungs, but the diagnosis revealed a cardiac weakness from which it might be difficult for the patient to rally. Two sinking turns had already occurred ; there was reason to believe that the patient would not resist a third. Mr. Delaplaine had held a conversation with his lawyer between ten and eleven that morning, in obstinate contradiction to the orders of his physicians. No bad result had yet shown itself, but now at any moment the invalid might again collapse. His tenac- ity was admirable, but he had already trifled with it most recklessly. " If he is conscious at two o'clock," said Mrs. Satter- thwaite, " he will, I know, desire to see Miss Van Rensselaer, the daughter of my brother, his former partner, whose recent death you are of course aware of." Dr. Clancey gravely nodded. " He will see the 178 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. young lady, or any one except his nurse, Mrs. Sat- terthwaite," was the answer, " at his own imminent danger." Soon after this, Mrs. Satterthwaite wrote to her sister, imperatively urging that she should come at once to West Tenth Street. Mrs. Auchincloss obeyed the summons. The two sisters met in Delaplaine's exquisite lower drawing-room. " My dear Letitia," began Mrs. Satterthwaite," I fear you may think that I have been behaving imprudently." "Imprudently, Augusta?" As Mrs. Auchincloss thus spoke she shook her head in apparent deprecation and looked down at the black-gloved hands which she had folded in her lap. Mrs. Satterthwaite gave a little agitated preliminary cough, and then softly plunged into the subject. " Spencer Delaplaine, rny dear, sent for me last evening. We had a long talk together. He is possessed with the idea of settling all his money upon Olivia." Mrs. Auchincloss abruptly started up. "Upon Olivia!" she exclaimed. "Before he dies? He is then so sure of death?" " Not so perfectly sure." The eyes of the two sisters met. Mrs. Auchincloss perceived that something was being withheld from her. But she made no reply ; she waited, with her most composed expression, for some further announce- ment. At last it came. " He is bent upon asking Olivia to marry him to have the ceremony performed at once. But ..." Here Mrs. Satterthwaite averted her eyes, and bit her lips very worriedly. " Well, Letitia, he does not wish OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 179 that Olivia, when she comes, should know there is any chance whatever of his recovery." Mrs. Auchincloss started again. "And pray on what account, Augusta ? Does he . . . ? " The lady rose, with a fluttered, appalled air, and then reseated herself. "You can't mean that he wants to to trick the girl into marrying him! " Mrs. Satterthwaite threw up both hands toward the ceiling, and lifted her eyes at the same time. " That is what I have heen so terribly afraid of, Letitia ! " And then the sisters looked at one another quite steadily again. Each had her own special kind of worldliness, of artificiality, perhaps of real evil as well. But each also had her own method of conceal- ment. If, just at present, there were to be anything culpable done, no such neat policy could be adopted, the younger sister had reasoned with herself, as that of a mutual masquerade. If Letitia chose to approve the whole odd business and lend a hand to its further- ing, let her take the cue offered. And so Mrs. Satter- thwaite, with the skill of one adroit in all such tactics, offered the cue. "It would be perfectly fearful, would it not," she now went on, " if he should conclude to get well after such a marriage ? I suppose he has a kind of hope that he will ; and loving Olivia, as he undoubtedly does, he wants to ... to ... (dear me, Letitia ! how shall I express it?) to give himself the . . . benefit of ..." " I see," Mrs. Auchincloss here interrupted the speaker, in the midst of this intentional stumbling. " You spoke a minute ago, sister, of his concluding to get well. People do not usually accomplish such ends 180 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. as that by their own volition. . . . And you say that the doctors give him up ? " "Yes." "Still, he may live?" " Oh, it wouldn't by any means be a miracle if he did." "I see," again murmured Mrs. Auchincloss, gazing fixedly at the floor ; " I see." Her sister felt that she saw and very lucidly, by this time. It looked as if she were going to slip into the little plot that should raise, if it were successful, her niece out of pauperism and dependence. Her next words, Mrs. Satterthwaite knew, would decide what part she would take whether one of non-com- pliance or of cooperation. And her next words did so decide, as they fell with lingering delay from her lips those lips that could press together their pink rims with such untold prudishness when occasion made it seem desirable. " My dear Augusta, I think that if Mr. Delaplaine chooses to believe there is a hope for him, in spite of all that the doctors have said, it is quite his affair and not ours. Naturally the intelligence of any one so ill as he is must be weakened. I should advise that we grant . . . his little . . . stipulation, or ... er ... request, regarding Olivia being told there is ... er ... any chance of his recovery. Humor him in this . . . why not? And as for Olivia herself, I only hope that she may see the spiritual sweetness in such an act as that which he shall ask of her, besides the more . . . er . . . more material aspect it will present." Augusta Satterthwaite rose from her chair with a short nod. " I hope so," she said, with cold laconism. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 181 It was very pleasing to secure her sister as a confed- erate in this proposed little enterprise, but she could not help a pang or two of aggravation at Letitia when the latter threw on her puritanic, not to say hypocritic, mantle, and began mincing about in it; for she had long ago assured herself that Letitia was never so apt to do this as when she was on bad terms with her own, vaunted conscience. " The great point is here," Mrs. Satterthwaite now went coolly on, in matter-of-fact tones that contrasted noticeably with her former perturbed and insecure ones; "Will Olivia consent to such a marriage? You and I, Letitia, have already had rather full proof of just how obstinate she can be." " Yes indeed, yes ! " "But the girl, I think, has her fair share both of pity and gratitude. These must be appealed to. She must see Delaplaine. I shall make a point of that ; we both must. If anything should be said afterward, you know, we must have it in our power to vindicate ourselves thoroughly." " Oh, thoroughly." struck in Mrs. Auchincloss. Both sisters at length understood exactly how to conduct themselves to one another; their roles were to be those of the most blameless apparent innocence. And now Mrs. Auchincloss continued : "We want to stand hereafter, if anything should happen, in the very clearest colors before that girl. For she is hasty- tempei-ed (we've seen that) and she would not hesitate to bring an accusation of some sort against us, embar- rassing enough, however undeserved." The masquerade, as Mrs. Satterthwaite now realized, was being most skilfully conducted on the part of her 182 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. sister. She, in turn, proceeded to enact her own due share of it. "Yes, Letitia; we cannot be too mindful of how delicate a position we will occupy. If Olivia should consent to this marriage, and if he should get better after it, the girl will of course pour blame on us for not having distressed poor Delaplaine by making her aware of one little remote probability that he might get well." "And yet," answered Mrs. Auchincloss, with a dainty upward gesture of the black-gloved hands, "at least there, Augusta, we shall be justified in using actual deceit. We need not let Olivia know that we ever knew of that remote little probability . . . Still, her consent to the marriage looks very un- certain, I should say." Here the lady grew visibly excited, as she drew forth a tiny crystal vinaigrette and placed it at either thin pink nostril. "Oh, no, no," she proceeded, with sidelong dips of the head toward her restorative salts till the sprays of jet on her black mourning bonnet sensitively tinkled, " I'm sure she'll never do it. Don't depend on her, Augusta. She would simply fly from the house in amazement if we made her any such proposition. And I doubt if she will even come here, unless you ask her in the most cautious way." "I've done that. I did not mention in my note that Delaplaine desired to do anything except alter his will in her favor. Oh, she will come ; it would be despicable in her if she remained away at the hour I appointed two o'clock this afternoon. She cer- tainly could not refuse to stand at the bedside of a dying man and that man so old and prized a friend of her father." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 183 " No ... as you have put your request she will of course accede to it. But this change in the will . . . has it been made already ? " "I think so. His lawyer was with him for some time this morning and against his two doctors' posi- tive orders." "The will is no doubt altered, then," said Mrs. Auchincloss. She was inwardly very much exercised about the whole affair. Had she been too reckless in her late tacit little compact? Ought she not to have waited and discussed the advisability of it with her reverenced Archibald? And yet could she do more than fancy that this oracle of tranquil wisdom would fail to commend the course she had taken? Such a marriage as this one for Olivia might savor of sensa- tionalism and of theatric coarseness. But then, how ameliorating it might prove to the girl's future ! Singular enough was the diversity between these two sisters when their congeniality was also fairly regarded. Both were astute, both lacking in that guidance of disinterested principle which makes the honor and creditable hope of all human progression. Both were selfish women, enswathed in supercilious- ness, degraded by ambitions of shallow and idle reach. And yet a gulf separated them, since Mrs. Auchin- closs's paltry ideal of conduct was to worship some perfectly meretricious god that she named good-taste, and the morale of Mrs. Satterthwaite was to worship an ideal, just as paltry, of temporal eminence, and glittering though tawdry power. Neither woman had the least vital valuation of abstract right; neither would have scrupled to sell her finer self-respect for that mess of pottage which the unsoiled spirit defines 184 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. by mere external and circumstantiaf acquirement. But the elder sister wanted her mess of pottage in a silver dish, with a cover that hid from all prying glances the homely quality of the viand ; while the younger sister, willing enough that it should be set before her in earthenware, clung to the desire of hav- ing it brought by a livened domestic and in a frescoed dining-hall. They were both snobs to their finger-tips, but one was the scandal-fearing and one the scandal- daring snob. Mrs. Auchincloss dreaded to risk a speck of odium upon her scarf-skin of respectability ; Mrs. Satterthwaite jauntily snapped her fingers at the infliction of any such petty soilure, so long as she maintained the gracious prerogative of going every- where, knowing everybody, and of putting every- where that she went and everybody whom she knew in the rose-tinted light of concession rather than of recipiency. All things considered, Mrs. Satterthwaite undeniably had the best hand in the cheap, trifling, fleeting game. To place the parallel much lower, it is the reprobate with a vestige or two of decency who picks a pocket under conditions of smaller individual gusto. At two o'clock that afternoon Olivia punctually ap- peared. She disliked coming with as much strength as that by which she had felt herself urged to come. There had been no evading the necessity of present- ing herself at Delaplaine's side; she would have despised her own shadow for months afterwards if she had refused so simple a boon. But the bequest of his fortune to her on the part of her father's old friend that had placed her in a kind of dizzying dilemma. Her pride revolted at once ; for was it not a deed of OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 185 charity which she would have refused without hesita- tion if the donor's hand had been a living and not a dying one? But self-rebuke struck an immediate blow at such pride, and bade her hold at its rightful worth the kindliness, beneficence and devotion of so magnificent a legacy. Perhaps the enthusiastic gratu- lations of Mrs. Ottarson had not a little to do with the final calming of her bewildered mind, which had almost lost the power to think coherently amid the rush of unaccustomed thoughts that besieged its facul- ties. " 'Livia ! " quivered her aunt, in a voice between laughing and weeping, "I 'clare t' goodness it jus' can't be true ! It can't be, an' 'tairtt! I'm dream in' ; I've got one o' those spells o' dreamin' I sometimes get from layin' flat on my back . . . Oh, no, I ain't, though ! It's all true 's it can be ! " And here the benignant if unsyntactical being caught Olivia to her breast and kissed her. "Of course it's awful to think of him dyin' so sudden ; but then, as your Aunt Satterthwaite says in her letter (an' the Lord knows she's 'cute 'nough 'bout all such things ! ) it's an ill-wind, deary ... or some- thing kind o' like that. 'T seems a reg'lar sin to laugh, don't it ? An' 't seems a sin to cry 's well, seem' 't I cry on'y from joy, jus' 's I laugh . . . Oh, my sakes! To think o' you havin' w'at you was born and brought up to, after all ! . . ." Generalities now gave place to particulars, and in a trice Mrs. Ottarson was viewing the whole recent event with practical vision. "I s'pose 't won't be very pleasant to go all alone. I wish I could be there too, an' kind o' stay somewheres round so 's 186 OLIVIA DELAPLAINK you knew I was near while he kep' you talkin' in the sick-room. You've just come from so much sufferin', Liv, it don't seem right you should see any more, f'r ever so long ; does it ! Wat you goin' to wear ? I'd put on, 'f I was you, the black dress with the ruffles up the sleeves; it suits you to a jiffy . . . an' then, you know, if the room's warm you can slip your sacque off, an' even if the old gent'man is goin' fast 't won't make him go any quicker 'f he sees you lookin' 's pretty 's possible." Olivia wore the dress with the ruffled sleeves, but, as it turned out, she slipped off her sacque, with Mrs. Satterthwaite's assistance, very soon after she had en- tered the house. She felt excited, and knew that her cheeks were glowing hotter as her aunt kissed her; but she did not know how sparklingly blue her eyes had become. She was not even aware that she had shaped the question " How is Mr. Delaplaine ? " until Mrs. Satterthwaite answered it by saying : " He's easier now, and ready to speak with you." Then Olivia looked full into her aunt's eyes. "It's a great kindness on his part, Aunt Augusta," she said a little brokenly. "I I hardly know how I ought to receive it or whether I I ought to receive it at all." Mrs. Satterthwaite put her hand on Olivia's shoul- der. " Receive it all, Olivia ! " she softly exclaimed. Just then a young man entered the room. It was Adrian, of whom we have heard mention before. During four or five years he had held a subordinate position in Delaplaine's household, not exactly ex- plainable as to the question of its being secretaryship or servantship. His full name was Adrian Etherege. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 187 He sometimes would spend an hour or two with Dela- plaine at the bank. He lived here in the West Tenth Street house, and had a room beyond any of the ser- vants' rooms in appointment and preference of loca- tion. He could not have been more than twenty years old ; perhaps he was still younger, though there was a certain mature look about his large, velvety brown eyes. They were feminine eyes, and his extremely slender and graceful figure, just tall enough to surpass that 6f most women, made an imaginative observer regret the unpicturesque limitations of our modern male costume; for Adrian Etherege, this boyish young beauty, with his smooth, oval face just touched about its upper lip by the downy growth of a blond mous- tache, and with the clustering mass of yellow curls lying negligent and too profuse above a broad, sculpt- urally white forehead, would have acquitted himself so admirably as a page of earlier romantic times ! What gave him the appearance of being perhaps a little older than twenty years, was a pensive expression that instantly revealed itself when you squarely con- fronted the lovely delicacy of his countenance. Olivia was at once won by him as he paused before Mrs. Satterthwaite. It swiftly struck her that he was one of the most beautiful youths whom she had ever seen. His dress, quite out of the prevailing fashion and yet as modestly inconspicuous as any garb of to-day could well be cut or worn, heightened the sweet, adolescent charm of his bearing. It darted through Olivia's mind, in spite of her anxiety and perplexity, "What a wonderfully winning and fasci- nating presence he has!" But he roused in her only the delight we bestow upon some thrifty and splendid 188 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. plant, with its knots of bloom lifted clear and perfect to the view. He caused her almost to forget the mel- ancholy mission on which she had entered this abode of her dead father's friend, while she heard him address Mrs. Satterthwaite in these few, low-toned words : " Mr. Delaplaine wishes to know if the young lady is here yet." " Yes," answered Mrs. Satterthwaite. She turned away from the speaker and put a hand on either of Olivia's arms, while she scanned the girl's flushed face. " You are ready to go up and see Mr. Delaplaine now, are you not?" she asked. " Yes," said Olivia. Her gaze wandered to the young man while she thus replied. It seemed as if she made her reply to him rather than to her aunt. A moment afterward, having transiently fixed his superb brown eyes upon Olivia's face, he passed from the room. " Who is he ? " quickly whispered Olivia, her look following him as he receded. "His name is Etherege Adrian Etherege," re- sponded Mrs. Satterthwaite. "Adrian Etherege," Olivia repeated. "How hand- some he is! What a charming face he has! It makes me think of faces in pictures that I saw somewhere abroad ... in Dresden, Venice, Florence, some- where among the galleries I used now and then to visit with poor papa." "Isn't he just too enchanting," cried Mrs. Satter- thwaite. " I'm so glad to hear some one say he is, for I've thought so a perfect age . . . I've only seen him once or twice before," she went on self-correctively. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 189 "Mr. Delaplaine has now and then sent him with a message to me since . . . since he engaged him about three or four years ago. He lives here, you know he's a sort of servant." "A servant he?" murmured Olivia. " Yes. A sort of servant. . . . You wouldn't be- lieve it, would you ? Neither would I at first. But he's educated ; he's not a real servant." " I should suppose not." Mrs. Satterthwaite laughed. "You've fallen in love with Adrian. So have I. He's adorable. And yet Mr. Delaplaine thinks him dull and rather stupid. But men don't see with our eyes, do they? I'm so glad you're eprise with Adrian, poor little fellow . . . But we mustn't talk of him. We must talk of doing what he told us to do." "Going up to ... to see Mr. Delaplaine," fal- tered Olivia. "Yes. You're not afraid to go, are you?" Olivia drew backward a few steps. "Afraid?" she repeated. "No. But this great act of kindness he wants me to benefit by. . . . That makes me almost afraid." Mrs. Satterthwaite was looking steadily into her eyes. " You know, Olivia, that he was in love with you before he was taken ill. You know that. He told you so." "Yes ... he told me that he wanted me to marry him." " He told you that he was in love with you," per- sisted her aunt. "Yes, he did, Olivia. And we your Aunt Augusta and I assured you of it after- ward.'* 190 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE, " Well . . . yes," replied Olivia. "Now, my dear girl," suddenly broke forth Mrs. Satterthwaite, "he wants you to accept this great favor at his hands." "I know. You wrote me." " But I did not write you all" "Not all?" "No. He has changed his will. The lawyer was here this morning. But there . . . well, there is something else." " Something else ? " " Yes. Don't look so startled. How can I tell you if you look so startled ? . . . He is dying you know." " I do know. You wrote me that." " But, my dear girl, there was something I did not write you." "No?" said Olivia, with a child's innocence of sur- prise. " What was it ? " Mrs. Satterthwaite shrugged her square, firm shoul- ders (so different from the drooping, fragile shoulders of her sister, Mrs. Auchincloss) and half turned away. "You shall soon know, my dear. He will tell you. It's . . . it's something he will want you to do." Suddenly Mrs. Satterthwaite veered about and caught both Olivia's hands in both her own. " I won't tell you, my dear. It's a dying request of his. Remem- ber that." "A dying request?" Olivia said, in a dazed way. She felt as if some weird trap were about to be sprung upon her. She had always distrusted these two aris- tocratic aunts of hers. Now one of them seemed to her brimming with guile and stratagem. She silently regretted that she had not allowed the staunch and OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 191 incorruptible Mrs. Ottarson to accompany her hither, as that doughty lady had proposed, if not insisted. " A dying request ? " she repeated. " Tell me what it is." But Mrs. Satterthwaite went up to the girl and put one of her arms within her own, drawing her reso- lutely and determinedly toward the door. " Now, don't be frightened," Mrs. Satterthwaite admonished. " You've nothing on earth to be frightened about . . . O . O Come . . . What he asks of you, my dear, you can refuse or accept, just as you choose." Olivia allowed herself to be led. The staircase in the outer hall was broad enough for them to ascend it two abreast. When they had readied the second hall and paused before a closed door, the first that they met, Mrs. Satterthwaite said: "Now go in. You'll find him very gentle and sweet. And, recollect he's dying." The next moment Mrs. Satterthwaite opened the door before which they both stood. She pushed Olivia into the chamber. Then she closed the door, leaving her niece alone with the sick man who was himself alone amid an artificial gloom, waiting for her, having dismissed every attendant. Whatever was the com- munication which he desired to impart, he had made up his mind that it should be for one pair of ears only. Olivia, seeing the bed and the dim face outlined against its pillows, drew quietly forward. " Olivia," called a faint voice. " Is that you?" " Yes, Mr. Delaplaine." " Come, nearer." She went nearer. He stretched out his hand, and 192 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. she took it, standing at his bedside. She looked down at his face. It seemed wan and drawn and changed to her. " Olivia," said the sick man, " you have come to me like the dear, good girl that you are. . . . They say I can't last very many hours longer." " I hope it isn't true, Mr. Delaplaine." "I know you hope that, Olivia. But if I really must go, I've arranged that you shall have all I leave behind me. I've arranged it. Did they tell you?" "They said you had done me this goodness," she answered. "But" . . . And then she paused, while the hand that he clasped trembled and he felt it tremble . . . "are there no others, Mr. Delaplaine, whom . . . ?" "No others no," he interrupted her, with a fev- erish, peevish ring in his husky voice. "But there are others relations of mine whom I don't care for whom I've helped now and then, but not even seen since I was a man of forty or thereabouts, and these might dispute my will." He paused, and gasped a little for breath, with a rattling in his throat that made Olivia's heart throb for pity. "Now, Olivia," he presently resumed, speaking with difficulty, "I want to make your claim sure. Sure, do you under- stand?" " Yes ... I understand." She felt his fingers grow tenser about the hand that still lay within his own. " No, you don't understand. There's only one sure way of making all their future litigation useless. Only one sure way." He closed his eyes and drew a long, stertorous breath, still clasping her hand. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 193 She watched him. She did not know just what to answer, except to ask him concerning the avoidant way to which he had alluded. So, presently, she said : "What 'is that way, Mr. Delaplaine?" He unclosed his eyes and fixed them upon her attentive face. "By marrying you here, inside the next hour. You'll only be my wife for a little while . . . I'll die soon afterward. I'll there, don't try to drag your hand away like that. Listen ! " She let her hand stay in the clasp of his. But if the room had not been so dusky he could have seen what a pallor had overswept her face. "I I will listen," she managed to answer: "but I I can't do what you ask." He raised himself in bed, taking her hand, now, in both his own. A new effect of light showed her how haggard he was. "Olivia," he cried hoarsely, "do this for me ! No not for me for yourself ! It isn't only that I love you it's far more it's that they'll try to take the money away from you if you won't consent! Don't be foolish, Olivia. You'll be my wife only for for a few hours. But . . ." " No ! no ! no ! " she cried, dragging her hand away from both his clinging hands. She stood for a mo- ment, watching him as he sank back upon the pillows. "No! no! no!" she repeated. And then, with her heart beating so that it seemed almost as if it would . leap out of her breast, she hurried toward the door of the dim chamber, opened it, and fled into the hall beyond. 194 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. XI. THE day on which Olivia made that unsuspicious little pilgrimage to Delaplaine's abode proved the first by which the reigning May had asserted her somewhat slender right even to be called vernal. A sharpness yet lingered in the breeze, but it was at least southerly strong concession from so bad-tempered a month as this had shown itself and you could easily imagine over what radiant wavelets it swept while it passed northward through the narrows into New York Bay. Fifth Avenue looked cheerful enough almost to de- serve the name of a handsome thoroughfare, since its miles of deplorable brown-stone spruceness are never so far from being a shock to artistic nerves as when they cumbrously scowl at us through a merry golden veil of sunshine. The Satterthwaites' house was of that usual sulky sobriety in the way of design which its locality loves to perpetuate for ill-starred future generations, and which, if the best speech of architecture may be called eloquence, might well deserve the name of platitude. But this large family-mansion, with its two windows on one side of the high stoop and one window on the other, was of brick, with stone copings, and had been decoratively and improvingly touched by a clever architect after the Satterthwaites purchased it. Being on a corner, it ran a good distance down along the transverse street, and showed glimpses of lace and OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 195 silken tapestries, of statuary and of other costly orna- mentation within, from its two large embayed windows and its many other smaller ones. To a young man, of calm, dark, serene face and rather foreign air, who had just ascended the stoop and pulled the bronze door-bell, it seemed a strikingly brilliant sort of residence. Though an American by birth, he had not been in this country for over ten years, and many changes were now evident to him in the great city which he had last observed as a boy of sixteen or thereabout. The footman who presently admitted him into a marbled and richly upholstered hall, was like a living memento of Parisian sojourns ; the new-comer had seen in Paris just such clean-shorn, intelligent, quick-moving fellows, among the salons, the best cafes. About ten minutes afterwards, while he sat with Emmeline and Elaine Satterthwaite in the grand gilded drawing-rooms, he expressed a similar opinion regarding New York itself. " It all has grown to wear a more foreign look," he said, in his even, composed, unassertive voice, which somehow always carried the latent suggestion of his being ready to weigh most carefully and respectfully any opposite opinion that you, on your part, might care to advance against his own. " At least all that I have yet seen of the huge town." "We don't see much change," replied Emmeline, looking at her sister for a moment ; " do we, Elly ? I suppose that is because we hardly ever give it a thought ; we've become so used to it, you know." "Yes," Elaine struck in, at this point, "you must remember, Jasper, that it will very soon be four years since we all met you in London." Here the younger 196 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. sister cast down her eyes and sighed. She had been told that the broad, creamy-white effect of her drooped eyelids at such times became her quite effectively. " How often Em and I have thought about the lovely way in which you treated us ! " "I?" exclaimed the young man, surprisedly looking at her with his dark, sweet, serious eyes. And then came his throaty, mellow, English-sounding laugh. "I have no idea, Elaine, really, in what my loveliness consisted." " Oh, Elly means that you devoted yourself to us in a more than cousinly manner during those pleasant Lon- don days of latter May and early June! " answered Em- meline. " You took us every where to the National Gallery, the Kensington Museum, the British Museum, the Grosvenor Gallery, the Tower, the ' Zoo,' Madame Tussaud's, Richmond, Greenwich, Windsor . . . where Jasper, did you not take us?" "And now, " hurried Elaine, as if she were deter- mined not to be out-done in the grace of gratitude by her elder sister, "you've come to New York at so dull a season that we have no means of repaying you for all that past kindness. There's never anything going on now in New York ; and besides, as you see, we're in mourning." " In mourning ? " repeated their guest, with that nice, prompt sympathy of tone which was all the more welcome because it partook of his intrinsic spontaneity and naturalness. He never appeared to be other than he really was ; his perfect breeding be- spoke some chivalrous origin to which the everyday skin-deep civilities bore little true resemblance; no kindly words ever escaped him without making his OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 197 listener somehow feel that they would not have been uttered at all if they had had to be delivered hypo- critically. " Our uncle, Mr. Houston Van Rensselaer, died a few days ago," said Emmeline. "We never knew him well, but then of course it can't be forgotten that he was mamma's own brother." "You remember Uncle Houston, don't you, Jas- per?" said Elaine. "He crossed over to London from Paris, that spring, with his daughter." "One very warm Sunday we all went together to Hampton Court," said Emmeline. " Don't you re- member now ? " " Yes, yes, indeed ! " suddenly declared the young man, as though memory had not until that instant obeyed his call. "And Mr. Van Rensselaer had such a sweet little daughter, with big blue eyes. Pray, what has become of her?" " She is here," answered Emmeline, stealing a fleet look at Elaine. "Ah? You mean that she is stopping here with you in this house ? " asked the young man. " Oh, no Em only means that she's here in New York," hastened Elaine, " She's . . . staying with ... er ... some other relations of hers." "Indeed?" said their guest. "I shall get you to give me her address, if you will be so good. I should like to see her again. She promised to become a most delightful creature ; I shouldn't like to miss my oppor- tunity of finding out whether the bud belied the rose. But of course I don't mean that I should think of pay- ing her a visit for a long time yet." It is difficult to say which of his two hearers re- 198 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. gavded with more profound disgust the idea of his going to see Olivia Van Rensselaer at all in her present highly plebeian abode. He was their cousin, though several times removed, and if he had not been Jasper Massereene or some one of equal notability they would perhaps have shown a very limited con- cern for the relationship. As it was, they held his visit to be impressively complimentary. Even in London he had not shone to them in the colors of a compatriot, but in those of an Englishman whose American birth was but dimly recollected, as if it had been some sort of early juvenile escapade. He had left Cambridge with high honors ; he was handsome, singularly amiable, and endowed with an address of the most gentleman-like fascination. "Mamma and papa "had been so proud and glad to meet him, and then it was easy to see that he had friends everywhere in the best London circles. Mr. Bleecker Satterthwaite's first cousin had been his mother ; she had married his father, Trevor Masser- eene, in New York, and it had been regarded as a very advantageous match. The young lady was a beauty, and a belle in society. Trevor Massereene was a near relative of the Earl of Meath, and had come to New York, years ago, to enter a banking- house of greater importance than that of Delaplaine & Van Rensselaer. He had acquired a fortune and afterward married one, the Satterthwaite estate being divided between Bleecker and his cousin, with a su- perb share for each. When his father had become a widower he had retired from Wall Street and taken his only child, Jasper, to live with him in England. The Earl of Meath had cordially received his kinsman, OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 199 and at his father's death young Jasper, with a really great inheritance, had found himself by no means neglected or ignored. He had come to America, after his long residence in England, with uncertain views as to how long he should remain here. He had passionately loved his mother, and she had died in New York. This formed a certain reason, rooted in sentiment, why he should wish to see once more the city of her birth and death. But there were other reasons for his corning. He had been a sincere student of many questions which he believed that this transatlantic trip could, perhaps, render more clear to him. He was a young man who could intellectually repress himself with so ready an adaptability that he possessed scores of acquaintances quite unconscious of any striking trait in him apart from that of his being a good fellow of the most con- vivial proficiences. But he never with intention shut to one acquaintance particular doors or windows of his individuality, and opened them to others. This process, which went on with him as often as he bade farewell to Tom, spoke a greeting word to Dick, or shook hands with Harry, was no less undeliberate than it was authentic. He had, in marked degree, the social gift, the rapid insight that measures and gauges character, the power to enjoy various phases of human society for what they were, apart from what they had failed in becoming. He was a student of his fellow-creatures, a philosopher who not seldom gazed upon the world with eyes of melancholy astonishment. But only those who knew him best ever perceived in him this occult spiritual distress, and even they found it to be transitory as a piece of gloomy emotion ; for 200 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. Massereene did not have it in him to repine ; his was that order of optimism which sees a line of light at the verge of the stormiest horizon, and deafens itself to all the grumbles of thunder that may lurk below. You could never have persuaded him that life was not worth living, though he fairly and unflinchingly faced every modern reason which the scientific pessi- mists presented for its being altogether vain and fu- tile. He could not with justice have been called other than agnostic, and yet that kind of grisly men- tal twilight which the consistent agnostic usually prides himself upon preserving, was lighted, in the case of Massereene, as one might easily imagine, by more than a single lonely trembling star. So long as it was a question of seeking to explain the universe, he tried to possess his soul in patience ; but his hopes and dreams that all was well, and that hu- manity would hereafter confront the explanation of its worst agony these were like white birds that inces- santly hovered about him, while making with the tender palpitations of their wings a harmony that drowned many harsher noises. Cheerfulness always flung its rose-light over his bearing and converse ; but there was something more than mere cheerfulness in this, the companionable and gregarious part of the man's nature ; it bore a closer resemblance to charity, expending and diffusing choice possessions with the freedom of copious alms. " I don't believe you have an enemy in the world, Jasper," one of his English friends had said to him once. And he had replied, with a little start and a troubled frown on his thought- ful face: "I hope that I don't deserve an enemy. .I'd rather have ten than feel that I deserved one." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 201 He did not specially admire either Emmeline Satter- thwaite or her sister, Elaine. They both affected him repellingly by their hardness, just as certain landscapes did in painting, ingenious though he might have found not a few of their minor details. But notwithstanding that he had brought here a number of letters, the Sat- terthwaite family made a first appeal to him through the memory of his dead mother, whose maiden name they bore. Emmeline and Elaine, on the other hand, considered him a most adorable young gentleman. They had learned from their father just how many thousands combined to form his annual income ; they had duly weighed the fact of his being an earl's near, relative ; they had observed his good looks, his manly and tastefully-garbed shape, his polished manners, his unfailing geniality. To meet him again like this, quite unexpectedly in their own drawing-rooms, produced for them both a mild, pleasing shock. And then had come the exasperating reflection that the lateness of the season and their own mourning-attire stood in the way of their having him accompany them among fash- ionable metropolitan gayeties. It would have been such a grand coup to have entered drawing-rooms at his side to have had it transpire that he was their kins- man, and yet the cousin of a distinguished nobleman as well ! The Auchinclosses would have felt it. It was something that would have pierced Madeleine's haughty little soul with envy ! Ah ! did not they know ? If there was anything on earth that could make Madeleine, with her prodigious veneration for herself and her parents and her priggish brother, bend that slim neck of hers cringingly, it was proximity to the British peerage ! . . . Jasper Massereene had mean- 202 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. while no shadow of suspicion what thoughts were passing through the minds of his two young hostesses as he said, in response to a second lament on Emme- line's part that New York was at present so " dread- fully quiet " : "I didn't care much for going to dances and five o'clock teas, I assure you. One has so many of those across the water. I merely wanted to look about rne and observe how the town has really altered since I last saw it. And then I thought something of going into the West. Now there's Chicago, for exam- ple. I want to see that. I hear it has become so enormous and so handsome." Emmeline broke into a mocking laugh, which Elaine echoed. " Oh, don't think of going to Chicago ! " exclaimed the latter. " Nobody ever does, except on business." " Well," smiled Massereene, " I shall go on business. I want to make a business of observation." "But it won't interest you," said Emmeline. "There's nothing in the world to see there. All those Western cities are so tiresome. The Rocky Mountains are probably stupendous, and that sort of thing; but our entire West is fearfully monotonous and full of semi-barbarians. We always pity people who are obliged to go out into those half-civilized regions. If it were not for the Englishmen who land o *--? here with a wild desire to shoot buffaloes, we would never bother ourselves that such dreary stretches of country exist." Emmeline spoke with an arrogance of which she was completely unconscious. She represented a class of New Yorkers who hold our splendid American interior in a contempt as unjust as it is ridiculous. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 203 Only the foreigner who enters New York for the first time and associates with the cliques and clans that base all their noteworthiness upon a smart imitation of habits, deportment, verbal accent, and personal vesture practised reverentially three thousand miles eastward, can appreciate how much typical partisanship this young lady had just exhibited. " I don't want to shoot buffaloes," said Massereene ; " but I confess that I entertain respect of the riiost substantial kind for anything that resembles a prairie." " Oh," comically wailed Elaine, " that is the way all you Englishmen feel as soon as you get over here." "Please don't call mean Englishman," Massereene admonished. "I'm a born American, you know. I've never forgotten it ; I should be sorry to do so, for I'm proud of it." "Oh, of course," assented Emmeline, with a shrug of her solid, symmetrical shoulders. "It's all very well for you to say that you, who've been through Cambridge, and go wherever you please in London, and can take the steamer home again as soon as you're thoroughly bored hei-e." She looked incredulously at Elaine, who returned her look in the same way ; and then both the girls laughed in concert, as though they understood very well what an easy bit of harmless posing it was for such an adopted Englishman as this to air a little dainty patriotism. But Massereene at once answered, in a voice which he had lowered and otherwise changed, and which instantly made both his hearers comprehend his ex- treme earnestness as clearly as if he had used no small amount of ardor and emphasis. " All that I say I mean. And I regard this country, 204 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. not England, as my real home. I've no right to do otherwise, and if I had the right I should not possess the inclination. I'm a good deal of a traveller ; I've been in many other lands ; during those three years or so since I last met you young ladies, I've seen a large part of the Orient, besides some rather out-of-the-way places in Europe; and I come to America to these United States, in fact with a belief that I shall be less disappointed here than I have ever been elsewhere, and that I shall find more true civilization, more healthy national greatness, than all my former experiences will be able to offer me." He spoke these words with so much gentle serenity that they quite lost the form of disagreement and con- tradiction, while retaining the significance of each. Possibly Elaine failed to perceive either their full drift or force ; for almost immediately after he had ended she broke in, with much lightness : " I begin to think that nothing makes one such a good American as to dwell outside of one's country." " Wait till you've been here a few months, Jasper," said Emmeline. " I hope to wait that long," replied Massereene, with the implication (as often was noticeable in some of his most placid speeches) of meaning more than he said. " Oh," suddenly cried Elaine, as her brother Aspin- wall now entered the room ; " here's a young gentleman who would be very glad to change New York with you for London ! . . . Aspy, I hope you haven't forgotten our cousin, Jasper Massereene." Forgotten Jasper Massereene ! Elaine might as well have asked her brother if he had forgotten the Houses OLIVIA DELAPLAIXE. 205 of Parliament or the Thames Embankment. He was indeed a mere boy then, though it was only three years ago. But during that London May had first budded in his soul the eager desire to be what he had since unf alterably and inflexibly become a dude. The very word had not then shaped its quaint monosyllable out of that etymologic mist whence it has so phantas- mally drifted to us, but it now expresses to perfection, nevertheless, just what Master Aspinwall Satterthwaite found himself yearning to become. Massereene was wholly unconscious of the secret reverence with which the young New Yorker watched every fresh pair of trousers, coat, or waistcoat in which he appeared. He dressed, like most Londoners of his age and position, somewhat smartly and carefully. But to Aspinwall he was the silent preacher of a new and precious creed. The unnumbered refinements, delights, intoxications of dress were now for the first time revealed to this noble-minded boy's expanding intellect. Aspinwall had since bloomed forth as the kind of young gentle- man who is considerably more exercised about the spotlessness of his gloves than of his moral character, and who would humiliate himself to an amazing degree rather than wear a hat which had not come out of Piccadilly. He shook hands with Massereene, actually daring to pass upon the latter's clothes a rapid mental criticism, and not a thoroughly favorable one at that. So does the past perish, and the influence of memory and tradition grow even as the dust that we sprinkle upon the wind ! Still, success and achievement have their stimulating retrospections. "By Jove," thought Aspinwall, while he buttoned one of his gloves, " the man isn't as well dressed as I am ! " And poor Mas- 206 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. sereene, equally ignorant of either this most virile creature's former worship or hia present alienation, looked as amiable as usual, and tried to crush a doubt lest his visit on the Satterthwaites that afternoon might not prove a trifle fatiguing. " Where are you going, Aspy ? " Emmeline presently asked of her brother, who carried his hat besides wear- ing his gloves. " Or have you just come in ?" " I'm going to see the coaches parade," returned Aspinwall ; and before he could add something sul- lenly regi-etful about his father's coach (for reasons explainable on the ground of family bereavement) not being to-day in the general line of the forthcoming procession, Elaine rather excitedly said : "Oh, let us -all go. It's only a few streets from here, Jasper Madison Square, you know." " I recollect Madison Square very well," said Mas- sereene. " It's our apology for not having a Hyde Park," said Aspinwall, sitting forward in his chair, stooping'a good deal, and knocking the but of a phenomenal silver- studded stick that he carried against the knuckles of one gloved hand. " It will seem a pretty small affair to you, Jasper, after the big London show." "Well, never mind whether it does or not," ex- claimed Emmeline. " You'll go, won't you, Jasper, if Elly and I run upstairs and put on our bonnets ? " " I'll go with pleasure," said Massereene. Aspinwall had been right. It did seem a pretty small affair, this New York apeing of a custom so essentially English. A short walk brought himself and the Satterthwaite party into the neighborhood of the Brunswick Hotel, that establishment which began by OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 207 appropriating to its uses a private residence and then absorbed other contiguous ones, until it now looms from the corner of Twenty-Sixth Street and Fifth Avenue as a curiously ill-proportioned and many- windowed pile, shorn of all dignity by its irregular roofage. Massereene and his companions reached the great gathered throng of people a trifle too late. Eleven coaches paraded that day, and their place of rendezvous had been the east side of Madison Square, opposite that row of mansions which is perhaps the most advantageously and salubriously situated of any in our narrow and building-crowded metropolis. One or two of the coaches had now passed the hotel, and the rest were slowly following, amid the continuous mellow clamor of horns made by some of their various occupants. The small, well-trained horses, four at each vehicle, stepped along with a brisk yet suppressed energy. They seemed to be conscious of the rainbow burdens that they drew, for the coaches themselves were severally tinted blue, green, red, and yellow, in chromatic disdain of all sombre panelling, and the ladies and gentlemen who had climbed up to their accommo- dating summits were clad in costumes of a most uncon- ventional gayety. The gentlemen wore " white hats," with a few dusky exceptions, and many of them were apparelled in pearl-hued coats with large gaudy nose- gays bulging from the lapels of these. The ladies, as next day's papers recorded of them, wore robes of "mouse-colored brocade," "white silk trimmed with flowered foulard," "crushed strawberry satin," and numberless other stuffs quite as costly and modish. . . . Massereene watched it all, and through his mind, as he did so, may have slipped the silent, instinctive com- 208 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. ment : " C'est magnifique^ mais ce n'est pas la guerre" It was certainly, in a limited way, magnificent ; and yet to him who had seen, season after season, the far more diverting and spectacular exhibition of Hyde Park, with such superior amplitude of local surround- ing and a multiplicity of coaches which put this pitia- ble eleven into humble numerical shade, it seemed like the most meagre attempted repetition of memorial grandeurs. It was English, and yet it was somehow not English enough to be authentic. He felt a kind of pained shame as he continued to look upon it ; the very expressions of the men and women who sat upon the coaches were in many cases not those which he would have desired to see on the faces of his country- people. They were often smiling enough, but they were daintily arrogant and even childishly pretentious as well. Perhaps they had been that in London, too ; but he had not thought of it there. It had possibly suited England ; it smote him like the most unrepub- lican of discords now and here. Emmeline and Elaine and Aspmwall were delivering their keenly interesting remarks at his side, but he scarcely realized the sense of what they spoke ; he was thinking whether such a proceeding as the present one were not a shame and a folly to be regretted and denounced. " There's Minnie Saltonstall," Elaine was saying. " Did you ever see such an unbecoming hat ? . . . And Lou Rivington's feather, Em do look ! . . . Oh, dear, this is the first time for an age that we haven't been in the coaching-parade, too. . . . Aspy, stop try- ing to make Jenny Hudsonbank see you. . . . Just think ! I was to have worn my pink silk, new from OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 209 Worth, and papa had filled his coach with such a jolly lot of people after we'd been invited to go on the others. . . . Look at Sadie Yan Tassel ; she got the box-seat, after all, on the Van Courtlandt coach, didn't she ? " "Don't speak so loudly, Elly," remonstrated Emme- line. "Recollect where we are. People are hearing you." These people, whether they heard or did not hear, appeared to Massereene as un-English in the extreme. They had, for the most part, none of that stolid re- cipient quiescence which usually marks the British looker-on during any such distinctly patrician mani- festation. They either stared greedily at the whole performance, as though it were in all respects novel to them, or they contemplated it with sinister grades of expression that varied from smouldering sarcasm to overt hostility. But the latter sign was, after all, not frequent, nor was the locality one to call it forth. A good deal of socialism may lurk among the beer- saloons of the Bowery and its contiguous streets ; but Fifth Avenue, in the jocund sunshine of a May after- noon, is rather too blithe a place for such grim pedes- trians as these to choose it. Massereene soon caught, however, some grunted sounds of disgust not far away from him, and on turning saw that a massive-framed Irishman, with a ruffianly look about his very soiled face, had just addressed a mate nearly as clumsy and unkempt as himself. " Jim," said the man, with a broad, red, snarl- ing sort of grin, " is them fellers lords, d'ye think?" "They luk 's if they wus," growled Jim, under a 210 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. clotted auburn moustache, while lie scratched one bristly jowl with dirt-caked nails. His comrade gave a bitter, gruff, contemptuous laugh. "American lords and ladies dooks and duchusses?" he exclaimed, so shrilly that perhaps a score or so of people heard him. " They ain't the genooine make, not quite, but they're warranted to wear, so they are, almost ez good. Come along, Jim." And he drew his friend away, with another scoffing laugh. " It's a queer kind o' country, this Ameriky, annyhow. It's ahvus a-screamin' out that it's freer nur any other, an' it screams this so loud that half the fools in the wurld is gettin' to believe it." The man's voice died into distance, but the meaning of what he had said stayed frettingly with Masscreene for some minutes afterward. Then he shook off the little chill, as of omen, that it gave him the pre- sentiment that his own hopes and expectations might not be satisfied and confirmed. And meanwhile he heard Emmeline's voice at his side, murmuring rather petulantly: "What are those dreadful men saying? I do think they ought to have dividing-lines, or some- thing of that sort, at times like this. One has no idea whom one is being jostled against." This had for Massereene a decidedly " West End " sound. But he made no reply, and watched the en- tire procession out, feeling rather bored at having to do so, as not a single person on any of the coaches chanced to be known to him. Now and then he fan- cied that he had seen one of the men in some London drawing-room, or perhaps in some restaurant like the Hotel Bristol or the Cafe Royal in Regent Street. But he was never quite sure the huge English OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 211 capital is so huge, and human countenances, during all occurrences of the daily routine, so rush there upon the vision. It was a relief to find the parade ended and to meet, as they at length did, Mr. Bleecker Satterthwaite, strolling along with a flower in his but- tonhole and the general demeanor of a man for whom life offers no requisition more of a chose obligatoire than whist, billiards or coach-driving. Satterthwaite was apparently very glad to meet Massereene. " My dear boy," he said, " it's a devil- ish shame that you couldn't have seen something of all this fun. "I'd have crowded you in at the last minute on top of my coach yes, I would, no matter how the girls and the men fussed and fumed about it. And I was to have such a jolly load ... I suppose the girls have told you. Houston Van Rensselaer's dead my wife's brother, you know. Decency's de- cency . . . but I never really knew the man ; he was forever living abroad ; he hated it here. . . . Well, Jasper, old boy, I'm awfully glad to see you." He put one hand caressingly on Massereene's shoulder as they all walked together up toward the Satterthwaite residence. " I was sure you'd come over at last. You look just the same, except that you're a trifle stouter." " I've gained a little in weight," said Massereene. This very ordinary remark struck Bleecker Satter- thwaite as something especially apt and neat. Almost any remark that Massereene could have made would thus have appealed to his kinsman. The father of Emmeline and Elaine was delighted to have seen his daughters in this wholly unexpected company. He had already swept his eyes over the personnel of 212 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. Massereene, and let his paternal soul swiftly whisper to him that he was a possible son-in-law of surpassing value. Jasper had nearly always met precisely this kind of parental welcome. He was so notoriously wealthy, he had such a presentable, reputable, at- tractive mien. Manoeuvring English mammas of the highest position 'wives of county grandees, baronets, and even noblemen had long ago forgiven him the drawback of his American birth in recalling that he was rich, handsome, a parti, and that he shared the blood of the Earl of Meath. Satterthwaite patted him on the shoulder and jo- cosely said : " My dear Jasper, don't you mind a few more pounds or so of weight. You can stand them. You're tall enough ; they don't take away from your good looks. It's deuced pleasant, old fellow, to see that you haven't forgotten us. This is a bad season infernally bad season for New York. But I'll write you down at the Metropolitan and Gramercy clubs. I'll have you made a six-months' visitor at both, if you'll agree to stay here as long as that." " Thanks," said Massereene. " I shall certainly stop here as long as six months." When Bleecker Satterthwaite had reconducted him into the Fifth Avenue mansion, and Emmeline, Elaine, Aspinwall and the head of the house himself had all gathered about him with a profusion of conversational hospitality, he began to feel the utter coldness and worldliness of this family as he had never felt it be- fore. They had no subject to discuss except banalite of the dreariest kind. Emmeline was a little different from the others ; her mind seemed now and then of an opposite order ; but her promises of a more interesting OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 213 development soon faded. Massereene was about taking his leave, having courteously refused an invi- tation to remain and dine, when Mrs. Satterthwaite made her appearance. She greeted him warmly. But she appeared to for- get him a moment afterward, and turned towai'd her husband and daughters. " I have such news for you all," she exclaimed, sink- ing into a chair and beginning to untie her bonnet- strings rather agitatedly. Everybody except Massereene gave a concerned start. " I do hope it's nothing bad about Delaplaine," said her husband. " Mamma ! " exclaimed Emmeline, rising and coming forward to where her mother sat. "Is he dead?" "Oh, yes," followed Elaine, rising too, and remem- bering that her anxiety (such as it was) had " Cousin Jasper" for an observer. "You do mean that Mr. Delaplaine is dead; don't you, mamma?" "No," replied Mrs. Satterthwaite, as she removed the bonnet. " I mean something much . . . well, much stranger than that." 214 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. XII. Before Olivia had taken more than twenty paces, on having closed the door of the sick man's room, she met somebody who soon addressed her dazed senses as her aunt, Mrs. Satterthwaite. And yet the girl's mind was in so flurried a state that she did not even recognize, at first, the person who accosted her. " Olivia," queried her aunt, " what has happened to make you look so dreadfully disturbed, my dear?" Mrs. Satterthwaite knew perfectly well what had happened. She caught both of her niece's hands and held them tightly while she scanned the delicate, alarmed, bewildered face of their possessor. "I have had a great shock," Olivia said, drawing a deep breath. Then she gave a little sigh, followed by a quick, distressful glance. "Did you have any idea that he he was going to speak like that?" she asked. "Like that?" repeated Mrs. Satterthwaite, as her niece broke away from her. "Why, what do you mean? What has he said?" " Forgive me, Aunt Augusta ! " now fell from Olivia. She was pierced by an abrupt self-reproach for having done her aunt an injustice. "Of course you did not know; how should you know? Mr. Delaplaine has asked me to marry him me! On his death-bed, too ! Think of it ! " Mrs. Satterthwaite had thought a great deal more about it than her poor young kinswoman remotely OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 215 imagined. She now threw open the door of an apart- ment next to that from which Olivia had just fled. "Come in here, my dear," she murmured, and they entered together. She had not been quite sure of her forthcoming policy until now, and now she suddenly felt herself to be quite sure. There was a large, com- fortable, tufted lounge in the chamber, and as Olivia sank into one corner of this her aunt sank at her side. "I will be very frank with you," Mrs. Satterthvvaite now went on. "I will confess to you that I had suspected something of this sort would take place." "Mr. Delaplaine told you, then ?" " He could make the matter plain to me without precisely telling ... do you not understand? And now pray let me know just what passed between you." Olivia clasped her hands together in her lap, lowered her eyes, and gave a clear if somewhat hesitating account of all that had taken place. When she fin- ished, her aunt allowed quite a marked interval of silence to ensue. And then she said, very measuredly and reflectively : "My dear, it seems to me a most noble action on his part. And if you were to do as he requests, no one could reasonably blame you. Marriage, Olivia, is a very sacred relation ; there should be love on both sides ; it is folly to affirm there should not be. But this proposed marriage is an affair outside of all ordi- nary considerations. It is or it would be, my dear a marriage of duty. I don't only mean duty to your dead father's old friend ; I mean duty to your dead father himself." "Aunt Augusta! what are you saying?" "The truth, Olivia or at least, the truth as I feel 216 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. it and see it. Mr. Delaplaine cannot live. He wishes to save you endless trouble and vexation in the retain- ing of that inheritance which he has left you after he is gone. He told you this you admit he did. Per- il aps you shrink from taking such a step because you believe it would be so hollow a mockery. But I can't agree with you on that point ; I'm older than you, and I've had a great deal more experience than you can possibly have had, and I am convinced that the whole proceeding (if you should consent to it) would rank among the tenderest and sweetest concessions that a young girl like yourself could make . . . My dear girl, it isn't as if you were marrying an old man for his money ! " Olivia nodded her head with positiveness here. "Yes, it is," she exclaimed. "It isn't anything else. I would be marrying an old man on his death-bed for his money. Just that ; you can't make it different from that ; I'm sure that you can't." " Let us see if I cannot, Olivia. He was the most faithful and devoted friend your father ever had. By leaving you his fortune he confers upon you a benefit which you may most honorably accept. But he has relatives; and then, most probably, the members of those charitable associations to which he had be- queathed so much, having learned long ago of his intended bequests, would array themselves against the administration of a will that had been changed a short time before his death. . . . All such distressing re- sults as these, a marriage like the one which Mr. Delaplaine proposes would swiftly and forever pre- vent. . . . Are you following me, my dear Olivia? You somehow look as if you were not ... as if you . . ." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 217 "Oh, I hear every word that you say?" exclaimed Olivia, rising from the lounge and beginning to pace the floor with drooped head and with hands joined behind her back. Mrs. Satterthwaite remained seated, watching her as she thus unexpectedly deported herself. " This promises well," thought the astute lady. She kept silent now, waiting for her niece to speak again. " If I did do it I can't help but feel certain that I would act with a a mean, grasping selfishness." Olivia said nothing more for some little time, though she still continued her nervous walk from end to end of the apartment. She was thinking of her life at Mrs. Ottarson's of the odd, coarse, uncongenial peo- ple whom she was forced to meet there of how the changed conditions of her days had begun to affect her with an incessant erosive and unconquerable dis- content. She was thinking of brief moods which had recently visited her when she had told herself that it would perhaps have been wisei*, more judicious, to have entered, even on terms of genteel dependence, into the household of either the Auchinclosses or the Satterthwaites. There she might have had her mo- ments of chagrin, irritation, humiliation, but at least she would have been among persons who knew the convenances, who were not continually reminding her that she came of gentlefolk and they did not. "You say, Aunt Augusta, that it would be a tender and sweet concession on my part. It wouldn't be at all that, for if I were to consent I should have only the realization that I had done so on my own account, and not Mr. Delaplaine's." " That would not prevent the good consequences of what you did do, my dear." 218 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. " Good consequences ! " As she repeated her aunt's words, Olivia paused directly in front of Mrs. Satter- thwaite, and looked down at this lady with eyes full of suppressed fire. "And what would he know or care when he was dead?" "It might make him die easier." Olivia nodded once or twice, gnawing her lips. Her face appeared to have aged within the last few min- utes ; she had never seemed less maid-like and more womanly than now, while her features were influenced by traces of the severest trouble. " That is perhaps true enough," she exclaimed, beginning her restive walk again. " But my motive ! I can't deceive my- self by not admitting that I would be marrying him for no other reason than the money he has settled upon me. If he wanted me to marry him simply as an act of benevolence, or a a tribute of sentiment before he died, would I hesitate for one instant in my re- fusal?" "Then you do hesitate now, my dear?" asked Mrs. Satterthwaite. The calm question, falling in modulated tones from this wiliest and most strategic of women, dealt Olivia a kind of sting. "I I do not want to hesitate ! " she stammered, knotting her hands together. "My darling, you want to think it over all alone by yourself," said Mrs. Satterthwaite, rising, going up to her, and kissing her on one cheek. " And you shall do so. ... There, I will leave you for ten or fifteen min- utes. Your aunt Letitia was to be here this afternoon ; perhaps she has arrived. . . . And, Olivia, love, re- member that you will be taking a step of which we OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 219 both approve. . . . Candidly, my dear, I believe that if you do not take it you will feel pangs of conscience hereafter." "Especially if his relatives carry a successful law- suit against me," said Olivia, with a swift irony that was quite unwonted in her, and showed how sharp a secret moral revolt had begun against the temptation that had latterly assailed her. Mrs. Satterthwaite patted her on the shoulder. She understood, with her worldly shrewdness, that this bitter sentence, so filled with feverish self-reproach, had its practical promise of surrender. " You argue foolishly, Olivia," she murmured. " If your stay at Mrs. Ottarson's has fatigued you, and you feel your- self unsuited for its ... peculiar requirements, that is no reason " " But I have not said that it fatigued me," broke in Olivia, with a querulous, perturbed, self-contradictory look straight into her aunt's composed eyes. " I grant that you have not, my dear. . . . We will let that pass. . . . But you must not assert to your own mind that the impulse would be a selfish one. You behave more heroically than you now perceive." " Heroically ! Aunt Augusta ! " "Yes, yes. I use the word in no careless way. It would all be a very fine and admirable service for you to perform. Your nice sense of right will make that plain to you hereafter. . . . There, no\v, my dear, I will leave you to think it over, as I said." At this point Mrs. Satterthwaite glided toward the door which led into the outer hall. " Pray wait here until I re- turn. If you decide that your consent is impossible, please don't think that either your Aunt Letitia or I 220 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. will attempt to use with you the least strenuous per- suasion. Oh, no, indeed. Everything will be left entirely with yourself with your well-known regard for your poor lost father and with your own inter- pretation of duty toward the truest and most faithful friend whom that father ever knew." She passed at once from the room after thus speak- ing. " It's in the girl to consent," she rapidly as- sured her own thoughts. " That awful woman, with her boarding-house entourage, has had just the effect I hoped for. And advice will do the rest or else I'm immensely wrong in my whole estimate." Olivia, left alone, dropped into a chair and stared at the floor. She had been slightly affected by her aunt's train of argument. There was no moral reason why she should marry Spencer Delaplaine. She did not owe it to her dead father ; she did not owe it to her father's dying friend. The oath of marriage was too holy a one to be taken except because her heart willed that she should swear it. If Delaplaine had been a man whom she had loved, this deathbed union would have its complete justification, and its romantic sanc- tity as well. But he was not such a man, and to marry him would be, under existing circumstances, a sacrifice unsupported by rational requirement. Her father would never have asked her to make it ; it must mean so much to a girl of the least sensitive- ness, the least sensibility " And yet " her musing continued, "I stop to brood over the matter. I don't refuse, once and for all, to give it a further minute of consideration. Why is this?" She met and faced the exact solution It was be- OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 221 cause she would, reap material benefit by becoming Spencer Pelaplaine's wife. She was far too honest a custodian of her own mind and heart not to insist upon flouting all duplicity with either. There lay the nude, unflattering truth. To allow this marriage would be to soil her own purity, to debase her ideal, no matter what Mrs. Satterthwaite might urge in refutation. But desire pushed its claim against the monitions of honor. Those past boarding-school days came back vividly to Olivia now. She recalled the sudden self- abandonment that would almost seem to thrust her over .the brink of some misdeed. . . . Was it not the same at this moment? Did she not feel that old ma- lign force at work? the insubordinate obstinacy of spirit the reaching out after a boon forbidden her by order, law, propriety, whatever name was held fittest to bestow on the opposing stress ? Yet she might resist if she chose. It had always been thus in former days, when comparative trifles were brought into question ; and now, when the trial was of larger moment and stronger meaning, she also might resist if so inclined. But, instead, she began to ask herself whether men and women would be liable to call such a marriage on her part a sordid and cold-blooded one. True, it would be almost like standing at the side of a coffin, and be- coming the bride of the corpse ; and yet, when every- thing was known, as everything must be at length known, society would doubtless take the same view of her conduct as that of Mrs. Satterthwaite. And then the subsequent gain ! Could she shut her eyes to that ? All the freedom and independence 222 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. of a married woman would be hers, to go whither she pleased, to do a hundred things that in an unwedded member of her sex would fall under the head of pre- sumption or immodesty. The fortune bequeathed her would be safe from litigious attacks. Olivia knew very little about the methods of legal administration in any country, but it was not hard for her to assume with confidence that as the wife of Delaplaine her title of heirship would prove unassailable. And what good might she accomplish with her fortune! She had often declared to herself, during the latter years of her girlhood, that the one most cogent means of secur- ing earthly happiness was in the vigilant and careful discharge of charitable offices. Once possessed of wealth, she would never find contentment in such idle pre-eminence as that which her father's two sisters were now enjoying. Not she! It was no sophistry that wrought tricksy spells upon her here. She was willing to admit her own selfishness in yielding at all to the voice that lured and enticed. But this was the generous and high-minded side, so to speak, of that very selfishness. Had she not again and again medi- tated upon the good that she might do with the money of which her orphanage would, as she once so firmly trusted, make her the mistress? In the stillness and suspense of her father's Inst hours thoughts like these had often come to her. It had never been among her musings, for some strange reason, to dream, as other girls were forever doing, of a possible gallant, gracious and irreproachable husband. A curious, delicate, vir- ginal fierceness had risen within her the moment she let her brain ponder that probability. What we have heard her tell Mrs. Ottarsou on the subject of never OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 223 meaning, to marry, had been spoken straight from the maidenly innocence of her own chaste, candid, fool- ishly devout conviction. And now it looked very much as if she would in- deed marry though after a fashion startlingly differ- ent from that to which her former protestations had borne reference. . . . She had for some little time ceased to pace the floor of the apartment. She had thrown herself into a half-reclining posture upon the lounge when Mrs. Satterthwaite softly opened the door and passed into the room. " My dear," said this lady, drawing quite close to her, "I have seen your Aunt Letitia, who ad- vises . . ." " Well," broke in Olivia, lifting up her head and showing how pale her face was, " what does Aunt Letitia advise ? " " That you do not trouble yourself any further regarding this matter. If your mind is not made up yet ... or if you still feel that you had best not con- sent . . ." Olivia rose, here, with suddenness. " My mind is made up," she said, " and I do consent." " My dear child ! " " Yes, I consent. Neither you nor Aiint Letitia could ever persuade me that I am doing right that I am doing what poor papa would sanction that I am serving any one's true interests except my own." . . . She paused, just here, and the feeblest and sad- dest of laughs made at her lips a sound that seemed only formed to die there as drearily as it did die. " But I am resolved. You may let Mr. Delaplaine know, whenever you choose, that I am . . . ready." 224 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. Daring the next half-hour or so Olivia felt herself beset by a fright that quickened her pulses and more than once sent shivers through her frame. But her determination had been taken. She moved nervously about the room, hardly aware that she did not still remain seated. She knew that her aunt Augusta had gone away again to superintend certain preparations. She was waiting. Sometimes her heart galloped so wildly that she believed herself on the verge of break- ing down altogether and of rushing out to find Mrs. Satterthwaite and avow her disability, her change of mood, her withdrawal of everything that she had lately affirmed. But no such hysterical act really resulted from her perturbation. She did not herself realize how strong was the new desire that filled and ruled her. Unable to do more than despise it, she still perversely clung to the idea of its gratification. Her choice was made. . . . When Mrs. Satterthwaite re-entered the room it did not seem to Olivia as if she had been away, this last time, longer than five minutes at the utmost. Mrs. Auchincloss, on the present occasion, followed closely behind her sister. She kissed her niece and pressed the girl's hand ; a sense of duty was every- where manifest in her behavior. You could see it, too, in the lines of her lips, the angle at which she held her nose, the very management of her eyelids. " There is something truly beautiful in your having consented, my dear," she whispered to Olivia. " I don't think there is anything beautiful in it at all, Aunt Letitia," was the reply, given with a blunt promptitude which bespoke more self-possession than Olivia's kindled eyes and pale, twitching lips other- OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 225 wise evidenced. " But if the affair is really to be gone through with, I I should like it begun yes, and ended as soon as possible." Mrs. Auchincloss still retained Olivia's hand ; she softly patted it with her other disengaged hand, now. "I have heard," she said, "that you insist upon sepa- rating from your proposed step any ... er ... com- passionate or ... er ... duteous impulse. But I know that this exists in you ; your Aunt Augusta knows it as well. "We both . . ." Here Mrs. Satterthwaite gave a little dry cough of pronounced impatience. She saw that Olivia's con- dition was more excited than when she had last quitted the chamber. The girl looked in no mood to endure much discussion of her resolve. How was it certain that Mrs. Auchincloss's efforts to moralize character- istically on the subject might not result in some sort of impetuous and disastrous recoil ? Besides, Delaplaine's malady had assumed still more fatal symptoms. It was by no means a surety that he would last until morning. What was to be done had best be quickly done. And so Mrs. Satterthwaite translated her ad- monitory cough, as it were, by at once saying : " Letitia, I really think we should lose no time." Olivia drew her hand away from the caressing clasp of her elder aunt with a vehemence of movement that admitted no misinterpretation. " Yes," she exclaimed, " do not let us lose any time. It might turn out very badly for me if I did so." The irony in that final sentence could not fail to affect its hearers. It caused them to exchange a look. O It made Mrs. Auchincloss pretend that she was griev- ously surprised ; it sent from the eyes of Mrs. Satter- 226 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. thwaite the glance that seemed to say : " Don't disturb her any more than she is disturbed now. Leave good alone. Don't you see that she may break down if we are not careful ! " The apartment of Delaplaine, as Olivia, between her two aunts, entered it a little while afterward, was con- siderably less dim than when she had hurried thence hardly an hour ago. Two or three figures stood near the bed, and one of these, from its clerical attire, left no doubt that it was the minister summoned to per- form the wedding ceremony. Delaplaine lay with open eyes and an expression of suffering on his hueless face. But he smiled faintly as his gaze rested upon Olivia. Mrs. Satterthwaite gently pushed her niece to the edge of the bed. An extreme stillness reigned in the apartment. Olivia heard her own heart beat as the sick man stretched out his hand and slowly clasped hers. She let him draw it toward him. Her head grew a little dizzy then, and she feared that she might fall. But soon this most tormenting sensation passed, and she perceived that the gentleman in the clerical dress was close beside her. He looked down at Delaplaine, who was breathing somewhat heavily now, and whose eyes would close for a few seconds, quickly to re-open and seek the face of Olivia, with a sharp relief that had the meaning of " Ah ! you are still there ! " and with a sudden tightening of his feverish fingers about the girl's palm. And in response to the clergyman's mute inquiry, Delaplaine nodded a very faint affirmative. The large, soft hand of the clergyman fell upon his and Olivia's where they lay joined. And then a low, rich voice broke the silence, repeating the Episcopal OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 227 wedding service. ... To Olivia it all had a dream- like unreality and rapidity. The ring had been slipped on her finger, and the last words of the sacred ritual were being uttered, when she became aware that Delaplaine's breathing was louder and more difficult than it had yet sounded. " If he should die before we are fully married ! " swept through her mind. ... A little later her aunts drew her away ; he seemed in great pain, and she heard him moan, " My side ! my side ! " as if the chief agony were there. Both her aunts kissed her, and then she let them lead her from the room " Will he live much longer?" she asked in low and O trembling tones. Mrs. Satterthwaite spoke : " The doctors think not." "I I wish to go, now," said Olivia. " I will of course come to-morrow, and send this evening from Aunt Thyrza's to find out how he is. But I would prefer to go, now." She saw amazement depict itself on Mrs. Auchin- closs's face. Mrs. Satterthwaite raised both hands and shook her head in energetic negative. The latter immediately spoke, saying : "Go now, Olivia! Why, my dear, of what can you be thinking? "And then Mrs. Auchincloss : "Go now, Olivia ! " They had all three just entei'ed the same room whence Olivia had passed in their company only a short while since. The girl stood in the centre of this room, after thus being unexpectedly addressed, and let her eyes wander from the countenance of one companion to that of the other. 228 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. " I don't understand you at all," she faltered, " why can I not go now? I have done what you required me to do. I I have married him. He is very ill; he is going to die." Here she paused. The pain of remorse was already at work in her. She had been quite certain the remorse would come. In other times, after she had yielded, and doggedly committed the very fault which she recognized as a fault, she had always foreseen the stabs of conscience to which, as it were, she had both rashly and deliberately committed herself. But the remorse, like the culpability, had been of so different kind, then ! A tremulous nervous weakness, a gloom of spirits, a shrinking from the arraignments of her own mortified and incensed moral obligations, had commenced to play fatal havoc with her inward peace. She felt none of the calmer reac- tion that with many natures would succeed fulfilment of a purpose conceived in turmoil of soul and executed as the means to a self-serving attainment. " You can't expect me to stay here," she at length continued, with a wistful though petulant ring in her voice, " until . . . until it happens. It may not happen for hours yet perhaps not for a day or two longer." Mrs. Auchincloss drew near to her and laid a light but firm touch on her arm. " Olivia," this model of all the higher and better duties now exclaimed, "do you not see that your present part is to behave as if it might not happen at all ? " " As if ... it ... might not happen at all ? " she repeated brokenly. " No ; I don't see that I should so behave, Aunt Letitia. At least not to yow." "Your aunt is right, my dear," said Mrs. Satter- thwaite. " Remember, you are a wife now." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 229 "Yes ... I am his wife. . . . And I shall soon be his widow." Mrs. Auchincloss gave her sister a despairing glance. " But, Olivia, you are not his widow yet" "No," was the answer. She looked down at the wedding-ring on her finger. "Not yet. Well? And if I am not?" Mrs. Auchincloss was about to speak, at this point, but Mrs. Satterthwaite silenced her by a gesture half imploring and half commanding. "Your proper place, then, is here here in this house. Don't you see that it is? ... Word will be sent to Mrs. Ottarson, if you wish. Change of attire, my dear, and all that, will be attended to. But you ought not to leave this house . . . you must not leave it." The door of the room had been left ajar. At this moment the graceful and handsome youth whom Olivia had seen not long ago, and whose name she had learned to be Adrian Etherege, crossed the thresh- old. He went at once to Mrs. Satterthwaite and said, in his clear, soft, winning voice : " Mr. Delaplaine is suffering very much, but he has asked to see you." "I will go to him," was the lady's ready answer. She made a step or two toward the door, and then turned, addressing Olivia: "You will remain here till I come back, my dear? You will remain with your Aunt Letitia?" Olivia made no answer. She had fixed her eyes upon Adrian Etherege. As if possessed by a sudden idea, she approached the young man, standing close at his side before he himself seemed to be aware of what she had done. 230 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. "Tell me," she said, "do you think that Mr. Dela- plaine will live through the night?" He whom she thus questioned gave a start. His large, luminous brown eyes lost all their gentleness, for an instant, as they met Olivia's. A hardness, a bit- terness, for which she was totally unprepared, seized and altered his charming visage. . . . And then the change vanished as swiftly as it had come. ... It had already passed when he responded, in a voice full of respectful courtesy : " I can't tell you how long Mr. Delaplaine may live. But I do not believe he is dying now at all. He is very ill, but I have every hope that he will recover." " Recover ?" murmured Olivia. . . . She shot a wild look at either of her two kinswomen. Both of them avoided it. "Recover?" she again said ... In another minute the room had begun to whirl about with her. She knew that she was staggering as she tried to find her seat. One of her aunts she could not tell which one helped her to find it. "You are ill, my dear," she heard a voice say. She could not make out to whom the voice belonged, her brain seemed in such a tumult. "Recover?" she murmured once more, though unaware that for the third time this word had left her quivering lips. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 231 XIII. THE faintness that had assailed Olivia soon left her. When she sat up and looked about her once more with a clear gaze, Adrian Etherege had quitted the room. Her first words were spoken to Mrs. Satterthwaite. " Do you believe this to be true? " she asked. "You mean what Adrian just said?" she replied. " Yes ; that is precisely what I do mean." Mrs. Sattei-thwaite had gone toward the door, and her hand was already on its knob. A request from Spencer Delaplaine at such an hour was not to be dis- regarded. " Positively, my dear," she said, " I do not believe it to be true. This young man, perhaps, finds it hard to realize that death has actually come. . . . There, I must leave you. Remain with your Aunt Le- titia . . . promise me that you will." Olivia made no answer, and Mrs. Satterthwaite quitted the room with a furtive and telling signal to her sister. The latter understood perfectly ; she was enjoined to repress all tendency on their niece's part in the direction of escape. And Mrs. Auchincloss was pi'epared to oppose that course in Olivia with quite as much vigor as any which Mrs. Satterthwaite could have drawn upon. Olivia had seated herself now. She was very pale, but her former excitement had apparently quite van- ished. Mrs. Auchincloss took a seat on the lounge at her side. 232 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. " Have you such a horror, then, of Mr. Delaplaine's recovery, my dear?" asked her aunt. "Why should I not have?" she answered in a voice that rang firm and steady, but held a new hollow note, like the emanation from some great hidden dread or anxiety. " If I thought he would get well, Aunt Letitia," she went on, "I am almost certain that I would kill myself." " Olivia ! What are you saying? " " I would either kill myself or else hide from him somewhere, miles and miles distant where he would not dream of finding me." She gave a slight, dolorous laugh here. "But he would find me, would he not, in these days of telegraphs, detectives, and newspapers, if he only searched enough ? " " My child ! " " Oh, the very thought is so terrible ! It has given me a kind of benumbed feeling. I was merely flut- tered and distraite before, thinking of how coldly calculating a thing I had done ! But now this seems like a vague threat of punishment." She drew herself up,, and a smile flashed along her lips. "I am too absurd, however, am I not? There is no chance none at all. That young man, Adrian Etherege, gave me such a shock ! I wish he had not spoken as he did ; I fancy I shall detest the very sight of him after this, handsome though he is." Mrs. Auchincloss felt chilled into silence. This ab- horrence that was ready to steep itself in the blackest tide of tragedy, frightened and amazed her. She was unused to such robustness of emotion ; she had held it in polite and dainty scorn all through her life. A surge of regret swept over her that she she, Letitia OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 233 Auchincloss, a woman of race and breeding and the most haughtily exclusive habit should thus have encountered the risk of being connected with anything so sensational, so " newspaperish," as the headlong despair at which her niece's behavior hinted. After a while she falteringly managed to say, while Olivia sat with eyes riveted on the floor and her lips tightly locked together : "You will not for a moment imagine, my dear, that I have had the least desire to make you act otherwise than as a dutiful daughter of your poor papa. I was quite without knowledge, on the other hand, Olivia, that you entertained such repugnance toward Mr. Delaplaine. . . . And, indeed, if I had supposed " "I entertain no repugnance toward him," Olivia trenchantly broke in, lifting her head and showing how much trouble blent with her strange composure. " But to to really be his wife! " She put her hands up to her face, covering it from sight. Her aunt watched her, while a faint tremor shook her frame. " Do not let us talk of that subject, please," she continued, let- ting her hands fall again into her lap. ..." You wish me to remain here, you and Aunt Augusta. You think it best that I should stay over-night. . . . Well, I will do so. But I must send for Aunt Thyrza for Mrs. Ottarson. You don't like her, either of you, I know. But I must send for her, all the same. She will come to me as soon as she gets my note. . . . Where can I write it ? a bit of paper and a pencil are all that I want. I must write it at once." She rose as she fin- ished speaking, a'nd looked about the room. She saw a desk in one corner, hastened toward it, and perceived that writing-paper was placed there, with pen and ink. 234 OLIVIA . DELAPLAINE. She seated herself before the desk, and began a note to her aunt with extraordinary swiftness. Mrs. Auch- incloss, from her place on the lounge, gazed with lifted eye-glasses at this hurried proceeding. " If that horri- ble woman is to be sent for," she reflected, " I had best go." It struck this lady very much as if she might be instrumental in having sown the wind to reap a hurricane. She had always borne herself as a placid idolatress of conventionalism, and now, when there was even a dim omen of her flawless respectability being put into any peril, she desired to lift her nice skirts clear of the least soilure. " There," said Olivia, having finished, sealed, and directed her note. " I have made it short, but Aunt Thyrza will understand that I want her." She rose, and again glanced about the apartment in search of a bell. She saw one and went to it. As she rang it she proceeded, still in the same collected voice that she had used of late : " I must have the note sent without delay. Some servant will be found to take it, of course." " I suppose so, Olivia," said Mrs. Auchincloss. " How you do cling to that lady, my dear ! " " I cling to her because she is the only real friend whom I now have on earth ! " Mrs. Auchincloss rose from the lounge with a pained look. "Are not your Aunt Augusta and I your friends, my dear ? " " I hope so," said Olivia, with an unmerciful frank- ness. "But you are not pardon me for expressing just what I mean at such a time you are not the same to me as Aunt Thyrza is. I want her near me now, and I must either have her here or else go to her." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 235 Mrs. Auchincloss sighed. " Then you agree to stay until she comes ? " " Yes." " Very well. Please do not expect me to meet her; that is all." " I don't expect it, or even wish it." Mrs. Auchincloss sighed again and walked toward the door. Just as she did so it was opened, and her sister once more appeared. Olivia, on seeing her, instantly said: "Well? . . . what is the news ? " Mrs. Satterthwaite eyed her niece with much as- sumed gravity. "Mr. Delaplaine is very weak, my dear," she answered, " and failing fast." "Ah!" said Olivia, drawing a deep breath. "Then that young man Adrian Etherege was wrong ? " " I fear he was," returned Mrs. Satterthwaite. " Augusta ! " here exclaimed Mrs. Auchincloss, in tones of great distress, "I I am most wretchedly agitated by what Olivia has been saying. I I feel myself to have been thoroughly misunderstood. I had no conception that she shrank with such loathing from the possibility of Mr. Delaplaine's recovery. She has written to Mrs. Ottarson, and insists upon having her note at once sent to that . . . person. And she has spoken words which have more than shocked me words, I mean, relative to her course of conduct in the the event of Mr. Delaplaine's not dying. She has mentioned suicide, Augusta yes, really i ... It is all too dreadful ! I must not stay here and listen to such language any longer ; it has made me truly ill. I I shall go at once. I should never have consented to this marriage never! 236 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. if I had known our niece had entered into it with such extremely worldly intentions." Mrs. Satterthwaite surveyed her plaintive sister tranquilly enough. " You are scared out of your wits and want to play traitor to me," she told her own thoughts. But aloud she said: "Very well, Letitia. Leave me to speak with Olivia alone." And Mrs. Auchin- closs, with a most aggrieved shake of the head and a deprecating elevation of both hands, passed from the chamber. "My dear," said Mrs. Satterthwaite to Olivia, as soon as they two were alone together, " what folly is all this ? " The girl gave no answer, and she present- ly went on with harsh directness : " It certainly has not the advantage of being in good taste." "Good taste," murmured Olivia, with a laugh full of forlorn mockery. "I should say not. No more has the act I've been guilty of." " No one sees guilt in it except yourself. Come, Olivia, be sensible. I haven't a doubt that you've been shocking your poor Aunt Letitia half to death. Fortunately it is not quite so easy to shock me. What you have done, my dear, you have done. Re- trogression is too late, now. You were not forced to take the course you did take. I have a very clear recollection of my own words to you just before your decision was made of how I advised that you should not trouble yourself any further regarding this matter. But you chose to do otherwise. As for Mr. Dela- plaine's condition, you can't say I deceived you the least in that. I thought him fatally ill then, and I think him fatally ill now. . . . Really, Olivia, if you OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 237 talked about suicide, and that sort of thing, with your Aunt Letitia, you did so without the faintest provoca- tion. I have no doubt whatever that he will have ceased to live in twenty-four hours' time." Olivia felt those latter sentences nerve and cheer her beyond expression. A little while ago she would hotly have resented such a charge as that she could, under any conceivable circumstances, have rejoiced in the tidings of a fellow-creature's imminent death. "In twenty-four hours' time," she softly repeated. That was the only answer she made, or thought of making. How comforting to have the distance between oneself and so calamitous a doom widen ! If Mrs. Satterthwaite had insulted her, now, she would hardly have minded it from one who came the emissary of such courage-bringing news. As it was, Mrs. Satterthwaite continued in no con- ciliatory tones: "You wish Mrs. Ottarson here. You have a letter in your hand which you wish despatched to her." "Yes." ' At this moment a knock was heard. Mi's. S#tter- thwaite turned and opened the door. A servant stood outside, having come in answer to Olivia's summons. "I rang," Olivia now went on. "I wish this letter sent immediately to the address written on it." She handed the envelope to Mrs. Satterthwaite, who in turn gave it to the servant. " Let it be taken as quickly as possible," Mrs. Sat- terthwaite said. After the servant had gone she turned to Olivia, reclosing the door. " You see, your letter is sent. But now that Mrs. 238 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. Ottarson is coming here, I prefer to absent myself at least until to-morrow. You agree, do you not, to stop here over night?" "It ... it will be so strange!" Olivia answered, with uneasy hesitancy. " But it will be best ; it will be right. This is your home now. You will claim it if he dies ; you must not desert it while he lives. . . . And, Olivia, bear in mind that you have contracted no secret marriage. It is sudden, hasty ; but it must promptly be published to the world for all that. I will see that it is printed in all the morning newspapers. People will talk, gos- sip ; that is to be expected. You are a Van Rensse- laer, and no one with your name and position can do anything of this sort without causing a perfect fer- ment of remai'k. But we have nothing to conceal. This is not the first time that such a ceremony as a death-bed marriage has taken place. . . . And now, promise me that you will preserve the propriety of the thing, my dear, and spend the night as Mrs. Spencer Delaplaine should in the house of your husband." Olivia's response was somewhat slow in coming, but at length it came : " Yes," she finally acquiesced ; " I promise." "That is the suitable way to speak, my dear and to feel, as well. Orders shall be given the servants to accommodate you perfectly. They know what has happened. As for changes of clothing, Mrs. Ottar- son will, no doubt, capably assist you there. . . . My dear Olivia, you have only to behave with discretion for a few hours longer. Afterward you will be you own mistress. You understand ; I am sure that you do understand." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 239 " Yes, I understand," the girl replied. " You may trust me." Mrs. Satterthwaite had left the house in Tenth Street by the time (a good hour later) that Mrs. Ot- tarson arrived there. Olivia received the latter in that same apartment which she had entered and had never once quitted since leaving her funereal bridal- chamber, not far away. The meeting was, on Olivia's side, a passionate one. The moment that she and Mrs. Ottarson were to- gether, with a shut and locked door between them- selves and the outer hall, every sign of tranquillity died from the girl, and she surrendered herself to an outburst of tears and moans, while both arms clung about her aunt's plumply accommodating neck. " I wrote you that I was married married, Aunt Thyrza ! And I am it's true! Oh, I've so much to tell you ! You don't know anything yet. It seems now as if I couldn't have done it as though some one else must have done it, not I! ... But do not blame me till you hear everything till you hear just how and why it happened." " I won't, 'Livia," replied Mrs. Ottarson, whose dark eyes were sparkling and whose mien denoted extreme perturbation. " I think I can guess a good deal of it. Those two aunts o' yours set you up to it, an' got him to consent. That's 'bout the size o' the whole thing, I reckon. Ain't it, now ? . . . Don't cry so. ... You ain't murdered if you are married." " No, no ; you're wrong," cried Olivia through her tears. "He wanted it ; he asked me; his wish his dying wish has been behind it all. ... I I pitied him, Aunt Thyrza, but it wasn't pity that made me 240 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. yield. It was something cold and wicked and grossly selfish in me. Yes, that only that ! And now I feel as if I were to be punished for letting that wrong impulse get the best of me. They say he is dying. But he may not die. And then . . . think! If he should not die ! . . . This never even occurred to me till afterwai'd. And when it came it froze my very blood with terror. . . . And now it seems so horrible that I should be waiting his death and wanting him to die! It is like one sin begetting another. . . . And yet I must either hope that be will die, or else No, no, no ! I haven't been bad enough to be punished so fearfully ! Have I, Aunt Thyrza ? It would be too cruel, too monstrous would it not ? " Olivia and Mrs. Ottarson stayed together in Dela- plaine's house that night. The room they occupied opened off from the same hall as did that of the inva- lid. Olivia slept fitfully ; Mrs. Ottarson scarcely slept at all. The latter had, so to speak, fully grasped the situation. She had sent for changes of attire to Twenty-Third Street; she had talked with two or three of the servants who had held converse with the nurse on watch at Delaplaine's bedside. If any dis- tinct alteration took place in, the condition of the sick man she was to be informed of it. And once or twice, while the hours were very small, she stole out of her own apartment and entered that of Delaplaine, meeting the nurse on its threshold. He was very ill. There had been no decisive turn for worse or better in his disease. This was all that she could ascertain. By about dawn she sank into a deep, fatigued sleep, and on awakening, she found that the sunny May morning was well advanced, and OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 241 that Olivia had risen, had dressed, and was now mov- ing about their bed-chamber. "I could not sleep," said Olivia; "I've been up since quite an early hour. I rang for a servant and inquired after Mr. Delaplaine. The answer was brought back to me that he continues exactly the same." "Jus' so," mused Mrs. Ottarson. " I s'pose he'll go right off 'fore you can say 'Jack Rob'son.' That's the way a good many 's old 's he is do go, 'specially when it's the pneumonia. . . . By the bye, Liv, did the help you saw say anything 'bout our gettin' any breakfast ? " " It will be served us whenever we want it, Aunt Thyrza." And not long afterward it was most admirably served them in the dining-room below stairs. What a contrast between this perfect attendance, this gleam- ing silver and snowy linen, these delicate dishes pre- pared with nicest art, and the haphazard waiting of Ann and Bridget, the plated forks and nicked china, and the precarious, not to say untrustworthy cooking by which Olivia had for days past been confronted ! Two or three of the servants addressed the girl as " Mrs. Delaplaine," and made her cheeks tingle as they did so. In the morning paper, which had been placed upon the breakfast table, she read the an- nouncement of her marriage thus : DELAPLAINE VAN RENSSELAER. On Tuesday, May , 188 , by the Rev. Dr. Ray Olmstead, SPENCER DELA- PLAINE to OLIVIA CLINTON, daughter of the late Houston Clinton Van Rensselaer. What a queer, impossible look it had ! It somehow recalled to her, in an oddly analogous way, a curious 242 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. poem which she had somewhere seen, about a ghost wandering through a graveyard, stumbling over an old grave and reading his own epitaph upon the crum- bled tombstone. That ghost could not have under- gone a more amazed thrill than hers was on reading those few little lines of divulging print. "There is nothing for us to do except to wait," Olivia said, after they had gone upstairs again and entered the sitting-room which opened off from the apartment in which they had slept. "You will stay with me here to-day, will you not, Aunt Thyrza?" " Oh, I s'pose so," replied Mrs. Ottarson. It was not easy for her to give even this partial kind of con- sent, since no Ida Strang now held a vice-regal posi- tion in West Twenty-Third Street, and she could not look upon the fact of her own absence without visions of dire domestic topsyturvy-dom. " P'rhaps I can slip off a little later, when we've heard what the doctors think. Then I can come back later on still, I guess." " Oh, do try, please," begged Olivia. " It is so dreadful for me to feel myself all alone here. And even if Aunt Letitia and Aunt Augusta do come, there's somehow such a gulf between them and me ! " " I see," said Mrs. Ottarson, with a grim intonation. "You jus' want me to kind o' be a bridge over the gulf, don't you? Well, Livvy, that's all right, but then bridges are trod on, an' that's w'at those two aunts o' yours would like to do to me. Oh, I know 'em. Well, we'll have to fix it so's I'm kep' out o' their sight, like something with too many claws an' teeth. I'm perfectly 'greeable to that, I mus* say." Olivia found herself growing bolder as the day lengthened. She repeatedly moved into the outer OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 243 hall and stood there, looking about at the quiet rich- ness of all the appointments. But whenever the lower hall-bell sounded she would disappear frightenedly. This bell began to sound very frequently, it soon occurred to her. Sometimes footsteps would pass her closed door. These, as she conjectured, were physi- cians coming or departing. By and by there was brought her a request from Mrs. Auchincloss and Mrs. Satterthwaite that she would kindly join them else- where. " I would much rather stay here with you," Olivia said, after she had sent back an affirmative reply. " There is nothing that I have to say to them except the asking of a single question. . . . Well, perhaps they will know how to answer it better than the ser- vants. I suppose Mrs. Satterthwaite has seen him." " It may be that he wants to see you" ventured Mrs. Ottarson. " Oh, I hope not ... I hope not ! " exclaimed Olivia. " Aunt Thyrza, I should feel so miserably ashamed to stand beside him, having had the the thoughts about him that you know of. ... And yet he must have been certain, all the while, of just why he prevailed upon me. If I had deceived him, my sense of sinfulness would be ten times worse than it is now!" Not long after this, Olivia opened the door, prepar- atory to joining her aunts. But just as her foot touched the threshold of the hall itself, a sound of voices arrested her. The persons who were speaking together could not have been many paces away. Every word of what they said came with the greatest distinctness to her hearing. 244 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. " It is a very extraordinary thing, Doctor," declared one voice. " His vitality," answered another, " is truly marvel- lous." "This change in his temperature has astonished me." "And the marked abatement of congestion that is even more unusual." " A superb constitution, Doctor." " Iron, my dear sir iron. . . . Well, he has lived a most careful life. It tells now." "Upon my word, I believe we are going to pull him through." Then came a laugh, in which both voices partici- pated. " He's going to pull himself through," were the next words, in response to those just uttered. "If his pulse and respiration continue as they are now five or six hours longer, he'll throw the whole trouble off as easily as if he were a boy of nineteen." Olivia staggered back from the half-closed door. She sank beside the chair on which Mrs. Ottarson was sitting, and hid her head in that lady's lap. Her form quivered, as shudder after shudder passed through it. Mrs. Ottarson was deeply alarmed, but presence of mind stood high among her worthy traits. She suspected that Olivia had overheard something, for she had seen the girl pause in a listening attitude. She stooped down, took Olivia in her arms, and rose, forcing the poor, cowering frame to rise also. "Now, 'Livia," she began, as the girl's head fell upon her shoulder and the shudders were again mani- fest, "this aint goin' to do one bit. No, deary, it aint. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 245 "W'atever you heard, it don't make any difference. You've got to brace up, an' not shame yourself. Come, now, w'at 'd you hear out yonder in the entry ? Let me know right straight off ! " Olivia raised her head and whispered these words from colorless lips : " I heard them say that he was going to get well. They were two doctors-, talking together. One of them said that if his pulse and respiration should con- tinue five or six hours longer as favorable as at pres- ent, he he would quite overcome this illness." Olivia's eyes were as dry in their light as diamonds, and below them lay heavy curves of shadow that her augmented pallor made mournfully plain. A few hours had turned her bloomful girlish face into that of a suffering woman. A desperation had come into it that clad all its features with melancholy maturity. You felt that its beauty would soon vanish if the pain that was wearing at her heart did not lessen. " I guess I wouldn't see either of my aunts, if I was you," said Mrs. Ottarson, solemnly, while Olivia still clung to her. "If they come up here, that's one thing. I don't think they will, though ; I guess I'll act as a scarecrow." And now she permitted herself to add a very imprudent thing. " I'd be one to 'em, sure enough, if they knew what deceit I suspect 'em both of tryin' to practise." Olivia sprang backward. Her eyes flashed. "Do you mean that, Aunt Thyrza? Do you mean they they knew all along he would get well ? " "I mean they jus' played on your belief he toowldn? get well. A word from either one of 'em would have made you alter as quick as wink, but they didn't say 246 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. it. Not them ! They wanted to get you Vay from me by hook or by crook ; an' they wanted you to make a 'ristocratic match besides, no matter w'ether it left you widow or wife." "True," murmured Olivia, in her shame, her wretch- edness, her growing affright. The homely phraseol- ogy of her Aunt Thyrza threw fresh revealing rays upon all which had passed. She had really been but a puppet in the hands of two ambitious kinswomen. She perceived this now, and the realization kindled an indignant fire in her young soul. She herself had been blarnable enough, but their cunning had dealt with her faultiness no less coolly than ignobly. An hour, two hours passed. Olivia had paid no heed to Mrs. Satterthwaite's request. At last, by about half-past one o'clock, a second summons came from the same lady. Would Mrs. Delaplaine have luncheon served upstairs, or would she take it down in the dining-room with her two aunts? Olivia seemed to muse for a moment. Then she answered the servant that she desired no luncheon whatever, but that her aunt, Mrs. Ottarson, would be served upstairs, here, in the sitting-room. The luncheon was sent up for two, and Mrs. Ottar- son forced Olivia to swallow at least a few mouthfuls of food. She did not like the girl's glassy eyes, her con- tinual startled, nervous motions, and the complete ab- sence of all color in her vigilant, strained, harassed countenance. The elder woman felt that all consolatory language must fall ineffective upon the younger one. That single irrepressible dread had grown into an anguish of suspense now, and no power except a certain dark yet distinct piece of information could OLIVIA DELAPLAIXE. 247 alleviate its cogency. Meanwhile, Mrs. Ottarson had misgivings lest some piteous collapse might soon over- whelm Olivia. She was like a being borne in a rud- derless and earless boat at the mercy of a flood which swept her toward an inexorable abyss. If the flood itself would only retard its menacing current, all might still be well with that unhappy, jeopardized life. But if not ! To watch Olivia as she rest- lessly, almost fiercely waited what she held to be her impending doom, was to comprehend how keen were her spiritual torments. By about three o'clock there came a knock at the door. Mrs. Ottarson went herself and answered the knock, this time. She admitted Mrs. Satterthwaite, followed by Mrs. Auchincloss. Both gave her a little freezing bow, and passed her without the least ap- parent concern as to whether she returned it or no. "My dear," began Mrs. Satterthwaite, as the two ladies approached Olivia, who stood in the centre of the chamber, " since you thought it best not to come to us we have decided it is best we should come to you." Olivia bowed her head. Both her visitors must have seen the striking pathetic change that had been wrought in her appearance. "Well," said the girl, coldly and formally, "you have come to tell me that Mr. Delaplaine is ... recov- ering, no doubt. I have heard that he will recover. Have I heard correctly ? " The ladies looked at one another. " Don't speak, please, Letitia," said Mrs. Satter- thwaite to her sister, in a low, eager voice. " Let me speak." 248 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. Olivia caught the two sentences. " Pray do speak at once," she said. " I wish to know my fate." "You foolish girl!" exclaimed Mrs. Satterthwaite, who had become paler than perhaps she herself guessed. " He is surprisingly better. Yes, the doctors now say that with a little careful nursing his life will be spared to his many friends. These will all be so thankful for this miracle. And why should not you be as well? You, my child, who now bear his name, and whom he will cherish as his wife with a fondness, an indulgence, that" A sharp, harsh cry sounded from Olivia, here. She lifted her hand and clenched it. "You knew you both knew that it might turn out like this!" she broke forth, with a voice of accusation, irony, arid despair. " You acted with deceit with cruelty. Oh, you were very diplomatic very non-committal ! There is nothing I can charge you with having said it is what you did not say that now makes me feel how you have acted as my tempters my enemies ! It will kill me or I hope it will." She swerved side- ways, at this moment, and both her hands went to her breast as though she would tear from it something that suffocated her. . . . Again she reeled, and by this time Mrs. Ottarson had darted toward her, past those whom she had thus heatedly addressed. " If I do die," she went on, with her look still fas- tened on the faces of her aunts, while she steadied herself, so to speak, in the arms of Mrs. Ottarson, "you you both of you two cold, heartless women . . . will . . . have to ... answer for my . . ." She did not pronounce the word " death," but as her eyes closed, and her breath resolved itself into a OLIVIA LELAPLAINE. 249 few short, resonant gasps, this word was faintly shaped by her lips. And then her form grew limp and effortless in Mrs. Ottarson's clasp. She had swooned, though the fit of unconsciousness was not a long one. But she awoke from it in delirium. That night her life, and not the life of her husband, was in peril. He had indeed already made wonderful strides toward convalescence. But with Olivia Delaplaine it was just the opposite. The physicians who watched her hourly expected an acute cerebral paralysis, or, if not that, a dementia consequent upon severe nervous shock. Even Mrs. Ottarson (who would not have left her if certain that every boarder in her establishment was to vacate it by the morrow) had not dreamed of how drastic had been the tension laid upon her darling's unprepared brain. As it was, stifling her tears like the brave soul nature had fashioned her, she hovered near Olivia, waiting, hoping, silently praying, but never forgetting capably to prove herself of service as well. 250 OLIVIA UELAPLAIXE. XIV. THE chronicler of the present history must now record that more than seventeen months have elapsed since Olivia's illness terminated, so fittingly yet so gloomily, the dramatic misfortune of her wedding- day. As the play-bills in the theatres will sometimes have it, our scene changes from grave to mirthful ; and one might readily concede that the cafe in Del- monico's, toward about eleven o'clock on a crisp-aired January evening, might supply all desirable elements of mirth. The large, crowded room certainly looked gay in the extreme. It was not bariole like the lady-haunted restaurant that faced on Fifth Avenue, but its merri- ment of mingled voices compensated for the absence of festal color. Nearly all the tables were occupied, and at one of these sat Jasper Massereene and as uncongenial an associate as young Aspinwall Satter- thwaite. They had not entered the cafe together, but had met here only a few minutes previously. Aspinwall was now in his graduating year at Columbia, and had long held his manhood to be about as firmly planted a fact in the estimation of a large public as the bluff, gallant, sailor-like bronze statue of Farragut just across the way at the edge of Madison Square. To-night meant a gathering of the fashionable clans, for it was to be marked by the first Patriarch's Ball of the season. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 251 Aspinwall would not for the world have missed airing in the Delmonioo rooms upstairs his new coat (just over from London) with the rolling satin collar, his white waistcoat with the gold buttons, and his new cat's-eye stud with the small row of diamonds running round it, of which the young Duke of Dunderhead had condescended to say last summer at one of the New- port Casino balls : " By Jove, now, that's quite neat, isn't it?" Aspin wall's pale, beardless face had lighted up as he strolled into the big, marble-floored room, wrapped in his sable-lined overcoat, and perceived " Cousin Jasper." But the spirits of Massereene mo- mentarily darkened, proof though their usual bright- ness rendered him against the depression produced by the ordinary bore. Aspinwall was in no sense an ordinary bore. The years that bring wisdom to the sophomore had in his case only inflated with fresh vanities the senior. And the worst of it all, as Mas- sereene may quickly have decided while his young relation flung off the costly outer garment preparatory to sitting down at the same table with himself, lay in the solidity of the worldly backing by which all these vanities were supported. This young Aspinwall Sat- terthwaite was a nonentity, an ignoramus, just able to acquit himself in his college exercises with decent competency, and yet the amplitude of his father's bank account and the witchery of possessing a family name with a strong patrician aroma diffused from it here were potent considerations enough to make many a clever young girl, his superior in a hundred ways, feel glad if he would condescend, during the progress of the ball upstairs this evening, to pause even for a few precious minutes at her side. 252 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. Alas! we speak with wonder, sometimes, of the days when men like Moore and Sheridan, provided they chose to leave Grub Street and seek the society of the dandies elsewhere, perforce had to cringe hat in hand to my lord this and my lord that, begging the entree to Watier's in Bolton Street, or moving heaven and earth to secure a card for White's. . . . Well, the old order changes, as a poet of our own century phrases it, and yet . . . does it so radically change, after all ? " A man's house is his castle," cries the select-souled American of to-day, " and he has a right to ask whom he pleases thither." True ; but what if the castle be built with too feudal an architectural touch, good friend, and filled by an assemblage who are lords and ladies in all except the titles that they would break their pi'oud, undemocratic hearts to win ? Caste, unless it be founded upon virtue, intellect, or good-breeding, is the foulest fungus in a republican soil. And caste that has none of these claims for its permission to thrive, infests and infects the chief cities of our land at this time. Young Aspinwall Satterthwaite meant and expressed caste of just this baleful character. Where was the difference between his actual heredi- tary "position" and that of some English, French, German, or Austrian stripling who presumes upon the prestige his own merits never earned him, and of which his follies might very properly dispossess him? " We have our dukes and marquises and earls here," thought Jasper Massereene as he looked at his cousin, now, across the table of the cafe. "There isn't the same historic romanticism about them ; their fields of sway are narrower ; they sometimes, though not always, exhibit more vulgarity and less native refinement than OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 253 their prototypes do. But their assumption, their mo- nopoly, their implied arrogance, is after all nearly the same." "You won't drink anything more, old chap ? n Aspin- \vall was meanwhile saying. He had just ordered a brandy-and-soda; he had called for it as a soda-and- brandy, doubtless with some idea that to reverse the names of the liquids thus would indicate a more Eng- lish turn of idiom. He wanted above all imaginable things to be English ; he would rather have been o o * undissentingly thought that by his set than have received from them any honor their esteem could devise for him. "I generally drink something before I go to a big crush like this ball. These affairs are so brutally common, you know. People break their necks for tickets. It wasn't so in the old days, when the town wasn't so large. They hadn't Patriarch balls at the Fourteenth Street Delmonico's^ but they used to have Assemblies, and then the rush wasn't half what it is now." "No," said Massereene amiably, "I suppose not." He knew nothing with regard to the Fourteenth Street Delmonico's. He had possibly been at Eton when its dead-and-gone glories were flourishing, and as oblivious that it existed as he was conscious of the old century-battered statue of Henry Sixth in the quadrangle there, of the sweet, umbrageous elms half obscuring Windsor's massive towers a few hundred yards beyond, and of the keen perplexity wrought by Latin verses upon the undergraduate mind. But perhaps there may have been a stray reveller among the talkative company scattered about him this evening, whose forty or fifty or even sixty years con- 254 OLIVIA DELAFLAINE. tained vivid reminiscences of that other demolished and irreparable structure. He may have been as fine a beau in his day as was Aspinwall Satterthwaite to- night, while he sat sipping his refection here in the new Delmonico's, and dreaming of the old. Memory is a tyrannous optimist on her own ground of retro- spection. What colors she can paint with, joyous as well as sombre ! This musing individual whom I take the liberty of fancying, and who may have had no real identity whatever, would have had to ask his sad soul after many a dead and loved comrade, many a happy and treasured reunion. The wine seethed crisper in the goblet then than it did to-night, and the laughter of those who quaffed it ransc with a mellower cadence. Where are those o noctes ambrosiance now? Where's Harry with his wit, Frank with his sporting-talk, Louis with his love- affairs? What's become of Johnny, with his princely manners, his exquisitely high-bred face, his early French education that gave him the least touch of a charming accent when he spoke English, and his clean, superb fifty thousand a year? How the girls courted him, how the mammas beamed on him, how the men gathered round him! Was ever a life so radiantly fortunate as his? When he came into the Four- teenth Street Delmonico's, after opera or dinner, you would somehow always hear the champagne- corks begin to pop not far away. It seemed like magic, but it was only tact; a sign, a whisper to one of the gar$ons, and there we all were, with our more economical whiskey-and-water spirited off, and the topaz Clicquot or Verzenay glistening or simmering before us. He was so considerate of his friends, so OLIVIA UELAPLAINE. 255 debonair, so frankly and heartily cordial, was Johnny, and withal such a natural instinctive aristocrat. . . . Only a few years later he was met in Broadway with a faded and rather vacant face, and with his former laugh, though all the sunshine had gone from it. He had been very ill somewhere abroad, he said (alas! we had heard of the sudden madness that had struck him down in the midst of Parisian pleasure far too wildly chased), and they had shut him, up for a long time. It was so good to be out, he added, looking round him with a dim flash of his once lucid blue eye and a glimpse of that bel air which his mental ailment had marred pathetically. And not very long after this we learned of his death, and soon his relations were quar- relling about his money. . . . But others besides poor Johnny have passed away into the great shadow and mystery, though he was the star of them all ! How it would teem with ghosts, that Fourteenth Street Delmonico's, if it had been left standing as it once stood, and they had not reared a huge upholstery store in its place! I sometimes feel like taking my hat off to that upholstery store and thanking it for the painful souvenirs that it spares me. It is like an immense merciful tomb, hiding a multitude of buried recollections and suggestions. Better that ne\v-married couples to-day should go there and buy carpets and furniture for the flats they have just rented, while they dream of soon-to-be-sought cradles and of heaven knows what domestic felicity besides, than that middle- aged croakers like myself, or the imaginary ruminator whom I have mentioned, should dine and tipple once more in the haunt of those dear dead friends. Better this, indeed, than that we should dance in ball-rooms 256 OLIVIA VELAPLAISE. where our springing step would now seem a desecra- tion as though we literally danced on the graves themselves of merry-makers whose blithe feet once kept time so rhythmically to our own! No doubt most of those who gave the ball this evening would have held Aspinwall Satterthwaite's anticipatory remarks concerning it to be highly imper- tinenit. It was the first large entertainment of a public kind that Massereene had ever witnessed in New York. He had been travelling about the West for many months after his return to these shores. He had wanted to see his country, not the seaboard, metropolitan, ultra-civilized portion of it. He had been everywhere, as a man may say who has roamed from St. Paul to New Orleans and from New York or Boston to San Francisco. At last he had drifted eastward again ; and the Satterthwaites, knowing of his return, had sent him a card for the present ball. Aspinwall accompanied him upstairs, and introduced him, with a flourishing manner which he strongly dis- liked, to the ladies who " received " in a room not far from the main ball-room. Massereene felt himself a stranger as he passed the threshold of the latter apart- ment. But Mrs. Satterthwaite, blazing with diamonds, soon saw him and called him to her side. He remem- bered, then, that he had engaged himself to dance the cotillon with Emmeline, and that he had sent this young lady a bouquet in testimony of the honor she was supposed to do him. But Emmeline, who soon paused near him in the promenade that followed every waltz or polka, had by no means forgotten either his engagement or his tribute. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 257 " Thanks so very much for those charming flowers," she said, stopping for a moment at his side, while three gallants who accompanied her opened their eyes uncivilly wide at him. . . . And then Ernrneline passed on, and in a little while he saw Elaine, attended with an equal devotion, and not long afterward he had said to Mrs. Satterthwaite : "Your daughters are enjoying themselves, are they not? It is very pleasant to see how happily their faces beam." These were commonplace words, and yet Mrs. Sat- terthwaite turned smilingly to hear them because of their speaker. Several other gentlemen were stand- ing before her ; she was one of the matrons who never missed being courteously attended. She was a power in society, and her increasing age was for this reason ignored. The men who wanted to push their way beset her with their suavities, and the men who had already pushed their way and who wanted to remain in her good graces, offered, for the most part, a similar politeness. She never suffered from the neg- lect experienced by other maturer ladies ; she enter- tained too much for that. Besides, even if it had not been thoroughly well-known that no young gentleman could dine or sup at the delectable Sntterthwaite mansion who did not pay his court to "mamma," she possessed the esprit de salon which made her at any time a vivacious transient companion. " Yes," she now said to Massereene, " the girls are having a jolly time. They always do, I'm glad to say." And then she tapped him on the shoulder with her jewelled fan. "Come, now," she w r ent on, "you mustn't waste yourself upon a poor old woman like 258 OLIVIA DELAPLAIXE. me. You must bear in mind that you are a some- body." "la somebody?" replied Massereene. "Of course you are," pursued Mrs. Satterthwaite. " The idea of your not recognizing it ! Lots of people are dying to know you. It's been whispered about who you are" " I'm the merest nobody, however," returned Mas- sereene. " Oh! are you? Well, they don't think so here. . . . By the way, have you met my sister, Mrs. Auchincloss?" "Not here yet," returned Massereene. "Oh, you mean that you dined there the other day. Yes, I heard that you did. It was quite a large dinner, wasn't it? And Mrs. Delaplaine, my niece, was there, was she not?" "Yes." "Did you sit near her?" "No; at some distance away." "You were presented, however?" " Yes ; but we had met before." "I remember in London. Do you think her handsome?" Massereene gave a little start at this question. " Who could fail to think so ? " he said. Mrs. Satterthwaite laughed in her metallic "society" way. " I hope you don't say that because she is my niece. You will most probably see her to-night." He did, a little later. She was standing near her husband; they had just entered the ball-room. She wore white, with a string of large pearls about her throat, and others braided amid the vapory gold of OLIVIA DELAPLAIXK 259 her hair. A great many eyes were fixed upon her; she was the belle of the Patriarchs' Ball that evening, beyond a shadow of dispute. She appeared to be neither specially ignorant nor conscious of this fact, but the complete repose of her demeanor may have meant indifference. She held four or five bouquets of tea-roses and lilies-of-the-valley, bound together and making one immense cluster. She was more beautiful than when we saw her last, though the girlish delicacy of her face had yielded to the spell of a sweet expan- sion, like the candor of an unfolded flower after its half-sheathed bud. But at the same time there was an expression on her face which had no concern with its youth and unblemished bloom. Perhaps it was rather a fitful visitation than an actual expression. It put, now and then, an icy light into her eyes and her smile; it seemed to come and go across her brow darkly, like a shadow ; it lived a moment in the tenser- drawn lines of her lips; it quivered at the edge of her sensitive nostril, or was conveyed in the transitory droop of her graceful head. It was intangible, unde- finable, yet it was there. Was it disappointment, unwilling toleration of wrong, contempt of self? Was it either of these, or was it all three subtly commingled and interblended ? Massereene had just begun to ask his own thoughts one or two questions of that kind. Olivia Delaplaine's face had fascinated and haunted him. He knew her story, or a certain part of it. Who did not know ? Had it not been cried from the house-tops? The strangeness of her sudden marriage to a man more than twice her years had caused the widest comment, and her long subsequent illness had given rise to many 2GO OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. peculiar contradictory reports. But it had never au- thentically transpired that she had married Spencer Delaplaine with the fixed belief in his immediate death. The world, with all its random uncharitable- ness, had spared her this distinct charge. It all came to the one result: she had been excessively talked about, but she had chosen a husband of the highest position, and neither gossip nor scandal had cast the least injurious slur upon her own. After everything was said, what had she probably done? Married a man older than herself, answered the babblers in the land, for his money and his station. But then she had had station herself ; she was far better born than he; she came of the oldest Knickerbocker lineage. Hundreds of those whom social notoriety of any sort keenly interests, were anxious to see her and know her. It had got abroad that she was to appear in gay circles to-night at the Patriarchs', for the first time since her return from Europe. She had spent last winter at Nice and Cannes and Monte Carlo with her husband, and though they had been home ever since latter August, their life had most success- fully eluded publicity. Till late October Mrs. Dela- plaine had dwelt in a country-seat on the Hudson, of which her husband had secured a long lease. For a month or so she had been passing her time most ob- scurely in West Tenth Street, and had not accepted a single invitation until very recently, when she had appeared at a dinner-party given in her honor by her aunt, Mrs. Archibald Auchincloss. Thus much Massereene and hosts of others had read concerning her in the society columns of the news- papers; for she had remained, as the picturesquely- OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 261 wedded wife of so eminent a personage as Spencer Delaplaine, just that object of prying curiosity which purveyors of on dits and canards are forever bent upon jealously observing. Massereene now went np to her and took the hand which she graciously offered him, with a feeling of pity in his large, kindly heart that she should be so mercilessly and speedily beset by the stares of the surrounding throngs. Spencer Delaplaine, looking, in his evening-dress, a trifle older, but no less elegant and distinguished than when we saw him last, shook hands cordially with Massereene, whom he had met a few days ago at the notable Anchincloss dinner. He was clearly aware of the attention that he and his wife were causing, but he bore himself with a consummate seeming uncon- cern of it. Tall, gray, serene, faultlessly gentle- manlike, he stood beside Olivia, presenting to her loveliness a contrast that was of cruel violence if one were aware of the relationship between them. Some of his old friends asserted of him that he bore himself, since his marriage, in an austerer way, and that he ostensibly cared less for either the notice or the esteem of his kind. Massereene, who rarely permitted himself to dislike people without cause, was repelled by something in his voice, his manner, his gestures and the turns of his phrases. " Bloodless insensibility to all that is most finely human," thought the young man, " was never stamped upon a face with greater emphasis." And then his eyes wandered to Olivia. "What a life he must lead her!" his medi- tations went on. "I somehow can't see in her face the reason why she married him, though his explains one side of the question perfectly." 262 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. Massereene almost fancied that Mrs. Delaplaine's blue eyes lit for him in a grateful way as he and she soon began conversation. The staring, brief a while as she had been called upon to endure it, must have proved extremely unpleasant. But Spencer Dela- plaine's acquaintance was too wide a one for a num- ber of the gentlemen present who desired the honor of knowing his wife not summarily to request that he would introduce them. Olivia's practical triumphs now commenced in vivid earnest. She had never until now felt what has truly been called the intoxi- cation of the ball-room ; and where is the woman with brilliant beauty and with her years hardly counting beyond the term of girlhood who ever stops to ask herself whether this heady wine of flattery, admira- tion and enjoyment that she lifts to her lips be not, after all, a beverage with more sparkle than flavor and with less cheer than enticement? We, who are a little older than Olivia was that night, we of either the beau sexe or its opposite, have grown to think this wine a poor and even an acid vintage. But we loved it once, and now our palates are alone to blame. And the wine will always be poured for some glad lips, while other paler and wearier ones refuse it, from satiety, perhaps disgust as well! Olivia quaffed it very willingly, surprised that the draught should be so agreeable. She had heard a hundred times of the follies that make the impetus and stimulus of society. But the pretty speeches that were now addressed to her had no indication of this aimless quality. Her wit, innate and nimble, ex- ulted in placid contests which it was now called upon to wage. She \vas not old enough to perceive the OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 268 flippancy in such undertaking, and she was sensible enough keenly and readily to discriminate between the ball-room bore, so ubiquitous and so intolerable, and the man of good reason, comparatively rare as he may be, who occasionally drifts among Delmoniconian gayeties. Already she had promised to dance the German with her cousin, Aspinwall Satterthwaite ; this dainty stripling had not been quite sure whether he had done a discreet thing or no in engaging her at the Auchincloss dinner, of which he had been one of the guests. Olivia had accepted his offer, and per- haps the most tasteful and expensive of the bouquets that she carried had been the one sent by Aspin- wall. Massereene watched her swiftly-growing popularity. He saw that she not only relished her belleship but carried it with an air of facile security. " She is beautiful," he thought; "and young. She likes to shine, and she deserves to shine. She is un- happy, and this babble affects her like a soothing elixir. That marble fellow, her husband, is secretly in love with her. I am mightily mistaken, or he de- plores while he is proud of the admiration that she creates." Delaplaine kept his wife in sight with a vigilance to justify this belief. Hosts of old friends waited to shake hands with him, yet he entirely deserted his former standard of deportment. He ceased to be the beau of yesterday ; he sought no one ; his calm eye observed but did not solicit. At last, just before supper, Massereene seized a chance. "You have been besieged," he said to Olivia. "But have you yet been asked to sup with 264 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. any one ? I hear that it is the custom here, at these Patriarch balls, to accept an escort to one of the small tables below, in the supper-room. Will you accept me?" A march was just then struck up by the orchestra; it meant the march to supper. Mr. J. Remington Todd had just given his arm to Mrs. Madison Lex- ington, the richest woman in the room, and the ad- mitted queen of society. He led the way to the apartment below stairs. The rest of the assem- blage prepared to follow Mr. J. Remington Todd, the arbiter of the Patriarchs', the gentleman who could by a wave of his little finger "keep out" the undesirable Miss Smith or "push back" the ineligi- ble Mr. Jones. There is always a Mr. J. Remington Todd in all great cities. He is a human expedient that rises ready at the call of social emergency. He interests himself with lists; he decides who shall cross the sacred patrician threshold and who shall not. He is alert, evasive, dexterous, polite and ap- propriately frivolous. He has nothing weightier to do than to make laws of just this petty sort, and in a country which has the republican right of despising such laws, he might have something a great deal wiser to do. Massereene had already heard of Mr. J. Remington Todd. " Shall we follow the Gen- eralissimo?" he said, offering his arm to Olivia. Olivia slipped her own arm into his. But just as she did so, Aspinwall Satterthwaite rushed up. *"My dear cousin!" he exclaimed. And then see- ing Massereene, he drew back. Aspinwall prided himself upon being always a gentleman of irrever- sible breeding among those whom he considered OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 265 liis equals. "Oh," lie said, "I see you have some- one else, Cousin Olivia." " Come and join us, won't you ? " answered Masser- eene, shortly. Something made him detest Aspin- Avall just then. He went downstairs with Mrs. Delaplaine. Aspinwall followed. There was the usual great hurry for tables. It happened that Massereene and Olivia secured one at which the great Mrs. Lexington and her professional kind of escort, Mr. Todd, had already seated themselves. It was not in the order of things that these two seats at this particular table should be thus occupied. Mrs. Ogden Van Wagenen was expected ; she had not arrived for some reason. Mrs. Lexington looked a storm-cloud at Olivia, and then suddenly grew pleasant. She recognized Olivia as a Van Rensse- laer; she had been a Van Twiller herself; it was so delightful, swiftly mused this great lady, to have a person of one's own kind near one. She smiled upon Olivia and promptly began a conversation with her. She even condescended to introduce herself she, the magisterial Mrs. Lexington, a personage whom even Mrs. Auchincloss would have paid duteous court to! She spoke to Olivia of her father, of her husband ; she was complaisant, almost garru- lous. She had a galaxy of the Lexington diamonds strung about her weirdly thin neck ; she was a very ugly woman, but she was Mrs. Lexington, and so people bowed down to her. On her other side, elbowing Mr. Todd, sat a lady named Mrs. Quinby Spence. The Quinby Spences, husband and wife, had been desirous of slipping into society for several years past. Mrs. Quinby Spence, a lady with sharp, thin 266 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. face and a pair of nervous black eyes, managed to get herself seated near the great Mrs. Lexington. She had contrived to whisper a word or two in the ear of Mr. Todd. " Introduce me, please, won't you?" Mrs. Quinby Spence had said. The Quinby Spences had feasted J. Remington Todd again and again in their splendid house in Fifty-Seventh Street. But Mr. Todd now winced notwithstanding. The Quinby Spences were " in," but they were not so " in " that they should presume lightly to seek acquaintance- ship with a potentate like Mrs. Madison Lexington. Still, "introduce me, please," had been imperative. Mr. Todd, with his bland, moonlike face embar- rassedly aglow, made the presentation. Mrs. Quin- by Spence, talking across the solid shoulder of him who had thus introduced her, said most volubly and effusively to the lady whose social cachet she desired to obtain : " I am so glad to meet you, Mrs. Lexington ! It gives me such pleasure! We have entertained so many mutual friends. I am very fond of entertain- ing at dinner." "Really?" murmured the great Mrs. Lexington. "Yes very fond. I was thinking over our many dinner-parties the other day. My husband and I were trying to recall just how many we had given this winter. It may seem to you, my dear Mrs. Lex- ington, a rather curious matter to think of at all, but we estimated, my husband and I, that we had enter- tained, during the last few months, almost a thousand people." Mrs. Quinby Spence thought this was all quite proper to say. So many of the really select peo- OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 267 pie had been to her dinner-parties ! It had indeed been said of the Quinby Spences that they had " dined themselves " into society. But the great Mrs. Lexington did not respond. She contented herself with turning to her friend, Mr. Todd, and saying in a tenuously lady-like whisper : " Good heavens ! Does this woman keep a hotel ? " But, all the same, Mrs. Quinby Spence scored a point and succeeded thenceforth in knowing Mrs. Lexington, and thus scaling the last rung of that social ladder which for years she had so assiduously climbed. Massereene and Olivia were meanwhile at the same table. Olivia had not yet learned the value of social grades. She did not realize how much importance had lain in the civility of the thin, ugly woman who had just been polite to her. Aspinwall, also, was at that table. He had begun to be very jealous of Massereene. It had vividly occurred to him that Olivia was the belle of the Patriarchs' Ball and he resented the idea of being " cut out " by even so acknowledged a notability as Jasper Massereene. But meanwhile Olivia had had another most wary and intent observer. This was her husband. 268 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. XV. OLIVIA was from that night a reigning success in + h fashionable world. The rush and whirl at first pleased her unspeakably ; they took her so effectually, for a time, out of herself. And the relief of being thus made in a measure forgetful, during certain mo- ments of the day or night, that she had become the wife of a man whom she abhorred, was deeply wel- come. This abhorrence had not been of quick growth with Olivia; it had gradually spread itself through her being with a steadfast, benumbing stealthiness of influence. When her long and dangerous illness terminated, she found herself facing her fate with a resignation that surprised her own spirit. Delaplaine was by this time in his usual health. He entered into his new character as the elderly husband of a youthful bride with steps that were so slow, cautious and dis- criminating as to awaken Olivia's admiration at his blended diplomacy and kindliness. She could never dream of loving him, but might not the respect which he was in a fair way of both rousing and perpetuating stand hereafter as at least a decorous apology and sub- stitute for love ? He had told her that he was dying ; but surely, she now reflected, he ^vas not culpable in having failed to die. No one had been culpable ex- cept her own miserable, wayward self. As soon as she was strong enough to see Mrs. Auchincloss and Mrs. Satterthwaite, she sent for them, and begged that OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 269 they would pardon her hasty, hysterical charges. The former accepted her niece's amends with a grieved complaisance, and held it her duty to show as much generosity on the occasion as the sad extent of the injury inflicted would allow. "Do not say another word about what happened then, my dear Olivia, was Mrs. Auchincloss's highly gracious response. "Of course I felt myself wounded by your words ; how could it be otherwise ? But I hope I am Christian enough to forgive them ! " " Oh, Letitia, how magnificent you sometimes are ! " thought Mrs. Satterthwaite ; but aloud she said to Olivia, with her chin a little in the air, her eyes no softer than if they had been agates, and her voice devoid of the least sympathetic ring : " Oh, it's all right, my dear, naturally. You were going to be very ill. You didn't know what you were saying. I assure you I should have come to you, just like this, whether you had sent for me or not." Still later Olivia began to change her opinion re- garding the part played by her two aunts in that little mati-imonial episode. But whatever certainty of op- posite conclusion she may have reached, her future conduct never revealed it to either lady. They had long ago taken the color of their environing world as a partridge takes that of its furrow. And it was a world so full of falsities and treacheries, of sham, meanness and misrepresentation, that one must either accept it as one found it or leave it to its own less critical denizens. To try and improve upon its con- glomeration of follies and misdoings would be indeed to try and bail out the sea ! 270 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. But just now Olivia had not such condemning thoughts about society. It acted like a lulling drug upon her tormented life. Delaplaine had begun woo- ingly and suavely, but he had soon dropped his mask. Beneath it was the face of a tyrant. Olivia had just made up her mind that to endure him as a husband would not be the misery she had anticipated, when he suddenly appeared before her in a new light. Her health, at this period, was thoroughly restored. They were about to visit Europe together ; the season was latter autumn. One day he entered her private sit- ting-room and found her in converse with Mrs. Ottar- son, whose devotion during her sickness had been un- paralleled in its noble self-surrender. He had never thus far shown the slightest rudeness toward Mrs. Ottarson, though he had more than once made it clear to his wife that she was not by any means an object of his liking. Moreover, he had paid respect, or some- thing which resembled it, to Olivia's loyal and loving gratitude for all that she now felt she owed her aunt. But to-day his manner was brusque and curt. After Mrs. Ottarson had departed, he said, speaking for the first time with that assertion of command for which the future had so many relentless examples in store : " I must tell you, quite candidly, that she sets my teeth on edge, that woman." Olivia turned pale. "Aunt Thyrza?" she faltei-ed, feeling as if an abrupt knife-stab had entered her flesh. "Yes, she is insupportable. I hope you mean to drop her as soon as you can. She has been very good as a nurse. But you are now quite strong again. If she had been your hired nurse you would not have OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 271 done more than give her a handsome salary. I am very willing that you should do that now. You have your allowance ; it ought to be equal to rewarding her services in a very nice way. But if it isn't, draw upon me for any reasonable sum or any unreason- able one, providing your sentiment toward the lady makes you think she deserves notable recompense. Only, I cannot have her continuing to come here and wake the echoes with her frightful sins against gram- mar and breeding." Olivia did not reply for several minutes. Then she said, measuring each word: "I think you misunder- stand Aunt Thyrza. She would never accept a dollar from me. She would regard it as an insult if I offered her the least payment." After this the young wife's voice broke a little, and she went on, using the name which he had asked her to call him by, and which he had told her that it was most pleasant music to hear from her lips : " It seems as if something had offended or annoyed you this afternoon, Spencer. I hope that I am not to blame for " He cut her short with a little impatient toss of the head. "One thing has offended and annoyed me that woman's ridiculous intimacy with you. If she were a man I should call her a rowdy. It occurs to me, Olivia, that you should rate your position, both as your father's daughter and as my wife, something less cheaply than you do." He at once left the room after having pronounced these few piercing sentences. To Olivia they meant the infliction of a wholly unforeseen terror. For sev- eral weeks past she had been assuring herself that their existence in each other's company was to prove 272 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. one of the most unruffled serenity. The mockery of their union must inexorably remain. He was not the husband of her heart, and she must forever hide from him spiritual depths of which his inevitable non-pos- session would forbid all sweeter and holier conditions of intimacy. But at least he was going to show him- self the gentleman and not the jailer, the indulgent guardian and not the surly sentinel. Apart from the combined farce and sadness of their bonds, they were no doubt destined to become excellent friends. Every new week repeated the comforting disappointment. Then there were jewels given her, and other costly gifts as well. No bride of her years could fail to be touched by these and like attentions. Love might lie as dormant as it pleased, with torch unlit and chaplet unbraided ; but if friendship were going to steal in with sweet puritan face and a frank willingness to keep the hearthstone always ruddy through chill weather, why the days might not lag so sluggishly, after all. Olivia had in truth made a little hopeful picture of her own future. Delaplaine and she were the two chief figures, of course. As he would become gradu- ally enfeebled by the multiplication of years, leaving her still strong and young, she would assume toward him a more and more aidful and tributary place. Herein should be the working out of her expiation the practical fulfilment of her repentance. She would do all that lay in her power to make Spencer Dela- plaine bless their marriage. Her act of selfishness should be caused to bear sacrificial fruit. When the hour came that really laid him upon his death-bed not upon that semblance of one which had formed her past reason for wedding him perhaps he would take OLIVIA DELAPLAIXi:. 273 her hand and tell her that she had been a worthy wife Such she meant to be, and she now constantly thanked God that the difficulty of attaining this desired object would not prove insuperable. Abruptly the change in her husband shattered aspi- ration. He was never the same to her from that afternoon when he showed her his unmantled self. The passion she had inspired in him had not ceased, but its primary fervors were diminished. Possibly the sharp line of division between what he had been and what he was henceforth to be, drew its extreme emphasis from a single manifestation of her own. She refused to obey him in the matter of slighting her Aunt Thyrza, and most assertively told him so. " You spoke not long ago," she said, looking at him with a courage in her glance that did not for a second flinch, "of my position as my father's daughter and as your wife. I love poor papa's memory so dearly that I could not dream of shaming it. If you think I owe you the concession of discontinuing to know one who is bound to me by the sweetest and strongest ties both of blood and gratitude one I love and respect as a woman whose great, benevolent heart deserves that I should do then I must point out your very serious mistake." He started a little, but that was all. " You mean, I suppose, that you will not drop Mrs. Ottarson?" he said, with immobility. " She is an irritating vul- garian, but you persist in keeping her up against my will?" " She is the dearest friend I have in the world, and I shall always treat her as the friend I believe hei\" Olivia was prepared to have him reply with fierce 274 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. anger, now ; but she had not yet followed his imper- turbable methods. The tenderness he had thus far disclosed to her had been of about the same depth as those brittle and curly woofs of lichen that we some- times find on rocks. She was too wofully destined to strike against the obdurate silicate that lay below! "I perceive," he said, with his gray eyes fixed on her face. "In spite of any orders of mine to the con- trary, you will have this person visit you here at my house." "No," said Olivia. "It is your house. I would not allow Aunt Thyrza to enter it against your wishes. Possibly you don't realize or care to realize, how much she would scorn to do so." "Ah . . . yes. ... It will merely be a series of visits on your part ? " " That is what I mean." " But suppose I forbid you to go there at all." Olivia firmly shook her head. "I shall not hesitate to go, all the same," she answered. He shrugged his shoulders and smiled icily. " Does this not seem to you a rather bold measure?" "Not bolder than is justifiable under the circum- stances." He gave her no answer. For hours afterward she felt like one who has been remorselessly duped. He was a man of stone ; she had thought him so, or very nearly so, before their marriage, and now the remem- brance of this old conviction tauntingly returned to her. . . . He proffered no further mention of Mrs. Ottarson. But almost every succeeding day showed her new exasperating points in his loveless and cynical dispo- OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 275 sition. He soon made up his mind that there was a point with her where his coercion must stop. Some women would have had physical fear of him, if none other. Olivia was so brave, so dauntless in her deal- ings with him, that he admired her secretly all the more on this account. Still, it would never do, he had assured himself, to go on with that honeymoon pose. He had begun to feel acutely bored by the necessity of maintaining it, and he had concluded that it had best be abolished forthwith. Let Olivia see him once and for all as he was ; she might as well get used to him, if she were ever going to be as accommo- dating as that ; she would doubtless have a good deal of his society during the next few years, to judge by the proofs of bodily toughness which he had given the physicians not long ago. They sailed for Europe a short time afterward. Olivia greeted the event as a source of precious dis- traction, just as she was greeting the turmoil of New York merriments now, a year later. Adrian Etherege, the handsome young secretary of Delaplaine, surprised Olivia by saying to her, a few days before her depart- ure took place : "It would give me such delight, Mrs. Delaplaine, if I could only go with you! " "Go with us, Adrian?" she repeated. She had always called him " Adrian." It had appeared quite natural for her to call him so on taking her rightful place as feminine head of the establishment. Occa- sionally her husband would permit the lad to dine with them, and once or twice he had done so at his wife's request. Adrian came and went in a most irregular style ; it seemed an accepted fact in the '216 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. household that he should be exempt from all rules of punctuality and exactitude. Now and then he would sleep away from the house in West Tenth Street, and perhaps not even return thither on the following clay. But no one showed the least concern regarding such absences, and it was only necessary to look with close- ness into his fair, star-eyed, poetic face for the least suspicion that he was of dissipated habits to vanish completely. His manner toward Olivia had been one full of exquisite politeness ever since they had first met after the protracted illness of the latter. J^t times it struck her that he might be desirous of oblit- erating from her memory all retention of the curiously angry look she had once seen him give her. What Olivia knew about Adrian Etherege's personal history and antecedents the youth himself had told her. Delaplaine had thus far not done more than say in his wife's hearing : "Adrian is a good boy, honest-minded and wholly trustworthy. . . ." On one occasion, just after the first dinner that the young secretary had taken with them, Olivia had the fancy that some further informa- tion concerning Adrian was to be given her by his employer. But although Delaplaine then seemed on the point of volunteering a statement, he refrained from doing so, and she did not press him for disclos- ures, feeling sure that they would be afforded by other lips. And they were. Adrian fell into the fashion of holding little talks with her when he and she met, in halls, on stairways, or perhaps in the library, to which he was allowed free access. He pleased Olivia indescribably. It was not merely his beauty that OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. Til attracted her; it was a winsomeness half melancholy half joyous. He affected her as an individuality that Nature had shaped for the freest acceptance of all life's yellowest and richest sunshine, but over whom circumstance had drawn a kind of shadowy veil. She had no more thought of being touched by him into an attachment beyond friendly interest than if his years had numbered fifteen instead of twenty. This very concern which he had aroused in her made her ques- tion him about his past. She wanted, naturally enough, to learn whence he had managed to derive his charming manners. And at length he had made her acquainted with a little history which she did not dream of doubting. Why should she so have dreamed? He gave it, finally, with an air of veracity and sim- plicity that his lovely brown eyes and his almost ideal countenance gently seemed to corroborate. A long time ago, he told her, when he was a small fellow, Mr. Delaplaine had known his father favorably as one of the bank-employees. His father had died suddenly, and he, an orphan, had been recommended to the charity of the wealthy, powerful banker. Mr. Delaplaine had been very good, giving him the advan- tage of a long term of schooling, and then permitting him to enter the banking-house in a minor capacity. Afterward the secretaryship had grown from that. There was really nothing more to narrate. The school had been a good one a boarding-school not far away from town at Fordham, in fact. If Mrs. Delaplaine was kind enough to think that he had fairly cultivated manners, this complimentary opinion could only be explained by the careful, refined course of instruction pursued at the suburban school. 278 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. Olivia unhesitatingly credited all this. Her heart had so warmed toward Adrian Etherege by the time he made his direct appeal to accompany herself and Delaplaine abroad, that she promptly looked upon such a project with entire acquiescence. But her husband instantly frowned upon it. His frown was one of unusual sternness, considering his ordinary composure. " Have you lost your senses?" he asked, after she had mentioned to him the wish of Adrian. " I should think you might see the insanity of such an idea." " Insanity ! " murmured Olivia. "Certainly." Delaplaine had no reservations from her now. He had cast off all disguises in unrelenting earnest. "An old fellow like me and a good-looking youngster like that ! I'd be a fine fool to let the world talk. No, thank you ! " Olivia's face crimsoned, and her eyes kindled. " You can't imagine " she began. "Imagine?" he broke in, with a hint of scoff in his tones. " Of course I don't. I'm not troubled with imagination, anyway. I'm what they call an exact thinker. Do you suppose I'm afraid you care for the boy? If I did I'd send him packing in no time. Be- sides, you couldn't care. He's not in your line. I know what might be. He isn't. You'd never fall in love with " " Stop ! " cried Olivia. " You insult me as your wife!" He gave a short, dry laugh. "Do I?" he retorted. "Oh, no, I don't. I merely show you how I might. You would feel insulted all the same if you were fond of poor young Adrian. Women are never so finely OLIVIA DELAPLA1NE. 279 innocent in their assumptions as when they're guilty. . . . We won't take the boy to Europe, however. I know it's not a matter of much moment with you whether we do or not. I keep a closer eye on you than you perhaps fancy I keep. There may come a time when you won't be altogether . . . indifferent. Possibly that time must come, as affairs are situated. But when it does, don't flatter yourself that I shall be fooled for more than a week. The chances are that I shall be even wiser from the very beginning than you are." He left her, after having spoken these words with what she held to be an infernal coolness, and he left her, also, rankling under the infliction of what she rightly held to be a brutality. But she was yet in her apprenticeship as regarded the full perception of just how satanically insolent he could show himself. It may readily be surmised that he behaved without provocation during conferences of this sort. He freely admitted to himself that he did. He was the kind of man who would have been execrable in all domestic relations, even if he had married twenty years younger than at present. The world had been easy enough for him to get on with. Its points of tangency, so to speak, were not at all like connubial ones. A very ill- natured bear in his home-circle may be a popular com- panion at the clubs. Delaplaine could never have been called popular anywhere, nor was he at any time a bear ; for in allowing him such a definition as the last, you would lose sight of his refined rather than blunt modes of torment, his premeditated rather than impulsive cruelty. "If I had married an angel from heaven," he had said to himself not long before the conversation 280 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. just recorded, " I should Lave found it impossible to get on with her unless we sometimes quarrelled. I don't know what I should have done to get up a quar- rel. I think I might have picked the feathers out of her wings while she was asleep." They went to Europe, leaving Adrian at home. He had grown singularly sad, Olivia observed, during the days that immediately preceded their departure. She wondered whether affection for Delaplaine could pos- sibly explain his altered spirits ; it seemed incredible that this should be the case. " You would like so very much to go to Europe ? " she said one day, a little while before they sailed. "Ah, how I should enjoy it! " he exclaimed, a light seeming to pass across his face and then vanish. " But some day you will go," said Olivia. " Some day ! Yes alone ! " "Alone?" she echoed, surprisedly. " Why do you so dread going that way, Adrian?" And then she saw that he had colored deeply. Thinking his embarrassment might have sprung from a betrayal of the regard which he bore his benefactor, she at once said, with the hope of putting him at his ease : "But of course you would rejoice in the companion- ship of one whom you have known so long and so intimately as you have known Mr. Delaplaine. It is always a pleasure to travel with those of whom we are fond." " Fond of him J/" The words leapt impetuously from his lips. Olivia saw, hurrying over his face and darkening it, the same fiercely irate expression witnessed there at a previous OLIVIA DELAPLAINE, 281 time. It amazed her that such specks of flame could swirn, however momentarily, in the tawny shadow of those peaceful eyes. "You dorit like Mr. Delaplaine, then?" she ex- claimed. He burst into the most awkwardly contrite little laugh. "I I didn't say that," he stammered. " I like him? Why, how could it be otherwise after all that he has done for me? Of course I like him." And then there was another apologetic laugh, lamer than that which had preceded it. "I I was merely a a trifle surprised that that you should be in doubt of how I really felt." " Oh, I was not in doubt," answered Olivia. But from that time she became confident of Adrian's keen yet smothered aversion. This knowledge made her somehow set greater value upon the youth's evi- dent regard for her; it forged a new link of congeni- ality between them. As for her husband's recent words, they wore dyes of deeper insult as she recalled their unprovoked acerbity. . . . Two days before they took the steamer for Havre, an event occurred which caused her to wonder in an oddly perplexed way. She had gone to make a few purchases in the morning and to speak a loving fare- well in the ear of her inalienable friend, Mrs. Ottarson. She returned at about three o'clock in the afternoon, and passed upstairs toward her own apartments. But just as she neared the library, a loud, clear voice, plainly that of a woman, sounded from behind the closed door of that particular room. "I don't want to have him kicked into a hole, like a dog," cried the voice, " when I'm dead and gone." 282 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. "Who cares what you want?" came the answer, loud as well, and most uncharacteristically so, since the new speaker was beyond dispute Delnplaine. " You had no right to come here. You must go at once. And don't ever presume to come again." Before Olivia had more than just slipped by the door of the library, it was flung open, and a woman crossed its threshold. The woman saw her as she receded, but Olivia caught only the least glimpse of a pale, rather careworn face, lit by dark eyes that were now as rayless as they might once have been radiant. Then Delaplaine himself appeared, as white as he had looked on the day he was believed to be dying. " Let this be the last time, now ! " he cried. " It's no place for you, and by , if you forget that again, I'll ." The woman, who stood then on the upper landing of the stairs, pointed with a sudden gesture and a slight laugh of mockery toward Olivia. Delaplaine turned, saw his wife, motionless and astonished a yard or two beyond, and gave a terrible start. The woman hastened downstairs, while Dela- plaine, more discomfited in manner and speech than Olivia would have thought it possible for him to be, stammeringly began some sort of explanation. " She is one one of those those beggars who bother me at times for money. They they come to you with all all sorts of tales. A person has to be very very careful, or he runs the chance of getting swindled horridly by them." The next moment he passed back into the library. Olivia slowly walked on toward her own suite of chambers. Perhaps Delaplaine had spoken the truth, OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 283 and it was some beggar, who referred to husband, son, or brother while saying that she did not wish to see him kicked into a hole, like a dog, after she was dead and gone. But then Spencer Delaplaine's unquestion- able agitation . . . why should that have shown itself ? " Surely," thought Olivia, while her maid was reliev- ing her of bonnet and wraps, " if the woman had been one whose presence here should bring shame on him, he need not have felt the slightest concern on my account. And as for his really feeling any, it doesn't at all correspond with his present perfectly undisguised brutalities . . . tout au contraire" The traits that she thus uncompromisingly de- scribed underwent no diminution after she and Dela- plaine sailed for European shores. " I like Paris," he said to her one day during the early part of their sojourn in that city. "It is so exquisitely filthy here." "Paris is generally thought to be a very clean city," said Olivia, quite misunderstanding. He laughed his raucous little laugh, and leaned backed in his chair. "Oh, I don't mean her streets; I mean her morals. Almost every other civilized nation of the globe has been piling abuse on France for centuries, and yet we've all such a secret delight in her. It's too amusing. Whenever I see one of these highly proper Americans or Englishmen who shudder at what he calls her 'nastiness' in painting, novel-writing or the drama, I always feel like sending a note to that fellow's wife anonymous, of course telling her to have him watched and followed on the evenings he says he's going to the club for a quiet 284 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. rubber of whist and will be home by eleven or a quarter past. . . ." "Did you ever meet any human being whom you trusted?" Olivia asked him, with a gentle exaspera- tion, at another later period. " No, not a single being of whom I could say, ' I'll trust him or her through anything that may happen in the way of temptation.' There isn't anybody who can be trusted like that. Every one who ever lived has had a price. Sometimes it's large, but then the size depends on the amount of respectability that is to be imperilled." "Then there is no such thing as conscience." "No. Emphatically no. Conscience is traditional, and that only. You might have a child, and train him up to believe that looking at the moon was a most horrible sin. All through the rest of his life, no matter how enlightening might be the influences brought to bear upon him, he would never look at the moon without a sense of violation and trespass. You would have established in him what Herbert Spencer would call a line of least resistance for the incident force of fear. Conscience, remorse, scrupulosity, all began with that. . . ." He paused, and watched Olivia with the smile that she had grown to detest. " I re- member I said something of this same sort to you before we were married and shocked you. Didn't I ? " " You shock me now." "I know. But I don't mind. I have got you all safe to myself, now; you can't escape me. Can you?" She saw that he was in one of his waspishly jocular moods, and she rose to leave the room. "Don't go," he said. "I've something to tell you. OLIVIA DEL A PLAINS. 285 It's about our truly remarkable marriage. For it was remarkable, was it not?" "Very," she answered, turning pale. She had a sudden curiosity to know what new sting he would inflict. He gave a soft, unctuous chuckle before he went on. "I told you I'd changed my will; I made your aunt Satterthwaite believe I had. But I didn't. I didn't intend to die. I was a little afraid that I might, in spite of my intentions, but still I'd made up my mind not to die if I could help it. It was all a delicious fraud on my part. You can't find many men who have the nerve to scheme like that on what may turn out their death-beds within an hour or two. If I had died before you married me you wouldn't have got a dime. That seeing my lawyer was all a blind a ruse de guerre . . . excuse my bad pronun- ciation ; you know I never could get on with French ; I leave that for my young and accomplished wife, who 'had resided abroad for many years previous to be- coming the spouse of her eminent banker-husband,' as that silly Franco-American newspaper announced the other day. ... If I had died after our queer wedding, you'd have got your widow's third no more." And then he gave another chuckle, and looked out from the window near which he sat, and which commanded a view of the Champs Elysees, bathed in winter sunshine. Olivia always bore this cat-and-mouse treatment with a solemn, almost a sublime patience. Afterward she would say to herself, thinking over some special dagger-thrust that he had dealt her: "I am glad I made him no answer. I am glad I bore it calmly as I did. It is my punishment." 286 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. But now and then, for several days at a time, lie would be a model of urbanity and good humor. Dur- ing intervals like these she could see why he had gained ascendancy with both women and men ; his caustic wit spared no person or thing, and yet she comprehended how, with other hearers than herself, it had sounded its discordant notes not too recklessly for the production of a distinct amusement. When they reached the Riviera all the hotels were packed with visitors, and gayeties reigned imperially at the various Mediterranean-skirting resorts. But Delaplaine would not allow his wife to participate in any festivities whatever. Many of her own country- people sent invitations, but he refused them himself, and vetoed their acceptance on the part of his wife. An occasional luncheon or dinner he permitted ; no large gatherings, however, would he sanction, nor any entertainments in which elaborated and magnificent costumes became requisite. "No," he soon informed Olivia, in his low-voiced, smooth-visaged way, " you shan't, as my wife, cheapen yourself at any of these foreign places. I won't even let you be presented at Court in London. As an American one is incontestably nobody the instant one's foot lands upon transatlantic soil. A good many Americans are constantly forgetting that more's the pity. I recollect dining once in the salon of Del- monico's, and seeing seated next me a' party of three palpably raw Westerners, who had come to view the town a father with a tanned face and a beard down under his chin ; a mother with a yellowish fur cape that reached below her waist, and long earrings of gold scroll-work, and a reticule ; and finally a son of OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 287 about fifteen or so, with enormous front teeth, and his mouth in a perpetual gape of awe. . . . You know the kind of rural persons I mean. . . . Well, they seemed in doubt what they would take. I was dining with a little party that evening (I believe your aunt Satter- thwaite gave the dinner, by the bye), and we fell into private giggles, all of us, over the absurd hesi- tancy of father, mother and son. The waiter stood listening with a resigned air for their decision, and finally it came. They ordered three pieces of mince pie and three cups of tea. . . . Well, that, after all, fairly represents the conduct of the average American citizen on English or Continental soil. Some Ameri- cans do even a great deal worse than that. Others (people of whom there are a few thousands like you and me) must suffer in consequence. Socially we are nothing here, the very best of us, and we need not for an instant flatter ourselves that we are something. You might make a great success among the swells here, but though you would be in their throng you would never really be of it ; they would always con- nect you with the species of person that orders a cup of tea and a plate of mince pie in Delmonico's at the usual dining hour. It may be hideously unjust all this . . . who says it isn't ? But when you've reached my age you'll understand the full rarity of justice on our planet; black swans and white crows are not a circumstance to it ... All very well, Olivia, for such women as Mrs. Brummagem Baker to despair of get- ting into New York society and go abroad for the purpose of having an aristocratic stamp put upon them, that they may come home afterwards with gilt- ed<;ed recommendations to the residents of their own 288 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. native metropolis. But you don't require to ' invade New York' as they used to say Mrs. Brummagem Baker did, after she'd been received at Marlborough House and passed a day at Sandringham. No ; you are a Van Rensselaer in the first place, and you're Mrs. Spencer Delaplaiue in the second. That will have to be enough for one lifetime or, at least, till I'm dead and you marry somebody else. Anyhow, you'd never win anything here but a sort of tinsel favoritism. They might take you, but they'd take you with a big pinch of salt as only an American. And I won't have you taken that way. . . . We'll wait until we get home before you try. a turn among the fashionable assemblages. There you're princess, duchess, and countess all rolled in one. Yes, you are, thanks to some of the ridiculous shortcomings of our ridiculous republic about as great a national failure, take it all in all, as the records of history can show." It will now readily be understood why the stay of Delaplaine and Olivia abroad was not attended by any except the most meagre social excitements. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 289 XVI. DELAPLAINE was of the opinion that America has but a single season whose record is handsome enough to deserve honorable mention in any calendar. This season, he affirmed, was autumn ; and on his return to his native land, in August of the following year, he expressed a great desire to see once more the Hudson when its banks were tinted with the summer's pris- matic decay. Accordingly he leased a very fine estate not far from Tarrytown, installing Olivia there, by no means against her will. The house was spacious and comfortable ; the grounds commanded a noble view of the lordly river near by. Olivia took long walks, long rides and long drives through the delightful surround- ing country. She was from early training an excellent equestrian, and the stables were as well stocked with horses as were the halls and chambers of her new abode supplied with drilled and efficient servants. Her husband now and then would spend one or two nights in town, but he always instructed her by letter or telegram of his intended absences, which decidedly did not fill her with inconsolable regret. She was o lonely, but not to any despondent degree. She had books of many sorts to read, and as she kept early hours, slept healthfully, and saw a good deal of the breezy sunshine which was then at its thriftiest, her days hardly dragged more than they could be ex- pected to do amid surroundings of so much undis- 290 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. turbed solitude. Besides she had the winter to antici- pate. She was to see something of social amusement then ; her husband had promised her that she should both entertain and be entertained after they returned to West Tenth Street, and she knew that his pride in her would make him keep his word, however caprice might delay him in the ultimate fulfilment of it. She feared showing too great a desire for distractions of a social kind ; his moods of tantalizing cruelty were never to be calculated on. She had discovered that the love he felt for her was one constantly on the alert to ensheathe itself in the most distressing jealousy. She had never, as yet, given him the least incentive to become jealous, but it was plain to her that this trait in him only waited an opportunity for rapid and morbid development. All this time she was very far from being happy. But, as she told her Aunt Thyrza during several trips that she made to town, it was not a misery that stood any chance of shortening her existence. "He is at times intolerable," she said. "One of the proofs of just how odious he can make himself, Aunt Thyrza, is the manner in which he forces me to meet you either secretly or not at all. I should so love to have you up there at Green acre to sniff the country air, dear old soul, for a week or two, and do just as you chose with everybody and everything about you!" Mrs. Ottarson gave one of her laughs. " Jfy, Liv ! " she exclaimed. "I guess I'd have pretty tough work doin' 's I chose with Mr. Del'plaine round ! " Olivia smiled drearily. " I am afraid any one would," she answered. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 291 Mrs. Ottarson took her hand caressingly between her own. "My poor deary! It's all been wrong. No one knows more'n I do jus how wrong it's all been. Many's the night, 'Livia, while you was over there 'cross the water, I've laid 'wake in bed thinkin' 'bout it. An' all I can say, Livvy, is that you've stood it splendid ever since you got through that awful illness. You d'serve credit for bein' so brave and womanly." "I surely deserve no credit at all, Aunt Thyrza," was the answer. " You and I have talked this matter over before now. The marriage may have been fraud- ulent enough on his part; but I need not have made it. I believe, now, that I fell a victim to the deceit of more persons than that sick man who lay with so white a face there in that dim chamber. . . . But never mind ; it is too late for any good to come of open accusations. Besides, I find no one so hard to pardon, in this matter, as myself. And I don't want to let myself believe, even for an instant, that I was excusable in having taken the downward step I did take. I might begin to waver, then to lose what courage I possess to strike back, blow for blow, in- stead of bearing it all as unflinchingly as I can, be- cause convinced that it is my just recompense, my rightful penalty." Two or three times Olivia met Adrian Etherege during short visits at the West Tenth Street house, while she was in town for a few hours. A year had made the youth look manlier, though it had robbed him of no beauty. He had a hundred questions to ask his friend concerning the lands and cities embraced by her own and Delaplaine's long absence. But it was not always of foreign travels that Adrian wanted 292 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. to talk. He sometimes chose subjects of a far less material sort. " You tell me that you are lonely," he once said to Olivia. " So am I ; and I sometimes feel that I shall continue lonely for the rest of my life." " Have you no friends, then?" his companion asked. " I mean apart from myself," she added sweetly ; for ever since her husband had let fall those memora- bly sneering words about the project of having Adrian accompany them abroad last year, she had lost no chance of showing the young secretary in how much purely amical regard she held him. "Few that I care for," said Adrian. "They are mostly young men of my own age and they are devoted to business pursuits ; they are at the bank of Delaplaine and Company, or they are at other banks, or in brokers' offices. Now, I have no love for the ideas, the aims and the undertakings that make up the chief joys of life for persons like these." " And yet they tell me that you are a clever busi- ness man." Adrian quickly shook his curly golden head. " Oh, they are wrong if by 'they' you mean Mr. Dela- plaine, as I suppose you do. I haven't my work at heart ; I go through it like an automaton ; when it is over I want to forget it. And there is no one to help me forget it. That is why I'm so lonely. If I had a love for books it might be different ; but I haven't. I I simply like people the people who amuse me." Olivia laughed ; she rarely laughed nowadays indeed, so rai*ely that the sound of her own audi- ble mirth woke a little thrill of surprise in her. "You OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 293 forget that yon also amuse them" She laid her hand on his arm and looked into his adorable eyes, which had never enchanted her moi'e than if they had been those of some woman whom she was fond of and thought singularly fascinating. "But my dear Adrian," she went on, calling him by the name which she had used in addressing him weeks before her departure for Europe, " you have the faculty of being intelligent without the need of books to make you so." "I am not intelligent, Mrs. Delaplaine," he an- swered, speaking with excessive earnestness. "I can never do anything in the least remarkable. I can simply like and appreciate those who have gifts and striking qualities above my own. I I was born to be a background and not a foreground. I'm no talker, as you know; I love to listen when I may get those to who;n I can listen without becoming wearied. Let me speak very frankly with you ; I don't want you to misunderstand me to imagine me vain in what I have just said about those mercan- tile associates. I am far from placing myself above them, but ... I can't even be a background to them. ... If I had been born above my present position in life, I think I should have made a suc- cess of it, as the phrase goes. I should have known persons who interested me artists, dreamers, poets, men of brains and culture. I should have been their patron, their helper. But now I am nothing. I am simply agreeable, as you once told me that I was. I'm not of enough importance for the talented beings wherever they exist in New York, if they exist at all to seek me out. So I must remain lonely, since 294 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. I have no means of meeting or mixing among the spirits with whom I truly sympathize." Olivia laughed again. " You don't know how you interest me," she said. Adrian looked at her fixedly for a moment. " Why? Because I declare myself a nonentity ? " he asked. "Absurd! Because you are so much less a nonen- tity than you imagine. ... I fancy, from what I have read of the great thinkers, the great poets, the great minds, generally speaking, that it is much more fortu- nate to be apart from them and admire them than to be one of them and suffer, as their biographies tell us that they nearly all have suffered. . . . But if you really want congenial acquaintanceship, perhaps I shall be able to find it for you." "To find it for me? You?" Olivia failed to notice just what accent and intonation went into this reply. " Yes. I shall see a good deal of the world next winter. Mr. Delaplaine " (she rarely spoke of him as "my husband") "has promised me that I shall. And then your chance will come. I prophesy it, Adrian." A startled, incredulous look responded to her. " Ah, he would never allow that ! " the young man mur- mured. " He would never let me even dream that I, his secretary, his servant, was on an equality with you! He would forbid the first effort you made." " Perhaps," said Olivia softly, as if speaking to her- self. But suddenly her face brightened. "I would tell him," she proceeded, "that I wanted to secure a wife for you." "A wife?" "Yes, . . . Some day you will marry, of course. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 295 Why should you not ? And I will carefully look all about me to obtain some charming girl who will be just the proper match for you." Olivia now assumed a humorously grave look. "Let me see: she must, in the first place, be handsome almost, if not quite, as handsome as you are. Secondly, she must be rich " "Pray, stop," broke in Adrian. There was a pained, imploring gaze in his eyes as they now lifted themselves to her own, which made Olivia pause and even regret the badinage that she had thus lightly begun. . . . She had never mentioned to her husband these few interviews which she had held with Adrian. One evening he said to her, amid the almost drowsy dul- ness following their seven o'clock dinner at Greenacre : "That boy, Adrian Etherege . . . you remember him ? " " Of course," returned Olivia. "He had better see to some loose papers which I have been leaving up here, and which need to be filed and labelled. He may come up with me to-morrow night. Do you object to his corning?" " No," replied Olivia. " Why should I object ?" Adrian carne up with Delaplaine the next evening. Dinner was served almost immediately after the arrival of host and guest. Adrian conducted him- self, as he always did iri the presence of his employer, with repression and comparative reticence. After dinner he went with Delaplaine into the pri- vate study of the latter, and remained there for over two hours. They came out together, and at once joined Olivia, who sat reading near a lamp, in a room that glowed with Japanese decorations. 296 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. " I hope to-morrow will be a glorious autumn day," she said smilingly to Adrian, " now it is arranged that you are to stop over at Greenacre for a holiday. We have had so many beautiful days during the past fort- night that it will be a sharne if to-morrow is not charming." "The best plan is never to expect anything good from the weather," said Delaplaine, with his glacial quietude. "Then it may agreeably disappoint you like some few women I have met." Long ago Olivia had learned to treat the sarcasms o o of her husband as though they had remained un- spoken. " And how do you like this absurdly large house of ours?" she again said to Adrian. " I am decidedly pleased with it," he answered. " The appointments are all in such taste. You forget both the size and the number of the rooms in their artistic treatment." " I knew you'd have something to say in praise of Greenacre," replied Olivia. " To-morrow I will show you some of those exquisite views of the river that I mentioned the other day." Delaplaine had drawn near the log-fire in the big chimney-place ; for the evening outside (broken with innumerable voices of crickets and katydids) told chillingly of perished summer. He turned his head a little away from the blaze, though still keeping his slender body bowed and one thin hand crooked like the claw of a bird, with the firelight shining through it and staining it pink. He spoke to his wife : "Did you see Adrian the other day?" h-e asked. " I did," said Olivia. She was sorry that her tongue had slipped. She had not previously referred, before OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 297 her husband, to these few past meetings with Adrian. If he had asked her whether his secretary were at the house in West Tenth Street when she had pre- sented herself there, she would unhesitatingly have answered " yes." As it was, she had preserved silence regarding the whole affair. Adrian now en- joyed a liberty on which, as the functionary of a man like her husband, he was certainly to be congratu- lated. Who could tell what sudden restriction might be placed upon his goings and comings, provided Olivia were to state that she had met and talked with him? And so she had held her peace, by no means regretful that Delaplaine had failed to question her. He moved away from the fire, now. He was look- ing with fixity at his wife. "You mean in Tenth Street ? " he said. " Yes," returned Olivia, striving to speak with utter carelessness and succeeding. "Adrian happened to be there at the same time with myself." "Ah . . . indeed," said Delaplaine, with a tone so neutral and colorless as to leave the spirit in which he made this brief response wholly inscrutable for his hearers. "I am usually in Tenth Street until three in the afternoon," " said Adrian, " when nothing calls me to the bank." Delaplaine 'turned and watched him placidly for a moment. " My dear boy," he said, " I know the irre- proachable industry of your habits as my secretary. You have no cause to enlighten me upon that point." Adrian bit his lip. He wondered what displeasure this sudden access of mock politeness foretokened. Almost immediately after this, Delaplaine strolled 298 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. out of the apartment, and in a few minutes a servant appeared requesting that Adrian would meet his mas- ter for a short further talk in the study. " He is angry," thought Olivia, " at my having pre- sumed to see poor Adrian in Tenth Street without informing him. And he is going to make his anger felt." She was right. Adrian did not pass the following day at Greenacre. Delaplaine had discovered that there were letters of importance in which he would require his secretary's assistance at the bank. Throughout the remainder of their residence in the country-house, Adrian was permitted to pay them no second visit. "Is it jealousy?" Olivia asked herself, "or is it only the autocratic protest of a man who searches for some cold-blooded device of annoyance?" Delaplaine never made her sure just what it was. If he anticipated an expression of disapproval on the part of his wife, no such evidence greeted him. The truth was, Olivia now simply awaited what the com- ing season in New York would bring forth. If he attempted then to hamper the enjoyment, the relaxa- tion, the self -forgetful ness that she daily grew to crave with stronger yearning, she might have some cards to play in such a cruel victimizing game by which he would be surprised if not repulsed. Latter October was despoiling the trees about Greenacre of their last leafy brilliancies when Mr. and Mrs. Delaplaine returned to town. The Tenth Street house was most capably prepared for their re- ception. Servants were in readiness ; carriages and horses waited Olivia's order; the air and distinction OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 299 of the entire household were past cavil. But no one was invited to participate in all this reposeful and flawlessly refined luxury. Olivia had hoped to see Adrian again, but he had seemingly left the abode to return no more. She refrained from questioning her husband with respect to his absence. November went by. Her two aunts, Mrs. Auchin- closs and Mrs. Satterthwaite, had exchanged visits with her. At last came the large Auchincloss din- ner, which she was permitted to accept, and which marked the beginning of her career as a woman of o o society. The Patriarchs' Ball was of course followed by many others, both public and private, and Olivia went to every one which the marital veto did not exclude. Delaplaine was excessively commode about it all. He never danced nowadays, and yet he would sit chatting with the dowagers till the small morning hours, again and again, while his wife shone as a star of the cotil- lon. It began to be declared of him that he would make a model husband. But no one saw his petty domestic tyrannies, or the lynx-like way in which he watched all Olivia's male admirers. It delighted his egotism that she should " succeed " thus brilliantly. He wanted his wife to be not merely a great lady, but also a lady of well-conceded personal charm. For this reason her popularity pleased him. But other points connected with it pricked and irritated him. Like almost every old man who has ever been in love with a young woman, he became susceptible to the sharpest pangs of jealousy ; but in his special case they were seizures which all the more clearly indicated how barren and arid was his nature through the aus- 300 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. terity of its unrelieved selfishness. His was the old dogTin-the-manger feeling : he could not secure Olivia's heart himself, but he was determined that no one else should secure it. Slowly, but with a gathering increase toward their culmination, his suspicions all assumed a single shape. The season was now ending; Lent was on the verge of throwing over the giddy multitude that penitential nimbus in which it is supposed to conceal its follies even while still indulging them. Delaplaine now felt certain that Jasper Massereene was preferred by Olivia to all her other devotees. He privately thought the young man excellent style, as he himself would have put it. What he chiefly liked about Massereene was the engaging simplicity which went with an intel- lect of no ordinai-y calibre. He had tested that intel- lect more than once in their talks together, and he had been astonished at the thoughtfulness, cultivation and acumen concealed behind manners that were no less elegant than unpretentious. The truth was that he failed to see in Jasper Mas- sereene a product of our so-called modern agnosticism totally opposite from that which he himself repre- sented, and yet in every way as distinctively stamped by the same peculiar parentage. Massereene was of necessity the finer and more thorough scholar of the two. His reading had been wider, his outlook was more educationally sweeping. But writers and think- ers like Mill, Spencer, Darwin, Buckle, Huxley or Lecky had stood the mental sponsors of both. And yet with Massereene a sincere and thriving optimism had resulted from precisely the same causes which had fed and vitalized Delaplaine's implacable pessim- OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 301 ism. The contrast between these two individualities could not have been more positive than it was, and yet they had been moulded, so to speak, by one iden- tical philosophic potency. Delaplaine had asked his own mind, not many weeks aero what could be the inducement which led this En^- o o lish-reared young radical to mix among the frivolities of a fashionable New York winter. He had seen that species of gayety at its most shining stage of London development. Why should he care for so feeble and comparatively provincial a reproduction of it as he encountered here? If he had been a shallow, or even a conventionally mediocre person, it would have al- tered the case ; but he was very far from being either. He might have gone to a few of those entertainments where one meets the meagre literary element of New York society; or he might have dropped in at a few of the Twentieth Century Club reunions, presided over by persons of culture and solid ability, even though their assembled throngs are perhaps not al- ways just the serious auditors to be expected at such momentous gatherings. But to go about night after night, where flippancy reigned undisputed, to dance that mechanical cotillon, to send bouquets idly broad- cast among silly women, to prefer deliberately the in- terchange of platitudes for that of ideas a like course in one so talented and sensible was hard to account for. Suddenly Delaplaine, with no cheerful sensations, grew confident that he had found a solution of the puzzle. Massereene went out into the merry world because Olivia went. He was more persistently and meaningly attentive to her than any other of her male 302 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. friends. The latter were getting, indeed, to pay him a certain deference of priority when he appeared. Delaplaine began to watch these demonstrations with an augmenting inward restlessness. One morn- ing he returned from the bank unexpectedly, and en- tered the drawing-room to find Olivia seated there with Jasper Massereene in earnest conversation. A day or two afterward, having promised Olivia that he would meet her at a certain large and noteworthy re- ception, he was exceedingly late in keeping the ap- pointment. Olivia had left the reception with Mas- sereene, having dismissed her carriage a few minutes beforehand. Delaplaine had the pleasure of seeing these two, strolling in the most leisurely manner side by side, from the window of his brougham as it sped up Madison Avenue. About a fortnight ago invitations had been sent out for a great ball at the Satterthwaites' on the day but one preceding Lent. This ball was regarded as a most appropriate termination of the winter's mirth- making. The Satterthwaites were such incontestable old Knickerbockers that society felt a grateful thrill to them for thus magnanimously helping to wind up the season. Then, too, it was so generous of the Sat- terthwaites ; for they had done so much entertaining in previous years, and their two girls, Emmeline and Elaine, were still husbandless. " I believe there is a ... a ... Mr. Plunkett who is quite attentive to the elder of my two cousins," Madeleine Auchincloss used to say nowadays, with her most innocent smile. "I don't know much about Mr. Plunkett, and of course the name is not a familiar one, but I think he has a married sister who goes among artists and OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 303 writers and that kind of people. I am not sure but that Mr. Plunkett is a writer himself." These last words were always added with the suggestion of not wanting to be too hard on the young gentleman concerned, and to give him his full right of contra- dicting what may have been a false accusation. There was no one conspicuously attentive to Made- leine. But she would never have put up with any- body whose principal recommendations to matrimony were that he possessed gifts either of brains or breed- ing. Who can guess just how keen a satisfaction it gave her to insinuate that if her cousin Emmeline should contract an engagement before very long, it would not be to a person of either station or wealth ? As for Madeleine herself, she would never be d prendre on d, laisser in the way that some well-born girls allow themselves to become. Not she! Either she would marry advantageously or not at all. Alas! it is just this high and disinterested view of marriage that is yearly filling the ranks of our most select American maidens with cases of inflexible spinster- hood ! A general understanding existed that the Satter- thwaite ball was to be given in honor of its hostess's beloved niece, Mrs. Spencer Delaplaine. Olivia's hus- band, after drawing these conclusions regarding Mas- sereene of which mention has been made, was now resolved that the intimacy should forthwith end. His wife had, once before, boldly disobeyed him ; that re- volt had concerned her ceasing longer to know Mrs. Ottarson. But on all other occasions where he had commanded she had acceded, and the meekness with which she had borne his manifold irritations could not 304 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. have offered any domestic despot more tempting chances of tyranny. There is little doubt that Delaplaine mistook the motives of this former con- tinued meekness when he said to her, only a short time before the much-talked-of ball : " I suppose you are engaged for the German at the Satterthwaites'?" "Yes," Olivia replied. " May I ask to whom ? " " To Mr. Massereene." "Ah?" murmured Delaplaine. It was about four o'clock in the afternoon, and he had met his wife, clad in a daintily fresh street-costume, at the door of the lower front drawing-room. Her coupe waited outside. She was going to pay some visits of etiquette. She had been looking over her cards, and held a little col- lection of them in her neat-gloved hand. They were the cards of the gentlewomen whose visiting-day hap- pened to be this particular one. " I have a word to say," Delaplaine now continued, with his usual faultless repose. "Be good enough to let me say it in here, will you ? " And he passed im- mediately into the drawing-room. Olivia followed him. He had tried her very sorely of late ; more than once she had felt her patience giv- ing way beneath his formidable impertinences, his steel-tipped personalities. She knew that her popu- larity gratified his pride, but she had begun to weary under the incessant goad of slur by which he made her pay for having thus pleased others besides himself. After they had both cleared the threshold of the outer hall by a good many paces, Delaplaine turned and quietly faced her. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 305 "You are too much seen in the company of that man, Massereene," he said. " Indeed ! You think so ? " "I decidedly think so. It must cease. I allow you to be a woman of fashion for the present, because it suits me that you should show people how my mar- riage, late in life though it was, has not resulted in my marrying a feminine dullard. You have held your own thus far very well. I did not expect to find it expedient that I should rebuke any imprudence in you. I now find it so. As I said, you see too' much of this Massereene. I don't wish you to dance with him the last German of the season. And I will not permit you thus to dance it. You must break your engagement with him for the Satterthwaite ball. . . . o o Do you understand me ? " "Perfectly," said Olivia. Her eyes had been drooped for several seconds. She now raised them and looked at him as lie had never seen -her look at him before not even when she had defied him with relation to cutting Mrs. Ottarson. " Perfectly," she repeated, " and I shall not do as you desire." She paused for a moment, and drew a deep, long breath, her face paling noticeably at the same time. "I am engaged to Mr. Massereene," she continued, "and I shall dance with him on Wednesday night." She took a step or two nearer Delaplaine. A light came flashingly into her blue eyes, and a curl raised her lip so that he could see the white teeth glistening be- neath it. "You have asked me," she still went on, " whether I understood you. I do understand you, thoroughly. And I refuse point-blank I refuse to do as you most unjustly require ! " 306 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. He stared at her. He had got out his eyeglasses, and had begun to twirl them by their slender cord over one finger. " Ah," he said in very low tones ; " you . . . you defy me, then ? " Olivia threw back her head, and laughed with a terrible bitterness. The stored-up misery of months rang in that laugh. But something else rang in it as well the desperate challenge of a spirit goaded until resignation was flung quite away. "I do defy you ! " she answered. " You have made me suffer long enough ! Now you shall see me throw off the mask. Now you shall see just what sort of a woman you married when you made her your wife made her so by the lies you yourself not long ago ac- knowledged that you spoke ! " OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 307 XVII. DELAPLAINE drew backward, feeling that he had indeed unloosed a whirlwind. Olivia's face was very pale, now, and its expression was one of blended cour- age and contempt. She gave her husband no time to reply. She seized upon the swift-passing chance that his own evident amazement afforded her. Her voice was not loud, but its vibrations expressed at once a fierceness and an intrepidity which mere sound could not have more plainly conveyed. " You have told me how you came to marry me. But you have never yet heard how I soiled myself by consenting to marry you. My consent had nothing whatever to do with gratitude toward my dead father. I became your wife, in the distressing way that I did so become, because ambitious feelings tempted me and most unworthily, I admit. . . . You know of my wretched illness after learning that you would live and be my husband. . . . Well, let all that pass . . . I recovered ; I was your wife, and I faced the fate that I had brought on myself. But how did I face it ? Just as if it had been the infliction of a deserved pen- ance ; that, indeed, is what I held it to be. You were my yoke my burden ; but I had brought you upon myself, and I determined to bear you bravely. At first your kind treatment was a new reproach to me. I did not merit being thus permitted to endure the consequences of my own misdeeds with so little conse- 308 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. qucnt pain. It seemed only right that I should suffer. But tliat came soon enough. You made me suffer. You cannot say that I flinched often. I am not a fool; you knew I was not that, when you married me. I don't know whether you saw or not that I was simply clenching my teeth and bearing it all as best I could. I think you did see this, and that it made you still more cruel in your dealings with me. Meanwhile I drew upon my own fortitude, and kept my nerves as steady as the good fortune of my youth could help me to keep them. If I had been an older woman, I might have broken down. As it was I did not break down. 'I am taking my punishment,' I said and I took it. Once you presumed to dictate terms regarding the continuance of my friendship with Aunt Thyrza. There I opposed you, for you passed (and at the very moment of assuming your real character) beyond the bounds of either my toleration or my self-control. But perhaps that little episode gave you my gauge, as it were; it showed you just how far you could bend me before I broke. On a hundred different occasions you have had no cause to complain of my disobedience. I have never been in the least afraid of you. If I had been I should have felt fear in taking the stand that I take now. For I admit that my patience is at last exhausted. You say that I shall not dance the Ger- man with Jasper Massereene at the Satterthwaite ball. I reply to you with the utmost conceivable defiance^ that I shall so dance. If you try to prevent my going to the ball, then you must use force it may be that you will even use personal violence. I have heard of husbands like yourself doing just those miserable things. Very well, then tout est dit. You push the OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 309 whole matter into publicity. For myself, I don't care whether you do or no. If they told me afterward that I had any good ground for getting a divorce from you, I am sure that I should sooner or later rejoice very much. I confess my entire rdle of hypocrisy to have been a sad failure. I play no longer either the saint or the meek-souled woman. Henceforth I mean to forget that I sinned in marrying you. Or, if I do not forget, I shall consider my expiation accomplished. Your future commands will win from me no more attention than your taunts have done for a year past. You must now either leave me my own mistress or be prepared for my desertion of you. I mean, plainly, that I will go back to Aunt Thyrza. No power on earth can make me live with you against my will, and certainly such power is not represented by either your insolence or your persecution." Olivia moved past her husband, after this long yet inflexibly sustained speech, with a queen's ownfroid- eur in her face. Heredity is a marvellous fact; you saw, as if by a sudden little burst of revelation, that she was her aunt Letitia's indisputable niece but with, of course, a vast difference. She left the room, and he allowed her to do so with- out volunteering the least reply. He could scarcely have done anything which Olivia would have found more tantalizing. For a long time, however, he remained there in the drawing-room. He was not angry at his wife. Lov- ing her as, in his curious fashion, he did love her, the audacity of her recent outburst had even placed her before him in a new admired light. But at the same time it had inflamed his jealousy with a wholly new 310 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. fire. He assured himself that Jasper Massereene was at the root of her abrupt rebellion. She had flung aside all disguise, but not because she was weary and stung beyond the bounds of patience. A passion had enveloped her spirit, and she was acting by its impe- rious dictates. Her swift sentences of accusation and of explanation had pierced him deeper than he desired to let any living mortal know and least of all her from whose quiver such wounding shafts had sped. He had always known and felt that she cared nothing for him ; but her announcement that she cared noth- ing for reputable concealment of her injuries and her matrimonial heart-burnings, assailed him with an un- expected keenness. He sat for a long while with his thin hands knotted together and his gray head most dejectedly drooped. He had too much power of brain not to perceive the mournful absurdity of his own position. The love that he bore Olivia the love that his acid and repul- sive temperament could no more express in a gracious and courtly way than some fountain whose tubes are mire-clogged can send forth a limpid current to the sun this love seemed now objective and apparent before him, mocking him with its incongruous vitality. And socially it stood a fair chance of wrecking him. He had always abhorred the idea of a scandal being connected with his name. But here, suddenly, he found himself face to face with a desperate woman a woman who had asserted that she would not hesitate to turn the full glare of publicity upon their past relations as man and wife. Still, Delaplaine's agitation, keen as it now was, did not prevent his lucid mind from working. Almost OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 311 instinctively he reviewed Olivia's late conduct, and compared it with the manner in which she had previ- ously behaved to him. Did she not really value her present position ? Had she not openly admitted that she had married him solely for reasons of worldliness? Infatuated as she may have become with Masscreene, was there not more temporary feminine heat in her late show of recklessness than its apparent sincerity would imply? She had assumed a posture of the most baffling indifference as regarded her pi'esent place before the world, but would this dauntless unconcern prove permanent? She had professed herself un re- gardful of future impoverishment, but would she so bravely meet, after all, the stern, practical test of her boasted hardihood? 'I will try her,' Delaplaine said to himself. And he did ti'y her believing unchange- ably, at the same time, that she was now swayed by an ai'dent and headlong sentiment for Jasper Mas- sereene. That same evening they .were engaged to be present at one of those great, costly dinners which grow more and more frequent as New York departs farther from early republican ideals. Delaplaine did not again see his wife until he met her in the lower hall, cloaked for the carriage that waited outside. He noted that she was a little paler than usual ; otherwise her counte- nance bore no traces of the tempest that not long ago had stirred and kindled it. A footman opened the front door, and she silently passed out, descending the stoop. Another footman opened the door of the carriage. As Olivia entered the latter she appeared perfectly ignorant that her husband was following her. He seated himself opposite to her, and the 312 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. vehicle rolled away. It was dark, and the electric lights were all aglow. Olivia, leaning back against soft cushions, let her gaze obliquely fasten itself upon an unshaded segment of the window nearest her. They had begun to move at a rapid pace, for their hosts lived considerably higher up town than West Tenth Street, and it was now almost the hour (half- past seven) at which they had been asked to present themselves. As the carriage was hurried clatteringly O O / through Fifth Avenue, Olivia watched the various forms of the passers, outlined with such inky darkness against the silvery glare all about them. They would have done, in their weirclness, for a Blake or a Vedder to have peopled some fanciful hell with. "And yet," came her thought, both humorous and grim, "I haven't a doubt that lots of them would be very unsuited to infernal surroundings. And I dare say that very few of them would change fates with me if they could look into my heart and see the darkness there" She had already begun to shudder at the prospect of Delaplaine's hostility being shown by some act of vengeful exposure. She was not willing to make the least retraction of her passionate words, nor did she, indeed, regret their utterance. But dearly as she still loved and would always love Mrs. Ottarson, the mere thought of returning to West Twenty-Third Street had borrowed from calmer reflection almost terrifying colors. Still, she would go back there resignedly if the worst should come. After all, if her husband refused full surrender, to live with him longer would be insupportable torment. His jealousy of young Adrian Etherege had seemed a trifling insult enough, without this later exposition. It was perhaps OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 313 because Jasper Massereene had roused in her feelings where an ardent respect narrowly approached positive reverence, that Delaplaine's last unforeseen fiat, pro- nounced with relation to him, had marked the abso- lute limit of her concession. She had still no more dreamed of loving Massareene than she had dreamed of not honoring his intellect, his manliness and his rectitude, or of not finding solace, help and encourage- ment in his unique companionship. She was a woman whose fervor of sentiment (provided that she, a wife, had realized cherishing it toward any man not her husband) might have burned on in her soul as harm- lessly as the fire of a diamond will burn amid its defensive crystal sheath. The silence that Delaplaine maintained there in the darkness of the carnage began to impress her with the keenest discomfort. What fell intensity of response or of counter action was he reserving behind this stony reticence ? The very gloom which enwrapped him added an appreciable dread to his mysteriously speechless policy. And policy was just the word to define his present attitude. He was a man of untold resources. He had doubtless dealt with women be- fore now under circumstances where emotion had arrayed itself against calculation and self-mastery. "And I," thought Olivia, while she continued im- movably to stare away from him, through the win- dow of the swift, rumbling carriage, "I have only my heart, my sense of right, my recognition of outrage to guide me, in fighting with his frigid tact, his experi- enced cruelty." Suddenly he surprised her by speaking. His voice was just loud enough to be plainly heard. 314 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. "You still intend to defy me in that matter of dancing with a certain gentleman ?" She gathered herself together, as it were, on the instant. "Yes," she replied. " I wouldn't excite myself again, if I were you," he returned, with the same impenetrable undertone. "I can hear you quite as well if you answer me in a lower key. I suppose you don't want to go into din- ner looking red in the face and vulgarly flustered. Your appearance was very composed very reputa- bly so when I last had the pleasure of seeing you. A quiet question asks only a quiet answer. I'm going to put another question, by the way. Provided you do leave me, as you distinctly threatened, have you weighed the importance of what I could say you stated to be your true reasons for having married me ?" "Have ... I ... weighed its importance?" came the somewhat faltered answer. Then, more firmly, she went on : "I have weighed the importance of but one thing ending the wrongs you have made me suffer from." "Ah," he murmured. She heard him draw a long breath. "It's rather a serious thing to have said of one that you married an old man on his death-bed for his money and afterward freely admitted this." Olivia gave a bleak laugh, unconscious of having done so. " And the old man ! " she exclaimed. " Pray don't forget his side of the affair. It would scarcely be just." " Oh, my dear madame, I assure you that I shall entirely forget it. If there is ever any public talk of you and me, the drift of opinion cannot possibly set but one way." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 315 " I understand," she returned ; " you will use every means to make it set so that falsehood can supply you. with." " Oh, not at all. My record, you know, is quite unimpeachable. I shall simply make a few state- ments, and people will all believe me. Don't for an instant flatter yourself that they will not. I have been a great many years before New York society. You may think very hard things about me, but New York society thinks exceedingly nice ones. It will say 'Poor Delaplaine! At his age to become the victim of a manoeuvring girl like that ! What a terribly unprincipled creature she must be ! ' Some of the people whom you told me you had met in Mrs. Ottarson's boarding-house might sympathize with you, after they had heard your side of the story. I don't just know how contented you would feel with that sort of a constituency. But it would be all you could ever secure. Of course if you had money, matters might be different; you could afford, then, to snap your fingers in the faces of your detractors. But as you would now be placed, you would represent two very unpleasant phases of life poverty and unpopu- larity. You would find that nearly all your friends would drop away from you after you had gone to the Twenty-Third Street boarding-house. It wouldn't be so difficult for them to forget that you are a Van Rensselaer after you had been at pains to remind them that you are also a ... Jenks. And your slim purse would be no temporary inconvenience, either, provided you really left me. I would get the clever- est lawyers I could find to keep you out of your thirds after you became my widow. I'm not sure but that 316 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. desertion would afford rather easy grounds for such an arrangement. I'm entirely serious about all this, as I think you must perceive. You might fight my will, but litigation is expensive." His words had to Olivia's jarred nerves the sharp- ness and hardness of knife-edges. " I shall not fight your will," she said. "If I live longer than you do I will not touch a dollar of your money except what you choose lawfully to leave me. As for quitting your house now, I will only do it if I am driven to it." "I see. If I don't consent to your dancing the German with Jasper Massureene." It would be impos- sible for any spoken sentence to convey satire at once more caustic and more serene. Olivia gnawed her lip in the darkness. She had always detested satire, but when, as she now felt, it became like a wounding splinter from the stony nature of him who employed it, her aversion deepened to loathing. " Put it that way if you please," she replied. " I have no objections. What you say is a part, though far from being all, of the actual truth." "Precisely," he muttered, with his unalterable re- pose. " The real cause of war between nations very often lies wholly outside the excuse for beginning hostilities." " I require no excuse," responded Olivia, " and I have no cause except one resentment against injury." Just then the carriage stopped. For the first time since their entrance into the carriage together, Olivia saw her husband's face, bathed in the white light that streamed from an opposite corner. It looked, that face of Delaplaine's, as though it were cut out of drab OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 317 slate. A slight smile flickered about its parted lips. She had seen that smile hundreds of times before, but it had never looked so coolly devilish to her as at this especial time. "You have another cause," he said. "I mean Jas- per Massareene." "That is untrue," she answered, while her heart gave one indignant throb. " You say so in the most virtuously glib way. But you can prove it by obeying my commands." " I will not obey them." " Oh, but you must," he said, looking at her with eyes that seemed to hold the glint of steel in their dim pupils. " I will not. What I say to you I say for the last time, too : I will not. Be prepared for any course you may decide to take. But rely on this : my oppo- sition meets and matches your tyranny, act for act." All this passed very quickly between them. In another moment the footman had swung wide open the door of the carriage. Delaplaine at once alighted, and assisted his wife to do the same, with that sn'ace- O ful composure of movement which his years had not yet destroyed, and which, in his earlier life, had won him a well-merited repute for courtly and distin- guished manners. It looked, now, like the most momentous sort of deadlock between them. But circumstance, that busiest of entanglers and unravellers in her dealings with the threads of all human destiny, was already employed on her usual incalculable task after a fashion that neither could have remotely prophesied. The Satterthwaite ball never occurred. Not many 318 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. hours later, New York society woke to the table fact that it would be deprived of so festal an opportunity for crossing the dreary Lenten threshold. Little Lulu Satterthwaito had been in her gayest spirits that morning. There was to be a commemora- tive cotillon at dancing-school in the afternoon. The school continued through Lent, but some of the merry young folk who 'formed its corps of disciples had induced their preceptors to give them a gala meeting, as if it were "winding up" an imaginary fashionable season. Lulu herself had risen the reigning spirit of the proposed frolic. She had been for days full of " mamma's ball," and watchful of all its preparatory details. She knew exactly what her mother and her two sisters were to wear, and had said to Elaine several days ago, with her little golden head put sapi- ently on one side, and a miniature frown of marked solemnity on her forehead : "Do you know, Elly, I've been thinking it over very seriously, and I do think nothing will be so becoming to you, after all, as your blue tulle trimmed with the forget-me-nots? You've only worn it once before, you know at the second of the assemblies and you've not a single dress that shows you off half as well. It's altogether the most fetching thing you have." But Elaine had answered snappishly that she would wear what she pleased, and that such proceedings were not of a sort to interest little girls. " Besides, Lulu," her sister added, " if you don't stop using those slangy phrases which I'm sure that Vnn Dnm boy teaches you, I'll get papa to make you cease having anything to do with him." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 319 Lulu tossed her head. "Papa wouldn't," she re- torted. " He knows Charity's a catch ; some day he will have lots and lots of money; all the big girls will be setting their caps for him when he grows up. I heard Mrs. Rivington tell her little Eva so the other day, at the dancing-class. Eva is so stupid. She wanted to know what kind of a cap, and how it was going to be set. And I explained just what her mother meant. I happened to be passing, on Dickey Van Horn's arm, at the time; and then I heard two or three of the other mammas laugh, and one of them said: 'She'll hold her own, some day,' meaning me, of course. Hold my own! I should think I would ! " And Lulu gave her slender little body a whirling turn that made her look for an instant not unlike that pirouetting fairy they used to put on the old-fashioned Christmas plum-cakes. She had been engaged by young Van Dam to lead the cotillon with him that afternoon ; or rather, she had indicated in a gracious, managerial way that this would be the most advisable plan. Monsieur Duprez, the head of the dancing-school, and his sister, Madame Chantillon, had become Lulu's willing slaves. As her brother Peyster expressed it, "Now, she bosses things, now, Lulu does," and Peyster was assuredly right. She had even considered with her preceptor all the different figures that were to be led, and her privi- leged eyes alone had prematurely gazed upon the glowing and tasteful favors after their purchase. She intended to look her very best that day, she had informed the two nurses who would assist her at her toilet. " There won't be many girls there much older than I am," she had said, " and I mean to cut them 320 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. out completely. Oh, dear, how I wish they only would mention our affairs in the papers, and describe how we were dressed. . . . Well, well, one must have patience ; all that is sure to come later, when one really goes out into society." She had been greatly excited all through the morn- ing; but it chanced to be Saturday, and hence was not a day of study with her. At about eleven o'clock she was handed by one of the servants a bouquet of the rarest roses, with a card attached to it, bearing the name of Mr. Charlton Van Dam. If Elaine's friend, Lord Scarletcoat, could have heard the little scream of pride and pleasure with which Lulu seized this enchanting nosegay, he would hardly have re- versed his previous unjust opinion as to there being no children in America. When the hour came for the child to be dressing, she discovered with dismay that her two sisters and her mother would all be absent. They had visits to pay, or engagements of a similiar sort. Elaine, just before departing, gave Lulu a quizzical look of amaze- ment as she said: " The idea, Lulu, of your expecting that we would stay in to see your frock put on 1 It is too absurd. ... If I only had my way with you, I'd stop all this vanity and nonsense by sending you up to the Park with your nurse, and letting you breathe fresh air and get some healthful exercise." "Pooh!" cried Lulu, disdainfully. "I see more of the Park than you do, Elly. I rode six or seven miles there yesterday. My riding-school teacher says I'm the bravest and best young rider, of my sex, that he has." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 321 Emnieline, who was always kinder to her preco- cious little sister than was Elaine, and who chanced also to be present, just then, here broke into an amused laugh. "Which means, Lulu," she said, " that you ride very well for a little girl. Why are you so afraid of being called a little girl ? Some day you'll be sorry nobody can possibly call you one any longer." Lulu gave a short, self-satisfied nod. "No doubt," she returned. "I want the time to come when I shall be sorry ; that's all." " You do too many things," said her mother, who had entered a few minutes ago and had been quietly listening, not far from the doorway. "It's your papa's idea that riding agrees with you ; it's not mine. But you've those red spots in your cheeks now, my dear, which show that you are ner- vous." "Oh, I'm always nervous," said Lulu, wheeling her tiny figure about. " I'm a nervous constitution." The three ladies exchanged glances that showed how comic they thought this admission from so ridiculously youthful an authority ; and Lulu swept over all their faces a covert look, revealing the most unchildish self-consciousness. She wanted to see whether she had not said something diverting and extraordinary for one of her years. Among the many faulty features of her unhappy education, was this tendency on the part of her elders to en- courage her in the 'habit of imitating their own forms of phraseology. Eager to be thought "old for her age," she was pei'petually having this unwholesome craving fostered instead of repressed by those very 322 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. observers of it who should have been the first to con- demn its indulgence. Her mother, Emmeline and Elaine soon afterward left her. She was alone with the two nurses at the commencement of her elaborate toilet. "Je suis un peu fatiguee" she suddenly said to Fran9oise, her favorite, after the process of frizzing her lovely golden locks had been completed before a large mirror. " J^ai mal a la tete, Franpoise ; peut- etre c'est nne espece de neuralgie. J^ai remarque que maman et mes soeurs souffrent comme pa, de temps en temps. Ce n'est rien ; fa passera, fen suis sfire" But it did not go away. In a short time there came upon the child what she piteously described as a raging headache ; she used even in her pain the modes of speech caught from others far older than herself. Her eyes began to shine with a feverishly unnatural light. The two nurses looked at each other in alarm. " Mademoiselle se trouve malade" murmured one. " Vraiementf" faltered the other. " I'm not ill," asserted Lulu. She had not yet put on her brilliant beribboned frock. But she went toward it, where it lay, bright as a sunset cloud, upon the bed. " I tell you it's only a headache, and it makes me a little dizzy. I I had one, something like it, the other day at dancing-school ; but it passed off; it didn't last as long as this, and it didn't make me so dizzy. . . . But this will pass off, too. . . . Ah, my dress my beautiful dress. . . ." And then, as her voice grew husky, she reeled, while one of the nurses sprang to her. . . . Mrs. Satterthwaite was the first of the absent ones OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 323 to return. She had taken "mamma's coupe" and had been shopping a little, and calling a little at the houses of various friends. She had spent money, and talked scandal over more than a single cup of tea, served her in the most delicate of china. She could not have told you in which occupation she found the most enjoyable desceuvrement, but spend- ing money, talking scandal and drinking tea were all very pleasurable pastimes. Her young son, Peyster, met her in the hall as she entered it. His eyes were red with crying. "Oh, mamma ! " he exclaimed, and ran toward her, seizing her dress. But she repulsed him ; it was a very handsome dress, and she did not like to have it treated so roughly, even by the son of whom, in her way, she professed to be very fond. "Peystey, what are you doing?" she cried. And then she saw what the dimness of the hall had not yet allowed her to see. "You're crying? What has hap- pened?" " Oh, mamma ! Lulu ! Now, she's, now . . ." The poor boy could say no more for his tears. 324 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. XVIII. DURING the next half hour or so, Bleecker Satter- thwaite and his daughters, Emmeline and Elaine, all three returned. They were all going to dine out somewhere ; they had calculated their time for dress- ing. Emmeline was going to one dinner-party, Elaine to a second, and Mr. and Mrs. Satterthwaite had a similar engagement which necessitated their keeping it in one another's company. As for Aspinwall, he had not returned at all. It was nearly always thus with the members of this mundane and insatiably pleasure-seeking household. Domesticity was un- known to them. Theirs was a home without a single home-like trait. They were a family who resembled some fanatical priesthood all passionately employed in various offices of pagan worship. Their temple was that of fashion, and their rites were per- formed with a truly sacerdotal zeal. It is doubtful whether they reaped much enjoyment from the whole senseless cult so doubly and signally sense- less arnid a government that professes to be lifted on republican bases above the Old World claims and pro- testations of caste. What charities were undertaken by Mrs. Satter- thwaite or by either of her daughters bore relation solely to the kind of co-patrons who would appear on the same lists with themselves. Mrs. Auchincloss and Madeleine literally, on many occasions, would OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 325 seek the slums of the city, personally acting as the teachers and agents of mission-schools and various other institutions. They were snobs, but snobs with a religion, and as far as their religion went, its ethical effects were salutary. Their trouble was the old Pharisaical one; they penetrated into the most dole- ful purlieus of the "East side," but it was known in Fifth Avenue that they did so, and their pilgrimages were not solitary ; they always made them in the so- ciety of ladies who, whether young or old, were incon- testably dans le monde. In fact, neither Mrs. Auchin- closs nor Madeleine would have thought herself quite as socially secure without her charities as with thorn. They were a part of " duty," and not to have a code of duty which you practically and rigorously respected was, in their belief, not to be crowned with the best sort of gentility. The root of the whole impulse religious, no less than eleemosynary may have lain in that one word, gentility. I am by no means sure that the chief recommendation of godliness in the eyes of Madeleine and her mother was not the highly respectable odor which they considered to pervade it. They prided themselves, too, upon being devo- tional thinkers. They were always, in spite of their avowed and seemingly adamantine faith, reading some book of the many which our curious age now pro- duces, wherein the defence of faith and its diligent support from metaphysical sources., were made the subject of numberless eloquent chapters. This month they would be " oh, so much interested " in " that en- chanting volume," " Science as the Confirmation of Scripture," and next month they would own to an equal admiration for " that wonderfully comforting 326 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. series of essays," "Modern Thought as the Hand- maid of Revelation." Mr. Auchincloss and the blameless Chichester would appear to share their esteem for works of this description. Mrs. Auchin- closs would now and then say : " My husband has been so absorbed, lately, in the delightful book," or Madeleine would declare : " My brother, Chichester, tells me that he has never read anything at once so logical and so cheering." With the Satterthwaites it had all been markedly different. Their world was not the world of books, and they would as soon have occupied their superficial, butterfly existences with the evidences of Christian creeds, from Methodism to the last decision of the (Ecumenical Council, as they would have questioned the advisability of mounting a tantivy coach or the wisdom of playing lawn-tennis. They accepted both modes of diversion, just as they accepted the rather tiresome but wholly proper occupation of aristocratic almsgiving. They lived solely for personal enjoy- ment; but since others, who lived just as they did, had conceded that it was "the thing" to show some heed for those disagreeable hundreds of thousands who made up the lower strata of society, they treated such a popular drift of taste as though it had been a new shade in bonnet-strings or a prevalent caprice in the tying of them. They were all keenly shocked on discovering the illness of Lulu. Mr. Satterthwaite and his daughters entered the little girl's chamber to find her mother, the nurses and two physicians grouped about the bed- side, while Peyster, with an awed look on his dull, hobbledehoy ish face, sat quite still in one corner. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 327 Lulu was fearfully ill ; it soon become apparent to the whole family that this was the case. Her trouble was a brain congestion of sharp violence. The physi- cians were loth to administer narcotics except in the smallest quantities, and these appeared thus far to accelerate rather than retard her disorder. There was no doubt that she now grew hourly worse. Fits of coma would be succeeded by bursts of delirium, in which her lips, hot with sudden fever, would let fall pell-mell sentences of the most pathetic mania. And it all bore incessant reference to the unnatu- rally strained, gay, frivolous life that she had been permitted to live ! "Mamma," she would suddenly cry, seeking to lift herself from the bed, with glassy, staring eyes and a face flushed crimson amid her yellow wealth of hair " Mamma, I shall be late for the dancing-class ! And you knoic I'm to lead the cotillon I've told you so fifty times! . . . Who's that girl in my dress? Make her take it off! Is it Sally Van Dam?" (Then a wild, shrill laugh that pierced her hearers.) " Oh, if it's only Sally, I don't care. She is Charity's sister. . . . But none of the other girls shall dance with Charity. . . . He and I are to lead together. On horseback, too! Isn't it nice and queer? A German in the Park on horseback! Yes, Monsieur Duprez said it was all right. . . ." (Then a shivering moan of terror and a glare of untold affright from the poor, dilated eyes.) "Oh, look! look! One of the horses is dancing all wrong. He's he's gone mad. . . . It's Peystey's black pony; he wants to kill Bessie Ludlow. . . . He'll trample her to death. . . . Pey- stey! Can't you manage him! Can't you! Ah! 328 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. it's all over ! He's killed her ! " (And then plaintive shrieks, these ending in convulsions that gave the frail limbs an almost unearthly strength.) By about ten o'clock that night she woke from one of her stupors, calling out : " Oh, I'm blind ! I'm blind ! " It was true. There had been some suffusion of the visual nerve-centres, and from that moment sight was hopelessly paralyzed. And then a most bitter thing happened. Mrs. Satterthwaite, trembling with distress, bent down and clasped the terrified child in her arms. "Lulu!" she cried, perhaps addressing her little girl with the first true motherly accent that she had ever yet heard from maternal lips : "Lulu! Don't be frightened ! I'm here. Mamma's here. Don't you know mamma?" But the child pushed her away, and rose up from the bed with both arms gropingly outstretched, as though her lost sight were hiding from her somewhere near by and she sought to regain it. The mother's embrace of consolation and protection was futile and meaningless to her. What did she, poor sufferer, know of such love as that ? A pat on the cheek, or a stroke of the curls, now and then a nod, a smile, or a laugh, when she delivered any of her bold, shrewd, quaint sayings an occasional frown, lifted finger or biting word of reprimand this child knew her mother by these and similar tokens, but by these alone. And now, in the ordeal of horror and pain, there was no sweet magic and magnetism of affection to claim her instinctive response. The arms that leaned to clasp her had no familiar feeling; the bosom that would have pillowed her head bore no recollected warmth. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 329 "It must be that I'm dying!" she shrieked. "The darkness must be that ! Oh, I don't want to die ! I want to live ! It's horrible to die, and turn all white and stiff, and be put in a dark grave ! And I love so to dance, and to ride on horseback, and to wear nice clothes! . . . What is it that makes me blind? Oh, can't somebody tear the blackness out of my eyes? . . ." Poignant as was all this for those who observed it, mercy at least lay in the fact of its not lasting very long. A swoon followed what had perhaps been the most agonizing of Lulu's outbursts, and for a long time she lay so pale and still that her watchers antici- pated death at any instant. But just before death, came re-awakened consciousness, and while a shudder ran through the group at the bedside because they feared a repetition of the lamentable scenes just enacted, Lulu opened her still sightless eyes and began to babble fragmentary sentences that soon told their own dreamy and sombre story. . . . She was at dancing-school at the grand fete that afternoon, from which, hours ago, a messenger had been hurried with dismay, to learn what detained herself and her brother. . . . Now she sat beside Charity Van Dam and smelled the bouquet he had sent her, and told him how lovely she thought the flowers, and how kind it was for him to send her such a real grown-up bouquet. . . . Again, she would be in the mazes of a cotillon- figure, prompting some fellow-dancer who was more dull of wit than herself, or less nimble of foot. . . . And at last she would seem to be in soft wonder and perplexity why the fete had not begun. "Everything is ready, Monsieur Duprez," she would murmur. . . . 330 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. " Where's the music ? We are all here in our places. . . . Why don't the musicians play for us?" But the musicians had played, poor little absentee, and you were not there to hear them! The lights have all gone out; the ball-room is silent and deserted; the children are home and in bed. They missed you very much. They heard with surprised and startled looks that you were ill and could not come. But they did not even fancy that you would never come again, with your eyes that danced as gayly as your pretty beribboned toes did, and your face as old and thought- ful in one way as it was young and bloomy in another! Somewhere near midnight, Lulu's babblings grew fainter and fainter, like those of a brook that has lost its path among alien pebbles and can trill but in the thinnest of voices what melody it has borne from its urn up among the hills. No complaint about her own blindness had fallen from her lips for a long time. She was very peaceable, with the cool white cloths laid and re-laid against the temples that had burned and throbbed so. But they did not burn or throb now. For many minutes she would not speak at all, and then the words that sounded from her would seem to have no more significance than the tender cooings of a pigeon by its cote. But when the end was very close at hand indeed, a smile broke like light about her lips, and a dim flash came into the blind eyes just before they dropped their lids in rest forever. All who stood at her bedside could plainly hear what she then said. " Oh, now we're going to begin. . . . There's the music! How merry it sounds!" Perhaps she caught the strains of a finer music than earthly flutes and OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 331 viols can make. But if truly she had heard such harmonies, her spirit went nearer to where they soared and floated, not ever returning to the small, placid little body whence it had flown on its far-away adven- ture and quest. No one was ever to know what Lulu had vanished to find. Though the great city where she had lived her brief span of days might crumble into the time-spurned ruin of another Thebes, through all its multitudinous morrows the light that she had seen and the music to which she had hearkened would remain as two more drops of gloom in the vast ocean of secresy we name death ! For, every life that the mighty shadow takes into itself is bathed by an equal dusk, and one same dignity of mystery clings about all who have sunk into its unsurrendering tides the pure as the sinful, the lofty as the lowly, the old, white with years, and the young, yet scathless under their goads ! After all was over, the family met, one by one, in the large drawing-rooms below stairs ; but two of its members remained absent Aspinwall, who had not yet come home, and Peyster, whose sobs the nurses were seeking to quiet, and whom everybody save these had forgotten. The drawing-rooms were per- vaded with preparations for the never-to-be-held Sat- terthwaite ball. It would have occurred on Monday ; to-morrow would be Sunday, and as such woi-k, for so-called holy reasons, must cease even in this secular household, arrangements had been fully completed before dark on Saturday evening. The floors were neatly covered with glossy linen "crash" for dancing; the furniture had been set close to the wall or else removed altogether; the mantels were stripped both 332 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. of drapery and ornament, waiting their burdens of bedded flowers. The apartments were not brightly lit ; they had a ghostly, staring, comfortless look ; and to the people who now gathered in them their aspect was horrible. As for Mr. and Mrs. Satter- thwaite, Emmeline and Elaine, they sat and gazed at one another, above the pale glare of those wide, long floors, in a senseless, blank, stupefied way. You might have detected a kind of irritated hauteur, too, in the expressions of their faces noticeably in that of Bleecker Satterthwaite himself. Perhaps it seemed to this family as if death had smitten them with an unwonted insolence in thus at all abruptly afflicting them. As for grief, they did not appear to know how one should show it. Possibly they were too stunned, just yet, to realize its existence in their souls. They had never given much heed to the question of souls. There had always been something brassy and flaunting about the completeness of their materialism. They had thought considerably more concerning the welfare of horses than that of their fellow-creatures. They had always found a stable more congenial quarters than a library this being as true of "papa" and Aspinwall as it was of the two grown-up girls. Aspinwall had not been home since luncheon time, and might very possibly have drifted into some gay company of college-friends. Nobody had known where to find him ; he had left no orders with his valet ; and there were certain rare occasions when even one with whom dress was so much afaible as with Aspinwall Satterthwaite, did not feel himself compelled to attire himself for dinner. Midnight had sounded some little time ago. They OLIVIA LELAPLAINE. 333 all had tacitly conceded, while sitting there in the big shadowy room, that they were waiting for "Aspy" to come home. Mr. Satterthwaite had begun to pace the long apartments with hands clasped behind him and lowered head. Emmeline cried a little, now and then. Her sister Elaine would turn and look at her very seriously as she wiped her eyes and drew short- ened, sobbing breaths. Elaine did not feel like crying. Her tears had never flowed except for selfish causes, and seldom even for those. It was not that she failed to mourn, but rather that a dazed and clouded sensa- tion had come upon her faculties. Such a calamitous event as this which had befallen herself and her kin- dred arrived in the guise of so bewildering a novelty ! Death had always been to her a possibility clad with remoteness. Of course it might enter their house one day. But it would give premonitory rumors of its hateful advance. There was so much time in which to become prepared for that; and meanwhile there were all the pleasurable pursuits, with inestimable bodily health added, to sum up, to adorn, to merrily intensify life. Elaine had not dreamed of scanning the whole problem deeper. To her it was not a prob- lem at all, but a festivity. She had thus far had her choice of cultivating or ignoring its guests. This black one, thrusting itself into her notice and insisting that it should not be treated de haut en bas, thrilled her with an unprecedented terror. Mrs. Satterthwaite remained motionless in her chair. She realized more piercingly this night that she was a mother than the worst pains of child birth had ever taught her to realize before. Her thoughts had flown to Aspinwall, her eldest son, loved beyond all her 334 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. other children by a heart which too often had let her only vaguely know that she in reality loved any of them overmuch. At intervals she would lift her head, as if listening for a sound in the outer hall. The sound for which she listened was the turning of a latch-key in the lock of the front door. At last she felt sure that she heard it, and suddenly rose. Her husband paused in his monotonous walk. She glided toward the large main doorway of the drawing-rooms. " That is Aspy, now," the others heai'd her say ; and then she disappeared into the hall. Frigid woman of the world as she had always been, her spirit of motherhood now yearned with an immense longing to clasp her favorite boy against her breast and be the first who should break the tidings of his little sister's death. A minute or so later they who were in the drawing- room heard a faint cry. All three, in an instant, gathered at the threshold of the door. They saw Aspinwall standing in the hall with a shamed leer on his face and a sagging laxity of post- ure that swiftly told its brutal tale. Mrs. Satterthwaite, pale and convulsed, motioned with one hand for them to leave her alone beside her son. The father and the two sisters drew backward. There was a potency of appeal in the look of that wife and mother which neither of them could resist. Still, while he receded, an oath of exasperation broke from Bleecker Satterthwaite. But Emmeline, whom they had been wont to laugh at in other days for her moods of so-termed sentimen- tality, sprang toward her father now. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 335 " Papa," she cried, " don't judge him too harshly ! Remember how we, who are all older than he is, have never taught him to feel the disgrace of it as we should have done! And yoii, papa would you have cared so much, after all, if it had not been ... to- night?" Satterthwaite did not alone hear these words. His wife, there in the near hall, heard them as well. Who shall say what an arrow of repi'oach they became, to cleave the conscience of either blameful parent? The news of little Lulu's death gave a sharp shock to hundreds of the Satterthwaites' friends. But it may be said to have acted most tellingly upon the very destiny of Olivia and her husband. Still, it is supposable, on general principles of deduction, that Delaplaine would finally have yielded. But he would not have done so until, as the phrase goes, the last gun had been fired. He would have waited for concession from Olivia, knowing how radically her present as- sumptive position would be weakened the moment she betrayed fear of consequences. As it was, Delaplaine hailed the non-occurrence of the Satterthwaite ball for a priceless piece of luck. He was now enabled to maintain his reputation as an unflinching opponent of contumacy. But a few days after Lulu's death had changed everything, Olivia surprised him by saying : " I wish to have a full understanding with you on the subject of Mr. Massereene." Her tones were all steadiness and self-command ; her blue eyes met his with an unfaltering fixity. " Ah," he said, preparing himself. Almost any other 336 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. man would have started with an irrepressible embar- rassment. Delaplaine only delivered himself of this ruminative "Ah," and leaned farther back in the big leathern chair of his study, where Olivia had found him. " I imagined that we had reached a full under- standing on that subject already," he coolly went on. "Then you were mistaken," returned Olivia. "Mistaken?" He did start, now, although his not doing so was merely pretension. " I assure you I had entirely made up my mind to the contrary. I had told you my wishes ; you had very hotly refused to follow them. But I had not the least fear that you would not follow them when the time came." Olivia threw back her head a little. The damask slipped up into her cheeks, and a glitter pricked its rays through the calm of her eyes. "In that case," she replied, with plain scorn, "it may have been just as well for your peace of mind that the time did not come." "You mean that you would have disobeyed me?" " I would have disobeyed you, as you are pleased to put it. There is not the faintest doubt on that point." He stroked his chin, smiling in a frozen way. ft Your determination, courage, firmness whatever you choose to call it, my dear Olivia might have failed you at the last moment." " It would not have failed me." "Ah, you tell me so now" he drawled. She was silent for a little space, standing there at his side. He saw with the corner of his eye that she was biting her underlip, and it gave him a pang of malicious delight to perceive that he had irritated her honest, brave nature anew. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 337 "Do you wish me to drop Mr. Massereene's ac- quaintance?" she presently asked. "Because if you do there had best be an immediate understanding between us. I " But Delaplaine had now sat up in his chair, lifted both shoulders, then lifted both hands, and, turning toward his wife, had shown her a countenance pos- sessed by so much vivid surprise that she involuntarily became silent with surprise correspondent. Ever since receiving intelligence that there would be no ball at the Satterthwaites', he had felt certain that his own sanction of Massereene's further acquaint- ance with his wife must become a question at issue between them. His jealousy was now much stronger than it had been ; the rebellion of Olivia had fed it into full-grown, viperish thrift. He believed that his wife loved Massereene, and all the wiliest duplicities of which he was inwardly master found themselves on a sudden summoned together by the most imperative little roll-call. He would never have forbidden Olivia to dance the German with her friend if he had been as jealous then as he was jealous now if he bad wanted then to discover what he now wanted to discover. At present he was bent upon watching every slightest feature of their intercourse. No detail should be trivial enough to escape him ; fame se mele d, tout. Once empowered with proof of her infatuation, he would be able to control Olivia as he desired. She might brave him to-day, but if to-morrow she were detected in a compromising attachment, he was confi- dent of knowing her character too well not to antici- O pate as a certainty her pliant and alarmed humiliation. " She would never take the foolish plunge that some 338 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. women take," he reflected. " She misftt look over the 7 O edge of the precipice, but she wouldn't jump. I un- derstand her too thoroughly not to be sure of that." The truth was, his tingling, senile-savored jealousy prevented in him the least lucid judgment of what she might or might not do. Olivia moved before him, daily and hourly, as spotless as ever wife could be, and morally incapable of even dreaming the misdeeds that his inflamed fancy needed but a mild incentive to .lay at her door. She was obdurate, unswerving, in her new course of action that and that only. She would either live her life beneath his roof as a gentle- woman whose honor rose above aspersion, whose de- cent social privileges resented vulgar molestation, or she would seek refuge and freedom elsewhere. She was implacably unwilling to give up the right of re- ceiving Jasper Massereene whenever he might care to visit her. If Delaplaine meant to push his objections beyond that boundary at which circumstance had lately compelled him to pause, she desired enlighten- ment concerning his intentions ; and for this reason she had quietly, intrepidly, sought the interview now in progress. Its new turn, on her husband's part, astonished her as she observed and followed it. "Do /wish you to drop Mr. Mnssereene's acquaint- ance?" he gently cried, repeating her own words. "Pray, have I ever given you the least excuse for thinking that I wanted you to do anything of this preposterous kind ? Can't you see the difference be- tween behaving civilly to a nice, gentlemanlike fellow, as I admit Mr. Massereene to be, and allowing the idiocy of gossip to connect your name unpleasantly OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 339 with his? Now that Lent has come, and all the lime-light glare of society has been extinguished until another season sets it blazing again, I haven't, of course, the vaguest objection to your receiving the man as often as you please." Here Delaplaine took off his eyeglasses and began to polish them with leisurely touches. " God bless my soul, Olivia ! what do you take me for ? An Othello ? Ask Massereene to dinner, some day, if you like. I can't conceive why you shouldn't. He's excessively clever. We don't agree on some points, but I haven't met any one in an age who impressed me with being a better thinker or a more interesting talker. . . ." Olivia left her husband's study that afternoon with a distinct sense of victory and an indistinct sense of adroit deception. But she shook the latter feeling off. She told herself that she should be thankful for any sort of respectable armistice. It chanced that on the next afternoon Massereene paid her a visit. While they sat and talked together in the drawing-room, Delaplaine entered. His greeting of Massereene was faultlessly courteous, and he sank into a chair after having extended it, while saying with his most gra- cious air : " So you have reconciled yourself to the repose of Lent, my friend ? " " Yes, and most willingly," answered Massereene. " But it has begun gloomily, as Mrs. Delaplaine and I were just telling one another." " In what way ? " Delaplaine asked. " We were speaking of poor little Lulu's funeral yesterday," said Olivia. Her husband broke into one of his most cynical 340 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. laughs. It was doubtless true he had of late grown more unconventionally daring both as to the bitter things he uttered and as to how he uttered them. "I should scarcely call the death of a child impor- tant enough to affect a community. Anybody's death, for that matter, is really a thousandfold less important than it gets the credit of being." " I am with you there," smiled Massereene. " We mortals magnify our own pettiness. But the Satter- thwaites are what would be called an influential fam- ily, and so their loss appears larger to those immedi- ately about them." " And a fine sermon could be preached from such a text," said Delaplaine. " I suppose none of the fash- ionable ministers dare touch the event, however dis- creetly. It would be an excellent thing if they exchanged one of their ordinary dull discourses for one with a subject like that. The little girl perished from sheer neglect in a home crowded with luxuries. Nobody had time to think of her ; they were all oc- cupied with trying to make themselves believe they were enjoying themselves. And poor little Lulu, with the constitution and nerves of a fairy, watched her elders, and thought it a capital idea to do as they were doing. She did, and it killed her. The Sat- terthwaites are pleasant enough people to meet, but . . ." " Be careful," interrupted Olivia at this point. " They are Mr. Massereene's cousins." " Which does not prevent my agreeing with Mr. Delaplaine," hurried Massereene, " as far as he has gone. I am sure that he knows the family much better than I do." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 341 " I know them very well indeed," said Delaplaine. " They make the unhappy mistake, I think, of living solely for outside appearances. They have brains, but they never dream of using them, and for the reason that most of their acquaintances are brainless. Hence they are at times keenly bored, though their loyalty to a fixed aristocratic principle remains ex- treme. If they were a foreign family, with a historic name, such desire for ascendancy might be forgiven them. But we are all commoners here, and intense American self-valuation, whether because of money or birth, is apt to recoil in ridicule upon those who profess it." He paused now, and gave Massereene a glance of direct scrutiny. " This nonsense of caste in New York must have surprised you considerably. Or had you heard of it before you came across ? " " I had not heard of it," replied Massereene ; " and it did not merely surprise, it grieved me." " Ah, you're patriotic, then ? " " I hope so." " I was, at your age or I fancied I was." "Perhaps you now only fancy you are not," Masser- eene said. " Oh, no, I don't ; I'm sure that patriotism is merely a grandiose form of selfishness. It's astonishing how ' self ' can be found at the root of all human exploits, performances, and even so-termed ideals, if we only search deep enough." Olivia started and looked at Massereene. He some- how returned her look, and Delaplaine did not miss the interchange. " She has told him of my cold-bloodedness," passed through the mind of Olivia's husband. "It is the 342 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. next thing to her telling him she detests me. Per- haps it even went with some such pretty disclosure, as a sort of confirming embellishment." Almost at once Massereene said : " The one su- preme patriotism is, of course, philanthropy. All our widest modern thinkers recognize this truth. But to serve one's country while living, and to die for her when occasion demands, is obviously, I should judge, the nearest that modern civilization will permit us to approach lofty self-sacrifice." "Right, indeed!" exclaimed Olivia. The eager ap- probation in her tones dealt Delaplaine a sting. He smiled as he now placidly watched Massereene, quite ignoring his wife's quick, impulsive comment. "You make me suspect you of enthusiasm," he responded, with his voice like an audible sneer, though his demeanor failed to betray the least touch of incivility. " I am always exceedingly timid when an enthusiasm pops up at me. I know I shouldn't stand the faintest chance against one while discuss- ing such a question as this. I confess I've regarded it from a very matter-of-fact standpoint. The soldier who defends his country is just as apt as not to re- ceive wages for defending an abominable cruelty or injustice. In thousands of cases he doesn't care ; he is too ignorant to care, and too intimately a part of that huge mechanism, an army. When he does care, and is an officer, he nearly always has to go dancing about as the puppet of statesmen and politicians, on a wire long enough to reach from their closets to his own battlefield." Massereene shook his head : "Patriotism is not war, though it must too often use war's weapons." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 343 " And be thrashed by them, as well." " Washington was not thrashed." " He came near being hanged." "And the elevation he reached is a good many times higher than the highest scaffold," said Mas- sereene, with his sunny look and smile. This rapid retort, with its not infelicitous turn, seemed to pique Delaplaine. " And perhaps a good many times higher than he deserved," the latter said, in tart semitone. " Deserved ? " Massereene echoed. And then, with a most serious intonation, he went on : " Such words as these have indeed a strange sound in America, Can you possibly mean that Washington is not worthy of great honor for purity as for bravery ? " Delaplaine began to polish his eyeglasses. " Oh, come," he said ; " that's quite too leading. There are still some subjects on which a man is compelled to think with the big crowd. Otherwise he runs a chance of being mobbed or lynched. Liberty of thought has here reached that superfine degree of development. . . ." At this moment Olivia rose to receive another visi- tor, and not long afterward Massereene found occasion to say, with lowered voice, in her ear : " Is there any- thing or anybody not liable to the sneers of your hus- band?" She looked at him surprisedly, and saw that he was annoyed. " I am sure I cannot tell you," she replied, almost stammering, and with still greater consterna- nation. She had got to know him quite well, and he had never before made the least adverse allusion to her husband. It somehow shocked her that he should 344 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. do so now. But she quickly recovered her former equipoise. After all, why should he not speak like that ? Was it not natural, she mused, for one of Jasper Massereene's healthful and hopeful tempera- ment to resent the positively mephitic and mildewed sentiments of Delaplaine ? . . . Weeks went by. Lent passed, and Spring, having first converted our New York streets into rivers of slush, froze them one day so that they glittered like glass, thawed- them again the next, dried them up with irrelevant repentance after a few more morrows, and finally devoted herself to decorating some of the trees in the parks with buds that it was uncertain whether she would nip and blight before another twenty-four hours. Meanwhile, Massereene had repeatedly visited the house in West Tenth Street and had often, if by no means invariably, met Delaplaine on these occasions. Olivia still drew only perplexity from her husband's politeness. She was yet waiting to ascertain what occult meaning, if any, lurked behind his hospi- table deportment. Omens were somehow in the air, and yet she could gather from these no palpable prophecy. In an unforeseen way she was fated shortly to arrive at much more satisfying conclusions. The veil of her uncertainty was destined soon to be rent with conse- quences of revelation no less definite than sudden. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 345 XIX. THE Satterthwaites would have been both amazed and incensed if they could have heard the harsh criti- cisms that Delaplaine had passed upon them. They had for years looked upon the bachelor banker of West Tenth Street as a staunch ally and supporter; and now that he had become the husband of their kinswoman, they took it for granted that he was bound to them with still firmer ties. Delaplaine's contemptuous opinion of their daily habits and doings, however, in no manner concerned the open homage that he was willing always to extend them. When, some time in May, he learned that Emmeline was engaged to Mr. Arthur Plunkett, he said to his wife : " We must give the girl a dinner. She's your cousin, and the Satterthwaites are all in mourning; so we 'd better make it a family affair and invite those soporific Auchinclosses. We will fill up all deficien- cies with outsiders, however, so as to give a Jill to every Jack. It ought, by the way, to be a rather handsome dinner, because I hear that Emmeline is marrying badly." In one sense Emmeline Satterthwaite was marrying remarkably well. Her fiance was a gentleman, both in manners and aspect. What caused numberless pairs of eyebrows to be lifted when the engagement became known, was the disti-essing fact that Mr. Plunkett did not belong to a family of the slightest 346 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. note, and yet presented no gilded apology for this shortcoming by being able to rank himself a million- aire. Indeed, if he had been a little less prosperous than he was he would have been actually poor. Society thought it a magnificent thing for him, but sighed that a Satterthwaite should so have lowered her standard. It chanced that young Plunkett was a man of considerable intellect, a rising star in the legal profession, and possessed of literary taste in no small degree. But these minor features of the alliance were naturally ignored. He wasn't a swell and he wasn't rich, and one of the Satterthwaite girls had consented to throw herself away on him voild, tout. Intel- lect? Literary taste ? " Bah ! " would have cried that charming goddess of caste and cultivation who presides over the holy inner circles of New York. " You can find plenty of that anywhere ; it grows on trees." Meanwhile, Emmeline carried herself with as grand an air as if she had just become engaged to young Lord Scarletcoat, whom Elaine had been tempting into cis-Atlantic matrimony with her most winsome smiles, but who had recently sailed for his paternal estates, whither, it was whispered, a sharp letter from his anxious ducal father had hastily summoned him. "I'm going to marry Arthur Plunkett," Emmeline had boldly said to her cousin Madeleine, one day, " and I know very well that people assert it's not a good match. But upon my word, I should like to know why. If Arthur were a baker or a grocer, I could at once give him position by marrying him. And as for money, papa's promised us the interest on four hundred thousand dollars twenty thousand a year. Then Arthur has about six thousand a year, OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 347 and that will make twenty-six thousand. Nothing very wonderful, of course, but then it isn't precisely poverty when you bear in mind that we shall be guests of papa and mamma at Newport in the sum- mer, for as long as we please. We can rent a small house on Fifth or Madison Avenue, and have two or three carriages and about four horses, and a butler besides the coachman, and a man to assist the butler, while at the same time going out alongside of the coachman and also acting as Arthur's valet, morning and evening, and a maid for me, and then about five other servants. But all of the other servants must be women. We can't afford a chef. Arthur and I have been figuring it all down, and we've decided that a chef is impossible. It grieves me to think of this, but the line must be drawn. It will be plain, genteel liv- ing, you see, but it distinctly will not be poverty, and I should be very glad, really, Lina, if you would con- tradict any reports you may hear circulated about papa having objected to the marriage, and his not intending to help us a particle." "I certainly will," replied Madeleine. "It must be so satisfactory," she went on, " to marry just as your heart prompts, whether he's rich or poor, high or low." ' If there ever was a falsehood,' thought Emmeline, ' she's telling it now ; for she thinks nothing of the sort.' But aloud, with the most amiable smile : " My dear, there's no such happiness none! And I do hope you'll find it soon, for you've waited long enough to deserve it." " Waited!" faltered Madeleine. "Well, then, only expected" said Emmeline, making matters a little worse instead of better between them, 348 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. as one young lady nearly always contrived to do with the other, during those urbane verbal fencings which they held together under the guise of pleasant conver- sation. The dinner-party given to Emmeline by the Dela- plaines was of sumptuous quality as regarded the repast itself. But it brought conflicting elements into real if not stormy commotion, and lacked, for this reason, all the better traits of a congratulatory reunion. The Satterthwaites had fallen under the secret disapprobation of the Auchinclosses through their conduct since little Lulu's death. They had not conducted themselves with a sufficient attention to "duty" as mourners for persons of their own race and name. They had done nothing in strikingly bad taste, but they had hovered upon the edge of such violation. And to-night it seemed to the Auchinclosses that their bereaved cousins were all much too gay. Olivia observed the whole series of demonstrations, and secretly smiled at them. Mrs. Auchincloss looked reproachfully at her sister whenever she laughed aloud. She had told Olivia, not long ago, that she had noticed a "softening effect, at first, upon Sister Augusta, caused by the loss of little Lulu, though it had unfortunately been one quite too soon obliter- ated."" Mrs. Satterthwaite, who raight still have had her depressed moments, evidently took pleasure in maltreating Mrs. Auchincloss's nerves this evening, by continuous exhibitions of mirthful spirits. Emme- line and Madeleine tossed bitter but sugared little pills at one another, across the table, Elaine now and then abetting her sister. Chichester Auchincloss attempted to patronize his cousin, Aspinwall Satter- OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 349 thwaite, on the subject of too profound a fondness for horses and horse-racing, and received from the heir of his uncle certain sarcasms which labored under the disadvantage of an ill-tempered crudeness. The ma- jestic Mr. Archibald Auchincloss came augustly to the rescue of his son, and was met by his brother-in-law, Bleecker Satterthwaite, with so much veiled yet mani- fest belligerence as to make Arthur Plunkett, Masse- reene and two or three other guests uncomfortably stare at their knives and forks. But the contest passed away in a travesty of genial reconciliation, like the ending of many similar engagements. Mr. Auchincloss had managed, however, before peace was restored, to say several caustic things about the Met- ropolitan Club, and Mr. Satterthwaite had held his own by vigorously deriding the Centennial. " What an unfortunate dinner it was ! " Olivia said laughingly to Massereene, when they met, a day or two later. " I never heard so many disgreeable remarks in the space of two hours. And Mr. Dela- plaine," she added, perhaps unconsciously changing her tones from levity to gravity, " was all the time astonishingly good-natured." "Does that happen so seldom?" asked Massereene. He had again and again asked himself whether Olivia would ever consent to speak without reserve on the subject of her extraordinary marriage. She colored a little, now. " You are beginning to know him quite well," she replied. " Judge for your- self. " Oh, he is always civil enough with me." " But he is terribly pessimistic," said Olivia, looking at her companion as though she wanted him either to 350 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. confirm or deny this view. " It seems to me that he grows worse and worse ns time passes. But that may only be my imagination." "He is a pessimist," returned Massereene. "And perhaps you're right about his 'growing worse.' Uap- petit vient en mangeant" " A short time ago I did not even know what the word ' pessimist ' meant," she exclaimed, with a rueful accent on each word and a troubled light beginning to shine in her eyes, which made their blue like that of shadowed water. " I had never heard of such people as pessimists. I might easily have been persuaded they were a kind of mineral." " They're thought to be of the earth, earthy. . . . But you had heard about Diogenes? " "Oh, yes. But it never occurred to me that the kind of things he said were worth listening to. I be- lieved that all the darkness in the world was the nat- ural shadow cast by the brightness." "And I hope you haven't changed your creed. Have you?" She shook her head very dubiously. " In a little while," she murmtfred, " I have had so much material for a totally new species of thought thrust upon my mind! I used to accept all the arrangements of life as functions of one perfect system. Those who were charitable, self-disciplined, kindly of spirit, received their reward not merely hereafter, but very often here as well. The selfish and cruel and wicked people were punished in the same way. ... I do not feel my faith waver at all on the subject of a 'hereafter,' but as for * here,' . . . well, it seems to me as if those who get the most out of life are those who can serve their own OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 351 interests with the greatest dexterity and craft." At this point Olivia paused, and laughed a little flutteredly. "That sounds as if I were turning pessimist, myself, in good earnest; does it not?" "It sounds as if you had been . . . disappointed." He lingered over the last word before pronouncing it, and as though he were on the verge of choosing another. " I have been disappointed," said Olivia, drooping her eyes. " In myself," she added. "Ah ... Who is not?" " I did a wilful, reckless thing, not long ago, and I am suffering for having done it." "Was it a selfish tiling?" asked Massereene. " Yes miserably so." . "There," he said gently. "See how a minute has made you contradict yourself. You have served your own interest, by your own confession. But you have not found it ' getting the most out of life.' " O O "You misunderstand. I meant those who began very young and lived that way in everything." " I see. The crustaceous persons. But you are not one of those. The people of such hard prose as that resemble the poets in a single respect at least they are born and not made." Olivia looked fixedly at the speaker for a moment. In her full gaze there had always been to Massereene a blending of courage and sweetness which made her face wholly different from that of any other woman he had met. "No," she said, slowly and thoughtfully, " I was never born to deafen and blind myself thus." " Never," Massereene repeated, with fervor. " And 352 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. this fault ... do you mind telling me what it is or was ? " " Oh, it still is. ... Its results are an incessant re- minder. . . . No, I will not tell you what it is. I don't doubt that you have more than half guessed already. Rien rfest plus facile" The long spring afternoon, which had been some- what chilly out of doors, filled the luxurious room where they sat with a light at once drowsy and cheer- ful; what came to them was bright enough sunshine, but folds of lace and velvet obstructed its too glaring ingress. A fire snapped and sparkled on the silver- grated hearth, sending little reddish floods of lustre to the big leaves of a tropic plant not far away, and mak- ing it appear as if visited by wizard memories of its own equatorial heats. As Olivia sat in one corner of a satin couch, with her feet on a carpet of richest texture and an arm resting upon the most costly of embroidered cushions, Massereene could not but feel how much irony of contrast lay between the luxuries of her environment and that discontent, that self-scorn, of which he had long ago guessed her to be the victim. He leaned a little nearer to her, and said : " You mean your marriage ? " She nodded, and looked about her with a sudden alarmed expression, as though an eavesdropper might be lurking behind one of the screens or arm-chairs. But this fancy, if indeed it had come to her, possibly caused the dim, sad smile that edged her lips as she now said : " Of course that is what I mean. I do not doubt you have heard many strange statements regarding my marriage." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 353 "Well . . . frankly ... I have heard it criticised." "And with little charity?" "Not always, perhaps, in the kindest manner." " I have often felt," she softly exclaimed, " that it deserved the worst odium." He seemed not to know just what interrogatory ven- tures on his part would transgress delicacy. With some hesitation he asked: " Was not Mr. Delaplaine very ill when you married him?" " Yes. Dying, I thought" Her head drooped, and he watched the rosy color bathe the cheek nearer him. "If ever shame stained a woman's cheek," he thought, " it is staining hers now." " He says that he deceived me," she went on ; and here, as though swayed by a thoroughly new impetus of feeling, she raised her head, and he saw that her eyes were most spiritedly enkindled. " He admits that he meant to live if he possibly could manage it. But I had received only his entreaties as a dying man ; I knew nothing of the hope which he had of his own recovery. He used my father's name in imploring me to become his wife; he offered their long friendship of the past as a reason for my present consent ; he " " Why, this completely exonerates yon ! " Massereene broke in. His face grew radiant to Olivia as he thus spoke. " I dared actually to blame you," he hurried on, with excited tones, and an expression in his eyes full of self-accusing ardor. "Yes, I, who had no earthly right, presumed to say that you had acted in a way unworthy of your better nature. I must ask your pardon for it. After having confessed thus much, I must be you for absolution." CJ / 354 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. "But you were right," said Olivia, firmly, meas- tiredly, and with a look of unflinching resolve on her face. " I did violate my better nature " " But he deceived you ; he " " He never once clouded my mind to the fact that I would be aiding my own fortunes in marrying him. There lies all my self-humiliation. I don't see how I can ever pardon myself for making what I believed a death-bed marriage, yet one which I knew would prove greatly to my own worldly advantage" " And you would like to be pardoned this fault by your own conscience?" " Yes." Massereene clasped his knee with both hands, and bowed his head musingly; the attitude would have been called, in some men, objectionably unconven- tional ; but he was always as graceful as he was natural in his movements, and for this reason took liberties with taste while managing not to offend it. " Pray what do you call your conscience?" he questioned. " Give me another name for it." "I will," said Olivia; "God." " Ah ! . . . you mean that your religious sense cries out against what you hold as the commission of a grave fault." "Yes, because with me all sense of right is religious sense. I cannot think of good without I think also of God." " And you believe God is offended with you for hav- ing . . . married as you did?" She nodded a sombre little affirmative. Then, seeing a slow smile creep about his mouth, she exclaimed pro- testingly : " I know it seems absurd enough to you, OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 355 who have thought and studied it all, and could prob- ably write a book upon it, to-morrow, of which I would not be able to understand more than an occa- sional chapter. But neither can you understand my faith ; " and as she pronounced that final word Masse- reene seemed to see what he would almost have de- fined as an expression of holiness flash across her face. " I cannot understand your faith," he said, " but I am by no means without a faith of my own." " You are an agnostic," said Olivia ; " I heard you tell my husband so." " I told him, yes. It is true." " But you and he are so different ! He is an agnos- tic, too, or so he would claim. But he always seems to be saying : ' Well, if this insoluble mystery that baffles me were really solved, I think we should find nothing- ness behind it.' You, on the other hand, seem at times to have chosen a hope for yourself that is enough like faith to be her twin sister ... I like to hear you talk with my husband on these terribly important themes. He never conquers you, though he is supple and adroit and a combatant to feel in dread of. And the reason, I am assured, is simply this : you have a divine con- viction, and .the power of presenting and advancing it. All his strategies of pessimism and cynicism cannot argue that away." " I sometimes think that I acquit myself very un- philosophically in those discussions," replied Masse- reene. " For conviction, however it may secretly comfort its possessor, will be apt to make him a sorry ally in debate." " I have not seen it prove so in your case," said 356 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. Olivia, with earnestness. "Your points always appear admirably taken. Whenever you have talked with my husband I have felt as if I might come to your rescue provided you were in danger of defeat; but I have never yet seen you even moderately jeopardized. And surely that is fortunate, is it not ? " " By no means," he returned, smiling. " I should enjoy being so honorably reinforced. . . . But this trouble of yours?" he pursued. "Since you are capable of imagining to yourself a definite individual God, I should fancy that you might gain comfort from the thought of making this Deity some atone- ment some "... " Ah," Olivia here broke in. " That is just what I have sought to do ! " " And successfully ? I mean, with satisfaction to your own wounded conscience ? " " No. I have failed wretchedly failed." " Failed ! " he repeated. She had averted her face, but she now turned it again toward his own, and laid her hand, as she did so, lightly and briefly on his arm. The instant she spoke he perceived that her voice was filled with the tears which had begun to swirn and glitter in her eyes. "I I can't tell yon just now what I mean," she faltered. " Perhaps some other time I will tell you. I I would like your help your counsel. But not now. Let it be enough, at present, for me to answer you by saying that I have failed that the God in whom I believe fervently now seems angry with mo, as with one who has not profited by the gifts of forti- tude and self-control that he gave me in the past. And yet I somehow cannot take up the task where I OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 357 have let it fall. Or, if I were willing so to take it up, there might be reasons against its resumption as be- fore . . ." " I understand you," began Massereene. You have " " Never mind what I have done ! " Olivia broke in, rising. " We will speak of all this again, no doubt, though I I can't promise you at just what hour such another talk will suit my humor." She looked down at him with a faint smile on her trembling lips and a starry plaintiveness in her moistened eyes. . . . But the next minute she had drawn out a pretty little bediamonded watch and glanced at it. "You came to take me to the Academy of Design," she went on, with an immediate alteration of tone. "It is already past four, and I shall need at least ten minutes to put on my bonnet and wraps. It will be nearly five by the time that we get down there . . . well, I hope you will not think I have quite spoiled our afternoon's project with my aimless commonplaces." " I have heard no commonplaces," Massereene an- swered ; "and I should dislike to call what you have said to me aimless, because, as I pray you will not forget, a sort of engagement results from it." "An engagement?" she repeated, puzzledly. . . . "Ah, yes, I remember But don't treat it as any- thing like a compact between us, or I may never be able, through sheer nervous reluctance, to speak again of the melancholy matter." " I hope you will be able and soon," he said. Olivia had glided toward the door. She stood for a moment looking at him over one shoulder. " Why?" she asked. 358 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. "Because I might offer some bit of advice not wholly despicable that's all." She left the room without a word of reply. Masse- reene paced the floor until she returned. He had never so vividly seen as now what a mockery and misery her life with Spencer Delaplaine had proved. If she ever gave him the right to counsel her, this young man knew (or he now passionately told himself that he knew) just what form such advocacy would take. He had seen enough of the Delaplaine menage to com- prehend how a sensitive and high-strung woman daily suffered under the lash of persecutions that her own large-minded ness alone kept her from resenting. He was alive to the painful delicacy of his own position, should any real question arise of urging Olivia to avail herself of a certain expedient ; for nothing, as he clearly realized, could exceed the difficulty of enacting this role with due tact and grace, when a little emo- tion of too lightly-bridled a quality might reveal more than the friendly spirit of intercession which he solely desired to exhibit. "She is the most charming woman in the world," JVlassereene now somewhat excitedly mused, " and one of the most spotless. In spite of what she believes the sin of her marriage, she would have made him the loveliest of wives, if the old satyr had but permitted. . . . Live? He may live twenty years yet ; and mean- while, age will not wither nor custom stale his infinite hatefulness. ... If she allows me to speak ten words of guidance to her hereafter, I know what those words will be." Olivia reappeared about a quarter of an hour later, dressed for the visit to the Academy of Design. They OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 359 walked from West Tenth Street up Fifth Avenue, talking on subjects that seemed to Massereene the airiest of trifles after that discussion which had pre- ceded them. The day was brilliant and salubrious; the Avenue rang with the hollow clatter of high-step- ping horses, and from open carriages Olivia and Mas- sereene received more than one smiling bow. Mrs. Delaplaine's career during the past season had been marked by so much 'en viable notability that a bow from her was no less eagerly sought than, in most cases, it was beamingly given. Among those who saluted Olivia and her companion, were Mrs. Satter- thwaite and Elaine. Mother and daughter were being driven out to the Park for ah airing in the prettiest and most chic of landaus. They were both in mourn- ing, of course, and the coachman and footman were in mourning also. The whole effect was very imposing in its general suggestion of strict family adherence to propriety, decorum and the usage du monde. But Olivia did not repress a sad smile as the carriage of her aunt and cousin rolled by. "Poor little Lulu!" she said. "Such majesty of mourning seems like an overwhelming tribute when one recollects what a tiny childish life it commemo- rates." . . . Then she bit her lip and added, soberly enough, " It would not seem so, I suppose, if any of them really cared. But I half believe they have almost, if not quite, forgotten "... The Academy of Design caused Massereene to burst into an amused laugh as they approached it. "I find it so ridiculously like and yet wwlike," he said, " the Venetian palace it is copied from in miniature." Olivia smiled. "I am afraid we are not going to 360 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. see anything half as artistically worth our notice inside" she said. " Is it an inferior exhibition ? " he asked. " Oh, I suppose it will be tame enough. And yet I have no reason to anticipate mediocrity. I have not even taken the trouble to read the newspaper notices upon it ; did you ? " " No. It is surely time that we had some good art in this country. And, indeed, I am sure that we have, Since my arrival I have met several American artists, and have visited their studios. They showed me excellent work, though it was mostly in landscape. They complain bitterly of the national tendency to do just what you have done." " And what have I done ? " asked Olivia, as they ascended the handsome marble steps leading into the suite of lofty and elegant apartments beyond. "You have unconsciously fallen into the popular vein of detraction. Before even getting a glimpse of what you come to examine as the production of your country-people, you have assumed that it is to strike you unfavorably." Olivia paused at the centre of the last stairway. "You are right," she affirmed, with vehemence. "I deserve to be both reproached and repressed for my unjust and unwarrantable prejudice." "I meant nothing so severe." " Yes, you did, and I thank you for it. I can so easily understand that good American artists should groan under the burden of indifference which con- stantly oppresses them. Is it such a very heavy one ? Before we go to look at these pictures, tell me what their ground of complaint truly is. Do they not say OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 361 that they are forced to struggle against foreign com- petition to a disheartening degree?" " That is their complaint," replied Massereene, in- terested by the swift repentance that he had awak- ened, and mentally matching it with other tendencies in Olivia's character which he had before marked as setting toward a humane and kindly estimate of her fellow-creatures. "They claim," he continued, "that the foreign craze of nearly all American buyers cruelly stands in the way of their own fair appreciation as painters. Mediocre canvases, bearing European names, are sold here for prices far above any which the best native effort may hope to secure. They state that the American spirit in art is a servile worshipper of im- ported labor. They admit that their cause has been defended by certain friendly journalistic pens ; but it has been so defended, they declare, without avail. No one seems to deny the wrong inflicted upon them ; but the great public here is like the Chancellor in Tennyson's poem, " who dallied with his golden chain, and smiling put the question by." It does not even trouble itself to contradict the fact that Smith and Jones, in their studios yonder on Fourth Avenue, or just across the street in the Young Men's Christian Association Building, can paint remarkably well. But it prefers to decorate its drawing-rooms, all the same, with the paintings of Germans and Frenchmen." "And this protest?" said Olivia, thoughtfully, as though Massereene's words had impressed her with no slight force. "Do you consider it founded upon a legitimate grievance ? " " Generally speaking, I do. Of course there are the incompetent grumblers ; but then they always skulk 362 OLIVIA DELAPLA1NE. at the skirts of any reformatory movement. Not that this should be called one. The contempt in which good American artists are held by those who should aid and support them is not, like our lack of all Copy, right Law, a subject for progressive legislation. There is a kind of ethical equity which cannot be secured either at Albany or Washington. On the chance of ultimately gaining this (for their descendants if not for themselves) our painters must base all future hopes." Olivia woke herself from a little revery. " Come," she said, ascending the last few steps that remained to be taken; "let us look at everything we find here, with thoroughly impartial eyes. Let us mettre les points sitr les i's like the most careful and incorrupti- ble critics." " You are a critic, then ? " asked Massereene. "Yes; why not? I have opinions. Is not a critic a man or woman who has opinions?" " That would make all the world a critic." " So it is. Is not everybody forever delivering an opinion on somebody else? If it is not expressed about the picture you paint, the poem you write, or the house you build, it is made to concern -the man you did marry, the woman you didn't marry, the beauty of your wife, the solvency of your husband." She broke into a gay laugh, and waved her catalogue to and fro. "A critic? Of course I'm one. I don't really know any more about painting than astronomy ; but that doesn't ever prevent me from saying fear- lessly what I think. Do you hold that to be unpar- donably impudent?" "No for an excellent reason." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 363 "What reason?" "Being confessedly ignorant, you only say what you think; you don't print it, as so many similar critics do." But Olivia misrepresented her own taste and knowl- edge in an equal degree. With her father, in past years, she had visited many of the most famous gal- leries abroad. She had acquired that power to seize upon the best attributes in a good picture or the superior ones in a picture of slender merit, which is less purely instinctive than resultant from early famil- iarity with superfine models. The various halls, opening one into another, con- tained groups of people scattered over their floors, with an occasional pair, such as Olivia and her escort, but nowhere the least semblance of a multitude. Three or four weeks had elapsed since the Academy had once again flung back its doors to the public, and that, for a city whose artistic perceptions are as lan- guid as those of New York, meant quite a protracted interval. Olivia had been betrayed, as she herself frankly conceded, into three or four little bursts of eulogy, and she was moving onward with her com- panion from one of the large chambers into a second still more spacious, when she suddenly became aware of a gentleman, catalogue in hand, who advanced directly toward herself and Massereene. The next instant she had seen that this gentleman was her husband. Such a meeting might have been the most accidental circumstance conceivable, and it might have been pre- arranged with vigilant adroitness. The latter explana- tion of it now shot through Olivia's mind. She had 364 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. nothing to be in the least ashamed of or embarrassed at, and yet while she stood beside Massereene and waited for her husband to approach still nearer, she could feel the deepening flush of crimson heat her cheeks. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 365 XX. IT was a confusion, a loss of savoir faire, that she hated herself for experiencing. She feared that Mas- sereene would observe it, and she knew that her husband would infallibly do so. In another minute, or less time than that, she perceived that he had done so. On his own part there was not the faintest reve- lation of surprise. He came to the spot where she had paused, with a tranquillity as unruffled as any that she had ever seen him show. He shook hands most composedly with Massereene, but Olivia was conscious of his cold, undeserting gray eye, fixed upon her flushed cheek with what her fluttered nerves readily construed into relentless exultation. " Have you come here to look at these amateurish pictures?" he said. "How odd that we should have hit on the same day ! It speaks plainly for the dul- ness of the season, does it not? I hardly know any mode of amusement that I should not have preferred." "We were just deciding," said Massereene, "that we had hit upon a very agreeable one." Delaplaine, as he had heard this, lifted his eyebrows a little. " What ? Truly ? " he murmured. Then he became at once his serene self again. " Oh, they are not all daubs, of course. But so many of them are, that one loses sight of the few creditable things." Olivia had striven with her detested agitation, by this time, and conquered it. She felt certain that her 366 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. color was receding, and on that account she trusted her voice. " The word ' daub ' is such a very harsh one," she hazarded. Then, satisfied that the tones just used were firm as she wanted them to be, notwithstanding those more rapid heart-beats which continued to annoy her, she boldly went on: "We have only seen, thus far, the contents of this one room. But, for my pai't, I like several paintings very much. I did not sup- pose that American art was in half so flourishing a condition." Delaplaine had on his glasses : he lifted one hand and re-arranged them by the daintiest of movements ; then he stared all about him, with a smile breaking through the hueless edges of his lips. "American art?" he queried with undisguised su- perciliousness. "I don't discover the vaguest evi- dence of any. There is a picture of some negroes grouped round a stove, grinning at one another, in the next room, which possibly might merit that name. But it is a bit of mongrel crudity, with horrors of coloring and the most precarious draughtsmanship. Whenever you light on anything good here, it strikes you as being so simply because it is not as bad an imitation of modern European masters as its ambi- tious but inefficient author might have made it." He ceased to speak for a moment, and his dry laugh sounded as shrill as the crackling of fagots in a quick breeze. " American art, indeed ! Why, the whole affair is like the work of a lot of pupils in some atelier of France or Germany. Even the clever landscape men are irritating copyists. I should like to discover a single original brush-stroke among them all." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 367 Olivia, without reply, passed slowly into the next apartment, whose threshold was but a few yards away. Delaplaine and Massereene followed. She went from picture to picture, gradually collecting herself and feeling the unpalatable certainty augment within her that this abrupt appearance on her husband's part had been the sly sequitur of some deliberate ambuscade. Soon .she heard her husband speaking again, and seemingly close at hand. He was no doubt answering some remark which Massereene had just addressed to him. " Some thinkers deny that there ever can be any- thing like an American literature, and they're most probably right. Nations cannot be expected to have a literature of their own without having a language of their own. What literature has Switzerland or Bel- gium? As long as the same language is spoken in London and New York, Liverpool and San Francisco, our Letters will deserve but a single name colonial, I don't see how any one who isn't quite besotted with patriotic prejudice can refuse to grant this. Why, some of the Greek poems and plays were written in such un-Attic Greek that it would almost have puzzled an Athenian ; and yet the whole collection was called Greek literature ; no one ever dreamed of calling it anything else. But as regards American art, that is a wholly different affair. We simply want to assert ourselves, to be representative, to be American, if there is anything artistically American to be!" "And you are inclined to think there is not," said Massereene. In his voice Olivia could detect only dispassionate inquiry, without the vaguest ring of either approval or censure. 368 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. " I can't see any evidence, from present indications, that such an element exists. And if it does, it is abominably neglected. Take the figure-painting here. It is all even the strongest of it weak as the struggles of tyros always are. Here we have an academy of tyros ; I dare say that some of them are gray-beards, and have 'been at it' for an age; but they're tyros, all the same." "I wonder," now thought Olivia, "that he dares talk like this. He may be overheard, but even if he is not, how can he know that Jasper Massereene doesn't secretly regard him as a person with whom the mau- vaise langue is a mere mania ? I have never known him so recklessly bitter as he has shown himself of late." And then a little thrill of dread passed through Olivia. What if his mind were beset by some malady of which these intemperate condemnations formed the discordant prelude ? Her life with him sane had been one of enough aggravation and dreariness. To what depth of distress might not this life sink if he should develop some cerebral distemper, fraught with new ordeal to herself, while at the same time exempted from the usual restrictions demanded by violence ? She now turned and joined her husband and Masse- reene, just as the latter was saying : "Your disrelish, Mr. Delaplaine, is a besom that sweeps away everything before it. For myself, I find some good painting here, though some that is both tentative and irrational." Delaplaine gave one of his bleak little laughs. " Every man who presumes to paint the human form should remember that though genius may not be OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 369 teachable, anatomy is. Look at that Carlo vingian princess, yonder, praying to her bai'barous conqueror. You find yourself astonished that she should have so little feminine vanity as to pray with such abnormal finger-joints. No true woman would have done it. She'd have seen her captive lord lose his head first." " That depends upon the captive lord's previous use of his head," Olivia could not resist saying, as she peered at one of the smaller pictures in a slightly stooped posture. Before her husband could answer if he had had such an inclination Massereene began : "Allow that there are faulty figure-pieces. The landscapes " But at once he was interrupted. " They're mostly either slavish in their copying of renowned landscape men abroad, or so finical and detailed that they sug- gest a new kind of nature, known and cherished only by their photographic portrayers of it." "I do not at all agree with you," remarked Masse- reene, with quiet firmness. " There, for instance, is a landscape by ," and he named a painter of more talent than fame, whose canvas fronted them. " Those autumnal tints are to be found nowhere in Europe ; this man has drawn his inspiration from the woods and fields of his own coiintry. That mist upon the distant hills, that brooding smoky color in the leafy valley, that cluster of frosted foliage pluming the foreground they are all American beyond dispute, and all treated with a lavish poetical spirit . . . At least 1 think so," finished Massereene, who scarcely ever per- mitted himself to be downright, even when convinced that he held the ruling side of a discussion. * "Ah, yes," responded Delaplaine, with a blunt 370 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. asperity that struck a most unhabitual note in liis wonted composure, " ' I think so.' That is the usual arbitration of the judge who has no better critical resources. ' I think so.' . . . Yes, yes, no doubt." This narrowly bordered upon impertinence, and its recipient answered it with a look full of gentle yet assertive dignity. But somehow, a moment later, he caught Olivia's eye, and saw there a kind of worried pleading which caused him speedily to forget her hus- band's unmannerly rebuff. "He is full of hatred toward Jasper Massareene," Olivia was then telling herself. " I am almost certain, now, that he has spied upon us. Behind all this scorn of American painting lies a mood whose harshness I shall feel the brunt of hereafter." They soon began, all three, to move onward, and for quite a long time there was no perceptible abate- ment of Delaplaine's inclement verdicts. Every new work that he condescended to notice at all he made a target for his most unmerciful raillery and disdain. There was often so much truth mingled with his sav- agery, that if some adept at shorthand could have taken down all that he said, and printed it verbatim in a newspaper, it would have served excellently for an example of the " brilliant," " slashing " or " fear- less" criticism of our period. In other words, it was wholly uncharitable, and marked by a perspicacity that reserved its keenest discernments for the worst errors of the artist. Meanwhile, however, he contrived to blend with all his acerbity a vein of clear concilia- tion toward Massareene. It soon became apparent that he desired to express regret, if nothing like con- trition; and they had not finished their tour of the OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 371 five or six apartments befoi'e he had courteously asked Massareeue whether he would not find it agreeable to give Mrs. Delaplaine and himself the pleasure of his company at dinner that evening. Massereene acquiesced. The young man may be said never to have formulated his own feelings as regarded the exact terms of his acquaintanceship with Olivia Delaplaine. But it is certainly well within the bounds of probability that he should have indulged a little self-introspection as to why he so coolly and unalarmedly confronted the prospect of a dinner at the board of her Rhadamanthine husband. As it was, he gave up a partial engagement to dine with an Englishman at Delmonico's that same evening. He softened his own compunction, after saying au revoir to Olivia on the outer steps of the Academy, by assur- ing himself that the Englishman was a pushing fellow whom he had always thought third-rate in nearly everything, and that he had not by any means prom- ised his own presence as an unfailing certainty. For the rest, a memory dwelt with him of Mrs. Dela- plaine's last look, and so dispelled all further consci- entious qualms. The look had seemed to say : " Do not disappoint; your coming may save me untold discomfort." Still, this was the mere haphazard inter- pretation of a most dubious intuition. Mrs. Delaplaine (as Massereene soon afterward informed his own thoughts) might have intended to do no more than look polite sanction of her husband's hospitality. Delaplaine's brougham was waiting for him outside the Academy. Massereene had already left them when husband and wife set foot upon the lower pave- ments. Olivia had by this time seen the brougham. 372 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. "I shall walk down home," she announced, very placidly. " There is not time for you to do so," he replied, pulling out his watch and giving it a glance. " It is nearly six now, and if you wish to dress for dinner " " I don't wish to dress for dinner," she interrupted, moving away. " I shall not be late and I prefer walking." She passed right on toward Madison Avenue with- out offering another word or waiting to hear one. The thought of being driven home at Delaplaine's side had become execrable to her; she did not know what thrilling insult might leave those unmerciful lips of his after he and she were once in the carriage to- gether. She felt glad that Massereene had hurried off up town, to dress, as he had told them, for dinner ; otherwise her husband might have construed her present course into some design of seeing the young man again between now and dinner-time. "I will not look at one of the carriages that go past me in the avenue," Olivia mutely determined ; and she did not. If her homeward progress was being scrutinized by a pair of pursuant marital eyes, she therefore remained ignorant of it. As for Delaplaine's late ccrdialty to Massereene, she had grown almost convinced that this had been founded upon sham. But why the employ- ment of sham ? Why the invitation to dinner ? Had her anxiety but conjured empty spectres after all? It may even have been that the meeting in the Academy of Design was accidental. Olivia tried to soothe her own troubled sensations by asking herself if she had possibly allowed mere nervous misgiving to cast a fantastic or hobgoblin light over the commonplace. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 373 She went immediately to her room, on reaching- home a little before seven. The changes that she had decided to make in her toilet were slight ; she had completed them when a servant knocked at her door, informing her that Mr. Massereene was in the drawing-room and that dinner was served. But she had scarcely gone out into the hall before she perceived her husband coming toward her from an opposite di- rection ; like herself, he was approaching the staircase that led below. "You are in time for dinner after all," he surprised her by most amiably saying. " Oh, yes," she answered, making her tones ex- tremely affable, and beginning to descend as she spoke ; " I was sure that I should be." " I suppose it quite astonished you to find me there, at the Academy." " Well, it seemed a little strange, as you said, that we should both have hit on the same day especially as you had not mentioned going. But no doubt you go every year ; do you not ? " He did not answer, and a minute later they both stood in the lower hall. Suddenly, she saw a look of great moroseness and acrimony possess his face, and it seemed to her that a cold, bluish light leaped electri- cally from his angered eyes. " You know very well," he said hissingly to her, "that I went there because you and Tie went be- cause I saw you from my carriage as I drove along because I had a most natural curiosity to ... to learn how this very friendly intimacy was devel- oping." The plain sneer in his last words lost its point for 374 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. Olivia, because of the suppressed fury that accom- panied it. She had become so used to his sneering under conditions of the most entire immobility that this unusual evidence of exasperation, and perhaps of burning jealousy as well, at once gave a weapon to her dauntless young spirit. She had never feared Delaplaine, as we know. She regarded him now with a look full of that rebuke which a larger nature can sometimes visually, inexplainably, and in a trice, as it were, communicate to a smaller one. " What admirable taste ! " she said, under her breath. " But I might have been prepared for it in you." She pointed to the closed door of the drawing-room, near which they both stood. " Why ask here, to dine with you, a gentleman upon whose acts you have played the spy ? " He made an enraged gesture. " Do you want me to speak out what I think," he said, " before him ? be- fore you both ? " Her eyes flashed. " If you insulted him, he would know bow to resent it," she answered. " If you in- sulted me in his presence, you would be lowering yourself more than a man of your social prudence would be at all apt to do." Her retort was vibrant with the most challenging scorn. She at once went forward to the closed door. As she placed her hand upon its knob, she heard him say, in tones replete with agitation and menace : " Take care take care." But she waited to hear no more. She felt desper- ately goaded and stung. In another moment she had glided into the drawing-room. Massereene was there, and rose as she entered. She left the door open, ex- OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 375 pecting that her husband would follow her. But he did not, and she seated herself, indicating by a slight motion that Massereene should do the same. " You seem excited," he murmured to her, as he dropped upon the sofa at her side. "I am," she could not help acknowledging. "Some- thing has happened something most distressing. I am not sure " and then she paused, with a break in her voice that her paleness accentuated to him while he waited for her to speak again. "My hus- band may make matters unpleasant," she went on, much more evenly and calmly. " I have just been greatly annoyed by certain words that he has ad- dressed to me. There are limits to one's patience. I confess that I would not speak thus if I had not a fear an actual fear lest he may seriously embarrass us both by " But Delaplaine now crossed the threshold of the drawing-room. He looked perfectly collected and host-like. In another minute he had shaken hands with Massereene, and almost jovially congratulated his guest upon the virtue of punctuality. " I believe dinner is served," he continued, with his best bow the bow that had long ago helped to es- tablish him as a favorite in the haute voice of a now dead-and-gone epoch. " Will you give your arm to my wife, Mr. Massereene ? " he continued, with a little burst of laughter. " I will walk unaccom- panied behind you. I will imagine that I have on my arm the most delightful and charming lady in town except our hostess. . . . Now, there's a compli- ment to my wife, Massereene ; isn't it ? And rather creditable for an old fellow past sixty, eh ? What do 376 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. you think of it for a proof that I'm the shining type of a model husband ? " Olivia slipped her hand into Massereene's proffered arm. The hand trembled and she could not but be aware that he was conscious of this betrayal. " What does it all mean ? " she was silently questioning her- self. " Will some horrid thing soon occur, or does he only wish to torture me in a new way, after having tortured me in the old one for so many months." But as the dinner proceeded, Delaplaine gave no signs of adopting any such painful course. It was not long, however, before he had turned the conver- sation between Massereene and himself into a some- what philosophic channel. And by degrees his materialistic views clouded his discourse more and more darkly, till Massereene, accustomed to all forms of argument among his English university friends, could not help exclaiming ; " You denounce as autocratic those who insist upon that ' one far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves.' But why are they more daringly d, priori than those who affirm the direct contrary, granting that both sides dispense with rev- elation as a kind of supernatural support ? Is it not, when all has been said, dogma for dogma? Only, have not the optimists the best oi the dis- pute ? For my part, I maintain that they have immeasurably." "Ah," replied Delaplaine, with a shrug of the shoulders, " if you have the remotest intention of beginning to justify and account for the whole absurd series of phenomena we call life on grounds of trans- cendentalism, you will find me a rather tough contest- OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 377 ant. You might as well quote Bishop Butler or Paley to me, and have clone with it." " I have no intention of quoting either author," re- plied Massereene. "My belief is something quite apart from their elaborate efforts to prove a per- sonal Divinity." "You mean your belief in a personal Divinity?" " No ; I neither believe nor disbelieve, there." " Ah, of course. From the purely agnostic vantage- ground I should speak in the same consistent terms of formula. But a minute ago you mentioned your be- lief. Am I to understand by this word your faith in the posthumous continuity of all human life, with results that throw satisfying light upon every present mystery? or, conversely, your denial that all is futil- ity, with blind forces flung accidentally together to create consciousness at the beginning, and the disrup- tion of these forces, with annihilation of consciousness, at the end ? " "You are certainly to understand my denial," de- clared Massereene, " that life is any such terrible trav- esty as this. A hundred signs point oppositely." " Give me one," said Delaplaine, while he selected a plump Spanish olive and began to nibble it. " The existence of mind as an apex, a terminus, of nature's many grades and degrees of performance. Man's possibility of progression is boundless. His divine destiny cannot be misinterpreted. He has but to speak, to think, to feel, and he has suggested his own heirship to eternity." Delaplaine smiled, while he still made little bites at his olive with his white, well-preserved teeth, holding it in a gingerly way between thumb and finger. 378 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. " Bah, my dear fellow, you talk like a poet. Can- didly, if I had my say, I should render .all people who were tried and found guilty of being poets, unable either to inherit or purchase property, besides taking away their privileges at the polls. The truth is simply this : for about five thousand years past, man has been ceaselessly endeavoring to find out whence he came, whither he is going, and why he is here at all." " He has probably been doing it for a much longer time than five thousand years." " Oh, we'll say two or three millions, if you please. I dare say it took a very great while longer for the ape to reach even the rudimentary human biped. But we know that man's inquiries as to the whence and whither of his fate have certainly been going on for about that period of five thousand years. And in all the monstrous interval thus employed, what has he learned ? Nothing. He has prostrated himself before the gods of many and many a separate theogony. He has spilled seas of blood in the defence of his different creeds. But to-day the sphinx holds the secret just as firmly as ever. Now, in this nineteenth century, we are beginning to make up our minds that there is no secret at all. We are concerning ourselves with matter, and we are gradually arriving at the rational conclusion that matter begins everything and ends everything." "Do you imply, then, that we are approaching atheism ? " " Yes." " Oh," cried Olivia, " that is horrible even to think of!" Delaplaine took no notice of her exclamation. "All OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 379 the great modern thinkers," he went on, addressing Massereene, " are atheists at heart. They pretend that they are not, but science is their gospel; and science, the more facts that she gathers, grows the more certain of how many picturesque falsehoods have been circulated in the name of metaphysics." *' Science pauses at the unknowable," said Masse- reene, " but she does not presume to postulate beyond it. She leaves the spiritual part of the question alone, and rightly. But she does not, for this reason, assert that no vast realm of marvellous supervision lies outside her powers of perception or analysis. I remember no instance among the writings of these thinkers to whom you have alluded where they can be credited with stating that a supreme Providence fails to overlook and direct the whole inscrutable plan." " No, they don't state it, but what do they infer ? Far more than that, what does the immense misery and sorrow inflicted upon the race at large infer ? It is when we take a broad view of this "inscrutable plan " that we discern how faint, how feeble is the testimony it furnishes of an intelligence in the least concerned with its welfare. Millions of people are now staggering, throughout the globe under a yoke of drudgery. A few are prosperous and compara- tively happy in all lands. Disease fastens upon those whom affection guards, dragging them to untimely death. Nature, the inveterate enemy of mankind, destroys by earthquake, cyclone, malarial infection, pest, shipwreck and the numberless ills through which she is ever proving to us that the sentimentalists have lied about her sympathy and her kindliness. Science conquers her dumb, stolid enmity in the steamship, 380 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. the railway, the telegraph, the telephone. But Nature, still an unlaid foe, inflicts her innumerable ills upon the race. Meanwhile, prayers and hymns of worship go up from the churches, and what answer do they receive? None. We find in ourselves the sole remedy for the enormous misfortune of existence. And it is a very meagre one. Our hospitals and asylums keep from us, in centres of civilization, the full sadness and horror. Our prisons aid too, for they hide the moral maladies as well as they can. Something perpetu- ally compels man to hope, to bear up to eat his dinner, when he can get it, and not fix too acute a gaze upon the general wretchedness of his lot. He is really a captive, cursed with a durance that has clutched him for the crime of having been born. But he is more than a mere captive, since he is one con- tinually under sentence of death. And those whom he loves are under a like sentence ; at any moment they may be torn from him, making his custody still more like the caprice of a tyrant. When he sees the whole despotism in its darkest hues and has the bold- ness to affirm life the unsolicited oppression that it is, he receives the condescending commiseration of those who wilfully darken their sight and stuff their ears. He is called ' morbid,' and ' unhealthy,' and ' a brooder.' By shibboleths like these he is denounced and silenced. Poets foam at the mouth before him in their illogical epilepsies which they call 'divination.' Religion tries to crush him with its tomes of ' revealed truth.' He is only a poor wretch of a pessimist. He can't hear the music of the spheres, or the choruses of the seraphim. He can hear other sounds, however very earthly ones, like groans and sobs and cries for help. He is OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 381 compelled to cloak his ' morbidness,' or his most influ- ential friends will cut him, and that may be a question of his bread-and-butter. But all the while, poor fellow, he has only told the truth about life. It's a king with a coffin for a throne, death herself for a queen-consort, despair for a prime minister, and religion for a court- jester. . . . There's poetry for you, Massereene, as you seem to be fond of the muse." It would be impossible to convey the real effect of these sentences as they fell from Delaplaine's lips, each one being spoken with an air of indifference, if not positive languor. His voice never once rose above the most ordinary conversational pitch ; and, delivered with a glacial disregard of all rhetorical parade, every phrase he uttered seemed to acquire a new pungency. " I am fond enough of poetry," returned Massereene, "but not of that kind one which reminds me of a certain French poetic school that prides itself upon wholly ignoring the spiritual side of life. I confess that I cannot honestly contradict anything you have said ; but there is to me proof of the infinite meaning and potency of life in the thought that two diverse lines of vision may touch it in such totally varying ways. The unhappiness that afflicts humanity is broken by gleams and flashes of the most exquisite joy and contentment. Scarcely a single man has ever lived who cannot truthfully assert this of his mortal career. But when he lives unselfishly, when he nur- tures within his own soul impulses of generous concern with the misfortunes and misdeeds of his fellows, then, in proportion as he grows less occupied by personal fears and hopes, the more does he realize how magnifi- cent may be the incumbency which before has seemed 382 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. so doom-like and so dispiriting. The finer agnosticism, then, offers him beautiful rewards for perished ortho- dox faith. He comprehends that to live duteously, sacrificially, cannot be to live in vain. He finds that ever) though the farther side of the grave may hold an eternal void and blank, this side of it teems with a potential godliness. Reason may repulse with its insuperable bounds, but the deeper that he probes the sources of philanthropy the more clearly he becomes aware from what sacred fountain-heads these have sprung. Where one may discern such riches of spirituality as those manifest in a chaste, altruistic life here on earth, it does not seem hard to let imagi- nation do reason's work, and point to some statelier disembodied condition. Still, evolution, from the marvels it has already shown us, may mean so glo- rious a rise, for the race if not for the individual, that in the mighty pulse and push of this great energy alone may lie our sole attainable heaven." "You are laudably cautious," loitered Delaplaine, watching the almost rapt look that had overspread his wife's face while Massereene had spoken her parted lips, her glistening eyes, and the tender tremor of either nostril though Olivia was herself quite una- ware of having provoked his attention. " You outline a Paradise for the race and not for the individual. And evolution is to bring about all that millennial state of things, eh ? How about dissolution, then ? This relatively small sun and tiny earth of ours will sooner or later, according to the very law you instance, be two cinders whirling through space. Astronomy as- sures us that many a solar system has burned itself out, and that the mementos of these are dark and OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 383 frozen worlds, which swing round their dark and frozen luminaries in the most ghastly way conceivable. Here is the priceless lesson that evolution teaches us ! I fail to see the necessity of progression and ameliora- tion, if it brings us a heaven based on such perishable foundations." " I am far from believing that the individual is cut off from all entity after death," Massereene replied, while a shade of annoyance crossed his face at being, as it struck him, maliciously misconstrued. "How can one touch these subjects except he does so in a speculative fashion ? If I were to put my creed in a few words, I should say that I am an agnostic, but a very reverential and idealistic one. No tidings may yet have reached us, but on this account we should by no means be comfortless." " Comfortless ! " cried Olivia, wholly forgetting her- self and stretching forth one hand until it rested on Massereene's wrist ; " I am not comfortless, but ah, how miserable it would make me if I thought no tid- ings had reached us ! " She paused, and with flushing cheek drew her hand away ; she had caught her hus- band's eye, and its cloudy look had made her guiltily conscious of what was, after all, the most harmless bit of friendliness. "We three," said Mnssereene, somewhat with the air of a person who wishes to fill an awkward pause, " represent three separate forms of mental growth." "Decidedly separate in my wife's case," muttered Delaplaine, with a stinging dryness. "But women would be lost without religion, I suppose. I can't recall any who did not possess it and were not more or less depraved." He now rose from the table; 384 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. dessert had been served ; Olivia was prepared to have him propose a cigar with Massereene upstairs in the library. But, to her surprise, he said : "I have an engagement which will detain me for two hours or so. I must be among a lot of financial fellows by nine o'clock to discuss the advisability of a government loan which I have already made up my mind not to be advisable. I would much prefer to remain here and talk with you of less tangible and mundane matters in my materialistic way." He shot a furtive look at Olivia while ending the last sentence. She understood (or believed that she un- derstood) this look, as signifying that his own side of the conversation with Massereene had been visibly if silently disapproved by her. And indeed, she had loathed both to watch and to listen while he vented what she considered his odious ideas and theories. It had occurred to her, once or twice, that he might have some desire to show Massereene in a worsted and humiliated plight, stricken by the lances of the Dela- plaine logic. But it would have taken a whole arsenal of such weapons, each one wielded by a most brilliant adept in their use, to have made Olivia's firm faitli waver or tremble. Her husband now went on, still addressing Masse- reene: "I must apologize for this summary exit; but probably yon won't mind letting Mrs. Delaplaine have your society for the next hour or so." (Those last few words were, for Olivia, fairly steeped in the most acrid sarcasm.) "I am sure iny wife will not object to your smoking; but my library, if you will allow me to say it, is the pleasanter room for that. . . . Edward " (to the butler) " you know where my cigars OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 385 are to be found. ... It is possible tbat I may return before you depart. But in case I do not, I will say good evening now. . . ." Olivia was not at all averse to ascending with Mas- sereene into her husband's library. Delaplaine's prop- osition that she should do so astonished her almost as much as his sudden withdrawal from the dinner-table. But his appearance in the Academy of Design and his invitation to her companion afterward had both been astonishing. This third little coup de thedtre, as she could not help secretly thinking it, was productive of a still greater amazement. " I doubt if he has any engagement whatever," she now said to her own thoughts. " He wishes to mystify, to bewilder me by a little train of eccentricities. Per- haps he has seen that he cannot wrangle successfully with Massereene and not become merely insolent, so concludes to retire and brood over some new means of provoking my future irritation." "You have never seen this room?" she said with a forced lightness to Massereene, after they had entered the library. " It is pretty, is it not ? " "Exceedingly pretty," her guest answered. The shaded lamp, and one or two dim-lit gas-jets in the chandelier above it, threw just the requisite illumina- tion upon rich-toned walls, low book-cases, infrequent yet rare objects of ornament, and carpet, rugs, table- cloth and tapestries of the most admirably harmonious hues. Across a wide doorway at some distance from the commodious chairs in which Olivia and Massereene now seated themselves hung a heavy curtain of velvet on rings attached to a gilded rod. Beyond this cur- tain, lay Delaplaine's own suite of apartments. Olivia 386 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. had not the faintest suspicion that her husband had not already left the house. She and Massereene had talked together in the dining-room over their fruit and coffee for at least a quarter of an hour after Delaplaine had disappeared. They had said very ordinary things to one another, and now, when the man at her side made reference to their brief colloquy just before dinner, his quiet but serious change of subject affected her with a startling sense of abruptness. " You spoke there, in the drawing-room," he began, "of a certain fear that seemed to bear upon your husband's forthcoming behavior. . . . Well, you were agreeably disappointed, were you not? He" did not make matters unpleasant, after all unless one takes into consideration your dislike of his cheerless tenets and canons." "Those chill me whenever I am obliged to hear them," she answered. "But no it was not to them that I alluded. He had been saying " But now her voice sank, while the color slowly dyed her face. "Well, I can't tell it," she broke off impetuously. " Never mind what he said or did or threatened." "Threatened?" Massereene repeated very sharply, and with an unmistakable note of query in his tones. She gazed steadily into his dark, manful face. How capable he looked of bravely defending one for whom he cared ! But she drooped her eyes a moment after- ward. "Threatened, I mean, to to distress me in your presence. No matter how." Here she again lifted her eyes and gave a little perturbed laugh. " Dear, dear, I am always wanting to talk of 'something else' with you lately, am I not?" OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 387 " I should like to talk of something else," said Masse- reene, staring down at the ruby end of the cigar which she had herself lighted for him not long ago. "I wonder though if you will think now a time for it. Perhaps you will not. I shall remember that you promised me your confidence, but I shall not seek to force from you, however gently, its expression. Entre Parbre et Vecorce ne mettez pas le doigt" "You mean about how I strove to atone for my fault the fault of my marriage and how I failed ? " "Yes," he answered. There was quite a long pause between them now. Olivia had lowered her eyes again, and somehow it seemed to him who watched her as if their glan ce had fallen upon the wedding-ring that shone, among others, from the small white knot which her clasped hands were making in her lap. And presently she began to speak, without altering either her attitude or her countenance. " I told myself that I had committed a sin by marrying as I did. But I had bowed my head under the yoke, and I must wear that yoke with fortitude until death his death, most probably disburdened me of it. I would endure the full consequences of my own sordid piece of ambition ; I would neither flinch nor murmur. . . . At first it seemed as if God had already forgiven me. . . . (You see, I cannot speak of God in your way ; when I think of Him at all He is a living, breathing presence to me, and in all sympathetic sense as human as He is in other senses divine.) But soon I discovered how greatly I had erred. A very hard task was before me." She now spoke on for many minutes, describing the humilia- 388 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. tion, impertinence, and generally deplorable treatment to which, during months and months after their mar- riage, Spencer Delaplaine had subjected her. "But at last," she pursued, "I I broke down; I gave way. I could stand it no longer. There is no need of my telling you just why this miserable col- lapse of mine occurred. But it did occur, and with the debdcle of my strong self-scourging resolves, I grew desperate and disdainful. I amazed him by the heat and intensity of my revolt. I poured out my re- proaches upon him; I warned him that except on certain conditions I would not live under his roof, but would go to my aunt, Mrs. Ottarson. . . . Well, circumstances arranged so that a particular demand which he had made of me and which I had refused to grant, could neither be enforced nor disregarded. A kind of compromise has been the result. There are times, however, when his treatment makes me dread a recurrence of those former piercing aggravations. . . . And I cannot suffer them to be resumed without resenting them ... I have told you all that I I deem it best to tell regarding his methods of render- ing me unhappy. If they are resumed, do you not think it would be wiser for me to leave him ? " " To leave him ? " echoed Massereene in a meditat- ing tone ..." Yes ! " he suddenly burst forth, his voice ringing as if a transport of passionate pity had seized him. " By all means, yes!" " This is your advice to me ? " "It is my advice." "You do not think it would be unpardonable weak- ness in me, after having entered into such a marriage of my own free will, to " OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 389 " Oh, absurdity ! " cried Massereene, springing to his feet. "Your own free will ? Why, has not your own story made it as plain as day to me that you were deceived, played upon, absolutely bedevilled by that man and your two heartless aunts? You, almost a child ! I don't think you understand the strength of the influence that they exerted. I believe there is hardly a girl living who would not have yielded under the stress of such persuasion as that brought to bear upon you then ! I " He paused, for Olivia had given a quick, shrill cry, and risen. She was looking toward the large velvet curtain at the farther end of the chamber. It had been partially withdrawn, and with his face showing very pale indeed against its dusky background. Spencer Delaplaine was standing just in front of it. He had heard every word of the recent conver- sation between Olivia and Massereene. 390 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. XXI. DURING about as long a time as it would take for any one in a leisurely manner to count ten, there reigned complete silence in the library. Neither Olivia nor Massereene was at all sure that the master of the house had been playing eavesdropper. But his extreme pallor, mixed with an accusative tension of the lips and a slight but distinct clouding of the brows, gradually rendered this conclusion almost a certainty. And while both were making up their minds how it would be best to break a silence every new instant of which was growing more severely painful, Delaplaine himself spoke, with the huskiness of an ungovernable wrath. He advanced toward Massereene, raising one hand rather with denunciation than with any hint of assault. "So you dare, sir," he cried, "to advise my wife that she shall leave me ? Is this what you call being a gentleman? I'm, of course, no match for you in strength, but by G if you do not leave this house at once, rascally prig and charlatan that you've shown yourself, I'll . . ." Massereene, pale from the shock of insult, here ut- tered a suppressed cry ; but his doing so was not the reason for Delaplaine having paused. The latter had just lifted one hand to his throat as though assailed by a fit of choking. In another instant his eyes OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 391 closed, and then rapidly re-opened, with a dilated and glassy stare. These changes had taken so little time that Massereene, through some oblique effect of the light, and no doubt because of his indignation as well, had not perceived them. He was even about to frame a retort that would have told his anger most unspar- ingly, when he saw the form of Delaplaine sway and then fall with piteous heaviness to the floor. . . . He was unconscious when uplifted, and he had sus- tained an abrasion of one side of the head near the temple, which bled profusely and distressingly, and which had, in the opinion of at least one physician who attended him, saved his life after the violent apoplectic stroke imperilled it. Olivia had no recollection of parting from Jasper Massereene that night. She was in a state of pathetic turmoil; it seemed to her that if her husband died she would be steeped in shame for the rest of her life- time. They had carried him upstairs, and she stood half the night listening at the door of his chamber, in tremors lest the announcement that he had died should freeze her already palpitating nerves. If she had wantonly violated those marriage vows taken in that same room near which she now kept eager vigil and taken there with such uncanny gloom of accompani- ment ! she could not have been more despondently the prey of remorse. "Mine is indeed an heirship of misfortune," she declared to herself while she waited in the dimness of the outer hall, kept by a sluggish horror at the heart from entering the room where he lay and assuming there the post or duties of an ordinary wife. " I begin to think that Jasper Massereene may have been right 392 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. that I was dragged into that marriage. And then all the sorrow and struggle that has followed it ! And now this new torment of having been implicated in his death ! For even although he survives the present attack, I sha.ll always feel as if his life may have been shortened by me ! " He did survive the present attack, and of course Olivia's desolation of spirit did not abide by any means as darksome as while the shadow of death hung most menacingly over her husband. But the self-rebuking, penitential mood had not departed. For a fortnight her husband lay quite speechless, and only conscious at intervals. During this period (at any minute of which he might suddenly have ceased to live) Olivia bestowed upon him her most devoted attention. The ice once broken, in so far as concerned her appearance at his bedside, she left no effort untried to preserve a life for whose extinction she felt that she would be at least partially culpable. But this impression began to vanish after a while ; it was expelled from her mind, so to speak, by the salutary forces of health, just as foreign element is cast out from the flesh by pure blood. Olivia was herself too healthy to brood long over an entirely imaginary fault. In all her relations with Jasper Massereene, she had been thoroughly guiltless, and this fact could not but thrust its knowl- edge, like some vivid beacon-ray of encouragement, through the tempest of her trouble. Still, she refused to receive Massereene, though he came again and again to see her. At last she wrote him. The letter was extremely difficult of composi- tion, because her avowed reasons for desiring to break their friendship once and for all, played about prov- OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 393 inces of mutual relationship describable only in terms that repelled her by an undue warmth. " I cannot tell him," she mused, " that his society has for weeks past been so dear to me as now to make our separation a positive trial." . . . And yet she did write very much in this strain. But her refusal to meet him again was absolute. " Our intimacy," she wrote, " must end for the present. If I were to put in words just why it cannot now be resumed, I should run one of two risks : I might wound you by too bluntly dealing with a friendly regard of which I have had such ample proof; or, still worse, I might soil in your eyes those gossamer things, my womanly delicacy and dignity, by reference to impediments both needlessly and cruelly reared." It was a good fortnight longer before Delaplaine was pronounced out of danger. He now spoke, choos- ing his words, at first, with so much hesitancy and deliberation that aphasia (most deplorable of infirmi- ties) became dreaded by his watchers. But this threat passed away, and it was soon found that the invalid could speak quite as intelligently and fluently as ever. A little while afterward, indeed, he began speaking to Olivia, and showed that none of his old cynicism had left him. He was still exceedingly feeble, and could not move about unassisted, one arm and one leg being partially paralyzed. A great many of Olivia's new fashionable friends now paid her visits of etiquette, but for very few did she permit herself to be " at home." Of course, when the Auchinclosses or Satterthwaites called, she was obliged to see them or, rather she chose, however inwardly disinclined, to pay the sisters of her dead father this courteous tribute. And yet the presence of 394 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. either lady was a stringent reminder to her of that strange episode from which a certain amount of hollow splendor and a very great deal of solid, remorseful misery had been born. Mrs. Auchincloss . came with Madeleine, just as Mrs. Satterthwaite afterward came with Emrneline. There was something almost super- human to Olivia in the deceit of self (if that were really the proper name for what she was often tempted to call quackery and mealy-mouthedness) which her Aunt Letitia and that formal precisian, Miss Madeleine, were capable of exhibiting. They both had not the slightest suspicion that Spencer Delaplaine's death would cause sorrow to his wife. They were indeed both very safely confident that such an event would produce relief rather than regret. Nevertheless, Mrs. Auchincloss announced, with her head put a little sideways, and her tones adjusted in precisely the right commiserating key : " Madeleine and I want you to feel, my dear, that in this hour of bitter trial you can command our services just as you know that you do command our sym- pathies." "Yes, Cousin Olivia," supplemented Madeleine, with her ascetic smile. " If ever one's blood relations should feel it their duty to be near one, it is at just such times of suffering as these." Olivia looked into her aunt's eyes until they fell, as she responded : " It is not so much a question of suffer- ing as of suspense." " Oh, yes," said Mrs. Auchincloss, glad to seize on any pretext for airing (what she would have thought you a most horrible person if you had refused to be- lieve) her "humanity"; "the suspense must be really OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 395 frightful. And do the doctors give you any decided hope that he will recover?" This was during the first few days after Delaplaine's seizure, when the doctors had given very little "hope." Mrs. Satterthwaite and Emmeline paid their visit somewhat later. The contrast between themselves and their kinswomen had in it a degree of real re- freshment to Olivia. They were so politely and non- committally brutal on the subject of Delaplaine's ill- ness. Perhaps little Lulu's death had had its permanently softening influence upon Mrs. Satter- thwaite, but if this were true, she did not in the least reveal any such attendrissement to the world at large. The facets of her personality remained as hard and clean cut as ever. Already no one in the family ever spoke of Lulu ; it was such a painful subject. Emmeline had occasionally referred to her dead little sister, but both her mother and Elaine had assured her that every time she did so it sent through them a kind of nervous chill. Aspinwall's unhappy return to the home of his parents, late on the night that Lulu breathed her last, formed doubtless, a rea- son for this excessive sensitiveness. If Augusta Sat- terthwaite had any love in her soul it was for the son who had come reeling into the house of death that night ; and there was a ghastly enough melancholy to her about this entire incident for its recollection to prove both abiding and acute. Still, " Aspy " had been forgiven not long afterward. His father held out the most obdurately of any one a circumstance doubly annoying to the young gentleman, because it involved not merely a plethora of disapprobation but a dearth of pocket-money. Mrs. Satterthwaite ulti- 396 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. mately talked her husband, however, into a more indulgent frame of mind, and Aspimvall gave his mother a drawled-out promise that he " wouldn't touch any spirits, don't you know, for a whole year." He kept this oath of penance exactly two weeks. But it was quite late when he came from Delrnonico's on the night that he broke it. Nobody saw him or heard him enter the house ; they were all sleeping almost as soundly in their warm, wide beds as poor little Lulu was sleeping in her cold and nar- row one. After a short time his violation of his word transpired among them. And when it did, nobody thought Aspy had committed so very dreadful an offence. Even his father, who had been so severe with him at first, was finally heard to say : " Poor young rascal, I hardly see how he could get along without taking an occasional drink. I suppose that ass of a Chichey Auchincloss could; but thank God, Aspy isn't cut after his pattern." Mrs. Satterthwaite, to whom these remarks were chiefly addressed, answered them in a tone that evinced regret for the lie of her son, however she may have felt willing to condone his vinous habit on grounds of easy, fashionable indulgence among youths of Aspinwall's age. " But the boy was only asked that his promise should relate to spirituous liquors" she said. "It allowed him still to drink wine whenever he pleased." " I know," replied Bleecker Satterthwaite dryly. " If it had forbidden the first and permitted the last I dare say he'd have been just as much tempted to break it. There is one glory of claret, another of champagne, and another of brandy-and-soda," he OLIVIA DEL A PLAINS. 397 added. " We must only hope that the boy will in time learn how to drink, as I did." And meanwhile, as in thousands of similar cases, it was an affair of the merest chance whether or not "the boy " drank himself into his grave before he had reached five-and-thirty. Every gentle yet subtle re- strictive educational force had been denied him ; all his early training had been a haphazard flinging away of salaries upon modish but incompetent masters ; he had been " crammed " in order to enter college, and had pursued his studies there with the audacious aid of " ponies," just escaping graduation at the foot of his class. The laurels of scholarship ; the honor of the intellectual life ; the fine, sweet wage that after years of toil is due a faithful political servant ; even the rectitude and probity crowning a long and useful commercial career these gains he had not been taught, in plain black-and-white, to despise, but he had never been taught to respect either the qualities that could win them or the prizes themselves when at- tained. Fashion ; pretension ; cultivation so culti- vated that it had become vulgarity ; the un-American malady of caste that has crept into- Americanism and may one day leave it a mass of mere democratic wreckage ; Anglomania which means the servile licking of England's hand, not the brotherly grasping of it these, and a hundred other items of perverse in- struction, had formed a part of his practical daily tui- tion, while above the whole noxious collection of pre- cepts, one fixed and deep-founded article of faith tow r ered proudly paramount the worship of money as the be-all and end-all of earthly precedence, valua- tion and prestige. 398 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. "I suppose you have no ... er ... expectation that he will ever be much better?" said Mrs. Satter- thwaite to Olivia, during this visit of hers with Emme- line. "I mean, he'll continue an invalid, even if he doesn't ... er ... die?" "That is about what the doctors now appear to think," said Olivia. "But he may become so little of an invalid as to dispense with attendance, to go out alone, and all that." "How perfectly horrible," said Ernmeline, "to have him not get any better and yet not . . ." She paused, but by no means embarrassedly, leaving her meaning to be understood, as she was wholly confident it would be. "Oh, perfectly agonizing," struck in her mother. " His ... er ... death would be far preferable, of course." And then its hardest note got into this lady's voice as she looked about the room and pro- ceeded : " Especially, my dear Olivia, when he leaves you so comfortable." "He hasn't left me yet," answered Olivia. There was no one in the world whom she would have answered in just that curt way except Augusta Sat- terthwaite, the woman whom she knew to have schemed, not long ago, against her maiden content, as also against her maiden integrity of principle. Her bluntness now resembled that which some accomplice in a crime might have used at an after period to him who had shared his guilt. Even Emmeline, sitting broad-shouldered, high-colored and robustly handsome at her mother's side, looked somewhat astonished. Then the girl gave a laugh of cold amusement, as she said : OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 399 "Well, Cousin Olivia, you don't speak as though you were to be exactly shattered by such a bereave- ment." " Shattered ? " said Mrs. Satterthwaite, looking at her daughter. " "What an odd word to use, Era ! I fancy that if Olivia is, she'll manage to collect her fragments and re-exist with them." Then, turning to Olivia : " Shall you not, my dear ? " . . . It was not very long after this that young Aspinwall Satterthwaite presented himself in the drawing-room of Olivia. Deplorable as she thought him in many respects, he was nevertheless her cousin, and he was making an evident call of condolence : so she saw him. But scarcely had Aspinwall begun to talk, in his blended strain of pomposity and fatigue, when a card was handed to Olivia bearing the name of Chi- chester Auchincloss. " Que faire ? " she questioned of herself, and then promptly decided. They were both equally related to her by blood, arch foes sworn though she knew them to be. Their detestation of each other might prove diverting under the circum- stances. She briefly instructed the servant who had brought in the card, and presently either of the two young men was producing a bomb-shell effect upon the other. They shook hands, and then surveyed each other with a mutual scorn, veiled under what was at least the similitude of politeness. "The old gentleman 's no better, then, Olivia," in- quired Aspinwall, playing with a stick that he carried, superbly mounted in silver. " No," Olivia said. "Does Aspinwall allude to your hitsban d ? " asked Chichester. 400 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. "I imagine he does," .replied Olivia. "Don't yon, Aspinwall ? " " Certainly," said Aspinwall. He half turned, and scanned Chichester with the corner of each eye ; his steep collar would not permit much greater laxity of movement, unless he shifted his entire position. Chi- chester, clad in the darkest and most simple garb, offered the sharpest contrast to his cousin, whose gloves were bright yellow, whose hat was of cinna- mon-brown, whose necktie was of sky-blue satin, whose waistcoat was blue with a kind of yellowish sprig in it, and whose trousers were of a flaring check pattern, red, black, white, and perhaps a few more colors beside. "What's the matter with 'old gentleman'?" said Aspinwall. " Don't you like it?" "No," emphatically answered his cousin. "Used in reference to Olivia's husband it savors painfully of slang. It is evidently employed in the same spirit as the 'old gentleman' which very many young men apply with such dreadful taste to their own fathers." Aspinwall laughed rather coarsely, and then looked at Olivia with a glance that expressed unfathomable contempt of his kinsman. But Olivia pretended not to see the glance. " I always call my dad ' old gentleman,' " said As- pinwall, in a provocative and highly satirical voice ; "that is, when I don't call him 'dad.' Sorry you think it such bad form." "Aspinwall," exclaimed Chichester, "you know we seldom do agree." This was meant to silence Aspin- wall. " Pray tell me something of Mr. Delaplaine's case," the young gentleman continued, leaning toward OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 401 Olivia and bending upon her his very closest atten- tion ; " I've read a little upon neurological subjects myself, and " " Jiminy ! " scoffed Aspinwall. He put up one yellow-gloved hand and hollowed it behind his ear. " Let's hear that big word again," he cried. " Where O O * did you get it from, Chichy?" Chichester coughed a little, and threw back his head a little, and crossed his own dark-gloved hands in his lap, with a piqued, snappish manner which his sister Madeleine sometimes rather tellingly adopted, but which with him had the effect of an almost old-maidish effeminacy. "I got that word, Aspinwall," he replied, "from a book you've not seen much more than the outside of. I mean the dictionary." Then he laughed titter- ingly and looked at his hostess. " He's probably as wise now as he was before ; don't you think so, Olivia?" But Olivia merely smiled in a neutral way. She had no intention of arraying herself on the side of either Montague or Capulet. Chichester at once proceeded, speaking to Olivia as though he were so oblivious of Aspinwall's presence that he had no longer the faintest remembrance of it ; "I should not have used the word 'neurological' with reference to your husband's case. It is one of apo- plexy, as I understand. Now, unless past inquiry into this subject quite escapes me, cerebral hemorrhage may be divided into four separate kinds." " Good Lord ! " ejaculated Aspinwall, under his breath, falling back into his chair. "What are we going to have next?" But Chichester, with magnificent self-possession, 402 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. pursued his monologue, keeping liis gaze fixed, all the while, upon Olivia's courteously disposed visage. " The first on the list is the case in which two or three or more bleedings rapidly succeed one another. The second is where death occurs inside twenty-four hours, and where the temperature falls at first, though it after- ward greatly increases. The third is where illness terminates in a few days after the attack; and here the temperature diminishes, but is followed by a sta- tionary period in which, after its physiological stand- ard has been regained, the body of the patient is beset by oscillations above and below this point. And the fourth is that stage in which the patient recovers. There is then " "Houpla!" exulted Aspinwall, with his head ab- surdly far back on the cushion of the lounge he occupied, and a cigarette between the thumb and finger of his right hand. "May I smoke, Cousin Olivia? Yes, I know you'll let me. I couldn't stand this medical lecture if you didn't." " No, Aspy," said Olivia. " You carCt smoke here, and you ought not to think of doing so." " There is, fourthly," continued Chichester, still haughtily ignoring his male cousin, "that happy case in which they say the patient stands an excellent chance of recovery. The temperature then falls, as in other serious attacks, but it is followed by a temporary rise, and later the normal standard so clearly asserts itself that " " Oh, look here ! " interrupted Aspinwall, pulling himself up from his semi-recumbent position and frowning serio-oomically upon the speaker. "We don't want to know about the chances of the old chap getting OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 403 well. We'd rather hear your highfalutin remarks on the subject of his quietly doing the other thing. . . . Eh, Olivia?" As the last word left Aspinwall, Olivia turned her eyes on him. " You are impertinent to me," she said, " and inhuman to my husband." Aspinwall sprang from his chair. He was one of the young New York gallants who pride themselves upon being gentlemen, without the dimmest real con- ception of those quieter occasions and intervals when high breeding should make itself smoothly and accept- ably evident. " By Jove ! " he exclaimed, " I hope I haven't bored you the least in the world! Save I? Now, do tell me if I have, and I'll get right down on my knees, don't you know, to beg your pardon ! " " Oh, you need not do anything so humble," said Olivia, smiling amicably, and at the same time telling herself how all indignation must be thrown away on such wearying fatuity as this cousin of hers represented! "The only apology I shall exact from you," she continued, " will be the civil treatment of our cousin Chichester's rather learned medical treatise." " Oh, he got it all from some book before he came here. Didn't you, Chi ? " exclaimed Aspinwall. Chichester drew himself up. "I have never in my life before been called ' Chi,' " he said, with the edges of his lips, as it were, "and I really wish you would never again, Aspinwall, address me by such an un- pleasant diminutive." Aspinwall shrugged his shoulders and toyed with, the cigarette which Olivia had forbidden him to light. "All right," he replied, and at the same time assured 404 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. himself that nature had never, no, never, created such a thorough ass as his cousin. When her two visitors had gone, Olivia went up- stairs again to the sick-room of her husband. He was then still so weak both in mind and body that he could scarcely address a coherent word to her. But in a short time he became strong enough to deliver himself of many words, and often excessively bitter ones. As he grew convalescent his venomous remarks increased, each day adding to their malig- nancy. Olivia was in just the repentant state to endure them silently. She had lost all her old rebel- lious impulse. She was still often haunted by the idea that she had pushed him into his present sickness, and the chief comfort she obtained with regard to this question of her culpability was secured from Mrs. Ottarson, whose friendship and loyalty strengthened in time of trouble. " Let him talk," 'Livia," asseverated her aunt. "You know jus' w'at he says that's false an' jus' w'at isn't. Make believe you don't care. He's sick. You've got to stand it. Goodness me! If you only had some o' my troubles! Deary, I'm glad 'nough you haven't got 'em. Mr. Spillington an' his wife have both left me, an' there's that thirty-five dollar suit of 'partmerits empty. An' w'y? 'Cause Amelia Sugby, the author- ess, wouldn't stand bein' browbeat. That woman's full o' spunk. I s'pose it comes from scribblin' those stories that curl people's hair. An' she got, oh so cantankerous ! An' I guess she was 'bout right, after all. He jus' laid himself out one evenin' at dinner. He told her she was panderirf in her writin's. That's the word he used, though I kind o' forget how he said OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 405 she was panderin'. But she didn't like the word, an' neither did I. An' she says to me, one mornin' : * Either he goes, Mrs. Ott'son, or else I go. Now w'ich is it to be ?' ' Well,' I says, 'Li via, ' fair play's fair play, an' I won't see any boarder o' mine unjustly attackted.' An' then it came out that he'd called her a penny-a-liner one afternoon when I wasn't round. That was bad, 'specially as she gets a sight more'n a penny a line for that stuff she writes, though I do think it's the worst trash I ever tried to read. So she s.aid she'd quit if Spillington didn't, an' she's good pay, an' she's lately got an order from the Weekly Evening J^anip, or some paper like that, which'll bring her in four thousand dollars. Now, Spillington owed me over a hundred dollars, an' I was 'fraid to tell him he must go, on that account. Still, I asked him to 'pologize to Mrs. Sugby. 'Pologize! I wish you'd seen him ! He jus' cleared that throat o' his an' began to talk so you'd almost heard him in 'Leventh Avenue. So I got mad, an' I says 'Go.' Well, he went, an' the hundred dollars went too. I don't believe I'll ever see a cent of it, an' I needed it. Still, I can scrape along, I guess, without it." Olivia drew out her purse and pushed it into her aunt's hand. "Here are two hundred dollars, Aunt Thyrza," she said. "I've no earthly use for the money. I've been simply carrying it about with me for an age. There, now, kiss me and take it. Don't say a word. You know how I love you. And remember all you did for me in those days when poor papa was dying ! " Toward the end of June, Delaplaine showed marked signs of recovery. The physicians recommended a 406 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. change of air. Greenacre was waiting, and a body- guard of servants also was waiting to conduct him thither. Olivia offered no objection whatever. She asked herself whether Jasper Massereene would hear of their departure or no. Yes, she concluded, since it was sure to transpire in the newspapers. Of late the dark, composed, virile face of Massereene had repeatedly shone upon her in her dreams. She loved him, and fully realized that she loved him. But her soul was so unstained, so helped by a faith in a God of immeasurable goodness, so convinced that this God would befriend her through all possible trials, that she found unspeakable comfort in prayer and in medita- tions no less holy. Her life became more and more penetrated with the most earnest belief. She reviewed her past temptations, ahd remembered them unceas* ingly in her prayers. She prayed not only for her- self but for Massereene. After they had arrived at Greenacre she devoted herself to Delaplaine with all the nursing arts that it lay in her power to exhibit. He incessantly made her the butt of his bitter wit, his torturing satire. As his health augmented, his cruelty kept pace with it. He referred to Massereene both openly and by the most hateful innuendo. But no matter what sinister things he said, Olivia maintained her post unflinchingly at his side. His cynicism revealed new depths that she had not dreamed of before. One day, while she accompanied him in a walk about the grounds (lie moving with the paralytic step that plainly betrayed his wretched dis- ease), she read to him a sad note from a friend in town who had recently lost a young child. "Bah!" he said. "How much absurd sentiment OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 407 is poured upon the question of parental affection ! What, after all, is a mother's or a father's love except the most utter selfishness ? And the children them- selves what is really lovable about them ? You can always buy a child's affection with a few sweets. I have often thought that all the badness of humanity is to be found in the undeveloped male or female biped. Where can you see more detestable traits of bullying coarseness than are to be met with in a boy ? I have always abominated boys. They are like young Neros and Caligulas. They delight in the meanest and wickedest deeds. Fortunately for the race, they unlearn some of these by the time they have become men. Among the numerous inanities for which ro- mance is responsible, a glorification of childhood and children stands foremost. Such writers as Victor Hugo (whom, by the way, I have for years believed to be a lunatic) do much toward popularizing such rubbish as that children are angelic. Satanic would be a far more suitable term for lots of them." He appeared to understand the new power which he had gained over his wife. It was evident to his shrewd mind that she had become possessed with the remorseful idea of having caused his perilous illness. He had no intention of altering the will which he had made on recovery to health after his singular mar- riage, and in which he had left Olivia mistress of his entire large property. Nevertheless, he delighted in having his lawyers visit him at Greenacre, and in remaining closeted with them for an hour or two at a time. Afterward he would devour his wife with a prolonged stare behind his glittering glasses, and say at length, with a little malicious writhing of his 408 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. pale lips, while he fumbled nervelessly among the documents that covered his desk: " It's a great bother, this re-arrangement of one's money affairs a great bother. Still, there's no tell- ing just when I may pop off now, and if I do I shan't be fool enough to have all my money fill another man's pockets not I ! " Olivia's face would flush at times like these, and she would gnaw her lips in agony of spirit. But not a word of retort left her. As for her husband's money, there were moments, even hours, nowadays, when she longed that he would bequeath her nothing. She wrote as much in a letter to her Aunt Thyrzn, wherein she poured out her soul, telling of the exqui- site pain he was inflicting upon her. " His allusions to Mr. Massereene," she wrote, "sting me more than all others ; for that name now points, as it were, to the very high-tide mark of his tyranny and my own complete innocence." Meanwhile he exulted over the thought that he was possibly filling her with the sharpest alarm regarding those lawyers and their mysterious departures and appearances. In reality some few changes of invest- ment were all that were meant by the latter ; but he constantly would inquire of both gentlemen, with an expression and a tone which indicated sharp avidity for the exact truth : " Did Mrs. Delaplaine say a word, when you met her down-stairs, this morning, about why you had run up from town ! " Or again : " My wife, by the way . . . has she asked you at any time what was the object of your coming up here from the city? Now think, please." . . . And he would put one of his tremulous hands upon the shoulder of the OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 409 gentleman addressed. " I beg that you will try accu- rately to recollect. I have an especial motive in presenting to you this question." But neither of the lawyers had the slightest gratifying information to impart. Olivia had made no inquiries of them ; and though quite unconscious that her reticence had the most irritant effect upon Delaplaine, she was none the less punishing him through it with about as much stringency as if she had employed some skilfully deliberate method. " You appear to be losing your looks," he said one day, in his inhuman sort of mutter, to which she had grown so forlornly accustomed. " Are you not well ?" "I am not precisely ill," she answered, "though I have felt better." " Ah, I see. Greenacre is boring you. You had expected Newport this summer, with a pleasant touch of Lenox in the autumn. Long drives on Ocean Avenue, long rambles over the hazy Berkshire hills, with" .... He paused, and she knew that he was watching her face, to see whether the color mounted to it or no. " Why don't you ask Massereene up here? " he presently said, in a darting, stabbing way. She bent her eyes a little closer on the book that she was reading. "I should not know where to find him," she said. " Oh, are you sure of that?" he asked, with a mock- ing insolence of distrust that she had long ago become more used to than she herself realized. " Yes," she replied. " Perfectly sure." He remained silent for quite a little interval. They had been sitting on the piazza. It was a day full of summer's brio-htest and most dulcet fascinations. The 410 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. sky had not a cloud in it, and the south wind was pulsing incessantly among the leaves, making their vibrant greenery sing like hundreds of voices heard in a dream. " Perhaps it is a trifle dull here," said Delaplaine, breaking the silence. " When Adrian comes up you may find it less so." "Adrian?" echoed Olivia, laying down her book. " Have you decided to ask him here ? " "Yes. But not as a guest. I must have a secre- tary, now that I've begun really to interest myself again in the conduct of my business affairs." "The doctors in New York said that you should not touch business affairs for at least six months longer," Olivia said. She thought it her duty to remind him -of this injunction, and did so. He nodded, and gave that dry laugh of his, which had made Olivia feel, while in a fanciful mood of criticism, the other day, that there were withered laughs, just as there were withered leaves. " How enchanting of you to take so much care of me ! " he answered. " One would imagine that you were really anxious that I should get well ! " OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 411 XXII. OLIVIA was charmed by the plan of having Adrian at Green acre. But on meeting him she was instantly struck with surprise, and of by no means the most agreeable nature. The sweetness, the pensiveness, the winsome femininity had all gone from Adrian. It seemed incredible that a few months could have so radically altered any one's personality. His brown eyes had hardened and brightened into a colder, more crystalline lustre. He carried his fine figure with an assertiveness that made it almost look mar- tial. He had never lacked suavity and ease of man- ner ; but a virile element was blended with his grace that gave it the most unexpected tinge of worldly- wise gallantry. Olivia found herself greatly inter- ested in the lad's development, if it were worthy of so large a name; after watching it a little she had a sense that perhaps it was worthy of being called only a pathetic effacement. To her husband's eyes there had been no metamorphosis at all, or else one which he had already observed. He showed perfect indifference, now, to all interviews between Adrian and his wife. He treated his secretary with a civil enough bearing, and made no attempt whatever to interfere with Adrian's hours of leisure. These were not few. Olivia no longer rode, and drove only in the company of her husband when he expressed a 412 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. desire that she should do so. She soon found herself wondering at the perfectly polite and yet marked repression in Adrian's manner toward herself. She had never had any but the most cordial feelings of friendship for him, and his coolness, however deco- rously he chose to mask it, roused in her a natural pique. It was all very well to make allowances for a swiftly disclosed maturity in Adrian, but this cere- monious waiving away on his part of their once frank and easy intimacy must be accounted for by other reasons. What were these reasons ? Olivia was too generous to dream of enforcing an explanation by any such magisterial means as those to which her semi- proprietorship at Greenacre would have entitled her. She resolved to break the ice with a very sharp blow as soon as occasion served ; and it did serve within a few days after Adrian's arrival. It was about two o'clock in the afternoon. Luncheon was just over. Delaplaine had gone upstairs to take his daily sleep of at least two hours' duration. Olivia had passed forth on the broad-sweeping piazza that lay just outside the low windows of the dining-room. She had been asking Adrian whether or no he thought that Mr. Delaplaine's health was being retarded by his dictation of financial correspondence during the morning. Adrian had answered negatively, add- ing: " The occupation is, I think, more of an amusement than a task. He merely gives me the roughest outline of what he wishes said, and I frame it in the kind of epistolary English that I know he prefers." " And with great skill, I am sure," said Olivia, smil- ing graciously if but transiently. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 413 " No ; it is nothing except the result of long habit. I've become quite used to the kind of work he de- sires." " And you have made up your mind to remain there at the Bank for a long time yet ? " Olivia artfully put this question just as she was stepping across the threshold of one of the windows. He was obliged to follow her out upon the piazza, or else to appear unpermissibly rude. She was almost certain that he would not have quitted the dining- room with her unless that much urbanity had become obligatory. But he bowed, as it was, to the necessity of acquiescence. There were several wicker-work chairs scattered about, and Olivia sank into one of them. He stood at her side, with his hands meeting behind him, a figure full of the most happy symmetries and crowned by a face and head which it struck her that some o the famed marbles have not surpassed. " I expect to continue at the Bank," he answered, "If Mr. Delaplaine will not object to my doing so; and I suppose he will not." " But if anything should happen to Mr. Delaplaine ? " questioned Olivia, looking up at him from where she was now seated. " Then there would still remain two other partners, as you doubtless know. I am on good terms with both of them." " You should be a partner there some day yourself, Adrian," she said to him very sweetly. " I wish it with all my heart. I think you deserve it." He colored, bit his lip, and half turned away. She stretched out her hand and caught his coat-sleeve, detainingly, between thumb and finger, pulling at it 414 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. with a hearty good will, as if she were well in earnest on the subject of his not leaving her just yet. As if suddenly conscience-stricken, he veered round and faced her. "Oh, Mrs. Delaplaine," he exclaimed Boftly, "how good of you! But you were always good to me." Olivia burst out laughing. " It's pleasant to receive that bit of intelligence from you, Mr. Etherege, at a time when I have been wondering what precise bee you've lately allowed to buzz in that bonnet of yours. Once or twice I've been on the verge of asking you if you would not, de bonne grace tell me what I had pos- sibly done to offend you to put you on your 'high horse,' in this perplexing manner. But no ; I con- cluded that I'd wait and dexterously drop my hand- kerchief so that you'd have to pick it up, with a grand Louis Quatorze bow ; and then, while receiving it, I'd inform you how beautiful your new manners were, and ask you whether you'd purchased them expressly to wear up here at Green acre." Adrian dropped into a chair at her side. "That would have been cruel and consequently very unlike yourself." "I can be terribly cruel when I believe people deserve it," she said. He shook his head, pointing upward. " There is somebody in this house from whom I am beginning to see that you are bearing cruelties angelically." She gave a little start. '-Oh, say philosophically," she replied coloring. " But never mind him, Adrian. Why have you treated me like so thorough a stranger?" He had drooped his eyes while she intently watched OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 415 him. " I almost dreaded to meet you again." And now he turned upon her the full, mild brown splendors of his eyes, and she saw that they were moist if not really tearful. "I I knew it was best that I should not come here. And yet something drew me ; I may say dragged me! I had made up my mind that I would not come that I would invent some excuse that even if it enraged him, even if he discharged me angrily because of it, I would still avoid coming. But at the last moment I weakly yielded. I " He impetuously caught her hand in both his own, and was lifting it to his lips, when she tore it away and rose from her chair. She had become pale, and her eyes were shining ; but otherwise there was not the least sign of agitation in her manner. " You are so irritating in your folly," she murmured. " Do you suppose I will permit you to stay here now ?" A little scornful laugh ran rippling through her next sentence. " I am not the least anxious to wound your feelings of which you have just given me so aston- ishing, so regrettable an evidence. But I have now only this to tell you : If, by the day after to-morrow, you have not found some excuse for leaving Greenacre, I must inform Mr. Delaplaine that you have been guilty of a very great discourtesy to me. . . . Do you understand?" she went on with much of sad appeal in her eyes and lips, while she put out both hands toward him, anxiously, compassionately, to withdraw them again in an instant. " I have understood you. ... I am very, very sorry. But it cannot be arranged otherwise." Then she hurried indoors, without his making the least effort to detain her, and reached her own room. 416 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. There she sat for a long time, staring at the huge silver serpent of the Hudson beyond, and telling herself that this whole affair was miserably unfortunate. In her solitude, broken as it was only by such unpalatable companionship as that of her husband, she had felt a soft little thrill of real joy to learn that she would soon be shaking hands with Adrian Etherege. She had never comprehended until then how sisterly had been her regard for the lad, how severe was her an- noyance at the separation Delaplaine had forced upon them, aiid by how many acts of helpful friendship she would have been willing to prove her attachment. The festivities of fashion, crowding upon her as they had done with new demands both upon consciousness and memory, had never made her forget Adrian Etherege. Not even Jasper Massereene had made her forget him. Perhaps it was Jasper Massereene's influence upon her now the recollection of his unfailing humanity, his power not only to feel/br but with suffering fellow- creatures that gradually changed the whole current of her thought and intention. " How can I be sure," she mused, " that I have not behaved blamably in my dealings with Adrian? His nature is impressionable, ardent ; it may be that I (mentally older than he was, if not so in years) did not use toward him the discretion he merited." When they next met, Olivia said, as soon as oppor- tunity favored : " I hope you are willing to assist me in forgetting what passed not long ago. I spoke too hastily, and apologize. You also spoke hastily; it may be that you will consent to ask my pardon. If you do I will readily grant it." She put out her hand as she finished speaking. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 417 He caught it, looked at her steadily first, and then lifted it to his lips. But she had studied his eyes and let him do so, this time. "I behaved myself like a a ruffian," he faltered. " How few good women there are, good enough to forgive me ! " . . . After that they were the best of friends again. And yet they were not friends in the same way as before. She had learned his secret. Adrian's company formed her sole social pastime. " There are a few people about us," she said to him, during one of their talks, " who have shown a desire to be more intimate with me this summer;" and she mentioned the names of several neighboring families. "But I have pleaded Mr. Delaplaine's illness as an excuse." "He is so much better, however," said Adrian. " Yes. But nothing restrains him from those bursts of bitterness and of personality the latter always directed, as you know, at myself. He prefers we should live quietly, and I think it is fortunate he does. I had hoped your presence might have some effect ; but he pours forth his streams of cynicism just as freely as before you came. I suppose they sometimes make you inwardly shudder, as they do me." "I bear them better, much better than I did," replied Adrian, with a touch of mysticism in his air. "How is that?" "Shall I tell you?" "Why not?" " I do not see why not," he returned, with sudden impetuosity. " In those other days when you and he and I were together I believed him " 418 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. "Well?" questioned Olivia, as the young man paused. " I believed him my father." She made a gesture of surprise. "And now?" "I know to the contrary." "You know?" "Yes." "He has told you?" "No." "Who, then?" "My mother." "Your mother? Ah, I see. And you asked her if such a thing were true ? " "No. But she saw how I hated him, and how my hate grew. The suspicion that he was my father had entered my head several months before you and I ever met. It made me hate YOU, at first, because I believed that I could compel him to right by marriage the wrong which he had done my mother." "That look you gave me that look of positive savagery on the day I became his wife," Olivia murmured. " I understand it now." He indistinctly caught her words, and said : " To what look do you refer?" He searched her face with eagerness while he thus spoke. "Never mind," Olivia returned. . . . "And your mother has told you . . . ? " " That I am not his son. It has lifted a great load from my heart." "But she your mother how was it that she induced him to aid you as he has done?" " She would not tell me that. Some day I hope to OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 419 know. But my mother and he were never well, you understand. It has been a great relief to me." " Poor boy ! " thought Olivia. " I don't doubt that his mother has told him a merciful falsehood." She soon got away from Adrian. These revelations had affected her in a singular way, and she wanted to be alone to brood on them. What she had heard made her regard her husband with a fresh, uncontrollable antipathy. . . . That night, at dinner, he was in one of his most cheerless and biting moods. He appeared in the dining-room with a card which he had just lighted on in the hall. "General and Mrs. Swartwout," he read from the card. "The General was never in but one action during his life, and on that occasion he was slightly wounded. . . . Where ? Some people said it was in the left breast, just above the region of the heart. A faithful friend and comrade of the General's, however, who chanced to be in the same action with him, used to deny this statement. He said that there was no wound in the General's left breast at all, as the bullet had stopped before getting there. ' What stopped it?' asked some one innocently. < His shoulder-blade,' replied that kind-hearted friend." . . . Here Dela- plaine laughed to himself in a smothered chuckle, as though he did not expect either Olivia or Adrian Etherege to join him. ..." Ah," he presently went on, beginning to sip his soup, " of all honorable occu- pations there is none to which society, feather-headed society, so bows down as the profession of killing. The moment you are a killer extraordinary of your fellow-creatures, like a general or a colonel, you are more or less worshipped. The clergy is simply no 420 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. where in comparison. There have been more monu- ments reared to the men who have killed successfully than to all the painters, sculptors, philosophers and reformers combined. You see, I leave out poets, not thinking them worthy of a moment's concern. They're merely melodious liars ; they'll lie prettily on anything, from life, death, or the so-termed human soul, to a glove, a ribbon, or a rosebud. . . . Well, Olivia, did you see the General and his wife ? " " No," said Olivia ; " I was not at home." " You mean ... in a poetical way." " I had gone for a little walk." "Um-m-m. And to gather a little sunburn. I wouldn't. It's hoiTibly unbecoming." " Why, Mrs. Delaplaine does not seem in the least sunburned to me, sir," said Adrian. " That's because a young stripling like you thinks half the milk-maids that he meets are goddesses." " Well," said Olivia, laughing, and at the same time hoping to turn the talk, if she might, into pleasanter channels, " Pm certainly no milk-maid." "You!" scoffed Delaplaine. "I should say not in the sense of pure-mindedness." Adrian colored and started. These thrusts had for him a sacrilegious atrocity. He looked straight at Mr. Delaplaine, and spoke with an accent of the deep- est sincerity and a sudden sparkling out of his old youthful demeanor : "I should say, sir, that your wife had as much pure- mindedness as any woman that ever lived." '" Ho, ho ! " laughed Delaplaine. " Much you know about the matter ! Take care, or she'll be twisting you round her finger in fine style. She's craftier than OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 421 when you knew her last ; she's had a season of New York deviltries to practise on." " In most of which you were my companion," Olivia either could not or simply did not resist now saying, although she had but lately shot Adrian a look that enjoined silence upon him. " I'm not so sure of that," he answered, and gave his laugh again. Olivia had trangressed her usual rule in having shown the faintest resentment toward her husband. She now regretted this fact, and immediately turned to Adrian, with a second pitiful attempt to alter the conversational current. "This General Swartwout," she said, "has such a pretty daughter. I should like, some time, to present you." But Delaplaine was unpropitiable to-night. " Why on earth," he asked, " would you pi-esent Adrian ? She's an airy girl, with a great idea of marrying a bigger swell than she is herself." "Oh," said Olivia, with a smile at Adrian, "we will not mind the marrying part, will we ? " "No, indeed," said Adrian, "I'm not at all ambi- tious to marry." " Still," struck in Delaplaine, " you'd like to marry ambitiously ; there's a difference." "There is no difference for me, sir," Adrian re- plied. "Stuff!" Delaplaine said. "Every man or woman, unless made a fool of by the mental distemper named love, always wants, if it be possible, to fly the matrimo- nial kite high. ... I have very rarely seen an ex- tremely rich man who did not marry a beautiful wife. 422 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. They have the pick of the market, as it were; any one whom they choose to ask is delighted to accept." Adrian shook his head. "You yourself admit, sir, that the mental distemper named love, exists after all." "It doesn't stand the dimmest chance against money, once in a thousand times. Not the dim- mest. Let the young capitalist appear on the scene and Phyllis will begin to smirk at him over Corydon's very shoulder. And presently she gets up and waltzes toward the new-comer, leaving poor Corydon her crook, perhaps, for consolation. She won't need it any more ; she's going to be too fine a lady." " Corydon ought to take up the crook," laughed Adrian, " and lay it over the millionaire's back." "Much good if he did. There'd be a lawsuit, and the millionaire, having money enough to supply him- self with the highest legal intelligence in the land, would handsomely win the day. And Phyllis would be sure to call her old swain a horrid rough wretch and to declare herself so glad she didn't marry him, while she gazed down at the glittering engagement- ring somebody else had just given her." Adrian again shook his head, but this time with a melancholy emphasis. " I hope, sir, the world isn't quite so black as you paint it ! " he exclaimed. " It's a good deal blacker, in many cases." " But I'd rather not at my age think it so," cried Adrian. "I want to think that it holds many good women and noble men." Delaplaine pointed across the table at his wife. As he did this, a light thrill shot through Olivia's blood. What new insult was he about to perpetrate ? Every OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 423 week his outward integument of gentlemanliness ap- peared to lose a layer or so of its density. He was perpetually sinking lower and lower toward a brutal- ity of which his extreme physical weakness alone pre- vented Olivia from dreading a still more gross deteri- oration. She had begun to tell herself that there was nothing his irritated and semi-diseased brain might not prompt him to say, for there are some maladies which intensify and reduplicate the worst and most prominent faults of just such a nature as his. But the chances of his doing her any bodily harm were slight enough, since his own muscular feebleness, if no other cause, would have prevented this crowning outrage. His finger still pointed at her. On his face was a smile of infernal derision. " Many good men and noble women ? " he said, with a mockery that to Olivia had in it the flickering of a snake's forked tongue. "There sits one of the latter. She's a noble woman ; I suppose you think so ; eh, Adrian ? " "I do ! " exclaimed Adrian, with a nervous break in his voice, as though he too were fearful of some insult specially violent. " Well, then, she married me on what she believed was my death-bed, and just for my money. No other reason. She thought I wouldn't live three hours. There's nobility for you. Eh, Adrian?" He fell back into his chair, laughing shrilly, while his finger still pointed at his wife. Olivia shuddered as she saw the butler and footman smile and turn away. She rose staggeringly from the table ; she was pale and gasped a little ; every instant 42.4 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. it seemed to her as if she might swoon ; the room whirled round with her ; but pricking through all other sensations with an intolerable poignancy, was her exquisite shame ! The next instant she saw Adrian spring toward her husband and stand over him with lifted arm and blaz- ing eyes. " You scoundrel ! " Adrian cried, every influence of past authority swept away in this one overwhelming moment of passionate championship. "It's only your weakness that keeps me from " "Adrian ! " Olivia screamed. " No, no ! " But be- fore she had reached his side the young man had folded his arms on his breast. There was a sneer on his lips and a look of scathing scorn still in his beautiful eyes. " Do not be afraid," he said to Olivia. " I shall not touch him." " Puppy ! " Delaplaine hissed. He had drawn him- self so far back into his chair and lie was so blood- jessly pale that he looked ten years older than his actual age. "Leave my house, and never dare to ask a dollar of me again ! " he went on, huskily. "I will leave your house this night," said Adrian. "I should feel degraded by every hour longer that I remained there." He was breathing hard, with set teeth, as he turned toward Olivia. " Good bye," he muttered, looking into her eyes. Then he strode out of the room, and she followed him. "Adrian," she pleaded, stopping him in the hall, "do not go to-night." "Yes yes," he said. "There is a train I can catch. If not, I can sleep in the village till morning." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 425 "But you must make up with him you must. Think : what will become of you if you are suddenly discharged from the bank? What will become of your mother, who, as you have told me, depends upon you for support ? " Adrian smiled. "There are twenty houses, at least, that I know of, willing to give me a corresponding position as clerk. Do not fear on that account." He watched her with a chivalrously tender look growing in his gaze. " You are far more to be pitied than I am, since you are a woman and must live on compara- tively alone with him." Olivia shuddered.- Suddenly she put both hands up to her face. The whirling feeling had come into her head again. She uncovered her face and reeled toward Adrian, who caught her. " My God ! " she gasped. " I feel as if I were dying. I I hope it is death ! I" And then a night put its blackness into her brain. But what seemed to her possible death was only the briefest of fainting-fits. She awoke to find herself on a lounge in the sitting-room, with one of the woman- servants bathing her temples. As soon as she felt sufficiently strong and collected to go in search of Adrian, she found that he had left Greenacre. He had gathered only a few articles of apparel together, had taken these with him in a portmanteau, and had informed a domestic that he would send for the others. . . . Olivia had a sense of absolute loathing now, as she prepared once more to enter the presence of her hus- band. She conquered such reluctance all the more easily, however, on recalling her new and positive 426 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. determination. She meant to leave on the morrow for New York and her Aunt Thyrza. It need not be a permanent absence ; she would be willing to return if certain promises were afterward given her. The self-accusative feeling had not yet left her. She could not rid herself of its occasional spell. But for the confession that she had made to Jasper Massereene, her husband would perhaps have escaped the stroke to which a great deal of his later abuses and imposi- tions might be attributable. In truth Olivia now bore herself with a martyr-like loveliness, where many an- other woman would have pursued a course either of lamentation or rebellion. Yet she had been taxing too severely her forces both of endurance and resigna- tion. A spiritual fatigue had resulted perhaps she did not dream how cogent a one. But she was des- tined soon to learn, and in a way which it would have appalled her with horror could she have soberly foreseen. Her husband had by this time gone, as she supposed, to his library upstairs. But on entering that room Olivia found it vacant. She next tried his bedcham- ber, but as she approached the latter she was met by Delaplaine's valet. "I do not think Mr. Delaplaine is at all well, ma'am," said the man. " Is he lying down ? " asked Olivia, pointing to the apartment which the man had just quitted. " Yes, ma'arn. He says he's in a good deal of pain." Pain ? " "Yes, ma'am ... I wasn't with him when he had those fits of internal gout, but from what he tells me I'm afraid it's another attack." OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 427 "Did you send for a doctor?" " I haven't yet, ma'am. Mr. Delaplaine said 'twas best to wait and see if the pain got worse . . ." Here the man paused. A heavy groan sounded from the near chamber. The pain was already worse, and a doctor was imme- diately sent for. Lulled through many months into submission and quietude, with its right of possession usurped, as one might have believed, by another wholly different disorder, the man's old foe, gout, had suddenly leaped upon him and begun to inflict its keenest pangs. The attack was a terrible one, and Delaplaine fainted two or three times during its first most agonizing seizures. By about twelve o'clock on the following day his regular physician arrived from New York. He remained about three hours at Green- acre, carefully watching the patient. " There is noth- ing for me to do," he told Olivia, " which the physi- cian whom I found in attendance cannot do as well. "We have consulted together, and our views entirely agree. This sudden access of hot weather is certainly against Mr. Delaplaine. He has rallied before from similar attacks, but he was not then, as now, weakened by the results of hemiplegy. Still, unless the internal gout should again manifest itself, I see no reason for further anxiety." The practitioner from L , near by, stayed with Delaplaine until about nine o'clock that evening. The patient was then seemingly better, though very weak. He slept at intervals, awaking after dozes of ten or fifteen minutes' duration, and complaining of extreme thirst. It was not thought advisable to give him any means of gratifying this thirst except minutely-cracked 428 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. ice, which he disliked and protested against as insuffi- cient to relieve his needs. The night had become oppressively hot. A full moon flooded the lawns of Greenacre and showed the great river beyond them in a scimetai'-like curve of brilliance. All the windows had been opened. Olivia supposed that the servants would close the house below stairs when the regular time came for doing so ; she had not given this question the least thought ; she had had too many other thoughts of over-towering import with which to concern herself. Just after the doctor from the village had gone, she said 'to the woman who watched at Delaplaine's bed- side : " You may go and lie down, now, Martha. I will stay here for two or three hours. When I grow very tired if I do grow so I will go upstairs to your room and call you. Then you can relieve me." "Yes, ma'arn," said Martha. "Do you know about the medicine, ma'am ? " " Yes." They were standing just at the threshold of Dela- plaine's dim room, where the yellow glow of a shaded lamp blent with the silver rays drifting in through two broad windows. " He is to have a tea-spoon of that medicine in the large glass the aconite every hour, provided he awakes," continued Olivia. " That's it, ma'am," said Martha. "But we're to be careful, you know." "Careful?" "Yes, ma'am. The doctor said it was so danger- ous . . . don't you remember, ma'am ? " OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 429 "Oh, yes," answered Olivia, really remembering. " You mean he might drink it if he reached out his hand, or anything like that. . . . Yes, I recollect what the doctor said. But he seems to be sleeping quietly, now ; and besides, Martha, it's not on the table by the bedside ; it's there on the bureau. . . . Oh, I'll be very careful." Every syllable of her own and Martha's words ap- peared so completely unimportant, then. But every syllable returned to her memory with so frightful a distinctness, not very long afterward ! Martha went upstairs to bed. Olivia stood at the door-sill of her husband's room for a slight while. His breathing was quite regular; he seemed in a wholly placid sleep. She passed into the room adjoining. It was the library, and here, too, the light had been turned somewhat low. But three windows, opened to their fullest extent, showed the magnificent pearly glamour of the moonlight, whose quality, for some rea- son belonging to the dead sultriness of the atmosphere, revealed a kind of milky, brooding thickness as the night advanced. Olivia seated herself near one of the windows. If her husband should wake and utter the least sound she knew that she could instantly hear him. She brushed the hair with both hands back from her heated temples, and leaned out as far as the window- ledge would let her. She was thinking : " How horrible my life has been of late ! What if its wretchedness should end to-night, or soon after to-night? Do I hope that it will? Have I power quite to crush down such a hope ? Let me try let me try with all my soul ! . . . I used to have 430 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. those wicked impulses in the old days of the pension abroad. I thought I had conquered them, when I came back for the last time with papa. . . . How poor papa used to laugh at them ! . . . I wonder if he is where he can know about me now, and be sorry that he ever did laugh. For it was one of those impulses that made me Olivia Delaplaine. Yes, it was all my fault. Neither Aunt Augusta nor Aunt Letitia was to blame, but I, only I ! " Then she thought of Massereene, as she sometimes could not help but think. "Where is he now? Has he forgotten me? If anything should happen, would he ?" But she forced herself to banish him from her mind, as she had done a hundred times before now. The exorcism cost her a struggle, however. To-night the failure to effect it seemed fraught with a peculiar unduteousness. " He is so good and high himself ! " she pursued, rising amid the vagueness of the moonlit chamber. "He would respect me more if he knew that I had striven to " At this point a sound broke upon her ears. She knew on the instant whence it proceeded. Her hus- band had waked and uttered it. She glided without delay into the next chamber where he was lying. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 431 XXIII. "Dro you call?' she asked, pausing at Delaplaine's bedside. He was wide-awake. A beam of moonlight had shot in from one of the windows, and spread its ice- like pallor across his colorless face. He looked like a living corpse. Olivia waited beside him. Some change in his expression (she could not have told just what) made her perceive that he recognized her. "Yes, I called," he said, presently. His eyes had begun to wander from point to point in her costume, as a child's might do, pausing once more at her face. And then, in the dimness, Olivia saw that a new expression filled them. It was vulpine to her, and she recoiled from it. But as she did so, he reached out a hand and clutched hers. The grasp was not a strong one ; she could easily have cast it off. But she did not. If it had been less weak, she would have done so ; but as it was, she did not. " I shouldn't be surprised if it were all up with me, this time," he said to her, in a voice not greatly above a whisper. " I feel as if it were going to be that way." His voice sank, and it seemed to her that the eyes with which he now fixedly stared into her own had become two spots of fiery, molten gray. She could never afterward quite be sure whether this effect was born of her own disturbed state or whether 432 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. some actual basilisk-like change of the sort really took place. "I hate to go," he said, "and not take you with me. Ah ! if I only could have you die when I died J If I only could ! You witch, you, that made me care for you in my old age, what shall I do without you if there should be any after-life ? . . . Eh ? what shall I do without you? If I were only strong enough to kill you just when I'd got sure of dying myself! Then we 'd go together together. That's what I want. It's horrible to think of going like this, and leaving you with all that youth to live out, and all that love in you, too, that you never gave me the tiniest part of ! It's horrible, I say, Olivia, and ..." But she snatched her hand away from him, here. He had leaned a little forward, but he now fell back upon the pillows, laughing hoarsely and faintly to himself. She felt certain, by this time, that his brain was afflicted with some serious lesion, even if she had truly doubted it during many weeks before. Shivers were passing through all her nerves, though she still forced herself to remain at the bedside. He roused in her an abhorrence that strangely blent with pity. She loathed and shrank from him, and yet she could not but feel now that the ravage of his disorder had been steal thier than she herself had appreciated, and that his present almost infantile demeanor showed a brain of no common order pitiably wrecked. Then, too, the thought shot through her mind : ' If I had more persistently kept before me this fact of his men- tal decay, might not many of the distressing things he has done have lost their chief power to wound ? ' OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 433 Still, almost simultaneously, these last words of his were ringing through recollection with a frightful mockery. Could it be possible that he really desired her to die with him, in case he himself died? His clutch upon her wrist had affected her as though its coldness and clamminess had been those of the dead. She felt its pressure yet, and furtively rubbed the wrist against one side of her gown as she at length said : " It is time for your medicine. I must give it to you now." He made her no answer, and she went to the man- tel where the medicine was placed. She brought it to him. The glass which contained it was almost full. He watched it with a greed in his gaze. "I'm thirsty," he said. Olivia was stirring the liquid in the glass with a spoon. But she now stopped, and looked down at the small table placed close beside the bed. " There is your ice," she answered. " I hate that horrid, slippery ice. It doesn't quench my thirst ; it only aggravates it by leaving those little drops of water in my mouth when I don't want drops of water at all when I want a whole glassful, like that you have in your hand." " This ! " exclaimed Olivia, starting, while both the doctor's and Martha's words came back to her. "Why, this is deadly poison." " And you're going to give it to me ! " he said grimly, as she stooped down toward him with a tea- spoonful of it. " Only .a small dose at a time," she answered. " It is aconite, you know." 434 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. He let her place the spoon between his lips. "I didn't know," he muttered, " and I don't much care." Immediately after he had taken the medicine he uttered a little sound of exasperation, and as she looked inquiringly into his face she saw that he was again staring into her own. " Don't be too sure," he began in a voice as husky as it was meaning. "Too sure?" she repeated. "Yes. That I am going to die this time. Per- haps I'm not. Remember how I fooled you once before. Threatened men, you know .... Don't be too sure, that's all." Olivia repressed a shudder. "It is all in God's hands," she said. " God's hands," he grumbled; "yes. When medi- cine goes out of the sick room by one door, religion's invited to come in by the other. ... I wish you'd turn that light down lower. It keeps me from sleep- ing. I believe it's that ; it must be that." Olivia at once obeyed him, turning the lamp down until it made but a vague star in the moonlight as vague. Her hand trembled so while she performed this little task that but for the gloom he might easily have remarked the agitation he had produced in her. To have him read, like this, emotions that she had Bought to hide even from her own intelligence ! There was a kind of crucial wizardry in it that made her want to fly from the chamber where he lay. She knew that his belief as to his not sleeping was wholly a de- lusion, and that he would soon have dropped into another slumber like that from which he had lately awakened. Slipping from his room, she gained the OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 435 one adjoining it. Here the moonlight was much am- pler of volume, and a great silvery medallion, wrought by it, lay upon the carpet. She had a calmer sensa- tion, somehow as soon as she was in this other apart- ment. . . . Why had he taunted her with those last words of his, that had pierced like one of the sharpest shafts which conscience itself can forge ? She had been anticipating his death. She could not help doing so. But if by any preventive act she could possibly keep him alive, would she not perform such act with all willingness and promptitude ? A wave of new nervous dread swept over her as she reflected upon what he had just said. This extra- ordinary fondness of his, which appeared to borrow its modes of exhibition from antipathy rather than affec- tion, might perpetuate itself through many future years. And if it did, how hateful must be her lot! Men with his vitality lived sometimes until ninety, and past that age. And she, if this prolongation of his life occurred, would still be young by contrast with his afflicting, bui'dening decrepitude. What fresh funds of patience and self-control must she draw upon to meet the continuance of all this martyrizing bondship? Where and from whom should she seek the needful fortitude ? In the sore straits of weariness, exhaustion, disgust, whence to draw added courage? A quette portef rapper ? Suddenly, after perhaps five good minutes had passed, while she stood there in the moonlight, terri- fied at the potential future that had piled its masses of gloom before her mental vision, she recollected some- thing, and a sharp little gasp left her lips. She had omitted to replace the glass of aconite upon 436 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. the mantel. It was there, now, on the table at her husband's bedside ! She flew to the threshold of the doorway that led into his room. And then, almost as abruptly as if some palpable hand had set upon her its detaining con- tact, she paused. Paused. . . but why? She knew, and yet her brain had begun to whirl in a chaotic way. Why did she not go to him and take the glass of poison from where he could so easily reach it ? She kept asking herself this question, dumbly, insistently, and yet . . she still remained immovable. With a frightful panoramic vividness, occurrence after occurrence of her past life had begun to rush before hej* inward vision. She saw herself at the pen- sion, beset again and again by those malign attacks of evil tendency at which her father had afterwards laughed so lightly but of whose pregnant meaning she was herself far better aware than he. Bursts of mis- chief as they had been, they had preluded that larger temptation, that more momentous fall, which had made her the wife of Spencer Delaplaine. And now ? She had only to leave the glass there a little longer. If he drank o'f it she would not be giv- ing him to drink of it. He might reach out his hand, and lift it to his lips, in the craving of his thirst. It Avould kill him, no doubt, before they could get the doctor to his bedside. . . Well; and if it did kill him? " Wait here just a few more minutes," a voice had begun piercingly to whisper. "You've a right to wait here if you chose. And should he reach out for that glass and drink what it contains, imagining this to be water, how should such an act at all incriminate you? OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 437 The chances are that he will not drink ; for he does not even know that the glass is there. How should he know ? He asked you to make the room darker, and you did so. He has most probably fallen into another doze. . . Still, wait here a little while longer. You have a perfect right to do so. Wait. There; the time is passing on, on, even now. Before you fairly know it, fifteen, twenty minutes will have elapsed. So much may happen in fifteen or twenty minutes." Olivia's eyes, all this time, were riveted upon the window through which the misty silver of the moon was passing. She "lived through many a new moon before the beams of it had become to her anything else than a ghastly reminder of that fateful interval. The lawns went sloping off into nebulous dreams of their own spaciousness; and, beyond, glittered the huge river. It had the sparkle of diamonds, of wealth ; it was shaped like a curving sword as it lay along the shadowed lands, and a sword symbolled power. But though power was good , liberty was more what Olivia longed for. Perhaps the contour of the sword meant that too the severance of bonds that were both an agony and a horror! These wholly idle fancies, rush- ing with gloomier and weightier thoughts through her brain, as light foam-wreaths will cling to dark throngs of on-rolling surges and be borne whither they hurry, came back to Olivia with a fearful definiteness during after reflections. She did not turn from the sophistries of that voice. She let it speak still further ; she listened to it. Her heart had got beating so violently that its strokes sounded like hammer-blows in her ears. She realized 438 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. that this baneful force, though a mere pranksome imp of old, had grown a devil now, and had silently but jeeringly challenged her to wrestle with him and over- come him. What a contrast between this demon and that of her girlhood ! What a contrast, and yet how traceable, how authentic a similarity ! But a full conception of her own resistant power at last broke upon Olivia. She sprang aloof, as it were, from the sorcery of temptation enmeshing her. She spoke to her own soul in that clarion way which it cannot but hear. Truth itself seemed to leap up her ally, and to help her destoy this enslaving spell, as the breeze might help a taintless flower to shake from its petals the brackish water that some fro ward chance had spilled upon it. " Free ? " she faintly sobbed to herself, recollecting the fancy that the sword -sh aped glory of the river had given her. "I am free now! Thank God for saving me ! " But abruptly a new thought darted through her mind. A certain length of time had intervened be- tween the beginning of that miserable struggle and the present moment. How long had it been ? Say ten, twelve, even twenty minutes. What if ? But she would not let herself think the thought out. She sped through the little passage-way leading into her husband's room. It was just as dim as she had left it. She stood with her foot on the threshold, listening. At first she told herself that she could hear him breathe with the regularity of one who sleeps tran- quilly. But soon she had become otherwise convinced ; he was breathing in an odd and very uncertain way. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 439 And then, making her strained nerves tingle, he gave, without any warning, a heavy and most painful groan. Olivia hurried to the lamp and turned it up. Then her glance shot toward the little table at the side of the bed. The glass was there, but it was empty. She would not believe her own senses at first. She went nearer to the table and peered down at the glass. Yes ! Empty ! Still clinging to a last frail hope that her eyesight had tricked her, she raised the glass in her hand. But it fell from her effete fingers to the floor. She did not attempt to pick it up, or even to ascer- tain whether it had been broken or no. She had turned her look upon her husband's face. He had closed his eyes, and lay upon his back. He appeared to be quite unconscious. She leaned over him and grasped his shoulder, slightly shaking his form once or twice. He seemed either in a state of sluggish coma, or else dead. Which was it? She rang the bell violently several times. Then she sank down on her knees at his bedside. Her face was hueless, her hands were clasped tightly together, her eyes were dilated, as though she were undergoing some intense physical torture. 440 OLIVIA UELAPLAINE. XXIV. AFTERWARD she felt as if she were in a dream as if .the servants who came hastening into the room were visionary shapes as if the voice with which she addressed them and that with which they answered her were heard through deadening folds of fog. The poison had begun speedily to work upon Delaplaine, as aconite nearly always does, and his sufferings became acute. He complained of a wretched giddiness, of a peculiar tingling in his arms and hands, of pain in the abdomen, of an almost asphyxiating heaviness about the heart. Then followed spasms of the most racking nausea, with other symptoms no less deplorable. Be- lieving that her husband would die, it was a relief to Olivia when he at length ceased staring at her and entirely lost consciousness. Until the arrival of the doctor she joined the servants in leaving scarcely an effort at restoration untried. From the first she had not hesitated to tell them, one and all, the cause of this unexpected attack. If she had failed to do so she would have seemed to herself like a veritable murder- ess concealing her crime. And, as it was, she had already told herself, with pangs of remorse which made her heart feel as if it were being cut in twain, that Delaplaine's death, if this really occurred, would be a result of those few minutes wherein she had so weakly, ignobly lingered and demurred. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 441 " Mr. Delaplaine must have drank his medicine," she said, " for I found the glass empty on returning to his room after being away from it only a little while." And then to her own soul she mutely added : " Though they arrest me and put me in prison as his assassin, I will speak the truth. God knows, if I did not do that I should then despise myself even more than now?" When the doctor at last came she told him in a clear and perfectly sustained manner just how her hus- band's illness had been brought about. "I may have been careless in leaving the glass of medicine on the table at his bedside," she finished, " but it could not have remained there more than twenty minutes at the utmost, and the room had been darkened through Mr. Delaplaine's desire, as he said that he wished to sleep and could not do so otherwise." " Mr. Delaplaine did not know that the medicine was on the table, I suppose," said the physician. He was watching, as he spoke, the few faint convulsions that of late had assailed the sick man. He had already concluded that there was no chance whatever of saving his patient's life ; the dose had been too heavy a one, and too much precious time had been lost before he had been enabled to reach Greenacre. " I think that he knew nothing of the medicine being there," answered Olivia. " I imagine that he gave this point no heed at all, however, and simply drank the first liquid that he could find." " Strange," murmured the doctor." "Do you consider it strange?" Olivia asked, with controlled voice and a self-possession that surprised her while she assumed it. 442 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. " Yes," came the reply. This country doctor was a quaint man, replete with bony angles, and having two dark, bluish streaks under his eyes that gave to his long, haggard face a look no less lugubrious than sin- cere. You had only to glance at him in order to see what a terribly serious matter with him was the rising of each day's sun, and also the going down thereof. He had instantly begun to blame himself for having left so large a dose of the deadly aconite in Dela- plaine's apartment, and for not having sufficiently warned those who surrounded the invalid concerning just how baneful a preparation it was. He was a person, this Dr. Matthew Gleason, who rather mor- bidly blamed himself a great deal for a great many things. " Yes," he now repeated. " If, as you say, the room was dark and no one was here to hand it to him, why, his taking it at all was certainly strange." The color flew to Olivia's cheeks. But for a brief period, at least, her sensations were not guilty ones. It gave her, indeed, a certain hectic gladness to speak the next words, which fell from her lips with a little accent of indignation : " No one could have been here to hand it to him. I hardly understand your meaning, Dr. Gleason. One would suppose " But the doctor did not hear her. He was bending over Delaplaine, in whom the first struggles of death were beginning. Assiduously, spurred by an energy that seemed determined to leave no conceivable re- source unused, this sombre man worked on and on, for an hour or more, with remedy and antidote. But at length he failed, as he had been almost convinced OLIVIA DELAPLAISH. 443 beforehand that he must fail. Perhaps the anticipation of how much he was hereafter to have on his brooding and sensitive conscience through the dreary and lonely nights of the coming winter, stimulated him now into making the prospective burden as light as possible. The sultry summer dawn was just breaking when Spencer Delaplaine died. He had been breathing al- most imperceptibly for some little while, when with- out a hint of premonition his frame was disturbed by two or three light, swift shivers. Dr. Gleason stooped down, with a ducking gesture whose infinite awkwardness could not escape Olivia, notwithstanding her perturbed state. He placed one of his large ears just below the left breast of the pros- trate man, and appeared for several minutes to be listening intently. When he raised his head, he at once turned toward Olivia. She silently bowed, wondering at her own thorough calmness. There was no mistaking the new o o gravity that had gathered upon the doctor's habitually mournful face. "Dead?" she murmured. "Yes," he answered below his breath, and she fancied that he shot at her, from his doleful eyes, a look of irrepressible reproach and accusation. . . . But she was mistaken here. In about half an hour Dr. Gleason had asked her to give him a few moments of private conversation. They went together into the room adjoining that where Delaplaine had lately ex- pired. The moonlight had given place to the dawn, and Dr. Gleason's countenance, illumined by the whitish glimmer that struck upon it, confronted Olivia with an unearthly ugliness. 444 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. "Is he going to charge me with having killed my husband?" she asked herself, as she stood before him in statue-like composure. But Dr. Gleason had not the remotest intention of playing any such grim part. On the contrary, he broke the silence by saying, with tones full of con- science-stricken disarray : "Mrs. Delaplaine, this unhappy accident has oc- curred, and and it must (I feel sure that it must) reflect very unfortunately upon upon myself as a medical man. If possible, I would endeavor to have the real facts hidden. But that cannot be. Too many people are already acquainted with them. . . . As for my culpability, I I don't know just how other physicians those who practice in the great centres like New York will regard my my share in the mistake. There is no doubt that I might have left a smaller portion of the dilution. But as it was, I gave clear warning in the matter of its noxious quality. And just now I am hard-worked in the village. It has been an unhealthy summer. I feared lest I might not reach Mr. Delaplaine again until to-morrow I should say this afternoon. And therefore I acted as seemed to me most wise and prudent. But I have apparently committed a a most grievous professional error. I acknowledge this ; I feel that it is my duty to make such acknowledgment, both before you and " But here Olivia broke in. "I cannot see where your error lies," she said. "Blame, if there is any blame, should belong to those with whom you left the dangerous drug, after having so explicitly warned them." And now she rested one hand upon Dr. OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 445 Gleason's big, angular arm. " I shall tell everybody," she went on, "that you deserve the fullest exonera- tion." Her voice almost failed her, for a few seconds, and then she again continued, with a fresh repose and serenity: "I shall tell everybody I promise you this most faithfully that my husband's death has been due to my own neglect in leaving that glass of aconite near him, even for the short space of time that I did so leave it." Dr. Gleason stretched forth one of his large-knuckled hands and clasped one of her own with it. " Oil, Mrs Delaplaine, I thank you ! I thank you so much! You you haven't just taken the load from my mind, but you've you've eased me wonder- fully!" . . . Olivia kept her word. From the morrow, as might be said, she faced the whole world unflinchingly with the truth. Or, if not the real truth, with enough of it to make everybody believe that she had kept nothing in reserve. The former gossip concerning her pecu- liar marriage was now revived, and perhaps a few cruel things were said in connection with that and the almost equally peculiar manner of her husband's death. But these comments were spared Olivia. And, yet, for that matter, she heai'd them in imagi- nation ; for this was a period of her life when those receptivities that mean in us the dealing of deep and incessant wounds were with Olivia most briskly opera- tive. Night followed night, after Delaplaine's death, and not an instant of sleep came to her. It was the sort of insomnia that has no briefer moods of mercy. "I shall go mad," she had begun to gasp in the dead night-watches, sitting up in bed and hearing the clock 446 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. tick and the very darkness itself seem to flow about her in whirls and counter-currents. But she had the vigor of youth, as yet, for this vampire of distempers to draw upon. An increased pallor was the sole change in her that, during several days, any of those whom circumstances called upon most closely to observe her remarked. Meanwhile Delaplaine's body had been brought to West Tenth Street, and his funeral had been held at Grace Church with that preponderance of black coats which invariably will mark such ceremonials when they take place in the middle of the summer season. The Auchinclosses had felt it their "duty" to come into town, notwithstanding the extreme discomfort of the heat, but the Satterthwaites had remained at Newport and written Olivia a note of "condolence." That is, Emmeline (who had secret misgivings lest her future wedding-present, when she married Arthur Plunkett in the autumn, might suffer as to size and general expensiveness) volunteered to represent her family by the composition of such a note. She began it with a yawn and ended it with one. " Oh, dear," she said, after two sheets of her mourning-rimmed paper had been covered, " what monstrous fibs I have told ! The idea of alluding to Olivia's ' painful affliction,' when we all know, and she knows we all know, that if she has any feeling at all regarding the affair, it must be one of pure delight." " Delight ?" echoed her sister, Elaine, lazily. "Oh, Em ! isn't that too strong ? " " Not a bit," returned Emmeline, " provided his Will is found to leave her everything." " It has somehow got around," said Elaine, with a OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 447 note of conviction in her voice, " that he has left her very little. They say he got to perfectly detest her for some time before he died. How horrible if he left her poor/" "Oh, d<m?t! n remonstrated Emmeline, as if the possibility were too harrowing a one for serious con- templation. But Spencer Delaplaine left his wife all his very large property, without reservation or stipulation of any sort. Olivia was keenly surprised when she learned this fact ; she had expected (when thinking at all on the subject) a legacy as great as the law itself apportioned her and not a dime greater. She was now an exceedingly rich young widow ; but during those days of feverish inward turmoil and outward tranquil- lity, she found herself constantly forgetting that this was the case. The lawyers, .however, soon began most pertina- ciously to remind her of it. " I guess, 'Livia, they'll worry an' pester you a good deal 'fore you're through with 'em," said Mrs. Ottarson, who was sitting with her one day, and whom Olivia liked to have at the West Tenth Street house as often as that lady could spare the time for coming. " There would be no worriment at all, Aunt Thyrza," she replied, "if if . . . ." She paused, and lifted her hands to her eyes, rubbing them almost as a sleepy child might do. " Well," she finished, with a little laugh as faint as it was discordant, "if I were only feeling more . . . more as I used to feel, some- how." The last words were spoken with the saddest of tremors, and then a forced brightening of demeanor followed them. 448 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. Mrs. Ottarson gave a little start, and afterward let her black eyes dwell very fixedly indeed upon Olivia, while the latter bent her head over a legal document which the servant had recently handed her. Presently Mrs. Ottarson rose from her chair. Olivia did not seem to be aware that she had done so until the lady's hand touched her shoulder. "'Livia?" "Well, aunt?" " Look here, 'Livia." Down sat Mrs. Ottarson, after that, and close to her niece's side. She caught one of Olivia's hands and held it pressed tight in her own. "Now, 'Livia," she recommenced, "I want you jus' t' look right straight at me. No droppin' your eyes like that, deary : I ain't 'fraid t' meet your eyes .... There; that's it. ... Now, 'Livia, you're jus' mis'ra- ble! I've seen it ever since you sent for me t' come here. I've watched you pretty smart, too, all the while we've been t'gether, an' I'm ready to swear somethin' 's half settin' you crazy." " Oh, no, Aunt Thyrza . . ." "Oh, yes. Aunt Thyrzy! Come, now, you can't fool me like that. I will jus' know w'at 't is. Out with it, now, 'Livia. I ain't to be bluffed off." "I I sleep badly," murmured Olivia. She had lifted her eyes but now she had again drooped them. "The truth is, if you will know, that I I don't sleep at all" "Don't sleep at all?" She shook her head. "I haven't had a minute's sleep, since " " I understand. Since that night. You're worryin* OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 449 'bout his drinkin' that med'cine. 'S if you could a helped it ! " " I could have helped it." She whispered the words. Mrs. Ottarson barely caught them. " Could ? " she repeated. . . . And then the color died quite out of her olive cheeks. " 'Livia, you don't mean w'at you're sayin' ! No, you don't!" Suddenly lowering her tones, she pursued: "Watever you do mean, tell me! Don't be 'fraid. Tell me/" She dropped Olivia's hand. She put forth both arms and threw them round her companion's form, through which shivers had begun to pass in quick, alarming succession. "I will tell you," Olivia cried, while her head fell upon her aunt's shoulder. "I will tell you, though you should hate and loathe me after you've heard ! " Then her voice fell almost to a whisper. "I I left the medicine there by mistake. He wanted the lamp turned down, and I tui-ned it. All that is true. Everything you've heard me say is true. But . . . there is something else." " Something else ? Well, what ? " " This ! " she answered, in a choked, hoarse way. And now for perhaps five minutes, with her head still on Mrs. Ottarson's shoulder, she spoke, agitatedly, brokenly, but not once with the least sign of tears. Her ending sentence was : " There, I have con- fessed to you just what a guilty creature I am, and how little sympathy I deserve from any living fellow-creature except those as much steeped in sin as myself!" For a few seconds there was no response to this 450 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. hopelessly mournful outburst. Then Olivia felt her aunt's arms tightening about her frame. " You great goose ! " exclaimed Mrs. Ottarson. " 'Xcuse me, 'Livia, but I can't help it ! W'y w'at on earth did you do? You jus' stood there in that dark room, an' had a few evil thoughts. Who mightn't a had 'em, if they'd been through all you'd been through ? An' then you conquered 'em, as you was certain to conquer 'em, an' rushed in t' where he was layin'. My! isfctoall?" Olivia raised her head, and stared supplicatingly, childishly, passionately, at the speaker. "Oh, Aunt Thyrza, are you in earnest? Don't deceive me! It means so much to me if you think if you really think that I. . . " She could say no more, and just as her lips were trembling incapably her aunt placed a heavy and hearty kiss upon them. "Who's dreampt o' deceivin' you, Livvy? W'y it's all sheer nonsense f you to go on so 'bout nothin' 't all. Ev'rybody has spells o' badness like that. It's the way the devil tries to catch his own, I s'pose. Gracious! I've had 'em fifty times. An' la snkes alives, what did you do, after all ? 'Livia, 'f you really felt well you wouldn't care a snap for such rubbishy fancies. . . . You ain't well, an' you mus' see a doctor. . . . I'm glad you're cryin' ; 't will do you good. 'T ain't the first time, is it, Liv, you've cried on this old shoulder o' mine ? " Olivia's tears came in a tempest. Perhaps they saved her reason. That night she slept profoundly, and far on into the next morning. Physically she was well enough afterward. But nevertheless a certain OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 451 reaction succeeded the supreme burst of thankfulness and exultation which Mrs. Ottarson's comforting words had invoked. Olivia soon found herself looking at her own behavior in what she could not but assure her own moral sense was the properly judicial light. She had been so far from actually causing the death of her husband that to accuse herself of having played such a hideous part was clear absurdity. Her temptation- had amounted to this : She had remained passive for a certain number of minutes when passivity might have meant fatal neglect of duty. She had resisted the impulse to continue away from Delaplaine's bed- side stoutly and successfully resisted it. But success had not come until a certain time had gone; and during that time the death-dealing potion had been lifted to the invalid's lips. Had she staid near him, she, his voluntary nurse had she been a sentinel at her post and not one who did worse than to desert it she might easily enough have saved his life. " It all lies there," Olivia afterward ruminated : "in the fact that I allowed those minutes to pass before I had put that hateful feeling away from me ! I shall never pardon myself for that hesitation. I shall never cease to blame myself because of it. I shall always think of myself as different from the fellow-creatures whom I daily meet and talk with. Even though I may not have committed a positive crime, the shadow of one has fallen upon me. Amid that shadow my spirit must dwell, alone and apart, from now until I die." In the second or third week of the autumn following Delaplaine's death, Jasper Massereene called upon Olivia. She had heard that he had been in Newport 452 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. all cummer, and had dreaded lest he should present himself in West Tenth Street on his return. For it belonged to the gloom of that "shadow" in which through the rest of her days she must be bathed, not to permit any but terms of the most distant future acquaintanceship between herself and Massereene. But for once, at least, she resolved to see him. Thereafter she would avoid doing so as far as lay in her power. She had silently rehearsed their meeting a hundred times, but when it took the guise of reality it was so diametrically different from what she had expected ! They shook hands with the most ordinary kind of collectedness on both sides. They fell to talking of Newport in tones and terms that might have been employed by two persons without a single true common interest. " They tell me it is a very delightful place," Olivia said. " Oh, very. You have never been there ? " "No. . . . Were you quite gay while there?" " Not gay at all. I did not see many people. I had pleasant rooms, and I read a good deal, drove or rode a good deal, and occasionally dined with friends, though not oftener than twice a week." "You selected a rather fashionable spot to be quiet in." " That, I found, is the charm of Newport. You can be as retired in the midst of all the merrymaking as though you were a hundred miles off." He hesitated, and looked with a sudden meaning animation at Olivia. In an instant, as it were, she realized that her ordeal had begun. " Besides," he added, " I had no choice for amuse- OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 453 ment no choice and no heart. You may perhaps guess why." " I may guess ? " she asked, making her voice neutral, except for its faint, conventional shading of surprise. He ignored this composed answer, " I came in town for . . . the funeral," he said. " I wanted to call upon you afterward, but thought it best not to do so. I suppose that was the wiser plan ; was it not? " I was quite unwell for some time afterward," she said. " Naturally. The shock must have affected you." "It did." "But you have recovered by this, I hope." Oh, yes." There was a silence. She felt rather than saw his eyes restlessly sweep her face. "May I say to you," he began, " that I trust my coming this afternoon has not been at all ... inopportune ? " She bit her lips. " Inopportune ? " she repeated. He made an impatient gesture, and leaned nearer toward her. " You are receiving me with a terrible coldness," he exclaimed. " What have I done to de- serve it ? " "You have done nothing; you are always blame- less," Olivia answered, with a little defiant, hollow, embarrassed laugh that she immediately regretted. " It is I," she added, with a less artificial air and just the hint of a break in her voice, " I who continually am making myself culpable." " You imagine that you are," he said, with an in- stant kindness. " Surely you had done nothing, in former days, to feel so grievously guilty about ; it had all been done to you. And yet you dwelt in a perpet- 454 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. ual atmosphere of self-arraignment . . . And now well, I have not caught even a rumor of what your true spirits are, but I will engage they are dark with remorse and repentance." He had ended smilingly, but she almost snatched the words from his lips, while her face was whitening. " Remorse repentance ? " she cried. " What do you mean? Why why should I feel either?" "You look as if you might have been a sufferer from both," said Massereene, shaking his head while the smile deepened on his lips. " Ah, I was sure of it ! That mistake about the medicine would, I knew, plunge you in agonies of contrition. You cannot forgive yourself. You are not just sure how it happens that your fault is so black, but you are no less confident of its blackness." His playful satire, so completely unsuspicious of the real truth, had by this time become apparent to his listener. He had thought manifold thoughts regard- ing Olivia Delaplaine since their separation, and among these could conspicuously be placed the deduction that she was the victim of an excessively tender conscience. In referring to the matter of the draught of aconite, he merely mentioned what had of course become a theme for current discussion during at least two or three weeks after Delaplaine's death. Olivia felt that he was indeed carelessly laying his hands upon wounds which the least rough touch might make betrayingly bleed. She managed to speak with a fair amount of quietude as she said : " I suppose that the story of the medicine got about everywhere. . . . Did they say ill-natured things of mo?" OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 455 "None that I heard." He laughed. "What could they say except the merest Mtises ? " " Even those are waspish, now and then ; they carry stings." "Only for very sensitive persons. . . . But you have a right to be sensitive to have a hundred trifles 'give you some nerves,' as I once heard a Frenchman say while he floundered in English. You have been through untold trials. But now all that is past. Your liberty has come again. You are still younger than many a girl who has not yet thought much about marriage. Everything should point to your perfect happiness, and no one hopes for it with greater sincerity than I do ! " He was the Massereene of old to her while he thus spoke; she surrendered herself to the rich sweetness of his voice and let herself enjoy the candid sparkle of his gaze. . . . Then, abruptly, came the chilling rec- ollection of that " set gray life and apathetic end " with which she had resolved that her future should be unalterably associated. "I thank you," she said, in tones grave enough thoroughly to suit the mourning attire which he had expected to see her wear, and yet which had seemed to keep her unduly removed from him ever since they had met this afternoon. " I begin to think there is no such thing as happiness in the sense you evidently mean. But I hope to secure the contentment that comes of charitable work toward my fellow-creatures. In this way I shall achieve that self-forgetfulness which is, after all, perhaps, the one most desirable aim. . . . My life is to be a busy and yet a very quiet one. I shall quite give up the world. Poor 456 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. dear Aunt Thyrza will be about the only friend whom I shall retain though for that matter, I was without friends here when I came back from Europe for the last time, and " "You have made none since! " broke in Massereene. His brow had clouded botli perplexedly and angrily. ".Tam doubtless not your friend! You wish to toss me aside you have done with me ! " "I I did not say that," answered Olivia, sitting pale before him, with drooped eyes. He sprang to his feet. " But you meant it you wanted to convey that meaning. You came down to meet ine with the fixed intention of sending me away from you, if you could do so in a peaceable way, for- ever. . . . You, at your age, and after the dog's life that Delaplaine led you, to talk of ' that self-forgetful- ness which is the one most desirable aim.' Good heavens, woman ! you have your life to live, health- fully and sensibly ! No one objects to your being as charitable as you please. Give thousands to the poor, if you like. But an ascetic you ! The very idea is preposterous ! . . . There," he ended, half turning away, " I have incensed you ; I see it in your face." "You have not incensed me," Olivia replied. "But you have not changed my resolution of wholly forsak- ing the world or at least that part of it called society. I can't fully explain to you my determin- ation. But it exists it exists unchangeably ; and if you neither approve it nor respect it, you can still recognize its permanence." He turned his back upon her, and she saw him bow his head ; but in another minute he had faced her once OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 457 more ; and with tones through which vibrated an un- mistakable despair, he cried : " I love you ! I want you to be my wife ! " "No, no," she said, rising and moving away from him. But he hurried close to her, then. " I can't give you up like this I can't and I won't ! There is no reason why I should, unless you care nothing for me. Tell me on your word of honor that you do care nothing ! " " I I care for that other life," she faltered. " I do not mean that it shall be the life of an ascetic. But I am resolved to live it, and I have no other answer than this." " And this is no answer ! At least, it is none if you love me. When, before his death, you forbade me even to know you, and wrote me that most repelling of letters, I said to myself that I would bide my time that I would wait until that dead wall of circum- stance no longer lifted its hard, chill bulk between us. I have waited, and now you inflict upon me this cruel sorrow without the least rational cause ! " Olivia felt herself begin to tremble. She slipped toward the door, which chanced not to be far away. " I gave you no cause, in those other days," she said, " to believe that I ever meant to become your wife." " I thought then that you loved me. I think still that you love me. This should be cause enough, surely ! " " But if you were wrong ? " she asked, with a sort of haughty exasperation. "If you were wrong then, and if you are wrong now ? " He took several steps in her direction. His eyes 458 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. were glowing the eyes that she loved, that she had seen gazing at her through the mist of a hundred dreams, that had nearly always made her heart beat quicker if she had looked into them deeply or without warning. "I am not wrong, Olivia," he said. "Your soul tells you that. . . . Don't let any mad fancy, caprice, theory, come between us. The stars in their courses should be with two hearts that love as ours do." He stretched out his arms and opened them. For one swift instant she longed to bound toward him to lay her head on his breast to tell him everything to accept the forgiveness that he was certain of extending her, and to let such forgiveness stand in the place of what she would have called God's. But her longing died under the stress of another ; it was one that she held to be far holier and higher. She receded to the very threshold of the room, all the while looking straight at Massereene. " I hope," she said, without a quiver in her voice, "that we shall never see one another again on this earth. I hope it most earnestly, devoutly. I may write you I am not sure. But if I do not, take my good-bye now and here." Then she saw his face through her rushing tears, and as it seemed to come nearer, she turned, hastening from the room. " Olivia ! " she heard him cry. . . . For days after- ward that sound echoed through her reveries, and now and then she would tell herself that it must so echo until the one last silence made it forever cease. But for two or three hours after disappearing from OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 459 the presence of Massereene, she remained in the most supplicatory and entranced mood of prayer. She poured forth thanks to God for having enabled her to resist the happiness offered her in place of that life- long expiation by which she could at least partially annul the atrocity of her sin. She prayed for strength, hereafter to discipline every desire which bore upon self-gratification ; and having thus prayed for strength, she arose, like the majority of those whom an ecstasy of personal prostration and abasement has intoxicated, believing that she was already vastly stronger. But she met with no further temptation from Jas- per Massereene. In about three weeks' time she learned through the Satterthwaites that he contem- plated recrossing the ocean . . . Spencer Delaplaine's will had required that his widow's share of the banking-business should, as soon as possible, become completely null. Her for- tune was to be withdrawn from the house, and sub- sequently re-invested elsewhere. All such operations as these took time, and were attended with not a few legal complications as well. Olivia had many a prosy term of converse to undergo, and some of the proceed- ings explained to her were by no means as lucid after explanation as she might have wished. Suddenly, one day, the thought of Adrian Etherege flashed through her mind. How materially he could have aided her in the clearer understanding of these per- plexing details ! And why had she not remembered him before ? The truth was, she had absolutely forgotten him for weeks. " How ungrateful of me ! " she reflected. " And after he defended me so bravely at Greenacre 460 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. that evening ! He must have felt bitterly toward me all this time. No doubt he has been waiting for me to summon him. What harm can there be in my doing so at once?" Still, she feared the questions he might ask her regarding that fateful night. Massereene's reference to it had caused her many a memorial shudder. What if Adrian had refrained from seeking her again because he suspected her of greater guilt than that with which she already charged her own unhappy self? A few hours later one of the employees at the Bank a gentleman with whom she had already held more than a single rather wearisome parley presented himself at her house. After not a little hesitation, she made up her mind to inquire concerning Adrian. "Etherege?" was the reply. "Oh, we have not seen him at the Bank for certainly six weeks. They say he is quite ill. I don't know what the trouble is. We have paid him his salary as usual. Once or twice his mother a tall, solemn-faced, elderly lady has appeared and received the money in pei-son. I myself had no conversation with her, but I believe she said her son was seriously ill with a fever. Several of the clerks called at Etherege's house, but I don't think any of them succeeded in seeing him. Mrs. Etherege always received the visitors, if I am not mistaken, and gave them the same answer that ,her son was too ill to have any one enter his room. . . . I've no idea how his sickness will terminate, but it is beginning to be whispered, down at the Bank, that he is in a very dangerous condition. You knew him well, I suppose, Mrs. Delaplaine, when your hus- band was alive?" OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 461 "Yes," Olivia said. "I knew him very well. His illness is a great surprise to me and a shock also. Can you give me his address?" "I can have it sent to you," came the answer. " Please do so, then, immediately." On the following day Olivia received the address. It was considerably up-town, in one of the easterly side-streets, not far from Second Avenue. That after- noon she had herself driven there in her own private carnage. She felt convinced that the woman whom she would now most probably meet was the same whom she had seen for a brief minute or two at the head of the stair- way on a certain afternoon, not very long ago, while Delaplaine's curt words of dismissal had rung out with such astonishing harshness. And this woman the mother of Adrian had no doubt once been the mistress of Delaplaine. All indications, as presented by Adrian himself, had tended toward such a belief on Olivia's part. It was not pleasant to seek her friend with the prospect of being accosted by Mrs. Etherege at the very outset of the search. Still, the gloomy character of the tidings Olivia had heard left her no alternative. In the way of sacrificing her own inclinations or prejudices, much more than she now contemplated doing would have cheerfully enough been undertaken by her for reasons like the present, The house at which her carriage finally drew up was one of those small, third-rate red-brick buildings that contribute so multitudmously toward the re< nowned ugliness of the metropolis. Here dwelt Mrs. Etherege, renting the house and sub-renting all floors of it but one. This was the first, or " parlor " floor, 462 OLIVIA DELAPLA1NE. and in its front apartment she received Olivia, amid surroundings of a shabby-genteel quality. Effects here and there suggested the taste or influence of Adrian ; but the ensemble was in the main both dreary and threadbare. Mrs. Etherege looked indisputably the first if not the last. Olivia recognized her at once. And the solemn lines on her worn face did not grow a grade more cheerful after she had been told her visitor's name. Indeed, Olivia noticed the lines about her mouth tighten ominously as she said : "You called, ma'am, to inquire about my son ? " "I called to see him, if I could. I hope he is well enough to see me. I " " He never sees anybody," was the interruption, hard as a blow. "I am very sorry," said Olivia, sweetly. "Is he then so exceedingly ill ? " "Yes. He's pretty sick." "Dangerously, do you mean?" " Yes." "Will you let me ask you what his trouble is? " - Mrs. Etherege did not seem at all disposed to tell. She was occupying a straight-backed chair in front of the easier one into which Olivia had sunk. She had drooped her eyes and was scanning the carpet with them. It appeared quite possible to Olivia that she might raise them any minute, and show them glitter- ing with most inhospitable beams. It was evident that the woman did not like her boldness in coming / thither, but also that she had motives for not making this disapproval too palpable. Meanwhile, notwith- standing the grimness and bleakness of her visage, OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 463 Olivia could detect in it a strong though covert resem- o o blance to Adrian's ; one might almost have said that its beauty had become insultingly flouted by trouble and disappointment two as malevolent vitriol- throwers, in their way, as any that ever prowled. " He's affected strangely," she at length said, raising her eyes. "He had typhoid. But that's gone now, and he's . . . well, he's very weak." All expression of animosity died on a sudden from her face, and one of excessive worriment succeeded it. " I'm very often afraid he's going crazy ! " she exclaimed. " Ah ! how dreadful ! " Olivia cried. " But perhaps it's only the result of the fever. It may wear off when he gets back his physical strength. Such cases are happening all the time." Nothing could have sounded more spontaneous, more sympathetic, than these words of the visitor's, uttered in her dulcet voice and with softly sparkling eyes. They perceptibly softened Mrs. Etherege, who gazed long and earnestly at her companion, and then said : "Adrian's mind is in a very curious state. He lies without speaking, for hours. Then he'll begin to murmur to himself in a most incoherent manner. It seems as if he were hiding something from me some- thing that he's heard or done in former days and yet as if this were preying so on his mind that he must sooner or later disclose it. ... He's often spoken of you, ma'am. . . ." " Of me ! " exclaimed Olivia, a pang of self-reproach passing through her heart. "... And I must acknowledge that lately," pur- sued Mrs. Etherege, as if she had made up her mind 464 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. to have it all out while her own propitious mood lasted, " he's been begging that I would send for you." "And why did you not? " Mrs. Etherege began to gnaw her lips. "Well," she said, " there were reasons. Mr. Delaplaine, as you know, was very good to Adrian. For quite a while he almost adopted him. There was nothing very re- markable in his doing so. Adrian was a handsome boy, and I ... er ... I was a relation of Mr. Dela- plaine's. I don't know if he has ever mentioned this fact to you or not." "No," said Olivia, "my husband never mentioned it to me. At least, not that I recollect." She had become somehow most promptly convinced that Mrs. Etherege's latter statement was a premeditated false- hood. All in all, however, she was rather glad that this coolly audacious way had been adopted of dealing with the whole awkward and unsavory subject. If Adrian's mother had ever sought to convince Dela- plaine that he was the father of her son, she must sig- nally have failed after the lad reached any appreciable age, since he bore no vaguest trace of such fatherhood. Whatever Delaplaine had subsequently done for Adrian must either have been prompted by some lingering shadow of sentiment for his mother (which, as Olivia had seen, that lady was inclined too daringly to count upon), or by the mingled comeliness and capability which the boy himself presented. "Yes, oh, yes," proceeded Mrs. Etherege, with a slow, decisive nod at Olivia. "I'm surprised he didn't speak of the relationship. Adrian knew nothing about it ; I never told him." Here she coughed, as though to give herself time for fresh OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 4G5 inventions. " I thought he might refer to it on some occasion when Mr. Delaplaine was not in the best of humors you understand ? " "Yes," acceded Olivia mechanically. She thought she understood very well indeed. " Now I was more than astonished," went on Mrs. Etherege, " I was grieved when I heard that Mr. Dela- plaine had not even remembered me by as much as a small legacy." She paused, and drew a long breath, and Olivia wondered whether, during these few min- utes of intercourse, she could not read her character somewhat clearly. Was she not a woman who had started life on a large stock of good looks and a mod- erate amount of principle, and who, having found the resources of both insufficient to keep her prosperously afloat, had luixed herself up in a hundred petty dupli- cities, remaining now, at a rather advanced age, wholly dissatisfied with the successful diplomacy of any ? " If, as you tell me, you are a relation of Mr. Dela- plaine's," Olivia at once answered, " I shall be glad to make some amends for my husband's neglect." She said this, thinking of Adrian, and hoping that she could thus turn a little golden key in the doorway of obstruction between himself and her. Mrs. Etherege smiled, and the smile seemed to as- tonish her sombre, fade face; you might have fancied that certain little muscles used in the process had grown stiff from lack of exercise. "Oh, thank you, ma'am thank you very much. We're not in the best of circumstances, and one or two of my boarders think of leaving me. If Adrian's sal- ary at the Bank should be stopped, it would be very hard on us. The truth is, as I can tell you^ my up- 466 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. stairs drainage isn't what it ought to be, and people don't stay with me long, even if they come. But I've a three-years' lease of the house, so I tmist stay here and try to make both ends meet." "Well," said Olivia, smiling, "I will help you to do that. Trust me." She was anxious to see Adrian at once, and would have made almost any kind of prom- ise, just then, in order to secure his mother's good wilt " It was because I felt so hurt about Mr. Delaplaine's forgetting me altogether," now pursued this lady, "that I well, I didn't think it was best to send for you, no matter how hard Adrian begged." "And he did beg hard?" exclaimed Olivia. "Ah, I hope you would have relented soon and sent for me!" "Well, I dare say I would," she replied, looking down with an uneasy roll of the eyeball ; and her hearer almost concluded that she would have been cruel enough to delay the summons perhaps many days. But Olivia now made an eager request to see Adrian. Mrs. Etherege presently rose and left the room, after saying that she would ascertain if such a plan were feasible. Her return was awaited most impatiently. But not until twenty good minutes afterward did she again appear. "He is very weak to-day," she said. " I had to tell him in the most cautious way that you were here." "And it gratified him to know?" asked Olivia. "It shocked him. He's in a state when so little will shock him. But he seems very glad now. He is waiting to see you with a kind of new look in his OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 467 face. . . . Please do not let him excite himself any more than you can help." " I will do my utmost to soothe, to quiet him," Olivia answered. " Very well. He wants me to leave you alone with him for a half arr hour. . . . That is rather a long time, considering how ill he is. ... But I shall be within call, if you should want me. It's only two rocms off. Will you come with me now?" Olivia rose, following Mrs. Etherege. Very soon, after that, she was standing in a neat, plainly-appointed room, near the bedside of Adrian. 468 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. XXV. His face, as she cast her eyes upon it, sent a thrill of horror through her nerves. Its beauty of contour and proportion was not so altered that she could not recognize it at once ; and yet the change, the pallor, the attenuation ! . . . Olivia did her best to conceal a visible tremor, and succeeded. She went nearer to the bed and took the hand that Adrian stretched out to her. Its clasp was burningly feverish. His exqui- site brown eyes seemed to devour her face as she paused close beside him. "Leave me here with Mrs. Delaplaine, mother," he said, suddenly making this appeal. " Remember your agreement." " Yes, Adrian," was the reply. Without another word Mrs. Etherege passed from the room. There was a chair quite near Olivia. She took it, and then, amid the silence that ensued after Adrian's mother had departed, she said, with her voice full of the tenderest solicitude : "I had no idea until yesterday that you were ill." "No?" he responded. His eyes dwelt upon hers as though some fascination compelled the searching intensity of their survey. " I wanted mother to send for you ; I wanted it so much ! But she kept putting me off. At length I made up my mind to do a certain thing, for I had lost all patience, and I suspected that she was deceiving me with false promises. If she did OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 469 not send for you this very day I had determined to give her a fright for she loves me, notwithstanding her tame and gloomy way of showing it." " A fright, Adrian ?" asked Olivia. " You mean ?" "I'd have told her the blunt truth that I'm dying, and that if she kept us apart any further length of time she would be merely hastening the end for me." "No, no, no," Olivia murmured. "You cannot mean that, Adrian ! " She laughed as cheerily as she could, though her heart had begun to beat in a sicken- ing way. " Yes, it is true. I made the doctor tell me yester- day. He is a clever man, Dr. Wallace ; he saw that I was in earnest, and that no prevarication would avail with me. Mother thinks that because my mind wanders, now and then, while I'm lying here as weak as a little child, it's my brain. But it is not. It's my heart. Dr. Wallace says so. Theie's no hope for me ; it's what they call an atrophy, a wasting away. It followed the fever; I had typhoid, you know, for months. . . . Isn't it strange that I should die from that? a heart that is starving ! I used to feel as if my heart were starving when I looked at you in those other days." " Oh, Adrian ! " Olivia faltered, drooping her head. " I did. But all that is past, now. I had resolved not to speak of it when you came. You knew that I loved you. It was torture for me to see him treat you as he did. I shall never forget that last evening at dinner. When I left you, a little later, after you had fainted, you believed (did you not?) that I had left for town?" " Yes." 470 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. "It was not true. I staid in the village all the next day. The next night I went back to Greenacre. My thoughts all day had been horrible. It seemed to me at times as if your very life were in peril from him. As I said, the next night I went back to Greenacre." He appeared purposely to emphasize that last iter- ated sentence. He spoke in a low voice almost too low for his mother, if she had chosen the part of eaves- dropper, to have heard him. Speaking doubtless fa- tigued him, and at times a glassy light would replace the richer and sweeter lustre of his eyes. He was too sick a man to talk as much as this. Olivia was about to tell him so, and gently bid him to exert himself less, when his repetition of those words, " the next night I went back to Greenacre," somehow made her forget her designed injunction. "Do you mean that you went there and asked for me?" she inquired. Adrian closed his eyes for a moment, and a smile of the most ironical sadness broke from his lips and slowly faded there. "No; I did not ask for you. I asked for no one, It was some time after dark. The night was very warm, as you perhaps remember." " I do remember," Olivia said, with a slight inward thrill. " The front doors were open ; the light from the hall shone out across the piazza upon the lawn, where jt joined the full, splendid moonlight. I did not know of Delaplaine's illness, but I felt sure I would not encounter him, as a closer view of the piazza told me he was not there, and I had observed that since his state had become so enfeebled he moved about very OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 471 little. But I believed that I might see you, and I wanted very much to see you. I had been racked by the most forcible pity for you. I longed to press your hand in farewell, and assure you that if you needed my presence hereafter you had only to telegraph me and I would obey the call without an instant of delay. . . . All looked lonely and deserted as I ascended the piazza. If I had met a servant I would have sent a message to you. But even after passing into the hall I met no one whatever. Then the idea occuri'ed to me of going upstairs to your sitting-room. Perhaps you would be there alone, and on such a warm night your door might be open. That would be better, I speedily decided, than to ring the bell for a servant and send up my name to you, thus risking the fact of my presence being made known to him. . . . Well, so I mounted the stairs and soon found myself in the upper hall. As I passed your husband's bed-room the door was slightly ajar. You were speaking with an attendant, and before I had realized it I had heard all you said and all she said. I even caught a glimpse, too, of the man who lay there, and understood clearly that he must be very ill. . . . The woman soon left the room, and by the time that she had done so, going straight upstairs, I had withdrawn into a corner of the dim-lit hall. If she had turned and discovered me, I suppose she would have screamed and taken me for a robber . . . and then I should not have done the thing that freed you from him forever." "What thing?" questioned Olivia, with her breath coining in gasps. A terror had begun to creep icily through her veins, but it was a terror somehow mixed with wild gladness. 472 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. "Can't you guess?" he answered. "You went out of the room, and I was going to follow along the hall and enter the other room where you were. But some- thing held me back. I was thinking of the poison in that glass ; I was thinking of how it could rid you of him forever." "Adrian!" "Presently he called you. You went in to him again. I heard those horrible words he spoke to you about wanting to have you die when he died. I was on the verge of rushing in when he grasped your hand like that; but I stood still outside there, instead, and felt my hate of him and my compassion for you mingle and surge through my veins. . . . Then he spoke of his thirst and of how he wanted a glassful of water as large as that of the medicine you were giving him. You told him it was a deadly poison, and after he had taken a spoonful of it you left the glass on the table at his side, because you were most probably agitated by those other words of his, warning you not to be too sure that he would die, after all you who would not have retarded his detestable life by one second for all the wealth of all the world ! . . . Then he told you to turn down the light, and you did, and left him. . . . And then my mind was made up, and I waited my chance." "Your chance?" "It came almost at once. He said, presently, in a husky voice, which you were too far off to heai*, ' Oh, how thirsty I am ! ' . . . And then I did not wait any longer. I went into the dark room, softly, on tiptoe. He did not see me enter. I glided up toward the head of the bed, too much beyond him for him to have seen me, even if the room had not been in such thick OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 473 shadow. I readied for the glass on the little table. * Here's water,' I said, and the voice I spoke in startled me; it was very faint, but it was so shrewd a copy of just the way you would have spoken those two words. He put out his hand in the gloom, and I gave him the glass. I heard him begin to drink, with the sound a very thirsty child might give. . . . And then I did not stop even to see if he would put the glass back on the table or let it fall. ... I shot away, and no one sa\v me dart downstairs and hurry out upon the lawn again. The news of his death came to me here in town. . . . I dare say the illness would have attacked me anyway. ... I don't know. But I began to suffer fearfully for what I had done, and and when the news also reached me that you had admitted his death was owing to your own carelessness in leaving the medi- cine so near him, I had a sick sort of dread lest you might might be reproaching yourself with the thought " These latter words were broken painfully, and ut- tered with a difficulty that seemed to indicate the approach of death itself. But extreme exhaustion, not death, was now at work with Adrian. In another moment his eyes had closed, and his ghastly face, turned a little sideways on the pillow, revealed his complete loss of consciousness. . . . Olivia rose from her chair. For a slight space of time she forgot even to cry out and summon the assist- ance of Mrs. Etherege. A single thought dominated her being. She was not guilty, after all ! Heavy bonds were falling from her spirit, and as if with the audible noise of shattered chains. Darkness was fly- ing away from her, struck into a hundred cloudy frag- 474 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. merits by shafts of poignant, enrapturing sunshine ! "Thank God! thank God!" broke from her lips, and as the words escaped her she seemed to gaze upon the very face of Massereene, as though it had become visible in the flesh close at her side. But she discerned it through a blur of besieging tears; and when, a little later, she hurried to find Adrian's mother, these tears were streaming down her cheeks as though the bitter- est grief and not the most impassioned joy had caused them. A few hours later she sat alone in her own room. An open letter lay before her, sheet after sheet, with the ink scarcely dry on the last one. It was to Mas- sereene. It told him everything the entire story of her temptation, her self-loathing, her renunciation of all future individual delights and it confessed that the love she bore him was chief and paramount among those delights. Then it recorded the meeting with Adrian Etherege and the new, dizzying revelation that had come to her from his lips. "Even if I should never see you again and that is now for you to decide " the letter here went on, "I implore you to keep as an absolute secret what I have just written. But I know your merciful heart and Adrian is a dying man ! His sin has been terrible; I feel that I can judge somewhat of its magnitude by the anguish that its consequences have cost me. There is no other living soul except yourself to whom I would have told his unhappy story. I wonder if it is selfish of me to feel that you must know the whole truth that it is only justice to my- self for such completeness of knowledge to be given OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. 475 you. ... As I said, Adrian Etherege will not live long; you already may read on his face that he is doomed. Explain it as you will, but I cannot help a feeling of infinite gratitude toward him. Still, in any case I would have promised his mother very liberal help, both before his death and afterward. . . ." Olivia directed her letter, sealed it, and sent it to the hotel at which Massereene always lived when in New York. " Will he come to me ? " she asked herself. Massereene, seated in his own room at the hotel, received two letters. He took them both carelessly, opened one and read in it that the particular state-room which he desired on a certain steamer sailing a few days from then would be reserved for him. . . . Then he glanced at the other envelope and gave a great start. His recognition of the handwriting set him in o o a quiver of excitement. . . . About fifteen minutes afterward he came downstairs with unwonted speed, almost threw himself into a cab, and gave orders to be driven to West Tenth Street. . . . "Foolish child!" he said to Olivia, afer the first and almost silent ecstasy of their meeting had passed ; " why should you not have told me your trouble before, when it was tormenting your soul ? I would have con- vinced you that your sin (no matter what may have been its result) was far less unpardonable than you believed." " Nothing could have so convinced me," said Olivia. She drew away from him with a little shivei', though his encircling arms would not let her recede far. " I have misgivings even now," she went on, " that I am absolving myself much too easily." 476 OLIVIA DELAPLAINE. " Oh, don't bother, then, about absolving yourself at all," smiled Mnssereerie. " Leave it all to me. Make me the keeper of your conscience." " You've enough that is mine to take care of already," said Olivia, looking deep into his eyes and answering his smile. "I've your heart," he said. "Do you mean that?" "Yes." He laughed. " Well, I'll own to the responsibility, my dearest, and not be too ambitious about increas- ing it." Olivia drew a long sigh. "Responsibility?" she murmured. " My sense of a great one will never cease while I live; for I shall always see reproachful proofs of my weakness in the strength which ought to have made it self-control." "And I," he replied, still playfully, "shall always hope for strength to grapple with your hardiest meta- physics, and repress them when they take too morbid an outlook." But she shook her head forbiddingly at this lighter mood of his, even while she drooped closer to him and let his arms more fondly enwrap her; for with all her ever-to-be-endured regret, she could not but love the levity that his happiness forced from him, and as naturally as the dawn itself will force a dewy glitter from those grasses that its first beams have bathed ! Tfie Worfcs of Eflgai Fawcett. EACH IN ONE VOLUME. 12MO. PRICE $1.60. Sent, postpaid, on receipt of the price, by the publishers, TICKNOR & CO., BOSTON. "He is the novelist of New- York life and society; he knows all the eddys and currents of its complicated course, and with faith- ful observation he has amassed a knowledge of its phases which makes him by far the best interpreter of its many-sided life. His minute acquaintance with New-York society gives his back- ground a brilliancy which heightens the strength of the character- drawing in his stories. No novelist of the present day, except Mr. Howells, has so thorough a comprehension of the feminine attitude toward society and life as Mr. Fawcett. His books are among the best American novels that we have. Domestic Monthly. " His observation is singularly keen. His judgment is generally true. His sense of humor is alert. His cheerful temper savt-s him from excessive bitterness. He has imagination enough to invest realistic description with the glow of poetry, and to repro- duce even dulness with vivacity and wit." New-York Tribune. " Few American authors have won more solid recognition and enduring fame than has Mr. Edgar Fawcett, poet, novelist, and playright. His works are more widely known and read than those of any of the other younger novelists; and his vigor and vivacity of "thought, combined with unusual delicacy of touch and charm of style, are recognized by the best critics of literature. The vigor of Mr. Fawcett's work is intellectually refreshing. His fiction is suggestive as well as interesting, and offers food for thought. The keenness with which salient points in life are pictured makes it most breezy and exhilarating reading. " Boston Traveller. THE CONFESSIONS OF CLAUD. With engraved portrait of Edgar Fawcett. " It possesses a weird sort of fascination, like Dore's pictures." Chicayo Journal. " It is a story of terrible power; it fascinates even when it is most disagreeable; it has some thrilling descriptions, and at times it reaches a high pitch of tragic intensity. Mr. Edgar Fawcett is known as a novelist who believes in painting the life of his city and his time, and who finds in this life the charm of romance as well as the realism of bread, butter, and banking. His local color is always good, and always the better that he blends with it the element of the ideal the 'light that never was on sea or land.' " New-York Tribune. TICKNOR & CO., BOSTON. EDGAR FAWCETT'S POEMS. Each in one volume. 12mo. Printed on Imported hand-made paper, with gilt tops and rough edges. ROMANCE AND REVERY. The Magic Flower, The Sorceress, Christ, Irony, The Dying Archangel, Twenty Sonnets, Sister Brenda, And many other Poems. " ' Romance and Revery ' is a volume of peculiar merit. 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" Harper's Mttc/azine. >' When you close this dainty volume with its fine linen leaves, rough edges, and gilt top, you will carry away with you in your heart, perhaps, the melody of the 'German Cradle Song,' the tenderness of ' Consolation,' and the beautiful story of ' The Singing of Luigi.'" Life. *' A young poet, therefore, who is essentially an artist, reveren- cing deeply his art, and master of all its technicalities, should attract our most earnest regard. Such a poet is Mr. Edgar Fawcett. Never falling into the snare of sound for sweet sound's sake only, his pregnant lines are nevertheless harmonious as though his sole aim were harmony. Mr. Fawcett's phrases are moulded with nicest skill; he makes them rich and delicious, tit to be rolled under the tongue; but each has a reason for being, each is vitalized with an idea. His poems are filled with the charm of suggestiveness; scarcely one but brings some new thought, some strange analogy to haunt the brain after reading it." ROBERT ELLIOTT, in T/ie Current. TICKNOR & CO., BOSTON. EDGAR FAWCETT'S WORKS. ADVENTURES OF A WIDOW. " The novel is abundant in breezy vivacity, and in its every aspect shows the hand of a bright and observant man of the world." Boston Gazette. " If Mr. Fawcett had never written any other novel than this, it would have been sufficient to stamp him as a writer of fiction of the first rank among modern American authors. It is in all probability the best story that has yet come from his pen. Among the haut ton of which he writes he is perfectly at home, his language is both graceful and natural; his action frequently dramatic." New-York Star. " Mr. Fawcett has been particularly happy in his pen pictures of American types of literary men and women, and his analysis of the shifting sands of pur society is deep and searching. " New York society is a somewhat well-worn target for our younger American writers, but Mr. Fawcett shoots with a polished and barbed arrow and leaves his shaft quivering in the very centre." Boston Commercial Bulletin. "There is a great deal of fine art in the book; pages upon pages are executed with the superb skill of a master; the words are culled with the nice perception of a poet and the accuracy of a linguist; the portraitures, excepting the bouffe group, succeed each other like cameos in a cabinet of jewels. The dialogue sparkles with epigram and wit, and there is scarcely a lapse of common-place even in the pauses. No lover of the art of word- painting can turn the pages without genuine admiration for the author." New-York Home Journal. TINKLING CYMBALS. "A strong and wholesome book." New-York Tribune. "A novel which would -be especially beneficial' to society people, and to people anxious to enter the ' best society,' inas- much as it principally deals with these two classes. Mr. Fawcett always writes of what he knows, and in this story has made his characters strikingly natural, and yet original." American, Queen. " He has the dramatic faculty which makes any thing that he writes very readable." Kan-Francisco Chronicle. " Their faithful delineation reveals a sense of the eccentric and the humorous that is delicious, but rare in works of American fiction. It is the best description we have of Newport fashionable society life as governed by that of New York; and its satire, humor, and literary skill are very strong and effective." Boston Globe. " Never have our social frivolities and shams been scourged with a more cutting lash." New-York Tribune. " Admirable and piquant sketches and novelettes of New-York life and society, rich in original types and vivid portrayals. Fawcett is one of the best of our younger novelists." Beacon. TICKNOR &, CO., BOSTON. EDGAR FAWCETT'S WORKS. THE HOUSE AT HIGH BRIDGE. " It is not often so good a novel appears in these days. We can commend it heartily to all those who enjoy Trollope's stories of English home-life; and we are delighted to see an American who is treading in the old-fashioned footsteps of that pleasure-giving English novelist." Boston Transcript. "There is plenty of entertainment in the book. No one will fail to finish it after once getting under way in it, and there is not a dull line in it." Chicago Tribune. " And in the matter of dramatic construction Mr. Fawcett may safely be said to stand alone; no living American or English novelist equals him in this respect, and the best French masters must admit him their peer. The plot of 'The House at High Bridge,' for example, is, so far as I can judge, nearly faultless. Its movement is quiet, steady, undemonstrative, but at every turn it gathers strength and significance; no touch that can add to the effect is missed or misapplied, and yet nothing is forced or exaggerated." JULIAN HAWTHORNE, in New-York World. "In ' The House at High Bridge,' there is a pleasant culmin- ation of his past experience, and the beauty of his sentences and perfection of his plot produces a most felicitous and happy volume." The Decorator. SOCIAL SILHOUETTES. Being the Impressions of Mr. Mark Manhattan. "Mr. Fawcett in this volume has shown a skill in analysis which makes him the most formidable rival of Henry James, while most readers of James' later work will admit that Mr. Fawcett seldom indulges in the hair-splitting style or the tedious mannerisms of the author of ' The Bostonians.' " San-Francisco Chronicle. " In a strain of humorous satire the essayist deals with some of the most glaring social follies and affectations of his age and country. 'The Young Gentleman who Succeeds,' is a rebuke to some silly preferences, 'A Millionaire Martyr,' is not without pathos in its stern reproof of the heartlessness of certain nomelles riches- 'The Gentleman who is Glib,' is a story of conquest in which we side with the victor. Other suggestive titles are: ' The Lady who Reformed,' 'The Destroyer of Firesides,' 'The Lady with a Son-in-Law,' ' Au Anglo-Maniac with Brains.' " Mon- treal Gazette. " The author's work is both delicate and accurate." Town Topics. " It must at the end be confessed that it is supremely, unquali- fiedly entertaining. It is a book to be taken up in a tired moment, to be tossed down, perhaps, at the end of a chapter, but never to be lost sight of until the very last page is turned." Milwaukee Sentinel. T1CKNOR & CO., BOSTON. WORKS OF EDWIN LASSETTER BYNNER. AN UNCLOSETED SKELETON. By EDWIN LASSETTER BYNNER and LUCRETIA P. HALE, i vol. 32010. Uniform with " Penelope's Suitors." 50 cents. A very dainty and charming little story, quaintly and appropriately bound. AGNES SURRIAGE. A Romance of the Massachusetts Province, i vol. i2mo. $1.50. The charm of the tale lies in its pathetic central conception, in the brightness and grace of the general handling, and in the singularly faithful and realizable handling of the social atmosphere of the old Colonial days. The Academy (London). It is wonderfully picturesque in its scenes. Its historic accuracy makes the book almost a living panorama rising from the past. The dramatic power of this series of living tableaux is remarkable, and the story is one that will take rank among the few great works of creative literature. Boston Traveller. DAMEN'S GHOST. $1.00. In paper covers, 50 cents. A book which commands remarkably the reader's attention. Boston Globe. The dramatic interest of the story is very strong, and the mystery is cleverly concealed until the critical moment Boston Gazette. PENELOPE'S SUITORS. i vol. 32mo. Quaint antique binding, and tied with cords. 50 cents. A dainty little romance of the days of Governor Bellingham, in the old Massa- chusetts Province. Few writers of the day have so well caught the old-time savor, which is much enhanced by the archaic printing, the long s's, catch-words, and so on. Alto- gether, the volume, though of vest-pocket sire, is a thoroughly charming bit of book-making. N. Y. Commercial A dvertiser. A dainty, old-fashioned little volume, a most delightful story of Boston in Colonial days. Chicago Tribune. The whole affair is a delicate jeu d^esfrit, and will delight gentlewomen as well as the man of taste. The Beacon (Boston). ** Sold by booksellers. Sent, post-paid, on receipt of price, by the publishers, TICKNOR AND COMPANY, Boston. A Brilliant New Novel, by the Author of " The Story of Margaret Kent." OUEEN MONEY. 1 vol. 12mo. $1.50. " Queen Money," by the author of "Margaret Kent," is a novel whose interest begins with the first page and sweeps right on to the last without interruption. There isn't a dull page in the book. It is written with a power that the reader recognizes at once. The master hand is there and is felt, and of course the in- terest is heightened by the fact that it is a nineteenth century story, an American story, a New York story, and a story of to-day. The conversations are exceed- ingly clever, and the wit and brightness of the book are beyond question. It is full of sharp and amusing dialogue. Whether we read it as a study of character, a picture of society, or merely a story of entertaining plot well told, it is equally sure to interest us. It is clean, entertaining, and suggestive, one of those books \vhich hold you until you have finished them, and whose story runs in your nead after you've read it, as if it were a real experience. Hartford Courant. The author of the story of " Margaret Kent " has written another capital novel, and one which should be read immediately. Chicago Tribune. The readers of "The Story of Margaret Kent" will expect in "Queen Money " a story worth reading and study, and they will not be disappointed. If many men and women, feverish and restless, and breathing the spirit of these modern times, an anxiety for sudden wealth, could read the story and take in its lessons, it would be well. The story is plain and simple, and reads more like episodes in the lives of real men and women than a romance. The characters are natural, never strained, evenly drawn, and, in a literary sense, wholly excellent. Chicago Inter-Ocean. Inimitable as was "The Story of Margaret Kent," the present novel of "Queen Money " is a far more complete novel, considered as a work of art, and also in point of interest. In fact, there can be no hesitancy in pronouncing that it will not only be the novel of the season but even of this decade. It is a story of New York life ; keen in its characterizations, vital with the electric spirit of the day. In the guise of one of the most fascinating of modern novels the life of to-day is held up to the mirror, and the false and the ignoble is relentlessly dis- criminated from the true and noble. There is no effort made to moralize, but he mho runs may read. The author's pictures of the most salient and alluring phases of city life are brilliant in color, impressive in characterization, full of life and sparkle and movement, and hold their touches of deepest pathos. " Queen Money" is a novel that sweeps every chord of life. Boston Traveller. *%* Sold by booksellers. Sent, fost-faid, on receipt of f rice, by the publishers, TICKNOR AND COMPANY, BOSTON. University of California SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY Return this material to the library from which it was borrowed. MM 25 '89 FFB 2 7 1989