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Title: The Hermit And The Wild Woman

Author: Edith Wharton

Release Date: October, 2003 [Etext# 4533]
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THE HERMIT AND THE WILD WOMAN AND OTHER STORIES

BY

EDITH WHARTON

NEW YORK

MCMVIII






TABLE OF CONTENTS

I _The Hermit and the Wild Woman_

II _The Last Asset_

III _In Trust_

IV _The Pretext_

V _The Verdict_

VI _The Pot-Boiler_

VII _The Best Man_






THE HERMIT AND THE WILD WOMAN

I





THE Hermit lived in a cave in the hollow of a hill. Below him was a
glen, with a stream in a coppice of oaks and alders, and on the
farther side of the valley, half a day's journey distant, another
hill, steep and bristling, which raised aloft a little walled town
with Ghibelline swallow-tails notched against the sky.

When the Hermit was a lad, and lived in the town, the crenellations
of the walls had been square-topped, and a Guelf lord had flown his
standard from the keep. Then one day a steel-coloured line of
men-at-arms rode across the valley, wound up the hill and battered
in the gates. Stones and Greek fire rained from the ramparts,
shields clashed in the streets, blade sprang at blade in passages
and stairways, pikes and lances dripped above huddled flesh, and all
the still familiar place was a stew of dying bodies. The boy fled
from it in horror. He had seen his father go forth and not come
back, his mother drop dead from an arquebuse shot as she leaned from
the platform of the tower, his little sister fall with a slit throat
across the altar steps of the chapel--and he ran, ran for his life,
through the slippery streets, over warm twitching bodies, between
legs of soldiers carousing, out of the gates, past burning
farmsteads, trampled wheat-fields, orchards stripped and broken,
till the still woods received him and he fell face down on the
unmutilated earth.

He had no wish to go back. His longing was to live hidden from life.
Up the hillside he found a hollow in the rock, and built before it a
porch of boughs bound together with withies. He fed on nuts and
roots, and on trout which he caught with his hands under the stones
in the stream. He had always been a quiet boy, liking to sit at his
mother's feet and watch the flowers grow on her embroidery frame,
while the chaplain read aloud the histories of the Desert Fathers
from a great silver-clasped volume. He would rather have been bred a
clerk and scholar than a knight's son, and his happiest moments were
when he served mass for the chaplain in the early morning, and felt
his heart flutter up and up like a lark, up and up till it was lost
in infinite space and brightness. Almost as happy were the hours
when he sat beside the foreign painter who came over the mountains
to paint the chapel, and under whose brush celestial faces grew out
of the rough wall as if he had sown some magic seed which flowered
while you watched it. With the appearing of every gold-rimmed face
the boy felt he had won another friend, a friend who would come and
bend above him at night, keeping off the ugly visions which haunted
his pillow--visions of the gnawing monsters about the church-porch,
evil-faced bats and dragons, giant worms and winged bristling hogs,
a devil's flock who crept down from the stone-work at night and
hunted the souls of sinful children through the town. With the
growth of the picture the bright mailed angels thronged so close
about the boy's bed that between their interwoven wings not a snout
or a claw could force itself; and he would turn over sighing on his
pillow, which felt as soft and warm as if it had been lined with
down from those sheltering pinions.

All these thoughts came back to him now in his cave on the
cliff-side. The stillness seemed to enclose him with wings, to fold
him away from life and evil. He was never restless or discontented.
He loved the long silent empty days, each one as like the other as
pearls in a well-matched string. Above all he liked to have time to
save his soul. He had been greatly troubled about his soul since a
band of Flagellants had passed through the town, exhibiting their
gaunt scourged bodies and exhorting the people to turn from soft
raiment and delicate fare, from marriage and money-getting and
dancing and games, and think only how they might escape the devil's
talons and the great red blaze of hell. For days that red blaze hung
on the edge of the boy's thoughts like the light of a burning city
across a plain. There seemed to be so many pitfalls to avoid--so
many things were wicked which one might have supposed to be
harmless. How could a child of his age tell? He dared not for a
moment think of anything else. And the scene of sack and slaughter
from which he had fled gave shape and distinctness to that blood-red
vision. Hell was like that, only a million million times worse. Now
he knew how flesh looked when devils' pincers tore it, how the
shrieks of the damned sounded, and how roasting bodies smelled. How
could a Christian spare one moment of his days and nights from the
long long struggle to keep safe from the wrath to come?

Gradually the horror faded, leaving only a tranquil pleasure in the
minute performance of his religious duties. His mind was not
naturally given to the contemplation of evil, and in the blessed
solitude of his new life his thoughts dwelt more and more on the
beauty of holiness. His desire was to be perfectly good, and to live
in love and charity with his fellow-men; and how could one do this
without fleeing from them?

At first his life was difficult, for in the winter season he was put
to great straits to feed himself; and there were nights when the sky
was like an iron vault, and a hoarse wind rattled the oakwood in the
valley, and a great fear came on him that was worse than any cold.
But in time it became known to his townsfolk and to the peasants in
the neighbouring valleys that he had withdrawn to the wilderness to
lead a godly life; and after that his worst hardships were over, for
pious persons brought him gifts of oil and dried fruit, one good
woman gave him seeds from her garden, another spun for him a hodden
gown, and others would have brought him all manner of food and
clothing, had he not refused to accept anything but for his bare
needs. The good woman who had given him the seeds showed him also
how to build a little garden on the southern ledge of his cliff, and
all one summer the Hermit carried up soil from the streamside, and
the next he carried up water to keep his garden green. After that
the fear of solitude quite passed from him, for he was so busy all
day long that at night he had much ado to fight off the demon of
sleep, which Saint Arsenius the Abbot has denounced as the chief foe
of the solitary. His memory kept good store of prayers and litanies,
besides long passages from the Mass and other offices, and he marked
the hours of his day by different acts of devotion. On Sundays and
feast days, when the wind was set his way, he could hear the church
bells from his native town, and these helped him to follow the
worship of the faithful, and to bear in mind the seasons of the
liturgical year; and what with carrying up water from the river,
digging in the garden, gathering fagots for his fire, observing his
religious duties, and keeping his thoughts continually upon the
salvation of his soul, the Hermit knew not a moment's idleness.

At first, during his night vigils, he had felt a great fear of the
stars, which seemed to set a cruel watch upon him, as though they
spied out the frailty of his heart and took the measure of his
littleness. But one day a wandering clerk, to whom he chanced to
give a night's shelter, explained to him that, in the opinion of the
most learned doctors of theology, the stars were inhabited by the
spirits of the blessed, and this thought brought great consolation
to the Hermit. Even on winter nights, when the eagle's wings clanged
among the peaks, and he heard the long howl of wolves about the
sheep-cotes in the valley, he no longer felt any fear, but thought
of those sounds as representing the evil voices of the world, and
hugged himself in the solitude of his cave. Sometimes, to keep
himself awake, he composed lauds in honour of Christ and the saints,
and they seemed to him so pleasant that he feared to forget them, so
after much debate with himself he decided to ask a friendly priest
from the valley, who sometimes visited him, to write down the lauds;
and the priest wrote them down on comely sheepskin, which the Hermit
dried and prepared with his own hands. When the Hermit saw them
written down they appeared to him so beautiful that he feared to
commit the sin of vanity if he looked at them too often, so he hid
them between two smooth stones in his cave, and vowed that he would
take them out only once in the year, at Easter, when our Lord has
risen and it is meet that Christians should rejoice. And this vow he
faithfully kept; but, alas, when Easter drew near, he found he was
looking forward to the blessed festival less because of our Lord's
rising than because he should then be able to read his pleasant
lauds written on fair sheepskin; and thereupon he took a vow that he
would not look upon the lauds till he lay dying.

So the Hermit, for many years, lived to the glory of God and in
great peace of mind.






II





ONE day he resolved to set forth on a visit to the Saint of the
Rock, who lived on the other side of the mountains. Travellers had
brought the Hermit report of this solitary, how he lived in great
holiness and austerity in a desert place among the hills, where snow
lay all winter, and in summer the sun beat down cruelly. The Saint,
it appeared, had vowed that he would withdraw from the world to a
spot where there was neither shade nor water, lest he should be
tempted to take his ease and think less continually upon his Maker;
but wherever he went he found a spreading tree or a gushing spring,
till at last he climbed up to the bare heights where nothing grows,
and where the only water comes from the melting of the snow in
spring. Here he found a tall rock rising from the ground, and in it
he scooped a hollow with his own hands, labouring for five years and
wearing his fingers to the bone. Then he seated himself in the
hollow, which faced the west, so that in winter he should have small
warmth of the sun and in summer be consumed by it; and there he had
sat without moving for years beyond number.

The Hermit was greatly drawn by the tale of such austerities, which
in his humility he did not dream of emulating, but desired, for his
soul's good, to contemplate and praise; so one day he bound sandals
to his feet, cut an alder staff from the stream, and set out to
visit the Saint of the Rock.

It was the pleasant spring season, when seeds are shooting and the
bud is on the tree. The Hermit was troubled at the thought of
leaving his plants without water, but he could not travel in winter
by reason of the snows, and in summer he feared the garden would
suffer even more from his absence. So he set out, praying that rain
might fall while he was away, and hoping to return again in five
days. The peasants labouring in the fields left their work to ask
his blessing; and they would even have followed him in great numbers
had he not told them that he was bound on a pilgrimage to the Saint
of the Rock, and that it behoved him to go alone, as one solitary
seeking another. So they respected his wish, and he went on and
entered the forest. In the forest he walked for two days and slept
for two nights. He heard the wolves crying, and foxes rustling in
the covert, and once, at twilight, a shaggy brown man peered at him
through the leaves and galloped away with a soft padding of hoofs;
but the Hermit feared neither wild beasts nor evil-doers, nor even
the fauns and satyrs who linger in unhallowed forest depths where
the Cross has not been raised; for he said: "If I die, I die to the
glory of God, and if I live it must be to the same end." Only he
felt a secret pang at the thought that he might die without seeing
his lauds again. But the third day, without misadventure, he came
out on another valley.

Then he began to climb the mountain, first through brown woods of
beech and oak, then through pine and broom, and then across red
stony ledges where only a pinched growth of lentisk and briar spread
in patches over the rock. By this time he thought to have reached
his goal, but for two more days he fared on through the same scene,
with the sky close over him and the green valleys of earth receding
far below. Sometimes for hours he saw only the red glistering slopes
tufted with thin bushes, and the hard blue heaven so close that it
seemed his hand could touch it; then at a turn of the path the rocks
rolled apart, the eye plunged down a long pine-clad defile, and
beyond it the forest flowed in mighty undulations to a plain shining
with cities and another mountain-range many days' journey away. To
some eyes this would have been a terrible spectacle, reminding the
wayfarer of his remoteness from his kind, and of the perils which
lurk in waste places and the weakness of man against them; but the
Hermit was so mated to solitude, and felt such love for all things
created, that to him the bare rocks sang of their Maker and the vast
distance bore witness to His greatness. So His servant journeyed on
unafraid.

But one morning, after a long climb over steep and difficult slopes,
the wayfarer halted suddenly at a bend of the way; for beyond the
defile at his feet there was no plain shining with cities, but a
bare expanse of shaken silver that reached away to the rim of the
world; and the Hermit knew it was the sea. Fear seized him then, for
it was terrible to see that great plain move like a heaving bosom,
and, as he looked on it, the earth seemed also to heave beneath him.
But presently he remembered how Christ had walked the waves, and how
even Saint Mary of Egypt, who was a great sinner, had crossed the
waters of Jordan dry-shod to receive the Sacrament from the Abbot
Zosimus; and then the Hermit's heart grew still, and he sang as he
went down the mountain: "The sea shall praise Thee, O Lord."

All day he kept seeing it and then losing it; but toward night he
came to a cleft of the hills, and lay down in a pine-wood to sleep.
He had now been six days gone, and once and again he thought
anxiously of his herbs; but he said to himself: "What though my
garden perish, if I see a holy man face to face and praise God in
his company?" So he was never long cast down.

Before daylight he was afoot under the stars; and leaving the wood
where he had slept, began climbing the face of a tall cliff, where
he had to clutch the jutting ledges with his hands, and with every
step he gained, a rock seemed thrust forth to hurl him back. So,
footsore and bleeding, he reached a little stony plain as the sun
dropped to the sea; and in the red light he saw a hollow rock, and
the Saint sitting in the hollow.

The Hermit fell on his knees, praising God; then he rose and ran
across the plain to the rock. As he drew near he saw that the Saint
was a very old man, clad in goatskin, with a long white beard. He
sat motionless, his hands on his knees, and two red eye-sockets
turned to the sunset. Near him was a young boy in skins who brushed
the flies from his face; but they always came back, and settled on
the rheum which ran from his eyes.

He did not appear to hear or see the approach of the Hermit, but sat
quite still till the boy said: "Father, here is a pilgrim."

Then he lifted up his voice and asked angrily who was there and what
the stranger sought.

The Hermit answered: "Father, the report of your holy practices came
to me a long way off, and being myself a solitary, though not worthy
to be named with you for godliness, it seemed fitting that I should
cross the mountains to visit you, that we might sit together and
speak in praise of solitude."

The Saint replied: "You fool, how can two sit together and praise
solitude, since by so doing they put an end to the thing they
pretend to honour?"

The Hermit, at that, was sorely abashed, for he had thought his
speech out on the way, reciting it many times over; and now it
appeared to him vainer than the crackling of thorns under a pot.

Nevertheless he took heart and said: "True, Father; but may not two
sinners sit together and praise Christ, who has taught them the
blessings of solitude?"

But the other only answered: "If you had really learned the
blessings of solitude you would not squander them in idle
wandering." And, the Hermit not knowing how to reply, he said again:
"If two sinners meet they can best praise Christ by going each his
own way in silence."

After that he shut his lips and continued motionless while the boy
brushed the flies from his eye-sockets; but the Hermit's heart sank,
and for the first time he felt all the weariness of the way he had
fared, and the great distance dividing him from home.

He had meant to take counsel with the Saint concerning his lauds,
and whether he ought to destroy them; but now he had no heart to say
another word, and turning away he began to descend the mountain.
Presently he heard steps running behind him, and the boy came up and
pressed a honey-comb in his hand.

"You have come a long way and must be hungry," he said; but before
the Hermit could thank him he had hastened back to his task. So the
Hermit crept down the mountain till he reached the wood where he had
slept before; and there he made his bed again, but he had no mind to
eat before sleeping, for his heart hungered more than his body; and
his salt tears made the honey-comb bitter.






III





ON the fourteenth day he came to the valley below his cliff, and saw
the walls of his native town against the sky. He was footsore and
heavy of heart, for his long pilgrimage had brought him only
weariness and humiliation, and as no drop of rain had fallen he knew
that his garden must have perished. So he climbed the cliff heavily
and reached his cave at the angelus.

But there a great wonder awaited him. For though the scant earth of
the hillside was parched and crumbling, his garden-soil reeked with
moisture, and his plants had shot up, fresh and glistening, to a
height they had never before attained. More wonderful still, the
tendrils of the gourd had been trained about his door, and kneeling
down he saw that the earth had been loosened between the rows of
sprouting vegetables, and that every leaf sparkled with drops as
though the rain had but newly ceased. Then it appeared to the Hermit
that he beheld a miracle, but doubting his own deserts he refused to
believe himself worthy of such grace, and went within doors to
ponder on what had befallen him. And on his bed of rushes he saw a
young woman sleeping, clad in an outlandish garment, with strange
amulets about her neck.

The sight was very terrifying to the Hermit, for he recalled how
often the demon, in tempting the Desert Fathers, had taken the form
of a woman for their undoing; but he reflected that, since there was
nothing pleasing to him in the sight of this female, who was brown
as a nut and lean with wayfaring, he ran no great danger in looking
at her. At first he took her for a wandering Egyptian, but as he
looked he perceived, among the heathen charms, an Agnus Dei in her
bosom; and this so surprised him that he bent over and called on her
to wake.

She sprang up with a start, but seeing the Hermit's gown and staff,
and his face above her, lay quiet and said to him: "I have watered
your garden daily in return for the beans and oil that I took from
your store."

"Who are you, and how do you come here?" asked the Hermit.

She said: "I am a wild woman and live in the woods."

And when he pressed her again to tell him why she had sought shelter
in his cave, she said that the land to the south, whence she came,
was full of armed companies and bands of marauders, and that great
license and bloodshed prevailed there; and this the Hermit knew to
be true, for he had heard of it on his homeward journey. The Wild
Woman went on to tell him that she had been hunted through the woods
like an animal by a band of drunken men-at-arms, Lansknechts from
the north by their barbarous dress and speech, and at length,
starving and spent, had come on his cave and hidden herself from her
pursuers. "For," she said, "I fear neither wild beasts nor the
woodland people, charcoal burners, Egyptians, wandering minstrels or
chapmen; even the highway robbers do not touch me, because I am poor
and brown; but these armed men flown with blood and wine are more
terrible than wolves and tigers."

And the Hermit's heart melted, for he thought of his little sister
lying with her throat slit across the altar steps, and of the scenes
of blood and rapine from which he had fled away into the wilderness.
So he said to the stranger that it was not meet he should house her
in his cave, but that he would send a messenger to the town across
the valley, and beg a pious woman there to give her lodging and work
in her household. "For," said he, "I perceive by the blessed image
about your neck that you are not a heathen wilding, but a child of
Christ, though so far astray from Him in the desert."

"Yes," she said, "I am a Christian, and know as many prayers as you;
but I will never set foot in city walls again, lest I be caught and
put back into the convent."

"What," cried the Hermit with a start, "you are a runagate nun?" And
he crossed himself, and again thought of the demon.

She smiled and said: "It is true I was once a cloistered woman, but
I will never willingly be one again. Now drive me forth if you like;
but I cannot go far, for I have a wounded foot, which I got in
climbing the cliff with water for your garden." And she pointed to a
deep cut in her foot.

At that, for all his fear, the Hermit was moved to pity, and washed
the cut and bound it up; and as he did so he bethought him that
perhaps his strange visitor had been sent to him not for his soul's
undoing but for her own salvation. And from that hour he earnestly
yearned to save her.

But it was not fitting that she should remain in his cave; so,
having given her water to drink and a handful of lentils, he raised
her up and putting his staff in her hand guided her to a hollow not
far off in the face of the cliff. And while he was doing this he
heard the sunset bells ring across the valley, and set about
reciting the _Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae_; and she joined in
very piously, with her hands folded, not missing a word.

Nevertheless the thought of her wickedness weighed on him, and the
next day when he went to carry her food he asked her to tell him how
it came about that she had fallen into such abominable sin. And this
is the story she told.






IV





I WAS born (said she) in the north country, where the winters are
long and cold, where snow sometimes falls in the valleys, and the
high mountains for months are white with it. My father's castle is
in a tall green wood, where the winds always rustle, and a cold
river runs down from the ice-gorges. South of us was the wide plain,
glowing with heat, but above us were stony passes where the eagle
nests and the storms howl; in winter great fires roared in our
chimneys, and even in summer there was always a cool air off the
gorges. But when I was a child my mother went southward in the great
Empress's train and I went with her. We travelled many days, across
plains and mountains, and saw Rome, where the Pope lives in a golden
palace, and many other cities, till we came to the great Emperor's
court. There for two years or more we lived in pomp and merriment,
for it was a wonderful court, full of mimes, magicians, philosophers
and poets; and the Empress's ladies spent their days in mirth and
music, dressed in light silken garments, walking in gardens of
roses, and bathing in a great cool marble tank, while the Emperor's
eunuchs guarded the approach to the gardens. Oh, those baths in the
marble tank, my Father! I used to lie awake through the whole hot
southern night, and think of that plunge at sunrise under the last
stars. For we were in a burning country, and I pined for the tall
green woods and the cold stream of my father's valley; and when I
had cooled my limbs in the tank I lay all day in the scant cypress
shade and dreamed of my next bath.

My mother pined for the coolness till she died; then the Empress put
me in a convent and I was forgotten. The convent was on the side of
a bare yellow hill, where bees made a hot buzzing in the thyme.
Below was the sea, blazing with a million shafts of light; and
overhead a blinding sky, which reflected the sun's glitter like a
huge baldric of steel. Now the convent was built on the site of an
old pleasure-house which a holy Princess had given to our Order; and
a part of the house was left standing with its court and garden. The
nuns had built all about the garden; but they left the cypresses in
the middle, and the long marble tank where the Princess and her
ladies had bathed. The tank, however, as you may conceive, was no
longer used as a bath; for the washing of the body is an indulgence
forbidden to cloistered virgins; and our Abbess, who was famed for
her austerities, boasted that, like holy Sylvia the nun, she never
touched water save to bathe her finger-tips before receiving the
Sacrament. With such an example before them, the nuns were obliged
to conform to the same pious rule, and many, having been bred in the
convent from infancy, regarded all ablutions with horror, and felt
no temptation to cleanse the filth from their flesh; but I, who had
bathed daily, had the freshness of clear water in my veins, and
perished slowly for want of it, like your garden herbs in a drought.

My cell did not look on the garden, but on the steep mule-path
leading up the cliff, where all day long the sun beat as if with
flails of fire, and I saw the sweating peasants toil up and down
behind their thirsty asses, and the beggars whining and scraping
their sores in the heat. Oh, how I hated to look out through the
bars on that burning world! I used to turn away from it, sick with
disgust, and lying on my hard bed, stare up by the hour at the
ceiling of my cell. But flies crawled in hundreds on the ceiling,
and the hot noise they made was worse than the glare. Sometimes, at
an hour when I knew myself unobserved, I tore off my stifling gown,
and hung it over the grated window, that I might no longer see the
shaft of hot sunlight lying across my cell, and the dust dancing in
it like fat in the fire. But the darkness choked me, and I struggled
for breath as though I lay at the bottom of a pit; so that at last I
would spring up, and dragging down the dress, fling myself on my
knees before the Cross, and entreat our Lord to give me the gift of
holiness, that I might escape the everlasting fires of hell, of
which this heat was like an awful foretaste. For if I could not
endure the scorching of a summer's day, with what constancy could I
meet the thought of the flame that dieth not?

This longing to escape the heat of hell made me apply myself to a
devouter way of living, and I reflected that if my bodily distress
were somewhat eased I should be able to throw myself with greater
zeal into the practice of vigils and austerities. And at length,
having set forth to the Abbess that the sultry air of my cell
induced in me a grievous heaviness of sleep, I prevailed on her to
lodge me in that part of the building which overlooked the garden.

For a few days I was quite happy, for instead of the dusty
mountainside, and the sight of the sweating peasants and their
asses, I looked out on dark cypresses and rows of budding
vegetables. But presently I found I had not bettered myself. For
with the approach of midsummer the garden, being all enclosed with
buildings, grew as stifling as my cell. All the green things in it
withered and dried off, leaving trenches of bare red earth, across
which the cypresses cast strips of shade too narrow to cool the
aching heads of the nuns who sought shelter there; and I began to
think sorrowfully of my former cell, where now and then there came a
sea-breeze, hot and languid, yet alive, and where at least I could
look out upon the sea. But this was not the worst; for when the
dog-days came I found that the sun, at a certain hour, cast on the
ceiling of my cell the reflection of the ripples on the garden-tank;
and to say how I suffered from this sight is not within the power of
speech. It was indeed agony to watch the clear water rippling and
washing above my head, yet feel no solace of it on my limbs: as
though I had been a senseless brazen image lying at the bottom of a
well. But the image, if it felt no refreshment, would have suffered
no torture; whereas every inch of my skin throbbed with thirst, and
every vein was a mouth of Dives praying for a drop of water. Oh,
Father, how shall I tell you the grievous pains that I endured?
Sometimes I so feared the sight of the mocking ripples overhead that
I hid my eyes from their approach, lying face down on my burning bed
till I knew that they were gone; yet on cloudy days, when they did
not come, the heat was even worse to bear.

By day I hardly dared trust myself in the garden, for the nuns
walked there, and one fiery noon they found me hanging so close
above the tank that they snatched me away, crying out that I had
tried to destroy myself. The scandal of this reaching the Abbess,
she sent for me to know what demon had beset me; and when I wept and
said, the longing to bathe my burning body, she broke into great
anger and cried out: "Do you not know that this is a sin well-nigh
as great as the other, and condemned by all the greatest saints? For
a nun may be tempted to take her life through excess of
self-scrutiny and despair of her own worthiness; but this desire to
indulge the despicable body is one of the lusts of the flesh, to be
classed with concupiscence and adultery." And she ordered me to
sleep every night for a month in my heavy gown, with a veil upon my
face.

Now, Father, I believe it was this penance that drove me to sin. For
we were in the dog-days, and it was more than flesh could bear. And
on the third night, after the portress had passed, and the lights
were out, I rose and flung off my veil and gown, and knelt in my
window fainting. There was no moon, but the sky was full of stars.
At first the garden was all blackness; but as I looked I saw a faint
twinkle between the cypress-trunks, and I knew it was the starlight
on the tank. The water! The water! It was there close to me--only a
few bolts and bars were between us.

The portress was a heavy sleeper, and I knew where her keys hung, on
a nail just within the door of her cell. I stole thither, unlatched
the door, seized the keys and crept barefoot down the corridor. The
bolts of the cloister-door were stiff and heavy, and I dragged at
them till the veins in my wrists were bursting. Then I turned the
key and it cried out in the ward. I stood still, my whole body
beating with fear lest the hinges too should have a voice--but no
one stirred, and I pushed open the door and slipped out. The garden
was as airless as a pit, but at least I could stretch my arms in it;
and, oh, my Father, the sweetness of the stars! The stones in the
path cut my feet as I ran, but I thought of the joy of bathing them
in the tank, and that made the wounds sweet to me. . . . My Father,
I have heard of the temptations which in times past assailed the
holy Solitaries of the desert, flattering the reluctant flesh beyond
resistance; but none, I think, could have surpassed in ecstasy that
first touch of the water on my limbs. To prolong the joy I let
myself slip in slowly, resting my hands on the edge of the tank, and
smiling to see my body, as I lowered it, break up the shining black
surface and shatter the starbeams into splinters. And the water, my
Father, seemed to crave me as I craved it. Its ripples rose about
me, first in furtive touches, then in a long embrace that clung and
drew me down; till at length they lay like kisses on my lips. It was
no frank comrade like the mountain pools of my childhood, but a
secret playmate compassionating my pains and soothing them with
noiseless hands. From the first I thought of it as an
accomplice--its whisper seemed to promise me secrecy if I would
promise it love. And I went back and back to it, my Father; all day
I lived in the thought of it; each night I stole to it with fresh
thirst. . . .

But at length the old portress died, and a young lay-sister took her
place. She was a light sleeper, and keen-eared; and I knew the
danger of venturing to her cell. I knew the danger, but when
darkness came I felt the water drawing me. The first night I fought
on my bed and held out; but the second I crept to her door. She made
no motion when I entered, but rose up secretly and stole after me;
and the second night she warned the Abbess, and the two came on me
as I stood by the tank.

I was punished with terrible penances: fasting, scourging,
imprisonment, and the privation of drinking water; for the Abbess
stood amazed at the obduracy of my sin, and was resolved to make me
an example to my fellows. For a month I endured the pains of hell;
then one night the Saracen pirates fell on our convent. On a sudden
the darkness was full of flames and blood; but while the other nuns
ran hither and thither, clinging to the Abbess's feet or shrieking
on the steps of the altar, I slipped through an unwatched postern
and made my way to the hills. The next day the Emperor's soldiery
descended on the carousing heathen, slew them and burned their
vessels on the beach; the Abbess and nuns were rescued, the convent
walls rebuilt, and peace restored to the holy precincts. All this I
heard from a shepherdess of the hills, who found me in my hiding,
and brought me honeycomb and water. In her simplicity she offered to
lead me home to the convent; but while she slept I laid off my
wimple and scapular, and stealing her cloak fled away lest she
should betray me. And since then I have wandered alone over the face
of the world, living in woods and desert places, often hungry, often
cold and sometimes fearful; yet resigned to any hardship, and with a
front for any peril, if only I may sleep under the free heaven and
wash the dust from my body in cool water.






V





THE Hermit, as may be supposed, was much perturbed by this story,
and dismayed that such sinfulness should cross his path. His first
motion was to drive the woman forth, for he knew the heinousness of
the craving for water, and how Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine and
other holy doctors have taught that they who would purify the soul
must not be distraught by the vain cares of bodily cleanliness; yet,
remembering the lust that drew him to his lauds, he dared not judge
his sister's fault too harshly.

Moreover he was moved by the Wild Woman's story of the hardships she
had suffered, and the godless company she had been driven to
keep--Egyptians, jugglers, outlaws and even sorcerers, who are
masters of the pagan lore of the East, and still practice their dark
rites among the simple folk of the hills. Yet she would not have him
think wholly ill of this vagrant people, from whom she had often
received food and comfort; and her worst danger, as he learned with
shame, had come from the _girovaghi_ or wandering monks, who are the
scourge and dishonour of Christendom; carrying their ribald idleness
from one monastery to another, and leaving on their way a trail of
thieving, revelry and worse. Once or twice the Wild Woman had nearly
fallen into their hands; but had been saved by her own quick wit and
skill in woodcraft. Once, so she assured the Hermit, she had found
refuge with a faun and his female, who fed and sheltered her in
their cave, where she slept on a bed of leaves with their shaggy
nurslings; and in this cave she had seen a stock or idol of wood,
extremely seamed and ancient, before which the wood-creatures, when
they thought she slept, laid garlands and the wild bees' honey-comb.

She told him also of a hill-village of weavers, where she lived many
weeks, and learned to ply their trade in return for her lodging; and
where wayfaring men in the guise of cobblers, charcoal-burners or
goatherds came and taught strange doctrines at midnight in the poor
hovels. What they taught she could not clearly tell, save that they
believed each soul could commune directly with its Maker, without
need of priest or intercessor; also she had heard from some of their
disciples that there are two Gods, one of good and one of evil, and
that the God of evil has his throne in the Pope's palace in Rome.
But in spite of these dark teachings they were a mild and merciful
folk, full of loving-kindness toward poor persons and wayfarers; so
that her heart grieved for them when one day a Dominican monk
appeared in the village with a company of soldiers, and some of the
weavers were seized and dragged to prison, while others, with their
wives and babes, fled to the winter woods. She fled with them,
fearing to be charged with their heresy, and for months they lay hid
in desert places, the older and weaker, who fell sick from want and
exposure, being devoutly ministered to by their brethren, and dying
in the sure faith of heaven.

All this she related modestly and simply, not as one who joys in a
godless life, but as having been drawn into it through misadventure;
and she told the Hermit that when she heard the sound of church
bells she never failed to say an Ave or a Pater; and that often, as
she lay in the midnight darkness of the forest, she had hushed her
fears by reciting the versicles from the Evening Hour:

Keep us, O Lord, as the apple of the eye,

Protect us under the shadow of Thy wings.

The wound in her foot healed slowly; and the Hermit, while it was
mending, repaired daily to her cave, reasoning with her in love and
charity, and exhorting her to return to the cloister. But this she
persistently refused to do; and fearing lest she attempt to fly
before her foot was healed, and so expose herself to hunger and
ill-usage, he promised not to betray her presence, or to take any
measures toward restoring her to her Order.

He began indeed to doubt whether she had any calling to the life
enclosed; yet her gentleness and innocency of mind made him feel
that she might be won back to holy living, if only her freedom were
assured. So after many inward struggles (since his promise forbade
his taking counsel with any concerning her) he resolved to let her
remain in the cave till some light should come to him. And one day,
visiting her about the hour of Nones (for it became his pious habit
to say the evening office with her), he found her engaged with a
little goatherd, who in a sudden seizure had fallen from a rock
above her cave, and lay senseless and full of blood at her feet. And
the Hermit saw with wonder how skilfully she bound up his cuts and
restored his senses, giving him to drink of a liquor she had
distilled from the wild simples of the mountain; whereat the boy
opened his eyes and praised God, as one restored by heaven. Now it
was known that this lad was subject to possessions, and had more
than once dropped lifeless while he heeded his flock; and the
Hermit, knowing that only great saints or unclean necromancers can
loosen devils, feared that the Wild Woman had exorcised the spirits
by means of unholy spells. But she told him that the goatherd's
sickness was caused only by the heat of the sun, and that, such
seizures being common in the hot countries whence she came, she had
learned from a wise woman how to stay them by a decoction of the
_carduus benedictus_, made in the third night of the waxing moon,
but without the aid of magic.

"But," she continued, "you need not fear my bringing scandal on your
holy retreat, for by the arts of the same wise woman my own wound is
well-nigh healed, and tonight at sunset I set forth on my travels."

The Hermit's heart grew heavy as she spoke, and it seemed to him
that her own look was sorrowful. And suddenly his perplexities were
lifted from him, and he saw what was God's purpose with the Wild
Woman.

"Why," said he, "do you fly from this place, where you are safe from
molestation, and can look to the saving of your soul? Is it that
your feet weary for the road, and your spirits are heavy for lack of
worldly discourse?"

She replied that she had no wish to travel, and felt no repugnance
to solitude. "But," said she, "I must go forth to beg my bread,
since in this wilderness there is none but yourself to feed me; and
moreover, when it is known that I have healed the goatherd, curious
folk and scandal-mongers may seek me out, and, learning whence I
come, drag me back to the cloister."

Then the Hermit answered her and said: "In the early days, when the
faith of Christ was first preached, there were holy women who fled
to the desert and lived there in solitude, to the glory of God and
the edification of their sex. If you are minded to embrace so
austere a life, contenting you with such sustenance as the
wilderness yields, and wearing out your days in prayer and vigil, it
may be that you shall make amends for the great sin you have
committed, and live and die in the peace of the Lord Jesus."

He spoke thus, knowing that if she left him and returned to her
roaming, hunger and fear might drive her to fresh sin; whereas in a
life of penance and reclusion her eyes might be opened to her
iniquity, and her soul snatched back from ruin.

He saw that his words moved her, and she seemed about to consent,
and embrace a life of holiness; but suddenly she fell silent, and
looked down on the valley at their feet.

"A stream flows in the glen below us," she said. "Do you forbid me
to bathe in it in the heat of summer?"

"It is not I that forbid you, my daughter, but the laws of God,"
said the Hermit; "yet see how miraculously heaven protects you--for
in the hot season, when your lust is upon you, our stream runs dry,
and temptation will be removed from you. Moreover on these heights
there is no excess of heat to madden the body, but always, before
dawn and at the angelus, a cool breeze which refreshes it like
water."

And after thinking long on this, and again receiving his promise not
to betray her, the Wild Woman agreed to embrace a life of reclusion;
and the Hermit fell on his knees, worshipping God and rejoicing to
think that, if he saved his sister from sin, his own term of
probation would be shortened.






VI





THEREAFTER for two years the Hermit and the Wild Woman lived side by
side, meeting together to pray on the great feast-days of the year,
but on all other days dwelling apart, engaged in pious practices.

At first the Hermit, knowing the weakness of woman, and her little
aptitude for the life apart, had feared that he might be disturbed
by the nearness of his penitent; but she faithfully held to his
commands, abstaining from all sight of him save on the Days of
Obligation; and when they met, so modest and devout was her
demeanour that she raised his soul to fresh fervency. And gradually
it grew sweet to him to think that, near by though unseen, was one
who performed the same tasks at the same hours; so that, whether he
tended his garden, or recited his chaplet, or rose under the stars
to repeat the midnight office, he had a companion in all his labours
and devotions.

Meanwhile the report had spread abroad that a holy woman who cast
out devils had made her dwelling in the Hermit's cliff; and many
sick persons from the valley sought her out, and went away restored
by her. These poor pilgrims brought her oil and flour, and with her
own hands she made a garden like the Hermit's, and planted it with
corn and lentils; but she would never take a trout from the brook,
or receive the gift of a snared wild-fowl, for she said that in her
vagrant life the wild creatures of the wood had befriended her, and
as she had slept in peace among them, so now she would never suffer
them to be molested.

In the third year came a plague, and death walked the cities, and
many poor peasants fled to the hills to escape it. These the Hermit
and his penitent faithfully tended, and so skilful were the Wild
Woman's ministrations that the report of them reached the town
across the valley, and a deputation of burgesses came with rich
offerings, and besought her to descend and comfort their sick. The
Hermit, seeing her depart on so dangerous a mission, would have
accompanied her, but she bade him remain and tend those who fled to
the hills; and for many days his heart was consumed in prayer for
her, and he feared lest every fugitive should bring him word of her
death.

But at length she returned, wearied-out but whole, and covered with
the blessings of the townsfolk; and thereafter her name for holiness
spread as wide as the Hermit's.

Seeing how constant she remained in her chosen life, and what
advance she had made in the way of perfection, the Hermit now felt
that it behoved him to exhort her again to return to the convent;
and more than once he resolved to speak with her, but his heart hung
back. At length he bethought him that by failing in this duty he
imperilled his own soul, and thereupon, on the next feast-day, when
they met, he reminded her that in spite of her good works she still
lived in sin and excommunicate, and that, now she had once more
tasted the sweets of godliness, it was her duty to confess her fault
and give herself up to her superiors.

She heard him meekly, but when he had spoken she was silent and her
tears ran over; and looking at her he wept also, and said no more.
And they prayed together, and returned each to his cave.

It was not till late winter that the plague abated; and the spring
and early summer following were heavy with rains and great heat.
When the Hermit visited his penitent at the feast of Pentecost, she
appeared to him so weak and wasted that, when they had recited the
_Veni, sancte spiritus_, and the proper psalms, he taxed her with
too great rigour of penitential practices; but she replied that her
weakness was not due to an excess of discipline, but that she had
brought back from her labours among the sick a heaviness of body
which the intemperance of the season no doubt increased. The evil
rains continued, falling chiefly at night, while by day the land
reeked with heat and vapours; so that lassitude fell on the Hermit
also, and he could hardly drag himself down to the spring whence he
drew his drinking-water. Thus he fell into the habit of going down
to the glen before cockcrow, after he had recited Matins; for at
that hour the rain commonly ceased, and a faint air was stirring.
Now because of the wet season the stream had not gone dry, and
instead of replenishing his flagon slowly at the trickling spring,
the Hermit went down to the waterside to fill it; and once, as he
descended the steep slope of the glen, he heard the covert rustle,
and saw the leaves stir as though something moved behind them. As he
looked silence fell, and the leaves grew still; but his heart was
shaken, for it seemed to him that what he had seen in the dusk had a
human semblance, such as the wood-people wear. And he was loth to
think that such unhallowed beings haunted the glen.

A few days passed, and again, descending to the stream, he saw a
figure flit by him through the covert; and this time a deeper fear
entered into him; but he put away the thought, and prayed fervently
for all souls in temptation. And when he spoke with the Wild Woman
again, on the feast of the Seven Maccabees, which falls on the first
day of August, he was smitten with fear to see her wasted looks, and
besought her to cease from labouring and let him minister to her in
her weakness. But she denied him gently, and replied that all she
asked of him was to keep her steadfastly in his prayers.

Before the feast of the Assumption the rains ceased, and the plague,
which had begun to show itself, was stayed; but the ardency of the
sun grew greater, and the Hermit's cliff was a fiery furnace. Never
had such heat been known in those regions; but the people did not
murmur, for with the cessation of the rain their crops were saved
and the pestilence banished; and these mercies they ascribed in
great part to the prayers and macerations of the two holy anchorets.
Therefore on the eve of the Assumption they sent a messenger to the
Hermit, saying that at daylight on the morrow the townspeople and
all the dwellers in the valley would come forth, led by their
Bishop, who bore the Pope's blessing to the two solitaries, and who
was mindful to celebrate the Mass of the Assumption in the Hermit's
cave in the cliffside. At the blessed word the Hermit was well-nigh
distraught with joy, for he felt this to be a sign from heaven that
his prayers were heard, and that he had won the Wild Woman's grace
as well as his own. And all night he prayed that on the morrow she
might confess her fault and receive the Sacrament with him.

Before dawn he recited the psalms of the proper nocturn; then he
girded on his gown and sandals, and went forth to meet the Bishop in
the valley.

As he went downward daylight stood on the mountains, and he thought
he had never seen so fair a dawn. It filled the farthest heaven with
brightness, and penetrated even to the woody crevices of the glen,
as the grace of God had entered into the obscurest folds of his
heart. The morning airs were hushed, and he heard only the sound of
his own footfall, and the murmur of the stream which, though
diminished, still poured a swift current between the rocks; but as
he reached the bottom of the glen a sound of chanting came to him,
and he knew that the pilgrims were at hand. His heart leapt up and
his feet hastened forward; but at the streamside they were suddenly
stayed, for in a pool where the water was still deep he saw the
shining of a woman's body--and on a stone hard by lay the Wild
Woman's gown and sandals.

Fear and rage possessed the Hermit's heart, and he stood as one
smitten speechless, covering his eyes from the shame. But the song
of the approaching pilgrims swelled ever louder and nearer, and
finding voice he cried to the Wild Woman to come forth and hide
herself from the people.

She made no answer, but in the dusk he saw her limbs sway with the
swaying of the water, and her eyes were turned to him as if in
mockery. At the sight blind fury filled him, and clambering over the
rocks to the pool's edge he bent down and caught her by the
shoulder. At that moment he could have strangled her with his hands,
so abhorrent to him was the touch of her flesh; but as he cried out
on her, heaping her with cruel names, he saw that her eyes returned
his look without wavering; and suddenly it came to him that she was
dead. Then through all his anger and fear a great pang smote him;
for here was his work undone, and one he had loved in Christ laid
low in her sin, in spite of all his labours.

One moment pity possessed him; the next he bethought him how the
people would find him bending above the body of a naked woman, whom
he had held up to them as holy, but whom they might now well take
for the secret instrument of his undoing; and beholding how at her
touch all the slow edifice of his holiness was demolished, and his
soul in mortal jeopardy, he felt the earth reel round him and his
sight grew red.

Already the head of the procession had entered the glen, and the
stillness shook with the great sound of the _Salve Regina_. When the
Hermit opened his eyes once more the air was quivering with thronged
candle-flames, which glittered on the gold thread of priestly
vestments, and on the blazing monstrance beneath its canopy; and
close above him was bent the Bishop's face.

The Hermit struggled to his knees.

"My Father in God," he cried, "behold, for my sins I have been
visited by a demon--" But as he spoke he perceived that those about
him no longer heeded him, and that the Bishop and all his clergy had
fallen on their knees about the pool. Then the Hermit, following
their gaze, saw that the brown waters of the pool covered the Wild
Woman's limbs as with a garment, and that about her floating head a
great light floated; and to the utmost edges of the throng a cry of
praise went up, for many were there whom the Wild Woman had healed
and comforted, and who read God's mercy in this wonder. But fresh
fear fell on the Hermit, for he had cursed a dying saint, and
denounced her aloud to all the people; and this new anguish, coming
so close upon the other, smote down his weakened frame, so that his
limbs failed him and he sank once more to the ground.

Again the earth reeled about him, and the bending faces grew remote;
but as he forced his weak voice once more to proclaim his sins he
felt the blessed touch of absolution, and the holy oils of the last
voyage laid on his lips and eyes. Peace returned to him then, and
with it a great longing to look once more upon his lauds, as he had
dreamed of doing at his last hour; but he was too far gone to make
this longing known, and so tried to banish it from his mind. Yet in
his weakness the wish held him, and the tears ran down his face.

Then, as he lay there, feeling the earth slip from under him, and
the Everlasting Arms replace it, he heard a great peal of voices
that seemed to come down from the sky and mingle with the singing of
the throng; and the words of the chant were the words of his own
lauds, so long hidden in the secret of his breast, and now rejoicing
above him through the spheres. And his soul rose on the chant, and
soared with it to the seat of mercy.






THE LAST ASSET

I





"THE devil!" Paul Garnett exclaimed as he re-read his note; and the
dry old gentleman who was at the moment his only neighbour in the
quiet restaurant they both frequented, remarked with a smile: "You
don't seem particularly annoyed at meeting him."

Garnett returned the smile. "I don't know why I apostrophized him,
for he's not in the least present--except inasmuch as he may prove
to be at the bottom of anything unexpected."

The old gentleman who, like Garnett, was an American, and spoke in
the thin rarefied voice which seems best fitted to emit sententious
truths, twisted his lean neck toward the younger man and cackled out
shrewdly: "Ah, it's generally a woman who is at the bottom of the
unexpected. Not," he added, leaning forward with deliberation to
select a tooth-pick, "that that precludes the devil's being there
too."

Garnett uttered the requisite laugh, and his neighbour, pushing back
his plate, called out with a perfectly unbending American
intonation: "Gassong! L'addition, silver play."

His repast, as usual, had been a simple one, and he left only thirty
centimes in the plate on which his account was presented; but the
waiter, to whom he was evidently a familiar presence, received the
tribute with Latin affability, and hovered helpfully about the table
while the old gentleman cut and lighted his cigar.

"Yes," the latter proceeded, revolving the cigar meditatively
between his thin lips, "they're generally both in the same hole,
like the owl and the prairie-dog in the natural history books of my
youth. I believe it was all a mistake about the owl and the
prairie-dog, but it isn't about the unexpected. The fact is, the
unexpected _is_ the devil--the sooner you find that out, the happier
you'll be." He leaned back, tilting his smooth bald head against the
blotched mirror behind him, and rambling on with gentle garrulity
while Garnett attacked his omelet.

"Get your life down to routine--eliminate surprises. Arrange things
so that, when you get up in the morning, you'll know exactly what is
going to happen to you during the day--and the next day and the
next. I don't say it's funny--it ain't. But it's better than being
hit on the head by a brick-bat. That's why I always take my meals at
this restaurant. I know just how much onion they put in things--if I
went to the next place I shouldn't. And I always take the same
streets to come here--I've been doing it for ten years now. I know
at which crossings to look out--I know what I'm going to see in the
shop-windows. It saves a lot of wear and tear to know what's coming.
For a good many years I never did know, from one minute to another,
and now I like to think that everything's cut-and-dried, and nothing
unexpected can jump out at me like a tramp from a ditch."

He paused calmly to knock the ashes from his cigar, and Garnett said
with a smile: "Doesn't such a plan of life cut off nearly all the
possibilities?"

The old gentleman made a contemptuous motion. "Possibilities of
what? Of being multifariously miserable? There are lots of ways of
being miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and
that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your
mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a
fairly good time."

"That was Schopenhauer's idea, I believe," the young man said,
pouring his wine with the smile of youthful incredulity.

"I guess he hadn't the monopoly," responded his friend. "Lots of
people have found out the secret--the trouble is that so few live up
to it."

He rose from his seat, pushing the table forward, and standing
passive while the waiter advanced with his shabby overcoat and
umbrella. Then he nodded to Garnett, lifted his hat politely to the
broad-bosomed lady behind the desk, and passed out into the street.

Garnett looked after him with a musing smile. The two had exchanged
views on life for two years without so much as knowing each other's
names. Garnett was a newspaper correspondent whose work kept him
mainly in London, but on his periodic visits to Paris he lodged in a
dingy hotel of the Latin Quarter, the chief merit of which was its
nearness to the cheap and excellent restaurant where the two
Americans had made acquaintance. But Garnett's assiduity in
frequenting the place arose, in the end, less from the excellence of
the food than from the enjoyment of his old friend's conversation.
Amid the flashy sophistications of the Parisian life to which
Garnett's trade introduced him, the American sage's conversation had
the crisp and homely flavor of a native dish--one of the domestic
compounds for which the exiled palate is supposed to yearn. It was a
mark of the old man's impersonality that, in spite of the interest
he inspired, Garnett had never got beyond idly wondering who he
might be, where he lived, and what his occupations were. He was
presumably a bachelor--a man of family ties, however relaxed, though
he might have been as often absent from home would not have been as
regularly present in the same place--and there was about him a
boundless desultoriness which renewed Garnett's conviction that
there is no one on earth as idle as an American who is not busy.
From certain allusions it was plain that he had lived many years in
Paris, yet he had not taken the trouble to adapt his tongue to the
local inflections, but spoke French with the accent of one who has
formed his conception of the language from a phrase-book.

The city itself seemed to have made as little impression on him as
its speech. He appeared to have no artistic or intellectual
curiosities, to remain untouched by the complex appeal of Paris,
while preserving, perhaps the more strikingly from his very
detachment, that odd American astuteness which seems the fruit of
innocence rather than of experience. His nationality revealed itself
again in a mild interest in the political problems of his adopted
country, though they appeared to preoccupy him only as illustrating
the boundless perversity of mankind. The exhibition of human folly
never ceased to divert him, and though his examples of it seemed
mainly drawn from the columns of one exiguous daily paper, he found
there matter for endless variations on his favorite theme. If this
monotony of topic did not weary the younger man, it was because he
fancied he could detect under it the tragic implication of the fixed
idea--of some great moral upheaval which had flung his friend
stripped and starving on the desert island of the little cafe where
they met. He hardly knew wherein he read this revelation--whether in
the resigned shabbiness of the sage's dress, the impartial courtesy
of his manner, or the shade of apprehension which lurked,
indescribably, in his guileless yet suspicious eye. There were
moments when Garnett could only define him by saying that he looked
like a man who had seen a ghost.






II





AN apparition almost as startling had come to Garnett himself in the
shape of the mauve note received from his _concierge_ as he was
leaving the hotel for luncheon.

Not that, on the face of it, a missive announcing Mrs. Sam Newell's
arrival at Ritz's, and her need of his presence there that afternoon
at five, carried any special mark of the portentous. It was not her
being at Ritz's that surprised him. The fact that she was
chronically hard up, and had once or twice lately been so brutally
confronted with the consequences as to accept--indeed solicit--a
loan of five pounds from him: this circumstance, as Garnett knew,
would never be allowed to affect the general tenor of her existence.
If one came to Paris, where could one go but to Ritz's? Did he see
her in some grubby hole across the river? Or in a family _pension_
near the Place de l'Etoile? There was no affectation in her tendency
to gravitate toward what was costliest and most conspicuous. In
doing so she obeyed one of the profoundest instincts of her nature,
and it was another instinct which taught her to gratify the first at
any cost, even to that of dipping into the pocket of an impecunious
newspaper correspondent. It was a part of her strength--and of her
charm too--that she did such things naturally, openly, without any
of the ugly grimaces of dissimulation or compunction.

Her recourse to Garnett had of course marked a specially low ebb in
her fortunes. Save in moments of exceptional dearth she had richer
sources of supply; and he was nearly sure that, by running over the
"society column" of the Paris _Herald_, he should find an
explanation, not perhaps of her presence at Ritz's, but of her means
of subsistence there. What really perplexed him was not the
financial but the social aspect of the case. When Mrs. Newell had
left London in July she had told him that, between Cowes and
Scotland, she and Hermy were provided for till the middle of
October: after that, as she put it, they would have to look about.
Why, then, when she had in her hand the opportunity of living for
three months at the expense of the British aristocracy, did she rush
off to Paris at heaven knew whose expense in the beginning of
September? She was not a woman to act incoherently; if she made
mistakes they were not of that kind. Garnett felt sure she would
never willingly relax her hold on her distinguished friends--was it
possible that it was they who had somewhat violently let go of her?

As Garnett reviewed the situation he began to see that this
possibility had for some time been latent in it. He had felt that
something might happen at any moment--and was not this the something
he had obscurely foreseen? Mrs. Newell really moved too fast: her
position was as perilous as that of an invading army without a base
of supplies. She used up everything too quickly--friends, credit,
influence, forbearance. It was so easy for her to acquire all
these--what a pity she had never learned to keep them! He himself,
for instance--the most insignificant of her acquisitions--was
beginning to feel like a squeezed sponge at the mere thought of her;
and it was this sense of exhaustion, of the inability to provide
more, either materially or morally, which had provoked his
exclamation on opening her note. From the first days of their
acquaintance her prodigality had amazed him, but he had believed it
to be surpassed by the infinity of her resources. If she exhausted
old supplies she always found new ones to replace them. When one set
of people began to find her impossible, another was always beginning
to find her indispensable. Yes--but there were limits--there were
only so many sets of people, at least in her social classification,
and when she came to an end of them, what then? Was this flight to
Paris a sign that she had come to an end--was she going to try Paris
because London had failed her? The time of year precluded such a
conjecture. Mrs. Newell's Paris was non-existent in September. The
town was a desert of gaping trippers--he could as soon think of her
seeking social restoration at Margate.

For a moment it occurred to him that she might have to come over to
replenish her wardrobe; but he knew her dates too well to dwell long
on this hope. It was in April and December that she visited the
dress-makers: before December, he had heard her explain, one got
nothing but "the American fashions." Mrs. Newell's scorn of all
things American was somewhat illogically coupled with the
determination to use her own Americanism to the utmost as a means of
social advance. She had found out long ago that, on certain lines,
it paid in London to be American, and she had manufactured for
herself a personality independent of geographical or social
demarcations, and presenting that remarkable blend of plantation
dialect, Bowery slang and hyperbolic statement, which is the British
nobility's favorite idea of an unadulterated Americanism. Mrs.
Newell, for all her talents, was not naturally either humorous or
hyperbolic, and there were times when it would doubtless have been a
relief to her to be as monumentally stolid as some of the persons
whose dulness it was her fate to enliven. It was perhaps the need of
relaxing which had drawn her into her odd intimacy with Garnett,
with whom she did not have to be either scrupulously English or
artificially American, since the impression she made on him was of
no more consequence than that which she produced on her footman.
Garnett was perfectly aware that he owed his success to his
insignificance, but the fact affected him only as adding one more
element to his knowledge of Mrs. Newell's character. He was as ready
to sacrifice his personal vanity in such a cause as he had been, at
the outset of their acquaintance, to sacrifice his professional
pride to the opportunity of knowing her.

When he had accepted the position of "London correspondent" (with an
occasional side-glance at Paris) to the New York _Searchlight_, he
had not understood that his work was to include the obligation of
"interviewing"; indeed, had the possibility presented itself in
advance, he would have met it by unpacking his valise and returning
to the drudgery of his assistant-editorship in New York. But when,
after three months in Europe, he received a letter from his chief,
suggesting that he should enliven the Sunday _Searchlight_ by a
series of "Talks with Smart Americans in London" (beginning, say,
with Mrs. Sam Newell), the change of focus already enabled him to
view the proposal without passion. For his life on the edge of the
great world-caldron of art, politics and pleasure--of that
high-spiced brew which is nowhere else so subtly and variously
compounded--had bred in him an eager appetite to taste of the heady
mixture. He knew he should never have the full spoon at his lips,
but he recalled the peasant-girl in one of Browning's plays, who has
once eaten polenta cut with a knife which has carved an ortolan.
Might not Mrs. Newell, who had so successfully cut a way into the
dense and succulent mass of English society, serve as the knife to
season his polenta?

He had expected, as the result of the interview, to which she
promptly, almost eagerly, assented, no more than the glimpse of
brightly lit vistas which a waiting messenger may catch through open
doors; but instead he had found himself drawn at once into the inner
sanctuary, not of London society, but of Mrs. Newell's relation to
it. She had been candidly charmed by the idea of the interview: it
struck him that she was conscious of the need of being freshened up.
Her appearance was brilliantly fresh, with the inveterate freshness
of the toilet-table; her paint was as impenetrable as armor. But her
personality was a little tarnished: she was in want of social
renovation. She had been doing and saying the same things for too
long a time. London, Cowes, Homburg, Scotland, Monte Carlo--that had
been the round since Hermy was a baby. Hermy was her daughter, Miss
Hermione Newell, who was called in presently to be shown off to the
interviewer and add a paragraph to the celebration of her mother's
charms.

Miss Newell's appearance was so full of an unassisted freshness that
for a moment Garnett made the mistake of fancying that she could
fill a paragraph of her own. But he soon found that her vague
personality was merely tributary to her parent's; that her youth and
grace were, in some mysterious way, her mother's rather than her
own. She smiled obediently on Garnett, but could contribute little
beyond her smile and the general sweetness of her presence, to the
picture of Mrs. Newell's existence which it was the young man's
business to draw. And presently he found that she had left the room
without his noticing it.

He learned in time that this unnoticeableness was the most
conspicuous thing about her. Burning at best with a mild light, she
became invisible in the glare of her mother's personality. It was in
fact only as a product of her environment that poor Hermione struck
the imagination. With the smartest woman in London as her guide and
example she had never developed a taste for dress, and with
opportunities for enlightenment from which Garnett's fancy recoiled
she remained simple, unsuspicious and tender, with an inclination to
good works and afternoon church, a taste for the society of dull
girls, and a clinging fidelity to old governesses and retired
nurse-maids. Mrs. Newell, whose boast it was that she looked facts
in the face, frankly owned that she had not been able to make
anything of Hermione. "If she has a role I haven't discovered it,"
she confessed to Garnett. "I've tried everything, but she doesn't
fit in anywhere."

Mrs. Newell spoke as if her daughter were a piece of furniture
acquired without due reflection, and for which no suitable place
could be found. She got, of course, what she could out of Hermione,
who wrote her notes, ran her errands, saw tiresome people for her,
and occupied an intermediate office between that of lady's maid and
secretary; but such small returns on her investment were not what
Mrs. Newell had counted on. What was the use of producing and
educating a handsome daughter if she did not, in some more positive
way, contribute to her parent's advancement?






III





"IT'S about Hermy," Mrs. Newell said, rising from the heap of
embroidered cushions which formed the background of her afternoon
repose.

Her sitting-room at Ritz's was full of penetrating warmth and
fragrance. Long-stemmed roses filled the vases on the chimney-piece,
in which a fire sparkled with that effect of luxury which fires
produce when the weather is not cold enough to justify them. On the
writing-table, among notes and cards, and signed photographs of
celebrities, Mrs. Newell's gold inkstand, her jewelled penholder,
her heavily-monogrammed despatch-box, gave back from their expensive
surfaces the glint of the flame, which sought out and magnified the
orient of the pearls among the lady's laces and found a mirror in
the pinky polish of her finger-tips. It was just such a scene as a
little September fire, lit for show and not for warmth, would
delight to dwell on and pick out in all its opulent details; and
even Garnett, inured to Mrs. Newell's capacity for extracting manna
from the desert, reflected that she must have found new fields to
glean.

"It's about Hermy," she repeated, making room for him among the
cushions. "I had to see you at once. We came over yesterday from
London."

Garnett, seating himself, continued his leisurely survey of the
room. In the glitter of Mrs. Newell's magnificence Hermione, as
usual, faded out of sight, and he hardly noticed her mother's
allusion.

"I have never seen you more resplendent," he remarked.

She received the tribute with complacency. "The rooms are not bad,
are they? We came over with the Woolsey Hubbards (you've heard of
them, of course?--they're from Detroit), and really they do things
very decently. Their motor-car met us at Boulogne, and the courier
always wires ahead to have the rooms filled with flowers. This
_salon,_ is really a part of their suite. I simply couldn't have
afforded it myself."

She delivered these facts in a high decisive voice, which had a note
akin to the clink of her many bracelets and the rattle of her ringed
hands against the enamelled cigarette-case which she extended to
Garnett after helping herself from its contents.

"You are always meeting such charming people," said Garnett with
mild irony; and, reverting to her first remark, he bethought himself
to add: "I hope Miss Hermione is not ill?"

"Ill? She was never ill in her life," exclaimed Mrs. Newell, as
though her daughter had been accused of an indelicacy.

"It was only that you said you had come over on her account."

"So I have. Hermione is to be married."

Mrs. Newell brought out the words impressively, drawing back to
observe their effect on her visitor. It was such that he received
them with a long silent stare, which finally passed into a cry of
wonder. "Married? For heaven's sake, to whom?"

Mrs. Newell continued to regard him with a smile so serene and
victorious that he saw she took his somewhat unseemly astonishment
as a merited tribute to her genius. Presently she extended a
glittering hand and took a sheet of note paper from the blotter.

"You can have that put in to-morrow's _Herald_," she said.

Garnett, receiving the paper, read in Hermione's own finished hand:
"A marriage has been arranged, and will shortly take place, between
the Comte Louis du Trayas, son of the Marquis du Trayas de la Baume,
and Miss Hermione Newell, daughter of Samuel C. Newell Esqre. of
Elmira, N. Y. Comte Louis du Trayas belongs to one of the oldest and
most distinguished families in France, and is equally well connected
in England, being the nephew of Lord Saint Priscoe and a cousin of
the Countess of Morningfield, whom he frequently visits at Adham and
Portlow."

The perusal of this document filled Garnett with such deepening
wonder that he could not, for the moment, even do justice to the
strangeness of its being written out for publication in the bride's
own hand. Hermione a bride! Hermione a future countess! Hermione on
the brink of a marriage which would give her not only a great
"situation" in the Parisian world but a footing in some of the best
houses in England! Regardless of its unflattering implications,
Garnett prolonged his stare of mute amazement till Mrs. Newell
somewhat sharply exclaimed--"Well, didn't I always tell you that she
would marry a Frenchman?"

Garnett, in spite of himself, smiled at this revised version of his
hostess's frequent assertion that Hermione was too goody-goody to
take in England, but that with her little dowdy air she might very
well "go off" in the Faubourg if only a _dot_ could be raked up for
her--and the recollection flashed a new light on the versatility of
Mrs. Newell's genius.

"But how did you do it--?" was on the tip of his tongue; and he had
barely time to give the query the more conventional turn of: "How
did it happen?"

"Oh, we were up at Glaish with the Edmund Fitzarthurs. Lady Edmund
is a sort of cousin of the Morningfields', who have a shooting-lodge
near Glaish--a place called Portlow--and young Trayas was there with
them. Lady Edmund, who is a dear, drove Hermy over to Portlow, and
the thing was done in no time. He simply fell over head and ears in
love with her. You know Hermy is really very handsome in her
peculiar way. I don't think you have ever appreciated her," Mrs.
Newell summed up with a note of exquisite reproach.

"I've appreciated her, I assure you; but one somehow didn't think of
her marrying--so soon."

"Soon? She's three-and-twenty; but you've no imagination," said Mrs.
Newell; and Garnett inwardly admitted that he had not enough to soar
to the heights of her invention. For the marriage, of course, was an
invention of her own, a superlative stroke of business, in which he
was sure the principal parties had all been passive agents, in which
everyone, from the bankrupt and disreputable Fitzarthurs to the rich
and immaculate Morningfields, had by some mysterious sleight of hand
been made to fit into Mrs. Newell's designs. But it was not enough
for Garnett to marvel at her work--he wanted to understand it, to
take it apart, to find out how the trick had been done. It was true
that Mrs. Newell had always said Hermy might go off in the Faubourg
if she had a _dot_--but even Mrs. Newell's juggling could hardly
conjure up a _dot:_ such feats as she was able to perform in this
line were usually made to serve her own urgent necessities. And
besides, who was likely to take sufficient interest in Hermione to
supply her with the means of marrying a French nobleman? The flowers
ordered in advance by the Woolsey Hubbards' courier made Garnett
wonder if that accomplished functionary had also wired over to have
Miss Newell's settlements drawn up. But of all the comments hovering
on his lips the only one he could decently formulate was the remark
that he supposed Mrs. Newell and her daughter had come over to see
the young man's family and make the final arrangements.

"Oh, they're made--everything is settled," said Mrs. Newell, looking
him squarely in the eye. "You're wondering, of course, about the
_dot_--Frenchmen never go off their heads to the extent of
forgetting _that;_ or at least their parents don't allow them to."

Garnett murmured a vague assent, and she went on without the least
appearance of resenting his curiosity: "It all came about so
fortunately. Only fancy, just the week they met I got a little
legacy from an aunt in Elmira--a good soul I hadn't seen or heard of
for years. I suppose I ought to have put on mourning for her, by the
way, but it would have eaten up a good bit of the legacy, and I
really needed it all for poor Hermy. Oh, it's not a fortune, you
understand--but the young man is madly in love, and has always had
his own way, so after a lot of correspondence it's been arranged.
They saw Hermy this morning, and they're enchanted."

"And the marriage takes place very soon?"

"Yes, in a few weeks, here. His mother is an invalid and couldn't
have gone to England. Besides, the French don't travel. And as Hermy
has become a Catholic--"

"Already?"

Mrs. Newell stared. "It doesn't take long. And it suits Hermy
exactly--she can go to church so much oftener. So I thought," Mrs.
Newell concluded with dignity, "that a wedding at Saint Philippe du
Roule would be the most suitable thing at this season."

"Dear me," said Garnett, "I am left breathless--I can't catch up
with you. I suppose even the day is fixed, though Miss Hermione
doesn't mention it," and he indicated the official announcement in
his hand.

Mrs. Newell laughed. "Hermy had to write that herself, poor dear,
because my scrawl's too hideous--but I dictated it. No, the day
isn't fixed--that's why I sent for you." There was a splendid
directness about Mrs. Newell. It would never have occurred to her to
pretend to Garnett that she had summoned him for the pleasure of his
company.

"You've sent for me--to fix the day?" he enquired humourously.

"To remove the last obstacle to its being fixed."

"I? What kind of an obstacle could I have the least effect on?"

Mrs. Newell met his banter with a look which quelled it. "I want you
to find her father."

"Her father? Miss Hermione's--?"

"My husband, of course. I suppose you know he's living."

Garnett blushed at his own clumsiness. "I--yes--that is, I really
knew nothing--" he stammered, feeling that each word added to it. If
Hermione was unnoticeable, Mr. Newell had always been invisible. The
young man had never so much as given him a thought, and it was
awkward to come on him so suddenly at a turn of the talk.

"Well, he is--living here in Paris," said Mrs. Newell, with a note
of asperity which seemed to imply that her friend might have taken
the trouble to post himself on this point.

"In Paris? But in that case isn't it quite simple--?"

"To find him? I daresay it won't be difficult, though he is rather
mysterious. But the point is that I can't go to him--and that if I
write to him he won't answer."

"Ah," said Garnett thoughtfully.

"And so you've got to find him for me, and tell him."

"Tell him what?"

"That he must come to the wedding--that we must show ourselves
together at church and at the breakfast."

She delivered the behest in her sharp imperative key, the tone of
the born commander. But for once Garnett ventured to question her
orders.

"And supposing he won't come?"

"He must if he cares for his daughter's happiness. She can't be
married without him."

"Can't be married?"

"The French are like that--especially the old families. I was given
to understand at once that my husband must appear--if only to
establish the fact that we're not divorced."

"Ah--you're _not_, then?" escaped from Garnett.

"Mercy, no! Divorce is stupid. They don't like it in Europe. And in
this case it would have been the end of Hermy's marriage. They
wouldn't think of letting their son marry the child of divorced
parents."

"How fortunate, then--"

"Yes; but I always think of such things beforehand. And of course
I've told them that my husband will be present."

"You think he will consent?"

"No; not at first; but you must make him. You must tell him how
sweet Hermione is--and you must see Louis, and be able to describe
their happiness. You must dine here to-night--he is coming. We're
all dining with the Hubbards, and they expect you. They have given
Hermy some very good diamonds--though I should have preferred a
cheque, as she'll be horribly poor. But I think Kate Hubbard means
to do something about the trousseau--Hermy is at Paquin's with her
now. You've no idea how delightful all our friends have been.--Ah,
here is one of them now," she broke off smiling, as the door opened
to admit, without preliminary announcement, a gentleman so glossy
and ancient, with such a fixed unnatural freshness of smile and eye,
that he gave Garnett the effect of having been embalmed and then
enamelled. It needed not the exotic-looking ribbon in the visitor's
button-hole, nor Mrs. Newell's introduction of him as her friend
Baron Schenkelderff, to assure Garnett of his connection with a race
as ancient as his appearance.

Baron Schenkelderff greeted his hostess with paternal playfulness,
and the young man with an ease which might have been acquired on the
Stock Exchange and in the dressing-rooms of "leading ladies." He
spoke a faultless, colourless English, from which one felt he might
pass with equal mastery to half a dozen other languages. He enquired
patronizingly for the excellent Hubbards, asked his hostess if she
did not mean to give him a drop of tea and a cigarette, remarked
that he need not ask if Hermione was still closeted with the
dress-maker, and, on the waiter's coming in answer to his ring,
ordered the tea himself, and added a request for _fine champagne_.
It was not the first time that Garnett had seen such minor liberties
taken in Mrs. Newell's drawing-room, but they had hitherto been
taken by persons who had at least the superiority of knowing what
they were permitting themselves, whereas the young man felt almost
sure that Baron Schenkelderff's manner was the most distinguished he
could achieve; and this deepened the disgust with which, as the
minutes passed, he yielded to the conviction that the Baron was Mrs.
Newell's aunt.






IV





GARNETT had always foreseen that Mrs. Newell might some day ask him
to do something he should greatly dislike. He had never gone so far
as to conjecture what it might be, but had simply felt that if he
allowed his acquaintance with her to pass from spectatorship to
participation he must be prepared to find himself, at any moment, in
a queer situation.

The moment had come; and he was relieved to find that he could meet
it by refusing her request. He had not always been sure that she
would leave him this alternative. She had a way of involving people
in her complications without their being aware of it, and Garnett
had pictured himself in holes so tight that there might not be room
for a wriggle. Happily in this case he could still move freely.
Nothing compelled him to act as an intermediary between Mrs. Newell
and her husband, and it was preposterous to suppose that, even in a
life of such perpetual upheaval as hers, there were no roots which
struck deeper than her casual intimacy with himself. She had simply
laid hands on him because he happened to be within reach, and he
would put himself out of reach by leaving for London on the morrow.

Having thus inwardly asserted his independence, he felt free to let
his fancy dwell on the strangeness of the situation. He had always
supposed that Mrs. Newell, in her flight through life, must have
thrown a good many victims to the wolves, and had assumed that Mr.
Newell had been among the number. That he had been dropped overboard
at an early stage in the lady's career seemed probable from the fact
that neither his wife nor his daughter ever mentioned him. Mrs.
Newell was incapable of reticence, and if her husband had still been
an active element in her life he would certainly have figured in her
conversation. Garnett, if he thought of the matter at all, had
concluded that divorce must long since have eliminated Mr. Newell;
but he now saw how he had underrated his friend's faculty for using
up the waste material of life. She had always struck him as the most
extravagant of women, yet it turned out that by a miracle of thrift
she had for years kept a superfluous husband on the chance that he
might some day be useful to her. The day had come, and Mr. Newell
was to be called from his obscurity. Garnett wondered what had
become of him in the interval, and in what shape he would respond to
the evocation. The fact that his wife feared he might not respond to
it at all, seemed to show that his exile was voluntary, or had at
least come to appear preferable to other alternatives; but if that
were the case it was curious that he should not have taken legal
means to free himself. He could hardly have had his wife's motives
for wishing to maintain the vague tie between them; but conjecture
lost itself in trying to picture what his point of view was likely
to be, and Garnett, on his way to the Hubbards' dinner that evening,
could not help regretting that circumstances denied him the
opportunity of meeting so enigmatic a person. The young man's
knowledge of Mrs. Newell's methods made him feel that her husband
might be an interesting study. This, however, did not affect his
resolve to keep clear of the business. He entered the Hubbards'
dining-room with the firm intention of refusing to execute Mrs.
Newell's commission, and if he changed his mind in the course of the
evening it was not owing to that lady's persuasions.

Garnett's curiosity as to the Hubbards' share in Hermione's marriage
was appeased before he had been seated five minutes at their table.

Mrs. Woolsey Hubbard was an expansive blonde, whose ample but
disciplined outline seemed the result of a well-matched struggle
between her cook and her corset-maker. She talked a great deal of
what was appropriate in dress and conduct, and seemed to regard Mrs.
Newell as a final arbiter on both points. To do or to wear anything
inappropriate would have been extremely mortifying to Mrs. Hubbard,
and she was evidently resolved, at the price of eternal vigilance,
to prove her familiarity with what she frequently referred to as
"the right thing." Mr. Hubbard appeared to have no such
preoccupations. Garnett, if called upon to describe him, would have
done so by saying that he was the American who always pays. The
young man, in the course of his foreign wanderings, had come across
many fellow-citizens of Mr. Hubbard's type, in the most diverse
company and surroundings; and wherever they were to be found, they
always had their hands in their pockets. Mr. Hubbard's standard of
gentility was the extent of a man's capacity to "foot the bill"; and
as no one but an occasional compatriot cared to dispute the
privilege with him, he seldom had reason to doubt his social
superiority.

Garnett, nevertheless, did not believe that this lavish pair were,
as Mrs. Newell would have phrased it, "putting up" Hermione's _dot_.
They would go very far in diamonds, but they would hang back from
securities. Their readiness to pay was indefinably mingled with a
dread of being expected to, and their prodigalities would take
flight at the first hint of coercion. Mrs. Newell, who had had a
good deal of experience in managing this type of millionaire, could
be trusted not to arouse their susceptibilities, and Garnett was
therefore certain that the chimerical legacy had been extracted from
other pockets. There were none in view but those of Baron
Schenkelderff, who, seated at Mrs. Hubbard's right, with a new order
in his button-hole, and a fresh glaze upon his features, enchanted
that lady by his careless references to crowned heads and his
condescending approval of the champagne. Garnett was more than ever
certain that it was the Baron who was paying; and it was this
conviction which made him suddenly feel that, at any cost,
Hermione's marriage must take place. He had felt no special interest
in the marriage except as one more proof of Mrs. Newell's
extraordinary capacity; but now it appealed to him from the girl's
own stand-point. For he saw, with a touch of compunction, that in
the mephitic air of her surroundings a love-story of surprising
freshness had miraculously flowered. He had only to intercept the
glances which the young couple exchanged to find himself transported
to the candid region of romance. It was evident that Hermione adored
and was adored; that the lovers believed in each other and in every
one about them, and that even the legacy of the defunct aunt had not
been too great a strain on their faith in human nature.

His first glance at the Comte Louis du Trayas showed Garnett that,
by some marvel of fitness, Hermione had happened upon a kindred
nature. If the young man's long mild features and short-sighted
glance revealed no special force of character, they showed a
benevolence and simplicity as incorruptible as her own, and declared
that their possessor, whatever his failings, would never imperil the
illusions she had so miraculously preserved. The fact that the girl
took her good fortune naturally, and did not regard herself as
suddenly snatched from the jaws of death, added poignancy to the
situation; for if she missed this way of escape, and was thrown back
on her former life, the day of discovery could not be long deferred.
It made Garnett shiver to think of her growing old between her
mother and Schenkelderff, or such successors of the Baron's as might
probably attend on Mrs. Newell's waning fortunes; for it was clear
to him that the Baron marked the first stage in his friend's
decline. When Garnett took leave that evening he had promised Mrs.
Newell that he would try to find her husband.






V





IF Mr. Newell read in the papers the announcement of his daughter's
marriage it did not cause him to lift the veil of seclusion in which
his wife represented him as shrouded.

A round of the American banks in Paris failed to give Garnett his
address, and it was only in chance talk with one of the young
secretaries of the Embassy that he was put on Mr. Newell's track.
The secretary's father, it appeared, had known the Newells some
twenty years earlier. He had had business relations with Mr. Newell,
who was then a man of property, with factories or something of the
kind, the narrator thought, somewhere in Western New York. There had
been at this period, for Mrs. Newell, a phase of large hospitality
and showy carriages in Washington and at Narragansett. Then her
husband had had reverses, had lost heavily in Wall Street, and had
finally drifted abroad and been lost to sight. The young man did not
know at what point in his financial decline Mr. Newell had parted
company with his wife and daughter; "though you may bet your hat,"
he philosophically concluded, "that the old girl hung on as long as
there were any pickings." He did not himself know Mr. Newell's
address, but opined that it might be extracted from a certain
official at the Consulate, if Garnett could give a sufficiently good
reason for the request; and here in fact Mrs. Newell's emissary
learned that her husband was to be found in an obscure street of the
Luxembourg quarter.

In order to be near the scene of action, Garnett went to breakfast
at his usual haunt, determined to despatch his business as early in
the day as politeness allowed. The head waiter welcomed him to a
table near that of the transatlantic sage, who sat in his customary
corner, his head tilted back against the blistered mirror at an
angle suggesting that in a freer civilization his feet would have
sought the same level. He greeted Garnett affably and the two
exchanged their usual generalizations on life till the sage rose to
go; whereupon it occurred to Garnett to accompany him. His friend
took the offer in good part, merely remarking that he was going to
the Luxembourg gardens, where it was his invariable habit, on good
days, to feed the sparrows with the remains of his breakfast roll;
and Garnett replied that, as it happened, his own business lay in
the same direction.

"Perhaps, by the way," he added, "you can tell me how to find the
rue Panonceaux where I must go presently. I thought I knew this
quarter fairly well, but I have never heard of it."

His companion came to a sudden halt on the narrow sidewalk, to the
confusion of the dense and desultory traffic which marks the old
streets of the Latin quarter. He fixed his mild eye on Garnett and
gave a twist to the cigar which lingered in the corner of his mouth.

"The rue Panonceaux? It _is_ an out of the way hole, but I can tell
you how to find it," he answered.

He made no motion to do so, however, but continued to bend on the
young man the full force of his interrogative gaze; then he added
abruptly: "Would you mind telling me your object in going there?"

Garnett looked at him with surprise: a question so unblushingly
personal was strangely out of keeping with his friend's usual
attitude of detachment. Before he could reply, however, the other
had quietly continued: "Do you happen to be in search of Samuel C.
Newell?"

"Why, yes, I am," said Garnett with a start of conjecture.

His companion uttered a sigh. "I supposed so," he said resignedly;
"and in that case," he added, "we may as well have the matter out in
the Luxembourg."

Garnett had halted before him with deepening astonishment. "But you
don't mean to tell me--?" he stammered.

The little man made a motion of assent. "I am Samuel C. Newell," he
said drily; "and if you have no objection, I prefer not to break
through my habit of feeding the sparrows. We are five minutes late
as it is."

He quickened his pace without awaiting any reply from Garnett, who
walked beside him in unsubdued wonder till they reached the
Luxembourg gardens, where Mr. Newell, making for one of the less
frequented alleys, seated himself on a bench and drew the fragment
of a roll from his pocket. His coming was evidently expected, for a
shower of little dusky bodies at once descended on him, and the
gravel fluttered with battling wings and beaks as he distributed his
dole with impartial gestures.

It was not till the ground was white with crumbs, and the first
frenzy of his pensioners appeased, that he turned to Garnett and
said: "I presume, sir, that you come from my wife."

Garnett coloured with embarrassment: the more simply the old man
took his mission the more complicated it appeared to himself.

"From your wife--and from Miss Newell," he said at length. "You have
perhaps heard that she is to be married."

"Oh, yes--I read the _Herald_ pretty faithfully," said Miss Newell's
parent, shaking out another handful of crumbs.

Garnett cleared his throat. "Then you have no doubt thought it
natural that, under the circumstances, they should wish to
communicate with you."

The sage continued to fix his attention on the sparrows. "My wife,"
he remarked, "might have written to me."

"Mrs. Newell was afraid she might not hear from you in reply."

"In reply? Why should she? I suppose she merely wishes to announce
the marriage. She knows I have no money left to buy
wedding-presents," said Mr. Newell astonishingly.

Garnett felt his colour deepen: he had a vague sense of standing as
the representative of something guilty and enormous, with which he
had rashly identified himself.

"I don't think you understand," he said. "Mrs. Newell and your
daughter have asked me to see you because they are anxious that you
should consent to appear at the wedding."

Mr. Newell, at this, ceased to give his attention to the birds, and
turned a compassionate gaze upon Garnett.

"My dear sir--I don't know your name--" he remarked, "would you mind
telling me how long you have been acquainted with Mrs. Newell?" And
without waiting for an answer he added judicially: "If you wait long
enough she will ask you to do some very disagreeable things for
her."

This echo of his own thoughts gave Garnett a sharp twinge of
discomfort, but he made shift to answer good-humouredly: "If you
refer to my present errand, I must tell you that I don't find it
disagreeable to do anything which may be of service to Miss
Hermione."

Mr. Newell fumbled in his pocket, as though searching unavailingly
for another morsel of bread; then he said: "From her point of view I
shall not be the most important person at the ceremony."

Garnett smiled. "That is hardly a reason--" he began; but he was
checked by the brevity of tone with which his companion replied: "I
am not aware that I am called upon to give you my reasons."

"You are certainly not," the young man rejoined, "except in so far
as you are willing to consider me as the messenger of your wife and
daughter."

"Oh, I accept your credentials," said the other with his dry smile;
"what I don't recognize is their right to send a message."

This reduced Garnett to silence, and after a moment's pause Mr.
Newell drew his watch from his pocket.

"I am sorry to cut the conversation short, but my days are mapped
out with a certain regularity, and this is the hour for my nap." He
rose as he spoke and held out his hand with a glint of melancholy
humour in his small clear eyes.

"You dismiss me, then? I am to take back a refusal?" the young man
exclaimed.

"My dear sir, those ladies have got on very well without me for a
number of years: I imagine they can put through this wedding without
my help."

"You are mistaken, then; if it were not for that I shouldn't have
undertaken this errand."

Mr. Newell paused as he was turning away. "Not for what?" he
enquired.

"The fact that, as it happens, the wedding can't be put through
without your help."

Mr. Newell's thin lips formed a noiseless whistle. "They've got to
have my consent, have they? Well, is he a good young man?"

"The bridegroom?" Garnett echoed in surprise. "I hear the best
accounts of him--and Miss Newell is very much in love."

Her parent met this with an odd smile. "Well, then, I give my
consent--it's all I've got left to give," he added philosophically.

Garnett hesitated. "But if you consent--if you approve--why do you
refuse your daughter's request?"

Mr. Newell looked at him a moment. "Ask Mrs. Newell!" he said. And
as Garnett was again silent, he turned away with a slight gesture of
leave-taking.

But in an instant the young man was at his side. "I will not ask
your reasons, sir," he said, "but I will give you mine for being
here. Miss Newell cannot be married unless you are present at the
ceremony. The young man's parents know that she has a father living,
and they give their consent only on condition that he appears at her
marriage. I believe it is customary in old French families--."

"Old French families be damned!" said Mr. Newell with sudden vigour.
"She had better marry an American." And he made a more decided
motion to free himself from Garnett's importunities.

But his resistance only strengthened the young man's. The more
unpleasant the latter's task became, the more unwilling he grew to
see his efforts end in failure. During the three days which had been
consumed in his quest it had become clear to him that the
bridegroom's parents, having been surprised into a reluctant
consent, were but too ready to withdraw it on the plea of Mr.
Newell's non-appearance. Mrs. Newell, on the last edge of tension,
had confided to Garnett that the Morningfields were "being nasty";
and he could picture the whole powerful clan, on both sides of the
Channel, arrayed in a common resolve to exclude poor Hermione from
their ranks. The very inequality of the contest stirred his blood,
and made him vow that in this case at least the sins of the parents
should not be visited on the children. In his talk with the young
secretary he had obtained some glimpses of Baron Schenkelderff's
past which fortified this resolve. The Baron, at one time a familiar
figure in a much-observed London set, had been mixed up in an ugly
money-lending business ending in suicide, which had excluded him
from the society most accessible to his race. His alliance with Mrs.
Newell was doubtless a desperate attempt at rehabilitation, a
forlorn hope on both sides, but likely to be an enduring tie because
it represented, to both partners, their last chance of escape from
social extinction. That Hermione's marriage was a mere stake in
their game did not in the least affect Garnett's view of its
urgency. If on their part it was a sordid speculation, to her it had
the freshness of the first wooing. If it made of her a mere pawn in
their hands, it would put her, so Garnett hoped, beyond farther risk
of such base uses; and to achieve this had become a necessity to
him.

The sense that, if he lost sight of Mr. Newell, the latter might not
easily be found again, nerved Garnett to hold his ground in spite of
the resistance he encountered; and he tried to put the full force of
his plea into the tone with which he cried: "Ah, you don't know your
daughter!"






VI





MRS. NEWELL, that afternoon, met him on the threshold of her
sitting-room with a "Well?" of pent-up anxiety.

In the room itself, Baron Schenkelderff sat with crossed legs and
head thrown back, in an attitude which he did not see fit to alter
at the young man's approach.

Garnett hesitated; but it was not the summariness of the Baron's
greeting which he resented.

"You've found him?" Mrs. Newell exclaimed.

"Yes; but--"

She followed his glance and answered it with a slight shrug. "I
can't take you into my room, because there's a dress-maker there,
and she won't go because she is waiting to be paid. Schenkelderff,"
she exclaimed, "you're not wanted; please go and look out of the
window."

The Baron rose and, lighting a cigarette, laughingly retired to the
embrasure. Mrs. Newell flung herself down and signed to Garnett to
take a seat at her side.

"Well--you've found him? You've talked with him?"

"Yes; I have talked with him--for an hour."

She made an impatient movement. "That's too long! Does he refuse?"

"He doesn't consent."

"Then you mean--?"

"He wants time to think it over."

"Time? There _is_ no time--did you tell him so?"

"I told him so; but you must remember that he has plenty. He has
taken twenty-four hours."

Mrs. Newell groaned. "Oh, that's too much. When he thinks things
over he always refuses."

"Well, he would have refused at once if I had not agreed to the
delay."

She rose nervously from her seat and pressed her hands to her
forehead. "It's too hard, after all I've done! The trousseau is
ordered--think how disgraceful! You must have managed him badly;
I'll go and see him myself."

The Baron, at this, turned abruptly from his study of the Place
Vendome.

"My dear creature, for heaven's sake don't spoil everything!" he
exclaimed.

Mrs. Newell coloured furiously. "What's the meaning of that
brilliant speech?"

"I was merely putting myself in the place of a man on whom you have
ceased to smile."

He picked up his hat and stick, nodded knowingly to Garnett, and
walked toward the door with an air of creaking jauntiness.

But on the threshold Mrs. Newell waylaid him.

"Don't go--I must speak to you," she said, following him into the
antechamber; and Garnett remembered the dress-maker who was not to
be dislodged from her bedroom.

In a moment Mrs. Newell returned, with a small flat packet which she
vainly sought to dissemble in an inaccessible pocket.

"He makes everything too odious!" she exclaimed; but whether she
referred to her husband or the Baron it was left to Garnett to
decide.

She sat silent, nervously twisting her cigarette-case between her
fingers, while her visitor rehearsed the details of his conversation
with Mr. Newell. He did not indeed tell her the arguments he had
used to shake her husband's resolve, since in his eloquent sketch of
Hermione's situation there had perforce entered hints unflattering
to her mother; but he gave the impression that his hearer had in the
end been moved, and for that reason had consented to defer his
refusal.

"Ah, it's not that--it's to prolong our misery!" Mrs. Newell
exclaimed; and after a moment she added drearily: "He has been
waiting for such an opportunity for years."

It seemed needless for Garnett to protract his visit, and he took
leave with the promise to report at once the result of his final
talk with Mr. Newell. But as he was passing through the ante-chamber
a side-door opened and Hermione stood before him. Her face was
flushed and shaken out of its usual repose of line, and he saw at
once that she had been waiting for him.

"Mr. Garnett!" she said in a whisper.

He paused, considering her with surprise: he had never supposed her
capable of such emotion as her voice and eyes revealed.

"I want to speak to you; we are quite safe here. Mamma is with the
dress-maker," she explained, closing the door behind her, while
Garnett laid aside his hat and stick.

"I am at your service," he said.

"You have seen my father? Mamma told me that you were to see him
to-day," the girl went on, standing close to him in order that she
might not have to raise her voice.

"Yes; I have seen him," Garnett replied with increasing wonder.
Hermione had never before mentioned her father to him, and it was by
a slight stretch of veracity that he had included her name in her
mother's plea to Mr. Newell. He had supposed her to be either
unconscious of the transaction, or else too much engrossed in her
own happiness to give it a thought; and he had forgiven her the last
alternative in consideration of the abnormal character of her filial
relations. But now he saw that he must readjust his view of her.

"You went to ask him to come to my wedding; I know about it,"
Hermione continued. "Of course it is the custom--people will think
it odd if he does not come." She paused, and then asked: "Does he
consent?"

"No; he has not yet consented."

"Ah, I thought so when I saw Mamma just now!"

"But he hasn't quite refused--he has promised to think it over."

"But he hated it--he hated the idea?"

Garnett hesitated. "It seemed to arouse painful associations."

"Ah, it would--it would!" she exclaimed.

He was astonished at the passion of her accent; astonished still
more at the tone with which she went on, laying her hand on his arm:
"Mr. Garnett, he must not be asked--he has been asked too often to
do things that he hated!"

Garnett looked at the girl with a shock of awe. What abysses of
knowledge did her purity hide?

"But, my dear Miss Hermione--" he began.

"I know what you are going to say," she interrupted him. "It is
necessary that he should be present at the marriage or the du Trayas
will break it off. They don't want it very much, at any rate," she
added with a strange candour, "and they will not be sorry,
perhaps--for of course Louis would have to obey them."

"So I explained to your father," Garnett assured her.

"Yes--yes; I knew you would put it to him. But that makes no
difference, Mr. Garnett. He must not be forced to come unwillingly."

"But if he sees the point--after all, no one can force him!"

"No; but if it is painful to him--if it reminds him too much . . .
Oh, Mr. Garnett, I was not a child when he left us. . . . I was old
enough to see . . . to see how it must hurt him even now to be
reminded. Peace was all he asked for, and I want him to be left in
peace!"

Garnett paused in deep embarrassment. "My dear child, there is no
need to remind you that your own future--"

She had a gesture that recalled her mother. "My future must take
care of itself; he must not be made to see us!" she said
imperatively. And as Garnett remained silent she went on: "I have
always hoped he did not hate me, but he would hate me now if he were
forced to see me."

"Not if he could see you at this moment!" he exclaimed.

She lifted her face with swimming eyes.

"Well, go to him, then; tell him what I have said to you!"

Garnett continued to stand before her, deeply struck. "It might be
the best thing," he reflected inwardly; but he did not give
utterance to the thought. He merely put out his hand, holding
Hermione's in a long pressure.

"I will do whatever you wish," he replied.

"You understand that I am in earnest?" she urged tenaciously.

"I am quite sure of it."

"Then I want you to repeat to him what I have said--I want him to be
left undisturbed. I don't want him ever to hear of us again!"

The next day, at the appointed hour, Garnett resorted to the
Luxembourg gardens, which Mr. Newell had named as a meeting-place in
preference to his own lodgings. It was clear that he did not wish to
admit the young man any further into his privacy than the occasion
required, and the extreme shabbiness of his dress hinted that pride
might be the cause of his reluctance.

Garnett found him feeding the sparrows, but he desisted at the young
man's approach, and said at once: "You will not thank me for
bringing you all this distance."

"If that means that you are going to send me away with a refusal, I
have come to spare you the necessity," Garnett answered.

Mr. Newell turned on him a glance of undisguised wonder, in which an
undertone of disappointment might almost have been detected.


"Ah--they've got no use for me, after all?" be said ironically.

Garnett, in reply, related without comment his conversation with
Hermione, and the message with which she had charged him. He
remembered her words exactly and repeated them without modification,
heedless of what they implied or revealed.

Mr. Newell listened with an immovable face, occasionally casting a
crumb to his flock. When Garnett ended he asked: "Does her mother
know of this?"

" Assuredly not!" cried Garnett with a movement of disgust.

"You must pardon me; but Mrs. Newell is a very ingenious woman." Mr.
Newell shook out his remaining crumbs and turned thoughtfully toward
Garnett.

"You believe it's quite clear to Hermione that these people will use
my refusal as a pretext for backing out of the marriage?"

"Perfectly clear--she told me so herself."

"Doesn't she consider the young man rather chicken-hearted?"

"No; he has already put up a big fight for her, and you know the
French look at these things differently. He's only twenty-three and
his marrying against his parents' approval is in itself an act of
heroism."

"Yes; I believe they look at it that way," Mr. Newell assented. He
rose and picked up the half-smoked cigar which he had laid on the
bench beside him.

"What do they wear at these French weddings, anyhow? A dress-suit,
isn't it?" he asked.

The question was such a surprise to Garnett that for the moment he
could only stammer out--"You consent then? I may go and tell her?"

"You may tell my girl--yes." He gave a vague laugh and added: "One
way or another, my wife always gets what she wants."






VII





MR. NEWELL'S consent brought with it no accompanying concessions. In
the first flush of his success Garnett had pictured himself as
bringing together the father and daughter, and hovering in an
attitude of benediction over a family group in which Mrs. Newell did
not very distinctly figure.

But Mr. Newell's conditions were inflexible. He would "see the thing
through" for his daughter's sake; but he stipulated that in the
meantime there should be no meetings or farther communications of
any kind. He agreed to be ready when Garnett called for him, at the
appointed hour on the wedding-day; but until then he begged to be
left alone. To this decision he adhered immovably, and when Garnett
conveyed it to Hermione she accepted it with a deep look of
understanding. As for Mrs. Newell she was too much engrossed in the
nuptial preparations to give her husband another thought. She had
gained her point, she had disarmed her foes, and in the first flush
of success she had no time to remember by what means her victory had
been won. Even Garnett's services received little recognition,
unless he found them sufficiently compensated by the new look in
Hermione's eyes.

The principal figures in Mrs. Newell's foreground were the Woolsey
Hubbards and Baron Schenkelderff. With these she was in hourly
consultation, and Mrs. Hubbard went about aureoled with the
importance of her close connection with an "aristocratic marriage,"
and dazzled by the Baron's familiarity with the intricacies of the
Almanach de Gotha. In his society and Mrs. Newell's, Mrs. Hubbard
evidently felt that she had penetrated to the sacred precincts where
"the right thing" flourished in its native soil. As for Hermione,
her look of happiness had returned, but with an undertint of
melancholy, visible perhaps only to Garnett, but to him always
hauntingly present. Outwardly she sank back into her passive self,
resigned to serve as the brilliant lay-figure on which Mrs. Newell
hung the trophies of conquest. Preparations for the wedding were
zealously pressed. Mrs. Newell knew the danger of giving people time
to think things over, and her fears about her husband being allayed,
she began to [87] dread a new attempt at evasion on the part of the
bridegroom's family.

"The sooner it's over the sounder I shall sleep!" she declared to
Garnett; and all the mitigations of art could not conceal the fact
that she was desperately in need of that restorative. There were
moments, indeed, when he was sorrier for her than for her husband or
her daughter; so black and unfathomable appeared the abyss into
which she must slip back if she lost her hold on this last spar of
safety.

But she did not lose her hold; his own experience, as well as her
husband's declaration, might have told him that she always got what
she wanted. How much she had wanted this particular thing was shown
by the way in which, on the last day, when all peril was over, she
bloomed out in renovated splendour. It gave Garnett a shivering
sense of the ugliness of the alternative which had confronted her.

The day came; the showy coupe provided by Mrs. Newell presented
itself punctually at Garnett's door, and the young man entered it
and drove to the rue Panonceaus. It was a little melancholy back
street, with lean old houses sweating rust and damp, and glimpses of
pit-life gardens, black and sunless, between walls bristling with
iron spikes. On the narrow pavement a blind man pottered along led
by a red-eyed poodle: a little farther on a dishevelled woman sat
grinding coffee on the threshold of a _buvette_. The bridal carriage
stopped before one of the doorways, with a clatter of hoofs and
harness which drew the neighbourhood to its windows, and Garnett
started to mount the ill-smelling stairs to the fourth floor, on
which he learned from the _concierge _that Mr. Newell lodged. But
half-way up he met the latter descending, and they turned and went
down together.

Hermione's parent wore his usual imperturbable look, and his eye
seemed as full as ever of generalisations on human folly; but there
was something oddly shrunken and submerged in his appearance, as
though he had grown smaller or his clothes larger. And on the last
hypothesis Garnett paused--for it became evident to him that Mr.
Newell had hired his dress-suit.

Seated at the young man's side on the satin cushions, he remained
silent while the carriage rolled smoothly and rapidly through the
net-work of streets leading to the Boulevard Saint-Germain; only
once he remarked, glancing at the elaborate fittings of the coupe:
"Is this Mrs. Newell's carriage?"

"I believe so--yes," Garnett assented, with the guilty sense that in
defining that lady's possessions it was impossible not to trespass
on those of her friends.

Mr. Newell made no farther comment, but presently requested his
companion to rehearse to him once more the exact duties which were
to devolve on him during the coming ceremony. Having mastered these
he remained silent, fixing a dry speculative eye on the panorama of
the brilliant streets, till the carriage drew up at the entrance of
Saint Philippe du Roule.

With the same air of composure he followed his guide through the mob
of spectators, and up the crimson velvet steps, at the head of
which, but for a word from Garnett, a formidable Suisse, glittering
with cocked hat and mace, would have checked the advance of the
small crumpled figure so oddly out of keeping with the magnificence
of the bridal party. The French fashion prescribing that the family
_cortege _shall follow the bride to the altar, the vestibule of the
church was thronged with the participatore in the coming procession;
but if Mr. Newell felt any nervousness at his sudden projection into
this unfamiliar group, nothing in his look or manner betrayed it. He
stood beside Garnett till a white-favoured carriage, dashing up to
the church with a superlative glitter of highly groomed horseflesh
and silver-plated harness, deposited the snowy apparition of the
bride, supported by her mother; then, as Hermione entered the
vestibule, he went forward quietly to meet her.

The girl, wrapped in the haze of her bridal veil, and a little
confused, perhaps, by the anticipation of the meeting, paused a
moment, as if in doubt, before the small oddly-clad figure which
blocked her path--a horrible moment to Garnett, who felt a pang of
misery at this satire on the infallibility of the filial instinct.
He longed to make some sign, to break in some way the pause of
uncertainty; but before he could move he saw Mrs. Newell give her
daughter a sharp push, he saw a blush of compunction flood
Hermione's face, and the girl, throwing back her veil, bent her tall
head and flung her arms about her father.

Mr. Newell emerged unshaken from the embrace: it seemed to have no
effect beyond giving an odder twist to his tie. He stood beside his
daughter till the church doors were thrown open; then, at a sign
from the verger, he gave her his arm, and the strange couple, with
the long train of fashion and finery behind them, started on their
march to the altar.

Garnett had already slipped into the church and secured a post of
vantage which gave him a side-view over the assemblage. The building
was thronged--Mrs. Newell had attained her ambition and given
Hermione a smart wedding. Garnett's eye travelled curiously from one
group to another--from the numerous representatives of the
bridegroom's family, all stamped with the same air of somewhat dowdy
distinction, the air of having had their thinking done for them for
so long that they could no longer perform the act individually, and
the heterogeneous company of Mrs. Newell's friends, who presented,
on the opposite side of the nave, every variety of individual
conviction in dress and conduct. Of the two groups the latter was
decidedly the more interesting to Garnett, who observed that it
comprised not only such recent acquisitions as the Woolsey Hubbards
and the Baron, but also sundry more important figures which of late
had faded to the verse of Mrs. Newell's horizon. Hermione's marriage
had drawn them back, bad once more made her mother a social entity,
had in short already accomplished the object for which it had been
planned and executed.

And as he looked about him Garnett saw that all the other actors in
the show faded into insignificance beside the dominant figure of
Mrs. Newell, became mere marionettes pulled hither and thither by
the hidden wires of her intention. One and all they were there to
serve her ends and accomplish her purpose: Schenkelderff and the
Hubbards to pay for the show, the bride and bridegroom to seal and
symbolize her social rehabilitation, Garnett himself as the humble
instrument adjusting the different parts of the complicated
machinery, and her husband, finally, as the last stake in her game,
the last asset on which she could draw to rebuild her fallen
fortunes. At the thought Garnett was filled with a deep disgust for
what the scene signified, and for his own share in it. He had been
her tool and dupe like the others; if he imagined that he was
serving Hermione, it was for her mother's ends that he had worked.
What right had he to sentimentalise a marriage founded on such base
connivances, and how could he have imagined that in so doing he was
acting a disinterested part?

While these thoughts were passing through his mind the ceremony had
already begun, and the principal personages in the drama were ranged
before him in the row of crimson velvet chairs which fills the
foreground of a Catholic marriage. Through the glow of lights and
the perfumed haze about the altar, Garnett's eyes rested on the
central figures of the group, and gradually the others disappeared
from his view and his mind. After all, neither Mrs. Newell's schmes
nor his own share in them could ever unsanctify hermione's marriage.
It was one more testimony to life's indefatigable renewals, to
nature's secret of drawing fragrance from corruption; and as his
eyes turned from the girl's illuminated presence to the resigned and
stoical figure sunk in the adjoining chair, it occured to him that
he had perhaps worked better than he knew in placing them, if only
for a moment, side by side.






IN TRUST





IN the good days, just after we all left college, Ned Halidon and I
used to listen, laughing and smoking, while Paul Ambrose set forth
his plans.

They were immense, these plans, involving, as it sometimes seemed,
the ultimate aesthetic redemption of the whole human race; and
provisionally restoring the sense of beauty to those unhappy
millions of our fellow country-men who, as Ambrose movingly pointed
out, now live and die in surroundings of unperceived and unmitigated
ugliness.

"I want to bring the poor starved wretches back to their lost
inheritance, to the divine past they've thrown away--I want to make
'em hate ugliness so that they'll smash nearly everything in sight,"
he would passionately exclaim, stretching his arms across the shabby
black-walnut writing-table and shaking his thin consumptive fist in
the fact of all the accumulated ugliness in the world.

"You might set the example by smashing that table," I once suggested
with youthful brutality; and Paul, pulling himself up, cast a
surprised glance at me, and then looked slowly about the parental
library, in which we sat.

His parents were dead, and he had inherited the house in Seventeenth
Street, where his grandfather Ambrose had lived in a setting of
black walnut and pier glasses, giving Madeira dinners, and saying to
his guests, as they rejoined the ladies across a florid waste of
Aubusson carpet: "This, sir, is Dabney's first study for the
Niagara--the Grecian Slave in the bay window was executed for me in
Rome twenty years ago by my old friend Ezra Stimpson--" by token of
which he passed for a Maecenas in the New York of the 'forties,' and
a poem had once been published in the Keepsake or the Book of Beauty
"On a picture in the possession of Jonathan Ambrose, Esqre."

Since then the house had remained unchanged. Paul's father, a frugal
liver and hard-headed manipulator of investments, did not inherit
old Jonathan's artistic sensibilities, and was content to live and
die in the unmodified black walnut and red rep of his predecessor.
It was only in Paul that the grandfather's aesthetic faculty
revived, and Mrs. Ambrose used often to say to her husband, as they
watched the little pale-browed boy poring over an old number of the
_Art Journal:_ "Paul will know how to appreciate your father's
treasures."

In recognition of these transmitted gifts Paul, on leaving Harvard,
was sent to Paris with a tutor, and established in a studio in which
nothing was ever done. He could not paint, and recognized the fact
early enough to save himself much wasted labor and his friends many
painful efforts in dissimulation. But he brought back a touching
enthusiasm for the forms of beauty which an old civilization had
revealed to him and an apostolic ardour in the cause of their
dissemination.

He had paused in his harangue to take in my ill-timed parenthesis,
and the color mounted slowly to his thin cheek-bones.

"It _is_ an ugly room," he owned, as though he had noticed the
library for the first time.

The desk was carved at the angles with the heads of helmeted knights
with long black-walnut moustaches. The red cloth top was worn
thread-bare, and patterned like a map with islands and peninsulas of
ink; and in its centre throned a massive bronze inkstand
representing a Syrian maiden slumbering by a well beneath a
palm-tree.

"The fact is," I said, walking home that evening with Ned Halidon,
"old Paul will never do anything, for the simple reason that he's
too stingy."

Ned, who was an idealist, shook his handsome head. "It's not that,
my dear fellow. He simply doesn't see things when they're too close
to him. I'm glad you woke him up to that desk."

The next time I dined with Paul he said, when we entered the
library, and I had gently rejected one of his cheap cigars in favour
of a superior article of my own: "Look here, I've been looking round
for a decent writing-table. I don't care, as a rule, to turn out old
things, especially when they've done good service, but I see now
that this is too monstrous--"

"For an apostle of beauty to write his evangel on," I agreed, "it
_is_ a little inappropriate, except as an awful warning."

Paul colored. "Well, but, my dear fellow, I'd no idea how much a
table of this kind costs. I find I can't get anything decent--the
plainest mahogany--under a hundred and fifty." He hung his head, and
pretended not to notice that I was taking out my own cigar.

"Well, what's a hundred and fifty to you?" I rejoined. "You talk as
if you had to live on a book-keeper's salary, with a large family to
support."

He smiled nervously and twirled the ring on his thin finger. "I
know--I know--that's all very well. But for twenty tables that I
_don't_ buy I can send some fellow abroad and unseal his eyes."

"Oh, hang it, do both!" I exclaimed impatiently; but the
writing-table was never bought. The library remained as it was, and
so did the contention between Halidon and myself, as to whether this
inconsistent acceptance of his surroundings was due, on our friend's
part, to a congenital inability to put his hand in his pocket, or to
a real unconsciousness of the ugliness that happened to fall inside
his point of vision.

"But he owned that the table was ugly," I agreed.

"Yes, but not till you'd called his attention to the fact; and I'll
wager he became unconscious of it again as soon as your back was
turned."

"Not before he'd had time to look at a lot of others, and make up
his mind that he couldn't afford to buy one."

"That was just his excuse. He'd rather be thought mean than
insensible to ugliness. But the truth is that he doesn't mind the
table and is used to it. He knows his way about the drawers."

"But he could get another with the same number of drawers."

"Too much trouble," argued Halidon.

"Too much money," I persisted.

"Oh, hang it, now, if he were mean would he have founded three
travelling scholarships and be planning this big Academy of Arts?"

"Well, he's mean to himself, at any rate."

"Yes; and magnificently, royally generous to all the world besides!"
Halidon exclaimed with one of his great flushes of enthusiasm.

But if, on the whole, the last word remained with Halidon, and
Ambrose's personal chariness seemed a trifling foible compared to
his altruistic breadth of intention, yet neither of us could help
observing, as time went on, that the habit of thrift was beginning
to impede the execution of his schemes of art-philanthropy. The
three travelling scholarships had been founded in the first blaze of
his ardour, and before the personal management of his property had
awakened in him the sleeping instincts of parsimony. But as his
capital accumulated, and problems of investment and considerations
of interest began to encroach upon his visionary hours, we saw a
gradual arrest in the practical development of his plan.

"For every thousand dollars he talks of spending on his work, I
believe he knocks off a cigar, or buys one less newspaper," Halidon
grumbled affectionately; "but after all," he went on, with one of
the quick revivals of optimism that gave a perpetual freshness to
his spirit, "after all, it makes one admire him all the more when
one sees such a nature condemned to be at war with the petty
inherited instinct of greed."

Still, I could see it was a disappointment to Halidon that the great
project of the Academy of Arts should languish on paper long after
all its details had been discussed and settled to the satisfaction
of the projector, and of the expert advisers he had called in
council.

"He's quite right to do nothing in a hurry--to take advice and
compare ideas and points of view--to collect and classify his
material in advance," Halidon argued, in answer to a taunt of mine
about Paul's perpetually reiterated plea that he was still waiting
for So-and-so's report; "but now that the plan's mature--and _such_
a plan! You'll grant it's magnificent?--I should think he'd burn to
see it carried out, instead of pottering over it till his enthusiasm
cools and the whole business turns stale on his hands."

That summer Ambrose went to Europe, and spent his holiday in a
frugal walking-tour through Brittany. When he came back he seemed
refreshed by his respite from business cares and from the
interminable revision of his cherished scheme; while contact with
the concrete manifestations of beauty had, as usual, renewed his
flagging ardour.

"By Jove," he cried, "whenever I indulged my unworthy eyes in a long
gaze at one of those big things--picture or church or statue--I kept
saying to myself: 'You lucky devil, you, to be able to provide such
a sight as that for eyes that can make some good use of it! Isn't it
better to give fifty fellows a chance to paint or carve or build,
than to be able to daub canvas or punch clay in a corner all by
yourself?'"

"Well," I said, when he had worked off his first ebullition, "when
is the foundation stone to be laid?"

His excitement dropped. "The foundation stone--?"

"When are you going to touch the electric button that sets the thing
going?"

Paul, with his hands in his sagging pockets, began to pace the
library hearth-rug--I can see him now, setting his shabby red
slippers between its ramified cabbages.

"My dear fellow, there are one or two points to be considered
still--one or two new suggestions I picked up over there--"

I sat silent, and he paused before me, flushing to the roots of his
thin hair. "You think I've had time enough--that I ought to have put
the thing through before this? I suppose you're right; I can see
that even Ned Halidon thinks so; and he has always understood my
difficulties better than you have."

This insinuation exasperated me. "Ned would have put it through
years ago!" I broke out.

Paul pulled at his straggling moustache. "You mean he has more
executive capacity? More--no, it's not that; he's not afraid to
spend money, and I am!" he suddenly exclaimed.

He had never before alluded to this weakness to either of us, and I
sat abashed, suffering from his evident distress. But he remained
planted before me, his little legs wide apart, his eyes fixed on
mine in an agony of voluntary self-exposure.

"That's my trouble, and I know it. Big sums frighten me--I can't
look them in the face. By George, I wish Ned had the carrying out of
this scheme--I wish he could spend my money for me!" His face was
lit by the reflection of a passing thought. "Do you know, I
shouldn't wonder if I dropped out of the running before either of
you chaps, and in case I do I've half a mind to leave everything in
trust to Halidon, and let him put the job through for me."

"Much better have your own fun with it," I retorted; but he shook
his head, saying with a sigh as he turned away: "It's _not_ fun to
me--that's the worst of it."

Halidon, to whom I could not help repeating our talk, was amused and
touched by his friend's thought.

"Heaven knows what will become of the scheme, if Paul doesn't live
to carry it out. There are a lot of hungry Ambrose cousins who will
make one gulp of his money, and never give a dollar to the work.
Jove, it _would_ be a fine thing to have the carrying out of such a
plan--but he'll do it yet, you'll see he'll do it yet!" cried Ned,
his old faith in his friend flaming up again through the wet blanket
of fact.






II





PAUL AMBROSE did not die and leave his fortune to Halidon, but the
following summer he did something far more unexpected. He went
abroad again, and came back married. Now our busy fancy had never
seen Paul married. Even Ned recognized the vague unlikelihood of
such a metamorphosis.

"He'd stick at the parson's fee--not to mention the best man's
scarf-pin. And I should hate," Ned added sentimentally, "to see 'the
touch of a woman's hand' desecrate the sublime ugliness of the
ancestral home. Think of such a house made 'cozy'!"

But when the news came he would own neither to surprise nor to
disappointment.

"Goodbye, poor Academy!" I exclaimed, tossing over the bridegroom's
eight-page rhapsody to Halidon, who had received its duplicate by
the same post.

"Now, why the deuce do you say that?" he growled. "I never saw such
a beast as you are for imputing mean motives."

To defend myself from this accusation I put out my hand and
recovered Paul's letter.

"Here: listen to this. 'Studying art in Paris when I met her--"the
vision and the faculty divine, but lacking the accomplishment," etc.
. . . A little ethereal profile, like one of Piero della Francesca's
angels . . . not rich, thank heaven, _but not afraid of money_, and
already enamored of my project for fertilizing my sterile millions .
. .'"

"Well, why the deuce--?" Ned began again, as though I had convicted
myself out of my friend's mouth; and I could only grumble obscurely:
"It's all too pat."

He brushed aside my misgivings. "Thank heaven, she can't paint, any
how. And now that I think of it, Paul's just the kind of chap who
ought to have a dozen children."

"Ah, then indeed: goodbye, poor Academy!" I croaked.

The lady was lovely, of that there could be no doubt; and if Paul
now for a time forgot the Academy, his doing so was but a
vindication of his sex. Halidon had only a glimpse of the returning
couple before he was himself snatched up in one of the chariots of
adventure that seemed perpetually waiting at his door. This time he
was going to the far East in the train of a "special mission," and
his head was humming with new hopes and ardors; but he had time for
a last word with me about Ambrose.

"You'll see--you'll see!" he summed up hopefully as we parted; and
what I was to see was, of course, the crowning pinnacle of the
Academy lifting itself against the horizon of the immediate future.

It was in the nature of things that I should, meanwhile, see less
than formerly of the projector of that unrealized structure. Paul
had a personal dread of society, but he wished to show his wife to
the world, and I was not often a spectator on these occasions. Paul
indeed, good fellow, tried to maintain the pretense of an unbroken
intercourse, and to this end I was asked to dine now and then; but
when I went I found guests of a new type, who, after dinner, talked
of sport and stocks, while their host blinked at them silently
through the smoke of his cheap cigars.

The first innovation that struck me was a sudden improvement in the
quality of the cigars. Was this Daisy's doing? (Mrs. Ambrose was
Daisy.) It was hard to tell--she produced her results so
noiselessly. With her fair bent head and vague smile, she seemed to
watch life flow by without, as yet, trusting anything of her own to
its current. But she was watching, at any rate, and anything might
come of that. Such modifications as she produced were as yet almost
imperceptible to any but the trained observer. I saw that Paul
wished her to be well dressed, but also that he suffered her to
drive in a hired brougham, and to have her door opened by the
raw-boned Celt who had bumped down the dishes on his bachelor table.
The drawing-room curtains were renewed, but this change served only
to accentuate the enormities of the carpet, and perhaps discouraged
Mrs. Ambrose from farther experiments. At any rate, the desecrating
touch that Halidon had affected to dread made no other inroads on
the serried ugliness of the Ambrose interior.

In the early summer, when Ned returned, the Ambroses had flown to
Europe again--and the Academy was still on paper.

"Well, what do you make of her?" the traveller asked, as we sat over
our first dinner together.

"Too many things--and they don't hang together. Perhaps she's still
in the chrysalis stage."

"Has Paul chucked the scheme altogether?"

"No. He sent for me and we had a talk about it just before he
sailed."

"And what impression did you get?"

"That he had waited to send for me _till_ just before he sailed."

"Oh, there you go again!" I offered no denial, and after a pause he
asked: "Did _she_ ever talk to you about it?"

"Yes. Once or twice--in snatches."

"Well--?"

"She thinks it all _too_ beautiful. She would like to see beauty put
within the reach of everyone."

"And the practical side--?"

"She says she doesn't understand business."

Halidon rose with a shrug. "Very likely you frightened her with your
ugly sardonic grin."

"It's not my fault if my smile doesn't add to the sum-total of
beauty."

"Well," he said, ignoring me, "next winter we shall see."

But the next winter did not bring Ambrose back. A brief line,
written in November from the Italian lakes, told me that he had "a
rotten cough," and that the doctors were packing him off to Egypt.
Would I see the architects for him, and explain to the trustees?
(The Academy already had trustees, and all the rest of its official
hierarchy.) And would they all excuse his not writing more than a
word? He was really too groggy--but a little warm weather would set
him up again, and he would certainly come home in the spring.

He came home in the spring--in the hold of the ship, with his widow
several decks above. The funeral services were attended by all the
officers of the Academy, and by two of the young fellows who had won
the travelling scholarships, and who shed tears of genuine grief
when their benefactor was committed to the grave.

After that there was a pause of suspense--and then the newspapers
announced that the late Paul Ambrose had left his entire estate to
his widow. The board of the Academy dissolved like a summer cloud,
and the secretary lighted his pipe for a year with the official
paper of the still-born institution.

After a decent lapse of time I called at the house in Seventeenth
Street, and found a man attaching a real-estate agent's sign to the
window and a van-load of luggage backing away from the door. The
care-taker told me that Mrs. Ambrose was sailing the next morning.
Not long afterward I saw the library table with the helmeted knights
standing before an auctioneer's door in University Place; and I
looked with a pang at the familiar ink-stains, in which I had so
often traced the geography of Paul's visionary world.

Halidon, who had picked up another job in the Orient, wrote me an
elegiac letter on Paul's death, ending with--"And what about the
Academy?" and for all answer I sent him a newspaper clipping
recording the terms of the will, and another announcing the sale of
the house and Mrs. Ambrose's departure for Europe.

Though Ned and I corresponded with tolerable regularity I received
no direct answer to this communication till about eighteen months
later, when he surprised me by a letter dated from Florence. It
began: "Though she tells me you have never understood her--" and
when I had reached that point I laid it down and stared out of my
office window at the chimney-pots and the dirty snow on the roof.

"Ned Halidon and Paul's wife!" I murmured; and, incongruously
enough, my next thought was: "I wish I'd bought the library table
that day."

The letter went on with waxing eloquence: "I could not stand the
money if it were not that, to her as well as to me, it represents
the sacred opportunity of at last giving speech to his
inarticulateness . . ."

"Oh, damn it, they're too glib!" I muttered, dashing the letter
down; then, controlling my unreasoning resentment, I read on. "You
remember, old man, those words of his that you repeated to me three
or four years ago: 'I've half a mind to leave my money in trust to
Ned'? Well, it _has_ come to me in trust--as if in mysterious
fulfillment of his thought; and, oh, dear chap--" I dashed the
letter down again, and plunged into my work.






III





"WON'T you own yourself a beast, dear boy?" Halidon asked me gently,
one afternoon of the following spring.

I had escaped for a six weeks' holiday, and was lying outstretched
beside him in a willow chair on the terrace of their villa above
Florence.

My eyes turned from the happy vale at our feet to the illuminated
face beside me. A little way off, at the other end of the terrace,
Mrs. Halidon was bending over a pot of carnations on the balustrade.

"Oh, cheerfully," I assented.

"You see," he continued, glowing, "living here costs us next to
nothing, and it was quite _her_ idea, our founding that fourth
scholarship in memory of Paul."

I had already heard of the fourth scholarship, but I may have
betrayed my surprise at the plural pronoun, for the blood rose under
Ned's sensitive skin, and he said with an embarrassed laugh: "Ah,
she so completely makes me forget that it's not mine too."

"Well, the great thing is that you both think of it chiefly as his."

"Oh, chiefly--altogether. I should be no more than a wretched
parasite if I didn't live first of all for that!"

Mrs. Halidon had turned and was advancing toward us with the slow
step of leisurely enjoyment. The bud of her beauty had at last
unfolded: her vague enigmatical gaze had given way to the clear look
of the woman whose hand is on the clue of life.

"_She's_ not living for anything but her own happiness," I mused,
"and why in heaven's name should she? But Ned--"

"My wife," Halidon continued, his eyes following mine, "my wife
feels it too, even more strongly. You know a woman's sensitiveness.
She's--there's nothing she wouldn't do for his memory--because--in
other ways. . . . You understand," he added, lowering his tone as
she drew nearer, "that as soon as the child is born we mean to go
home for good, and take up his work--Paul's work."

Mrs. Halidon recovered slowly after the birth of her child: the
return to America was deferred for six months, and then again for a
whole year. I heard of the Halidons as established first at
Biarritz, then in Rome. The second summer Ned wrote me a line from
St. Moritz. He said the place agreed so well with his wife--who was
still delicate--that they were "thinking of building a house there:
a mere cleft in the rocks, to hide our happiness in when it becomes
too exuberant"--and the rest of the letter, very properly, was
filled with a rhapsody upon his little daughter. He spoke of her as
Paula.

The following year the Halidons reappeared in New York, and I heard
with surprise that they had taken the Brereton house for the winter.

"Well, why not?" I argued with myself. "After all, the money is
hers: as far as I know the will didn't even hint at a restriction.
Why should I expect a pretty woman with two children" (for now there
was an heir) "to spend her fortune on a visionary scheme that its
originator hadn't the heart to carry out?"

"Yes," cried the devil's advocate--"but Ned?"

My first impression of Halidon was that he had thickened--thickened
all through. He was heavier, physically, with the ruddiness of good
living rather than of hard training; he spoke more deliberately, and
had less frequent bursts of subversive enthusiasm. Well, he was a
father, a householder--yes, and a capitalist now. It was fitting
that his manner should show a sense of these responsibilities. As
for Mrs. Halidon, it was evident that the only responsibilities she
was conscious of were those of the handsome woman and the
accomplished hostess. She was handsomer than ever, with her two
babies at her knee--perfect mother as she was perfect wife. Poor
Paul! I wonder if he ever dreamed what a flower was hidden in the
folded bud?

Not long after their arrival, I dined alone with the Halidons, and
lingered on to smoke with Ned while his wife went alone to the
opera. He seemed dull and out of sorts, and complained of a twinge
of gout.

"Fact is, I don't get enough exercise--I must look about for a
horse."

He had gone afoot for a good many years, and kept his clear skin and
quick eye on that homely regimen--but I had to remind myself that,
after all, we were both older; and also that the Halidons had
champagne every evening.

"How do you like these cigars? They're some I've just got out from
London, but I'm not quite satisfied with them myself," he grumbled,
pushing toward me the silver box and its attendant taper.

I leaned to the flame, and our eyes met as I lit my cigar. Ned
flushed and laughed uneasily. "Poor Paul! Were you thinking of those
execrable weeds of his?--I wonder how I knew you were? Probably
because I have been wanting to talk to you of our plan--I sent Daisy
off alone so that we might have a quiet evening. Not that she isn't
interested, only the technical details bore her."

I hesitated. "Are there many technical details left to settle?"

Halidon pushed his armchair back from the fire-light, and twirled
his cigar between his fingers. "I didn't suppose there were till I
began to look into things a little more closely. You know I never
had much of a head for business, and it was chiefly with you that
Paul used to go over the figures."

"The figures--?"

"There it is, you see." He paused. "Have you any idea how much this
thing is going to cost?"

"Approximately, yes."

"And have you any idea how much we--how much Daisy's fortune amounts
to?"

"None whatever," I hastened to assert.

He looked relieved. "Well, we simply can't do it--and live."

"Live?"

"Paul didn't _live_," he said impatiently. "I can't ask a woman with
two children to think of--hang it, she's under no actual
obligation--" He rose and began to walk the floor. Presently he
paused and halted in front of me, defensively, as Paul had once done
years before. "It's not that I've lost the sense of _my_
obligation--it grows keener with the growth of my happiness; but my
position's a delicate one--"

"Ah, my dear fellow--"

"You _do_ see it? I knew you would." (Yes, he was duller!) "That's
the point. I can't strip my wife and children to carry out a plan--a
plan so nebulous that even its inventor. . . . The long and short of
it is that the whole scheme must be re-studied, reorganized. Paul
lived in a world of dreams."

I rose and tossed my cigar into the fire. "There were some things he
never dreamed of," I said.

Halidon rose too, facing me uneasily. "You mean--?"

"That _you_ would taunt him with not having spent that money."

He pulled himself up with darkening brows; then the muscles of his
forehead relaxed, a flush suffused it, and he held out his hand in
boyish penitence.

"I stand a good deal from you," he said.

He kept up his idea of going over the Academy question--threshing it
out once for all, as he expressed it; but my suggestion that we
should provisionally resuscitate the extinct board did not meet with
his approval.

"Not till the whole business is settled. I shouldn't have the
face--Wait till I can go to them and say: 'We're laying the
foundation-stone on such a day.'"

We had one or two conferences, and Ned speedily lost himself in a
maze of figures. His nimble fancy was recalcitrant to mental
discipline, and he excused his inattention with the plea that he had
no head for business.

"All I know is that it's a colossal undertaking, and that short of
living on bread and water--" and then we turned anew to the hard
problem of retrenchment.

At the close of the second conference we fixed a date for a third,
when Ned's business adviser was to be called in; but before the day
came, I learned casually that the Halidons had gone south. Some
weeks later Ned wrote me from Florida, apologizing for his
remissness. They had rushed off suddenly--his wife had a cough, he
explained.

When they returned in the spring, I heard that they had bought the
Brereton house, for what seemed to my inexperienced ears a very
large sum. But Ned, whom I met one day at the club, explained to me
convincingly that it was really the most economical thing they could
do. "You don't understand about such things, dear boy, living in
your Diogenes tub; but wait till there's a Mrs. Diogenes. I can
assure you it's a lot cheaper than building, which is what Daisy
would have preferred, and of course," he added, his color rising as
our eyes met, "of course, once the Academy's going, I shall have to
make my head-quarters here; and I suppose even you won't grudge me a
roof over my head."

The Brereton roof was a vast one, with a marble balustrade about it;
and I could quite understand, without Ned's halting explanation,
that "under the circumstances" it would be necessary to defer what
he called "our work--" "Of course, after we've rallied from this
amputation, we shall grow fresh supplies--I mean my wife's
investments will," he laughingly corrected, "and then we'll have no
big outlays ahead and shall know exactly where we stand. After all,
my dear fellow, charity begins at home!"






IV





THE Halidons floated off to Europe for the summer. In due course
their return was announced in the social chronicle, and walking up
Fifth Avenue one afternoon I saw the back of the Brereton house
sheathed in scaffolding, and realized that they were adding a wing.

I did not look up Halidon, nor did I hear from him till the middle
of the winter. Once or twice, meanwhile, I had seen him in the back
of his wife's opera box; but Mrs. Halidon had grown so resplendent
that she reduced her handsome husband to a supernumerary. In January
the papers began to talk of the Halidon ball; and in due course I
received a card for it. I was not a frequenter of balls, and had no
intention of going to this one; but when the day came some obscure
impulse moved me to set aside my rule, and toward midnight I
presented myself at Ned's illuminated portals.

I shall never forget his look when I accosted him on the threshold
of the big new ballroom. With celibate egoism I had rather fancied
he would be gratified by my departure from custom; but one glance
showed me my mistake. He smiled warmly, indeed, and threw into his
hand-clasp an artificial energy of welcome--"You of all people--my
dear fellow! Have you seen Daisy?"--but the look behind the smile
made me feel cold in the crowded room.

Nor was Mrs. Halidon's greeting calculated to restore my
circulation. "Have you come to spy on us?" her frosty smile seemed
to say; and I crept home early, wondering if she had not found me
out.

It was the following week that Halidon turned up one day in my
office. He looked pale and thinner, and for the first time I noticed
a dash of gray in his hair. I was startled at the change in him, but
I reflected that it was nearly a year since we had looked at each
other by daylight, and that my shaving-glass had doubtless a similar
tale to tell.

He fidgeted about the office, told me a funny story about his little
boy, and then dropped into a chair.

"Look here," he said, "I want to go into business."

"Business?" I stared.

"Well, why not? I suppose men have gone to work, even at my age, and
not made a complete failure of it. The fact is, I want to make some
money." He paused, and added: "I've heard of an opportunity to pick
up for next to nothing a site for the Academy, and if I could lay my
hands on a little cash--"

"Do you want to speculate?" I interposed.

"Heaven forbid! But don't you see that, if I had a fixed job--so
much a quarter--I could borrow the money and pay it off gradually?"

I meditated upon this astounding proposition. "Do you really think
it's wise to buy a site before--"

"Before what?"

"Well--seeing ahead a little?"

His face fell for a moment, but he rejoined cheerfully: "It's an
exceptional chance, and after all, I _shall_ see ahead if I can get
regular work. I can put by a little every month, and by and bye,
when our living expenses diminish, my wife means to come
forward--her idea would be to give the building--"

He broke off and drummed on the table, waiting nervously for me to
speak. He did not say on what grounds he still counted on a
diminution of his household expenses, and I had not the cruelty to
press this point; but I murmured, after a moment: "I think you're
right--I should try to buy the land."

We discussed his potentialities for work, which were obviously still
an unknown quantity, and the conference ended in my sending him to a
firm of real-estate brokers who were looking out for a partner with
a little money to invest. Halidon had a few thousands of his own,
which he decided to embark in the venture; and thereafter, for the
remaining months of the winter, he appeared punctually at a desk in
the brokers' office, and sketched plans of the Academy on the back
of their business paper. The site for the future building had
meanwhile been bought, and I rather deplored the publicity which Ned
gave to the fact; but, after all, since this publicity served to
commit him more deeply, to pledge him conspicuously to the
completion of his task, it was perhaps a wise instinct of
self-coercion that had prompted him.

It was a dull winter in realty, and toward spring, when the market
began to revive, one of the Halidon children showed symptoms of a
delicate throat, and the fashionable doctor who humoured the family
ailments counselled--nay, commanded--a prompt flight to the
Mediterranean.

"He says a New York spring would be simply criminal--and as for
those ghastly southern places, my wife won't hear of them; so we're
off. But I shall be back in July, and I mean to stick to the office
all summer."

He was true to his word, and reappeared just as all his friends were
deserting town. For two torrid months he sat at his desk, drawing
fresh plans of the Academy, and waiting for the wind-fall of a "big
deal"; but in September he broke down from the effect of the
unwonted confinement, and his indignant wife swept him off to the
mountains.

"Why Ned should work when we have the money--I wish he would sell
that wretched piece of land!" And sell it he did one day: I chanced
on a record of the transaction in the realty column of the morning
paper. He afterward explained the sale to me at length. Owing to
some spasmodic effort at municipal improvement, there had been an
unforeseen rise in the adjoining property, and it would have been
foolish--yes, I agreed that it would have been foolish. He had made
$10,000 on the sale, and that would go toward paying off what he had
borrowed for the original purchase. Meanwhile he could be looking
about for another site.

Later in the winter he told me it was a bad time to look. His
position in the real-estate business enabled him to follow the trend
of the market, and that trend was obstinately upward. But of course
there would be a reaction--and he was keeping his eyes open.

As the resuscitated Academy scheme once more fell into abeyance, I
saw Halidon less and less frequently; and we had not met for several
months, when one day of June, my morning paper startled me with the
announcement that the President had appointed Edward Halidon of New
York to be Civil Commissioner of our newly acquired Eastern
possession, the Manana Islands. "The unhealthy climate of the
islands, and the defective sanitation of the towns, make it
necessary that vigorous measures should be taken to protect the
health of the American citizens established there, and it is
believed that Mr. Halidon's large experience of Eastern life and
well-known energy of character--" I read the paragraph twice; then I
dropped the paper, and projected myself through the subway to
Halidon's office. But he was not there; he had not been there for a
month. One of the clerks believed he was in Washington.

"It's true, then!" I said to myself. "But Mrs. Halidon in the
Mananas--?"

A day or two later Ned appeared in my office. He looked better than
when we had last met, and there was a determined line about his
lips.

"My wife? Heaven forbid! You don't suppose I should think of taking
her? But the job is a tremendously interesting one, and it's the
kind of work I believe I can do--the only kind," he added, smiling
rather ruefully.

"But my dear Ned--"

He faced me with a look of quiet resolution. "I think I've been
through all the _buts_. It's an infernal climate, of course, but
then I am used to the East--I know what precautions to take. And it
would be a big thing to clean up that Augean stable."

"But consider your wife and children--"

He met this with deliberation. "I _have_ considered my
children--that's the point. I don't want them to be able to say,
when they look back: 'He was content to go on living on that
money--'"

"My dear Ned--"

"That's the one thing they _shan't_ say of me," he pressed on
vehemently. "I've tried other ways--but I'm no good at business. I
see now that I shall never make money enough to carry out the scheme
myself; but at least I can clear out, and not go on being _his_
pensioner--seeing his dreams turned into horses and carpets and
clothes--"

He broke off, and leaning on my desk hid his face in his hands. When
he looked up again his flush of wrath had subsided.

"Just understand me--it's not _her_ fault. Don't fancy I'm trying
for an instant to shift the blame. A woman with children simply
obeys the instinct of her sex; she puts them first--and I wouldn't
have it otherwise. As far as she's concerned there were no
conditions attached--there's no reason why she should make any
sacrifice." He paused, and added painfully: "The trouble is, I can't
make her see that I am differently situated."

"But, Ned, the climate--what are you going to gain by chucking
yourself away?"

He lifted his brows. "That's a queer argument from _you_. And,
besides, I'm up to the tricks of all those ague-holes. And I've
_got_ to live, you see: I've got something to put through." He saw
my look of enquiry, and added with a shy, poignant laugh--how I hear
it still!--: "I don't mean only the job in hand, though that's
enough in itself; but Paul's work--you understand.--It won't come in
_my_ day, of course--I've got to accept that--but my boy's a
splendid chap" (the boy was three), "and I tell you what it is, old
man, I believe when he grows up _he'll put it through_."

Halidon went to the Mananas, and for two years the journals brought
me incidental reports of the work he was accomplishing. He certainly
had found a job to his hand: official words of commendation rang
through the country, and there were lengthy newspaper leaders on the
efficiency with which our representative was prosecuting his task in
that lost corner of our colonies. Then one day a brief paragraph
announced his death--"one of the last victims of the pestilence he
had so successfully combated."

That evening, at my club, I heard men talking of him. One said:
"What's the use of a fellow wasting himself on a lot of savages?"
and another wiseacre opined: "Oh, he went off because there was
friction at home. A fellow like that, who knew the East, would have
got through all right if he'd taken the proper precautions. I saw
him before he left, and I never saw a man look less as if he wanted
to live."

I turned on the last speaker, and my voice made him drop his lighted
cigar on his complacent knuckles.

"I never knew a man," I exclaimed, "who had better reasons for
wanting to live!"

A handsome youth mused: "Yes, his wife is very beautiful--but it
doesn't follow--"

And then some one nudged him, for they knew I was Halidon's friend.






THE PRETEXT

I





MRS. RANSOM, when the front door had closed on her visitor, passed
with a spring from the drawing-room to the narrow hall, and thence
up the narrow stairs to her bedroom.

Though slender, and still light of foot, she did not always move so
quickly: hitherto, in her life, there had not been much to hurry
for, save the recurring domestic tasks that compel haste without
fostering elasticity; but some impetus of youth revived,
communicated to her by her talk with Guy Dawnish, now found
expression in her girlish flight upstairs, her girlish impatience to
bolt herself into her room with her throbs and her blushes.

Her blushes? Was she really blushing?

She approached the cramped eagle-topped mirror above her plain prim
dressing-table: just such a meagre concession to the weakness of the
flesh as every old-fashioned house in Wentworth counted among its
relics. The face reflected in this unflattering surface--for even
the mirrors of Wentworth erred on the side of depreciation--did not
seem, at first sight, a suitable theatre for the display of the
tenderer emotions, and its owner blushed more deeply as the fact was
forced upon her.

Her fair hair had grown too thin--it no longer quite hid the blue
veins in her candid forehead--a forehead that one seemed to see
turned toward professorial desks, in large bare halls where a snowy
winter light fell uncompromisingly on rows of "thoughtful women."
Her mouth was thin, too, and a little strained; her lips were too
pale; and there were lines in the corners of her eyes. It was a face
which had grown middle-aged while it waited for the joys of youth.

Well--but if she could still blush? Instinctively she drew back a
little, so that her scrutiny became less microscopic, and the pretty
lingering pink threw a veil over her pallor, the hollows in her
temples, the faint wrinkles of inexperience about her lips and eyes.
How a little colour helped! It made her eyes so deep and shining.
She saw now why bad women rouged. . . . Her redness deepened at the
thought.

But suddenly she noticed for the first time that the collar of her
dress was cut too low. It showed the shrunken lines of the throat.
She rummaged feverishly in a tidy scentless drawer, and snatching
out a bit of black velvet, bound it about her neck. Yes--that was
better. It gave her the relief she needed. Relief--contrast--that
was it! She had never had any, either in her appearance or in her
setting. She was as flat as the pattern of the wall-paper--and so
was her life. And all the people about her had the same look.
Wentworth was the kind of place where husbands and wives gradually
grew to resemble each other--one or two of her friends, she
remembered, had told her lately that she and Ransom were beginning
to look alike. . . .

But why had she always, so tamely, allowed her aspect to conform to
her situation? Perhaps a gayer exterior would have provoked a
brighter fate. Even now--she turned back to the glass, loosened the
tight strands of hair above her brow, ran the fine end of the comb
under them with a rapid frizzing motion, and then disposed them,
more lightly and amply, above her eager face. Yes--it was really
better; it made a difference. She smiled at herself with a timid
coquetry, and her lips seemed rosier as she smiled. Then she laid
down the comb and the smile faded. It made a difference,
certainly--but was it right to try to make one's hair look thicker
and wavier than it really was? Between that and rouging the ethical
line seemed almost impalpable, and the spectre of her rigid New
England ancestry rose reprovingly before her. She was sure that none
of her grandmothers had ever simulated a curl or encouraged a blush.
A blush, indeed! What had any of them ever had to blush for in all
their frozen lives? And what, in Heaven's name, had she? She sat
down in the stiff mahogany rocking-chair beside her work-table and
tried to collect herself. From childhood she had been taught to
"collect herself"--but never before had her small sensations and
aspirations been so widely scattered, diffused over so vague and
uncharted an expanse. Hitherto they had lain in neatly sorted and
easily accessible bundles on the high shelves of a perfectly ordered
moral consciousness. And now--now that for the first time they
_needed_ collecting--now that the little winged and scattered bits
of self were dancing madly down the vagrant winds of fancy, she knew
no spell to call them to the fold again. The best way, no doubt--if
only her bewilderment permitted--was to go back to the
beginning--the beginning, at least, of to-day's visit--to
recapitulate, word for word and look for look. . . .

She clasped her hands on the arms of the chair, checked its swaying
with a firm thrust of her foot, and fixed her eyes upon the inward
vision. . . .

To begin with, what had made to-day's visit so different from the
others? It became suddenly vivid to her that there had been many,
almost daily, others, since Guy Dawnish's coming to Wentworth. Even
the previous winter--the winter of his arrival from England--his
visits had been numerous enough to make Wentworth aware that--very
naturally--Mrs. Ransom was "looking after" the stray young
Englishman committed to her husband's care by an eminent Q. C. whom
the Ransoms had known on one of their brief London visits, and with
whom Ransom had since maintained professional relations. All this
was in the natural order of things, as sanctioned by the social code
of Wentworth. Every one was kind to Guy Dawnish--some rather
importunately so, as Margaret Ransom had smiled to observe--but it
was recognized as fitting that she should be kindest, since he was
in a sense her property, since his people in England, by profusely
acknowledging her kindness, had given it the domestic sanction
without which, to Wentworth, any social relation between the sexes
remained unhallowed and to be viewed askance. Yes! And even this
second winter, when the visits had become so much more frequent, so
admitted a part of the day's routine, there had not been, from any
one, a hint of surprise or of conjecture. . . .

Mrs. Ransom smiled with a faint bitterness. She was protected by her
age, no doubt--her age and her past, and the image her mirror gave
back to her. . . .

Her door-handle turned suddenly, and the bolt's resistance was met
by an impatient knock.

"Margaret!"

She started up, her brightness fading, and unbolted the door to
admit her husband.

"Why are you locked in? Why, you're not dressed yet!" he exclaimed.

It was possible for Ransom to reach his dressing-room by a slight
circuit through the passage; but it was characteristic of the
relentless domesticity of their relation that he chose, as a matter
of course, the directer way through his wife's bedroom. She had
never before been disturbed by this practice, which she accepted as
inevitable, but had merely adapted her own habits to it, delaying
her hasty toilet till he was safely in his room, or completing it
before she heard his step on the stair; since a scrupulous
traditional prudery had miraculously survived this massacre of all
the privacies.

"Oh, I shan't dress this evening--I shall just have some tea in the
library after you've gone," she answered absently. "Your things are
laid out," she added, rousing herself.

He looked surprised. "The dinner's at seven. I suppose the speeches
will begin at nine. I thought you were coming to hear them."

She wavered. "I don't know. I think not. Mrs. Sperry's ill, and I've
no one else to go with."

He glanced at his watch. "Why not get hold of Dawnish? Wasn't he
here just now? Why didn't you ask him?"

She turned toward her dressing-table, and straightened the comb and
brush with a nervous hand. Her husband had given her, that morning,
two tickets for the ladies' gallery in Hamblin Hall, where the great
public dinner of the evening was to take place--a banquet offered by
the faculty of Wentworth to visitors of academic eminence--and she
had meant to ask Dawnish to go with her: it had seemed the most
natural thing to do, till the end of his visit came, and then, after
all, she had not spoken. . . .

"It's too late now," she murmured, bending over her pin cushion.

"Too late? Not if you telephone him."

Her husband came toward her, and she turned quickly to face him,
lest he should suspect her of trying to avoid his eye. To what
duplicity was she already committed!

Ransom laid a friendly hand on her arm: "Come along, Margaret. You
know I speak for the bar." She was aware, in his voice, of a little
note of surprise at his having to remind her of this.

"Oh, yes. I meant to go, of course--"

"Well, then--" He opened his dressing-room door, and caught a
glimpse of the retreating house-maid's skirt. "Here's Maria now.
Maria! Call up Mr. Dawnish--at Mrs. Creswell's, you know. Tell him
Mrs. Ransom wants him to go with her to hear the speeches this
evening--the _speeches_, you understand?--and he's to call for her
at a quarter before nine."

Margaret heard the Irish "Yessir" on the stairs, and stood
motionless, while her husband added loudly: "And bring me some
towels when you come up." Then he turned back into his wife's room.

"Why, it would be a thousand pities for Guy to miss this. He's so
interested in the way we do things over here--and I don't know that
he's ever heard me speak in public." Again the slight note of
fatuity! Was it possible that Ransom was a fatuous man?

He paused in front of her, his short-sighted unobservant glance
concentrating itself unexpectedly on her face.

"You're not going like that, are you?" he asked, with glaring
eye-glasses.

"Like what?" she faltered, lifting a conscious hand to the velvet at
her throat.

"With your hair in such a fearful mess. Have you been shampooing it?
You look like the Brant girl at the end of a tennis-match."

The Brant girl was their horror--the horror of all right-thinking
Wentworth; a laced, whale-boned, frizzle-headed, high-heeled
daughter of iniquity, who came--from New York, of course--on long,
disturbing, tumultuous visits to a Wentworth aunt, working havoc
among the freshmen, and leaving, when she departed, an angry wake of
criticism that ruffled the social waters for weeks. _She_, too, had
tried her hand at Guy--with ludicrous unsuccess. And now, to be
compared to her--to be accused of looking "New Yorky!" Ah, there are
times when husbands are obtuse; and Ransom, as he stood there, thick
and yet juiceless, in his dry legal middle age, with his wiry
dust-coloured beard, and his perpetual _pince-nez_, seemed to his
wife a sudden embodiment of this traditional attribute. Not that she
had ever fancied herself, poor soul, a "_ femme incomprise_." She
had, on the contrary, prided herself on being understood by her
husband, almost as much as on her own complete comprehension of him.
Wentworth laid a good deal of stress on "motives"; and Margaret
Ransom and her husband had dwelt in a complete community of motive.
It had been the proudest day of her life when, without consulting
her, he had refused an offer of partnership in an eminent New York
firm because he preferred the distinction of practising in
Wentworth, of being known as the legal representative of the
University. Wentworth, in fact, had always been the bond between the
two; they were united in their veneration for that estimable seat of
learning, and in their modest yet vivid consciousness of possessing
its tone. The Wentworth "tone" is unmistakable: it permeates every
part of the social economy, from the _coiffure_ of the ladies to the
preparation of the food. It has its sumptuary laws as well as its
curriculum of learning. It sits in judgment not only on its own
townsmen but on the rest of the world--enlightening, criticising,
ostracizing a heedless universe--and non-conformity to Wentworth
standards involves obliteration from Wentworth's consciousness.

In a world without traditions, without reverence, without stability,
such little expiring centres of prejudice and precedent make an
irresistible appeal to those instincts for which a democracy has
neglected to provide. Wentworth, with its "tone," its backward
references, its inflexible aversions and condemnations, its hard
moral outline preserved intact against a whirling background of
experiment, had been all the poetry and history of Margaret Ransom's
life. Yes, what she had really esteemed in her husband was the fact
of his being so intense an embodiment of Wentworth; so long and
closely identified, for instance, with its legal affairs, that he
was almost a part of its university existence, that of course, at a
college banquet, he would inevitably speak for the bar!

It was wonderful of how much consequence all this had seemed till
now. . . .






II





WHEN, punctually at ten minutes to seven, her husband had emerged
from the house, Margaret Ransom remained seated in her bedroom,
addressing herself anew to the difficult process of self-collection.
As an aid to this endeavour, she bent forward and looked out of the
window, following Ransom's figure as it receded down the elm-shaded
street. He moved almost alone between the prim flowerless
grass-plots, the white porches, the protrusion of irrelevant
shingled gables, which stamped the empty street as part of an
American college town. She had always been proud of living in Hill
Street, where the university people congregated, proud to associate
her husband's retreating back, as he walked daily to his office,
with backs literary and pedagogic, backs of which it was whispered,
for the edification of duly-impressed visitors: "Wait till that old
boy turns--that's so-and-so."

This had been her world, a world destitute of personal experience,
but filled with a rich sense of privilege and distinction, of being
not as those millions were who, denied the inestimable advantage of
living at Wentworth, pursued elsewhere careers foredoomed to
futility by that very fact.

And now--!

She rose and turned to her work-table where she had dropped, on
entering, the handful of photographs that Guy Dawnish had left with
her. While he sat so close, pointing out and explaining, she had
hardly taken in the details; but now, on the full tones of his low
young voice, they came back with redoubled distinctness. This was
Guise Abbey, his uncle's place in Wiltshire, where, under his
grandfather's rule, Guy's own boyhood had been spent: a long gabled
Jacobean facade, many-chimneyed, ivy-draped, overhung (she felt
sure) by the boughs of a venerable rookery. And in this other
picture--the walled garden at Guise--that was his uncle, Lord
Askern, a hale gouty-looking figure, planted robustly on the
terrace, a gun on his shoulder and a couple of setters at his feet.
And here was the river below the park, with Guy "punting" a girl in
a flapping hat--how Margaret hated the flap that hid the girl's
face! And here was the tennis-court, with Guy among a jolly
cross-legged group of youths in flannels, and pretty girls about the
tea-table under the big lime: in the centre the curate handing bread
and butter, and in the middle distance a footman approaching with
more cups.

Margaret raised this picture closer to her eyes, puzzling, in the
diminished light, over the face of the girl nearest to Guy
Dawnish--bent above him in profile, while he laughingly lifted his
head. No hat hid this profile, which stood out clearly against the
foliage behind it.

"And who is that handsome girl?" Margaret had said, detaining the
photograph as he pushed it aside, and struck by the fact that, of
the whole group, he had left only this member unnamed.

"Oh, only Gwendolen Matcher--I've always known her--. Look at this:
the almshouses at Guise. Aren't they jolly?"

And then--without her having had the courage to ask if the girl in
the punt were also Gwendolen Matcher--they passed on to photographs
of his rooms at Oxford, of a cousin's studio in London--one of Lord
Askern's grandsons was "artistic"--of the rose-hung cottage in Wales
to which, on the old Earl's death, his daughter-in-law, Guy's
mother, had retired.

Every one of the photographs opened a window on the life Margaret
had been trying to picture since she had known him--a life so rich,
so romantic, so packed--in the mere casual vocabulary of daily
life--with historic reference and poetic allusion, that she felt
almost oppressed by this distant whiff of its air. The very words he
used fascinated and bewildered her. He seemed to have been born into
all sorts of connections, political, historical, official, that made
the Ransom situation at Wentworth as featureless as the top shelf of
a dark closet. Some one in the family had "asked for the Chiltern
Hundreds"--one uncle was an Elder Brother of the Trinity House--some
one else was the Master of a College--some one was in command at
Devonport--the Army, the Navy, the House of Commons, the House of
Lords, the most venerable seats of learning, were all woven into the
dense background of this young man's light unconscious talk. For the
unconsciousness was unmistakable. Margaret was not without
experience of the transatlantic visitor who sounds loud names and
evokes reverberating connections. The poetry of Guy Dawnish's
situation lay in the fact that it was so completely a part of early
associations and accepted facts. Life was like that in England--in
Wentworth of course (where he had been sent, through his uncle's
influence, for two years' training in the neighbouring electrical
works at Smedden)--in Wentworth, though "immensely jolly," it was
different. The fact that he was qualifying to be an electrical
engineer--with the hope of a secretaryship at the London end of the
great Smedden Company--that, at best, he was returning home to a
life of industrial "grind," this fact, though avowedly a bore, did
not disconnect him from that brilliant pinnacled past, that
many-faceted life in which the brightest episodes of the whole body
of English fiction seemed collectively reflected. Of course he would
have to work--younger sons' sons almost always had to--but his uncle
Askern (like Wentworth) was "immensely jolly," and Guise always open
to him, and his other uncle, the Master, a capital old boy too--and
in town he could always put up with his clever aunt, Lady Caroline
Duckett, who had made a "beastly marriage" and was horribly poor,
but who knew everybody jolly and amusing, and had always been
particularly kind to him.

It was not--and Margaret had not, even in her own thoughts, to
defend herself from the imputation--it was not what Wentworth would
have called the "material side" of her friend's situation that
captivated her. She was austerely proof against such appeals: her
enthusiasms were all of the imaginative order. What subjugated her
was the unexampled prodigality with which he poured for her the same
draught of tradition of which Wentworth held out its little
teacupful. He besieged her with a million Wentworths in one--saying,
as it were: "All these are mine for the asking--and I choose you
instead!"

For this, she told herself somewhat dizzily, was what it came
to--the summing-up toward which her conscientious efforts at
self-collection had been gradually pushing her: with all this in
reach, Guy Dawnish was leaving Wentworth reluctantly.

"I _was_ a bit lonely here at first--but _now!_" And again: "It will
be jolly, of course, to see them all again--but there are some
things one doesn't easily give up. . . ."

If he had known only Wentworth, it would have been wonderful enough
that he should have chosen her out of all Wentworth--but to have
known that other life, and to set her in the balance against
it--poor Margaret Ransom, in whom, at the moment, nothing seemed of
weight but her years! Ah, it might well produce, in nerves and
brain, and poor unpractised pulses, a flushed tumult of sensation,
the rush of a great wave of life, under which memory struggled in
vain to reassert itself, to particularize again just what his last
words--the very last--had been. . . .

When consciousness emerged, quivering, from this retrospective
assault, it pushed Margaret Ransom--feeling herself a mere leaf in
the blast--toward the writing-table from which her innocent and
voluminous correspondence habitually flowed. She had a letter to
write now--much shorter but more difficult than any she had ever
been called on to indite.

"Dear Mr. Dawnish," she began, "since telephoning you just now I
have decided not--"

Maria's voice, at the door, announced that tea was in the library:
"And I s'pose it's the brown silk you'll wear to the speaking?"

In the usual order of the Ransom existence, its mistress's toilet
was performed unassisted; and the mere enquiry--at once friendly and
deferential--projected, for Margaret, a strong light on the
importance of the occasion. That she should answer: "But I am not
going," when the going was so manifestly part of a household
solemnity about which the thoughts below stairs fluttered in proud
participation; that in face of such participation she should utter a
word implying indifference or hesitation--nay, revealing herself the
transposed, uprooted thing she had been on the verge of becoming; to
do this was--well! infinitely harder than to perform the alternative
act of tearing up the sheet of note-paper under her reluctant pen.

Yes, she said, she would wear the brown silk. . . .






III





ALL the heat and glare from the long illuminated table, about which
the fumes of many courses still hung in a savoury fog, seemed to
surge up to the ladies' gallery, and concentrate themselves in the
burning cheeks of a slender figure withdrawn behind the projection
of a pillar.

It never occurred to Margaret Ransom that she was sitting in the
shade. She supposed that the full light of the chandeliers was
beating on her face--and there were moments when it seemed as though
all the heads about the great horse-shoe below, bald, shaggy, sleek,
close-thatched, or thinly latticed, were equipped with an additional
pair of eyes, set at an angle which enabled them to rake her face as
relentlessly as the electric burners.

In the lull after a speech, the gallery was fluttering with the
rustle of programmes consulted, and Mrs. Sheff (the Brant girl's
aunt) leaned forward to say enthusiastically: "And now we're to hear
Mr. Ransom!"

A louder buzz rose from the table, and the heads (without relaxing
their upward vigilance) seemed to merge, and flow together, like an
attentive flood, toward the upper end of the horse-shoe, where all
the threads of Margaret Ransom's consciousness were suddenly drawn
into what seemed a small speck, no more--a black speck that rose,
hung in air, dissolved into gyrating gestures, became distended,
enormous, preponderant--became her husband "speaking."

"It's the heat--" Margaret gasped, pressing her handkerchief to her
whitening lips, and finding just strength enough left to push back
farther into the shadow.

She felt a touch on her arm. "It _is_ horrible--shall we go?" a
voice suggested; and, "Yes, yes, let us go," she whispered, feeling,
with a great throb of relief, _that_ to be the only possible, the
only conceivable, solution. To sit and listen to her husband
_now_--how could she ever have thought she could survive it?
Luckily, under the lingering hubbub from below, his opening words
were inaudible, and she had only to run the gauntlet of sympathetic
feminine glances, shot after her between waving fans and programmes,
as, guided by Guy Dawnish, she managed to reach the door. It was
really so hot that even Mrs. Sheff was not much surprised--till long
afterward. . . .

The winding staircase was empty, half dark and blessedly silent. In
a committee room below Dawnish found the inevitable water jug, and
filled a glass for her, while she leaned back, confronted only by a
frowning college President in an emblazoned frame. The academic
frown descended on her like an anathema when she rose and followed
her companion out of the building.

Hamblin Hall stands at the end of the long green "Campus" with its
sextuple line of elms--the boast and the singularity of Wentworth. A
pale spring moon, rising above the dome of the University library at
the opposite end of the elm-walk, diffused a pearly mildness in the
sky, melted to thin haze the shadows of the trees, and turned to
golden yellow the lights of the college windows. Against this soft
suffusion of light the Library cupola assumed a Bramantesque grace,
the white steeple of the congregational church became a campanile
topped by a winged spirit, and the scant porticoes of the older
halls the colonnades of classic temples.

"This is better--" Dawnish said, as they passed down the steps and
under the shadow of the elms.

They moved on a little way in silence before he began again: "You're
too tired to walk. Let us sit down a few minutes."

Her feet, in truth, were leaden, and not far off a group of park
benches, encircling the pedestal of a patriot in bronze, invited
them to rest. But Dawnish was guiding her toward a lateral path
which bent, through shrubberies, toward a strip of turf between two
of the buildings.

"It will be cooler by the river," he said, moving on without waiting
for a possible protest. None came: it seemed easier, for the moment,
to let herself be led without any conventional feint of resistance.
And besides, there was nothing wrong about _this_--the wrong would
have been in sitting up there in the glare, pretending to listen to
her husband, a dutiful wife among her kind. . . .

The path descended, as both knew, to the chosen, the inimitable spot
of Wentworth: that fugitive curve of the river, where, before
hurrying on to glut the brutal industries of South Wentworth and
Smedden, it simulated for a few hundred yards the leisurely pace of
an ancient university stream, with willows on its banks and a
stretch of turf extending from the grounds of Hamblin Hall to the
boat houses at the farther bend. Here too were benches, beneath the
willows, and so close to the river that the voice of its gliding
softened and filled out the reverberating silence between Margaret
and her companion, and made her feel that she knew why he had
brought her there.

"Do you feel better?" he asked gently as he sat down beside her.

"Oh, yes. I only needed a little air."

"I'm so glad you did. Of course the speeches were tremendously
interesting--but I prefer this. What a good night!"

"Yes."

There was a pause, which now, after all, the soothing accompaniment
of the river seemed hardly sufficient to fill.

"I wonder what time it is. I ought to be going home," Margaret began
at length.

"Oh, it's not late. They'll be at it for hours in there--yet."

She made a faint inarticulate sound. She wanted to say:
"No--Robert's speech was to be the last--" but she could not bring
herself to pronounce Ransom's name, and at the moment no other way
of refuting her companion's statement occurred to her.

The young man leaned back luxuriously, reassured by her silence.

"You see it's my last chance--and I want to make the most of it."

"Your last chance?" How stupid of her to repeat his words on that
cooing note of interrogation! It was just such a lead as the Brant
girl might have given him.

"To be with you--like this. I haven't had so many. And there's less
than a week left."

She attempted to laugh. "Perhaps it will sound longer if you call it
five days."

The flatness of that, again! And she knew there were people who
called her intelligent. Fortunately he did not seem to notice it;
but her laugh continued to sound in her own ears--the coquettish
chirp of middle age! She decided that if he spoke again--if he _said
anything_--she would make no farther effort at evasion: she would
take it directly, seriously, frankly--she would not be doubly
disloyal.

"Besides," he continued, throwing his arm along the back of the
bench, and turning toward her so that his face was like a dusky
bas-relief with a silver rim--"besides, there's something I've been
wanting to tell you."

The sound of the river seemed to cease altogether: the whole world
became silent.

Margaret had trusted her inspiration farther than it appeared likely
to carry her. Again she could think of nothing happier than to
repeat, on the same witless note of interrogation: "To tell me?"

"You only."

The constraint, the difficulty, seemed to be on his side now: she
divined it by the renewed shifting of his attitude--he was capable,
usually, of such fine intervals of immobility--and by a confusion in
his utterance that set her own voice throbbing in her throat.

"You've been so perfect to me," he began again. "It's not my fault
if you've made me feel that you would understand everything--make
allowances for everything--see just how a man may have held out, and
fought against a thing--as long as he had the strength. . . . This
may be my only chance; and I can't go away without telling you."

He had turned from her now, and was staring at the river, so that
his profile was projected against the moonlight in all its beautiful
young dejection.

There was a slight pause, as though he waited for her to speak; then
she leaned forward and laid her hand on his.

"If I have really been--if I have done for you even the least part
of what you say . . . what you imagine . . . will you do for me,
now, just one thing in return?"

He sat motionless, as if fearing to frighten away the shy touch on
his hand, and she left it there, conscious of her gesture only as
part of the high ritual of their farewell.

"What do you want me to do?" he asked in a low tone.

"_ Not_ to tell me!" she breathed on a deep note of entreaty.

"_ Not_ to tell you--?"

"Anything--_anything_--just to leave our . . . our friendship . . .
as it has been--as--as a painter, if a friend asked him, might leave
a picture--not quite finished, perhaps . . . but all the more
exquisite. . . ."

She felt the hand under hers slip away, recover itself, and seek her
own, which had flashed out of reach in the same instant--felt the
start that swept him round on her as if he had been caught and
turned about by the shoulders.

"You--_you_--?" he stammered, in a strange voice full of fear and
tenderness; but she held fast, so centred in her inexorable resolve
that she was hardly conscious of the effect her words might be
producing.

"Don't you see," she hurried on, "don't you _feel_ how much safer it
is--yes, I'm willing to put it so!--how much safer to leave
everything undisturbed . . . just as . . . as it has grown of itself
. . . without trying to say: 'It's this or that' . . . ? It's what
we each choose to call it to ourselves, after all, isn't it? Don't
let us try to find a name that . . . that we should both agree upon
. . . we probably shouldn't succeed." She laughed abruptly. "And
ghosts vanish when one names them!" she ended with a break in her
voice.

When she ceased her heart was beating so violently that there was a
rush in her ears like the noise of the river after rain, and she did
not immediately make out what he was answering. But as she recovered
her lucidity she said to herself that, whatever he was saying, she
must not hear it; and she began to speak again, half playfully, half
appealingly, with an eloquence of entreaty, an ingenuity in
argument, of which she had never dreamed herself capable. And then,
suddenly, strangling hands seemed to reach up from her heart to her
throat, and she had to stop.

Her companion remained motionless. He had not tried to regain her
hand, and his eyes were away from her, on the river. But his
nearness had become something formidable and exquisite--something
she had never before imagined. A flush of guilt swept over
her--vague reminiscences of French novels and of opera plots. This
was what such women felt, then . . . this was "shame." . . . Phrases
of the newspaper and the pulpit danced before her. . . . She dared
not speak, and his silence began to frighten her. Had ever a heart
beat so wildly before in Wentworth?

He turned at last, and taking her two hands, quite simply, kissed
them one after the other.

"I shall never forget--" he said in a confused voice, unlike his
own.

A return of strength enabled her to rise, and even to let her eyes
meet his for a moment.

"Thank you," she said, simply also.

She turned away from the bench, regaining the path that led back to
the college buildings, and he walked beside her in silence. When
they reached the elm walk it was dotted with dispersing groups. The
"speaking" was over, and Hamblin Hall had poured its audience out
into the moonlight. Margaret felt a rush of relief, followed by a
receding wave of regret. She had the distinct sensation that her
hour--her one hour--was over.

One of the groups just ahead broke up as they approached, and
projected Ransom's solid bulk against the moonlight.

"My husband," she said, hastening forward; and she never afterward
forgot the look of his back--heavy, round-shouldered, yet a little
pompous--in a badly fitting overcoat that stood out at the neck and
hid his collar. She had never before noticed how he dressed.






IV





THEY met again, inevitably, before Dawnish left; but the thing she
feared did not happen--he did not try to see her alone.

It even became clear to her, in looking back, that he had
deliberately avoided doing so; and this seemed merely an added proof
of his "understanding," of that deep undefinable communion that set
them alone in an empty world, as if on a peak above the clouds.

The five days passed in a flash; and when the last one came, it
brought to Margaret Ransom an hour of weakness, of profound
disorganization, when old barriers fell, old convictions faded--when
to be alone with him for a moment became, after all, the one craving
of her heart. She knew he was coming that afternoon to say
"good-by"--and she knew also that Ransom was to be away at South
Wentworth. She waited alone in her pale little drawing- room, with
its scant kakemonos, its one or two chilly reproductions from the
antique, its slippery Chippendale chairs. At length the bell rang,
and her world became a rosy blur--through which she presently
discerned the austere form of Mrs. Sperry, wife of the Professor of
palaeontology, who had come to talk over with her the next winter's
programme for the Higher Thought Club. They debated the question for
an hour, and when Mrs. Sperry departed Margaret had a confused
impression that the course was to deal with the influence of the
First Crusade on the development of European architecture--but the
sentient part of her knew only that Dawnish had not come.

He "bobbed in," as he would have put it, after dinner--having, it
appeared, run across Ransom early in the day, and learned that the
latter would be absent till evening. Margaret was in the study with
her husband when the door opened and Dawnish stood there.
Ransom--who had not had time to dress--was seated at his desk, a
pile of shabby law books at his elbow, the light from a hanging lamp
falling on his grayish stubble of hair, his sallow forehead and
spectacled eyes. Dawnish, towering higher than usual against the
shadows of the room, and refined by his unusual pallor, hung a
moment on the threshold, then came in, explaining himself
profusely--laughing, accepting a cigar, letting Ransom push an
arm-chair forward--a Dawnish she had never seen, ill at ease,
ejaculatory, yet somehow more mature, more obscurely in command of
himself.

Margaret drew back, seating herself in the shade, in such a way that
she saw her husband's head first, and beyond it their visitor's,
relieved against the dusk of the book shelves. Her heart was
still--she felt no throbbing in her throat or temples: all her life
seemed concentrated in the hand that lay on her knee, the hand he
would touch when they said good-by.

Afterward her heart rang all the changes, and there was a mood in
which she reproached herself for cowardice--for having deliberately
missed her one moment with him, the moment in which she might have
sounded the depths of life, for joy or anguish. But that mood was
fleeting and infrequent. In quieter hours she blushed for it--she
even trembled to think that he might have guessed such a regret in
her. It seemed to convict her of a lack of fineness that he should
have had, in his youth and his power, a tenderer, surer sense of the
peril of a rash touch--should have handled the case so much more
delicately.

At first her days were fire and the nights long solemn vigils. Her
thoughts were no longer vulgarized and defaced by any notion of
"guilt," of mental disloyalty. She was ashamed now of her shame.
What had happened was as much outside the sphere of her marriage as
some transaction in a star. It had simply given her a secret life of
incommunicable joys, as if all the wasted springs of her youth had
been stored in some hidden pool, and she could return there now to
bathe in them.

After that there came a phase of loneliness, through which the life
about her loomed phantasmal and remote. She thought the dead must
feel thus, repeating the vain gestures of the living beside some
Stygian shore. She wondered if any other woman had lived to whom
_nothing had ever happened?_ And then his first letter came. . . .

It was a charming letter--a perfect letter. The little touch of
awkwardness and constraint under its boyish spontaneity told her
more than whole pages of eloquence. He spoke of their friendship--of
their good days together. . . . Ransom, chancing to come in while
she read, noticed the foreign stamps; and she was able to hand him
the letter, saying gaily: "There's a message for you," and knowing
all the while that _her_ message was safe in her heart.

On the days when the letters came the outlines of things grew
indistinct, and she could never afterward remember what she had done
or how the business of life had been carried on. It was always a
surprise when she found dinner on the table as usual, and Ransom
seated opposite to her, running over the evening paper.

But though Dawnish continued to write, with all the English loyalty
to the outward observances of friendship, his communications came
only at intervals of several weeks, and between them she had time to
repossess herself, to regain some sort of normal contact with life.
And the customary, the recurring, gradually reclaimed her, the net
of habit tightened again--her daily life became real, and her one
momentary escape from it an exquisite illusion. Not that she ceased
to believe in the miracle that had befallen her: she still treasured
the reality of her one moment beside the river. What reason was
there for doubting it? She could hear the ring of truth in young
Dawnish's voice: "It's not my fault if you've made me feel that you
would understand everything. . . ." No! she believed in her miracle,
and the belief sweetened and illumined her life; but she came to see
that what was for her the transformation of her whole being might
well have been, for her companion, a mere passing explosion of
gratitude, of boyish good-fellowship touched with the pang of
leave-taking. She even reached the point of telling herself that it
was "better so": this view of the episode so defended it from the
alternating extremes of self-reproach and derision, so enshrined it
in a pale immortality to which she could make her secret pilgrimages
without reproach.

For a long time she had not been able to pass by the bench under the
willows--she even avoided the elm walk till autumn had stripped its
branches. But every day, now, she noted a step toward recovery; and
at last a day came when, walking along the river, she said to
herself, as she approached the bench: "I used not to be able to pass
here without thinking of him; _and now I am not thinking of him at
all!_"

This seemed such convincing proof of her recovery that she began, as
spring returned, to permit herself, now and then, a quiet session on
the bench--a dedicated hour from which she went back fortified to
her task.

She had not heard from her friend for six weeks or more--the
intervals between his letters were growing longer. But that was
"best" too, and she was not anxious, for she knew he had obtained
the post he had been preparing for, and that his active life in
London had begun. The thought reminded her, one mild March day, that
in leaving the house she had thrust in her reticule a letter from a
Wentworth friend who was abroad on a holiday. The envelope bore the
London post mark, a fact showing that the lady's face was turned
toward home. Margaret seated herself on her bench, and drawing out
the letter began to read it.

The London described was that of shops and museums--as remote as
possible from the setting of Guy Dawnish's existence. But suddenly
Margaret's eye fell on his name, and the page began to tremble in
her hands.

"I heard such a funny thing yesterday about your friend Mr. Dawnish.
We went to a tea at Professor Bunce's (I do wish you knew the
Bunces--their atmosphere is so _uplifting_), and there I met that
Miss Bruce-Pringle who came out last year to take a course in
histology at the Annex. Of course she asked about you and Mr.
Ransom, and then she told me she had just seen Mr. Dawnish's
aunt--the clever one he was always talking about, Lady Caroline
something--and that they were all in a dreadful state about him. I
wonder if you knew he was engaged when he went to America? He never
mentioned it to _us_. She said it was not a positive engagement, but
an understanding with a girl he has always been devoted to, who
lives near their place in Wiltshire; and both families expected the
marriage to take place as soon as he got back. It seems the girl is
an heiress (you know _how low_ the English ideals are compared with
ours), and Miss Bruce-Pringle said his relations were perfectly
delighted at his 'being provided for,' as she called it. Well, when
he got back he asked the girl to release him; and she and her family
were furious, and so were his people; but he holds out, and won't
marry her, and won't give a reason, except that he has 'formed an
unfortunate attachment.' Did you ever hear anything so peculiar? His
aunt, who is quite wild about it, says it must have happened at
Wentworth, because he didn't go anywhere else in America. Do you
suppose it _could_ have been the Brant girl? But why 'unfortunate'
when everybody knows she would have jumped at him?"

Margaret folded the letter and looked out across the river. It was
not the same river, but a mystic current shot with moonlight. The
bare willows wove a leafy veil above her head, and beside her she
felt the nearness of youth and tempestuous tenderness. It had all
happened just here, on this very seat by the river--it had come to
her, and passed her by, and she had not held out a hand to detain
it. . . .

Well! Was it not, by that very abstention, made more deeply and
ineffaceably hers? She could argue thus while she had thought the
episode, on his side, a mere transient effect of propinquity; but
now that she knew it had altered the whole course of his life, now
that it took on substance and reality, asserted a separate existence
outside of her own troubled consciousness--now it seemed almost
cowardly to have missed her share in it.

She walked home in a dream. Now and then, when she passed an
acquaintance, she wondered if the pain and glory were written on her
face. But Mrs. Sperry, who stopped her at the corner of Maverick
Street to say a word about the next meeting of the Higher Thought
Club, seemed to remark no change in her.

When she reached home Ransom had not yet returned from the office,
and she went straight to the library to tidy his writing-table. It
was part of her daily duty to bring order out of the chaos of his
papers, and of late she had fastened on such small recurring tasks
as some one falling over a precipice might snatch at the weak bushes
in its clefts.

When she had sorted the letters she took up some pamphlets and
newspapers, glancing over them to see if they were to be kept. Among
the papers was a page torn from a London _Times_ of the previous
month. Her eye ran down its columns and suddenly a paragraph flamed
out.

"We are requested to state that the marriage arranged between Mr.
Guy Dawnish, son of the late Colonel the Hon. Roderick Dawnish, of
Malby, Wilts, and Gwendolen, daughter of Samuel Matcher, Esq. of
Armingham Towers, Wilts, will not take place."

Margaret dropped the paper and sat down, hiding her face against the
stained baize of the desk. She remembered the photograph of the
tennis-court at Guise--she remembered the handsome girl at whom Guy
Dawnish looked up, laughing. A gust of tears shook her, loosening
the dry surface of conventional feeling, welling up from unsuspected
depths. She was sorry--very sorry, yet so glad--so ineffably,
impenitently glad.






V





THERE came a reaction in which she decided to write to him. She even
sketched out a letter of sisterly, almost motherly, remonstrance, in
which she reminded him that he "still had all his life before him."
But she reflected that so, after all, had she; and that seemed to
weaken the argument.

In the end she decided not to send the letter. He had never spoken
to her of his engagement to Gwendolen Matcher, and his letters had
contained no allusion to any sentimental disturbance in his life.
She had only his few broken words, that night by the river, on which
to build her theory of the case. But illuminated by the phrase "an
unfortunate attachment" the theory towered up, distinct and
immovable, like some high landmark by which travellers shape their
course. She had been loved--extraordinarily loved. But he had chosen
that she should know of it by his silence rather than by his speech.
He had understood that only on those terms could their transcendant
communion continue--that he must lose her to keep her. To break that
silence would be like spilling a cup of water in a waste of sand.
There would be nothing left for her thirst.

Her life, thenceforward, was bathed in a tranquil beauty. The days
flowed by like a river beneath the moon--each ripple caught the
brightness and passed it on. She began to take a renewed interest in
her familiar round of duties. The tasks which had once seemed
colourless and irksome had now a kind of sacrificial sweetness, a
symbolic meaning into which she alone was initiated. She had been
restless--had longed to travel; now she felt that she should never
again care to leave Wentworth. But if her desire to wander had
ceased, she travelled in spirit, performing invisible pilgrimages in
the footsteps of her friend. She regretted that her one short visit
to England had taken her so little out of London--that her
acquaintance with the landscape had been formed chiefly through the
windows of a railway carriage. She threw herself into the
architectural studies of the Higher Thought Club, and distinguished
herself, at the spring meetings, by her fluency, her competence, her
inexhaustible curiosity on the subject of the growth of English
Gothic. She ransacked the shelves of the college library, she
borrowed photographs of the cathedrals, she pored over the folio
pages of "The Seats of Noblemen and Gentlemen." She was like some
banished princess who learns that she has inherited a domain in her
own country, who knows that she will never see it, yet feels,
wherever she walks, its soil beneath her feet.

May was half over, and the Higher Thought Club was to hold its last
meeting, previous to the college festivities which, in early June,
agreeably disorganized the social routine of Wentworth. The meeting
was to take place in Margaret Ransom's drawing-room, and on the day
before she sat upstairs preparing for her dual duties as hostess and
orator--for she had been invited to read the final paper of the
course. In order to sum up with precision her conclusions on the
subject of English Gothic she had been rereading an analysis of the
structural features of the principal English cathedrals; and she was
murmuring over to herself the phrase: "The longitudinal arches of
Lincoln have an approximately elliptical form," when there came a
knock on the door, and Maria's voice announced: "There's a lady down
in the parlour."

Margaret's soul dropped from the heights of the shadowy vaulting to
the dead level of an afternoon call at Wentworth.

"A lady? Did she give no name?"

Maria became confused. "She only said she was a lady--" and in reply
to her mistress's look of mild surprise: "Well, ma'am, she told me
so three or four times over."

Margaret laid her book down, leaving it open at the description of
Lincoln, and slowly descended the stairs. As she did so, she
repeated to herself: "The longitudinal arches are elliptical."

On the threshold below, she had the odd impression that her bare and
inanimate drawing-room was brimming with life and noise--an
impression produced, as she presently perceived, by the resolute
forward dash--it was almost a pounce--of the one small figure
restlessly measuring its length.

The dash checked itself within a yard of Margaret, and the lady--a
stranger--held back long enough to stamp on her hostess a sharp
impression of sallowness, leanness, keenness, before she said, in a
voice that might have been addressing an unruly committee meeting:
"I am Lady Caroline Duckett--a fact I found it impossible to make
clear to the young woman who let me in."

A warm wave rushed up from Margaret's heart to her throat and
forehead. She held out both hands impulsively. "Oh, I'm so glad--I'd
no idea--"

Her voice sank under her visitor's impartial scrutiny.

"I don't wonder," said the latter drily. "I suppose she didn't
mention, either, that my object in calling here was to see Mrs.
Ransom?"

"Oh, yes--won't you sit down?" Margaret pushed a chair forward. She
seated herself at a little distance, brain and heart humming with a
confused interchange of signals. This dark sharp woman was his
aunt--the "clever aunt" who had had such a hard life, but had always
managed to keep her head above water. Margaret remembered that Guy
had spoken of her kindness--perhaps she would seem kinder when they
had talked together a little. Meanwhile the first impression she
produced was of an amplitude out of all proportion to her somewhat
scant exterior. With her small flat figure, her shabby heterogeneous
dress, she was as dowdy as any Professor's wife at Wentworth; but
her dowdiness (Margaret borrowed a literary analogy to define it),
her dowdiness was somehow "of the centre." Like the insignificant
emissary of a great power, she was to be judged rather by her
passports than her person.

While Margaret was receiving these impressions, Lady Caroline, with
quick bird-like twists of her head, was gathering others from the
pale void spaces of the drawing-room. Her eyes, divided by a sharp
nose like a bill, seemed to be set far enough apart to see at
separate angles; but suddenly she bent both of them on Margaret.

"This _is_ Mrs. Ransom's house?" she asked, with an emphasis on the
verb that gave a distinct hint of unfulfilled expectations.

Margaret assented.

"Because your American houses, especially in the provincial towns,
all look so remarkably alike, that I thought I might have been
mistaken; and as my time is extremely limited--in fact I'm sailing
on Wednesday--"

She paused long enough to let Margaret say: "I had no idea you were
in this country."

Lady Caroline made no attempt to take this up. "And so much of it,"
she carried on her sentence, "has been wasted in talking to people I
really hadn't the slightest desire to see, that you must excuse me
if I go straight to the point."

Margaret felt a sudden tension of the heart. "Of course," she said
while a voice within her cried: "He is dead--he has left me a
message."

There was another pause; then Lady Caroline went on, with increasing
asperity: "So that--in short--if I _could_ see Mrs. Ransom at
once--"

Margaret looked up in surprise. "I am Mrs. Ransom," she said.

The other stared a moment, with much the same look of cautious
incredulity that had marked her inspection of the drawing-room. Then
light came to her.

"Oh, I beg your pardon. I should have said that I wished to see Mrs.
_Robert_ Ransom, not Mrs. Ransom. But I understood that in the
States you don't make those distinctions." She paused a moment, and
then went on, before Margaret could answer: "Perhaps, after all,
it's as well that I should see you instead, since you're evidently
one of the household--your son and his wife live with you, I
suppose? Yes, on the whole, then, it's better--I shall be able to
talk so much more frankly." She spoke as if, as a rule,
circumstances prevented her giving rein to this propensity. "And
frankness, of course, is the only way out of this--this extremely
tiresome complication. You know, I suppose, that my nephew thinks
he's in love with your daughter-in-law?"

Margaret made a slight movement, but her visitor pressed on without
heeding it. "Oh, don't fancy, please, that I'm pretending to take a
high moral ground--though his mother does, poor dear! I can
perfectly imagine that in a place like this--I've just been driving
about it for two hours--a young man of Guy's age would _have_ to
provide himself with some sort of distraction, and he's not the kind
to go in for anything objectionable. Oh, we quite allow for that--we
should allow for the whole affair, if it hadn't so preposterously
ended in his throwing over the girl he was engaged to, and upsetting
an arrangement that affected a number of people besides himself. I
understand that in the States it's different--the young people have
only themselves to consider. In England--in our class, I mean--a
great deal may depend on a young man's making a good match; and in
Guy's case I may say that his mother and sisters (I won't include
myself, though I might) have been simply stranded--thrown
overboard--by his freak. You can understand how serious it is when I
tell you that it's that and nothing else that has brought me all the
way to America. And my first idea was to go straight to your
daughter-in-law, since her influence is the only thing we can count
on now, and put it to her fairly, as I'm putting it to you. But, on
the whole, I dare say it's better to see you first--you might give
me an idea of the line to take with her. I'm prepared to throw
myself on her mercy!"

Margaret rose from her chair, outwardly rigid in proportion to her
inward tremor.

"You don't understand--" she began.

Lady Caroline brushed the interruption aside. "Oh, but I
do--completely! I cast no reflection on your daughter-in-law. Guy
has made it quite clear to us that his attachment is--has, in short,
not been rewarded. But don't you see that that's the worst part of
it? There'd be much more hope of his recovering if Mrs. Robert
Ransom had--had--"

Margaret's voice broke from her in a cry. "I am Mrs. Robert Ransom,"
she said.

If Lady Caroline Duckett had hitherto given her hostess the
impression of a person not easily silenced, this fact added sensibly
to the effect produced by the intense stillness which now fell on
her.

She sat quite motionless, her large bangled hands clasped about the
meagre fur boa she had unwound from her neck on entering, her rusty
black veil pushed up to the edge of a "fringe" of doubtful
authenticity, her thin lips parted on a gasp that seemed to sharpen
itself on the edges of her teeth. So overwhelming and helpless was
her silence that Margaret began to feel a motion of pity beneath her
indignation--a desire at least to facilitate the excuses which must
terminate their disastrous colloquy. But when Lady Caroline found
voice she did not use it to excuse herself.

"You _can't_ be," she said, quite simply.

"Can't be?" Margaret stammered, with a flushing cheek.

"I mean, it's some mistake. Are there _two_ Mrs. Robert Ransoms in
the same town? Your family arrangements are so extremely puzzling."
She had a farther rush of enlightenment. "Oh, I _see!_ I ought of
course to have asked for Mrs. Robert Ransom 'Junior'!"

The idea sent her to her feet with a haste which showed her
impatience to make up for lost time.

"There is no other Mrs. Robert Ransom at Wentworth," said Margaret.

"No other--no 'Junior'? Are you _sure?_" Lady Caroline fell back
into her seat again. "Then I simply don't see," she murmured
helplessly.

Margaret's blush had fixed itself on her throbbing forehead. She
remained standing, while her strange visitor continued to gaze at
her with a perturbation in which the consciousness of indiscretion
had evidently as yet no part.

"I simply don't see," she repeated.

Suddenly she sprang up, and advancing to Margaret laid an inspired
hand on her arm. "But, my dear woman, you can help us out all the
same; you can help us to find out _who it is_--and you will, won't
you? Because, as it's not you, you can't in the least mind what I've
been saying--"

Margaret, freeing her arm from her visitor's hold, drew back a step;
but Lady Caroline instantly rejoined her.

"Of course, I can see that if it _had_ been, you might have been
annoyed: I dare say I put the case stupidly--but I'm so bewildered
by this new development--by his using you all this time as a
pretext--that I really don't know where to turn for light on the
mystery--"

She had Margaret in her imperious grasp again, but the latter broke
from her with a more resolute gesture.

"I'm afraid I have no light to give you," she began; but once more
Lady Caroline caught her up.

"Oh, but do please understand me! I condemn Guy most strongly for
using your name--when we all know you'd been so amazingly kind to
him! I haven't a word to say in his defence--but of course the
important thing now is: _who is the woman, since you're not?_"

The question rang out loudly, as if all the pale puritan corners of
the room flung it back with a shudder at the speaker. In the silence
that ensued Margaret felt the blood ebbing back to her heart; then
she said, in a distinct and level voice: "I know nothing of the
history of Mr. Dawnish."

Lady Caroline gave a stare and a gasp. Her distracted hand groped
for her boa and she began to wind it mechanically about her long
neck.

"It would really be an enormous help to us--and to poor Gwendolen
Matcher," she persisted pleadingly. "And you'd be doing Guy himself
a good turn."

Margaret remained silent and motionless while her visitor drew on
one of the worn gloves she had pulled off to adjust her veil. Lady
Caroline gave the veil a final twitch.

"I've come a tremendously long way," she said, "and, since it isn't
you, I can't think why you won't help me. . . ."

When the door had closed on her visitor Margaret Ransom went slowly
up the stairs to her room. As she dragged her feet from one step to
another, she remembered how she had sprung up the same steep flight
after that visit of Guy Dawnish's when she had looked in the glass
and seen on her face the blush of youth.

When she reached her room she bolted the door as she had done that
day, and again looked at herself in the narrow mirror above her
dressing-table. It was just a year since then--the elms were budding
again, the willows hanging their green veil above the bench by the
river. But there was no trace of youth left in her face--she saw it
now as others had doubtless always seen it. If it seemed as it did
to Lady Caroline Duckett, what look must it have worn to the fresh
gaze of young Guy Dawnish?

A pretext--she had been a pretext. He had used her name to screen
some one else--or perhaps merely to escape from a situation of which
he was weary. She did not care to conjecture what his motive had
been--everything connected with him had grown so remote and alien.
She felt no anger--only an unspeakable sadness, a sadness which she
knew would never be appeased.

She looked at herself long and steadily; she wished to clear her
eyes of all illusions. Then she turned away and took her usual seat
beside her work-table. From where she sat she could look down the
empty elm-shaded street, up which, at this hour every day, she was
sure to see her husband's figure advancing. She would see it
presently--she would see it for many years to come. She had a sudden
aching sense of the length of the years that stretched before her.
Strange that one who was not young should still, in all likelihood,
have so long to live!

Nothing was changed in the setting of her life, perhaps nothing
would ever change in it. She would certainly live and die in
Wentworth. And meanwhile the days would go on as usual, bringing the
usual obligations. As the word flitted through her brain she
remembered that she had still to put the finishing touches to the
paper she was to read the next afternoon at the meeting of the
Higher Thought Club.

The book she had been reading lay face downward beside her, where
she had left it an hour ago. She took it up, and slowly and
painfully, like a child laboriously spelling out the syllables, she
went on with the rest of the sentence:

--"and they spring from a level not much above that of the springing
of the transverse and diagonal ribs, which are so arranged as to
give a convex curve to the surface of the vaulting conoid."






THE VERDICT





I HAD always thought Jack Gisburn rather a cheap genius--though a
good fellow enough--so it was no great surprise to me to hear that,
in the height of his glory, he had dropped his painting, married a
rich widow, and established himself in a villa on the Riviera.
(Though I rather thought it would have been Rome or Florence.)

"The height of his glory"--that was what the women called it. I can
hear Mrs. Gideon Thwing--his last Chicago sitter--deploring his
unaccountable abdication. "Of course it's going to send the value of
my picture 'way up; but I don't think of that, Mr. Rickham--the loss
to Arrt is all I think of." The word, on Mrs. Thwing's lips,
multiplied its _rs_ as though they were reflected in an endless
vista of mirrors. And it was not only the Mrs. Thwings who mourned.
Had not the exquisite Hermia Croft, at the last Grafton Gallery
show, stopped me before Gisburn's "Moon-dancers" to say, with tears
in her eyes: "We shall not look upon its like again"?

Well!--even through the prism of Hermia's tears I felt able to face
the fact with equanimity. Poor Jack Gisburn! The women had made
him--it was fitting that they should mourn him. Among his own sex
fewer regrets were heard, and in his own trade hardly a murmur.
Professional jealousy? Perhaps. If it were, the honour of the craft
was vindicated by little Claude Nutley, who, in all good faith,
brought out in the Burlington a very handsome "obituary" on
Jack--one of those showy articles stocked with random technicalities
that I have heard (I won't say by whom) compared to Gisburn's
painting. And so--his resolve being apparently irrevocable--the
discussion gradually died out, and, as Mrs. Thwing had predicted,
the price of "Gisburns" went up.

It was not till three years later that, in the course of a few
weeks' idling on the Riviera, it suddenly occurred to me to wonder
why Gisburn had given up his painting. On reflection, it really was
a tempting problem. To accuse his wife would have been too easy--his
fair sitters had been denied the solace of saying that Mrs. Gisburn
had "dragged him down." For Mrs. Gisburn--as such--had not existed
till nearly a year after Jack's resolve had been taken. It might be
that he had married her--since he liked his ease--because he didn't
want to go on painting; but it would have been hard to prove that he
had given up his painting because he had married her.

Of course, if she had not dragged him down, she had equally, as Miss
Croft contended, failed to "lift him up"--she had not led him back
to the easel. To put the brush into his hand again--what a vocation
for a wife! But Mrs. Gisburn appeared to have disdained it--and I
felt it might be interesting to find out why.

The desultory life of the Riviera lends itself to such purely
academic speculations; and having, on my way to Monte Carlo, caught
a glimpse of Jack's balustraded terraces between the pines, I had
myself borne thither the next day.

I found the couple at tea beneath their palm-trees; and Mrs.
Gisburn's welcome was so genial that, in the ensuing weeks, I
claimed it frequently. It was not that my hostess was "interesting":
on that point I could have given Miss Croft the fullest reassurance.
It was just because she was _not_ interesting--if I may be pardoned
the bull--that I found her so. For Jack, all his life, had been
surrounded by interesting women: they had fostered his art, it had
been reared in the hot-house of their adulation. And it was
therefore instructive to note what effect the "deadening atmosphere
of mediocrity" (I quote Miss Croft) was having on him.

I have mentioned that Mrs. Gisburn was rich; and it was immediately
perceptible that her husband was extracting from this circumstance a
delicate but substantial satisfaction. It is, as a rule, the people
who scorn money who get most out of it; and Jack's elegant disdain
of his wife's big balance enabled him, with an appearance of perfect
good-breeding, to transmute it into objects of art and luxury. To
the latter, I must add, he remained relatively indifferent; but he
was buying Renaissance bronzes and eighteenth-century pictures with
a discrimination that bespoke the amplest resources.

"Money's only excuse is to put beauty into circulation," was one of
the axioms he laid down across the Sevres and silver of an
exquisitely appointed luncheon-table, when, on a later day, I had
again run over from Monte Carlo; and Mrs. Gisburn, beaming on him,
added for my enlightenment: "Jack is so morbidly sensitive to every
form of beauty."

Poor Jack! It had always been his fate to have women say such things
of him: the fact should be set down in extenuation. What struck me
now was that, for the first time, he resented the tone. I had seen
him, so often, basking under similar tributes--was it the conjugal
note that robbed them of their savour? No--for, oddly enough, it
became apparent that he was fond of Mrs. Gisburn--fond enough not to
see her absurdity. It was his own absurdity he seemed to be wincing
under--his own attitude as an object for garlands and incense.

"My dear, since I've chucked painting people don't say that stuff
about me--they say it about Victor Grindle," was his only protest,
as he rose from the table and strolled out onto the sunlit terrace.

I glanced after him, struck by his last word. Victor Grindle was, in
fact, becoming the man of the moment--as Jack himself, one might put
it, had been the man of the hour. The younger artist was said to
have formed himself at my friend's feet, and I wondered if a tinge
of jealousy underlay the latter's mysterious abdication. But no--for
it was not till after that event that the _rose Dubarry_
drawing-rooms had begun to display their "Grindles."

I turned to Mrs. Gisburn, who had lingered to give a lump of sugar
to her spaniel in the dining-room.

"Why _has_ he chucked painting?" I asked abruptly.

She raised her eyebrows with a hint of good-humoured surprise.

"Oh, he doesn't _have_ to now, you know; and I want him to enjoy
himself," she said quite simply.

I looked about the spacious white-panelled room, with its
_famille-verte_ vases repeating the tones of the pale damask
curtains, and its eighteenth-century pastels in delicate faded
frames.

"Has he chucked his pictures too? I haven't seen a single one in the
house."

A slight shade of constraint crossed Mrs. Gisburn's open
countenance. "It's his ridiculous modesty, you know. He says they're
not fit to have about; he's sent them all away except one--my
portrait--and that I have to keep upstairs."

His ridiculous modesty--Jack's modesty about his pictures? My
curiosity was growing like the bean-stalk. I said persuasively to my
hostess: "I must really see your portrait, you know."

She glanced out almost timorously at the terrace where her husband,
lounging in a hooded chair, had lit a cigar and drawn the Russian
deerhound's head between his knees.

"Well, come while he's not looking," she said, with a laugh that
tried to hide her nervousness; and I followed her between the marble
Emperors of the hall, and up the wide stairs with terra-cotta nymphs
poised among flowers at each landing.

In the dimmest corner of her boudoir, amid a profusion of delicate
and distinguished objects, hung one of the familiar oval canvases,
in the inevitable garlanded frame. The mere outline of the frame
called up all Gisburn's past!

Mrs. Gisburn drew back the window-curtains, moved aside a
_jardiniere_ full of pink azaleas, pushed an arm-chair away, and
said: "If you stand here you can just manage to see it. I had it
over the mantel-piece, but he wouldn't let it stay."

Yes--I could just manage to see it--the first portrait of Jack's I
had ever had to strain my eyes over! Usually they had the place of
honour--say the central panel in a pale yellow or _rose Dubarry_
drawing-room, or a monumental easel placed so that it took the light
through curtains of old Venetian point. The more modest place became
the picture better; yet, as my eyes grew accustomed to the
half-light, all the characteristic qualities came out--all the
hesitations disguised as audacities, the tricks of prestidigitation
by which, with such consummate skill, he managed to divert attention
from the real business of the picture to some pretty irrelevance of
detail. Mrs. Gisburn, presenting a neutral surface to work
on--forming, as it were, so inevitably the background of her own
picture--had lent herself in an unusual degree to the display of
this false virtuosity. The picture was one of Jack's "strongest," as
his admirers would have put it--it represented, on his part, a
swelling of muscles, a congesting of veins, a balancing, straddling
and straining, that reminded one of the circus-clown's ironic
efforts to lift a feather. It met, in short, at every point the
demand of lovely woman to be painted "strongly" because she was
tired of being painted "sweetly"--and yet not to lose an atom of the
sweetness.

"It's the last he painted, you know," Mrs. Gisburn said with
pardonable pride. "The last but one," she corrected herself--"but
the other doesn't count, because he destroyed it."

"Destroyed it?" I was about to follow up this clue when I heard a
footstep and saw Jack himself on the threshold.

As he stood there, his hands in the pockets of his velveteen coat,
the thin brown waves of hair pushed back from his white forehead,
his lean sunburnt cheeks furrowed by a smile that lifted the tips of
a self-confident moustache, I felt to what a degree he had the same
quality as his pictures--the quality of looking cleverer than he
was.

His wife glanced at him deprecatingly, but his eyes travelled past
her to the portrait.

"Mr. Rickham wanted to see it," she began, as if excusing herself.
He shrugged his shoulders, still smiling.

"Oh, Rickham found me out long ago," he said lightly; then, passing
his arm through mine: "Come and see the rest of the house."

He showed it to me with a kind of naive suburban pride: the
bath-rooms, the speaking-tubes, the dress-closets, the
trouser-presses--all the complex simplifications of the
millionaire's domestic economy. And whenever my wonder paid the
expected tribute he said, throwing out his chest a little: "Yes, I
really don't see how people manage to live without that."

Well--it was just the end one might have foreseen for him. Only he
was, through it all and in spite of it all--as he had been through,
and in spite of, his pictures--so handsome, so charming, so
disarming, that one longed to cry out: "Be dissatisfied with your
leisure!" as once one had longed to say: "Be dissatisfied with your
work!"

But, with the cry on my lips, my diagnosis suffered an unexpected
check.

"This is my own lair," he said, leading me into a dark plain room at
the end of the florid vista. It was square and brown and leathery:
no "effects"; no bric-a-brac, none of the air of posing for
reproduction in a picture weekly--above all, no least sign of ever
having been used as a studio.

The fact brought home to me the absolute finality of Jack's break
with his old life.

"Don't you ever dabble with paint any more?" I asked, still looking
about for a trace of such activity.

"Never," he said briefly.

"Or water-colour--or etching?"

His confident eyes grew dim, and his cheeks paled a little under
their handsome sunburn.

"Never think of it, my dear fellow--any more than if I'd never
touched a brush."

And his tone told me in a flash that he never thought of anything
else.

I moved away, instinctively embarrassed by my unexpected discovery;
and as I turned, my eye fell on a small picture above the
mantel-piece--the only object breaking the plain oak panelling of
the room.

"Oh, by Jove!" I said.

It was a sketch of a donkey--an old tired donkey, standing in the
rain under a wall.

"By Jove--a Stroud!" I cried.

He was silent; but I felt him close behind me, breathing a little
quickly.

"What a wonder! Made with a dozen lines--but on everlasting
foundations. You lucky chap, where did you get it?"

He answered slowly: "Mrs. Stroud gave it to me."

"Ah--I didn't know you even knew the Strouds. He was such an
inflexible hermit."

"I didn't--till after. . . . She sent for me to paint him when he
was dead."

"When he was dead? You?"

I must have let a little too much amazement escape through my
surprise, for he answered with a deprecating laugh: "Yes--she's an
awful simpleton, you know, Mrs. Stroud. Her only idea was to have
him done by a fashionable painter--ah, poor Stroud! She thought it
the surest way of proclaiming his greatness--of forcing it on a
purblind public. And at the moment I was _the_ fashionable painter."

"Ah, poor Stroud--as you say. Was _that_ his history?"

"That was his history. She believed in him, gloried in him--or
thought she did. But she couldn't bear not to have all the
drawing-rooms with her. She couldn't bear the fact that, on
varnishing days, one could always get near enough to see his
pictures. Poor woman! She's just a fragment groping for other
fragments. Stroud is the only whole I ever knew."

"You ever knew? But you just said--"

Gisburn had a curious smile in his eyes.

"Oh, I knew him, and he knew me--only it happened after he was
dead."

I dropped my voice instinctively. "When she sent for you?"

"Yes--quite insensible to the irony. She wanted him vindicated--and
by me!"

He laughed again, and threw back his head to look up at the sketch
of the donkey. "There were days when I couldn't look at that
thing--couldn't face it. But I forced myself to put it here; and now
it's cured me--cured me. That's the reason why I don't dabble any
more, my dear Rickham; or rather Stroud himself is the reason."

For the first time my idle curiosity about my companion turned into
a serious desire to understand him better.

"I wish you'd tell me how it happened," I said.

He stood looking up at the sketch, and twirling between his fingers
a cigarette he had forgotten to light. Suddenly he turned toward me.

"I'd rather like to tell you--because I've always suspected you of
loathing my work."

I made a deprecating gesture, which he negatived with a
good-humoured shrug.

"Oh, I didn't care a straw when I believed in myself--and now it's
an added tie between us!"

He laughed slightly, without bitterness, and pushed one of the deep
arm-chairs forward. "There: make yourself comfortable--and here are
the cigars you like."

He placed them at my elbow and continued to wander up and down the
room, stopping now and then beneath the picture.

"How it happened? I can tell you in five minutes--and it didn't take
much longer to happen. . . . I can remember now how surprised and
pleased I was when I got Mrs. Stroud's note. Of course, deep down, I
had always _felt_ there was no one like him--only I had gone with
the stream, echoed the usual platitudes about him, till I half got
to think he was a failure, one of the kind that are left behind. By
Jove, and he _was_ left behind--because he had come to stay! The
rest of us had to let ourselves be swept along or go under, but he
was high above the current--on everlasting foundations, as you say.

"Well, I went off to the house in my most egregious mood--rather
moved, Lord forgive me, at the pathos of poor Stroud's career of
failure being crowned by the glory of my painting him! Of course I
meant to do the picture for nothing--I told Mrs. Stroud so when she
began to stammer something about her poverty. I remember getting off
a prodigious phrase about the honour being _mine_--oh, I was
princely, my dear Rickham! I was posing to myself like one of my own
sitters.

"Then I was taken up and left alone with him. I had sent all my
traps in advance, and I had only to set up the easel and get to
work. He had been dead only twenty-four hours, and he died suddenly,
of heart disease, so that there had been no preliminary work of
destruction--his face was clear and untouched. I had met him once or
twice, years before, and thought him insignificant and dingy. Now I
saw that he was superb.

"I was glad at first, with a merely aesthetic satisfaction: glad to
have my hand on such a 'subject.' Then his strange life-likeness
began to affect me queerly--as I blocked the head in I felt as if he
were watching me do it. The sensation was followed by the thought:
if he _were_ watching me, what would he say to my way of working? My
strokes began to go a little wild--I felt nervous and uncertain.

"Once, when I looked up, I seemed to see a smile behind his close
grayish beard--as if he had the secret, and were amusing himself by
holding it back from me. That exasperated me still more. The secret?
Why, I had a secret worth twenty of his! I dashed at the canvas
furiously, and tried some of my bravura tricks. But they failed me,
they crumbled. I saw that he wasn't watching the showy bits--I
couldn't distract his attention; he just kept his eyes on the hard
passages between. Those were the ones I had always shirked, or
covered up with some lying paint. And how he saw through my lies!

"I looked up again, and caught sight of that sketch of the donkey
hanging on the wall near his bed. His wife told me afterward it was
the last thing he had done--just a note taken with a shaking hand,
when he was down in Devonshire recovering from a previous heart
attack. Just a note! But it tells his whole history. There are years
of patient scornful persistence in every line. A man who had swum
with the current could never have learned that mighty up-stream
stroke. . . .

"I turned back to my work, and went on groping and muddling; then I
looked at the donkey again. I saw that, when Stroud laid in the
first stroke, he knew just what the end would be. He had possessed
his subject, absorbed it, recreated it. When had I done that with
any of my things? They hadn't been born of me--I had just adopted
them. . . .

"Hang it, Rickham, with that face watching me I couldn't do another
stroke. The plain truth was, I didn't know where to put it--_I had
never known_. Only, with my sitters and my public, a showy splash of
colour covered up the fact--I just threw paint into their faces. . .
. Well, paint was the one medium those dead eyes could see
through--see straight to the tottering foundations underneath. Don't
you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says
half the time not what one wants to but what one can? Well--that was
the way I painted; and as he lay there and watched me, the thing
they called my 'technique' collapsed like a house of cards. He
didn't sneer, you understand, poor Stroud--he just lay there quietly
watching, and on his lips, through the gray beard, I seemed to hear
the question: 'Are you sure you know where you're coming out?'

"If I could have painted that face, with that question on it, I
should have done a great thing. The next greatest thing was to see
that I couldn't--and that grace was given me. But, oh, at that
minute, Rickham, was there anything on earth I wouldn't have given
to have Stroud alive before me, and to hear him say: 'It's not too
late--I'll show you how'?

"It _was_ too late--it would have been, even if he'd been alive. I
packed up my traps, and went down and told Mrs. Stroud. Of course I
didn't tell her _that_--it would have been Greek to her. I simply
said I couldn't paint him, that I was too moved. She rather liked
the idea--she's so romantic! It was that that made her give me the
donkey. But she was terribly upset at not getting the portrait--she
did so want him 'done' by some one showy! At first I was afraid she
wouldn't let me off--and at my wits' end I suggested Grindle. Yes,
it was I who started Grindle: I told Mrs. Stroud he was the 'coming'
man, and she told somebody else, and so it got to be true. . . . And
he painted Stroud without wincing; and she hung the picture among
her husband's things. . . ."

He flung himself down in the arm-chair near mine, laid back his
head, and clasping his arms beneath it, looked up at the picture
above the chimney-piece.

"I like to fancy that Stroud himself would have given it to me, if
he'd been able to say what he thought that day."

And, in answer to a question I put half-mechanically--"Begin again?"
he flashed out. "When the one thing that brings me anywhere near him
is that I knew enough to leave off?"

He stood up and laid his hand on my shoulder with a laugh. "Only the
irony of it is that I _am_ still painting--since Grindle's doing it
for me! The Strouds stand alone, and happen once--but there's no
exterminating our kind of art."






THE POT-BOILER

I





The studio faced north, looking out over a dismal reach of roofs and
chimneys, and rusty fire-escapes hung with heterogeneous garments. A
crust of dirty snow covered the level surfaces, and a December sky
with more snow in it lowered over them.

The room was bare and gaunt, with blotched walls and a stained
uneven floor. On a divan lay a pile of "properties"--limp draperies,
an Algerian scarf, a moth-eaten fan of peacock feathers. The janitor
had forgotten to fill the coal-scuttle over-night, and the cast-iron
stove projected its cold flanks into the room like a black iceberg.
Ned Stanwell, who had just added his hat and great-coat to the
miscellaneous heap on the divan, turned from the empty stove with a
shiver.

"By Jove, this is a little too much like the last act of _Boheme_,"
he said, slipping into his coat again after a vain glance at the
coal-scuttle. Much solitude, and a lively habit of mind, had bred in
him the habit of audible soliloquy, and having flung a shout for the
janitor down the seven flights dividing the studio from the
basement, he turned back, picking up the thread of his monologue.
"Exactly like _Boheme_, really--that crack in the wall is much more
like a stage-crack than a real one--just the sort of crack Mungold
would paint if he were doing a Humble Interior."

Mungold, the fashionable portrait-painter of the hour, was the
favourite object of the younger men's irony.

"It only needs Kate Arran to be borne in dying," Stanwell continued
with a laugh. "Much more likely to be poor little Caspar, though,"
he concluded.

His neighbour across the landing--the little sculptor, Caspar Arran,
humorously called "Gasper" on account of his bronchial asthma--had
lately been joined by a sister, Kate Arran, a strapping girl, fresh
from the country, who had installed herself in the little room off
her brother's studio, keeping house for him with a chafing-dish and
a coffee-machine, to the mirth and envy of the other young men in
the building.

Poor little Gasper had been very bad all the autumn, and it was
surmised that his sister's presence, which he spoke of growlingly,
as a troublesome necessity devolved on him by the inopportune death
of an aunt, was really an indication of his failing ability to take
care of himself. Kate Arran took his complaints with unfailing
good-humour, darned his socks, brushed his clothes, fed him with
steaming broths and foaming milk-punches, and listened with
reverential assent to his interminable disquisitions on art. Every
one in the house was sorry for little Gasper, and the other fellows
liked him all the more because it was so impossible to like his
sculpture; but his talk was a bore, and when his colleagues ran in
to see him they were apt to keep a hand on the door-knob and to
plead a pressing engagement. At least they had been till Kate came;
but now they began to show a disposition to enter and sit down.
Caspar, who was no fool, perceived the change, and perhaps detected
its cause; at any rate, he showed no special gratification at the
increased cordiality of his friends, and Kate, who followed him in
everything, took this as a sign that guests were to be discouraged.

There was one exception, however: Ned Stanwell, who was deplorably
good-natured, had always lent a patient ear to Caspar, and he now
reaped his reward by being taken into Kate's favour. Before she had
been a month in the building they were on confidential terms as to
Caspar's health, and lately Stanwell had penetrated farther, even to
the inmost recesses of her anxiety about her brother's career.
Caspar had recently had a bad blow in the refusal of his _magnum
opus_--a vast allegorical group--by the Commissioners of the
Minneapolis Exhibition. He took the rejection with Promethean irony,
proclaimed it as the clinching proof of his ability, and abounded in
reasons why, even in an age of such crass artistic ignorance, a
refusal so egregious must react to the advantage of its object. But
his sister's indignation, if as glowing, was a shade less hopeful.
Of course Caspar was going to succeed--she knew it was only a
question of time--but she paled at the word and turned imploring
eyes on Stanwell. _Was there time enough?_ It was the one element in
the combination that she could not count on; and Stanwell, reddening
under her look of interrogation, and cursing his own glaring
robustness, would affirm that of course, of course, of course, by
everything that was holy there was time enough--with the mental
reservation that there wouldn't be, even if poor Caspar lived to be
a hundred.

"Vos that you yelling for the shanitor, Mr. Sdanwell?" inquired an
affable voice through the doorway; and Stanwell, turning with a
laugh, confronted the squat figure of a middle-aged man in an
expensive fur coat, who looked as if his face secreted the oil which
he used on his hair.

"Hullo, Shepson--I should say I was yelling. Did you ever feel such
an atmosphere? That fool has forgotten to light the stove. Come in,
but for heaven's sake don't take off your coat."

Mr. Shepson glanced about the studio with a look which seemed to say
that, where so much else was lacking, the absence of a fire hardly
added to the general sense of destitution.

"Vell, you ain't as vell fixed as Mr. Mungold--ever been to his
studio, Mr. Sdanwell? De most ex_ quis_ite blush hangings, and a
gas-fire, choost as natural--"

"Oh, hang it, Shepson, do you call _that_ a studio? It's like a
manicure's parlour--or a beauty-doctor's. By George," broke off
Stanwell, "and that's just what he is!"

"A peauty-doctor?"

"Yes--oh, well, you wouldn't see," murmured Stanwell, mentally
storing his epigram for more appreciative ears. "But you didn't come
just to make me envious of Mungold's studio, did you?" And he pushed
forward a chair for his visitor.

The latter, however, declined it with an affable motion. "Of gourse
not, of gourse not--but Mr. Mungold is a sensible man. He makes a
lot of money, you know."

"Is that what you came to tell me?" said Stanwell, still humorously.

"My gootness, no--I was downstairs looking at Holbrook's sdained
class, and I shoost thought I'd sdep up a minute and take a beep at
your vork."

"Much obliged, I'm sure--especially as I assume that you don't want
any of it." Try as he would, Stanwell could not keep a note of
eagerness from his voice. Mr. Shepson caught the note, and eyed him
shrewdly through gold-rimmed glasses.

"Vell, vell, vell--I'm not prepared to commit myself. Shoost let me
take a look round, vill you?"

"With the greatest pleasure--and I'll give another shout for the
coal."

Stanwell went out on the landing, and Mr. Shepson, left to himself,
began a meditative progress about the room. On an easel facing the
improvised dais stood a canvas on which a young woman's head had
been blocked in. It was just in that happy state of semi-evocation
when a picture seems to detach itself from the grossness of its
medium and live a wondrous moment in the actual; and the quality of
the head in question--a vigorous dusky youthfulness, a kind of
virgin majesty--lent itself to this illusion of vitality. Stanwell,
who had re-entered the studio, could not help drawing a sharp breath
as he saw the picture-dealer pausing with tilted head before this
portrait: it seemed, at one moment, so impossible that he should not
be struck with it, at the next so incredible that he should be.

Shepson cocked his parrot-eye at the canvas with a desultory "Vat's
dat?" which sent a twinge through the young man.

"That? Oh--a sketch of a young lady," stammered Stanwell, flushing
at the imbecility of his reply. "It's Miss Arran, you know," he
added, "the sister of my neighbour here, the sculptor."

"Sgulpture? There's no market for modern sgulpture except
tombstones," said Shepson disparagingly, passing on as if he
included the sister's portrait in his condemnation of her brother's
trade.

Stanwell smiled, but more at himself than Shepson. How could he ever
have supposed that the gross fool would see anything in his sketch
of Kate Arran? He stood aside, straining after detachment, while the
dealer continued his round of exploration, waddling up to the
canvases on the walls, prodding with his stick at those stacked in
corners, prying and peering sideways like a great bird rummaging for
seed. He seemed to find little nutriment in the course of his
search, for the sounds he emitted expressed a weary distaste for
misdirected effort, and he completed his round without having
thought it worth while to draw a single canvas from its obscurity.

As his visits always had the same result, Stanwell was reduced to
wondering why he had come again; but Shepson was not the man to
indulge in vague roamings through the field of art, and it was safe
to conclude that his purpose would in due course reveal itself. His
tour brought him at length face to face with the painter, where he
paused, clasping his plump gloved hands behind his back, and shaking
an admonitory head.

"Gleffer--very gleffer, of course--I suppose you'll let me know when
you want to sell anything?"

"Let you know?" gasped Stanwell, to whom the room grew so glowingly
hot that he thought for a moment the janitor must have made up the
fire.

Shepson gave a dry laugh. "Vell, it doesn't sdrike me that you want
to now--doing this kind of thing, you know!" And he swept a
comprehensive hand about the studio.

"Ah," said Stanwell, who could not keep a note of flatness out of
his laugh.

"See here, Mr. Sdanwell, vot do you do it for? If you do it for
yourself and the other fellows, vell and good--only don't ask me
round. I sell pictures, I don't theorize about them. Ven you vant to
sell, gome to me with what my gustomers vant. You can do it--you're
smart enough. You can do most anything. Vere's dat bortrait of
Gladys Glyde dat you showed at the Fake Club last autumn? Dat little
thing in de Romney sdyle? Dat vas a little shem, now," exclaimed Mr.
Shepson, whose pronunciation became increasingly Semitic in moments
of excitement.

Stanwell stared. Called upon a few months previously to contribute
to an exhibition of skits on well-known artists, he had used the
photograph of a favourite music-hall "star" as the basis of a
picture in the pseudo-historical style affected by the popular
portrait-painters of the day.

"That thing?" he said contemptuously. "How on earth did you happen
to see it?"

"I see everything," returned the dealer with an oracular smile. "If
you've got it here let me look at it, please."

It cost Stanwell a few minutes' search to unearth his skit--a clever
blending of dash and sentimentality, in just the right proportion to
create the impression of a powerful brush subdued to mildness by the
charms of the sitter. Stanwell had thrown it off in a burst of
imitative frenzy, beginning for the mere joy of the satire, but
gradually fascinated by the problem of producing the requisite
mingling of attributes. He was surprised now to see how well he had
caught the note, and Shepson's face reflected his approval.

"By George! Dat's something like," the dealer ejaculated.

"Like what? Like Mungold?" Stanwell laughed.

"Like business! Like a big order for a bortrait, Mr. Sdanwell--dat's
what it's like!" cried Shepson, swinging round on him.

Stanwell's stare widened. "An order for me?"

"Vy not? Accidents _vill_ happen," said Shepson jocosely. "De fact
is, Mrs. Archer Millington wants to be bainted--you know her sdyle?
Well, she prides herself on her likeness to little Gladys. And so
ven she saw dat bicture of yours at de Fake Show she made a note of
your name, and de udder day she sent for me and she says: 'Mr.
Shepson, I'm tired of Mungold--all my friends are done by Mungold. I
vant to break away and be orishinal--I vant to be done by the
bainter that did Gladys Glyde."

Shepson waited to observe the result of this overwhelming
announcement, and Stanwell, after a momentary halt of surprise,
brought out laughingly: "But this _is_ a Mungold. Is this what she
calls being original?"

"Shoost exactly," said Shepson, with unexpected acuteness. "That's
vat dey all want--something different from what all deir friends
have got, but shoost like it all de same. Dat's de public all over!
Mrs. Millington don't want a Mungold, because everybody's got a
Mungold, but she wants a picture that's in the same sdyle, because
dat's _de_ sdyle, and she's afraid of any oder!"

Stanwell was listening with real enjoyment. "Ah, you know your
public," he murmured.

"Vell, you do, too, or you couldn't have painted dat," the dealer
retorted. "And I don't say dey're wrong--mind dat. I like a bretty
picture myself. And I understand the way dey feel. Dey're villing to
let Sargent take liberties vid them, because it's like being punched
in de ribs by a King; but if anybody else baints them, they vant to
look as sweet as an obituary." He turned earnestly to Stanwell. "The
thing is to attract their notice. Vonce you got it they von't gif
you dime to sleep. And dat's why I'm here to-day--you've attracted
Mrs. Millington's notice, and vonce you're hung in dat new
ball-room--dat's vere she vants you, in a big gold panel--vonce
you're dere, vy, you'll be like the Pianola--no home gompleat
without you. And I ain't going to charge you any commission on the
first job!"

He stood before the painter, exuding a mixture of deference and
patronage in which either element might predominate as events
developed; but Stanwell could see in the incident only the stuff for
a good story.

"My dear Shepson," he said, "what are you talking about? This is no
picture of mine. Why don't you ask me to do you a Corot at once? I
hear there's a great demand for them still in the West. Or an Arthur
Schracker--I can do Schracker as well as Mungold," he added, turning
around a small canvas at which a paint-pot seemed to have been
hurled with violence from a considerable distance.

Shepson ignored the allusion to Corot, but screwed his eyes at the
picture. "Ah, Schracker--vell, the Schracker sdyle would take first
rate if you were a foreigner--but, for goodness sake, don't try it
on Mrs. Millington!"

Stanwell pushed the two skits aside. "Oh, you can trust me," he
cried humorously. "The pearls and the eyes very large--the
extremities very small. Isn't that about the size of it?"

Dat's it--dat's it. And the cheque as big as you vant to make it!
Mrs. Millington vants the picture finished in time for her first
barty in the new ball-room, and if you rush the job she won't
sdickle at an extra thousand. Vill you come along with me now and
arrange for your first sitting?"

He stood before the young man, urgent, paternal, and so imbued with
the importance of his mission that his face stretched to a ludicrous
length of dismay when Stanwell, administering a good-humoured push
to his shoulder, cried gaily: "My dear fellow, it will make my price
rise still higher when the lady hears I'm too busy to take any
orders at present--and that I'm actually obliged to turn you out now
because I'm expecting a sitter!"

It was part of Shepson's business to have a quick ear for the note
of finality, and he offered no resistance to Stanwell's friendly
impulsion; but on the threshold he paused to murmur, with a
regretful glance at the denuded studio: "You could haf done it, Mr.
Sdanwell--you could haf done it!"






II





KATE ARRAN was Stanwell's sitter; but the janitor had hardly filled
the stove when she came in to say that she could not sit. Caspar had
had a bad night: he was depressed and feverish, and in spite of his
protests she had resolved to fetch the doctor. Care sat on her
usually tranquil features, and Stanwell, as he offered to go for the
doctor, wished he could have caught in his picture the wide gloom of
her brow. There was always a kind of Biblical breadth in the
expression of her emotions, and today she suggested a text from
Isaiah.

"But you're not busy?" she hesitated; in the full voice which seemed
tuned to a solemn rhetoric.

"I meant to be--with you. But since that's off I'm quite
unemployed."

She smiled interrogatively. "I thought perhaps you had an order. I
met Mr. Shepson rubbing his hands on the landing."

"Was he rubbing his hands? Well, it was not over me. He says that
from the style of my pictures he doesn't suppose I want to sell."

She looked at him superbly. "Well, do you?"

He embraced his bleak walls in a circular gesture. "Judge for
yourself!"

"Ah, but it's splendidly furnished!"

"With rejected pictures, you mean?"

"With ideals!" she exclaimed in a tone caught from her brother, and
which would have been irritating to Stanwell if it had not been
moving.

He gave a slight shrug and took up his hat; but she interposed to
say that if it didn't make any difference she would prefer to have
him go and sit with poor Caspar, while she ran for the doctor and
did some household errands by the way. Stanwell divined in her
request the need for a brief respite from Caspar, and though he
shivered at the thought of her facing the cold in the scant jacket
which had been her only wear since he had known her, he let her go
without a protest, and betook himself to Arran's studio.

He found the little sculptor dressed and roaming fretfully about the
melancholy room in which he and his plastic off-spring lodged
together. In one corner, where Kate's chair and work-table stood, a
scrupulous order prevailed; but the rest of the apartment had the
dreary untidiness, the damp grey look, which the worker in clay
usually creates about him. In the centre of this desert stood the
shrouded image of Caspar's disappointment: the colossal rejected
group as to which his friends could seldom remember whether it
represented Jove hurling a Titan from Olympus or Science Subjugating
Religion. Caspar was the sworn foe of religion, which he appeared to
regard as indirectly connected with his inability to sell his
statues.

The sculptor was too ill to work, and Stanwell's appearance loosed
the pent-up springs of his talk.

"Hullo! What are you doing here? I thought Kate had gone over to sit
to you. She wanted a little fresh air? I should say enough of it
came in through these windows. How like a woman, when she's agreed
to do a certain thing, to make up her mind at once that she's got to
do another! They don't call it caprice--it's always duty: that's the
humour of it. I'll be bound Kate alleged a pressing engagement.
Sorry she should waste your time so, my dear fellow. Here am I with
plenty of it to burn--look at my hand shake; I can't do a thing!
Well, luckily nobody wants me to--posterity may suffer, but the
present generation isn't worrying. The present generation wants to
be carved in sugar-candy, or painted in maple syrup. It doesn't want
to be told the truth about itself or about anything in the universe.
The prophets have always lived in a garret, my dear fellow--only the
ravens don't always find out their address! Speaking of ravens,
though, Kate told me she saw old Shepson coming out of your place--I
say, old man, you're not meditating an apostasy? You're not doing
the kind of thing that Shepson would look at?"

Stanwell laughed. "Oh, he looked at them--but only to confirm his
reasons for rejecting them."

"Ha! ha! That's right--he wanted to refresh his memory with their
badness. But how on earth did he happen to have any doubts on the
subject? I should as soon have thought of his coming in here!"

Stanwell winced at the analogy, but replied in Caspar's key: "Oh,
he's not as sure of any of us as he is of you!"

The sculptor received this tribute with a joyous expletive. "By God,
no, he's sure of me, as you say! He and his tribe know that I'll
starve in my tracks sooner than make a concession--a single
concession. A fellow came after me once to do an angel on a
tombstone--an angel leaning against a broken column, and looking as
if it was waiting for the elevator and wondering why in hell it
didn't come. He said he wanted me to show that the deceased was
pining to get to heaven. As she was his wife I didn't dispute the
proposition, but when I asked him what he understood by _heaven_ he
grabbed his hat and walked out of the studio. _He_ didn't wait for
the elevator."

Stanwell listened with a practised smile. The story of the man who
had come to order the angel was so familiar to Arran's friends that
its only interest consisted in waiting to see what variation he
would give to the retort which had put the mourner to flight. It was
generally supposed that this visit represented the sculptor's
nearest approach to an order, and one of his fellow-craftsmen had
been heard to remark that if Caspar _had_ made the tombstone, the
lady under it would have tried harder than ever to get to heaven. To
Stanwell's present mood, however, there was something more than
usually irritating in the gratuitous assumption that Arran had only
to derogate from his altitude to have a press of purchasers at his
door.

"Well--what did you gain by kicking your widower out?" he objected.
"Why can't a man do two kinds of work--one to please himself and the
other to boil the pot?"

Caspar stopped in his jerky walk--the stride of a tall man attempted
with short legs (it sometimes appeared to Stanwell to symbolize his
artistic endeavour).

"Why can't a man--why can't he? You ask me that, Stanwell?" he
blazed out.

"Yes; and what's more, I'll answer you: it isn't everybody who can
adapt his art as he wants to!"

Caspar stood before him, gasping with incredulous scorn. "Adapt his
art? As he wants to? Unhappy wretch, what lingo are you talking? If
you mean that it isn't every honest man who can be a renegade--"

"That's just what I do mean: he can't unless he's clever enough to
see the other side."

The deep groan with which Caspar met this casuistry was cut short by
a knock at the studio door, which thereupon opened to admit a small
dapperly-dressed man with a silky moustache and mildly-bulging eyes.

"Ah, Mungold," exclaimed Stanwell, to cover the gloomy silence with
which Arran received the new-comer; whereat the latter, with the air
of a man who does not easily believe himself unwelcome, bestowed a
sympathetic pressure on the sculptor's hand.

"My dear chap, I've just met Miss Arran, and she told me you were
laid up with a bad cold, so I thought I'd pop in and cheer you up a
little."

He looked about him with a smile evidently intended as the first act
in his beneficent programme.

Mr. Mungold, freshly soaped and scented, with a neat glaze of
gentility extending from his varnished boot-tips to his glossy hat,
looked like the "flattered" portrait of a common man--just such an
idealized presentment as his own brush might have produced. As a
rule, however, he devoted himself to the portrayal of the other sex,
painting ladies in syrup, as Arran said, with marsh-mallow children
leaning against their knees. He was as quick as a dressmaker at
catching new ideas, and the style of his pictures changed as rapidly
as that of the fashion-plates. One year all his sitters were done on
oval canvases, with gauzy draperies and a background of clouds; the
next they were seated under an immemorial elm, caressing enormous
dogs obviously constructed out of door-mats. Whatever their
occupation they always looked straight out of the canvas, giving the
impression that their eyes were fixed on an invisible camera. This
gave rise to the rumour that Mungold "did" his portraits from
photographs; it was even said that he had invented a way of
transferring an enlarged photograph to the canvas, so that all that
remained was to fill in the colours. If he heard of this charge he
took it calmly, but probably it had not reached the high spheres in
which he moved, and in which he was esteemed for painting pearls
better, and making unsuggestive children look lovelier, than any of
his fellow-craftsmen. Mr. Mungold, in fact, deemed it a part of his
professional duty to study his sitters in their home-life; and as
this life was chiefly led in the homes of others, he was too busy
dining out and going to the opera to mingle much with his
colleagues. But as no one is wholly consistent, Mr. Mungold had
lately belied his ambitions by falling in love with Kate Arran; and
with that gentle persistency which made him so wonderful in managing
obstreperous infantile sitters, he had contrived to establish a
precarious footing in her brother's studio.

Part of his success was due to the fact that he could not easily
think himself the object of a rebuff. If it seemed to hit him he
regarded it as deflected from its aim, and brushed it aside with a
discreet gesture. A touch of comedy was lent to the situation by the
fact that, till Kate Arran's coming, Mungold had always served as
her brother's Awful Example. It was a mark of Arran's lack of humour
that he persisted in regarding the little man as a conscious
apostate, instead of perceiving that he painted as he could, in a
world which really looked to him like a vast confectioner's window.
Stanwell had never quite divined how Mungold had won over the
sister, to whom her brother's prejudices were a religion; but he
suspected the painter of having united a deep belief in Caspar's
gifts with the occasional offer of opportune delicacies--the
port-wine or game which Kate had no other means of procuring for her
patient.

Stanwell, persuaded that Mungold would stick to his post till Miss
Arran's return, felt himself freed from his promise to the latter
and left the incongruous pair to themselves. There had been a time
when it amused him to see Caspar submerge the painter in a torrent
of turbid eloquence, and to watch poor Mungold sputtering under the
rush of denunciation, yet emitting little bland phrases of assent,
like a gentleman drowning correctly, in gloves and eye-glasses. But
Stanwell was beginning to find less food for gaiety than for envy in
the contemplation of his colleague. After all, Mungold held his
ground, he did not go under. Spite of his manifest absurdity he had
succeeded in propitiating the sister, in making himself tolerated by
the brother; and the fact that his success was due to the ability to
purchase port-wine and game was not in this case a mitigating
circumstance. Stanwell knew that the Arrans really preferred him to
Mungold, but the knowledge only sharpened his envy of the latter,
whose friendship could command visible tokens of expression, while
poor Stanwell's remained gloomily inarticulate. As he returned to
his over-populated studio and surveyed anew the pictures of which
Shepson had not offered to relieve him, he found himself wishing,
not for Mungold's lack of scruples, for he believed him to be the
most scrupulous of men, but for that happy mean of talent which so
completely satisfied the artistic requirements of the inartistic.
Mungold was not to be despised as an apostate--he was to be
congratulated as a man whose aptitudes were exactly in line with the
taste of the persons he liked to dine with.

At this point in his meditations, Stanwell's eye fell on the
portrait of Miss Gladys Glyde. It was really, as Shepson said, as
good as a Mungold; yet it could never be made to serve the same
purpose, because it was the work of a man who knew it was bad art.
That at least would have been Caspar Arran's contention--poor
Caspar, who produced as bad art in the service of the loftiest
convictions! The distinction began to look like mere casuistry to
Stanwell. He had never been very proud of his own adaptability. It
had seemed to him to indicate the lack of an individual stand-point,
and he had tried to counteract it by the cultivation of an
aggressively personal style. But the cursed knack was in his
fingers--he was always at the mercy of some other man's sensations,
and there were moments when he blushed to remember that his
grandfather had spent a laborious life-time in Rome, copying the Old
Masters for a generation which lacked the facile resource of the
camera. Now, however, it struck him that the ancestral versatility
might be a useful inheritance. In art, after all, the greatest of
them did what they could; and if a man could do several things
instead of one, why should he not profit by the multiplicity of his
gifts? If one had two talents why not serve two masters?






III





STANWELL, while seeing Caspar through the attack which had been the
cause of his sister's arrival, had struck up a friendship with the
young doctor who climbed the patient's seven flights with
unremitting fidelity. The two, since then, had continued to exchange
confidences regarding the sculptor's health, and Stanwell, anxious
to waylay the doctor after his visit, left the studio door ajar, and
went out when he heard a sound of leave-taking across the landing.
But it appeared that the doctor had just come, and that it was
Mungold who was making his adieux.

The latter at once assumed that Stanwell had been on the alert for
him, and met the supposed advance by affably inviting himself into
the studio.

"May I come and take a look around, my dear fellow? I have been
meaning to drop in for an age--" Mungold always spoke with a girlish
emphasis and effusiveness--"but I have been so busy getting up Mrs.
Van Orley's tableaux--English eighteenth century portraits, you
know--that really, what with that and my sittings, I've hardly had
time to think. And then you know you owe me about a dozen visits!
But you're a savage--you don't pay visits. You stay here and
_piocher_--which is wiser, as the results prove. Ah, you're very
strong--immensely strong!" He paused in the middle of the studio,
glancing about a little apprehensively, as though he thought the
stored energy of the pictures might result in an explosion. "Very
original--very striking--ah, Miss Arran! A powerful head;
but--excuse the suggestion--isn't there just the least little lack
of sweetness? You don't think she has the sweet type? Perhaps
not--but could she be so lovely if she were not intensely feminine?
Just at present, though, she is not looking her best--she is
horribly tired. I am afraid there is very little money left--and
poor dear Caspar is so impossible: he won't hear of a loan.
Otherwise I should be most happy--. But I came just now to propose a
piece of work--in fact to give him an order. Mrs. Archer Millington
has built a new ball-room, as I daresay you may have seen in the
papers, and she has been kind enough to ask me for some hints--oh,
merely as a friend: I don't presume to do more than advise. But her
decorator wants to do something with Cupids--something light and
playful, you understand. And so I ventured to say that I knew a very
clever sculptor--well, I _do_ believe Caspar has talent--latent
talent, you know--and at any rate a job of that sort would be a big
lift for him. At least I thought he would regard it so; but you
should have heard him when I showed him the decorator's sketch. He
asked me what the Cupids were to be done in--lard? And if I thought
he had had his training at a confectioner's? And I don't know what
more besides--but he worked himself up to such a degree that he
brought on a frightful fit of coughing, and Miss Arran, I'm afraid,
was rather annoyed with me when she came in, though I'm sure an
order from Mrs. Archer Millington is not a thing that would annoy
most people!"

Mr. Mungold paused, breathless with the rehearsal of his wrongs, and
Stanwell said with a smile: "You know poor Caspar is terribly stiff
on the purity of the artist's aim."

"The artist's aim?" Mr. Mungold stared. "What is the artist's aim
but to please--isn't that the purpose of all true art? But his
theories are so extravagant. I really don't know what I shall say to
Mrs. Millington--she is not used to being refused. I suppose I had
better put it on the ground of ill-health." The artist glanced at
his handsome repeater. "Dear me, I promised to be at Mrs. Van
Orley's before twelve o'clock. We are to settle about the curtain
before luncheon. My dear fellow, it has been a privilege to see your
work. By the way, you have never done any modelling, I suppose?
You're so extraordinarily versatile--I didn't know whether you might
care to undertake the Cupids yourself."

Stanwell had to wait a long time for the doctor; and when the latter
came out he looked grave. Worse? No, he couldn't say that Caspar was
worse--but then he wasn't any better. There was nothing mortal the
matter, but the question was how long he could hold out. It was the
kind of case where there is no use in drugs--he had just scribbled a
prescription to quiet Miss Arran.

"It's the cold, I suppose," Stanwell groaned. "He ought to be
shipped off to Florida."

The doctor made a negative gesture. "Florida be hanged! What he
wants is to sell his group. That would set him up quicker than
sitting on the equator."

"Sell his group?" Stanwell echoed. "But he's so indifferent to
recognition--he believes in himself so thoroughly. I thought at
first he would be hard hit when the Exhibition Committee refused it,
but he seems to regard that as another proof of its superiority."

His visitor turned on him the penetrating eye of the confessor.
"Indifferent to recognition? He's eating his heart out for it. Can't
you see that all that talk is just so much whistling to keep his
courage up? The name of his disease is failure--and I can't write
the prescription that will cure that complaint. But if somebody
would come along and take a fancy to those two naked parties who are
breaking each other's heads, we'd have Mr. Caspar putting on a pound
a day."

The truth of this diagnosis became suddenly vivid to Stanwell. How
dull of him not to have seen before that it was not cold or
privation which was killing Caspar--not anxiety for his sister's
future, nor the ache of watching her daily struggle--but simply the
cankering thought that he might die before he had made himself
known! It was his vanity that was starving to death, and all
Mungold's hampers could not appease that hunger. Stanwell was not
shocked by the discovery--he was only the more sorry for the little
man, who was, after all, denied that solace of self-sufficiency
which his talk so noisily pro- claimed. His lot seemed hard enough
when Stanwell had pictured him as buoyed up by the scorn of public
opinion--it became tragic if he was denied that support. The artist
wondered if Kate had guessed her brother's secret, or if she were
still the dupe of his stoicism. Stanwell was sure that the sculptor
would take no one into his confidence, and least of all his sister,
whose faith in his artistic independence was the chief prop of that
tottering pose. Kate's penetration was not great, and Stanwell
recalled the incredulous smile with which she had heard him defend
poor Mungold's "sincerity" against Caspar's assaults; but she had
the insight of the heart, and where her brother's happiness was
concerned she might have seen deeper than any of them. It was this
last consideration which took the strongest hold on Stanwell--he
felt Caspar's sufferings chiefly through the thought of his sister's
possible disillusionment.






IV





WITHIN three months two events had set the studio building talking.
Stanwell had painted a full-length portrait of Mrs. Archer
Millington, and Caspar Arran had received an order to execute his
group in marble.

The name of the sculptor's patron had not been divulged. The order
came through Shepson, who explained that an American customer living
abroad, having seen a photograph of the group in one of the papers,
had at once cabled home to secure it. He intended to bestow it on a
public building in America, and not wishing to advertise his
munificence, had preferred that even the sculptor should remain
ignorant of his name. The group bought by an enlightened compatriot
for the adornment of a civic building in his native land! There
could hardly be a more complete vindication of unappreciated genius,
and Caspar made the most of the argument. He was not exultant, he
was sublimely magnanimous. He had always said that he could afford
to await the Verdict of Posterity, and his unknown patron's act
clearly shadowed forth that impressive decision. Happily it also
found expression in a cheque which it would have taken more
philosophy to await. The group was paid for in advance, and Kate's
joy in her brother's recognition was deliciously mingled with the
thrill of ordering him some new clothes, and coaxing him out to dine
succulently at a neighbouring restaurant. Caspar flourished
insufferably on this regime: he began to strike the attitude of the
recognized Great Master, who gives advice and encouragement to the
struggling neophyte. He held himself up as an example of the reward
of disinterestedness, of the triumph of the artist who clings
obstinately to his convictions.

"A man must believe in his star--look at Napoleon! It's the dogged
trust in one's convictions that tells--it always ends by forcing the
public into line. Only be sure you make no concessions--don't give
in to any of their humbug! An artist who lis- tens to the critics is
ruined--they never have any use for the poor devils who do what they
tell them to. Run after fame and she'll keep you running, but stay
in your own corner and do your own work, and by George, sir, she'll
come crawling up to you and ask to have her likeness done!"

These exhortations were chiefly directed to Stanwell, partly because
the inmates of the other studios were apt to elude them, partly also
because the rumours concerning Stanwell's portrait of Mrs.
Millington had begun to disquiet the sculptor. At first he had taken
a condescending interest in the fact of his friend's receiving an
order, and had admonished him not to lose the chance of "showing up"
his sitter and her environment. It was a splendid opportunity for a
fellow with a "message" to be introduced into the tents of the
Philistine, and Stanwell was charged to drive a long sharp nail into
the enemy's skull. But presently Arran began to suspect that the
portrait was not as comminatory as he could have wished. Mungold,
the most kindly of rivals, let drop a word of injudicious praise:
the picture, he said, promised to be delightfully "in keeping" with
the decorations of the ball-room, and the lady's gown harmonized
exquisitely with the window-curtains. Stanwell, called to account by
his monitor, reminded the latter that he himself had been selected
by Mungold to do the Cupids for Mrs. Millington's ball-room, and
that the friendly artist's praise could, therefore, not be taken as
positive evidence of incapacity.

"Ah, but I didn't do them--I kicked him out!" Caspar rejoined; and
Stanwell could only plead that, even in the cause of art, one could
hardly kick a lady.

"Ah, that's the worst of it. If the women get at you you're lost.
You're young, you're impressionable, you won't mind my saying that
you're not built for a stoic, and hang it, they'll coddle you,
they'll enervate you, they'll sentimentalize you, they'll make a
Mungold of you!"

"Ah, poor Mungold," Stanwell laughed. "If he lived the life of an
anchorite he couldn't help painting pictures that would please Mrs.
Millington."

"Whereas you could," Kate interjected, raising her head from the
ironing-board where, Sphinx-like, magnificent, she swung a splendid
arm above her brother's shirts.

"Oh, well, perhaps I shan't please her; perhaps I shall elevate her
taste."

Caspar directed a groan to his sister. "That's what they all think
at first--Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came. But inside the Dark
Tower there's the Venusberg. Oh, I don't mean that you'll be taken
with truffles and plush footmen, like Mungold. But praise, my poor
Ned--praise is a deadly drug! It's the absinthe of the artist--and
they'll stupefy you with it. You'll wallow in the mire of success."

Stanwell raised a protesting hand. "Really, for one order, you're a
little lurid!"

"One? Haven't you already had a dozen others?"

"Only one other, so far--and I'm not sure I shall do that."

"Not sure--wavering already! That's the way the mischief begins. If
the women get a fad for you they'll work you like a galley-slave.
You'll have to do your round of 'copy' every morning. What becomes
of inspiration then? How are you going to loaf and invite the soul?
Don't barter your birthright for a mess of pottage! Oh, I understand
the temptation--I know the taste of money and success. But look at
me, Stanwell. You know how long I had to wait for recognition. Well,
now it's come to me I don't mean to let it knock me off my feet. I
don't mean to let myself be overworked; I have already made it known
that I will not be bullied into taking more orders than I can do
full justice to. And my sister is with me, God bless her; Kate would
rather go on ironing my shirts in a garret than see me prostitute my
art!"

Kate's glance radiantly confirmed this declaration of independence,
and Stanwell, with his evasive laugh, asked her if, meanwhile, she
should object to his investing a part of his ill-gotten gains in
theatre tickets for the party that evening.

It appeared that Stanwell had also been paid in advance, and well
paid; for he began to permit himself various mild distractions, in
which he generally contrived to have the Arrans share. It seemed
perfectly natural to Kate that Caspar's friends should spend their
money for his recreation, and by one of the most touching
sophistries of her sex she thus reconciled herself to the anomaly of
taking a little pleasure on her own account. Mungold was less often
in the way, for she had never been able to forgive him for proposing
that Caspar should do Mrs. Millington's Cupids; and for a few
radiant weeks Stanwell had the undisputed enjoyment of her pride in
her brother's achievement.

Stanwell had "rushed through" Mrs. Millington's portrait in time for
the opening of her new ball-room; and it was perhaps in return for
this favour that she consented to let the picture be exhibited at a
big Portrait Show which was held in April for the benefit of a
fashionable charity.

In Mrs. Millington's ball-room the picture had been seen and
approved only by the distinguished few who had access to that social
sanctuary; but on the walls of the exhibition it became a centre of
comment and discussion. One of the immediate results of this
publicity was a visit from Shepson, with two or three orders in his
pocket, as he put it. He surveyed the studio with fresh disgust,
asked Stanwell why he did not move, and was impressed rather than
downcast on learning that the painter had not decided whether he
would take any more orders that spring.

"You might haf a studio at Newport," he suggested. "It would be
rather new to do your sitters out of doors, with the sea behind
them--showing they had a blace on the gliffs!"

The picture produced a different and less flattering effect on the
critics. They gave it, indeed, more space than they had ever before
accorded to the artist's efforts, but their estimate seemed to
confirm Caspar Arran's forebodings, and Stanwell had perhaps never
despised them so little as when he read their comments on his work.
On the whole, however, neither praise nor blame disquieted him
greatly. He was engrossed in the contemplation of Kate Arran's
happiness, and basking in the refracted warmth it shed about her.
The doctor's prognostications had come true. Caspar was putting on a
pound a week, and had plunged into a fresh "creation" more symbolic
and encumbering than the monument of which he had been so
opportunely relieved. If there was any cloud on Stanwell's enjoyment
of life, it was caused by the discovery that success had quadrupled
Caspar's artistic energies. Meanwhile it was delightful to see
Kate's joy in her brother's recovered capacity for work, and to
listen to the axioms which, for Stanwell's guidance, she deduced
from the example of Caspar's heroic pursuit of the ideal. There was
nothing repellent in Kate's borrowed didacticism, and if it
sometimes bored Stanwell to hear her quote her brother, he was sure
it would never bore him to be quoted by her himself; and there were
moments when he felt he had nearly achieved that distinction.

Caspar was not addicted to the visiting of art exhibitions. He took
little interest in any productions save his own, and was moreover
disposed to believe that good pictures, like clever criminals, are
apt to go unhung. Stanwell therefore thought it unlikely that his
portrait of Mrs. Millington would be seen by Kate, who was not given
to independent explorations in the field of art; but one day, on
entering the exhibition--which he had hitherto rather nervously
shunned--he saw the Arrans at the end of the gallery in which the
portrait hung. They were not looking at it, they were moving away
from it, and to Stanwell's quickened perceptions their attitude
seemed almost that of flight. For a moment he thought of flying too;
then a desperate resolve nerved him to meet them, and stemming the
crowd, he made a circuit which brought him face to face with their
retreat.

The room in which they met was momentarily empty, and there was
nothing to intervene between the shock of their inter-changed
glances. Caspar was flushed and bristling: his little body quivered
like a machine from which the steam has just been turned off. Kate
lifted a stricken glance. Stanwell read in it the reflexion of her
brother's tirade, but she held out her hand in silence.

For a moment Caspar was silent too; then, with a terrible smile: "My
dear fellow, I congratulate you; Mungold will have to look to his
laurels," he said.

The shot delivered, he stalked away with his seven-league stride,
and Kate moved tragically through the room in his wake.






V





SHEPSON took up his hat with a despairing gesture.

"Vell, I gif you up--I gif you up!" he said.

"Don't--yet," protested Stanwell from the divan.

It was winter again, and though the janitor had not forgotten the
fire, the studio gave no other evidence of its master's increasing
prosperity. If Stanwell spent his money it was not upon himself.

He leaned back against the wall, his hands in his pockets, a
cigarette between his lips, while Shepson paced the dirty floor or
halted impatiently before an untouched canvas on the easel.

"I tell you vat it is, Mr. Sdanwell, I can't make you out!" he
lamented. "Last vinter you got a sdart that vould have kept most men
going for years. After making dat hit vith Mrs. Millington's picture
you could have bainted half the town. And here you are sitting on
your divan and saying you can't make up your mind to take another
order. Vell, I can only say that if you take much longer to make it
up, you'll find some other chap has cut in and got your job. Mrs.
Van Orley has been waiting since last August, and she dells me you
haven't even answered her letter."

"How could I? I didn't know if I wanted to paint her."

"My goodness! Don't you know if you vant three thousand tollars?"

Stanwell surveyed his cigarette. "No, I'm not sure I do," he said.

Shepson flung out his hands. "Ask more den--but do it quick!" he
exclaimed.

Left to himself, Stanwell stood in silent contemplation of the
canvas on which the dealer had riveted his reproachful gaze. It had
been destined to reflect the opulent image of Mrs. Alpheus Van
Orley, but some secret reluctance of Stanwell's had stayed the
execution of the task. He had painted two of Mrs. Millington's
friends in the spring, had been much praised and liberally paid for
his work, and then, declining several recent orders to be executed
at Newport, had surprised his friends by remaining quietly in town.
It was not till August that he hired a little cottage on the New
Jersey coast and invited the Arrans to visit him. They accepted the
invitation, and the three had spent together six weeks of seashore
idleness, during which Stanwell's modest rafters shook with Caspar's
denunciations of his host's venality, and the brightness of Kate's
gratitude was tempered by a tinge of reproach. But her grief over
Stanwell's apostasy could not efface the fact that he had offered
her brother the means of escape from town, and Stanwell himself was
consoled by the reflection that but for Mrs. Millington's portrait
he could not have performed even this trifling service for his
friends.

When the Arrans left him in September he went to pay a few visits in
the country, and on his return, a month later, to the studio
building he found that things had not gone well with Caspar. The
little sculptor had caught cold, and the labour and expense of
converting his gigantic off- spring into marble seemed to hang
heavily upon him. He and Kate were living in a damp company of
amorphous clay monsters, unfinished witnesses to the creative frenzy
which had seized him after the sale of his group; and the doctor had
urged that his patient should be removed to warmer and drier
lodgings. But to uproot Caspar was impossible, and his sister could
only feed the stove, and swaddle him in mufflers and felt slippers.

Stanwell found that during his absence Mungold had reappeared, fresh
and rosy from a summer in Europe, and as prodigal as ever of the
only form of attention which Kate could be counted on not to resent.
The game and champagne reappeared with him, and he seemed as ready
as Stanwell to lend a patient ear to Caspar's homilies. But Stanwell
could see that, even now, Kate had not forgiven him for the Cupids.
Stanwell himself had spent the early winter months in idleness. The
sight of his tools filled him with a strange repugnance, and he
absented himself as much as possible from the studio. But Shepson's
visit roused him to the fact that he must decide on some definite
course of action. If he wished to follow up his success of the
previous spring he must refuse no more orders: he must not let Mrs.
Van Orley slip away from him. He knew there were competitors enough
ready to profit by his hesitations, and since his success was the
result of a whim, a whim might undo it. With a sudden gesture of
decision he caught up his hat and left the studio.

On the landing he met Kate Arran. She too was going out, drawn forth
by the sudden radiance of the January afternoon. She met him with a
smile which seemed the answer to his uncertainties, and he asked
abruptly if she had time to take a walk with him.

Yes; for once she had time, for Mr. Mungold was sitting with Caspar,
and had promised to remain till she came in. It mattered little to
Stanwell that Mungold was with Caspar as long as he himself was with
Kate; and he instantly soared to the suggestion that they should
prolong the painter's vigil by taking the "elevated" to the Park. In
this too his companion acquiesced after a moment of surprise: she
seemed in a consenting mood, and Stanwell augured well from the
fact.

The Park was clothed in the double glitter of snow and sunshine.
They roamed the hard white alleys to a continuous tinkle of
sleigh-bells, and Kate brightened with the exhilaration of the
scene. It was not often that she permitted herself such an escape
from routine, and in this new environment, which seemed to detach
her from her daily setting, Stanwell had his first complete vision
of her. To the girl also their unwonted isolation seemed to create a
sense of fuller communion, for she began presently, as they reached
the leafless solitude of the Ramble, to speak with sudden freedom of
her brother. It appeared that the orders against which Caspar had so
heroically steeled himself were slow in coming: he had received no
commission since the sale of his group, and he was beginning to
suffer from a reaction of discouragement. Oh, it was not the craving
for popularity--Stanwell knew how far above that he stood. But it
had been exquisite, yes, exquisite to him to find himself believed
in, understood. He had fancied that the purchase of the group was
the dawn of a tardy recognition--and now the darkness of
indifference had set in again, no one spoke of him, no one wrote of
him, no one cared.

"If he were in good health it would not matter--he would throw off
such weakness, he would live only for the joy of his work; but he is
losing ground, his strength is failing, and he is so afraid there
will not be time enough left--time enough for full recognition," she
explained.

The quiver in her voice silenced Stanwell: he was afraid of echoing
it with his own. At length he said: "Oh, more orders will come.
Success is a gradual growth."

"Yes, _real_ success," she said, with a solemn note in which he
caught--and forgave--a reflection on his own facile triumphs.

"But when the orders do come," she continued, "will he have strength
to carry them out? Last winter the doctor thought he only needed
work to set him up; now he talks of rest instead! He says we ought
to go to a warm climate--but how can Caspar leave the group?"

"Oh, hang the group--let him chuck the order!" cried Stanwell.

She looked at him tragically. "The money is spent," she said.

He coloured to the roots of his hair. "But ill-health--ill-health
excuses everything. If he goes away now he will come back good for
twice the amount of work in the spring. A sculptor is not expected
to deliver a statue on a given day, like a package of groceries! You
must do as the doctor says--you must make him chuck everything and
go."

They had reached a windless nook above the lake, and, pausing in the
stress of their talk, she let herself sink on a bench beside the
path. The movement encouraged him, and he seated himself at her
side.

"You must take him away at once," he repeated urgently. "He must be
made comfortable--you must both be free from worry. And I want you
to let me manage it for you--"

He broke off, silenced by her rising blush, her protesting murmur.

"Oh, stop, please; let me explain. I'm not talking of lending you
money; I'm talking of giving you--myself. The offer may be just as
unacceptable, but it's of a kind to which it's customary to accord
it a hearing. I should have made it a year ago--the first day I saw
you, I believe!--but that, then, it wasn't in my power to make
things easier for you. But now, you know, I've had a little luck.
Since I painted Mrs. Millington things have changed. I believe I can
get as many orders as I choose--there are two or three people
waiting now. What's the use of it all, if it doesn't bring me a
little happiness? And the only happiness I know is the kind that you
can give me."

He paused, suddenly losing the courage to look at her, so that her
pained murmur was framed for him in a glittering vision of the
frozen lake. He turned with a start and met the refusal in her eyes.

"No--really no?" he repeated.

She shook her head silently.

"I could have helped you--I could have helped you!" he sighed.

She flushed distressfully, but kept her eyes on his.

"It's just that--don't you see?" she reproached him.

"Just that--the fact that I could be of use to you?"

"The fact that, as you say, things have changed since you painted
Mrs. Millington. I haven't seen the later portraits, but they tell
me--"

"Oh, they're just as bad!" Stanwell jeered.

"You've sold your talent, and you know it: that's the dreadful part.
You did it deliberately," she cried with passion.

"Oh, deliberately," he interjected.

"And you're not ashamed--you talk of going on."

"I'm not ashamed; I talk of going on."

She received this with a long shuddering sigh, and turned her eyes
away from him.

"Oh, why--why--why?" she lamented.

It was on the tip of Stanwell's tongue to answer, "That I might say
to you what I am just saying now--" but he replied instead: "A man
may paint bad pictures and be a decent fellow. Look at Mungold,
after all!"

The adjuration had an unexpected effect. Kate's colour faded
suddenly, and she sat motionless, with a stricken face.

"There's a difference--" she began at length abruptly; "the
difference you've always insisted on. Mr. Mungold paints as well as
he can. He has no idea that his pictures are--less good than they
might be."

"Well--?"

"So he can't be accused of doing what he does for money--of
sacrificing anything better." She turned on him with troubled eyes.
"It was you who made me understand that, when Caspar used to make
fun of him."

Stanwell smiled. "I'm glad you still think me a better painter than
Mungold. But isn't it hard that for that very reason I should starve
in a hole? If I painted badly enough you'd see no objection to my
living at the Waldorf!"

"Ah, don't joke about it," she murmured. "Don't triumph in it."

"I see no reason to at present," said Stanwell drily. "But I won't
pretend to be ashamed when I'm not. I think there are occasions when
a man is justified in doing what I've done."

She looked at him solemnly. "What occasions?"

"Why, when he wants money, hang it!"

She drew a deep breath. "Money--money? Has Caspar's example been
nothing to you, then?"

"It hasn't proved to me that I must starve while Mungold lives on
truffles!"

Again her face changed and she stirred uneasily, and then rose to
her feet.

"There is no occasion which can justify an artist's sacrificing his
convictions!" she exclaimed.

Stanwell rose too, facing her with a mounting urgency which sent a
flush to his cheek.

"Can't you conceive such an occasion in my case? The wish, I mean,
to make things easier for Caspar--to help you in any way you might
let me?"

Her face reflected his blush, and she stood gazing at him with a
wounded wonder.

"Caspar and I--you imagine we could live on money earned in _that_
way?"

Stanwell made an impatient gesture. "You've got to live on
something--or he has, even if you don't include yourself!"

Her blush deepened miserably, but she held her head high.

"That's just it--that's what I came here to say to you." She stood a
moment gazing away from him at the lake.

He looked at her in surprise. "You came here to say something to
me?"

"Yes. That we've got to live on something, Caspar and I, as you say;
and since an artist cannot sacrifice his convictions, the sacrifice
must--I mean--I wanted you to know that I have promised to marry Mr.
Mungold."

"Mungold!" Stanwell cried with a sharp note of irony; but her white
look checked it on his lips.

"I know all you are going to say," she murmured, with a kind of
nobleness which moved him even through his sense of its
grotesqueness. "But you must see the distinction, because you first
made it clear to me. I can take money earned in good faith--I can
let Caspar live on it. I can marry Mr. Mungold; because, though his
pictures are bad, he does not prostitute his art."

She began to move away from him slowly, and he followed her in
silence along the frozen path.

When Stanwell re-entered his studio the dusk had fallen. He lit his
lamp and rummaged out some writing-materials. Having found them, he
wrote to Shepson to say that he could not paint Mrs. Van Orley, and
did not care to accept any more orders for the present. He sealed
and stamped the letter and flung it over the banisters for the
janitor to post; then he dragged out his unfinished head of Kate
Arran, replaced it on the easel, and sat down before it with a grim
smile.






THE BEST MAN

I





DUSK had fallen, and the circle of light shed by the lamp of
Governor Mornway's writing-table just rescued from the surrounding
dimness his own imposing bulk, thrown back in a deep chair in the
lounging attitude habitual to him at that hour.

When the Governor of Midsylvania rested he rested completely. Five
minutes earlier he had been bowed over his office desk, an Atlas
with the State on his shoulders; now, his working hours over, he had
the air of a man who has spent his day in desultory pleasure, and
means to end it in the enjoyment of a good dinner. This freedom from
care threw into relief the hovering fidgetiness of his sister, Mrs.
Nimick, who, just outside the circle of lamplight, haunted the warm
gloom of the hearth, from which the wood fire now and then sent up
an exploring flash into her face.

Mrs. Nimick's presence did not usually minister to repose; but the
Governor's serenity was too deep to be easily disturbed, and he felt
the calmness of a man who knows there is a mosquito in the room, but
has drawn the netting close about his head. This calmness reflected
itself in the accent with which he said, throwing himself back to
smile up at his sister: "You know I am not going to make any
appointments for a week."

It was the day after the great reform victory which had put John
Mornway for the second time at the head of his State, a triumph
compared with which even the mighty battle of his first election
sank into insignificance, and he leaned back with the sense of
unassailable placidity which follows upon successful effort.

Mrs. Nimick murmured an apology. "I didn't understand--I saw in this
morning's papers that the Attorney-General was reappointed."

"Oh, Fleetwood--his reappointment was involved in the campaign. He's
one of the principles I represent!"

Mrs. Nimick smiled a little tartly. "It seems odd to some people to
think of Mr. Fleetwood in connection with principles."

The Governor's smile had no answering acerbity; the mention of his
Attorney-General's name had set his blood humming with the thrill of
the fight, and he wondered how it was that Fleetwood had not already
been in to clasp hands with him over their triumph.

"No," he said, good-humoredly, "two years ago Fleetwood's name
didn't stand for principles of any sort; but I believed in him, and
look what he's done for me! I thought he was too big a man not to
see in time that statesmanship is a finer thing than practical
politics, and now that I've given him a chance to make the
discovery, he's on the way to becoming just such a statesman as the
country needs."

"Oh, it's a great deal easier and pleasanter to believe in people,"
replied Mrs. Nimick, in a tone full of occult allusion, "and, of
course, we all knew that Mr. Fleetwood would have a hearing before
any one else."

The Governor took this imperturbably. "Well, at any rate, he isn't
going to fill all the offices in the State; there will probably be
one or two to spare after he has helped himself, and when the time
comes I'll think over your man. I'll consider him."

Mrs. Nimick brightened. "It would make _such_a difference to
Jack--it might mean anything to the poor boy to have Mr. Ashford
appointed!"

The Governor held up a warning hand.

"Oh, I know, one mustn't say that, or at least you mustn't listen.
You're so dreadfully afraid of nepotism. But I'm not asking for
anything for Jack--I have never asked for a crust for any of us,
thank Heaven! No one can point to _me_--" Mrs. Nimick checked
herself suddenly and continued in a more impersonal tone: "But
there's no harm, surely, in my saying a word for Mr. Ashford, when I
know that he's actually under consideration, and I don't see why the
fact that Jack is in his office should prevent my speaking."

"On the contrary," said the Governor, "it implies, on your part, a
personal knowledge of Mr. Ashford's qualifications which may be of
great help to me in reaching a decision."

Mrs. Nimick never quite knew how to meet him when he took that tone,
and the flickering fire made her face for a moment the picture of
uncertainty; then at all hazards she launched out: "Well, I have
Ella's promise, at any rate."

The Governor sat upright. "Ella's promise?"

"To back me up. She thoroughly approves of him!"

The Governor smiled. "You talk as if Ella had a political _salon_and
distributed _lettres de cachet!_I'm glad she approves of Ashford;
but if you think my wife makes my appointments for me--" He broke
off with a laugh at the superfluity of such a protest.

Mrs. Nimick reddened. "One never knows how you will take the
simplest thing. What harm is there in my saying that Ella approves
of Mr. Ashford? I thought you liked her to take an interest in your
work."

"I like it immensely. But I shouldn't care to have it take that
form."

"What form?"

"That of promising to use her influence to get people appointed. But
you always talk of politics in the vocabulary of European courts.
Thank Heaven, Ella has less imagination. She has her sympathies, of
course, but she doesn't think they can affect the distribution of
offices."

Mrs. Nimick gathered up her furs with an air at once crestfallen and
resentful. "I'm sorry--I always seem to say the wrong thing. I'm
sure I came with the best intentions--it's natural that your sister
should want to be with you at such a happy moment."

"Of course it is, my dear," exclaimed the Governor genially, as he
rose to grasp the hands with which she was nervously adjusting her
wraps.

Mrs. Nimick, who lived a little way out of town, and whose visits to
her brother were apparently achieved at the cost of immense effort
and mysterious complications, had come to congratulate him on his
victory, and to sound him regarding the nomination to a coveted post
of the lawyer in whose firm her eldest son was a clerk. In the
urgency of the latter errand she had rather lost sight of the
former, but her face softened as the Governor, keeping both her
hands in his, said in the voice which always seemed to put the most
generous interpretation on her motives: "I was sure you would be one
of the first to give me your blessing."

"Oh, your success--no one feels it more than I do!" sighed Mrs.
Nimick, always at home in the emotional key. "I keep in the
background. I make no noise, I claim no credit, but whatever
happens, no one shall ever prevent my rejoicing in my brother's
success!"

Mrs. Nimick's felicitations were always couched in the conditional,
with a side-glance at dark contingencies, and the Governor, smiling
at the familiar construction, returned cheerfully: "I don't see why
any one should want to deprive you of that privilege."

"They couldn't--they couldn't--" Mrs. Nimick heroically affirmed.

"Well, I'm in the saddle for another two years at any rate, so you
had better put in all the rejoicing you can."

"Whatever happens--whatever happens!" cried Mrs. Nimick, melting on
his bosom.

"The only thing likely to happen at present is that you will miss
your train if I let you go on saying nice things to me much longer."

Mrs. Nimick at this dried her eyes, renewed her clutch on her
draperies, and stood glancing sentimentally about the room while her
brother rang for the carriage.

"I take away a lovely picture of you," she murmured. "It's wonderful
what you've made of this hideous house."

"Ah, not I, but Ella--there she _does_reign undisputed," he
acknowledged, following her glance about the library, which wore an
air of permanent habitation, of slowly formed intimacy with its
inmates, in marked contrast to the gaudy impersonality of the usual
executive apartment.

"Oh, she's wonderful, quite wonderful. I see she has got those
imported damask curtains she was looking at the other day at
Fielding's. When I am asked how she does it all, I always say it's
beyond me!" Mrs. Nimick murmured.

"It's an art like another," smiled the Governor. "Ella has been used
to living in tents and she has the knack of giving them a wonderful
look of permanence."

"She certainly makes the most extraordinary bargains--all the knack
in the world won't take the place of such curtains and carpets."

"Are they good? I'm glad to hear it. But all the good curtains and
carpets won't make a house comfortable to live in. There's where the
knack comes in, you see."

He recalled with a shudder the lean Congressional years--the years
before his marriage--when Mrs. Nimick had lived with him in
Washington, and the daily struggle in the House had been combined
with domestic conflicts almost equally recurrent. The offer of a
foreign mission, though disconnecting him from active politics, had
the advantage of freeing him from his sister's tutelage, and in
Europe, where he remained for two years, he had met the lady who was
to become his wife. Mrs. Renfield was the widow of one of the
diplomatists who languish in perpetual first secretary-ship at our
various embassies. Her life had given her ease without triviality,
and a sense of the importance of politics seldom found in ladies of
her nationality. She regarded a public life as the noblest and most
engrossing of careers, and combined with great social versatility an
equal gift for reading blue-books and studying debates. So sincere
was the latter taste that she passed without regret from the
amenities of a European life well stocked with picturesque
intimacies to the rawness of the Midsylvanian capital. She helped
Mornway in his fight for the Governorship as a man likes to be
helped by a woman--by her tact, her good looks, her memory for
faces, her knack of saying the right thing to the right person, and
her capacity for obscure hard work in the background of his public
activity. But, above all, she helped him by making his private life
smooth and harmonious. For a man careless of personal ease, Mornway
was singularly alive to the domestic amenities. Attentive service,
well-ordered dinners, brightly burning fires, and a scent of flowers
in the house--these material details, which had come to seem the
extension of his wife's personality, the inevitable result of her
nearness, were as agreeable to him after five years of marriage as
in the first surprise of his introduction to them. Mrs. Nimick had
kept house jerkily and vociferously; Ella performed the same task
silently and imperceptibly, and the results were all in favor of the
latter method. Though neither the Governor nor his wife had large
means, the household, under Mrs. Mornway's guidance, took on an air
of sober luxury as agreeable to her husband as it was exasperating
to her sister-in-law. The domestic machinery ran without a jar.
There were no upheavals, no debts, no squalid cookless hiatuses
between intervals of showy hospitality; the household moved along on
lines of quiet elegance and comfort, behind which only the eye of
the housekeeping sex could have detected a gradually increasing
scale of expense.

Such an eye was now projected on the Governor's surroundings, and
its explorations were summed up in the tone in which Mrs. Nimick
repeated from the threshold: "I always say I don't see how she does
it!"

The tone did not escape the Governor, but it disturbed him no more
than the buzz of a baffled insect. Poor Grace! It was not his fault
if her husband was given to chimerical investments, if her sons were
"unsatisfactory," and her cooks would not stay with her; but it was
natural that these facts should throw into irritating contrast the
ease and harmony of his own domestic life. It made him all the
sorrier for his sister to know that her envy did not penetrate to
the essence of his happiness, but lingered on those external signs
of well-being which counted for so little in the sum total of his
advantages. Poor Mrs. Nimick's life seemed doubly thin and mean when
one remembered that, beneath its shabby surface, there were no
compensating riches of the spirit.






II





IT was the custodian of his own hidden treasure who at this moment
broke in upon his musings. Mrs. Mornway, fresh from her afternoon
walk, entered the room with that air of ease and lightness which
seemed to diffuse a social warmth about her; fine, slender, pliant,
so polished and modeled by an intelligent experience of life that
youth seemed clumsy in her presence. She looked down at her husband
and shook her head.

"You promised to keep the afternoon to yourself, and I hear Grace
has been here."

"Poor Grace--she didn't stay long, and I should have been a brute
not to see her."

He leaned back, filling his gaze to the brim with her charming
image, which obliterated at a stroke the fretful ghost of Mrs.
Nimick.

"She came to congratulate you, I suppose?"

"Yes, and to ask me to do something for Ashford."

"Ah--on account of Jack. What does she want for him?"

The Governor laughed. "She said you were in her confidence--that you
were backing her up. She seemed to think your support would ensure
her success."

Mrs. Mornway smiled; her smile, always full of delicate
implications, seemed to caress her husband while it gently mocked
his sister.

"Poor Grace! I suppose you undeceived her."

"As to your influence? I told her it was paramount where it ought to
be."

"And where is that?"

"In the choice of carpets and curtains. It seems ours are almost too
good."

"Thanks for the compliment! Too good for what?"

"Our station in life, I suppose. At least they seemed to bother
Grace."

"Poor Grace! I've always bothered her." She paused, removing her
gloves reflectively and laying her long fine hands on his shoulders
as she stood behind him. "Then you don't believe in Ashford?"
Feeling his slight start, she drew away her hands and raised them to
detach her veil.

"What makes you think I don't believe in Ashford?" he asked.

"I asked out of curiosity. I wondered whether you had decided
anything."

"No, and I don't mean to for a week. I'm dead beat, and I want to
bring a fresh mind to the question. There is hardly one appointment
I'm sure of except, of course, Fleetwood's."

She turned away from him, smoothing her hair in the mirror above the
mantelpiece. "You're sure of that?" she asked after a moment.

"Of George Fleetwood? And poor Grace thinks you are deep in my
counsels! I am as sure of re-appointing Fleetwood as I am that I
have just been re-elected myself. I've never made any secret of the
fact that if they wanted me back they must have him, too."

"You are tremendously generous!" she murmured.

"Generous? What a strange word to use! Fleetwood is my trump
card--the one man I can count on to carry out my ideas through thick
and thin."

She mused on this, smiling a little. "That's why I call you
generous--when I remember how you disliked him two years ago!"

"What of that? I was prejudiced against him, I own; or rather, I had
a just distrust of a man with such a past. But how splendidly he's
wiped it out! What a record he has written on the new leaf he
promised to turn over if I gave him the chance! Do you know," the
Governor interrupted himself with a pleasantly reminiscent laugh, "I
was rather annoyed with Grace when she hinted that you had promised
to back up Ashford--I told her you didn't aspire to distribute
patronage. But she might have reminded me--if she'd known--that it
_was_you who persuaded me to give Fleetwood that chance."

Mrs. Mornway turned with a slight heightening of color. "Grace--how
could she possibly have known?"

"She couldn't, of course, unless she'd read my weakness in my face.
But why do you look so startled at my little joke?"

"It's only that I so dislike Grace's ineradicable idea that I am a
wire-puller. Why should she imagine I would help her about Ashford?"

"Oh, Grace has always been a mild and ineffectual conspirator, and
she thinks every other woman is built on the same plan. But you
_did_get Fleetwood's job for him, you know," he repeated with
laughing insistence.

"I had more faith than you in human nature, that's all." She paused
a moment, and then added: "Personally, you know, I have always
rather disliked him."

"Oh, I never doubted your disinterestedness. But you are not going
to turn against your candidate, are you?"

She hesitated. "I am not sure; circumstances alter cases. When you
made Fleetwood Attorney-General two years ago he was the inevitable
man for the place."

"Well--is there a better one now?"

"I don't say there is--it's not my business to look for him, at any
rate. What I mean is that at that time Fleetwood was worth risking
anything for--now I don't know that he is."

"But, even if he were not, what do I risk for him now? I don't see
your point. Since he didn't cost me my re-election, what can he
possibly cost me now I'm in?"

"He's immensely unpopular. He will cost you a great deal of
popularity, and you have never pretended to despise that."

"No, nor ever sacrificed anything essential to it. Are you really
asking me to offer up Fleetwood to it now?"

"I don't ask you to do anything--except to consider if he
_is_essential. You said you were over-tired and wanted to bring a
fresh mind to bear on the other appointments. Why not delay this one
too?"

Mornway turned in his chair and looked at her searchingly. "This
means something, Ella. What have you heard?"

"Just what you have, probably, but with more attentive ears. The
very record you are so proud of has made George Fleetwood
innumerable enemies in the last two years. The Lead Trust people are
determined to ruin him, and if his reappointment is attacked you
will not be spared."

"Attacked? In the papers, you mean?"

She paused. "You know the 'Spy' has always threatened a campaign.
And he has a past, as you say."

"Which was public property long before I first appointed him.
Nothing could be gained by raking up his old political history.
Everybody knows he didn't come to me with clean hands, but to hurt
him now the 'Spy' would have to fasten a new scandal on him, and
that would not be easy."

"It would be easy to invent one!"

"Unproved accusations don't count much against a man of such proved
capacity. The best answer is his record of the last two years. That
is what the public looks at."

"The public looks wherever the press points. And besides, you have
your own future to consider. It would be a pity to sacrifice such a
career as yours for the sake of backing up even as useful a man as
George Fleetwood." She paused, as if checked by his gathering frown,
but went on with fresh decision: "Oh, I'm not speaking of personal
ambition; I'm thinking of the good you can do. Will Fleetwood's
reappointment secure the greatest good of the greatest number, if
his unpopularity reacts on you to the extent of hindering your
career?"

The Governor's brow cleared and he rose with a smile. "My dear, your
reasoning is admirable, but we must leave my career to take care of
itself. Whatever I may be to-morrow, I am Governor of Midsylvania
to-day, and my business as Governor is to appoint as
Attorney-General the best man I can find for the place--and that man
is George Fleetwood, unless you have a better one to propose." She
met this with perfect good-humor. "No, I have told you already that
that is not my business. But I _have_a candidate of my own for
another office, so Grace was not quite wrong, after all."

"Well, who is your candidate, and for what office? I only hope you
don't want to change cooks!"

"Oh, I do that without your authority, and you never even know it
has been done." She hesitated, and then said with a bright
directness: "I want you to do something for poor Gregg."

"Gregg? Rufus Gregg?" He stared. "What an extraordinary request!
What can I do for a man I've had to kick out for dishonesty?"

"Not much, perhaps; I know it's difficult. But, after all, it was
your kicking him out that ruined him."

"It was his dishonesty that ruined him. He was getting a good salary
as my stenographer, and if he hadn't sold those letters to the 'Spy'
he would have been getting it still."

She wavered. "After all, nothing was proved--he always denied it."

"Good heavens, Ella! Have you ever doubted his guilt?"

"No--no; I don't mean that. But, of course, his wife and children
believe in him, and think you were cruel, and he has been out of
work so long that they are starving."

"Send them some money, then; I wonder you thought it necessary to
ask."

"I shouldn't have thought it so, but money is not what I want. Mrs.
Gregg is proud, and it is hard to help her in that way. Couldn't you
give him work of some kind--just a little post in a corner?"

"My dear child, the little posts in the corner are just the ones
where honesty is essential. A footpad doesn't wait under a
street-lamp! Besides, how can I recommend a man whom I have
dismissed for theft? I won't say a word to hinder his getting a
place, but on my conscience I can't give him one."

She paused and turned toward the door silently, though without any
show of resentment; but on the threshold she lingered long enough to
say: "Yet you gave Fleetwood his chance!"

"Fleetwood? You class Fleetwood with Gregg? The best man in the
State with a little beggarly thieving nonentity? It's evident enough
you're new at wire-pulling, or you would show more skill at it!"

She met this with a laugh. "I'm not likely to have much practice if
my first attempt is such a failure. Well, I will see if Mrs. Gregg
will let me help her a little--I suppose there is nothing else to be
done."

"Nothing that we can do. If Gregg wants a place he had better get
one on the staff of the 'Spy.' He served them better than he did
me."






III





THE Governor stared at the card with a frown. Half an hour had
elapsed since his wife had gone upstairs to dress for the big dinner
from which official duties excused him, and he was still lingering
over the fire before preparing for his own solitary meal. He
expected no one that evening but his old friend Hadley Shackwell,
with whom it was his long-established habit to talk over his defeats
and victories in the first lull after the conflict; and Shackwell
was not likely to turn up till nine o'clock. The unwonted stillness
of the room, and the knowledge that he had a quiet evening before
him, filled the Governor with a luxurious sense of repose. The world
seemed to him a good place to be in, and his complacency was
shadowed only by the fear that he had perhaps been a trifle
over-harsh in refusing his wife's plea for the stenographer. There
seemed, therefore, a certain fitness in the appearance of the man's
card, and the Governor with a sigh gave orders that Gregg should be
shown in.

Gregg was still the soft-stepping scoundrel who invited the toe of
honesty, and Mornway, as he entered, was conscious of a sharp
revulsion of feeling. But it was impossible to evade the interview,
and he sat silent while the man stated his case.

Mrs. Mornway had represented the stenographer as being in desperate
straits, and ready to accept any job that could be found, but though
his appearance might have seemed to corroborate her account, he
evidently took a less hopeless view of his case, and the Governor
found with surprise that he had fixed his eye on a clerkship in one
of the Government offices, a post which had been half promised him
before the incident of the letters. His plea was that the Governor's
charge, though unproved, had so injured his reputation that he could
only hope to clear himself by getting some sort of small job under
the Administration. After that, it would be easy for him to obtain
any employment he wanted.

He met Mornway's refusal with civility, but remarked after a moment:
"I hadn't expected this, Governor. Mrs. Mornway led me to think that
something might be arranged."

The Governor's tone was brief. "Mrs. Mornway is sorry for your wife
and children, and for their sake would be glad to find work for you,
but she could not have led you to think that there was any chance of
your getting a clerkship."

"Well, that's just it; she said she thought she could manage it."

"You have misinterpreted my wife's interest in your family. Mrs.
Mornway has nothing to do with the distribution of Government
offices." The Governor broke off, annoyed to find himself
asseverating for the second time so obvious a fact.

There was a moment's silence; then Gregg said, still in a perfectly
equable tone: "You've always been hard on me, Governor, but I don't
bear malice. You accused me of selling those letters to the 'Spy'--"

The Governor made an impatient gesture.

"You couldn't prove your case," Gregg went on imperturbably, "but
you were right in one respect. I _was_on confidential terms with the
'Spy.'" He paused and glanced at Mornway, whose face remained
immovable. "I'm on the same terms with them still, and I'm ready to
let you have the benefit of it if you'll give _me_the chance to
retrieve my good name."

In spite of his irritation the Governor could not repress a smile.

"In other words, you will do a dirty trick for me if I undertake to
convince people that you are the soul of honor."

Gregg smiled also.

"There are always two ways of putting a thing. Why not call it a
plain case of give and take? I want something and can pay for it."

"Not in any coin I have a use for," said Mornway, pushing back his
chair.

Gregg hesitated; then he said: "Perhaps you don't mean to reappoint
Fleetwood." The Governor was silent, and he continued: "If you do,
don't kick me out a second time. I'm not threatening you--I'm
speaking as a friend. Mrs. Mornway has been kind to my wife, and I'd
like to help her."

The Governor rose, gripping his chair-back sternly. "You will be
kind enough to leave my wife's name out of the discussion. I
supposed you knew me well enough to know that I don't buy newspaper
secrets at any price, least of all at that of the public money!"

Gregg, who had risen also, stood a few feet off, looking at him
inscrutably.

"Is that final, Governor?"

"Quite final."

"Well, good evening, then."






IV





SHACKWELL and the Governor sat over the evening embers. It was after
ten o'clock, and the servant had carried away the coffee and
liqueurs, leaving the two men to their cigars. Mornway had once more
lapsed into his arm-chair, and sat with out-stretched feet, gazing
comfortably at his friend.

Shackwell was a small dry man of fifty, with a face as sallow and
freckled as a winter pear, a limp mustache, and shrewd, melancholy
eyes.

"I am glad you have given yourself a day's rest," he said, looking
at the Governor.

"Well, I don't know that I needed it. There's such exhilaration in
victory that I never felt fresher."

"Ah, but the fight's just beginning."

"I know--but I'm ready for it. You mean the campaign against
Fleetwood. I understand there is to be a big row. Well, he and I are
used to rows."

Shackwell paused, surveying his cigar. "You knew the 'Spy' meant to
lead the attack?"

"Yes. I was offered a glimpse of the documents this afternoon."

Shackwell started up. "You didn't refuse?"

Mornway related the incident of Gregg's visit. "I could hardly buy
my information at that price," he said, "and, besides, it is really
Fleetwood's business this time. I suppose he has heard the report,
but it doesn't seem to bother him. I rather thought he would have
looked in to-day to talk things over, but I haven't seen him."

Shackwell continued to twist his cigar through his sallow fingers
without remembering to light it. "You're determined to reappoint
Fleetwood?" he asked at length.

The Governor caught him up. "You're the fourth person who has asked
me that to-day! You haven't lost faith in him, have you, Hadley?"

"Not an atom!" said the other with emphasis.

"Well, then, what are you all thinking of, to suppose I can be
frightened by a little newspaper talk? Besides, if Fleetwood is not
afraid, why should I be?"

"Because you'll be involved in it with him."

The Governor laughed. "What have they got against me now?"

Shackwell, standing up, confronted his friend solemnly. "This--that
Fleetwood bought his appointment two years ago."

"Ah--bought it of me? Why didn't it come out at the time?"

"Because it wasn't known then. It has only been found out lately."

"Known--found out? This is magnificent! What was my price, and what
did I do with the money?"

Shackwell glanced about the room, and his eyes returned to Mornway's
face.

"Look here, John, Fleetwood is not the only man in the world."

"The only man?"

"The only Attorney-General. "The 'Spy' has the Lead Trust behind it
and means to put up a savage fight. Mud sticks, and--"

"Hadley, is this a conspiracy? You're saying to me just what Ella
said this afternoon."

At the mention of Mrs. Mornway's name a silence fell between the two
men and the Governor moved uneasily in his chair.

"You are not advising me to chuck Fleetwood because the 'Spy' is
going to accuse me of having sold him his first appointment?" he
said at length.

Shackwell drew a deep breath. "You say yourself that Mrs. Mornway
gave you the same advice this afternoon."

"Well, what of that? Do you imagine that my wife distrib--" The
Governor broke off with an exasperated laugh.

Shackwell, leaning against the mantelpiece, looked down into the
embers. "I didn't say the 'Spy' meant to accuse _you_of having sold
the office."

Mornway stood up slowly, his eyes on his friend's averted face. The
ashes dropped from his cigar, scattering a white trail across the
carpet which had excited Mrs. Nimick's envy.

"The office is in my gift. If I didn't sell it, who did?" he
demanded.

Shackwell laid a hand on his arm. "For heaven's sake, John--"

"Who did, who did?" the Governor violently repeated.

The two men faced each other in the closely curtained silence of the
dim luxurious room. Shackwell's eyes again wandered, as if summoning
the walls to reply. Then he said, "I have positive information that
the 'Spy' will say nothing if you don't appoint Fleetwood."

"And what will it say if I do appoint him?"

"That he bought his first appointment from your wife."

The Governor stood silent, immovable, while the blood crept slowly
from his strong neck to his lowering brows. Once he laughed, then he
set his lips and continued to gaze into the fire. After a while he
looked at his cigar and shook the freshly formed cone of ashes
carefully upon the hearth. He had just turned again to Shackwell
when the door opened and the butler announced: "Mr. Fleetwood."

The room swam about Shackwell, and when he recovered himself,
Mornway, with outstretched hand, was advancing quietly to meet his
guest.

Fleetwood was a smaller man than the Governor. He was erect and
compact, with a face full of dry energy, which seemed to press
forward with the spring of his prominent features, as though it were
the weapon with which he cleared his way through the world. He was
in evening dress, scrupulously appointed, but pale and nervous. Of
the two men, it was Mornway who was the more composed.

"I thought I should have seen you before this," he said.

Fleetwood returned his grasp and shook hands with Shackwell.

"I knew you needed to be let alone. I didn't mean to come to-night,
but I wanted to say a word to you."

At this, Shackwell, who had fallen into the background, made a
motion of leave-taking, but the Governor arrested it.

"We haven't any secrets from Hadley, have we, Fleetwood?"

"Certainly not. I am glad to have him stay. I have simply come to
say that I have been thinking over my future arrangements, and that
I find it will not be possible for me to continue in office."

There was a long pause, during which Shackwell kept his eyes on
Mornway. The Governor had turned pale, but when he spoke his voice
was full and firm.

"This is sudden," he said.

Fleetwood stood leaning against a high chair-back, fretting its
carved ornaments with restless fingers. "It is sudden--yes. I--there
are a variety of reasons."

"Is one of them the fact that you are afraid of what the 'Spy' is
going to say?"

The Attorney-General flushed deeply and moved away a few steps. "I'm
sick of mud-throwing," he muttered.

"George Fleetwood!" Mornway exclaimed. He had advanced toward his
friend, and the two stood confronting each other, already oblivious
of Shackwell's presence.

"It's not only that, of course. I've been frightfully hard-worked.
My health has given way--"

"Since yesterday?"

Fleetwood forced a smile. "My dear fellow, what a slave-driver you
are! Hasn't a man the right to take a rest?"

"Not a soldier on the eve of battle. You have never failed me
before."

"I don't want to fail you now. But it isn't the eve of
battle--you're in, and that's the main thing."

"The main thing at present is that you promised to stay in with me,
and that I must have your real reason for breaking your word."

Fleetwood made a deprecatory movement. "My dear Governor, if you
only knew it, I'm doing you a service in backing out."

"A service--why?"

"Because I'm hated--because the Lead Trust wants my blood, and will
have yours too if you appoint me."

"Ah, that's the real reason, then--you're afraid of the 'Spy'?"

"Afraid--?"

The Governor continued to speak with dry deliberation. "Evidently,
then, you know what they mean to say."

Fleetwood laughed. "One needn't do that to be sure it will be
abominable!"

"Who cares how abominable it is if it isn't true?"

Fleetwood shrugged his shoulders and was silent. Shackwell, from a
distant seat, uttered a faint protesting sound, but no one heeded
him. The Governor stood squarely before Fleetwood, his hands in his
pockets. "It _is_true, then?" he demanded.

"What is true?"

"What the 'Spy' means to say--that you bought my wife's influence to
get your first appointment."

In the silence Shackwell started suddenly to his feet. A sound of
carriage-wheels had disturbed the quiet street. They paused and then
rolled up the semicircle to the door of the Executive Mansion.

"John!" Shackwell warned him.

The Governor turned impatiently; there was the sound of a servant's
steps in the hall, followed by the opening and closing of the outer
door.

"Your wife--Mrs. Mornway!" Shackwell cried.

Another step, accompanied by a soft rustle of skirts, was advancing
toward the library.

"My wife? Let her come!" said the Governor.






V





She stood before them in her bright evening dress, with an arrested
brilliancy of aspect like the sparkle of a fountain suddenly caught
in ice. Her look moved rapidly from one to the other; then she came
forward, while Shackwell slipped behind her to close the door.

"What has happened?" she said.

Shackwell began to speak, but the Governor interposed calmly:

"Fleetwood has come to tell me that he does not wish to remain in
office."

"Ah!" she murmured.

There was another silence. Fleetwood broke it by saying: "It is
getting late. If you want to see me to-morrow--"

The Governor looked from his face to Ella's. "Yes; go now," he said.

Shackwell moved in Fleetwood's wake to the door. Mrs. Mornway stood
with her head high, smiling slightly. She shook hands with each of
the men in turn; then she moved toward the sofa and laid aside her
shining cloak. All her gestures were calm and noble, but as she
raised her hand to unclasp the cloak her husband uttered a sudden
exclamation.

"Where did you get that bracelet? I don't remember it."

"This?" She looked at him with astonishment. "It belonged to my
mother. I don't often wear it."

"Ah--I shall suspect everything now," he groaned.

He turned away and flung himself with bowed head in the chair behind
his writing-table. He wanted to collect himself, to question her, to
get to the bottom of the hideous abyss over which his imagination
hung. But what was the use? What did the facts matter? He had only
to put his memories together--they led him straight to the truth.
Every incident of the day seemed to point a leering finger in the
same direction, from Mrs. Nimick's allusion to the imported damask
curtains to Gregg's confident appeal for rehabilitation.

"If you imagine that my wife distributes patronage--" he heard
himself repeating inanely, and the walls seemed to reverberate with
the laughter which his sister and Gregg had suppressed. He heard
Ella rise from the sofa and lifted his head sharply.

"Sit still!" he commanded. She sank back without speaking, and he
hid his face again. The past months, the past years, were dancing a
witches' dance about him. He remembered a hundred significant
things. . . . _Oh, God_, he cried to himself, _if only she does not
lie about it!_Suddenly he recalled having pitied Mrs. Nimick because
she could not penetrate to the essence of his happiness. Those were
the very words he had used! He heard himself laugh aloud. The clock
struck--it went on striking interminably. At length he heard his
wife rise again and say with sudden authority: "John, you must
speak."

Authority--she spoke to him with authority! He laughed again, and
through his laugh he heard the senseless rattle of the words, "If
you imagine that my wife distributes patronage . . ."

He looked up haggardly and saw her standing before him. If only she
would not lie about it! He said: "You see what has happened."

"I suppose some one has told you about the 'Spy.'"

"Who told you? Gregg?" he interposed.

"Yes," she said quietly.

"That was why you wanted--?"

"Why I wanted you to help him? Yes."

"Oh, God! . . . He wouldn't take money?"

"No, he wouldn't take money."

He sat silent, looking at her, noting with a morbid minuteness the
exquisite finish of her dress, that finish which seemed so much a
part of herself that it had never before struck him as a merely
purchasable accessory. He knew so little what a woman's dresses
cost! For a moment he lost himself in vague calculations; finally,
he said: "What did you do it for?"

"Do what?"

"Take money from Fleetwood."

She paused a moment and then said: "If you will let me explain--"

And then he saw that, all along, he had thought she would be able to
disprove it! A smothering blackness closed in on him, and he had a
physical struggle for breath. Then he forced himself to his feet and
said: "He was your lover?"

"Oh, no, no, _no!_" she cried with conviction. He hardly knew
whether the shadow lifted or deepened; the fact that he instantly
believed her seemed only to increase his bewilderment. Presently he
found that she was still speaking, and he began to listen to her,
catching a phrase now and then through the deafening clamor of his
thoughts.

It amounted to this--that just after her husband's first election,
when Fleetwood's claims for the Attorney-Generalship were being
vainly pressed by a group of his political backers, Mrs. Mornway had
chanced to sit next to him once or twice at dinner. One day, on the
strength of these meetings, he had called and asked her frankly if
she would not help him with her husband. He had made a clean breast
of his past, but had said that, under a man like Mornway, he felt he
could wipe out his political sins and purify himself while he served
the party. She knew the party needed his brains, and she believed in
him--she was sure he would keep his word. She would have spoken in
his favor in any case--she would have used all her influence to
overcome her husband's prejudice--and it was by a mere accident
that, in the course of one of their talks, he happened to give her a
"tip" (his past connections were still useful for such purposes), a
"tip" which, in the first invading pressure of debt after Mornway's
election, she had not had the courage to refuse. Fleetwood had made
some money for her--yes, about thirty thousand dollars. She had
repaid what he had lent her, and there had been no further
transactions of the kind between them. But it appeared that Gregg,
before his dismissal, had got hold of an old check-book which gave a
hint of the story, and had pieced the rest together with the help of
a clerk in Fleetwood's office. The "Spy" was in possession of the
facts, but did not mean to use them if Fleetwood was not
reappointed, the Lead Trust having no personal grudge against
Mornway.

Her story ended there, and she sat silent while he continued to look
at her. So much had perished in the wreck of his faith that he did
not attach much value to what remained. It scarcely mattered that he
believed her when the truth was so sordid. There had been, after
all, nothing to envy him for but what Mrs. Nimick had seen; the core
of his life was as mean and miserable as his sister's. . . .

His wife rose at length, pale but still calm. She had a kind of
external dignity which she wore like one of her rich dresses. It
seemed as little a part of her now as the finery of which his gaze
contemptuously reckoned the cost.

"John--" she said, laying her hand on his shoulder.

He looked up wearily. "You had better go to bed," he interjected.

"Don't look at me in that way. I am prepared for your being angry
with me--I made a dreadful mistake and must bear my punishment: any
punishment you choose to inflict. But you must think of yourself
first--you must spare yourself. Why should you be so horribly
unhappy? Don't you see that since Mr. Fleetwood has behaved so well
we are quite safe? And I swear to you I have paid back every penny
of the money."






VI





THREE days later Shackwell was summoned by telephone to the
Governor's office in the Capitol. There had been, in the interval,
no communication between the two men, and the papers had been silent
or non-committal.

In the lobby Shackwell met Fleetwood leaving the building. For a
moment the Attorney-General seemed about to speak; then he nodded
and passed on, leaving to Shackwell the impression of a face more
than ever thrust forward like a weapon.

The Governor sat behind his desk in the clear autumn sunlight. In
contrast to Fleetwood he seemed relaxed and unwieldy, and the face
he turned to his friend had a gray look of convalescence. Shackwell
wondered, with a start of apprehension, if he and Fleetwood had been
together.

He relieved himself of his overcoat without speaking, and when he
turned again toward Mornway he was surprised to find the latter
watching him with a smile.

"It's good to see you, Hadley," the Governor said.

"I waited to be sent for; I knew you'd let me know when you wanted
me," Shackwell replied.

"I didn't send for you on purpose. If I had, I might have asked your
advice, and I didn't want to ask anybody's advice but my own." The
Governor spoke steadily, but in a voice a trifle too well
disciplined to be natural. "I've had a three days' conference with
myself," he continued, "and now that everything is settled I want
you to do me a favor."

"Yes?" Shackwell assented. The private issues of the affair were
still wrapped in mystery to him, but he had never had a moment's
doubt as to its public solution, and he had no difficulty in
conjecturing the nature of the service he was to render. His heart
ached for Mornway, but he was glad the inevitable step was to be
taken without further delay.

"Everything is settled," the Governor repeated, "and I want you to
notify the press that I have decided to reappoint Fleetwood."

Shackwell bounded from his seat. "Good heavens!" he ejaculated.

"To reappoint Fleetwood," the Governor repeated, "because at the
present juncture of affairs he is the only man for the place. The
work we began together is not finished, and I can't finish it
without him. Remember the vistas opened by the Lead Trust
investigation--he knows where they lead and no one else does. We
must put that inquiry through, no matter what it costs us, and that
is why I have sent for you to take this letter to the 'Spy.'"

Shackwell's hand drew back from the proffered envelope.

"You say you don't want my advice, but you can't expect me to go on
such an errand with my eyes shut. What on earth are you driving at?
Of course Fleetwood will persist in refusing."

Mornway smiled. "He did persist--for three hours. But when he left
here just now he had given me his word to accept."

Shackwell groaned. "Then I am dealing with two madmen instead of
one."

The Governor laughed. "My poor Hadley, you're worse than I expected.
I thought you would understand me."

"Understand you? How can I, in heaven's name, when I don't
understand the situation?

"The situation--the situation?" Mornway repeated slowly. "Whose? His
or mine? I don't either--I haven't had time to think of them."

"What on earth have you been thinking of then?"

The Governor rose, with a gesture toward the window, through which,
below the slope of the Capitol grounds, the roofs and steeples of
the city spread their smoky mass to the mild air.

"Of all that is left," he said. "Of everything except Fleetwood and
myself."

"Ah--" Shackwell murmured.

Mornway turned back and sank into his seat. "Don't you see that was
all I had to turn to? The State--the country--it's big enough, in
all conscience, to fill a good deal of a void! My own walls had
grown too cramped for me, so I just stepped outside. You have no
idea how it simplified matters at once. All I had to do was to say
to myself: 'Go ahead, and do the best you can for the country.' The
personal issue simply didn't exist."

"Yes--and then?"

"Then I turned over for three days this question of the
Attorney-Generalship. I couldn't see that it was changed--how should
_my_feelings have affected it? Fleetwood hasn't betrayed the State.
There isn't a scar on his public record--he is still the best man
for the place. My business is to appoint the best man I can find,
and I can't find any one as good as Fleetwood."

"But--but--your wife?" Shackwell stammered.

The Governor looked up with surprise. Shackwell could almost have
sworn that he had indeed forgotten the private issue.

"My wife is ready to face the consequences," he said.

Shackwell returned to his former attitude of incredulity.

"But Fleetwood? Fleetwood has no right to sacrifice--"

"To sacrifice my wife to the State? Oh, let us beware of big words.
Fleetwood was inclined to use them at first, but I managed to
restore his sense of proportion. I showed him that our private lives
are only a few feet square anyhow, and that really, to breathe
freely, one must get out of them into the open." He paused and broke
out with sudden violence, "My God, Hadley, didn't you see that
Fleetwood had to obey me?"

"Yes--I see that," said Shackwell, with reviving obstinacy. "But if
you've reached such a height and pulled him up to your side it seems
to me that from that standpoint you ought to get an even clearer
view of the madness of your position. You say you have decided to
sacrifice your own feelings and your wife's--though I'm not so sure
of your right to dispose of _her_voice in the matter; but what if
you sacrifice the party and the State as well, in this
transcendental attempt to distinguish between private and public
honor? You'll have to answer that before you can get me to carry
this letter."

The Governor did not blanch under the attack.

"I think the letter will answer you," he said calmly.

"The letter?"

"Yes. It's something more than a notification of Fleetwood's
reappointment." Mornway paused and looked steadily at his friend.
"You're afraid of an investigation--an impeachment? Well, the letter
anticipates that."

"How, in heaven's name?"

"By a plain statement of the facts. My wife has told me that she did
borrow of Fleetwood. He speculated for her and made a considerable
sum, out of which she repaid his loan. The 'Spy's' accusation is
true. If it can be proved that my wife induced me to appoint
Fleetwood, it may be argued that she sold him the appointment. But
it can't be proved, and the 'Spy' won't waste its breath in trying
to, because my statement will take the sting out of its innuendoes.
I propose to anticipate its attack by setting forth the facts in its
columns, and asking the public to decide between us. On one side is
the private fact that my wife, without my knowledge, borrowed money
from Fleetwood just before I appointed him to an important post; on
the other side is his public record and mine. I want people to see
both sides and judge between them, not in the red glare of a
newspaper denunciation, but in the plain daylight of common-sense.
Charges against the private morality of a public man are usually
made in such a blare of headlines and cloud of mud-throwing that the
voice he lifts up in his defence can not make itself heard. In this
case I want the public to hear what I have to say before the yelping
begins. My letter will take the wind out of the 'Spy's' sails, and
if the verdict goes against me, the case will have been decided on
its own merits, and not at the dictation of the writers of scare
heads. Even if I don't gain my end, it will be a good thing, for
once, for the public to consider dispassionately how far a private
calamity should be allowed to affect a career of public usefulness,
and the next man who goes through what I am undergoing may have
cause to thank me if no one else does."

Shackwell sat silent for a moment, with the ring of the last words
in his ears.

Suddenly he rose and held out his hand. "Give me the letter," he
said.

The Governor caught him up with a kindling eye. "It's all right,
then? You see, and you'll take it?"

Shackwell met his glance with one of melancholy interrogation. "I
think I see a magnificent suicide, but it's the kind of way I
shouldn't mind dying myself."

He pulled himself silently into his coat and put the letter into one
of its pockets, but as he was turning to the door the Governor
called after him cheerfully: "By the way, Hadley, aren't you and
Mrs. Shackwell giving a big dinner to-morrow?"

Shackwell paused with a start. "I believe we are--why?"

"Because, if there is room for two more, my wife and I would like to
be invited."

Shackwell nodded his assent and turned away without answering. As he
came out of the lobby into the clear sunset radiance he saw a
victoria drive up the long sweep to the Capitol and pause before the
central portion. He descended the steps, and Mrs. Mornway leaned
from her furs to greet him.

"I have called for my husband," she said, smiling. "He promised to
get away in time for a little turn in the Park before dinner."




End of Project Gutenberg's The Hermit And The Wild Woman, by Edith Wharton