"We must not look at Goblin men,We must not buy their fruits;Who knows upon what soil they fedTheir hungry thirsty roots?"
A FAIRY PALACE, WITH A FAIRY GARDEN; . . . . .
INSIDE THE TROLLS DWELL, . . . . . WORKING AT
THEIR MAGIC FORGES, MAKING AND MAKING ALWAYS
THINGS RARE AND STRANGECHARLES KINGSLEY
Copyright,1905 , by
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.
Published March,1905
Charles Scribner's Sons. Copyright, 1904, by The Ridgway-Thayer Co.
To
Isabelle McClung
Isabelle McClung
As the train neared Tarrytown, Imogen Willard began to wonder why she had consented to be one of Flavia's house party at all. She had not felt enthusiastic about it since leaving the city, and was experiencing a prolonged ebb of purpose, a current of chilling indecision, under which she vainly sought for the motive which had induced her to accept Flavia's invitation.
Perhaps it was a vague curiosity to see Flavia's husband, who had been the magician of her childhood and the hero of innumerable Arabian fairy tales. Perhaps it was a desire to see M. Roux, whom Flavia had announced as the especial attraction of the occasion. Perhaps it was a wish to study that remarkable woman in her own setting.
Imogen admitted a mild curiosity concerning Flavia. She was in the habit of taking
people rather seriously, but somehow found it im-
When Imogen stepped upon the station platform she was immediately appropriated by her hostess, whose commanding figure and assurance of attire she had recognized from a distance. She was hurried into a high tilbury and Flavia, taking the driver's cushion beside her, gathered up the reins with an experienced hand.
"My dear girl," she remarked, as she turned
"To think of M. Roux's being in this part of the world at all, and subject to the vicissitudes of river boats! Why in the world did he come over?" queried Imogen with lively interest. "He is the sort of man who must dissolve and become a shadow outside of Paris."
"Oh, we have a houseful of the most interesting people," said Flavia, professionally.
"We have actually managed to get Ivan Schemetzkin. He was ill in California at the close
of his concert tour, you know, and he is recuperating with us, after his wearing journey
from the coast. Then there is Jules Martel, the painter; Signor Donati, the tenor; Professor
Schotte, who has dug up Assyria, you know; Restzhoff, the Russian chemist; Alcée Buisson,
the philologist; Frank Wellington, the novelist; and Will Maidenwood, the editor of
Woman. Then there is my second cousin, Jemima Broadwood,
who made such a hit in Pinero's comedy last winter, and Frau Lichtenfeld.
Imogen confessed her utter ignorance of Frau Lichtenfeld, and Flavia went on.
"Well, she is a most remarkable person; one of those advanced German women, a militant iconoclast, and this drive will not be long enough to permit of my telling you her history. Such a story! Her novels were the talk of all Germany when I was there last, and several of them have been suppressed—an honour in Germany, I understand. 'At Whose Door' has been translated. I am so unfortunate as not to read German."
"I'm all excitement at the prospect of meeting Miss Broadwood," said Imogen. "I've seen her in nearly everything she does. Her stage personality is delightful. She always reminds me of a nice, clean, pink-and-white boy who has just had his cold bath, and come down all aglow for a run before breakfast."
"Yes, but isn't it unfortunate that she will limit herself to those minor comedy parts that are so little appreciated in this country? One ought to be satisfied with nothing less than the best, ought one?" The peculiar, breathy tone in which Flavia always uttered that word "best," the most worn in her vocabulary, always jarred on Imogen and always made her obdurate.
"I don't at all agree with you," she said re-
Flavia could not endure being contradicted; she always seemed to regard it in the light of a defeat, and usually coloured unbecomingly. Now she changed the subject.
"Look, my dear," she cried, "there is Frau Lichtenfeld now, coming to meet us. Doesn't she look as if she had just escaped out of Walhalla? She is actually over six feet."
Imogen saw a woman of immense stature, in a very short skirt and a broad, flapping sun hat, striding down the hillside at a long, swinging gait. The refugee from Walhalla approached, panting. Her heavy, Teutonic features were scarlet from the rigour of her exercise, and her hair, under her flapping sun hat, was tightly befrizzled about her brow. She fixed her sharp little eyes upon Imogen and extended both her hands.
"So this is the little friend?" she cried, in a rolling baritone.
Imogen was quite as tall as her hostess; but everything, she reflected, is comparative. After the introduction Flavia apologized.
"I wish I could ask you to drive up with us, Frau Lichtenfeld."
"Ah, no!" cried the giantess, drooping her head in humorous caricature of a time-honoured pose of the heroines of sentimental romances. "It has never been my fate to be fitted into corners. I have never known the sweet privileges of the tiny."
Laughing, Flavia started the ponies, and the colossal woman, standing in the middle of the dusty road, took off her wide hat and waved them a farewell which, in scope of gesture, recalled the salute of a plumed cavalier.
When they arrived at the house, Imogen looked about her with keen curiosity, for this
was veritably the work of Flavia's hands, the materialization of hopes long deferred. They
passed directly into a large, square hall with a gallery on three sides, studio fashion.
This opened at one end into a Dutch breakfast-room, beyond which was the large
dining-room. At the other end of the hall was the music-room. There was a smoking-room,
which one entered through the library behind the staircase. On the second floor there was
the same general arrangement; a square hall, and, opening from it, the guest
When Imogen went to her room, the guests had begun to return from their various afternoon excursions. Boys were gliding through the halls with ice-water, covered trays, and flowers, colliding with maids and valets who carried shoes and other articles of wearing apparel. Yet, all this was done in response to inaudible bells, on felt soles, and in hushed voices, so that there was very little confusion about it.
Flavia had at last builded her house and hewn out her seven pillars; there could be no
doubt, now, that the asylum for talent, the sanatorium of the arts, so long projected, was
an accomplished fact. Her ambition had long ago outgrown the dimensions of her house on
Prairie Avenue; besides, she had bitterly complained that in Chicago traditions were against her.
Her project had been delayed by Arthur's doggedly standing out for the Michigan woods, but Flavia
knew well enough that certain of the
Flavia's house was the mirror of her exultation; it was a temple to the gods of
Victory, a sort of triumphal arch. In her earlier days she had swallowed experiences that
would have unmanned one of less torrential enthusiasm or blind pertinacity. But, of late
years, her determination had told; she saw less and less of those mysterious persons with
mysterious obstacles in their path and mysterious grievances against the world, who had once
frequented her house on Prairie Avenue. In the stead of this multitude of the unarrived, she
had now the few, the select, "the best." Of all that band of indigent retainers who had once fed
at her board like the suitors in the halls of Penelope, only Alcée Buisson still retained
his right of entrée. He alone had remembered that ambition hath a knapsack at his back, wherein
he puts alms to oblivion, and he alone had been considerate enough to do what Flavia had expected of him,
and give his name a current value in the world. Then, as Miss Broadwood put it, "he was her first real
one,"—and
The "House of Song," as Miss Broadwood had called it, was the outcome of Flavia's more exalted strategies. A woman who made less a point of sympathizing with their delicate organisms, might have sought to plunge these phosphorescent pieces into the tepid bath of domestic life; but Flavia's discernment was deeper. This must be a refuge where the shrinking soul, the sensitive brain, should be unconstrained; where the caprice of fancy should outweigh the civil code, if necessary. She considered that this much Arthur owed her; for she, in her turn, had made concessions. Flavia, had, indeed, quite an equipment of epigrams to the effect that our century creates the iron genii which evolve its fairy tales: but the fact that her husband's name was annually painted upon some ten thousand threshing machines, in reality contributed very little to her happiness.
Arthur Hamilton was born, and had spent his boyhood in the West Indies, and physically
he had never lost the brand of the tropics. His father, after inventing the machine which bore
his name, had returned to the States to patent and
While Imogen was dressing she heard a knock at her door, and a young woman entered whom
she at once recognized as Jemima Broadwood—"Jimmy" Broadwood, she was called by people in
her own profession. While there was something unmistakably professional in her frank
"Ah! you are Miss Willard, and I see I need not introduce myself. Flavia said you were kind enough to express a wish to meet me, and I preferred to meet you alone. Do you mind if I smoke?"
"Why, certainly not," said Imogen, somewhat disconcerted and looking hurriedly about for matches.
"There, be calm, I'm always prepared," said Miss Broadwood, checking Imogen's flurry with a soothing gesture, and producing an oddly-fashioned silver match-case from some mysterious recess in her dinner-gown. She sat down in a deep chair, crossed her patent-leather Oxfords, and lit her cigarette. "This match-box," she went on meditatively, "once belonged to a Prussian officer. He shot himself in his bath-tub, and I bought it at the sale of his effects."
Imogen had not yet found any suitable reply to make to this rather irrelevant
confidence, when
"Why, how funny!" ejaculated Imogen.
"On the contrary," remarked Miss Broadwood. "I thought it decidedly lacked humour."
"I meant," stammered Imogen, beginning to feel very much like Alice in Wonderland, "I meant that I thought it rather strange Mrs. Hamilton should fancy you would be interested."
Miss Broadwood laughed heartily. "Now, don't let my rudeness frighten you. Really,
I found it very interesting, and no end impressive. You see, most people in my profession
are good for absolutely nothing else, and, therefore, they have a deep and abiding
conviction that in some other line they might have shone. Strange to say, scholarship is
the object of our envious and particular admiration. Anything in type impresses us
greatly; that's why so many of us marry authors or newspapermen and lead miserable
lives." Miss Broadwood saw that she had rather disconcerted Imogen, and blithely
tacked in another direction. "You see," she went on, toss-
"Well, it's rather too soon for me to have any opinion at all," said Imogen, as she again turned to her dressing. "So far, you are the only one of the artists I've met."
"One of them?" echoed Miss Broadwood. "One of the
Imogen turned from the mirror in blank astonishment, and sat down on the arm of a chair, facing her visitor. "I can't fathom you at all, Miss Broadwood," she said frankly. "Why shouldn't you take yourself seriously? What's the use of beating about the bush? Surely you know that you are one of the few players on this side of the water who have at all the spirit of natural or ingenuous comedy?"
"Thank you, my dear. Now we are quite even about the thesis, aren't we? Oh! did
you mean it? Well, you
Flavia conducted Imogen and Miss Broadwood downstairs. As they reached the lower hall
they heard voices from the music-room, and dim figures were lurking in the shadows under
the gallery, but their hostess led straight to the smoking-room. The June evening was
chilly, and a fire had been lighted in the fireplace. Through
"I am glad you arrived promptly, Miss Willard," he said with an indifferent drawl. "Flavia was afraid you might be late. You had a pleasant ride up, I hope?"
"O, very, thank you, Mr. Hamilton," she replied, feeling that he did not particularly care whether she replied at all.
Flavia explained that she had not yet had time to dress for dinner, as she had been attending to Mr. Will Maidenwood, who had become faint after hurting his finger in an obdurate window, and immediately excused herself. As she left, Hamilton turned to Miss Broadwood with a rather spiritless smile.
"Well, Jimmy," he remarked, "I brought up a piano box full of fireworks for the boys. How do you suppose we'll manage to keep them until the Fourth?"
"We can't, unless we steel ourselves to deny there are any on the premises," said Miss Broadwood, seating herself on a low stool by Hamilton's chair, and leaning back against the mantel. "Have you seen Helen, and has she told you the tragedy of the tooth?"
"She met me at the station, with her tooth wrapped up in tissue paper. I had tea with her an hour ago. Better sit down, Miss Willard;" he rose and pushed a chair toward Imogen, who was standing peering into the conservatory. "We are scheduled to dine at seven, but they seldom get around before eight."
By this time Imogen had made out that here the plural pronoun, third person, always
referred
Hamilton's keen, quick, satisfied glance at his wife had recalled to Imogen all her
inventory of speculations about them. She looked at him with compassionate surprise. As a
child she had never permitted herself to believe that Hamilton cared at all for the woman
who had taken him away from her; and since she had begun to think about them again, it had
never occurred to her that
When they went out to dinner, Imogen realized the completeness of Flavia's triumph. They were people of one name, mostly, like kings; people whose names stirred the imagination like a romance or a melody. With the notable exception of M. Roux, Imogen had seen most of them before, either in concert halls or lecture rooms; but they looked noticeably older and dimmer than she remembered them.
Opposite her sat Schemetzkin, the Russian pianist, a short, corpulent man, with an
apoplectic face and
Frank Wellington, the young Kansas man who had been two years out of Harvard and had
published three historical novels, sat next Mr. Will Maidenwood, who was still pale from
his recent sufferings, and carried his hand bandaged. They took little part in the general
conversation, but, like the lion and the unicorn, were always at it; discussing, every
time they met, whether there were or were not passages in Mr. Wellington's
Woman.
Maidenwood, in the smoothest of voices, urged the necessity of the author's recognizing
certain restrictions at the outset, and Miss Broadwood, who joined the argument quite
without invitation or encouragement, seconded him with pointed and malicious remarks which
caused the young editor manifest discomfort. Restzhoff, the chemist, demanded the
attention of the entire company for his exposition of his devices for manufacturing
ice-cream from vegetable oils, and for administering drugs in bonbons.
Flavia, always noticeably restless at dinner, was somewhat apathetic toward the
advocate of peptonized chocolate, and was plainly concerned about the sudden departure of
M. Roux, who had announced that it would be necessary for him to leave to-morrow. M. Emile
Roux, who sat at
Throughout the discussion between Wellington and Will Maidenwood, though they invited his participation, he remained silent, betraying no sign either of interest or contempt. Since his arrival he had directed most of his conversation to Hamilton, who had never read one of his twelve great novels. This perplexed and troubled Flavia. On the night of his arrival, Jules Martel had enthusiastically declared, "There are schools and schools, manners and manners; but Roux is Roux, and Paris sets its watches by his clock." Flavia had already repeated this remark to Imogen. It haunted her, and each time she quoted it she was impressed anew.
Flavia shifted the conversation uneasily, evidently exasperated and excited by her
repeated failures to draw the novelist out. "Monsieur Roux," she began abruptly,
with her most animated smile, "I remember so well a statement I read some years ago
in your
"I meant, madam," said the novelist conservatively, "intellectual in a sense very special, as we say of men in whom the purely intellectual functions seem almost independent."
"And you still think a woman so constituted a mythical personage?" persisted Flavia, nodding her head encouragingly.
"
"And Mrs. Browning, George Eliot, and your own Mme. Dudevant?" queried Flavia with that fervid enthusiasm with which she could, on occasion, utter things simply incomprehensible for their banality—at her feats of this sort Miss Broadwood was wont to sit breathless with admiration.
"Madam, while the intellect was undeniably present in the performances of those women, it was only the stick of the rocket. Although this woman has eluded me, I have studied her conditions and perturbations as astronomers conjecture the orbits of planets they have never seen. If she exists, she is probably neither an artist nor a woman with a mission, but an obscure personage, with imperative intellectual needs, who absorbs rather than produces."
Flavia, still nodding nervously, fixed a strained glance of interrogation upon M. Roux. "Then you think she would be a woman whose first necessity would be to know, whose instincts would be satisfied only with the best, who could draw from others; appreciative, merely?"
The novelist lifted his dull eyes to his interlocutress with an untranslatable smile, and a slight inclination of his shoulders. "Exactly so; you are really remarkable, madam," he added, in a tone of cold astonishment.
After dinner the guests took their coffee in the music-room, where Schemetzkin sat down at the piano to drum rag-time, and give his celebrated imitation of the boarding-school girl's execution of Chopin. He flatly refused to play anything more serious, and would practise only in the morning, when he had the music-room to himself. Hamilton and M. Roux repaired to the smoking-room to discuss the necessity of extending the tax on manufactured articles in France,—one of those conversations which particularly exasperated Flavia.
After Schemetzkin had grimaced and tortured the keyboard with malicious vulgarities for half an hour, Signor Donati, to put an end to his torture, consented to sing, and Flavia and Imogen went to fetch Arthur to play his accompaniments. Hamilton rose with an annoyed look, and placed his cigarette on the mantel. "Why yes, Flavia, I'll accompany him, provided he sings something with a melody, Italian arias or ballads, and provided the recital is not interminable."
"You will join us, M. Roux?"
"Thank you, but I have some letters to write," replied the novelist bowing.
As Flavia had remarked to Imogen, "Arthur really played accompaniments remarkably well." To hear him recalled vividly the days of her childhood, when he always used to spend his business vacations at her mother's home in Maine. He had possessed for her that almost hypnotic influence which young men sometimes exert upon little girls. It was a sort of phantom love affair, subjective and fanciful, a precocity of instinct, like that tender and maternal concern which some little girls feel for their dolls. Yet this childish infatuation is capable of all the depressions and exaltations of love itself; it has its bitter jealousies, cruel disappointments, its exacting caprices.
Summer after summer she had awaited his coming and wept at his departure, indifferent
to the gayer young men who had called her their sweetheart, and laughed at everything she
said. Although Hamilton never said so, she had been always quite sure that he was fond of
her. When he pulled her up the river to hunt for fairy knolls shut about by low, hanging
willows, he was often silent for an hour at a time, yet she
Imogen had discovered at dinner that he could still smile at one secretly, out of his eyes, and that he had the old manner of outwardly seeming bored, but letting you know that he was not. She was intensely curious about his exact state of feeling toward his wife, and more curious still to catch a sense of his final adjustment to the conditions of life in general. This, she could not help feeling, she might get again—if she could have him alone for an hour, in some place where there was a little river and a sandy cove bordered by drooping willows, and a blue sky seen through white sycamore boughs.
That evening, before retiring, Flavia entered her husband's room, where he sat in his smoking-jacket, in one of his favourite low chairs.
"I suppose it's a grave responsibility to bring an ardent, serious young thing
like Imogen here among all these fascinating personages," she remarked reflectively.
"But, after all, one can never
"O, so that is your plan?" queried her husband dryly. "I was wondering why you got her up here. She doesn't seem to mix well with the faciles. At least, so it struck me."
Flavia paid no heed to this jeering remark, but repeated, "No, after all, it may not be a bad thing."
"Then do consign her to that shaken reed, the tenor," said her husband yawning. "I remember she used to have a taste for the pathetic."
"And then," remarked Flavia coquettishly, "after all, I owe her mother a return in kind. She was not afraid to trifle with destiny."
But Hamilton was asleep in his chair.
Next morning Imogen found only Miss Broadwood in the breakfast-room.
"Good-morning, my dear girl, whatever are you doing up so early? They never breakfast before eleven. Most of them take their coffee in their room. Take this place by me."
Miss Broadwood looked particularly fresh and encouraging in her blue serge
walking-skirt, her open jacket displaying an expanse of stiff, white,
Hamilton entered, followed by two dark, handsome little boys. The girl, who was very tiny, blonde like her mother, and exceedingly frail, he carried in his arms. The boys came up and said good-morning with an ease and cheerfulness uncommon, even in well-bred children, but the little girl hid her face on her father's shoulder.
"She's a shy little lady," he explained, as he put her gently down in her chair. "I'm afraid she's like her father; she can't seem to get used to meeting people. And you, Miss Willard, did you dream of the white rabbit or the little mermaid?"
"O, I dreamed of them all! All the personages of that buried civilization,"
cried Imogen, de-
"Come, William," said Miss Broadwood, turning to the younger of the two boys, "and what did you dream about?"
"We dreamed," said William gravely—he was the more assertive of the two and always spoke for both—"we dreamed that there were fireworks hidden in the basement of the carriage-house; lots and lots of fireworks."
His elder brother looked up at him with apprehensive astonishment, while Miss Broadwood hastily put her napkin to her lips, and Hamilton dropped his eyes. "If little boys dream things, they are so apt not to come true," he reflected sadly. This shook even the redoubtable William, and he glanced nervously at his brother. "But do things vanish just because they have been dreamed?" he objected.
"Generally that is the very best reason for their vanishing," said Arthur gravely.
"But, father, people can't help what they dream," remonstrated Edward gently.
"Oh, come! You're making these children
Flavia presently entered, a book in her hand, and bade them all good-morning. "Come, little people, which story shall it be this morning?" she asked winningly. Greatly excited, the children followed her into the garden. "She does then, sometimes," murmured Imogen as they left the breakfast-room.
"Oh, yes, to be sure," said Miss Broadwood cheerfully. "She reads a story to them every morning in the most picturesque part of the garden. The mother of the Gracchi, you know. She does so long, she says, for the time when they will be intellectual companions for her. What do you say to a walk over the hills?"
As they left the house they met Frau Lichtenfeld and the bushy Herr Schotte—the professor cut an astonishing figure in golf stockings—returning from a walk and engaged in an animated conversation on the tendencies of German fiction.
"Aren't they the most attractive little children," exclaimed Imogen as they wound down the road toward the river.
"Yes, and you must not fail to tell Flavia that you think so. She will look at you
in a sort of
"But don't any of the artist-folk fancy children?" asked Imogen.
"Yes, they just fancy them and no more. The chemist remarked the other day that children are like certain salts which need not be actualized because the formulæ are quite sufficient for practical purposes. I don't see how even Flavia can endure to have that man about."
" I have always been rather curious to know what Arthur thinks of it all," remarked Imogen cautiously.
"Thinks of it!" ejaculated Miss Broadwood. "Why, my dear, what would any man think of having his house turned into an hotel, habited by freaks who discharge his servants, borrow his money, and insult his neighbours? This place is shunned like a lazaretto!"
"Well, then, why does he—why does he—" persisted Imogen.
"Bah!" interrupted Miss Broadwood impatiently, "why did he in the first place? That's the question."
"Marry her, you mean?" said Imogen colouring.
"Exactly so," said Miss Broadwood sharply, as she snapped the lid of her match-box.
"I suppose that is a question rather beyond us, and certainly one which we cannot discuss," said Imogen. "But his toleration on this one point puzzles me, quite apart from other complications."
"Toleration? Why this point, as you call it, simply
"But will it end at all, now?"
"Such an absurd state of things can't go on indefinitely. A man isn't going to see
his wife make a guy of herself forever, is he? Chaos has already begun in the servants'
quarters. There are six different languages spoken there now. You see, it's all on an
entirely false basis. Flavia hasn't the slightest notion of what these people are really
like, their good and their bad alike escape her.
"Then, in the name of goodness, why does she
"That's what M. Roux has kept asking himself. I can't pretend to analyse it. She reads papers on the Literary Landmarks of Paris, and the Loves of the Poets, and that sort of thing, to clubs out in Chicago. To Flavia it is more necessary to be called clever than to breathe. I would give a good deal to know that glum Frenchman's diagnosis. He has been watching her out of those fishy eyes of his as a biologist watches a hemisphereless frog."
For several days after M. Roux's departure, Flavia gave an embarrassing share of her
attention to Imogen. Embarrassing, because Imogen had the feeling of being energetically
and
"I rather feel as though I had got in here under false pretences," Imogen confided to Miss Broadwood, "I'm sure I don't know what it is that she wants of me."
"Ah," chuckled Jemima, "you are not equal to these heart to heart talks
with Flavia. You utterly fail to communicate to her the atmosphere of that untroubled joy
in which you dwell. You must remember that she gets no feeling out of things herself, and
she demands that you impart yours to her by some process of psychic transmission. I once
met a blind girl, blind from birth, who could discuss the peculiarities of the Barbizon
school with just Flavia's glibness and enthusiasm. Ordinarily Flavia knows how to get what
she wants from people, and her memory is wonderful. One evening I heard her giving Frau
Lichtenfeld some random impressions about
After some days of unsuccessful effort, Flavia withdrew herself, and Imogen found Hamilton ready to catch her when she was tossed a-field. He seemed only to have been awaiting this crisis, and at once their old intimacy re-established itself as a thing inevitable and beautifully prepared for. She convinced herself that she had not been mistaken in him, despite all the doubts that had come up in later years, and this renewal of faith set more than one question thumping in her brain. "How did he, how can he?" she kept repeating with a tinge of her childish resentment, "what right had he to waste anything so fine?"
When Imogen and Arthur were returning from a walk before luncheon one morning about a
week after M. Roux's departure, they noticed an absorbed group before one of the hall
After luncheon the men went to the golf links, and Imogen, at the first opportunity,
possessed herself of the newspaper which had been
"Wait a moment, Miss Willard," he said peremptorily, "I want to see whether we can find what it was that so interested our friends this morning. Give me the paper, please."
Imogen grew quite white as he opened the journal. She reached forward and crumpled it with her hands. "Please don't, please don't," she pleaded, "it's something I don't want you to see. Oh! why will you? It's just something low and despicable that you can't notice."
Arthur had gently loosed her hands and he pointed her to a chair. He lit a cigar and
read the
"You are right," he remarked as he came back, dusting his hands with his handkerchief. "It's quite impossible to comment. There are extremes of blackguardism for which we have no name. The only thing necessary is to see that Flavia gets no wind of this. This seems to be my cue to act; poor girl."
Imogen looked at him tearfully; she could only murmur, "Oh, why did you read it!"
Hamilton laughed spiritlessly. "Come, don't you worry about it. You always took
other people's troubles too seriously. When you were little and all the world was gay and
everybody happy, you must needs get the Little Mermaid's troubles to grieve over. Come
with me into the music-room. You remember the musical setting I once made you for the Lay
of the Jabberwock? I was trying it over the other night, long after you were in bed, and I
decided it was quite as fine as the Erl-King music. How I wish I could give you some of
the cake that Alice ate and make you a little girl again. Then, when you had got through
At dinner that evening, Flavia, with fatal persistence, insisted upon turning the
conversation to M. Roux. She had been reading one of his novels and had remembered anew
that Paris set its watches by his clock. Imogen surmised that she was tortured by a
feeling that she had not sufficiently appreciated him while she had had him. When she
first mentioned his name, she was answered only by the pall of silence that fell over the
company. Then everyone began to talk at once, as though to correct a false position. They
spoke of him with a fervid, defiant admiration, with the sort of hot praise that covers a
double purpose. Imogen fancied she could see that they felt a kind of relief at what the
man had done, even those who despised him for doing it; that they felt a spiteful hate
against Flavia, as though she had tricked them, and a certain contempt for themselves that
they had been beguiled. She was reminded of the fury of the crowd in the fairy tale, when
once the
Hamilton lounged, fingering the stem of his wine glass, gazing down the table at one face after another and studying the various degrees of self-consciousness they exhibited. Imogen's eyes followed his, fearfully. When a lull came in the spasmodic flow of conversation, Arthur, leaning back in his chair, remarked deliberately, "As for M. Roux, his very profession places him in that class of men whom society has never been able to accept unconditionally because it has never been able to assume that they have any ordered notion of taste. He and his ilk remain, with the mountebanks and snake charmers, people indispensable to our civilization, but wholly unreclaimed by it; people whom we receive, but whose invitations we do not accept."
Fortunately for Flavia, this mine was not exploded until just before the coffee was
brought. Her laughter was pitiful to hear; it echoed
After dinner the guests retired immediately to their rooms, and Imogen went upstairs on tiptoe, feeling the echo of breakage and the dust of crumbling in the air. She wondered whether Flavia's habitual note of uneasiness were not, in a manner, prophetic, and a sort of unconscious premonition, after all. She sat down to write a letter, but she found herself so nervous, her head so hot and her hands so cold, that she soon abandoned the effort. Just as she was about to seek Miss Broadwood, Flavia entered and embraced her hysterically.
"My dearest girl," she began, "was there ever such an unfortunate and incomprehensible
speech made before? Of course it is scarcely necessary to explain to you poor Arthur's lack
of tact, and that he meant nothing. But they! Can they be expected to understand? He will feel
wretchedly about it when he realizes what he has
Imogen was thoroughly disconcerted; this was the first time she had ever seen Flavia betray any personal emotion which was indubitably genuine. She replied with what consolation she could. "Need they take it personally at all? It was a mere observation upon a class of people—"
"Which he knows nothing whatever about, and with whom he has no sympathy," interrupted Flavia.
"Ah, my dear, you could not be
"But, surely, Mrs. Hamilton, it was, after all, a mere expression of opinion, such as we are any of us likely to venture upon any subject whatever. It was neither more personal nor more extravagant than many of M. Roux's remarks."
"But, Imogen, certainly M. Roux has the right. It is a part of his art, and that
is
"I think you mistake his attitude," replied Imogen, feeling a flush that made
her ears tingle, "that is, I fancy he is more appreciative than he
"That's just where it stings most," here Flavia began pacing the floor, "it is just because they have all shown such tolerance, and have treated Arthur with such unfailing consideration, that I can find no reasonable pretext for his rancour. How can he fail to see the value of such friendships on the children's account, if for nothing else! What an advantage for them to grow up among such associations! Even though he cares nothing about these things himself he might realize that. Is there nothing I could say by way of explanation? To them, I mean? If some one were to explain to them how unfortunately limited he is in these things—"
"I'm afraid I cannot advise you," said Imo-
Flavia took her hand and glanced at her affectionately, nodding nervously. "Of course, dear girl, I can't ask you to be quite frank with me. Poor child, you are trembling and your hands are icy. Poor Arthur! But you must not judge him by this altogether; think how much he misses in life. What a cruel shock you've had. I'll send you some sherry. Goodnight, my dear."
When Flavia shut the door, Imogen burst into a fit of nervous weeping.
Next morning she awoke after a troubled and restless night. At eight o'clock Miss Broadwood entered in a red and white striped bath-robe.
"Up, up, and see the great doom's image!" she cried, her eyes sparkling with
excitement. "The hall is full of trunks, they are packing. What bolt has fallen? It's
you,
Imogen, rising on her elbow, plunged excitedly into the story of the Roux interview,
which Miss Broadwood heard with the keenest interest,
"Stop a moment," she cried, "you mean to tell me that he had such a heaven-sent means to bring her to her senses and didn't use it, that he held such a weapon and threw it away?"
"Use it?" cried Imogen unsteadily, "of course he didn't! He bared his back to the tormentor, signed himself over to punishment in that speech he made at dinner, which every one understands but Flavia. She was here for an hour last night and disregarded every limit of taste in her maledictions."
"My dear!" cried Miss Broadwood, catching her hand in inordinate delight at the situation, "do you see what he has done? There'll be no end to it. Why he has sacrificed himself to spare the very vanity that devours him, put rancours in the vessels of his peace, and his eternal jewel given to the common enemy of man, to make them kings, the seed of Banquo kings! He is magnificent!"
"Isn't he always that?" cried Imogen hotly. "He's like a pillar of sanity and law in this house of shams and swollen vanities, where people stalk about with a sort of mad-house dignity, each one fancying himself a king or a pope. If you could have heard that woman talk of him! Why she thinks him stupid, bigoted, blinded by middle-class prejudices. She talked about his having no æsthetic sense, and insisted that her artists had always shown him tolerance. I don't know why it should get on my nerves so, I'm sure, but her stupidity and assurance are enough to drive one to the brink of collapse."
"Yes, as opposed to his singular fineness, they are calculated to do just that," said Miss Broadwood gravely, wisely ignoring Imogen's tears. "But what has been is nothing to what will be. Just wait until Flavia's black swans have flown! You ought not to try to stick it out; that would only make it harder for every one. Suppose you let me telephone your mother to wire you to come home by the evening train?"
"Anything, rather than have her come at me like that again. It puts me in a perfectly impossible
position, and he
"Of course it does," said Miss Broadwood
Miss Broadwood's counsel was all the more generous seeing that, for her, the most interesting element of this dénouement would be eliminated by Imogen's departure. "If she goes now, she'll get over it," soliloquized Miss Broadwood, "if she stays she'll be wrung for him, and the hurt may go deep enough to last. I haven't the heart to see her spoiling things for herself." She telephoned Mrs. Willard, and helped Imogen to pack. She even took it upon herself to break the news of Imogen's going to Arthur, who remarked, as he rolled a cigarette in his nerveless fingers:
"Right enough, too. What should she do here with old cynics like you and me, Jimmy? Seeing that she
is brim full of dates and formulæ and other positivisms, and is so girt about with il-
Arthur went with them to the station. Flavia was so prostrated by the concerted action
of her guests that she was able to see Imogen only for a moment in her darkened sleeping
chamber, where she kissed her hysterically, without lifting her head, bandaged in aromatic
vinegar. On the way to the station both Arthur and Imogen threw the burden of keeping up
appearances entirely upon Miss Broadwood, who blithely rose to the occasion. When Hamilton
carried Imogen's bag into the car, Miss Broadwood detained her for a moment, whispering as
she gave her a large, warm handclasp, "I'll come to see you when I get back to town;
and, in the meantime, if you meet any of our artists, tell them you have left
A group of the townspeople stood on the station siding of a little Kansas town, awaiting the coming
of the night train, which was already twenty minutes overdue. The snow had fallen thick over everything;
in the pale starlight the line of bluffs across the wide, white meadows south of the town made soft,
smoke-coloured curves against the clear sky. The men on the siding stood first on one foot and then on the
other, their hands thrust deep into their trousers pockets, their overcoats open, their shoulders screwed
up with the cold; and they glanced from time to time toward the southeast, where the railroad track wound
along the river shore. They conversed in low tones and moved about restlessly, seeming uncertain as to what
was expected of them. There was but one of the company who looked as though he knew exactly why he
was there; and he kept conspicuously apart, walking to
"I reckon she's a-goin' to be pretty late agin to-night, Jim," he remarked in a squeaky falsetto. "S'pose it's the snow?"
"I don't know," responded the other man with a shade of annoyance, speaking from out an astonishing cataract of red beard that grew fiercely and thickly in all directions.
The spare man shifted the quill toothpick he was chewing to the other side of his mouth. "It ain't likely that anybody from the East will come with the corpse, I s'pose," he went on reflectively.
"I don't know," responded the other, more curtly than before.
"It's too bad he didn't belong to some lodge or other. I like an order funeral myself.
They seem
The heavy man turned on his heel, without replying, and walked up the siding. The spare man shuffled back to the uneasy group. "Jim's ez full ez a tick, ez ushel," he commented commiseratingly.
Just then a distant whistle sounded, and there was a shuffling of feet on the platform.
A number of lanky boys of all ages appeared as suddenly and slimily as eels wakened by the crack
of thunder; some came from the waiting-room, where they had been warming themselves by the red
stove, or half asleep on the slat benches; others uncoiled themselves from baggage trucks or slid
out of express wagons. Two clambered down from the driver's seat of a hearse that stood backed up
against the siding. They straightened their stooping shoulders and lifted their heads, and a flash
of momentary animation kindled their dull eyes at that cold, vibrant scream, the world-wide call
for men. It stirred them like the note of
The night express shot, red as a rocket, from out the eastward marsh lands and wound along the river shore under the long lines of shivering poplars that sentinelled the meadows, the escaping steam hanging in grey masses against the pale sky and blotting out the Milky Way. In a moment the red glare from the headlight streamed up the snow-covered track before the siding and glittered on the wet, black rails. The burly man with the disheveled red beard walked swiftly up the platform toward the approaching train, uncovering his head as he went. The group of men behind him hesitated, glanced questioningly at one another, and awkwardly followed his example. The train stopped, and the crowd shuffled up to the express car just as the door was thrown open, the spare man in the G.A.R. suit thrusting his head forward with curiosity. The express messenger appeared in the doorway, accompanied by a young man in a long ulster and travelling cap.
"Are Mr. Merrick's friends here?" inquired the young man.
The group on the platform swayed and shuffled
"Send the agent out here," growled the express messenger, "and tell the operator to lend a hand."
The coffin was got out of its rough box and down on the snowy platform. The townspeople drew back enough to make room for it and then formed a close semicircle about it, looking curiously at the palm leaf which lay across the black cover. No one said anything. The baggage man stood by his truck, waiting to get at the trunks. The engine panted heavily, and the fireman dodged in and out among the wheels with his yellow torch and long oil-can, snapping the spindle boxes. The young Bostonian, one of the dead sculptor's pupils who had come with the body, looked about him helplessly. He turned to the banker, the only one of that black, uneasy, stoop-shouldered group who seemed enough of an individual to be addressed.
"None of Mr. Merrick's brothers are here?" he asked uncertainly.
The man with the red beard for the first time
"Take the long hill road up, Thompson, it will be easier on the horses," called the liveryman as the undertaker snapped the door of the hearse and prepared to mount to the driver's seat.
Laird, the red-bearded lawyer, turned again to the stranger: "We didn't know whether there would be any one with him or not," he explained. "It's a long walk, so you'd better go up in the hack." He pointed to a single battered conveyance, but the young man replied stiffly: "Thank you, but I think I will go up with the hearse. If you don't object," turning to the undertaker, "I'll ride with you."
They clambered up over the wheels and drove off in the starlight up the long, white hill toward the town. The lamps in the still village were shining from under the low, snow-burdened roofs; and beyond, on every side, the plains reached out into emptiness, peaceful and wide as the soft sky itself, and wrapped in a tangible, white silence.
When the hearse backed up to a wooden side-
The grating sound made by the casket, as it was drawn from the hearse, was answered by a scream from the house; the front door was wrenched open, and a tall, corpulent woman rushed out bareheaded into the snow and flung herself upon the coffin, shrieking: "My boy, my boy! And this is how you've come home to me!"
As Steavens turned away and closed his eyes with a shudder of unutterable repulsion, another woman, also tall, but flat and angular, dressed entirely in black, darted out of the house and caught Mrs. Merrick by the shoulders, crying sharply: "Come, come, mother; you musn't go on like this!" Her tone changed to one of obsequious solemnity as she turned to the banker: "The parlour is ready, Mr. Phelps."
The bearers carried the coffin along the narrow boards, while the undertaker ran ahead with the coffin-rests. They bore it into a large, unheated room that smelled of dampness and disuse and furniture polish, and set it down under a hanging lamp ornamented with jingling glass prisms and before a "Rogers group" of John Alden and Priscilla, wreathed with smilax. Henry Steavens stared about him with the sickening conviction that there had been some horrible mistake, and that he had somehow arrived at the wrong destination. He looked painfully about over the clover-green Brussels, the fat plush upholstery; among the hand-painted china plaques and panels, and vases, for some mark of identification, for something that might once conceivably have belonged to Harvey Merrick. It was not until he recognized his friend in the crayon portrait of a little boy in kilts and curls hanging above the piano, that he felt willing to let any of these people approach the coffin.
"Take the lid off, Mr. Thompson; let me see my boy's face," wailed the elder woman between her
sobs. This time Steavens looked fearfully, almost beseechingly into her face, red and swollen
under its masses of strong, black, shiny hair. He
The daughter—the tall, raw-boned woman in crêpe, with a mourning comb in her hair
which curiously lengthened her long face—sat stiffly upon the sofa, her hands, conspicuous for
their large knuckles, folded in her lap, her mouth and eyes drawn down, solemnly awaiting the opening of
the coffin. Near the door stood a mulatto woman, evidently a servant in the house, with a timid bearing
and an emaciated face pitifully sad and gentle. She was weeping silently, the corner of her calico
apron lifted to her eyes, occa-
Feeble steps were heard on the stairs, and an old man, tall and frail, odorous of pipe smoke, with shaggy, unkept grey hair and a dingy beard, tobacco-stained about the mouth, entered uncertainly. He went slowly up to the coffin and stood rolling a blue cotton handkerchief between his hands, seeming so pained and embarrassed by his wife's orgy of grief that he had no consciousness of anything else.
"There, there, Annie, dear, don't take on," he quavered timidly, putting out a shaking hand
and awkwardly patting her elbow. She turned with a cry, and sank upon his shoulder with such
violence that he tottered a little. He did not even glance toward the coffin, but continued to look
at her with a dull, frightened, appealing expression, as a spaniel looks at the whip. His sunken
cheeks slowly reddened and burned with miserable shame. When his wife rushed from the room, her
daughter strode after her with set lips. The servant stole up to the coffin, bent over it for a
moment, and then slipped away to the kitchen, leaving Steavens, the lawyer and the father to themselves.
The old man stood trembling and looking
The old man's lips were working under his stained beard. He turned to the lawyer with timid deference: "Phelps and the rest are comin' back to set up with Harve, ain't they?" he asked. "Thank 'ee, Jim, thank 'ee." He brushed the hair back gently from his son's forehead. "He was a good boy, Jim; always a good boy. He was ez gentle ez a child and the kindest of 'em all—only we didn't none of us ever onderstand him." The tears trickled slowly down his beard and dropped upon the sculptor's coat.
"Martin, Martin. Oh, Martin! come here," his wife wailed from the top of the stairs. The old man started timorously: "Yes, Annie, I'm coming." He turned away, hesitated, stood for a moment in miserable indecision; then reached back and patted the dead man's hair softly, and stumbled from the room.
"Poor old man, I didn't think he had any tears left. Seems as if his eyes would have gone dry long ago. At his age nothing cuts very deep," remarked the lawyer.
Something in his tone made Steavens glance up. While the mother had been in the room, the young man had scarcely seen any one else; but now, from the moment he first glanced into Jim Laird's florid face and blood-shot eyes, he knew that he had found what he had been heartsick at not finding before—the feeling, the understanding, that must exist in some one, even here.
The man was red as his beard, with features swollen and blurred by dissipation, and a hot, blazing
blue eye. His face was strained—that of a man who is controlling himself with difficulty—
and he kept plucking at his beard with a sort of fierce resentment. Steavens, sitting by the window, watched
him turn down the glaring
From the kitchen an uproar was sounding; when the dining-room door opened, the import of it was clear. The mother was abusing the maid for having forgotten to make the dressing for the chicken salad which had been prepared for the watchers. Steavens had never heard anything in the least like it; it was injured, emotional, dramatic abuse, unique and masterly in its excruciating cruelty, as violent and unrestrained as had been her grief of twenty minutes before. With a shudder of disgust, the lawyer went into the dining-room and closed the door into the kitchen.
"Poor Roxy's getting it now," he remarked when he came back. "The Merricks took her out of the poor-house
years ago; and if her loyalty would let her, I guess the poor old thing could tell tales that would curdle
your blood. She's the mulatto woman who was standing in here a while ago, with her apron to her eyes. The old
woman is a fury; there never was anybody like her for
"He was wonderful," said Steavens slowly, "wonderful; but until to-night I have never known how wonderful."
"That is the true and eternal wonder of it, anyway; that it can come even from such a dung-heap as this," the lawyer cried, with a sweeping gesture which seemed to indicate much more than the four walls within which they stood.
"I think I'll see whether I can get a little air. The room is so close I am beginning to feel
rather faint," murmured Steavens, struggling with one of the windows. The sash was stuck, however,
and would not yield, so he sat down dejectedly and began pulling at his collar. The lawyer came
over, loosened the sash with one blow of his red fist and sent the window up a few inches. Steavens
thanked him, but the nausea which had been gradually climbing into his throat for the last half hour
left him with but one desire—a desperate feeling that he must get away from this place with what
was left of Harvey Merrick. Oh, he comprehended well enough
He remembered that once, when Merrick returned from a visit home, he brought with him a singularly feeling and suggestive bas-relief of a thin, faded old woman, sitting and sewing something pinned to her knee; while a full-lipped, full-blooded little urchin, his trousers held up by a single gallows, stood beside her, impatiently twitching her gown to call her attention to a butterfly he had caught. Steavens, impressed by the tender and delicate modelling of the thin, tired face, had asked him if it were his mother. He remembered the dull flush that had burned up in the sculptor's face.
The lawyer was sitting in a rocking-chair beside the coffin, his head thrown back and his eyes closed. Steavens looked at him earnestly, puzzled at the line of the chin, and wondering why a man should conceal a feature of such distinction under that disfiguring shock of beard. Suddenly, as though he felt the young sculptor's keen glance, he opened his eyes.
"Was he always a good deal of an oyster?" he asked abruptly. "He was terribly shy as a boy."
"Yes, he was an oyster, since you put it so,"
"A burnt dog dreads the fire," said the lawyer grimly, and closed his eyes.
Steavens went on and on, reconstructing that whole miserable boyhood. All this raw, biting ugliness
had been the portion of the man whose tastes were refined beyond the limits of the reasonable—whose
mind was an exhaustless gallery of beautiful impressions, and so sensitive that the mere shadow of a
poplar leaf flickering against a sunny wall would be etched and held there forever. Surely, if ever a
man had the magic wand in his finger-tips, it was Merrick. Whatever he touched, he revealed its holiest
secret; liberated it from enchantment and restored it to its pristine loveliness, like the Arabian prince
who fought the enchantress spell for spell. Upon
Steavens understood now the real tragedy of his master's life; neither love nor wine, as many had conjectured; but a blow which had fallen earlier and cut deeper than these could have done—a shame not his, and yet so unescapably his, to hide in his heart from his very boyhood. And without— the frontier warfare; the yearning of a boy, cast ashore upon a desert of newness and ugliness and sordidness, for all that is chastened and old, and noble with traditions.
At eleven o'clock the tall, flat woman in black crêpe entered and announced that the watchers were arriving, and asked them "to step into the dining-room." As Steavens rose, the lawyer said dryly: "You go on—it'll be a good experience for you, doubtless; as for me, I'm not equal to that crowd to-night; I've had twenty years of them."
As Steavens closed the door after him he glanced back at the lawyer, sitting by the coffin in the dim light, with his chin resting on his hand.
The same misty group that had stood before the door of the express car shuffled into the dining-
"S'pose there'll be a will, Phelps?" he queried in his weak falsetto.
The banker laughed disagreeably, and began trimming his nails with a pearl-handled pocket-knife.
"There'll scarcely be any need for one, will there?" he queried in his turn.
The restless Grand Army man shifted his position again, getting his knees still nearer his chin. "Why, the ole man says Harve's done right well lately," he chirped.
The other banker spoke up. "I reckon he means by that Harve ain't asked him to mortgage any more farms lately, so as he could go on with his education."
"Seems like my mind don't reach back to a time when Harve wasn't bein' edycated," tittered the Grand Army man.
There was a general chuckle. The minister took out his handkerchief and blew his nose sonorously.
Banker Phelps closed his knife with a snap. "It's too bad the old man's sons didn't turn out better,"
he remarked with reflective authority. "They never hung together. He spent money enough on Harve to
stock a dozen cattle-farms and he might as well have poured it into Sand Creek. If Harve had stayed
at home and helped nurse what little they had, and gone into
"Harve never could have handled stock none," interposed the cattleman. "He hadn't it in him to be
sharp. Do you remember when he bought Sander's mules for eight-year olds, when everybody in town knew
that Sander's father-in-law give 'em to his wife for a wedding present eighteen years before, an' they
was full-grown mules then
Every one chuckled, and the Grand Army man rubbed his knees with a spasm of childish delight.
"Harve never was much account for anything practical, and he shore was never fond of work," began
the coal and lumber dealer. "I mind the last time he was home; the day he left, when the old man was
out to the barn helpin' his hand hitch up to take Harve to the train, and Cal Moots was patchin' up the
fence, Harve, he come out on the step and sings out, in his ladylike voice:
"That's Harve for you," approved the Grand
"Where the old man made his mistake was in sending the boy East to school," said Phelps, stroking his goatee and speaking in a deliberate, judicial tone. "There was where he got his head full of trapseing to Paris and all such folly. What Harve needed, of all people, was a course in some first-class Kansas City business college."
The letters were swimming before Steaven's eyes. Was it possible that these men did not understand,
that the palm on the coffin meant nothing to them? The very name of their town would have remained
forever buried in the postal guide had it not been now and again mentioned in the world in connection
with Harvey
The cattleman took up the comment. "Forty's young for a Merrick to cash in; they usually hang on pretty well. Probably he helped it along with whisky."
"His mother's people were not long lived, and Harvey never had a robust constitution," said the minister
mildly. He would have liked to say more. He had been the boy's Sunday-school teacher, and had been fond of
him; but he felt that he was not in a position to speak. His own sons had turned out badly, and it was not
a year since one of them had made his last trip home in
"Nevertheless, there is no disputin' that Harve frequently looked upon the wine when it was red, also variegated, and it shore made an oncommon fool of him," moralized the cattleman.
Just then the door leading into the parlour rattled loudly and every one started involuntarily, looking relieved when only Jim Laird came out. His red face was convulsed with anger, and the Grand Army man ducked his head when he saw the spark in his blue, blood-shot eye. They were all afraid of Jim; he was a drunkard, but he could twist the law to suit his client's needs as no other man in all western Kansas could do; and there were many who tried. The lawyer closed the door gently behind him, leaned back against it and folded his arms, cocking his head a little to one side. When he assumed this attitude in the court-room, ears were always pricked up, as it usually foretold a flood of withering sarcasm.
"I've been with you gentlemen before," he began in a dry, even tone, "when you've sat by the coffins
of boys born and raised in this town; and, if I remember rightly, you were never any too well
satisfied when you checked them up.
The lawyer paused and unfolded his arms, laying one clenched fist quietly on the table.
"I'll tell you why. Because you drummed nothing but money and knavery into their ears from the time
they wore knickerbockers; because you carped away at them as you've been carping here to-night,
holding our friends Phelps and Elder up to them for their models, as our grandfathers held up
George Washington and John Adams. But the boys, worse luck, were young, and raw at the business you
put them to; and how could they match coppers with such artists
"Old Nimrod, here, thinks Harve drank too much; and this from such as Nimrod and me!
"Brother Elder says Harve was too free with the old man's money—fell short in filial consideration, maybe. Well, we can all remember the very tone in which brother Elder swore his own father was a liar, in the county court; and we all know that the old man came out of that partnership with his son as bare as a sheared lamb. But maybe I'm getting personal, and I'd better be driving ahead at what I want to say."
The lawyer paused a moment, squared his
"Well, I came back here and became the damned shyster you wanted me to be. You pretend
to have some sort of respect for me; and yet you'll stand up and throw mud at Harvey Mer-
"And we? Now that we've fought and lied and sweated and stolen and hated as only the disappointed strugglers in a bitter, dead little Western town know how to do, what have we got to show for it? Harvey Merrick wouldn't have given one sunset over your marshes for all you've got put together, and you know it. It's not for me to say why, in the inscrutable wisdom of God, a genius should ever have been called from this place of hatred and bitter waters; but I want this Boston man to know that the drivel he's been hearing here to-night is the only tribute any truly great man could ever have from such a lot of sick, side-tracked, burnt-dog, land-poor sharks as the here-present financiers of Sand City—upon which town may God have mercy!"
The lawyer thrust out his hand to Steavens as
Next day Jim Laird was drunk and unable to attend the funeral services. Steavens called twice at his office, but was compelled to start East without seeing him. He had a presentiment that he would hear from him again, and left his address on the lawyer's table; but if Laird found it, he never acknowledged it. The thing in him that Harvey Merrick had loved must have gone under ground with Harvey Merrick's coffin; for it never spoke again, and Jim got the cold he died of driving across the Colorado mountains to defend one of Phelps's sons who had got into trouble out there by cutting government timber.
When Caroline Noble's friends learned that Raymond d'Esquerré was to
spend a month at her place on the Sound before he sailed to fill his engagement
for the London opera season, they considered it another striking instance of
the perversity of things. That the month was May, and the most mild and florescent
of all the blue-and-white Mays the middle coast had known in years, but added to
their sense of wrong. D'Esquerré, they learned, was ensconced in the lodge in
the apple orchard, just beyond Caroline's glorious garden, and report went that at
almost any hour the sound of the tenor's voice and of Caroline's crashing
accompaniment could be heard floating through the open windows, out among
the snowy apple boughs. The Sound, steel-blue and dotted with white sails,
was splendidly seen from the windows of the lodge. The garden to the left
and the orchard to the right had never been so riotous
Of course, they admitted, Caroline was musical—well, she ought to be!—but in that as in everything she was paramountly cool-headed, slow of impulse, and disgustingly practical; in that, as in everything else, she had herself so provokingly well in hand. Of course it would be she, always mistress of herself in any situation, she who would never be lifted one inch from the ground by it, and who would go on superintending her gardeners and workmen as usual, it would be she who got him. Perhaps some of them suspected that this was exactly why she did get him, and it but nettled them the more.
Caroline's coolness, her capableness, her general success, especially exasperated
people because they felt that, for the most part, she had made herself what she was; that
she had cold-bloodedly set about complying with the demands of life and making her position
comforta-
The impression of cold calculation, of having a definite policy, which Caroline gave, was far from a false one; but there was this to be said for her, that there were extenuating circumstances which her friends could not know.
If Caroline held determinedly to the middle course, if she was apt to regard
with distrust everything which inclined toward extravagance, it was not because
she was unacquainted with other standards than her own, or had never seen another
side of life. She had grown up in Brooklyn, in a shabby little house under the
vacillating administration of her father, a music teacher who usually neglected
his duties to write orchestral compositions for which the world seemed to have
no especial need. His spirit was
It was not a cheerful home for a girl to grow up in. The mother, who idolized her husband as the music lord of the future, was left to a life-long battle with broom and dust-pan, to never ending conciliatory overtures to the butcher and grocer, to the making of her own gowns and of Caroline's, and to the delicate task of mollifying Auguste's neglected pupils.
The son, Heinrich, a painter, Caroline's only brother, had inherited all
his father's vindictive sensitiveness without his capacity for slavish application.
His little studio on the third floor had been much frequented by young men as
unsuccessful as himself, who met there to give themselves over to contemptuous
derision of this or that artist whose industry and stupidity had won him recognition.
Heinrich, when he worked at all, did newspaper sketches at twenty-five dollars a
week. He was too indolent and
After her mother's death Caroline assumed the management of that bankrupt
establishment. The funeral expenses were unpaid, and Auguste's pupils had been
frightened away by the shock of successive disasters and the general atmosphere
of wretchedness that pervaded the house. Auguste himself was writing a symphonic poem,
Icarus, dedicated to the memory of his son. Caroline was barely twenty when she
was called upon to face this tangle of difficulties, but she reviewed the situation
can-
From her childhood she had hated it, that humiliating and uncertain existence,
with its glib tongue and empty pockets, its poetic ideals and sordid realities,
its indolence and poverty tricked out in paper roses. Even as a little girl,
when vague dreams beset her, when she wanted to lie late in bed and commune with
visions, or to leap and sing because the sooty little trees
When she came into the control of herself and the house, she refused
to proceed any further with her musical education. Her father, who had intended
to make a concert pianist of her, set
When Caroline was twenty-four she married Howard Noble, then a widower
of forty, who had been for ten years a power in Wall
Caroline had been married for six years when Raymond d'Esquerré came to stay with them. He came chiefly because Caroline was what she was; because he, too, felt occasionally the need of getting out of Klingsor's garden, of dropping down somewhere for a time near a quiet nature, a cool head, a strong hand. The hours he had spent in the garden lodge were hours of such concentrated study as, in his fevered life, he seldom got in anywhere. She had, as he told Noble, a fine appreciation of the seriousness of work.
One evening two weeks after d'Esquerré had sailed, Caroline was in
the library giving her husband an account of the work she had laid out
"What do you think, Caroline, of having the garden lodge torn down and putting a new summer house there at the end of the arbour; a big rustic affair where you could have tea served in mid-summer?" he asked.
"The lodge?" repeated Caroline looking at him quickly. "Why, that seems almost a shame, doesn't it, after d'Esquerré has used it?"
Noble put down his book with a smile of amusement.
"Are you going to be sentimental about it? Why, I'd sacrifice the whole place to see that come to pass. But I don't believe you could do it for an hour together."
"I don't believe so, either," said his wife, smiling.
Noble took up his book again and Caroline went into the music-room to practise.
She was not ready to have the lodge torn down. She had gone there for a quiet hour
every day during the two weeks since d'Esquerré had left them. It
Caroline went to bed soon after her husband, but she was not able to sleep.
The night was close and warm, presaging storm. The wind had fallen and the water
slept, fixed and motionless as the sand. She rose and thrust her feet into
slippers and putting a dressing-gown over her shoulders opened the door of her
husband's room; he was sleeping soundly. She went into the hall and down the stairs;
then, leaving the house through a side door, stepped into the vine covered arbour
that led to the garden lodge. The scent of the June roses was heavy in the still
air, and the stones that paved the path felt pleasantly cool through the
thin soles of her slippers. Heat-lightning flashed continuously from the
bank of clouds that had gathered over the sea, but the shore was flooded
with moonlight and, beyond, the rim of the Sound lay smooth and shining.
Caroline had the key of the lodge, and the door creaked as she opened it.
She stepped into the long, low room radiant with the moonlight which streamed
through the bow window and lay in a silvery pool along the waxed floor.
Even that
It was a mistake, she felt, ever to have asked d'Esquerré to come at all.
She had an angry feeling that she had done it rather in self-defiance, to rid
herself finally of that instinctive
And d'Esquerré was a man to reckon with. Caroline did not deceive herself
now upon that score. She admitted it humbly enough, and since she had said
good-bye to him she had not been free for a moment from the sense of his
formidable power. It formed the undercurrent of her consciousness; whatever
she might be doing or thinking, it went on, involuntarily, like her breathing;
sometimes welling up until suddenly she found herself suffocating. There was
a moment of this to-night, and Caroline rose and stood shuddering, looking about
her in the blue duskiness of the silent room. She had not been
Yes, she knew, she knew well enough, of what absurdities this spell was woven;
she mocked, even while she winced. His power she knew, lay not so much in anything
that he actually had—though he had so much—or in anything that he actually
was; but in what he suggested, in what he seemed picturesque enough to have or be—
and that was just anything that one chose to believe or to desire. His appeal was all
the more persuasive and alluring that it was to the imagination alone, that it was as indefinite
and impersonal as those cults of idealism which so have their way with women. What he
had was that, in his mere personality, he quickened and in a
D'Esquerré had become the centre of a movement, and the Metropolitan had become the temple of a cult. When he could be induced to cross the Atlantic, the opera season in New York was successful; when he could not, the management lost money; so much everyone knew. It was understood, too, that his superb art had disproportionately little to do with his peculiar position. Women swayed the balance this way or that; the opera, the orchestra, even his own glorious art, achieved at such a cost, were but the accessories of himself; like the scenery and costumes and even the soprano, they all went to produce atmosphere, were the mere mechanics of the beautiful illusion.
Caroline understood all this; to-night was not the first time that she had put it to herself so. She had seen the same feeling in other people; watched for it in her friends, studied it in the house night after night when he sang, candidly putting herself among a thousand others.
D'Esquerré's arrival in the early winter was the signal for a feminine hegira toward New York. On the nights when he sang, women flocked to the Metropolitan from mansions and hotels, from typewriter desks, school-rooms, shops and fitting-rooms. They were of all conditions and complexions. Women of the world who accepted him knowingly, as they sometimes took champagne for its agreeable effect; sisters of charity and overworked shop-girls, who received him devoutly; withered women who had taken doctorate degrees and who worshipped furtively through prism spectacles; business women and women of affairs, the Amazons who dwelt afar from men in the stony fastnesses of apartment houses. They all entered into the same romance; dreamed, in terms as various as the hues of phantasy, the same dream; drew the same quick breath when he stepped upon the stage, and, at his exit, felt the same dull pain of shouldering the pack again.
There were the maimed, even; those who came on crutches, who were pitted
by smallpox or grotesquely painted by cruel birth stains. These, too, entered
with him into enchantment. Stout matrons became slender girls again; worn
Sometimes when the house was crowded from the orchestra to the last row of the gallery, when the air was charged with this ecstasy of fancy, he himself was the victim of the burning reflection of his power. They acted upon him in turn; he felt their fervent and despairing appeal to him; it stirred him as the spring drives the sap up into an old tree; he, too, burst into bloom. For the moment he, too, believed again, desired again, he knew not what, but something.
But it was not in these exalted moments that Caroline had learned to fear
him most. It was in the quiet, tired reserve, the dullness, even, that kept
him company between these outbursts that she found that exhausting drain
upon her sympathies which was the very pith and substance of their alliance.
It was the tacit admission of disappointment under all this glamour of
success—the helplessness of the enchanter to at an enchant himself—
that awoke in her an illogical,
She had observed drastically to herself that it was her eighteenth year he awoke in her—those hard years she had spent in turning gowns and placating tradesmen, and which she had never had time to live. After all, she reflected, it was better to allow one's self a little youth; to dance a little at the carnival and to live these things when they are natural and lovely, not to have them coming back on one and demanding arrears when they are humiliating and impossible. She went over to-night all the catalogue of her self-deprivations; recalled how, in the light of her father's example, she had even refused to humour her innocent taste for improvising at the piano; how, when she began to teach, after her mother's death, she had struck out one little indulgence after another, reducing her life to a relentless routine, unvarying as clockwork. It seemed to her that ever since d'Esquerré first came into the house she had been haunted by an imploring little girlish ghost that followed her about, wringing its hands and entreating for an hour of life.
The storm had held off unconscionably long;
Walküre, the last of his rôles they had practised
together; playing listlessly and absently at first, but with gradually
increasing seriousness. Perhaps it was the still heat of the summer night,
perhaps it was the heavy odours from the garden that came in through the open
windows; but as she played there grew and grew the feeling that he was there,
beside her, standing in his accustomed place. In the duett at the end of the
first act she heard him clearly: "Thou art the Spring for
which I sighed in Winter's cold embraces."
Sieglinde when he drew her toward the window.
She had been wonderfully the mistress of herself at the time; neither Thou art the Spring for which I sighed in Winter's cold
embraces." Caroline lifted her hands quickly from the keyboard, and she
bowed her head in them, sobbing.
The storm broke and the rain beat in, spattering her night-dress until
she rose and lowered the windows. She dropped upon the couch and began fighting
over again the battles of other days, while the ghosts of the slain rose as from
a sowing of dragon's teeth. The shadows of things, always so scorned and flouted,
bore down upon her merciless and triumphant. It was not enough; this happy, useful,
well-ordered life was not enough. It did not satisfy, it was not even real. No, the other
things, the shadows—they were
The lodge was still and silent; her fit of weeping over, Caroline made no sound, and within the room, as without in the garden, was the blackness of storm. Only now and then a flash of lightning showed a woman's slender figure rigid on the couch, her face buried in her hands.
Toward morning, when the occasional rumbling of thunder was heard no
more and the beat of the rain drops upon the orchard leaves was steadier,
she fell asleep and did not waken until the first red streaks of dawn shone
through the twisted boughs of the apple trees. There was a moment between
world and world, when, neither asleep nor awake, she felt her dream grow
thin, melting away from her, felt the warmth under her heart growing cold.
Something seemed to slip from the clinging hold of her arms, and she groaned
protestingly through her parted lips,
The dream was gone, but the feverish reality of it still pervaded her
and she held it as the vibrating string holds a tone. In the last hour
the shadows had had their way with Caroline. They had shown her the
nothingness of time and space, of system and discipline, of closed doors
and broad waters. Shuddering, she thought of the Arabian fairy tale in
which the Genii brought the princess of China to the sleeping
prince of Damascus, and carried her through the air back to her palace
at dawn. Caroline closed her eyes and dropped her elbows weakly upon her
knees, her shoulders sinking together. The horror was that it had not come
from without, but from within. The dream was no blind chance; it was the
expression of something she had kept so close a prisoner that she had never
seen it herself; it was the wail from the donjon deeps when the watch slept.
Only as the outcome of such a night of sorcery could the thing have been
loosed
Caroline rose unsteadily and crept guiltily from the lodge and along
the path under the arbour, terrified
At breakfast her husband looked across the table at her with concern. "It seems to me that you are looking rather fagged, Caroline. It was a beastly night to sleep. Why don't you go up to the mountains until this hot weather is over? By the way, were you in earnest about letting the lodge stand?"
Caroline laughed quietly. "No, I find I was
Noble gave her a glance, half humorous, half vexed. "Do you know I am rather disappointed?" he said. "I had almost hoped that, just for once, you know, you would be a little bit foolish."
"Not now that I've slept over it," replied Caroline, and they both rose from the table, laughing.
Everett Hilgarde was conscious that the man in the seat across the aisle was looking at him intently. He was a large, florid man, wore a conspicuous diamond solitaire upon his third finger, and Everett judged him to be a travelling salesman of some sort. He had the air of an adaptable fellow who had been about the world and who could keep cool and clean under almost any circumstances.
The "High Line Flyer," as this train was derisively called among railroad men, was jerking along through
the hot afternoon over the monotonous country between Holdridge and Cheyenne. Besides the blond man and himself the only occupants of the car were two dusty, bedraggled-looking girls who had been to the Exposition at Chicago, and who were earnestly discussing the cost of their first trip out of Colorado. The four uncomfortable passengers
were covered
As the slanting rays of the sun beat in stronger and stronger through the car-windows, the blond gentleman asked
the ladies' permission to remove his coat, and sat in his lavender striped shirt-sleeves, with a black silk handkerchief
tucked carefully about his collar. He had seemed interested in Everett since they had boarded the train at Holdridge, and kept glancing at him curiously and then looking reflectively out of the window, as though he were trying to recall something. But wherever Everett went someone was almost sure to look at him with that curious interest, and it had ceased to embarrass or annoy him. Presently the stranger, seeming satisfied with his observation, leaned back in his seat, half closed his eyes,
Proserpine, the cantata that a dozen years before
had made its young composer famous in a night. Everett had heard that air on guitars in Old Mexico, on mandolins at college
glees, on cottage organs in New England hamlets, and only two weeks ago he had heard it played on sleighbells
at a variety theatre in Denver. There was literally no way of escaping his brother's precocity. Adriance could live
on the other side of the Atlantic, where his youthful indiscretions were forgotten in his mature achievements, but his brother had never been able to outrun Proserpine, and here he found it again in the Colorado sand-hills. Not that Everett was exactly ashamed of Proserpine; only a man of genius could have written it, but it was the sort of thing that a man of genius outgrows as soon as he can.
Everett unbent a trifle, and smiled at his neighbour across the aisle. Immediately the large man rose and coming over dropped into the seat facing Hilgarde, extending his card.
"Dusty ride, isn't it? I don't mind it myself; I'm used to it. Born and bred in de briar patch, like Br'er Rabbit.
I've been trying to place you
"Thank you," said Everett, taking the card; "my name is Hilgarde. You've probably met my brother, Adriance; people often mistake me for him."
The travelling-man brought his hand down upon his knee with such vehemence that the solitaire blazed.
"So I was right after all, and if you're not Adriance Hilgarde you're his double. I thought I couldn't be mistaken.
Seen him? Well, I guess! I never missed one of his recitals at the Auditorium, and he played the piano score of Proserpine through to us once at the Chicago Press Club. I used to be on the Commercial there before I began to travel for the publishing department of the concern. So you're Hilgarde's brother, and here I've run into you at the jumping-off place. Sounds like a newspaper yarn, doesn't it?"
The travelling-man laughed and offered Everett a cigar and plied him with questions on the only subject that people ever seemed to care to talk to Everett about. At length the salesman and the two girls alighted at a Colorado way station, and Everett went on to Cheyenne alone.
The train pulled into Cheyenne at nine o'clock, late by a matter of four hours or so; but no one seemed particularly concerned at its tardiness except the station agent, who grumbled at being kept in the office over time on a summer night. When Everett alighted from the train he walked down the platform and stopped at the track crossing, uncertain as to what direction he should take to reach a hotel. A phaeton stood near the crossing and a woman held the reins. She was dressed in white and her figure was clearly silhouetted against the cushions, though it was too dark to see her face. Everett had scarcely noticed her, when the switch-engine came puffing up from the opposite direction, and the head-light threw a strong glare of light on his face. Suddenly the woman in the phaeton uttered a low cry and dropped the reins. Everett started forward and caught the horse's head, but the animal only lifted its ears and whisked its tail in impatient surprise. The woman sat perfectly still, her head sunk between her shoulders and her handkerchief pressed to her face. Another woman came out of the depot and hurried toward the phaeton, crying, "Katharine, dear, what is the matter?"
Everett hesitated a moment in painful embarrassment, then lifted his hat and passed on. He was accustomed to sudden recognitions in the most impossible places, especially by women, but this cry out of the night had shaken him.
While Everett was breakfasting the next morning, the head waiter leaned over his chair to murmur that there was a gentleman waiting to see him in the parlour. Everett finished his coffee, and went in the direction indicated, where he found his visitor restlessly pacing the floor. His whole manner betrayed a high degree of nervous agitation, though his physique was not that of a man whose nerves lie near the surface. He was something below medium height, square-shouldered and solidly built. His thick, closely cut hair was beginning to show grey about the ears, and his bronzed face was heavily lined. His square brown hands were locked behind him, and he held his shoulders like a man conscious of responsibilities, yet, as he turned to greet Everett, there was an incongruous diffidence in his address.
"Good-morning, Mr. Hilgarde," he said, extending his hand; "I found your name on the hotel register. My name is
Gaylord; I'm afraid
"Ah! the young lady in the phaeton? I'm sure I didn't know whether I had anything to do with her alarm or not. If I did, it is I who owe the apology."
The man coloured a little under the dark brown on his face.
"Oh, it's nothing you could help, sir, I fully understand that. You see, my sister used to be a pupil of your brother's, and it seems you favour him, and when the switch-engine threw a light on your face it startled her."
Everett wheeled about in his chair. "Oh!
"Is she doing here?" said Gaylord, grimly filling out the pause. "You've got at the heart of the matter. You knew my sister had been in bad health for a long time?"
"No, I had never heard a word of that. The last I knew of her she was singing in London. My brother and I correspond
infrequently, and seldom get beyond family matters. I am deeply
The lines in Charley Gaylord's brow relaxed a little.
"What I'm trying to say, Mr. Hilgarde, is that she wants to see you. I hate to ask you, but she's so set on it. We live several miles out of town, but my rig's below, and I can take you out any time you can go."
"I can go now, and it will give me real pleasure to do so," said Everett, quickly. "I'll get my hat and be with you in a moment."
When he came downstairs Everett found a cart at the door, and Charley Gaylord drew a long sigh of relief as he gathered up the reins and settled back into his own element.
"You see, I think I'd better tell you something about my sister before you see her, and I don't know just where to begin. She travelled in Europe with your brother and his wife, and sang at a lot of his concerts; but I don't know just how much you know about her."
"Very little, except that my brother always thought her the most gifted of his pupils, and that when I knew her she was very young and very beautiful and turned my head sadly for a while."
Everett saw that Gaylord's mind was quite engrossed by his grief. He was wrought up to the point where his reserve and sense of proportion had quite left him, and his trouble was the one vital thing in the world. "That's the whole thing," he went on, flecking his horses with the whip.
"She was a great woman, as you say, and she didn't come of a great family. She had to fight her own way from the first. She got to Chicago, and then to New York, and then to Europe, where she went up like lightning, and got a taste for it all; and now she's dying here like a rat in a hole, out of her own world, and she can't fall back into ours. We've grown apart, some way—miles and miles apart— and I'm afraid she's fearfully unhappy."
"It's a very tragic story that you are telling, Gaylord," said Everett. They were well out into the country now, spinning along over the dusty plains of red grass, with the ragged blue outline of the mountains before them.
"Tragic!" cried Gaylord, starting up in his seat, "my God, man, nobody will ever know how tragic. It's a tragedy
I live with and eat with and sleep with, until I've lost my grip on everything. You see she had made a good bit
of money,
Everett saw that, whatever Charley Gaylord's present status in the world might be, he had brought the brakeman's heart up the ladder with him, and the brakeman's frank avowal of sentiment. Presently Gaylord went on:
"You can understand how she has outgrown her family. We're all a pretty common sort, railroaders from away
back. My father was a con-
The reins slackened in Charley Gaylord's hand as they drew up before a showily painted house with many gables and a round tower. "Here we are," he said, turning to Everett, "and I guess we understand each other."
They were met at the door by a thin, colourless woman, whom Gaylord introduced as "My sister, Maggie." She asked her brother to show Mr. Hilgarde into the music-room, where Katharine wished to see him alone.
When Everett entered the music-room he gave a little start of surprise, feeling that he had stepped from the glaring Wyoming sunlight into some New York studio that he had always known. He wondered which it was of those countless studios, high up under the roofs, over banks and shops and wholesale houses, that this room resembled, and he looked incredulously out of the window at the grey plain that ended in the great upheaval of the Rockies.
The haunting air of familiarity about the room perplexed him. Was it a copy of some particular studio he knew, or was it merely the studio atmosphere that seemed so individual and poignantly reminiscent here in Wyoming? He sat down in a reading-chair and looked keenly about him. Suddenly his eye fell upon a large photograph of his brother above the piano. Then it all became clear to him: this was veritably his brother's room. If it were not an exact copy of one of the many studios that Adriance had fitted up in various parts of the world, wearying of them and leaving almost before the renovator's varnish had dried, it was at least in the same tone. In every detail Adriance's taste was so manifest that the room seemed to exhale his personality.
Among the photographs on the wall there was one of Katharine Gaylord, taken in the days when Everett had known
her, and when the flash of her eye or the flutter of her skirt was enough to set his boyish heart in a tumult.
Even now, he stood before the portrait with a certain degree of embarrassment. It was the face of a woman already
old in her first youth, thoroughly sophisticated and a trifle hard, and it told of what her brother had called her
fight. The
Everett was still standing before the picture, his hands behind him and his head inclined, when he heard the door open. A very tall woman advanced toward him, holding out her hand. As she started to speak she coughed slightly, then, laughing, said, in a low, rich voice, a trifle husky: "You see I make the traditional Camille entrance—with the cough. How good of you to come, Mr. Hilgarde."
Everett was acutely conscious that while addressing him she was not looking at him at all, and, as he assured her
of his pleasure in coming, he was glad to have an opportunity to collect himself. He had not reckoned upon the ravages
of a long illness. The long, loose folds of her white gown had been especially designed to conceal the sharp outlines
of her emaciated body, but the stamp of her disease was there, simple and ugly and obtrusive, a pitiless fact that could
not be disguised or evaded. The splendid shoulders were stooped, there was a swaying unevenness in her gait, her arms seemed disproportionately long, and her hands were transparently white, and cold to the touch. The changes in her face were less ob-
She sat down upon the divan and began nervously to arrange the pillows. "I know I'm not an inspiring object to look upon, but you must be quite frank and sensible about that and get used to it at once, for we've no time to lose. And if I'm a trifle irritable you won't mind?—for I'm more than usually nervous."
"Don't bother with me this morning if you are tired," urged Everett. "I can come quite as well to-morrow."
"Gracious, no!" she protested, with a flash of that quick, keen humour that he remembered as a part of her. "It's solitude that I'm tired to death of—solitude and the wrong kind of people. You see, the minister, not content with reading the prayers for the sick, called on me this morning. He happened to be riding by on his bicycle and felt it his duty to stop. Of course, he disapproves of my profession, and I think he takes it for granted that I have a dark past. The funniest feature
of his conversation is that he is always excusing my own vocation to me—condoning it,
Everett laughed. "Oh! I'm afraid I'm not the person to call after such a serious gentleman—I can't sustain the situation. At my best I don't reach higher than low comedy. Have you decided to which one of the noble uses you will devote yourself?"
Katharine lifted her hands in a gesture of renunciation and exclaimed: "I'm not equal to any of them, not even the least noble. I didn't study that method."
She laughed and went on nervously. "The parson's not so bad. His English never offends me, and he has read Gibbon's
'Decline and Fall,' all five volumes, and that's something. Then, he has been to New York, and that's a great deal.
But how we are losing time! Do tell me about New York; Charley says you're just on from there. How does it look
and taste and smell just now? I think a whiff of the Jersey ferry would be as flagons of cod-liver oil to me.
Who conspicuously walks the Rialto now, and what does he or she wear? Are the trees still green in Madison Square,
or have they grown brown and dusty?
Rheingold, when he became conscious that she was looking at him intently, and that he was talking to the four walls.
Katharine was lying back among the pillows, watching him through half-closed eyes, as a painter looks at a picture.
He finished his explanation vaguely enough and put the envelope back in his pocket. As he did so, she said,
quietly:
He laughed, looking up at her with a touch of pride in his eyes that made them seem quite boyish. "Yes, isn't it absurd? It's almost as awkward as looking like Napoleon—But, after all, there are some advantages. It has made some of his friends like me, and I hope it will make you."
Katharine smiled and gave him a quick, meaning glance from under her lashes. "Oh, it did that long ago. What a haughty, reserved youth you were then, and how you used to stare at people, and then blush and look cross if they paid you back in your own coin. Do you remember that night when you took me home from a rehearsal, and scarcely spoke a word to me?"
"It was the silence of admiration," protested Everett, "very crude and boyish, but very sincere and not a little painful. Perhaps you suspected something of the sort? I remember you saw fit to be very grown up and worldly."
"I believe I suspected a pose; the one that college boys usually affect with singers—'an earthen vessel
in love with a star,' you know. But it
"Don't ask a man to confess the follies of his youth," said Everett, smiling a little sadly; "I am sensitive about some of them even now. But I was not so sophisticated as you imagined. I saw my brother's pupils come and go, but that was about all. Sometimes I was called on to play accompaniments, or to fill out a vacancy at a rehearsal, or to order a carriage for an infuriated soprano who had thrown up her part. But they never spent any time on me, unless it was to notice the resemblance you speak of."
"Yes," observed Katharine, thoughtfully, "I noticed it then, too; but it has grown as you have grown older. That is rather strange, when you have lived such different lives. It's not merely an ordinary family likeness of feature, you know, but a sort of interchangeable individuality; the suggestion of the other man's personality in your face—like an air transposed to another key. But I'm not attempting to define it; it's beyond me; something altogether unusual and a trifle—well, uncanny," she finished, laughing.
"I remember," Everett said, seriously, twirling the pencil between his fingers and looking, as he sat with his
head thrown back, out under the red window-blind which was raised just a little, and as it swung back and forth
in the wind revealed the glaring panorama of the desert—a blinding stretch of yellow, flat as the sea in dead
calm, splotched here and there with deep purple shadows; and, beyond, the ragged blue outline of the mountains and
the peaks of snow, white as the white clouds— "I remember, when I was a little fellow I used to be very sensitive
about it. I don't think it exactly displeased me, or that I would have had it otherwise if I could, but it seemed
to me like a birthmark, or something not to be lightly spoken of. People were naturally always fonder of Ad than of
me, and I used to feel the chill of reflected light pretty often. It came into even my relations with my mother. Ad went abroad to study when he was absurdly young, you know, and mother was all broken up over it. She did her whole duty
by each of us, but it was sort of generally understood among us that she'd have made burnt-offerings of us all for
Ad any day. I was a little fellow then, and when she sat alone on the porch in the sum-
"Poor little chap," said Katharine, and her tone was a trifle huskier than usual. "How fond people have always been of Adriance! Now tell me the latest news of him. I haven't heard, except through the press, for a year or more. He was in Algiers then, in the valley of the Chelif, riding horseback night and day in an Arabian costume, and in his usual enthusiastic fashion he had quite made up his mind to adopt the Mahometan faith and become as nearly an Arab as possible. How many countries and faiths has he adopted, I wonder? Probably he was playing Arab to himself all the time. I remember he was a sixteenth-century duke in Florence once for weeks together."
"Oh, that's Adriance," chuckled Everett. "He is himself barely long enough to write checks and be measured for his clothes. I didn't hear from him while he was an Arab; I missed that."
He was writing an Algerian
Everett drew a letter from his pocket. "This came about a month ago. It's chiefly about his new opera which is to be brought out in London next winter. Read it at your leisure."
"I think I shall keep it as a hostage, so that I may be sure you will come again. Now I want you to play for me. Whatever you like; but if there is anything new in the world, in mercy let me hear it. For nine months I have heard nothing but 'The Baggage Coach Ahead' and 'She is My Baby's Mother.'"
He sat down at the piano, and Katharine sat near him, absorbed in his remarkable physical likeness to his brother, and trying to discover in just what it consisted. She told herself that it was very much as though a sculptor's finished work had been rudely copied in wood. He was of a larger build than Adriance, and his shoulders were broad and heavy, while those of his brother were slender and rather girlish. His face was of the same oval mould, but it was grey, and darkened about the mouth by continual shaving. His eyes were of the same inconstant April colour, but they were reflective and rather dull; while Adri-
As Everett sat smoking on the veranda of the Inter-Ocean House that night, he was a victim to random recollections. His infatuation for Katharine Gaylord, visionary as it was, had been the most serious of his boyish love-affairs, and had long disturbed his bachelor dreams. He was painfully timid in everything relating to the emotions, and his hurt had withdrawn him from the society of women. The fact that it was all
He remembered how bitter and morose he had grown during his stay at his brother's studio when Katharine Gaylord was working there, and how he had wounded Adriance on the night of his last concert in New York. He had sat there in the box while his brother and Katharine were called back again and again after the last number, watching the roses go up over the footlights until they were stacked half as high as the piano, brooding, in his sullen boy's heart, upon the pride those two felt in each other's work—spurring each other to their best and beautifully contending in song. The footlights
had seemed a hard, glittering line drawn sharply between their life and his; a circle of flame set about those splendid children of genius. He walked back to his hotel alone, and sat in his window staring out on Madison Square until long after midnight, resolving to beat no more at doors that he could never enter,
Everett's week in Cheyenne stretched to three, and he saw no prospect of release except through the thing he
dreaded. The bright, windy days of the Wyoming autumn passed swiftly. Letters and telegrams came urging him to hasten
his trip to the coast, but he resolutely postponed his business engagements. The mornings he spent on one of Charley Gaylord's ponies, or fishing in the mountains, and in the evenings he sat in his room writing letters or reading. In the afternoon he was usually at his post of duty. Destiny, he reflected, seems to have very positive notions about the sort of parts we are fitted to play. The scene changes and the compensation varies, but in the end we usually find that we have played the same class of business from first to last. Everett had been a stop-gap all his life. He remembered going
through a looking-glass labyrinth when he was a boy, and trying gallery after gallery, only at every turn to bump his nose against his own
The question which most perplexed him was, "How much shall I know? How much does she wish me to know?" A few days
after his first meeting with Katharine Gaylord, he had cabled his brother to write her. He had merely said that she was mortally ill; he could depend on Adriance to say the right thing—that was a part of his gift. Adriance always said
not only the right thing, but the opportune, graceful, exquisite thing. His phrases took the colour of the moment and the then present condition, so that they never savored of perfunctory compliment or frequent usage. He always caught the lyric essence of the moment, the poetic suggestion of every situation. Moreover, he usually did the right thing, the opportune, graceful, exquisite thing—except when he did very cruel things—bent upon making people happy when their existence touched his, just as he insisted that his material environment should be beautiful; lavishing upon those near
Three weeks after Everett had sent his cable, when he made his daily call at the gayly painted ranch-house, he found Katharine laughing like a school-girl. "Have you ever thought," she said, as he entered the music-room, "how much these séances of ours are like Heine's 'Florentine Nights,' except that I don't give you an opportunity to monopolize the conversation as Heine did?" She held his hand longer than usual as she greeted him, and looked searchingly up into his face. "You are the kindest man living, the kindest," she added, softly.
Everett's grey face coloured faintly as he drew his hand away, for he felt that this time she was looking at him, and not at a whimsical caricature of his brother. "Why, what have I done now?" he asked, lamely. "I can't remember having sent you any stale candy or champagne since yesterday."
She drew a letter with a foreign postmark from between the leaves of a book and held it out, smiling. "You got him to write it, Don't say
Everett sat down in a low chair facing the window-seat in which she reclined with a barricade of pillows behind her. He opened the letter, his lashes half-veiling his kind eyes, and saw to his satisfaction that it was a long one; wonderfully tactful and tender, even for Adriance, who was tender with his valet and his stable-boy, with his old gondolier and the beggar-women who prayed to the saints for him.
The letter was from Granada, written in the Alhambra, as he sat by the fountain of the Patio di Lindaraxa.
The air was heavy with the warm fragrance of the South and full of the sound of splashing, running water,
as it had been in a certain old garden in Florence, long ago. The sky was one great turquoise, heated until it glow-
As Everett folded the letter he felt that Adriance had divined the thing needed and had risen to it in his own wonderful way. The letter was consistently egotistical, and seemed to him even a trifle patronizing, yet it was just what she had wanted. A strong realization of his brother's charm and intensity and power came over him; he felt the breath of that
whirlwind of flame in which Adriance passed, consuming all in his path, and himself even more resolutely than he
"I think I can scarcely answer his letter, but when you see him next you can do that for me. I want you to tell him many things for me, yet they can all be summed up in this: I want him to grow wholly into his best and greatest self, even at the cost of the dear boyishness that is half his charm to you and me. Do you understand me?"
"I know perfectly well what you mean," answered Everett, thoughtfully. "I have often felt so about him myself. And yet it's difficult to prescribe for those creative fellows; so little makes, so little mars."
Katharine raised herself upon her elbow, and her face flushed with feverish earnestness. "Ah, but it is the waste of himself that I mean; his lashing himself out on stupid and uncomprehending people until they take him at their own estimate. He can kindle marble, strike fire from putty, but is it worth what it costs him?"
"Come, come," expostulated Everett, alarmed at her excitement. "Where is the new sonata? Let him speak for himself."
He sat down at the piano and began playing
"How he has grown!" she cried. "What the three last years have done for him! He used to write only the tragedies of passion; but this is the tragedy of the soul, the shadow coexistent with the soul. This is the tragedy of effort and failure, the thing Keats called hell. This is my tragedy, as I lie here spent by the race-course, listening to the feet of the runners as they pass me—ah, God! the swift feet of the runners!"
She turned her face away and covered it with her straining hands. Everett crossed over to her quickly and knelt beside her. In all the days he had known her she had never before, beyond an occasional ironical jest, given voice to the bitterness of her own defeat. Her courage had become
"Don't do it," he gasped. "I can't stand it, I really can't, I feel it too much. We mustn't speak of that; it's too tragic and too vast."
When she turned her face back to him there was a ghost of the old, brave, cynical smile on it, more bitter
than the tears she could not shed. "No, I won't be so ungenerous; I will save that for the watches of the night
when I have no better company. Now you may mix me another drink of some sort. Formerly, when it was not Souvenirs
d'Automne,' and he was, as I most like to remember him; so calm and happy and tired; not gay, as he usually is, but just contented and tired with that heavenly tiredness that comes after a good work done at last. Outside, the rain poured down in torrents, and the wind moaned for the pain of all the world and sobbed in the branches of the shivering olives and about the walls of that deso-
and in the book we read no more that night.'"
She gave the old line with a certain bitter humour, and with the hard, bright smile in which of old she had wrapped her weakness as in a glittering garment. That ironical smile, worn like a mask through so many years, had gradually
"Ah, yes, I cared," she replied, closing her eyes with a long-drawn sigh of relief; and lying perfectly still, she went on: "You can't imagine what a comfort it is to have you know how I cared, what a relief it is to be able to tell it to some one. I used to want to shriek it out to the world in the long nights when I could not sleep. It seemed to me that I could not die with it. It demanded some sort of expression. And now that you know, you would scarcely believe how much less sharp the agony of it is."
Everett continued to look helplessly at the floor. "I was not sure how much you wanted me to know," he said.
"Oh, I intended you should know from the first time I looked into your face, when you came that day with Charley. I flatter myself that I have been able to conceal it when I chose, though I suppose women always think that. The more
observing ones may have seen, but discerning peo-
"And has he never known at all?" asked Everett, in a thick voice.
"Oh! never at all in the way that you mean. Of course he is accustomed to looking into the eyes of women
and finding love there; when he doesn't find it there he thinks he must have been guilty of some discourtesy
and is miserable about it. He has a genuine fondness for everyone who is not stupid or gloomy, or old or preternaturally ugly. Granted youth and cheerfulness, and a moderate amount of wit and some tact, and Adriance will always be glad
to see you coming around the corner. I shared with the rest; shared the smiles and the gallantries and the droll little sermons. It was quite like a Sunday-school picnic; we wore our best clothes and a smile and took our turns. It
"Don't; you'll make me hate him," groaned Everett.
Katharine laughed and began to play nervously with her fan. "It wasn't in the slightest degree his fault; that is the most grotesque part of it. Why, it had really begun before I ever met him. I fought my way to him, and I drank my doom greedily enough."
Everett rose and stood hesitating. "I think I must go. You ought to be quiet, and I don't think I can hear any more just now."
She put out her hand and took his playfully. "You've put in three weeks at this sort of thing, haven't you? Well, it may never be to your glory in this world, perhaps, but it's been the mercy of heaven to me, and it ought to square accounts for a much worse life than yours will ever be."
Everett knelt beside her, saying, brokenly: "I stayed because I wanted to be with you, that's all. I have never cared about other women since I met you in New York when I was a lad. You are a part of my destiny, and I could not leave you if I would."
She put her hands on his shoulders and shook
The courage in her eyes was like the clear light of a star to him as he went out.
On the night of Adriance Everett's opening concert in Paris, Everett sat by the bed in the ranch-house in Wyoming, watching over the last battle that we have with the flesh before we are done with it and free of it forever. At times it
The nurse touched him on the shoulder, he started and awoke. She screened the lamp with her hand. Everett saw that Katharine was awake and conscious, and struggling a little. He lifted her gently on his arm and began to fan her. She laid her hands lightly on his hair and looked into his face with eyes that seemed never to have wept or doubted. "Ah, dear Adriance, dear, dear," she whispered.
Everett went to call her brother, but when they came back the madness of art was over for Katharine.
Two days later Everett was pacing the station siding, waiting for the west-bound train. Charley Gaylord walked beside him, but the two men had nothing to say to each other. Everett's bags were piled on the truck, and his step was hurried and his eyes were full of impatience, as he gazed again and again up the track, watching for the train. Gaylord's impatience was not less than his own; these two, who had grown so close, had now become painful and impossible to each other, and longed for the wrench of farewell.
As the train pulled in, Everett wrung Gay-
"
Everett quickly withdrew his arm, and lifted his hat, blushing. "Pardon me, madame, but I see that you have mistaken me for Adriance Hilgarde. I am his brother," he said, quietly, and turning from the crestfallen singer he hurried into the car.
The sequence of events was such that MacMaster did not make his pilgrimage to Hugh Treffinger's studio until three years after that painter's death. MacMaster was himself a painter, an American of the Gallicized type, who spent his winters in New York, his summers in Paris, and no inconsiderable amount of time on the broad waters between. He had often contemplated stopping in London on one of his return trips in the late autumn, but he had always deferred leaving Paris until the prick of necessity drove him home by the quickest and shortest route.
Treffinger was a comparatively young man at the time of his death, and there had seemed
no occasion for haste until haste was of no avail. Then, possibly, though there had been
some correspondence between them, MacMaster felt certain qualms about meeting in the flesh
a man
Marriage of
, which had never
left his studio, and of which MacMaster's friends had now and again brought report that it was
the painter's most characteristic production.
The young man arrived in London in the evening, and the next morning went out to
Kensington to find Treffinger's studio. It lay in one of the perplexing by-streets off
Holland Road, and the number he found on a door set in a high garden wall, the top of
which was covered with broken green glass and over which a budding lilac-bush nodded.
Treffinger's plate was still there, and a card requesting visitors to ring for the
attendant. In response to MacMaster's ring, the door was opened by a cleanly built little
man, clad in a shooting jacket and trousers that had been made
Sporting Life. While MacMaster was explaining the purpose of
his call, he noticed that the man surveyed him critically, though not impertinently. He
was admitted into a little tank of a lodge made of white-washed stone, the back door and
windows opening upon a garden. A visitor's book and a pile of catalogues lay on a deal
table, together with a bottle of ink and some rusty pens. The wall was ornamented with
photographs and coloured prints of racing favourites.
"The studio is h'only open to the public on Saturdays and Sundays," explained
the man—he referred to himself as "Jymes"—"but of course we make
exceptions in the case of pynters. Lydy Elling Treffinger 'erself is on the Continent, but
Sir 'Ugh's orders was that pynters was to 'ave the run of the place." He selected a
key
MacMaster entered a long, narrow room, built of smoothed planks, painted a light green; cold and damp even on that fine May morning. The room was utterly bare of furniture—unless a step-ladder, a model throne, and a rack laden with large leather portfolios could be accounted such—and was windowless, without other openings than the door and the skylight, under which hung the unfinished picture itself. MacMaster had never seen so many of Treffinger's paintings together. He knew the painter had married a woman with money and had been able to keep such of his pictures as he wished. These, with all of his replicas and studies, he had left as a sort of common legacy to the younger men of the school he had originated.
As soon as he was left alone, MacMaster sat down on the edge of the model throne before the unfinished picture. Here indeed was what he had come for; it rather paralysed his receptivity for the moment, but gradually the thing found its way to him.
At one o'clock he was standing before the col-
Boccaccio's Garden when he heard a voice
at his elbow.
"Pardon, sir, but I was just about to lock up and go to lunch. Are you lookin' for the figure study of Boccaccio 'imself?" James queried respectfully. "Lydy Elling Treffinger give it to Mr. Rossiter to take down to Oxford for some lectures he's been a-giving there."
"Did he never paint out his studies, then?" asked MacMaster with perplexity. "Here are two completed ones for this picture. Why did he keep them?"
"I don't know as I could say as to that, sir," replied James, smiling
indulgently, "but that was 'is way. That is to say, 'e pynted out very frequent, but
'e always made two studies to stand; one in water colours and one in oils, before 'e went
at the final picture,—to say nothink of all the pose studies 'e made in pencil before
he begun on the composition proper at all. He was that particular. You see 'e wasn't so
keen for the final effect as for the proper pyntin' of 'is pictures. 'E used to say they
ought to be well made, the same as any other h'article of trade. I can lay my 'and on the
pose studies for you, sir." He rummaged in one of the portfolios and pro-
"That's in Paris, as I remember," James continued reflectively. "It went with the Saint Cecilia into the Baron H—'s collection. Could you tell me, sir,
'as 'e it still? I don't like to lose account of them, but some 'as changed 'ands since
Sir 'Ugh's death."
"H—'s collection is still intact, I believe," replied MacMaster. "You were with Treffinger long?"
"From my boyhood, sir," replied James with gravity. "I was a stable boy when 'e took me."
"You were his man, then?"
"That's it, sir. Nobody else ever done anything around the studio. I always mixed
'is colours and 'e taught me to do a share of the varnishin'; 'e said as 'ow there wasn't
a 'ouse in England as could do it proper. You aynt looked at the Marriage
yet, sir?" he asked abruptly, glancing doubtfully at MacMaster, and indicating with his thumb
the picture under the north light.
"Not very closely. I prefer to begin with some-
"Well may you say that, sir," said James warmly. "That one regular killed Sir 'Ugh; it regular broke 'im up, and nothink will ever convince me as 'ow it didn't bring on 'is second stroke."
When MacMaster walked back to High Street to take his
Several days after his first visit to the studio, MacMaster wrote to Lady Mary Percy, telling her that he would be in London for some time and asking her if he might call. Lady Mary was an only sister of Lady Ellen Treffinger, the painter's widow, and MacMaster had known her during one winter he spent at Nice. He had known her, indeed, very well, and Lady Mary, who was astonishingly frank and communicative upon all subjects, had been no less so upon the matter of her sister's unfortunate marriage.
In her reply to his note, Lady Mary named an afternoon when she would be alone. She was as good as her word, and when MacMaster arrived he found the drawing-room empty. Lady Mary entered shortly after he was announced. She was a tall woman, thin and stiffly jointed; and her body stood out under the folds of her gown with the rigour of cast-iron. This rather metallic suggestion was further carried out in her heavily knuckled hands, her stiff grey hair and long, bold-featured face, which was saved from freakishness only by her alert eyes.
"Really," said Lady Mary, taking a seat beside him and giving him a sort of military inspection through her nose-glasses, "Really, I had begun to fear that I had lost you altogether. It's four years since I saw you at Nice, isn't it? I was in Paris last winter, but I heard nothing from you."
"I was in New York then."
"It occurred to me that you might be. And why are you in London?"
"Can you ask?" replied MacMaster gallantly.
Lady Mary smiled ironically. "But for what else, incidentally?"
"Well, incidentally, I came to see Treffinger's studio and his unfinished picture. Since I've been here, I've decided to stay the summer. I'm even thinking of attempting to do a biography of him."
"So that is what brought you to London?"
"Not exactly. I had really no intention of anything so serious when I came. It's his last picture, I fancy, that has rather thrust it upon me. The notion has settled down on me like a thing destined."
"You'll not be offended if I question the clemency of such a destiny," remarked Lady Mary dryly. "Isn't there rather a surplus of books on that subject already?"
"Such as they are. Oh, I've read them all," here MacMaster faced Lady Mary triumphantly. "He has quite escaped your amiable critics," he added, smiling.
"I know well enough what you think, and I daresay we are not much on art,"
said Lady Mary with tolerant good humour. "We leave that to peoples who have no
physique. Treffinger made a stir for a time, but it seems that we are not capable of a
sustained appreciation of such extraordinary methods. In the end we go back
"That really
Lady Mary laughed her hoarse baritone laugh. "Bravo! and you've come to me for inspiration for your panegyric?"
MacMaster smiled with some embarrassment. "Not altogether for that purpose. But I want to consult you, Lady Mary, about the advisability of troubling Lady Ellen Treffinger in the matter. It seems scarcely legitimate to go on without asking her to give some sort of grace to my proceedings, yet I feared the whole subject might be painful to her. I shall rely wholly upon your discretion."
"I think she would prefer to be consulted," replied Lady Mary judicially.
"I can't understand how she endures to have the wretched affair continually raked up,
but she does. She seems to feel a sort of moral responsibility. Ellen
"I want very much to meet her. She is, I hope, quite recovered in every way," queried MacMaster, hesitatingly.
"No, I can't say that she is. She has remained in much the same condition she sank to before his death. He trampled over pretty much whatever there was in her, I fancy. Women don't recover from wounds of that sort; at least, not women of Ellen's grain. They go on bleeding inwardly."
"You, at any rate, have not grown more reconciled," MacMaster ventured.
"Oh, I give him his dues. He was a colourist, I grant you; but that is a vague and unsatisfactory quality to marry to; Lady Ellen Treffinger found it so."
"But, my dear Lady Mary," expostulated MacMaster, "and just repress me
if I'm becoming too personal—but it must, in the first place,
Lady Mary poised her glasses on her large forefinger and assumed an attitude suggestive of the clinical lecture room as she replied. "Ellen, my dear boy, is an essentially romantic person. She is quiet about it, but she runs deep. I never knew how deep until I came against her on the issue of that marriage. She was always discontented as a girl; she found things dull and prosaic, and the ardour of his courtship was agreeable to her. He met her during her first season in town. She is handsome, and there were plenty of other men, but I grant you your scowling brigand was the most picturesque of the lot. In his courtship, as in everything else, he was theatrical to the point of being ridiculous, but Ellen's sense of humour is not her strongest quality. He had the charm of celebrity, the air of a man who could storm his way through anything to get what he wanted. That sort of vehemence is particularly effective with women like Ellen, who can be warmed only by reflected heat, and she couldn't at all stand out against it. He convinced her of his necessity; and that done, all's done."
"I can't help thinking that, even on such a basis, the marriage should have turned out better," MacMaster remarked reflectively.
"The marriage," Lady Mary continued with a shrug, "was made on the basis of a mutual misunderstanding. Ellen, in the nature of the case, believed that she was doing something quite out of the ordinary in accepting him, and expected concessions which, apparently, it never occurred to him to make. After his marriage he relapsed into his old habits of incessant work, broken by violent and often brutal relaxations. He insulted her friends and foisted his own upon her—many of them well calculated to arouse aversion in any well-bred girl. He had Ghillini constantly at the house—a homeless vagabond, whose conversation was impossible. I don't say, mind you, that he had not grievances on his side. He had probably over-rated the girl's possibilities, and he let her see that he was disappointed in her. Only a large and generous nature could have borne with him, and Ellen's is not that. She could not at all understand that odious strain of plebeian pride which plumes itself upon not having risen above its sources."
As MacMaster drove back to his hotel, he re-
As he had told Lady Mary Percy, MacMaster had found the imperative inspiration of his
purpose in Treffinger's unfinished picture, the Marriage of
. He had always believed that the key to Treffinger's individuality lay in his singular education;
in the Roman de la Rose, in Boccaccio, and Amadis, those works which had literally transcribed
themselves upon the blank soul of the London street boy, and through which he had been
born into the world of spiritual things. Treffinger had been a man who lived after his
imagination; and his mind, his ideals and, as MacMaster believed, even his personal
ethics, had to the last been coloured by the trend of his early training. There was in him
alike the freshness and spontaneity, the frank brutality and the religious mysticism which
lay well back of the fifteenth century. In the Marriage of
MacMaster found the ultimate expression of this spirit, the final word as to Treffinger's point of view.
As in all Treffinger's classical subjects, the conception was wholly mediæval. This
Phædra, just turning from her husband and maidens to greet her husband's son, giving him
her first fearsome glance from under her half lifted veil,
From James's attitude toward the picture, MacMaster could well conjecture what the
painter's had been. This picture was always uppermost in James's mind; its custodianship
formed, in his
Marriage as killed
'im," he would often say, "and for the matter 'o that, it did like to 'av been the death
of all of us."
By the end of his second week in London, MacMaster had begun the notes for his study of
Hugh Treffinger and his work. When his researches led him occasionally to visit the
studios of Treffinger's friends and erstwhile disciples, he found their Treffinger manner
fading as the ring
He could not himself have traced the successive steps by which he was gradually
admitted into James's confidence. Certainly most of his adroit strategies to that end
failed humiliatingly, and whatever it was that built up an understand-
One morning, when MacMaster was seated before the Marriage of
, James entered on his usual round of dusting.
"I've 'eard from Lydy Elling by the post, sir," he remarked, "an' she's give h'orders to 'ave the 'ouse put in readiness. I doubt she'll be 'ere by Thursday or Friday next."
"She spends most of her time abroad?" queried MacMaster; on the subject of Lady Treffinger James consistently maintained a very delicate reserve.
"Well, you could 'ardly say she does that, sir. She finds the 'ouse a bit dull, I
daresay, so durin' the season she stops mostly with Lydy Mary Percy, at Grosvenor Square.
Lydy Mary's a h'only sister." After a few moments he continued, speaking in jerks
governed by the rigour of his dusting: "Honly this morning I come upon this
scarf-pin," exhibiting a very striking instance of that article, "an' I recalled
as 'ow Sir 'Ugh give it me when 'e was a-courting of Lydy Elling. Blowed if I ever see a
man go in for a
Marriage there—though 'e mostly
went in on things pretty keen; 'ad the measles when 'e was thirty, strong as cholera,
an' come close to dyin' of 'em. 'E wasn't strong for Lydy Elling's set; they was a
bit too stiff for 'im. A free an' easy gentleman, 'e was; 'e liked 'is dinner with a
few friends an' them jolly, but 'e wasn't much on what you might call big affairs. But
once 'e went in for Lydy Elling 'e broke 'imself to new paces. He give away 'is
rings an' pins, an' the tylor's man an' the
The next week, in consequence of an invitation from Lady Ellen Treffinger, MacMaster
went one afternoon to take tea with her. He was shown into the garden that lay between the
residence and the studio, where the tea-table was set under a gnarled pear tree. Lady
Ellen rose as he approached—he was astonished to note
While he was explaining the purpose of his frequent visits to the studio, she heard him
with courteous interest. "I have read, I think, everything that has been published on
Sir Hugh Tref-
"I believe they are rather inadequate," she remarked vaguely. She hesitated a moment, absently fingering the ribbons of her gown, then continued, without raising her eyes; "I hope you will not think me too exacting if I ask to see the proofs of such chapters of your work as have to do with Sir Hugh's personal life. I have always asked that privilege."
MacMaster hastily assured her as to this, adding, "I mean to touch on only such facts in his personal life as have to do directly with his work—such as his monkish education under Ghillini."
"I see your meaning, I think," said Lady Ellen, looking at him with wide, uncomprehending eyes.
When MacMaster stopped at the studio on leaving the house, he stood for some time
before Treffinger's one portrait of himself; that brigand of a picture, with its full
throat and square head; the short upper lip blackened by the close-clipped moustache, the
wiry hair tossed down over the forehead, the strong white teeth set hard on a short pipe
stem. He could well understand
Toward the close of the season Lady Ellen Treffinger left town. MacMaster's work was progressing rapidly, and he and James wore away the days in their peculiar relation, which by this time had much of friendliness. Excepting for the regular visits of a Jewish picture dealer, there were few intrusions upon their solitude. Occasionally a party of Americans rang at the little door in the garden wall, but usually they departed speedily for the Moorish hall and tinkling fountain of the great show studio of London, not far away.
This Jew, an Austrian by birth, who had a large business in Melbourne, Australia, was a
man of considerable discrimination, and at once selected the Marriage of
as the object of his especial interest. When, upon his
first visit, Lichtenstein had declared the picture one
James had, from the first, felt such a distrust of the man that he would never leave
him alone in the studio for a moment. When Lichtenstein insisted upon having Lady Ellen
Treffinger's address, James rose to the point of insolence. "It ayn't no use to give
it, noway. Lydy Treffinger never has nothink to do with dealers." MacMaster quietly
repented his rash confidences, fearing that he might indirectly cause Lady Ellen annoyance
from this merciless speculator, and he re-
Marriage
of
was to occupy.
By this time the first chapters of MacMaster's book were in the hands of his publisher, and his visits to the studio were necessarily less frequent. The greater part of his time was now employed with the engravers who were to reproduce such of Treffinger's pictures as he intended to use as illustrations.
He returned to his hotel late one evening after a long and vexing day at the engravers, to find James in his room, seated on his steamer trunk by the window, with the outline of a great square draped in sheets resting against his knee.
"Why, James, what's up?" he cried in astonishment, glancing enquiringly at the sheeted object.
"Ay'nt you seen the pypers, sir?" jerked out the man.
"No, now I think of it, I haven't even looked at a paper. I've been at the engravers' plant all day. I haven't seen anything."
James drew a copy of the Times from his pocket and handed it to him, pointing
with a
"Well, what of it, my man? That surely is her privilege."
James took the paper, turned to another page, and silently pointed to a paragraph in
the art notes which stated that Lady Treffinger had presented to the X— gallery the
entire collection of paintings and sketches now in her late husband's studio, with the
exception of his unfinished picture, the Marriage of
,
which she had sold for a large sum to an Australian dealer who had come to London purposely to secure some of
Treffinger's paintings.
MacMaster pursed up his lips and sat down, his overcoat still on. "Well, James, this is something of a—something of a jolt, eh? It never occurred to me she'd really do it."
"Lord, you don't know 'er, sir," said James bitterly, still staring at the floor in an attitude of abandoned dejection.
MacMaster started up in a flash of enlightenment, "What on earth have you got there, James? It's not—surely it's not——"
"Yes, it is, sir," broke in the man excitedly. "It's the Marriage
itself. It aynt a-going to H'australia, no'ow!"
"But man, what are you going to do with it? It's Lichtenstein's property now, as it seems."
"It aynt, sir, that it aynt. No, by Gawd, it aynt!" shouted James, breaking
into a choking fury. He controlled himself with an effort and added supplicatingly:
"Oh, sir, you aynt a-going to see it go to H'australia, w'ere they send
convic's?" He unpinned and flung aside the sheets as though to let
plead for herself.
MacMaster sat down again and looked sadly at the doomed masterpiece. The notion of James having carried it across London that night rather appealed to his fancy. There was certainly a flavour about such a high-handed proceeding. "However did you get it here?" he queried.
"I got a four-wheeler and come over direct, sir. Good job I 'appened to 'ave the chaynge about me."
"You came up High Street, up Piccadilly, through the Haymarket and Trafalgar Square, and into the Strand?" queried MacMaster with a relish.
"Yes, sir. Of course, sir," assented James with surprise.
MacMaster laughed delightedly. "It was a beautiful idea, James, but I'm afraid we can't carry it any further."
"I was thinkin' as 'ow it would be a rare chance to get you to take the Marriage over to Paris for a year or two, sir, until the thing blows
over?" suggested James blandly.
"I'm afraid that's out of the question, James. I haven't the right stuff in me for a pirate, or even a vulgar smuggler, I'm afraid." MacMaster found it surprisingly difficult to say this, and he busied himself with the lamp as he said it. He heard James's hand fall heavily on the trunk top, and he discovered that he very much disliked sinking in the man's estimation.
"Well, sir," remarked James in a more formal tone, after a protracted silence; "then there's nothink for it but as 'ow I'll 'ave to make way with it myself."
"And how about your character, James? The evidence would be heavy against you, and even if Lady Treffinger didn't prosecute you'd be done for."
"Blow my character!—your pardon, sir," cried James, starting to his feet. "W'at do I want of a character? I'll chuck the 'ole thing, and damned lively, too. The shop's to be sold out, an' my place is gone any'ow. I'm a-going to enlist, or try the gold-fields. I've lived too long with h'artists; I'd never give satisfaction in livery now. You know 'ow it is yourself, sir; there aynt no life like it, no'ow."
For a moment MacMaster was almost equal to abetting James in his theft. He reflected that pictures had been white-washed, or hidden in the crypts of churches, or under the floors of palaces from meaner motives, and to save them from a fate less ignominious. But presently, with a sigh, he shook his head.
"No, James, it won't do at all. It has been tried over and over again, ever since the world has been a-going and pictures a-making. It was tried in Florence and in Venice, but the pictures were always carried away in the end. You see the difficulty is that, although Treffinger told you what was not to be done with the picture, he did not say definitely what was to be done with it. Do you think Lady Treffinger really understands that he did not want it to be sold?"
"Well, sir, it was like this, sir," said James, resuming his seat on the trunk and again
resting the picture against his knee. "My memory is as clear as glass about it. After Sir 'Ugh
got up from 'is first stroke, 'e took a fresh start at the Marriage.
Before that 'e 'ad been working at it only at night for awhile back; the Legend
was the big picture then, an' was under the north light w'ere 'e worked of a morning. But
one day 'e bid me take the Legend down an' put the Marriage
in its place, an' 'e says, dashin' on 'is jacket, 'Jymes, this is a start for the finish, this
time.
"From that on 'e worked at the night picture in the mornin'—a thing
contrary to 'is custom. The Marriage went wrong, and wrong—an'
Sir 'Ugh a-gettin' seedier an' seedier every day. 'E tried models an' models, an' smudged an'
pynted out on account of 'er face goin' wrong in the shadow. Sometimes 'e layed it on the
colours, an' swore at me an' things general. He got that discouraged about 'imself
that on 'is low days 'e used to say to me: 'Jymes, remember one thing; if anythink
'appens to me, the Marriage is not to go out of 'ere unfinished. It's
worth the lot of 'em, my boy, an it's not a-going
"He was workin' at the picture the last day, before 'e went to 'is club. 'E kept the carriage waitin' near an hour while 'e put on a stroke an' then drawed back for to look at it, an' then put on another, careful like. After 'e 'ad 'is gloves on, 'e come back an' took away the brushes I was startin' to clean, an' put in another touch or two. 'It's a-comin' Jymes,' 'e says, 'by gad if it aynt.' An' with that 'e goes out. It was cruel sudden, w'at come after.
"That night I was lookin' to 'is clothes at the 'ouse when they brought 'im 'ome. He was conscious, but w'en I ran down stairs for to 'elp lift 'im up, I knowed 'e was a finished man. After we got 'im into bed, 'e kept lookin' restless at me and then at Lydy Elling and a-jerkin' of 'is 'and. Finally 'e quite raised it an' shot 'is thumb out towards the wall. 'He wants water; ring Jymes,' says Lydy Elling, placid. But I knowed 'e was pointin' to the shop.
"'Lydy Treffinger,' says I, bold, 'he's pointin' to the studio. He means about the
Marriage; 'e told me to-day as 'ow 'e never wanted it sold unfinished.
Is that it, Sir 'Ugh?"
"He smiled an' nodded slight an' closed 'is eyes. 'Thank you, Jymes,' says Lydy Elling, placid. Then 'e opened 'is eyes an' looked long and 'ard at Lydy Elling.
"'Of course I'll try to do as you'd wish about the pictures, 'Ugh, if that's w'at's
troublin' you,' she says quiet. With that 'e closed 'is eyes and 'e never opened 'em.
He died unconscious at four that mornin'.
"You see, sir, Lydy Elling was always cruel 'ard on the Marriage.
From the first it went wrong, an' Sir 'Ugh was out of temper pretty constant. She came into the
studio one day and looked at the picture an' asked 'im why 'e didn't throw it up an'
quit a-worriting 'imself. He answered sharp, an' with that she said as 'ow she didn't see
w'at there was to make such a row about, no'ow. She spoke 'er mind about that picture, free;
an' Sir 'Ugh swore 'ot an' let a 'andful of brushes fly at 'is study, an' Lydy Elling picked up
'er skirts careful an' chill, an' drifted out of the studio with 'er eyes calm and 'er chin 'igh.
If there was one thing Lydy Elling 'ad no comprehension of, it was the usefulness of swearin'.
So the Marriage was a sore thing between 'em. She is uncommon calm, but
uncommon bit-
"I'll tell you what I'll do, James, and it's our only hope. I'll see Lady Ellen
to-morrow. The Times says she returned to-day. You take the
picture back to its place, and I'll do what I can for it. If anything is done to save it,
it must be done through Lady Ellen Treffinger herself; that much is clear. I can't think
that she fully understands the situation. If she did, you know, she really couldn't have any
motive—" He stopped suddenly. Somehow, in the dusky lamplight her small, close-sealed
face came ominously back to him. He rubbed his forehead and knitted his brows thoughtfully.
After a moment he shook his head and went on: "I am positive that nothing can be gained by
high-handed methods, James. Captain Gresham is one of the most popular men in London, and his
friends would tear up Treffinger's bones if he were annoyed by any scandal of our making—
and this scheme you propose would inevitably result in scandal. Lady
He found James amenable, though doggedly sceptical. He went down into the street,
called a carriage, and saw James and his burden into it. Standing in the doorway, he
watched the carriage roll away through the drizzling mist, weave in and out among the wet,
black vehicles and darting cab fights, until it was swallowed up in the glare and
confusion of the Strand. "It is rather a fine touch of irony," he reflected, "that he,
who is so out of it, should be the one to really care. Poor Treffinger," he murmured as, with
a rather spiritless smile, he turned back into his hotel. "Poor Treffinger;
The next afternoon MacMaster kept his promise. When he arrived at Lady Mary Percy's
house he saw preparations for a function of some sort, but he went resolutely up the
steps, telling the footman that his business was urgent. Lady Ellen came down alone,
excusing her sister. She was dressed for receiving, and Mac-
MacMaster apologized for his intrusion and came unflinchingly to the object of his call. He had come, he said, not only to offer her his warmest congratulations, but to express his regret that a great work of art was to leave England.
Lady Treffinger looked at him in wide-eyed astonishment. Surely, she said, she had been careful to select the best of the pictures for the X— gallery, in accordance with Sir Hugh Treffinger's wishes.
"And did he—pardon me, Lady Treffinger, but in mercy set my mind at rest—did he or did he not express any definite wish concerning this one picture, which to me seems worth all the others, unfinished as it is?"
Lady Treffinger paled perceptibly, but it was not the pallor of confusion. When she
spoke there was a sharp tremor in her smooth voice, the edge of a resentment that tore her
like pain. "I think his man has some such impression, but I believe it to be utterly
unfounded. I cannot find that he ever expressed any wish concerning the disposition of the
picture to any of his friends.
"Captain Gresham, Lady Ellingham and Miss Ellingham," announced a servant, appearing at the door.
There was a murmur in the hall, and MacMaster greeted the smiling Captain and his aunt as he bowed himself out.
To all intents and purposes the Marriage of
was already entombed in a vague continent in the Pacific, somewhere on the other side of the world.
I received one morning a letter, written in pale ink on glassy, blue-lined note-paper, and bearing the postmark of a little Nebraska village. This communication, worn and rubbed, looking as though it had been carried for some days in a coat pocket that was none too clean, was from my Uncle Howard and informed me that his wife had been left a small legacy by a bachelor relative who had recently died, and that it would be necessary for her to go to Boston to attend to the settling of the estate. He requested me to meet her at the station and render her whatever services might prove necessary. On examining the date indicated as that of her arrival, I found it no later than to-morrow. He had characteristically delayed writing until, had I been away from home for a day, I must have missed the good woman altogether.
The name of my Aunt Georgiana called up
The next morning, after preparing my landlady somewhat, I set out for the station. When
the train arrived I had some difficulty in finding my aunt. She was the last of the
passengers to alight, and it was not until I got her into the carriage that she seemed really
to recognize me. She had come all the way in a day coach; her linen duster had become black
with soot and her black bonnet grey with dust during the journey. When we arrived at my boarding-
Whatever shock Mrs. Springer experienced at my aunt's appearance, she considerately
concealed. As for myself, I saw my aunt's misshapen figure with that feeling of awe and
respect with which we behold explorers who have left their ears and fingers north of
Franz-Joseph Land, or their health somewhere along the Upper Congo. My Aunt Georgiana had
been a music teacher at the Boston Conservatory, somewhere back in the latter sixties. One
summer, while visiting in the little village among the Green Mountains where her ancestors
had dwelt for generations, she had kindled the callow fancy of the most idle and shiftless
of all the village lads, and had conceived for this Howard Carpenter one of those extravagant
passions which a handsome country boy of twenty-one sometimes inspires in an angular, spectacled
woman of thirty. When she returned to her duties in Boston, Howard followed her, and the upshot
of this inexplicable infatuation was that she eloped with him, eluding the reproaches of her family
and the criticisms of her friends by going with him to the Nebraska frontier. Carpenter, who, of
course, had no money, had
But Mrs. Springer knew nothing of all this, and must have been considerably shocked at
what was left of my kinswoman. Beneath the soiled linen duster which, on her arrival, was the
most conspicuous feature of her costume, she wore a black stuff dress whose ornamentation showed
that she had surrendered herself unquestioningly into the hands of a country dressmaker. My poor
aunt's figure, however, would have presented astonishing difficulties to any dressmaker. Originally
stooped, her shoulders were almost bent together over her sunken chest.
I owed to this woman most of the good that ever came my way in my boyhood, and had a reverential
affection for her. During the years when I was riding herd for my uncle, my aunt, after cooking
the three meals—the first of which was ready at six o'clock in the morning— and putting the
six children to bed, would often stand until midnight at her ironing-board, with me at the kitchen table
beside her, hearing me recite Latin declensions and conjugations, gently shaking me when my drowsy head
sank down over a page of irregular verbs. It was to her, at her ironing or mending, that I read my first
Shakespere, and her old text-book on mythology was the first that ever came into my empty hands. She
taught me my scales and exercises, too—on the little parlour organ, which her husband had bought
her after fifteen years, during which she had not so much as seen any instrument, but an accordion
Euryanthe I had found among her music books, she came up to me and,
putting her hands over my eyes, gently drew my head back upon her shoulder, saying tremulously, "Don't love
it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you. Oh! dear boy, pray that whatever your sacrifice may be,
it be not that."
When my aunt appeared on the morning after her arrival, she was still in a semi-somnambulant state.
She seemed not to realize that she was in the city where she had spent her youth, the place longed
for hungrily half a lifetime. She had been so wretchedly train-sick throughout the journey that she
had no recollection of anything but her discomfort, and, to all intents and purposes, there were but
a few hours of nightmare between the farm in Red Willow County and my
Huguenots she had seen in Paris, in her
youth. At two o'clock the Symphony Orchestra was to give a Wagner programme, and I intended to take my aunt;
though, as I conversed with her I grew doubtful about her enjoyment of it. Indeed, for her own sake,
I could only wish her taste for such things quite dead, and the long struggle mercifully ended at last.
I suggested our visiting the Conservatory and the Common before lunch, but she seemed altogether too
timid to wish to venture out. She questioned me absently about various changes in the city, but she was
chiefly concerned that she had forgotten to leave instructions about feeding half-skimmed milk to
a certain weakling calf, "old Maggie's calf, you know, Clark," she explained, evidently having forgotten
how long I had been away. She was further troubled because she had neglected to tell her daughter about the
I asked her whether she had ever heard any of the Wagnerian operas, and found that she
had not, though she was perfectly familiar with their respective situations, and had once possessed
the piano score of The Flying Dutchman
From the time we entered the concert hall, however, she was a trifle less passive and inert, and for
the first time seemed to perceive her surroundings. I had felt some trepidation
We sat at the extreme left of the first balcony, facing the arc of our own and the balcony above us, vertible hanging gardens, brilliant as tulip beds. The matinée audience was made up chiefly of women. One lost the contour of faces and figures, indeed any effect of line whatever, and there was only the colour of bodices past counting the shimmer of fabrics soft and firm, silky and sheer; red, mauve, pink, blue, lilac, purple, ecru, rose, yellow, cream, and white, all the colours that an impressionist finds in a sunlit landscape, with here and there the dead shadow of a frock coat. My Aunt Georgiana regarded them as though they had been so many daubs of tube-paint on a palette.
When the musicians came out and took their places, she gave a little stir of anticipation, and looked
with quickening interest down over the rail at that invariable grouping, perhaps the first
wholly familiar thing that had greeted her eye
The first number was the Tannhauser overture. When the horns drew out the first
strain of the Pilgrim's chorus, my Aunt Georgiana clutched my coat sleeve. Then it was that I
first realized that for her this broke a silence of thirty years; the inconceivable silence of the plains.
With the battle between the two motives, with the frenzy
The overture closed, my aunt released my coat sleeve, but she said nothing. She sat staring at the
orchestra through a dullness of thirty years, through the films made little by little by each of the three
hundred and sixty-five days in every one of them. What, I wondered, did she get from it? She had been a good
pianist in her day I knew, and her musical education had been broader than that of most music teachers
of a quarter of a century ago. She had often told me of Mozart's operas and Meyerbeer's, and I could
I watched her closely through the prelude to Tristan and Isolde, trying vainly
to conjecture what that seething turmoil of strings and winds might mean to her, but she sat mutely staring
at the violin bows that drove obliquely downward, like the pelting streaks of rain in a summer shower.
Had this music any message for her? Had she enough left to at all comprehend this glory which had kindled
the world since she had left it? I was in a fever of curiosity, but Aunt Georgiana sat silent upon her peak
in Darien. She preserved this utter immobility throughout the number from the Flying
Dutchman, though her fingers worked mechanically upon her black dress, as though, of themselves,
they were recalling the piano score they had once
Soon after the tenor began the "Prize Song," I heard a quick drawn breath and turned to my aunt. Her eyes were closed, but the tears were glistening on her cheeks, and I think, in a moment more, they were in my eyes as well. It never really died, then—the soul that can suffer so excruciatingly and so interminably; it withers to the outward eye only; like that strange moss which can lie on a dusty shelf half a century and yet, if placed in water, grows green again. She wept so throughout the development and elaboration of the melody.
During the intermission before the second half of the concert, I questioned my aunt and
found that the "Prize Song" was not new to her. Some years before there had drifted to the farm
in Red Willow County a young German, a tramp cow puncher, who had sung in the chorus at Beyruth,
"Well, we have come to better things than the old Trovatore at any rate,
Aunt Georgie?" I queried, with a well meant effort at jocularity.
Her lip quivered and she hastily put her handkerchief up to her mouth. From behind it she murmured, "And you have been hearing this ever since you left me, Clark?" Her question was the gentlest and saddest of reproaches.
The second half of the programme consisted of four numbers from the Ring, and closed
with Siegfried's funeral march. My aunt wept quietly, but almost continuously, as a shallow vessel overflows
in a rain-storm. From time to time her dim eyes looked up at the lights which studded the ceiling, burning
softly under their dull glass globes; doubtless they were stars in truth to her. I was still perplexed as to
what measure of musical comprehension was left to her, she who had heard nothing but the singing of Gospel Hymns
at Methodist services in the square frame school-house on Section Thirteen for so many years. I was unable to
gauge how much of it had been dissolved in soapsuds, or worked into bread, or milked into the bottom of a pail.
The deluge of sound poured on and on; I never knew what she found in the shining current of it; I never knew
how far it bore her, or past what happy islands. From the trembling of her face I could well believe that before the last numbers she had been carried out where the myriad graves are, into the grey, nameless burying grounds of
the sea; or into some world of death vaster yet, where, from the beginning of the world, hope has lain down with
The concert was over; the people filed out of the hall chattering and laughing, glad to relax and find the living level again, but my kinswoman made no effort to rise. The harpist slipped its green felt cover over his instrument; the flute-players shook the water from their mouthpieces; the men of the orchestra went out one by one, leaving the stage to the chairs and music stands, empty as a winter cornfield.
I spoke to my aunt. She burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly. "I don't want to go, Clark, I don't want to go!"
I understood. For her, just outside the door of the concert hall, lay the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs; the tall, unpainted house, with weather-curled boards; naked as a tower, the crook-backed ash seedlings where the dishcloths hung to dry; the gaunt, moulting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door.
A STUDY IN TEMPERAMENT
It was Paul's afternoon to appear before the faculty of the Pittsburgh High School to account for his various misdemeanours. He had been suspended a week ago, and his father had called at the Principal's office and confessed his perplexity about his son. Paul entered the faculty room suave and smiling. His clothes were a trifle outgrown and the tan velvet on the collar of his open overcoat was frayed and worn; but for all that there was something of the dandy about him, and he wore an opal pin in his neatly knotted black four-in-hand, and a red carnation in his buttonhole. This latter adornment the faculty somehow felt was not properly significant of the contrite spirit befitting a boy under the ban of suspension.
Paul was tall for his age and very thin, with high, cramped shoulders and a narrow chest. His
eyes were remarkable for a certain hysterical brilliancy and he continually used them in a con-
When questioned by the Principal as to why he was there, Paul stated, politely enough,
that he wanted to come back to school. This was a lie, but Paul was quite accustomed to
lying; found it, indeed, indispensible for overcoming friction. His teachers were asked to
state their respective charges against him, which they did with such a rancour and aggrievedness
as evinced that this was not a usual case. Disorder and impertinence were among the offences named,
yet each of his instructors felt that it was scarcely possible to put into words the real cause
of the trouble, which lay in a sort of hysterically defiant manner of the boy's; in the contempt
which they all knew he felt for them, and which he seemingly made not the least effort to conceal.
Once, when he had been making a synopsis of a paragraph at the blackboard, his English teacher had
stepped to his side and attempted to guide his hand. Paul had started back with a shudder and thrust
his hands violently behind him. The astonished
His teachers felt this afternoon that his whole attitude was symbolized by his shrug and his flippantly
red carnation flower, and they fell upon him without mercy, his English teacher leading the pack. He stood
through it smiling, his pale lips parted over his white teeth. (His lips were continually twitching, and
he had a habit of raising his eyebrows that was contemptuous and irritating to the last degree.) Older boys
than Paul had broken down and shed tears under that baptism of fire, but his set smile did not once desert him,
and his only sign of discomfort was the nervous trembling of the fingers that toyed with the buttons of his
overcoat, and an occasional jerking of the other hand that held
As the inquisition proceeded, one of his instructors repeated an impertinent remark of the boy's, and the Principal asked him whether he thought that a courteous speech to have made a woman. Paul shrugged his shoulders slightly and his eyebrows twitched.
"I don't know," he replied. "I didn't mean to be polite or impolite, either. I guess it's a sort of way I have of saying things regardless."
The Principal, who was a sympathetic man, asked him whether he didn't think that a way it would be well to get rid of. Paul grinned and said he guessed so. When he was told that he could go, he bowed gracefully and went out. His bow was but a repetition of the scandalous red carnation.
His teachers were in despair, and his drawing master voiced the feeling of them all
when he declared there was something about the boy which none of them understood. He
added: "I don't
The drawing master had come to realize that, in looking at Paul, one saw only his white teeth and the forced animation of his eyes. One warm afternoon the boy had gone to sleep at his drawing-board, and his master had noted with amazement what a white, blue-veined face it was; drawn and wrinkled like an old man's about the eyes, the lips twitching even in his sleep, and stiff with a nervous tension that drew them back from his teeth.
His teachers left the building dissatisfied and unhappy; humiliated to have felt so vindictive toward a mere boy, to have uttered this feeling in cutting terms, and to have set each other on, as it were, in the grewsome game of intemperate reproach. Some of them remembered having seen a miserable street cat set at bay by a ring of tormentors.
As for Paul, he ran down the hill whistling the
Faust looking wildly behind him now and then to see
whether some of his teachers were not there to writhe under his light-heartedness. As it was now late
in the afternoon and Paul was on duty that evening as usher at Carnegie Hall, he decided
that he would not go home to supper. When he reached the concert hall the doors were not yet open and,
as it was chilly outside, he decided to go up into the picture gallery—always deserted at this
hour—where there were some of Raffelli's gay studies of Paris streets and an airy blue Venetian
scene or two that always exhilarated him. He was delighted to find no one in the gallery but the old
guard, who sat in one corner, a newspaper on his knee, a black patch over one eye and the other closed.
Paul possessed himself of the place and walked confidently up and down, whistling under his breath. After
a while he sat down before a blue Rico and lost himself. When he bethought him to look at his watch, it was
after seven o'clock, and he rose with a start and ran downstairs, making a face at Augustus, peering out
from the cast-room, and an evil gesture at the Venus of Milo as he passed her on the stairway.
When Paul reached the ushers' dressing-room
Somewhat calmed by his suppression, Paul dashed out to the front of the house to seat the early comers. He
was a model usher; gracious and smiling he ran up and down the aisles; nothing was too much trouble
for him; he carried messages and brought programmes as though it were his greatest pleasure in life, and
all the people in his section thought him a charming boy, feeling that he remembered and admired them.
As the house filled, he grew more and more vivacious and animated, and the colour came to his cheeks
and lips. It was very much as though this were a great reception and Paul were the
When the symphony began Paul sank into one of the rear seats with a long sigh of relief, and lost himself
as he had done before the Rico. It was not that symphonies, as such, meant anything in particular to Paul,
but the first sigh of the instruments seemed to free some hilarious and potent spirit within him;
something that struggled there like the Genius in the bottle found by the Arab fisherman.
He felt a sudden zest of life; the lights danced before his eyes and the
After a concert was over Paul was always irritable and wretched until he got to sleep, and to-night he was even more than usually restless. He had the feeling of not being able to let down, of its being impossible to give up this delicious excitement which was the only thing that could be called living at all. During the last number he withdrew and, after hastily changing his clothes in the dressing-room, slipped out to the side door where the soprano's carriage stood. Here he began pacing rapidly up and down the walk, waiting to see her come out.
Over yonder the Schenley, in its vacant stretch, loomed big and square through the fine rain, the windows
of its twelve stories glowing
At last the singer came out, accompanied by the conductor, who helped her into her carriage and
closed the door with a cordial Sunday World supplement. A quick gust of wind brought the rain down
with sudden vehemence, and Paul was startled to find that he was still outside in the slush of the
gravel driveway; that his boots were letting in the water and his scanty overcoat was clinging wet
about him; that the lights in front of the concert hall were out, and that the rain was driving in
sheets between him and the orange glow of the windows above him. There it was, what he wanted—
tangibly before him, like the fairy world of a Christmas pantomime, but mocking spirits stood guard
at the doors, and, as the rain beat in his face, Paul wondered whether he were destined always to
shiver in the black night outside, looking up at it.
He turned and walked reluctantly toward the car tracks. The end had to come sometime; his father
in his night-clothes at the top of the stairs, explanations that did not explain, hastily improvised
fictions that were forever tripping him up, his upstairs room and its horrible yellow wall-paper, the
creaking bureau with the greasy plush collar-box, and over his painted wooden bed the pictures
of George Washington and John Calvin, and the framed motto, "Feed my
Half an hour later, Paul alighted from his car and went slowly down one of the side
streets off the main thoroughfare. It was a highly respectable street, where all the
houses were exactly alike, and where business men of moderate means begot and reared large
families of children, all of whom went to Sabbath-school and learned the shorter
catechism, and were interested in arithmetic; all of whom were as exactly alike as their
homes, and of a piece with the monotony in which they lived. Paul never went up Cordelia
Street without a shudder of loathing. His home was next the house of the Cumberland minister.
He approached it to-night with the nerveless sense of defeat, the hopeless feeling of sinking back
forever into ugliness and commonness that he always had when he came home. The moment he turned
into Cordelia Street he felt the waters close above his head. After each of these orgies of living,
he experienced all the physical depression which follows a debauch; the loathing of respectable beds,
of common food, of a house penetrated by kitchen odours; a shuddering repulsion for the flavourless,
colour-
The nearer he approached the house, the more absolutely unequal Paul felt to the sight
of it all; his ugly sleeping chamber; the cold bath-room with the grimy zinc tub, the
cracked mirror, the dripping
Meanwhile, he was wet and cold. He went around to the back of the house and tried one
of the basement windows, found it open, raised it cautiously, and scrambled down the
cellar wall to the floor. There he stood, holding his breath, terrified by the noise he
had made, but the floor above him was silent, and there was no creak on the stairs. He
found a soap-box, and carried it over to the soft ring of light that streamed from
The following Sunday was fine; the sodden November chill was broken by the last flash of
autumnal summer. In the morning Paul had to go to church and Sabbath-school, as always. On seasonable
Sunday afternoons the burghers of Cordelia Street always sat out on their front "stoops," and talked
to their neighbours on the
On this last Sunday of November, Paul sat all the afternoon on the lowest step of his "stoop," staring
into the street, while his sisters, in their rockers, were talking to the minister's daughters
To-day Paul's father sat on the top step, talking to a young man who shifted a restless baby from
knee to knee. He happened to be the young man who was daily held up to Paul as a model, and after whom
it was his father's dearest hope that he would pattern. This young man was of a ruddy complexion, with
a compressed, red mouth, and faded, near-sighted eyes, over which he wore thick spectacles, with gold
bows that curved about his ears. He was clerk to one of the magnates of a great steel corporation, and
was looked upon in Cordelia Street as a young man with a future. There was a story that, some five
years ago—he was now barely twenty-six—he had been a trifle dissipated but in order to curb
his appetites and save the loss of time and
The young man was relating how his chief, now cruising in the Mediterranean, kept in touch with all the details of the business, arranging his office hours on his yacht just as though he were at home, and "knocking off work enough to keep two stenographers busy." His father told, in turn, the plan his corporation was considering, of putting in an electric railway plant at Cairo. Paul snapped his teeth; he had an awful apprehension that they might spoil it all before he got there. Yet he rather liked to hear these legends of the iron kings, that were told and retold on Sundays and holidays; these stories of palaces in Venice, yachts on the Mediterranean, and high play at Monte Carlo appealed to his fancy, and he was interested in the triumphs of these cash boys who had become famous, though he had no mind for the cash-boy stage.
After supper was over, and he had helped to dry the dishes, Paul nervously asked his father whether he could go to George's to get some help in his geometry, and still more nervously asked for car fare. This latter request he had to repeat, as his father, on principle, did not like to hear requests for money, whether much or little. He asked Paul whether he could not go to some boy who lived nearer, and told him that he ought not to leave his school work until Sunday; but he gave him the dime. He was not a poor man, but he had a worthy ambition to come up in the world. His only reason for allowing Paul to usher was, that he thought a boy ought to be earning a little.
Paul bounded upstairs, scrubbed the greasy odour of the dish-water from his hands with the ill-smelling soap he hated, and then shook over his fingers a few drops of violet water from the bottle he kept hidden in his drawer. He left the house with his geometry conspicuously under his arm, and the moment he got out of Cordelia Street and boarded a downtown car, he shook off the lethargy of two deadening days, and began to live again.
The leading juvenile of the permanent stock
It was at the theatre and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived; the rest was but a sleep
and a forgetting. This was Paul's fairy tale, and it had for him all the allurement of a secret
love. The moment he inhaled the gassy, painty, dusty odour behind the scenes, he breathed like a
prisoner set free, and felt within him the possibility of doing or saying splendid, brilliant, poetic
things. The moment the cracked orchestra beat out the overture from Martha
or jerked at the serenade from Rigoletto, all stupid and ugly things slid
from him, and his senses were deliciously, yet delicately fired.
Perhaps it was because, in Paul's world, the
It would be difficult to put it strongly enough how convincingly the stage entrance of that theatre was for Paul the actual portal of Romance. Certainly none of the company ever suspected it, least of all Charley Edwards. It was very like the old stories that used to float about London of fabulously rich Jews, who had subterranean halls there, with palms, and fountains, and soft lamps, and richly apparelled women who never saw the disenchanting light of London day. So, in the midst of that smoke-palled city, enamoured of figures and grimy toil, Paul had his secret temple, his wishing carpet, his bit of blue-and-white Mediterranean shore bathed in perpetual sunshine.
Several of Paul's teachers had a theory that his imagination had been perverted by garish fiction, but the truth was that he scarcely ever read at all. The books at home were not such as would either tempt or corrupt a youthful mind, and as for reading the novels that some of his friends urged upon him—well, he got what he wanted much more quickly from music; any sort of music, from an orchestra to a barrel organ. He needed only the spark, the indescribable thrill that made his imagination master of his senses, and he could make plots and pictures enough of his own. It was equally true that he was not stage struck—not, at any rate, in the usual acceptation of that expression. He had no desire to become an actor, any more than he had to become a musician. He felt no necessity to do any of these things; what he wanted was to see, to be in the atmosphere, float on the wave of it, to be carried out, blue league after blue league, away from everything.
After a night behind the scenes, Paul found the school-room more than ever repulsive; the bare floors
and naked walls; the prosy men who never wore frock coats, or violets in their button-holes; the women
with their dull gowns, shrill
Matters went steadily worse with Paul at school. In the itch to let his instructors know how
heartily he despised them and their homilies, and how thoroughly he was appreciated elsewhere,
he mentioned once or twice that he had no time to fool with theorems; adding—with a
The upshot of the matter was, that the Principal went to Paul's father, and Paul was taken out of school and put to work. The manager at Carnegie Hall was told to get another usher in his stead; the doorkeeper at the theatre was warned not to admit him to the house; and Charley Edwards remorsefully promised the boy's father not to see him again.
The members of the stock company were vastly amused when some of Paul's stories reached them—especially the women. They were hard-working women, most of them supporting indigent husbands or brothers, and they laughed rather bitterly at having stirred the boy to such fervid and florid inventions. They agreed with the faculty and with his father that Paul's was a bad case.
The east-bound train was ploughing through a January snow-storm; the dull dawn was beginning
to show grey when the engine whistled a mile out of Newark. Paul started up from the
Paul had slept very little, and he felt grimy and uncomfortable. He had made the all-night journey in a day coach, partly because he was ashamed, dressed as he was, to go into a Pullman, and partly because he was afraid of being seen there by some Pittsburgh business man, who might have noticed him in Denny & Carson's office. When the whistle awoke him, he clutched quickly at his breast pocket, glancing about him with an uncertain smile. But the little, clay-bespattered Italians were still sleeping, the slatternly women across the aisle were in open-mouthed oblivion, and even the crumby, crying babies were for the nonce stilled. Paul settled back to struggle with his impatience as best he could.
When he arrived at the Jersey City station,
It was a little after one o'clock when he drove up to the Waldorf, and after settling with the cabman, went into the office. He registered from Washington; said his mother and father had been abroad, and that he had come down to await the arrival of their steamer. He told his story plausibly and had no trouble, since he volunteered to pay for them in advance, in engaging his rooms; a sleeping-room, sitting-room and bath.
Not once, but a hundred times, Paul had plan-
It had been wonderfully simple; when they had shut him out of the theatre and concert hall, when they had taken away his bone, the whole thing was virtually determined. The rest was a mere matter of opportunity. The only thing that at all surprised him was his own courage—for he realized well enough that he had always been tormented by fear, a sort of apprehensive dread that, of late years, as the meshes of the lies he had told closed about him, had been pulling the muscles of his body tighter and tighter. Until now, he could not remember the time when he had not been dreading something. Even when he was a little boy, it was always there—behind him, or before, or on either side. There had always been the shadowed corner, the dark place into which he dared not look, but from which something seemed always to be watching him—and Paul had done things that were not pretty to watch, he knew.
But now he had a curious sense of relief, as though he had at last thrown down the gauntlet to the thing in the corner.
Yet it was but a day since he had been sulking in the traces; but yesterday afternoon that he had been sent to the bank with Denny & Carson's deposits, as usual—but this time he was instructed to leave the book to be balanced. There was above two thousand dollars in checks, and nearly a thousand in the bank notes which he had taken from the book and quietly transferred to his pocket. At the bank he had made out a new deposit slip. His nerves had been steady enough to permit of his returning to the office, where he had finished his work and asked for a full day's holiday tomorrow, Saturday, giving a perfectly reasonable pretext. The bank book, he knew, would not be returned before Monday or Tuesday, and his father would be out of town for the next week. From the time he slipped the bank notes into his pocket until he boarded the night train for New York, he had not known a moment's hesitation. It was not the first time Paul had steered through treacherous waters.
How astonishingly easy it had all been; here he was, the thing done, and this time there would be no awakening, no figure at the top of the stairs. He watched the snow flakes whirling by his window until he fell asleep.
When he awoke, it was three o'clock in the afternoon. He bounded up with a start; half of one of his precious days gone already! He spent more than an hour in dressing, watching every stage of his toilet carefully in the mirror. Everything was quite perfect; he was exactly the kind of boy he had always wanted to be.
When he went downstairs, Paul took a carriage and drove up Fifth Avenue toward the Park. The snow had somewhat abated; carriages and tradesmen's wagons were hurrying soundlessly to and fro in the winter twilight; boys in woollen mufflers were shovelling off the doorsteps; the avenue stages made fine spots of colour against the white street. Here and there on the corners were stands, with whole flower gardens blooming under glass cases, against the sides of which the snow flakes stuck and melted; violets, roses, carnations, lilies of the valley—somehow vastly more lovely and alluring that they blossomed thus unnaturally in the snow. The Park itself was a wonderful stage winter-piece.
When he returned, the pause of the twilight had ceased, and the tune of the streets had changed.
The snow was falling faster, lights streamed from the hotels that reared their dozen stories
The boy set his teeth and drew his shoulders together in a spasm of realization; the plot of all dramas, the text of all romances, the nerve-stuff of all sensations was whirling about him like the snow flakes. He burnt like a faggot in a tempest.
When Paul went down to dinner, the music of the orchestra came floating up the elevator
shaft to greet him. His head whirled as he stepped into the thronged corridor, and he sank
back into one of the chairs against the wall to get his breath. The lights, the chatter,
the perfumes, the bewil-
When he reached the dining-room he sat down at a table near a window. The flowers, the
white linen, the many-coloured wine glasses, the gay toilettes of the women, the low popping
of corks, the undulating repetitions of the Blue Danube from the
orchestra, all flooded Paul's dream with bewildering radiance. When the roseate tinge of his
champagne was added—that cold, precious, bubbling stuff that creamed and foamed in
his glass—Paul wondered that there were honest men in the world at all. This was what
all the world was fighting for, he reflected; this was what all the struggle was about. He
doubted the reality of his past. Had he ever known a place called Cordelia Street, a place
where fagged-looking business men got on the early car; mere rivets in a machine they seemed
to Paul,—sickening men, with combings of children's hair al-
He was not in the least abashed or lonely. He had no especial desire to meet or to know
any of these people; all he demanded was the right to look on and conjecture, to watch the
pageant. The mere stage properties were all he contended for. Nor was he lonely later in
the evening, in his
He found it hard to leave his beautiful sitting-room to go to bed that night, and sat long watch-
Sunday morning the city was practically snow-bound. Paul breakfasted late, and in the afternoon he fell in with a wild San Francisco boy, a freshman at Yale, who said he had run down for a "little flyer" over Sunday. The young man offered to show Paul the night side of the town, and the two boys went out together after dinner, not returning to the hotel until seven o'clock the next morning. They had started out in the confiding warmth of a champagne friendship, but their parting in the elevator was singularly cool. The freshman pulled himself together to make his train, and Paul went to bed. He awoke at two o'clock in the afternoon, very thirsty and dizzy, and rang for ice-water, coffee, and the Pittsburgh papers.
On the part of the hotel management, Paul excited no suspicion. There was this to be said for
On the eighth day after his arrival in New York, he found the whole affair exploited in the
Paul had just come in to dress for dinner; he sank into a chair, weak to the knees, and clasped
his head in his hands. It was to be worse than jail, even; the tepid waters of Cordelia Street were
to close over him finally and forever. The grey monotony stretched before him in hopeless, unrelieved
years; Sabbath-school, Young People's Meeting, the yellow-papered room, the damp dish-towels; it all
rushed back upon him with a sickening vividness. He had the old feeling that the orchestra had suddenly
stopped, the sinking sensation that the play was over. The sweat broke
He had no sooner entered the dining-room and caught the measure of the music than his remembrance was lightened by his old elastic power of claiming the moment, mounting with it, and finding it all sufficient. The glare and glitter about him, the mere scenic accessories had again, and for the last time, their old potency. He would show himself that he was game, he would finish the thing splendidly. He doubted, more than ever, the existence of Cordelia Street, and for the first time he drank his wine recklessly. Was he not, after all, one of those fortunate beings born to the purple, was he not still himself and in his own place? He drummed a nervous accompaniment to the Pagliacci music and looked about him, telling himself over and over that it had paid.
He reflected drowsily, to the swell of the music and the chill sweetness of his wine,
that he might have done it more wisely. He might have caught
Paul was awakened next morning by a painful throbbing in his head and feet. He had thrown himself across the bed without undressing, and had slept with his shoes on. His limbs and hands were lead heavy, and his tongue and throat were parched and burnt. There came upon him one of those fateful attacks of clear-headedness that never occurred except when he was physically exhausted and his nerves hung loose. He lay still and closed his eyes and let the tide of things wash over him.
His father was in New York; "stopping at some joint or other," he told himself. The memory
of successive summers on the front stoop fell upon him like a weight of black water. He had not
a hundred dollars left; and he knew now, more than ever, that money was everything, the
He rose and moved about with a painful effort, succumbing now and again to attacks of nausea. It was the old depression exaggerated; all the world had become Cordelia Street. Yet somehow he was not afraid of anything, was absolutely calm; perhaps because he had looked into the dark corner at last and knew. It was bad enough, what he saw there, but somehow not so bad as his long fear of it had been. He saw everything clearly now. He had a feeling that he had made the best of it, that he had lived the sort of life he was meant to live, and for half an hour he sat staring at the revolver. But he told himself that was not the way, so he went down stairs and took a cab to the ferry.
When Paul arrived at Newark, he got off the train and took another cab, directing the driver to follow
the Pennsylvania tracks out of the town.
The carnations in his coat were drooping with the cold, he noticed; their red glory all over. It occurred
to him that all the flowers he had seen
The sound of an approaching train awoke him, and he started to his feet, remembering only his resolution,
and afraid
He felt something strike his chest, and that his
THE McCLURE PRESS, NEW YORK