Scribner's Magazine
by Willa Sibert Cather
From Scribner's Magazine, 33 (January 1903): 109-121.
A Death in the Desert
WINDERMERE 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 Windermere 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 Holdredge 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 with a sediment of fine, yellow dust which clung to their hair and eyebrows like gold powder. It blew up in clouds from the bleak, lifeless country through which they passed, until they were one color with the sage-brush and sand-hills. The gray and yellow desert was varied only by occasional ruins of deserted towns, and the little red boxes of station-houses, where the spindling trees and sickly vines in the blue-grass yards were kept alive only by continual hypodermic injections of water from the tank where the engines were watered, little green reserves fenced off in that confusing wilderness of sand.
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 Windermere since they had boarded the train at Holdredge, and kept glancing at him curiously and then looking reflectively out of the window, as though he were trying to recall something. But wherever Windermere 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, and began softly to whistle the Spring Song from "Proserpine," the cantata that a dozen years before had made its young composer famous in a night. Windermere 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 Windermere 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, and its popularity was the gravest charge conservative critics could make against it.
Windermere unbent a trifle, and smiled at his neighbor 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 for a long time; I think I must have met you before."
"Thank you," said Windermere, 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 Windermere a cigar and plied him with questions on the only subject that people ever seemed to care to talk to Windermere about. At length the salesman and the two girls alighted at a Colorado way station, and Windermere 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 Windermere 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 phaëton 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. Windermere 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 phaëton uttered a low cry and dropped the reins. Windermere 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 phaëton, crying, "Katharine, dear, what is the matter?"
Windermere 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 Windermere 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 parlor. Windermere 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 gray 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 Windermere, 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 my sister startled you at the station last night, Mr. Hilgarde, and I've come around to apologize."
"Ah! the young lady in the phaëton? 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, and I make it to you most sincerely."
The man colored 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 favor him, and when the switch-engine threw a light on your face it startled her."
Windermere wheeled about in his chair. "Oh! Katharine Gaylord! Is it possible! Now it's you who have given me a turn. Why, I used to know her when I was a boy. What on earth—"
"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 sorry to hear this. There are many reasons why I should be more concerned than I can tell you."
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 Windermere, quickly. "I'll get my hat and be with you in a moment."
When he came downstairs Windermere 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."
Windermere 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, someway—miles and miles apart— and I'm afraid she's fearfully unhappy."
"It's a very tragic story that you are telling, Gaylord," said Windermere. 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, but she spent it all going to health resorts. It's her lungs, you know. I've got money enough to send her anywhere, but the doctors all say it's no use. She hasn't the ghost of a chance. It's just getting through the days until the end now. I had no notion she was half so bad before she came to me. She just wrote that she was all run down. Now that she's here, I think she'd be happier anywhere under the sun, but she won't leave. She says it's easier to let go of life here, and that to go East would be dying twice. There was a time when I was a brakeman with a run out of Bird City, Iowa, and she was a little thing I could carry on my shoulder, when I could get her everything on earth she wanted, and she hadn't a wish my $80 a month didn't cover; and now, when I've got a little property together, I can't buy her a night's sleep!" He stopped with a gulp and half closed his eyes.
Windermere 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 conductor. He died when we were kids. Maggie, my other sister, who lives with me, was a telegraph operator here while I was getting my grip on things. We had no education to speak of. I have to hire a stenographer because I can't spell straight—the Almighty couldn't teach me to spell. The things that make up life to Kate are all Greek to me, and there's scarcely a point where we touch any more, except in our recollections of the old times when we were all young and happy together, and Kate sang in a church choir in Bird City. But I believe, Mr. Hilgarde, that if she can see just one person like you, who knows about the things and people she cares for, it will give her about the only comfort she can have now."
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 Windermere, "and I guess we understand each other."
They were met at the door by a thin, colorless 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 Windermere 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 gray plain that ended in the great upheaval of the Rockies. There are little skeleton-closets of the arts scattered here and there all over the West, where some Might-Have-Been hides his memories and the trophies of his student days on the Continent and the rusty tools of the craft that he once believed had called him; but this room savored of the present, and about it there was an air of immediate touch with the art of the present.
On the walls were autograph sketches by several of the younger American painters, and young Scotchmen whose names were scarcely known on this side of the water. Above one of the book-cases was a large photograph of Rodin's Balzac; on the music-rack were the scores of Massenet's latest opera and Chaminade's latest song. It seemed scarcely possible that the glad tidings of these things should have reached Wyoming already. The haunting air of familiarity about the place perplexed Windermere. Was the room 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, framed in dark wood, 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. The black oak ceiling and floor, the dull red walls, the huge brick fire-place with a Wagnerian inscription on the tiles, the old Venetian lamp that hung under the copy of the Mona Lisa, the cast of the Parthenon frieze that ran about the room, the tall brass candlesticks with their sacerdotal candles, were all exactly as Adriance would have had them.
Among the photographs on the wall there was one of Katharine Gaylord, taken in the days when Windermere 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 camaraderie of her frank, confident eyes was qualified by the deep lines about her mouth and the curve of the lips, which was both sad and cynical. Certainly she had more good-will than confidence toward the world, and the bravado of her smile could not conceal the shadow of an unrest that was almost discontent. Perhaps that, too, was only the scar of the struggle of which her brother had spoken; perhaps the long warfare against adverse conditions had brought about an almost antagonistic and distrustful attitude of mind. The chief charm of the woman, as Windermere had known her, lay in her superb figure and in her eyes, which possessed a warm, life-giving quality like the sunlight; generous, fearless eyes, which glowed with sympathy and good-cheer for all living things, a sort of perpetual salutat to the world. Her head Windermere remembered as peculiarly well shaped and proudly poised. There had been always a little of the imperatrix about her, and her pose in the photograph revived all his old impressions of her unattachedness, of how absolutely and valiantly she stood alone.
Windermere 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."
Windermere 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 on the ravages of a long illness. The long, loose folds of her white gown had been especially designed to disguise 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 nor 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 as water-flowers. Her chest, that full, proud singer's chest, that had swelled like the bellows of an organ when she took her high notes, was fallen and flat. The changes in her face were less obvious; the proud carriage of the head, the warm, clear eyes, even the delicate flush of color in her cheeks, all defiantly remained, though they were all in a lower key—older, sadder, softer.
She sat down upon the divan and began nervously arranging 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 Windermere. "I can come quite as well to-morrow."
"Gracious, no!" she protested, with a flash of that quick, keen humor 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, you know—and trying to patch up my peace with my conscience by suggesting possible noble uses for what he kindly calls my talent."
Windermere 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 went on: "I'm not equal to any of them, not even the least noble. I didn't study that method. Neither Marchesi nor your brother taught me the moral purpose of singing the scales."
Katharine laughed indulgently. "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? Does the chaste Diana on the Garden Theatre still keep her vestal vows through all the exasperating changes of weather? Who has your brother's old studio now, and what misguided aspirants practise their scales in the rookeries above Carnegie Hall? What do people go to see at the theatres, and what do they eat and drink there in the world nowadays? You see, I love it all, from the Battery to Riverside. Oh, let me die in Harlem!" she was interrupted by a violent attack of coughing, and Windermere, embarrassed by her discomfort, plunged into gossip about the professional people he had met in town during the summer, and the musical outlook for the winter. He was diagramming with his pencil, on the back of an old envelope he found in his pocket, some new mechanical device to be used at the Metropolitan in the production of the "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: "How wonderfully like Adriance you are!" and he felt as though a crisis of some sort had been met and tided over.
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—there's no possibility of living up to the part. I really believe it kept me out of a scrape or two when I was in college, and, 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 Windermere, 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 rather surprised me in you, for you must have seen a good deal of your brother's pupils. Or had you an omnivorous capacity, and elasticity that always met the occasion?"
"Don't ask a man to confess the follies of his youth," said Windermere, 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," Windermere 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 affected 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 summer dusk, she used sometimes to call me to her and turn my face up in the light that streamed out through the shutters and kiss me, and then I always knew she was thinking of Adriance."
"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 Windermere. "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."
"Well, he had a piano carted out into the desert somehow, and was living in a tent beside a dried water-course grown up with dwarf oleanders. He was writing an Algerian suite for the piano then; it must be in the publisher's hands by this time. I have been too ill to answer his letter, and have lost touch with him."
Windermere 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. Windemere was not even a handsom man, and everyone admitted that his brother was. Katharine 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 gray, and darkened about the mouth by continual shaving. His eyes were of the same inconstant April color, but they were reflective and rather dull, while Adriance's were always points of high light, and always meaning another thing than the thing they meant yesterday. But it was hard to see why this earnest man should so continually suggest that lyric, youthful face that was as gay as his was grave. For Adriance, though he was ten years older, and though his hair was streaked with silver, had the face of a boy of twenty, so mobile that it told his thoughts before he could put them into words or music, and responded to the nerve-centres of his sensitive brain as the keyboard to the touch. A contralto, famous for the extravagance of her vocal methods and of her affections, had once said of him that the shepherd-boys who sang under the oaks in the Vale of Tempe must certainly have looked like young Hilgarde, and the comparison had been appropriated by a hundred shyer women who preferred to quote.
As Windermere 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 so done and dead and far behind him and that the woman had lived her life out since then, gave him an oppressive sense of age and loss. He bethought himself of something that Stevenson had said about sitting by the hearth and remembering the faces of women without desire," and felt himself an octogenarian.
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, as he had read in some Greek lyric. 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, and realizing more keenly than ever before how far this glorious dream world of production and beautiful creations lay beyond the prow of the merchant marines. He told himself that he had in common with this woman only the baser uses of life. That sixth sense, the passion for perfect expression, and the lustre of her achievement were like a rosy mist veiling her, such as the goddesses of the elder days wrapped about themselves when they vanished from the arms of men.
II
Windermere'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 as the sands through an hour-glass. 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 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. Windermere Hilgarde had been a stop-gap all his life, and whatever career he embarked upon he drifted back always to the same harbor, refused by the high seas, and found himself doing the work of all his several friends and serving every purpose save his own. 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 face, which, indeed, was not his own, but his brother's. No matter what his mission, east or west, by land or sea, he was sure to find himself employed in his brother's business, one of the tributary lives which helped to swell the shining current of Adriance Hilgarde's. It was not the first time that his duty had been to comfort as best he could one of the broken things his brother's imperious speed had cast aside and forgotten. He made no attempt to analyze the situation or to state it in exact terms, but he felt Katharine Gaylord's need for him, and he accepted it as a commission from his brother to help this woman to die. Day by day he felt her demands on him grow more imperious, her need for him grow more acute and positive, and day by day he felt that in his peculiar relation to her, his own individuality played a smaller part. His power to minister to her comfort, he saw, lay solely in his link with his brother's life. He understood all that his physical resemblance meant to her. He knew that she sat by him always watching for some common trick of gesture, some familiar play of expression, some trick of light and shadow, in which he should seem wholly Adriance. He knew that she lived upon this and that her disease fed upon it; that it sent shudders of remembrance through her and quickened nerves that the grave had already chilled; that all the womanhood in her cried out for this, and that in the exhaustion which followed this turmoil of her dying senses, she slept deep and sweet, and dreamed of youth and art and days in a certain old Florentine garden, and not of bitterness and death.
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 color 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 effluvium 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 him all the warmth and radiance of his rich nature, all the homage of the poet and troubadour, and, when they were no longer near, forgetting, for that also was a part of Adriance's gift.
Three weeks after Windermere 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.
Windermere's gray face colored 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 copy of "Fort comme la Morte" and held it out, smiling. "You got him to write it, Don't say you didn't, for it came direct, you see, and the last address I gave him was a place in Florida. This deed shall be remembered of you when I am with the just in Paradise. But one thing you did not ask him to do, for you didn't know about it. He has sent me his latest work, a pastoral sonata, the most ambitious thing he has ever done, and you are to play it for me directly, though it looks horribly intricate. But first for the letter; I think you would better read it aloud to me."
Windermere sat down in a low chair facing the window-seat in which she sat with a barricade of pillows behind her, and, playing with the lace on her sleeve, 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 beautiful 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. In the oragne and box and citron trees about him the nightengales were singing all the unwritten and unwritable music in the world, and "Je pense à mon amie," he wrote. 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 glowed. The wonderful Moorish arches threw graceful blue shadows all about him. He had sketched an outline of them on the margin of his note-paper. The subtleties of Arabic decoration had cast an unholy spell over him, and Christian art and the brutal exaggerations of Gothic architecture were no more for him. The soul of Théophile Gautier had entered into him, and Western civilization was a bad dream, easily forgotten. The Alhambra itself had from the first seemed perfectly familiar to him, and he knew that he must have trod that court, sleek and brown and obsequious, centuries before Ferdinand rode into Andalusia. The letter was full of confidences about his work, and delicate allusions to their old happy days of study and comradeship, and of her own work, still so warmly remembered and appreciatively discussed everywhere he went.
As Windermere 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. He wondered whether all the gift-bearers, all the sons of genius, broke what they touched and blighted what they caressed thus. 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 consumed others. Then he looked down at this white, burnt-out brand that lay before him. "Like him, isn't it?" she said, quietly, and Windermere felt in her voice the softness of the south wind in the spring.
"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 from 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 Windermere, 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 of her speech. "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?" Certainly there is a sacred and dignified selfishness which properly belongs to art and religion. You know how he wastes his time and strength in those idiotic social obligations which he takes so seriously—in chivalrous attentions to vapid old women who knew his mother, and in writing wedding-marches for every pink-and-white thing who asks him."
"Come, come," expostulated Windermere, alarmed at her excitement. "Where is the new sonata? Let him speak for himself."
He sat down at the piano and began playing the first movement of the sonota, which was indeed the voice of Adriance, his lofty and proper speech. The sonata was dedicated to Brahms, and was the most classic work Hilgarde had done up to that time. It marked, indeed, the transition from his purely lyric vein to that deeper and nobler style by which he will live. Windermere played intelligently, without the least affectation of virtuosity, but with that sympathetic comprehension which seems peculiar to a certain lovable class of men who never accomplish anything in particular. When he had finished he turned to Katharine.
"How he has grown! Heavens, how he has grown!" she cried. "This thing is entirely great. There is not a trace of that persistent saccharine quality that was always creeping into his earlier work. The theme, the whle conception is big and serene. How firm the texture is! and surely he never wrote such harmonies before. What the last three 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 white 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. Windermere crossed over to her quickly and knelt beside her. In all the days he had known her she had never before given voice to the bitterness of her own defeat beyond an occasional ironical jest. Her courage had become a point of pride with him, and to see it going sickened him.
"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 if I should ever sing Brunhilda, but quite simply when I should sing Brunhilda, I was always starving myself and thinking what I might drink and what I might not. But broken music-boxes may drink whatsoever they list, and no one cares whether they lose their figure. Run over that shepherd-boy theme at the beginning again. That, at least, is not new. It was running in his head when we were in Venice years ago, and he used to drum it on his glass at the dinner-table. He had just begun to work it out when the late autumn came on, and the paleness of the Adriatic oppressed him, and he decided to go to Florence for the winter, and lost touch with the theme during his illness. Do you remember those frightful days? All the people who have loved him are not strong enough to save him from himself! When I got word from Florence that he had been ill, I was in Nice filling a concert engagement. His wife was hurrying to him from Paris, but I reached him first. I arrived at dusk, in a terrific storm. They had taken an old palace there for the winter, and I found him in the library—a long, dark room full of old Latin books and heavy furniture and bronzes. He was sitting by a wood fire at one end of the room, looking, oh, so worn and pale!—as he always does when he is ill, you know. Ah, it is so good that you do know! Even his red smoking-jacket lent no color to his face. His first words were not to tell me how ill he had been, but that that morning he had been well enough to put the last strokes to the score of his '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 desolated old palace. There was a concert piano in the room, and he played that prelude of Chopin's with the ceaseless pelting of rain-drops in the bass. He wrote it, you know, when George Sand carried him off to Majorca and shut him up in a damp grotto in the hill-side, and it rained forever and ever, and he had only goat's milk to drink. Adriance had been to Majorca, you know, and had slept in their grotto. How that night comes back to me! There were no lights in the room, only the wood fire which glowed upon the hard features of the bronze Dante like the reflection of purgatorial flames, and threw long black shadows about us; beyond us it scarcely penetrated the gloom at all. How heavy and impenetrable were those shadows! quite like the darkness of the under world, where it will be resting-time indeed, and the last strokes will have been put to the last score, and we shall all be together, resting in the common darkness, after it is all over. Suddenly Adriance stopped playing and sat staring at the fire with the weariness of all his life in his eyes, and of all the other lives that must aspire and suffer to make up one such life as his. Somehow the wind with all its world pain had got into the room, and the cold rain was in our eyes, and the wave came up in both of us at once—that awful vague, universal pain, that cold fear of life and death and God and hope—and we were like two clinging together on a spar in mid-ocean after the shipwreck of everything. Then we heard the front door open with a great gust of wind that shook even the walls, and the servants came running with lights, announcing that Madame had returned from Paris, 'and in the book we read no more that night.'" She gave the old line with a certain bitter humor, 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 changed even the lines of her face completely, and when she looked in the mirror she saw not herself, but the scathing critic, the amused observer and satirist of herself. Sometimes while looking at the mask she wore, Windermere had thought of Richard's lines, "the shadow of my sorrow hath destroyed the shadow of my face." He dropped his head upon his hand and sat looking at the rug. "How much you have cared!" he said.
"Ah, yes, I cared," she said, 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 someone. 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."
Windermere 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 people are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little before we begin to discern. But I wanted you to know; you are so like him that it is almost like telling him himself. At least, I feel now that he will know some day, and then I will be quite sacred from his compassion, for we none of us dare pity the dead. Since it was what my life has chiefly meant, I should like him to know. On the whole, I am not ashamed of it. I have fought a good fight."
"And has he never known at all?" asked Windermere, 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 was his kindness that was hardest. I have pretty well used my life up at standing punishment."
"Don't; you'll make me hate him," groaned Windermere.
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. His early music was the first that ever really took hold of me. When I was a child out in Iowa, and Charley was braking on the road, I used to lie out under the apple-trees and dream about him. I had seen his picture in some magazine or other, and I always fancied him in Paris leading the gilded existence of a Ouida hero. I had a tough pull to get started; it was a long jump from Bird City to Chicago, and a longer one from Chicago to New York. I fought my way to him, and I drank my doom greedily enough."
Windermere 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 will stand to your credit in the land to which I travel. I wax quotational. 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. 'Unto one of the least of these,' you remember."
Windermere 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 her head. "No, no; don't tell me that. I have seen enough of the tragedy of life, God knows: don't show me any more just as the curtain is going down. No, no, it was only a boy's fancy, and your divine pity and my utter pitiableness have recalled it for a moment. One does not love the dying, dear friend. If some fancy of that sort had been left over from boyhood, this would rid you of it, and that were well. Now go, and you will come again to-morrow, as long as there are tomorrows, will you not?" She took his hand with a smile that lifted the mask from her soul, that was both courage and sadness, hope and despair, and full of infinite loyalty and tenderness, she said softly: For ever and for ever, farewell, Cassius; If we do meet again, why, we shall smile; If not, why then, this parting was well made.
The courage in her eyes was like the clear light of a star to him as he went out.
On the night of Adriance Hilgarde's opening concert in Paris, Windermere 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 seemed that the serene soul of her must have left already and found some refuge from the storm, and only the tenacious animal life were left to do battle with death. She labored under a delusion at once pitiful and merciful, thinking that she was in the Pullman on her way to New York, going back to her life and her work. When she aroused from her stupor, it was only to ask the porter to waken her half an hour out of Jersey City, or to remonstrate with him about the roughness of the road, and to declare that she would never travel by that line again. At midnight Windermere and the nurse were left alone with her. Poor Charley Gaylord had lain down on a couch outside the door. Windermere sat looking at the sputtering night-lamp until it made his eyes ache. His head dropped forward on the foot of the bed and he sank into a heavy, distressful slumber. He was dreaming of Adriance's concert in Paris, and of Adriance, the troubadour, smiling and debonair, with his boyish face and the touch of silver gray in his hair. He heard the applause and he saw the roses going up over the footlights until they were stacked half as high as the piano, and the petals fell and scattered, making crimson splotches on the floor. Down this crimson pathway came Adriance with his youthful step, leading his prima donna by the hand; a dark woman this time, with Spanish eyes.
The nurse touched him on the shoulder, he started and awoke. She screened the lamp with her hand. Windermere 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.
Windermere went to call her brother, but when they came back the madness of art was over for Katharine.
Two days later Windermere 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. Windermere'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, Windermere wrung Gaylord's hand among the crowd of alighting passengers. The people of a German opera company, en route for the coast, rushed by them in frantic haste to snatch their breakfast during the stop. Windermere heard an exclamation in a broad South German dialect, and a massive woman whose figure persistently escaped from her stays in the most improbable places and whose florid face was marked by good living and champagne as by fine tide lines, rushed up to him, her blond hair disordered by the wind, and glowing with joyful surprise she caught his coat-sleeve with her tightly gloved hands.
"Herr Gott, Adriance, lieber Freund," she cried, emotionally.
Windermere 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.
