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A Speckled Bird

by Augusta J. Evans · English · Gutenberg #36029 · 674,051 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: A Speckled Bird

Author: Augusta J. Evans


        
Release date: May 4, 2011 [eBook #36029]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36029

Credits: E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


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E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan, and the Online
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A SPECKLED BIRD

by

AUGUSTA EVANS WILSON

Author of "St. Elmo," "Vashti," "Infelice," "At the Mercy of Tiberius,"
etc.


    "As a speckled bird, the birds round about are against her."







G. W. Dillingham Company
Publishers New York

Copyright, 1902, by
G. W. Dillingham Company

A Speckled Bird.
Issued August, 1902.




                        To
                  MY KIND READERS
    KNOWN AND UNKNOWN, WHO HAVE DESIRED AND ASKED
      ME TO WRITE AGAIN, THESE PAGES ARE OFFERED
          IN GRATEFUL RECOGNITION OF VERY
              LOYAL FRIENDSHIP DURING
                    MANY YEARS




A SPECKLED BIRD




CHAPTER I


"Grandma, who named me Eglah?"

"My cousin, Bishop Vivian, when he baptized you."

"Do you think he had any right to put such a label on me?"

"Certainly, because your father selected your name, and the bishop had
no choice."

"It is so ugly, I never can like it, and a little baby that can't speak
her mind ought not to be tied to something she must drag all her life
and hate for ever and ever."

"Eat your breakfast, and try to be a good, quiet child, then your name
will not trouble you so much."

"I never shall like it, any more than you do, and you know, grandma,
when you call me your mouth twists like you had toothache."

"I was not consulted about your name. It belonged to your New England
Grandmother Kent, and as it appears you belong only to your father, you
were called after his mother. I heard him tell you it was the name of a
queen--one of David's wives."

"Yes, but I found out she was not the head queen--just a sort of
step-wife queen. Now if I could only be the pet queen, Sheba, I should
not fret at all."

"The Queen of Sheba was not David's wife."

"You are all wrong about your Bible, grandma, because you are only a
Methodist. David's Sheba was nicknamed Bath Sheba, for the reason that
he saw her going to her bath-house, and she looked so pretty. I saw her
picture in father's 'Piscopal Bible."

"There, there! Be quiet. Drink your milk."

Mrs. Maurice leaned back in her chair and sighed as she looked down at
the fragile child beside her. The tall, silver coffee urn showed in
repousse on one side the flight of Europa, on the other Dirce dragged to
death. Eglah could never understand how the strands of the victim's hair
supported the weight of her form, and wondered why they did not give way
and set the prisoner free. To-day she eyed it askance, then surveyed her
own fair image reflected in the polished, smooth surface below the band
of figures.

"Grandma, don't you think horses are much nicer for ladies to ride than
oxen?"

"Yes, my dear."

"Then why did you buy ox riders?" one small finger pointed to the
heirloom fetich.

"I did not buy the urn. It has belonged to your Grandfather Maurice's
family for one hundred and fifty years, and was brought from Old
England. Eliza, take her away. If she cannot be silent, she must go back
and have her meals with you. It seems impossible to teach her that in
the presence of grown people children are expected to listen."

Mrs. Mitchell came forward from a side table, lifted the little girl
from her chair, and untied the ruffled bib that protected her white
dimity dress.

"Now tell grandmother you are sorry you annoyed her, and if she will let
you sit at her table you will be as quiet as she wishes."

"Ma-Lila, don't make me tell stories; she doesn't believe them, and I am
so tired saying things I don't mean. I want to go back to the side
table, where you are not always scolding me. Grandma, it will be
peacefuller if I stay with Ma-Lila----"

"Hush! Come here."

Mrs. Maurice lifted the little one's dimpled chin and studied the fair
face that had bloomed seven years in her lonely home: a winsome face cut
like a gem, velvety-brown eyes, long-lashed, and the pure, pale oval set
in a shining bronze frame of curling hair, all chestnut in shade,
braided with gold when sunshine hid among the ripples.

"Kent! Kent--even her ears small as any other rogue's. She is her
father's child."

"Is that a sin, grandma?"

Mrs. Maurice swiftly laid her hand over the uplifted, upbraiding eyes,
to veil something in their depths that often disquieted her, and sought
refuge in her habitual command:

"Take her away, Eliza."

Ringing the small bell close to the breakfast tray, the mistress took a
spray of starry jasmine from the vase in the centre of the table, and as
she turned away said to the grey-haired butler:

"Aaron, you will put a plate and chair for Miss Eglah at the side table
until further orders. Tell Oliver I shall not want the carriage until
four o'clock."

Unusually tall and very handsome was this stately widow of a Confederate
general who had been slain during one of the fierce conflicts around
beleaguered Richmond. No white hairs marred the glossy blackness of the
thick coil half hidden under a snowy crepe cap, and the brilliant blue
eyes were undimmed by tearful years of widowhood--a widowhood involving
for her the full, sad significance of the sacred and melancholy term, an
inability to forget, a despair of any earthly consolation, and a jealous
reticence that denied all discussion of her sorrow, as she would have
defended her dead from an alien's rude touch. To her, time had brought
neither oblivion nor alleviation, only a sharpened sense of irreparable
bereavement; and as one standing in an unending and hopeless eclipse,
she accepted the gloom with a stern and silent rejection of all other
lights when the sun of her life went down.

Anniversaries are electric batteries that thrill the domain of emotions,
and one day out of every three hundred and sixty-five the strings of
memory are keyed to their utmost tension, vibrating with an intolerable
intensity that reddens the lips of old wounds and quickens dull aches to
stinging torture.

This memorial morning Mrs. Maurice crossed the wide, vaulted hall, and
passing through the long, pillared drawing-room, opened a locked door
and shut herself in a darkened chamber to keep tryst with the sacred
souvenirs that represented all she held dear. Raising the window, she
turned the blinds to allow sunlight entrance into this silent reliquary
filled with mementoes jealously guarded "in solemn salvatory": a heavy,
square bedstead with twisted columns that upheld a red-lined tester
whence embroidered draperies fell; a gilded swinging wicker crib, with
baby blankets, rose bordered; a velvet easy chair, where a gentleman's
quilted silk dressing-gown hung over the carved back, and his slippers
lay beneath; a table heaped with a child's toys, books, and
daguerreotypes of various sizes. On a leathern couch lay a folded
Confederate uniform, and a man's straw hat, cane, spurs, and riding whip
had been placed beside the faded grey coat. Over the old-fashioned, high
marble mantel hung a portrait of General Egbert Maurice, clad in
uniform, wearing three stars and a wreath on his collar, and holding his
plumed hat in his right hand. At one corner of the mantel a furled
Confederate flag leaned until it touched the frame of the picture, and
from the marble shelf, where lay the general's sash and sword, hung the
stained and torn guidon of his favorite regiment. On the wall opposite
the fireplace the portrait of a lovely girl with an apron full of roses
seemed to fill the room with radiance and color.

With a slow, caressing movement, Mrs. Maurice's slim white hand passed
over the front of the smoking-gown, and fastened in a button hole the
spray of fragrant, satin-starred jasmine; then, lifting the faded grey
coat, she held it to her heart in a tight, straining clasp, as she
seated herself on the couch, and her fingers lingered on tarnished gilt
buttons and braid. Inside the uniform was pinned a parcel wrapped in
tissue paper, from which she shook out a mass of yellowed lace, and as
the filmy folds of an infant's christening robe swept across her lap, a
subtle perfume of withered flowers like the breath of a rose jar stole
over the room.

With dry eyes she looked long at one portrait, then at the other: the
husband of her youth and the only child that had come as crowning
blessing to a happy married life where no dissensions muttered, no
discordant clash jarred the perfect harmony. As the dead years babbled,
she listened now to echoes of manly tones, and now to a baby's prattling
lisp, still dividing as of yore her heart's homage. When war robbed her
of the husband who had never ceased to be tender lover, her only hold on
life centred in their beautiful daughter Marcia, and the struggle to
guard her and defend from confiscation and ruin the fine landed estate
and large fortune left by General Maurice had served, in some degree, to
lessen the tendency to morbid brooding.

To the truly typical Southern woman who survived the loss of family
idols and of her country's freedom, for which she had surrendered them,
"reconstruction," political and social, was no more possible than the
physical resurrection and return of slain thousands lying in Confederate
graves all over the trampled and ruined South.

No mourning Southern matron indulged more intensely an inexorable,
passionate hatred of Northern invaders than did Mrs. Maurice, who
refused to accept the inevitable, and shut her doors against agents of
"union and reconstruction" as promptly as she would have barred out
leprosy or smallpox.

Proud of the social prestige with which her Brahmin birth and stainless
family record had dowered her, she wielded her influence in
uncompromising hostility to all who advocated a tacit acceptance of the
new conditions called "peace." The loss of negroes that abandoned
several plantations would have materially impaired the Maurice fortune,
had not the prevision of the general's commission merchant in a distant
seaport induced the precautionary course of sending a portion of his
crop of cotton to Liverpool early in the first year of the war, thus
securing a large amount of treasure under the British flag, where (as
the cotton factor wrote Mrs. Maurice a few years later) "'Union' thieves
could not steal, nor 'reconstruction' moths and rust feed upon it." Out
of the wreckage that succeeded the final catastrophe at Appomattox the
family fortune of General Maurice emerged triumphant in proportions, and
the minority of Marcia was a bulwark that defied successfully the
numerous assaults of "loyal confiscators."

Sooner or later the _diabolus ex machina_ confronts us all, and pierces
at the one spot least guarded because deemed invulnerable. Mrs.
Maurice's maternal pride was built on the shifting sands of girlish
impulse and flattered vanity, and the crash showed her that somewhere at
the cross roads she had failed to offer a black lamb in propitiating
evil divinities--had left no morsel of meat for the sleuth-hounds of
baleful destiny that suddenly bayed destruction to the last earthly hope
life held for her. Reared in the semi-cloistral seclusion of a Southern
girl's education in ante-bellum days, trained at home by governesses,
and barred from society until she should have made the European tour for
which her mother had fixed an early date, predestined Marcia went to her
doom when at the house of a friend she met accidentally the recently
appointed Federal judge, Allison Kent--handsome, courtly, debonair, and
wily.

Clandestine courtships rarely lag; hence this lover of forty years,
dreading discovery and the prompt removal of an infatuated girl only
seventeen on her last birthday, kept the mother in complete ignorance of
impending calamity until the night before her departure for Europe, when
Marcia fled with him to an adjoining State, where a justice of the peace
made them man and wife.

In accordance with life-long custom, Mrs. Maurice went to her child's
bedroom to kiss her good night, and on the pillow found a farewell note,
praying for forgiveness, and promising to meet her at a town on the line
of her journey. How the mother bore this shock only God knew; no eye but
His watched during that long night, when her soul went down into a
Gehenna of torture--when, alone in her crucifixion, she accepted defeat,
and girded herself for grim endurance. As day dawned she unlocked her
door, and summoning her servants, said:

"Miss Marcia has left me to marry a man who cannot enter my house. Take
this note to Mr. Whitfield's residence at once; not to his office, to
his house. Minerva, you will finish packing Miss Marcia's trunk, which
must be sent to her. I shall make no change in my plans, except to take
the noon train instead of the one at midnight. Ask me no questions. Send
Mitchell and Eliza to me."

When her attorney, Mr. Whitfield, appalled by the stony white face that
showed no hint of tears, no more trace of grief than the marble figure
that supported the mantel at her side, essayed a few words of sympathy,
she put out her hands with an imperious gesture.

"There is no comfort possible, and I need your help only in writing a
new will. I start to New York at noon, so you have little time."

A few hours later, having seen only her pastor and her lawyer, she left
her rifled home by a route that enabled her to avoid the town designated
as a place of meeting. Across the girl's farewell letter, which was
returned to "Marcia Maurice," she had written: "My only hope is that God
will take me out of this world before I see again the face of the child
who has disgraced the memory of her father and the name of her mother."

Eighteen months had been spent in Europe, whence she was most
reluctantly recalled by the death of Robert Mitchell, the overseer and
business manager of one of her plantations, who was killed by the
explosion of a mill engine. His young widow, Eliza, had been sheltered
and guarded in Mrs. Maurice's home when orphaned by the death of her
father, a Methodist chaplain attached to General Maurice's command, and
the intimacy of years was marked by unfailing kindness and confidence on
the part of the benefactress, by profound affection and ardent gratitude
on that of the destitute girl. The peculiarly harrowing circumstances
attending her husband's loss had so severely shocked Eliza that Mrs.
Maurice promptly removed her from the "overseer's cottage" to her own
house, where she was nursed tenderly and skilfully in the room that
before her marriage she had so long called her home. Loving Marcia very
warmly, she had attempted to intercede with the indignant mother, and
one of her letters had enclosed an appeal from the erring daughter. It
was returned unopened, and accompanied by a very positive assurance that
any future repetition would not be forgiven. Old friends gathered to
greet the returned traveller, yet all intuitively avoided allusion to
the domestic cancer that, despite her proud, silent composure, was
eating the heart barred against sympathy. She learned from the
newspapers that under the new Federal regime Judge Kent was temporarily
Senator, and that after a season in Washington he and Marcia were living
at a hotel in her own neighboring city; but as the latter had followed
her husband into the Episcopal Church, no meeting occurred between
parent and child. So complete was the estrangement, and so
unapproachable the stern, silent attitude of the mother, that when Dr.
Eggleston, the family physician, and Bishop Vivian, the favorite cousin,
called early one morning on an urgent errand, both realized that they
championed a forlorn and desperate cause in battling with this old
lioness robbed of her young.

Instinctively she divined their mission as her eyes fell upon a letter
lying on the bishop's knee, and her lips narrowed and tightened.
Standing on the hearth with her arms folded, she listened quietly to her
cousin's impassioned pleading for forgiveness and to the doctor's
distressing presentation of Marcia's alarming condition, which he felt
constrained to pronounce hopeless.

"Madam, if you deny her dying prayer, remorse will drive you to
despair."

"She has been dead to me since the hour she deliberately deceived and
forsook me. Kent's wife ceased to be my child when she insulted,
disgraced, her father's name."

"Oh, Patricia, how can you hope or claim God's mercy for yourself if you
refuse pardon to your repentant and unhappy daughter?"

A spark leaped into the cold clear eyes.

"For mercy I think I shall never need to plead, and when my God grants
me justice I will try to be satisfied."

"Will you not at least read the few lines the poor child wrote while we
held her hand and guided the pen? Oh, cousin, if you could see her now!"
The bishop held out the letter.

"Because you are the bearer I cannot refuse you that courtesy."

She walked to the window and, holding the curtain aside, read the brief
petition:

     "My Own Mother:

     "Let me come home to die. It will not be so hard if I can look
     into your face once more, and know that your dear hand will
     close my eyes as I go down into my grave. I shall see father
     soon, and if he could come now to my help, you know he would
     take me in his arms and lay me in my mother's lap. Be merciful
     to your poor, dying

     "MARCIA."

Leaning eagerly forward, the two grey-haired men watched and listened
for some relenting token; but after a few moments she turned toward a
desk, and with no change in the frozen calm of her handsome face, she
merely traced a word at the bottom of the page, handed it to the bishop,
and left the room. "Come."

That night a cold waxen image of a boy whose soul refused to enter its
clay tabernacle was laid for a moment in Eliza Mitchell's arms, to be
kissed as only young mothers can kiss their dead first-born. The
following day the hospital ambulance brought back on a stretcher the wan
form of the erring daughter, who fainted from exhaustion as the bearers
carried her into the home of her fathers. Three days later she died in
her mother's arms, whispering with icy lips: "If my baby lives, keep her
for my sake--for my sake."

So little Eglah Kent was given, when three hours old, to the care of the
young foster-mother Eliza, and slept upon the heart that mourned for the
lost baby boy. Since then seven years had passed, and to-day, as Mrs.
Maurice caressed Marcia's lace christening robe, she put aside all that
pertained to the girl's disobedience and elopement, and memory dwelt
only upon the sunny time when her husband and daughter made home a
heaven. Into the quiet room crept the whine of a dog scratching at the
door. As she opened it, a feeble brown creature crossed the floor,
crouched before the hearth, and, raising soft, tender eyes to the
portrait of the general, barked once and beat the carpet with his tail,
as if in salute; her husband's favorite pointer Hector, failing fast,
but loyal and true as the heart of his widow.




CHAPTER II


Sharing in some degree that infallible instinct whereby lower animals
interpret the character of their owners, young children are often as
wise and wary as dogs and cats, and before Eglah could walk without
clinging to Eliza's finger, she knew intuitively that her silent,
watchful grandmother eyed her suspiciously, and that warm caresses could
be expected only from her father and her young foster-mother. Profound
and regretful compassion rather than tenderness filled Mrs. Maurice's
heart, and she faithfully ministered to the infant's needs, as she would
have pityingly warmed and fed some bleating lamb bereft of its dam by
March snows. Since the little girl showed, except in form, no faintest
trace of Maurice blood, her grandmother regarded her most
sorrowfully--not as Marcia's baby, but as the living monument of a cruel
and unpardonable injury inflicted by Judge Kent. Even in the cradle
Eglah defied an authority supreme in the household.

"You must not say Lila, but Mama-Eliza."

"I won't! It hurths my tongue to say Elitha. I will say Ma-Lila."

The child's inherent antagonism made her a vexing embodiment of protest,
an obstinate interrogation point punctuating the commands of this
old-fashioned lady whose domestic canons belonged to an era when boys
and girls were not considered "servile" because trained to answer their
elders "No, sir," or "Yes, ma'am," and when after a meal in the sunset
glow young human broods followed feathered folk to an early rest before
stars spangled the sky. If among General Maurice's choice collection of
thoroughbred game fowls, with yellow legs and bronze breasts, had
appeared an uncouth mongrel pullet, dust-colored and blue of skin, his
exacting widow would not have rejected it more summarily than did her
proud soul repudiate the Kent scion whom she housed luxuriously because
of Marcia's last prayer, but felt no more desire to caress than to
fondle the bullet that slew her husband.

Judge Kent's official duties called him often from the city, and during
his visits to his child Mrs. Maurice, if compelled to see him,
maintained the reticent, frigid courtesy with which she had received him
when he first crossed her threshold bearing his unconscious wife. He had
never touched the slender white fingers that pointed to the staircase
that day, and while she allowed herself no verbal expression of
animosity, he was humiliated by the consciousness of her intense
detestation. As Southern hostess in a typical Southern home, she fully
realized _noblesse oblige_, and her punctilious observance of the
etiquette of hospitality accentuated the position she assigned him--that
of stranger within her gates. He had hoped the baby might bridge the
chasm, but when he ventured to dwell upon his unwillingness to deprive
Mrs. Maurice of this "sweet source of solace," she promptly dispelled
his illusion.

"Make no mistake, Judge Kent. You leave the poor child here, and I
retain her simply because her mother so requested."

Desiring to minimize sources of future contention, she had directed Mr.
Whitfield to acquaint him with her will, whereby the entire estate would
pass at her death into the hands of certain trustees, who, after
providing a liberal annuity for Eglah and Eliza, should control
absolutely all interests until Eglah was twenty-one years old, when a
legacy of five thousand dollars would be paid to Eliza. Should the
little girl be removed from the care of her foster-mother, the annuity
of the former ceased, and half of the value of the estate should be
deducted from her inheritance; and if Eglah died before marriage, the
homestead was bequeathed to childless Confederate widows of that State,
as an Egbert Maurice memorial. Since General Maurice's last testament
had left his fortune unconditionally to his wife, there was no appeal
from her decision, and Judge Kent bore the keen disappointment with such
semblance of acquiescence as he could summon, striving to veil his
hatred of the woman whose contempt lay beneath her studied courtesy like
an iron wall under a sheet of ice. An adroit and tireless schemer, he
usually steered safely in the troubled political sea, and only once, in
an unguarded moment, dared the current of Mrs. Maurice's convictions.

"If the people of the South could only reason from the analogy of
history----"

He was silenced by the hand thrown up, palm outward.

"We have only the privilege of suffering and remembering. The grim
analogy of Sicily under Verres suggests a rather painful parallel. For
us there remains solely the grace of silence; and it were well if you,
sir, could set me an example, when numbered among guests under my roof."

The voice was low, clear, steady, but the narrow lip arched, and the
light in her blue eyes reminded him of the violet flame one sees flash
up over a bed of hot anthracite.

Eglah was five years old when her father was called to Washington, and
thence sent to Europe on a government mission, which he so successfully
accomplished that on his return the governor of his native State
appointed him senator to fill an unexpired term. Having proved a useful
servant of the Administration, official influence secured his election
and return to the United States' Senate two years later, and Mrs.
Maurice welcomed any change that removed him from her neighborhood. His
rare visits were festivals to his little daughter, and she revelled in
the wealth of caresses, the endearing words, the prodigality of gifts
that always characterized his brief sojourns. Thus were laid the
foundations of an intense and absorbing devotion to her father that
gradually became the dominant factor in her life.

"Nutwood"--the three-storied red brick house crowning an eminence shaded
by walnut and chestnut trees--had been built in 1825 by General
Maurice's father, and its pillared piazza running along three sides
overlooked the city of Y----, two miles distant, where spires and
factory chimneys lifted their lines against mellow western skies. On the
first and second floors of the old mansion wide halls crossed at right
angles, admitting breezes from every point of the compass, and so
unusually thick were the walls that the nearly square windows framed in
cedar furnished comfortable lounging seats. For many years this place
had been famous throughout the State for its race-horses, game chickens,
pointers, fox-hounds, and fine library, and the hospitality dispensed
was peculiar to an era characterized by conditions that the Civil War
annihilated. No invading army had reached the city of Y----, but raiding
cavalry squads once completely sacked the Maurice plantations many miles
distant in the river valley, and burned not only the empty gin house,
but the commodious family residence often occupied in autumn. Prior to
her departure for Europe Mrs. Maurice had rebuilt gin and warehouses,
and erected a pretty four-room cottage comfortably furnished, which,
with fifty acres of adjoining land, she gave as dower to Eliza when she
married the faithful overseer and manager of the "Bend Plantations."

One sultry spring morning in Eglah's ninth year, she sat with Eliza in
the "out-door schoolroom" where lessons were studied in warm weather. It
was a cool retreat--a circular, latticed summer-house--overrun by yellow
woodbine, honeysuckle, and a pink multiflora rose, all in full bloom,
busy distilling perfume their satin lips offered in libation to the
lazily wandering wind that caressed them. The pointed roof was rain
proof, the floor tiled, and between the arched openings seats were
fastened to the lattice wall. From the round table in the centre lovely
views of shrubbery, lily-starred lawn, far-off grain fields, green
pasture lands where cattle browsed, seemed set in frames of leafage and
tendril that ran riot around the archways. A walk bordered with lilacs
and azaleas led to the door of the conservatory, which flanked the long
drawing-room; stretching beyond, one could see the wide front of the
house, where no balustrade broke the line of white columns rising to the
crenellated flat roof. Eglah sat with a geography lying open before her
on the table, and her head supported by arms resting on the map, but
once she turned a leaf, and the wind fluttered a letter many weeks old
from her father.

"Are you ready to answer the map questions?"

"No, Ma-Lila. Why must I always answer other people's questions, when
nobody answers mine? I will say my lesson when you tell me what
'scallawag' and 'carpet-bagger' mean."

"They are ugly slang words, and if I were you I should try to forget I
ever heard them. Little girls have nothing to do with politics, and you
have not told me of whom the Graham children were speaking at the
party."

"Never mind about names. I looked in the dictionary, but could not find
'scallawag.' I know it means something horrid and vulgar and hateful,
and I never will go to another party."

Eliza's reply was drowned by the scream of "King Herod"--a lordly
peacock that had earned the title from his slaughter of young turkeys
and chickens in the poultry yard. Now he trailed his feathers across the
walk, came up to the summer-house, and uttered his piercing cry in quick
succession.

"Something is going to happen. Uncle Aaron says it is a bad sign when
Herod squalls at a door."

"Something happened a while ago, when a man rode up the avenue and tied
his horse. Now he is leaving the steps, and Herod knows he is a
stranger. You must not listen to superstitious foolishness from
negroes," said Eliza, with a fine scorn of all but her own peculiar pet
superstition, kept closely guarded in her heart.

Eglah shut the geography, propped her chin on her palms as her elbows
rested on the table, and watched the beautiful bird preen his feathers.

"Ma-Lila, how old must I be before you will be ready to tell me why
grandmother hates my father so?"

"Dearie, she does not 'hate' him, and you ought to try not to----"

"Don't tell stories, Ma-Lila, because I want always to believe
everything you say--and--there! Listen to grandma's bell. Three rings;
that is for you."

Eliza laid in her work basket the embroidered cambric ruffle she was
hemming and, throwing her white apron over her head, went swiftly to the
house.

Mrs. Maurice sat in the drawing-room, with two newspapers unfolded on
her lap, but whether their contents annoyed or gratified her, the cold,
quiet face gave no indication.

"Is Eglah ready to come and recite her lessons?"

"Not yet, madam."

"Put away her books; she will be excused from lessons to-day. Judge Kent
has married again in Washington, and these papers furnish detailed
accounts of the brilliant wedding reception. He has swallowed the gold
bait of a widow he met in Europe. She is reputed rich, of course--a Mrs.
Nina Herriott--and the bridal pair will go to England for the summer."

"Our poor baby! This news will break her heart," replied the
foster-mother, whose eyes had filled with tears at thought of the
child's suffering.

"Yes, she will grieve sorely, but better now than later in life. I have
been pondering the best way to break the news to her."

"Let me tell her. I think I understand her disposition more thoroughly
than anyone else."

"You fancy I do not comprehend my own granddaughter?"

"I beg your pardon, dear Mrs. Maurice. I mean only that I have watched
all her little ways, and she feels less restraint with me than with you;
but of course you must choose your own way in this matter."

"For us, this marriage is fortunate, and I rejoice at every circumstance
that heightens the barrier between Judge Kent and me. He will never dare
to disturb the child while I live, and brides are not importunate for
the custody of step-children. Eliza, I never felt until to-day that
Eglah is really Marcia's baby. She is a thousand times dearer to me now
than ever before."

"Dear madam, I thank God for anything that will make you open your heart
and take the precious child in. In many ways she needs tenderness from
you, and especially since the children's parties she has attended
recently, where rude things were said about her father. She has not told
me all, but you know the damaging rumors about some of his decisions
while Federal Judge in our State, and the Graham children, whose
interests suffered through him, speak very bitterly of his career. Eglah
has asked me many questions lately, which I always evaded, but she
broods over this matter and is resentful."

"Poor little thing! Her father has lived on sour grapes so long, her
teeth must inevitably be on edge. Henceforth she belongs to me."

"She is absolutely devoted to him, and it is distressing to know how her
very heartstrings are tied around him. It amounts to idolatry."

"Yes, I realize that, and it will be a sad day for her when the glamour
fades and she sees the ugly, deformed clay feet of her idol."

"It would break her heart."

"No. We both know sorrow does not destroy, and death is deaf to calls
from crushed hearts. She will simply find herself chained to a galling
sense of shame. These papers were brought this morning by a young man
who impressed me as a thoroughbred gentleman--Mr. Noel Herriott, son of
Mrs. Kent's first husband. He spoke kindly of his stepmother, and
explained that, as he was passing through Y---- on his way west, Judge
Kent had given him a card of introduction to me, and requested him to
see Eglah, for whom he brought the package yonder on the window sill. I
knew the poor child would be distressed at the news, and thought it best
she should have time to recover from the shock before seeing him. He
continues his journey by the midnight train, and I have invited him to
return and take tea here, when Eglah can be introduced to him. Eliza,
perhaps you are right; certainly you are more nearly her mother than any
living being, and you will tenderly break the news to her. Carry the
papers and the parcel and make her understand. After a while I wish to
come out and join you."

In shaking and furling his rainbow train King Herod had shed a long
feather. Eglah picked it up, and finding a knife in the work basket
proceeded to sharpen the end into a pen, with which she purposed writing
to her father. As Eliza entered and placed the papers on the table, the
little girl looked up.

"Oh, Ma-Lila, you are crying! What is it? Not bad news from father?"

"My baby, your father is well and has sent you a present. Come to me,
darling; I want to talk to you." She drew her to her lap and held her
close.

"We know, of course, your father dearly loves his daughter, but he is
often very lonely, and as he cannot have you with him, what would you
think if you heard he had married a lady who would be kind and good to
him? Don't you----"

"I know that would be a lie--a wicked lie! Why do you say such horrible
things and hurt me so?" She threw off the clasping arm and sprang to the
floor, stamping the tiles with her right foot.

"My precious baby, I would not hurt you for a million of dollars! You
know your Lila loves you better than everything else in the world. I
would rather hold my hand in the fire than tell you a painful thing if
it could be helped. But somebody must speak the truth to you."

She knelt down by the indignant child and kissed her hot cheek twice.

"My darling, it is true--positively true--that your father was married
some days ago. Now, you must not struggle to get away from me. Listen,
and let me explain it all."

"Don't! I won't listen. I can't--wait--wait--" She went to the seat
along the wall and threw herself face downward, crossing her arms over
her head. She lay so still that a quarter of an hour later Eliza sat
down beside her, and while her hand softly stroked the brown curls, she
read slowly the description of church wedding and subsequent reception.

"My darling, you love your father so well you want him to be happy,
and----"

"No, not with another wife, and away from me. I would rather he was
dead--for then nobody else could claim him. Two wives! It is like having
two Gods."

Taking the papers, she read the marked paragraphs, and though neither
sob nor tear betrayed the intensity of her sorrow, one little hand
caught at her throat, where a stricture seemed to stifle her.

"You must try to bear this trouble patiently."

"I can't. I would not bear it at all, if I could help myself. Now I am
an orphan! An orphan!"

"Not while I live to love you. Look at this parcel, your father's
present."

Eliza unwrapped the paper and took out an oblong gilded box, to which
was fastened a card: "For our dear little daughter Eglah, with love of
her father and mother." The child glanced at the handwriting and her
eyes seemed almost to take fire. She snatched the box and threw it to
the floor.

"It is not mine; I have no father and no mother. I have only Ma-Lila
left!"

She buried her face in Eliza's lap, and hoping a burst of tears would
relieve the strain, the nurse silently caressed her, waiting for the
storm to break; but save the trembling of the figure no sign was given.
After a while, Eliza whispered,

"Grandmother is coming down the walk."

Eglah started up as if electrified, and lifted the box from the floor,
holding it against her breast. Leaning on her cane, Mrs. Maurice came to
the table, sat down, and opened her arms.

"My dear child, come here."

Not an inch stirred Eglah, and Eliza gently forced her forward within
reach of the extended arms. Mrs. Maurice leaned down to kiss her, but
she turned her head away.

"My poor little girl, don't you know I love you?"

"Oh, no, grandma; you never did love me, and you never will."

"But I do, dear child. Kiss me."

"I don't want to kiss you any more than you want to kiss me. I
understand exactly how you feel. You are sorry for me because you think
father has treated me badly in getting married. But, grandmother, you
need not pity me now, for I must make you understand that _my father
always is right_. No matter what he may do, he has good reasons, and if
I am satisfied nobody else can complain. I shall always know father is
right."

The dry, white face was lifted proudly, and the challenging eyes met her
grandmother's steadily, but the childish lips trembled and the hand
clutched spasmodically at her throat.

A gush of genuine tenderness warmed the old lady's heart as she took the
quivering fingers, spread them on her own palm, and touched the girl's
forehead with her lips.

"'Loyal and true'--that is the Maurice motto. 'Though He slay me, yet
will I trust Him!' To-day we will have no lessons, and this evening
Eliza shall dress you especially to meet the gentleman, Mr. Herriott,
whom your father wishes you to know. Eliza, see that she has a warm
bath, and put some orange flower water in her glass of lemonade."

In after years Noel Herriott often recalled that afternoon spent at
Nutwood. The inimitable courtesy of the handsome stately hostess, the
sweet countenance of the widowed foster-mother--whose anxious, tender
gaze rarely left the white-clad child--the grave negro butler, wearing
linen apron that matched his grey head, and the spacious old
cedar-wainscotted dining-room where, on bare, polished mahogany table,
the light of wax candles was reflected in silver dishes and candelabra,
and glittered from heavy, antique-shaped, cut-glass bowls, while golden
honeycomb and ripe strawberries mixed their fragrance with the breath of
crimson carnations heaped in a Sevres china centrepiece that once graced
banquets at Trianon. Most vivid of all impressions, he retained the
imperishable image of a beautiful girl, with singularly white cheeks and
lustrous, shy eyes, glowing unnaturally from her fierce struggle for
composure--a proud, sensitive face whose exquisite lines suggested rare
old cameos behind cabinet glass.

Though the guest was a very young man, his quiet manner and perfect ease
indicated thorough acquaintance with the most refined society, and
despite her sectional prejudice Mrs. Maurice yielded to the charm of an
unusually handsome personality and a conversation marred by no trace of
egotism. The crocus light of after-glow still tinged the west, where the
sickle of a new moon swung, when the visitor rose to depart.

"Miss Eglah, when I come back from New Mexico and Arizona, shall I bring
you a Zuni pickaninny or a Moqui pony?"

She shook her head.

"Since your father has stolen my stepmother, do you not think you might
persuade yourself to accept me as a sort of half cousin or
hemi-demi-semi-stepbrother, or any kind of a relative you may choose? I
am quite alone in the world, and you are just the sister I should like
to claim as my hermanita. May I?"

"Thank you, sir, I would rather not. I want only my father."

He bowed, and lifting her dainty little hand brushed it with his
mustache.

"Mrs. Maurice, in saying good-bye, I must thank you cordially for the
privilege of spending several hours in your lovely home, which
illustrates all I have read of charming Southern life, and realizes
completely my ideal picture of what your sunny land must have been in
former years."

"Good-bye, Mr. Herriott. I wish you a pleasant journey. Nutwood is a
mere shadow of old and happier days. Ichabod is printed all over the
ruined South, and we live only to guard our graves."




CHAPTER III


The quiet, systematic routine of life at Nutwood was by no means
cloistral in its seclusion, and though the term "house-party" had not
yet taken root south of the Potomac, guests from various parts of the
State frequently spent a week with Mrs. Maurice, and were entertained at
dinners, luncheons, and teas with the lavish hospitality traditional in
the family. Accustomed early to meeting strangers, Eglah was neither
bashful nor awkward, but she understood fully that her father was
unpopular in the social world around her, and she deeply resented an
antipathy which, though never discussed in her presence, she felt it
impossible to forgive or remove. The explanatory assistance of Minerva,
daughter of the cook, had enabled her to comprehend all the unpleasant
significance of "scallawag" and "carpet-bagger," and with the fervor of
indignant loyalty she promptly espoused whatever cause her father was
reputed to represent. Alert and _en garde_, she expected attacks, felt
eager to retaliate, and consequently was often stung by the young people
of her circle with whom she was no favorite. For many months after Judge
Kent's second marriage, Mrs. Maurice yielded to a new and yearning
tenderness toward her grandchild, whom she heartily pitied, but the
overtures came too late; the plastic season had passed, the angles had
stiffened, the childish heart had hardened hopelessly, and caresses that
formerly might have won her love were received in cold, irresponsive
passiveness.

Once she had gone under Eliza's care to spend Christmas in Washington,
and though the pretty, gay, good-natured stepmother laid siege to the
girl's heart and fondled and pampered her, Mrs. Kent knew from the
defiant gleam in her watchful, jealous eyes that the daughter would
never tolerate a usurper who sat on her own mother's throne and divided
her father's affections.

During the following year, Mrs. Maurice was prostrated by an attack of
pneumonia that resulted in heart weakness, from which she never fully
rallied. The reins of household government slipped easily into Eliza's
hands, and that reticent, faithful young woman proved worthy of the
confidence so long reposed in her by her benefactress.

The last link in the chain of daily duties to which the invalid clung
was her habit of listening to Eglah's recitations from text-books, but
the hour came when she reluctantly laid down the self-imposed task.

"My dear, in future say your lessons to Eliza. I find I am not strong
enough to be patient, and without perfect patience no one should attempt
to teach. Go now and practise your piano exercises; it will not disturb
me in the least."

She took into her own cold, beautifully shaped hand Eglah's slender,
warm fingers, looked at them critically, and smiled as she drew them
tenderly across her cheek.

"Kiss me, little one. Try always to obey Eliza, for she will never fail
you when you need comfort, and in all this world nobody loves you as she
does. Send her to me."

When the nurse came in and seated herself, darning gourd in hand, Mrs.
Maurice was glancing over a blank book used for memoranda.


"Eliza, here are some instructions you must follow faithfully when I am
gone. I have written them carefully, so that you cannot misunderstand. I
leave nothing to your discretion, not because your judgment is
defective, but simply for the reason that I desire my wishes executed
exactly. It is an absolute condition of my will that you should have the
personal care of Eglah until she marries. If she should be sent to a
new-fangled college (one of her father's Yankee fads), you will board in
sight of her; when she travels, you go with her. Nothing but her death,
or marriage, shall separate you, and with this provision I can safely
leave her. Egbert and Marcia will understand I have done what was
possible for the poor baby. Proud little thing! she will be tortured
indeed if ever the time comes when she feels ashamed of her father--and
wily though he is, her eyes are keen. She is all Kent in appearance,
except her hands and feet; they are dainty, beautiful, patrician,
genuinely Maurice like my Marcia's."

She laid the book on Eliza's lap, motioned her away, and, turning her
head aside, closed her eyes.

With the ebbing of summer tide her pulse waned slowly but steadily, like
a star going down to the gates of the west. Leaning heavily on her
husband's cane, followed by the aged pointer, the tall, wasted figure
went to and fro through the old house, as one having packed and waiting
for departure looks to see if aught has been forgotten; and over the
pallid face with its cloud of black hair an exultant smile sometimes
shone, as she realized how soon she should reclaim her treasures in the
beckoning Beyond. It was an August night when the pilot's signal came,
and swiftly and gladly she "crossed the bar." Eliza was aroused from a
sound sleep by Eglah, who shook her.

"Ma-Lila, I am so frightened! I heard grandma call out 'Egbert!'
'Marcia!' Something had already waked me suddenly."

"Oh, dearie, you were only dreaming."

She sprang up and lighted a candle, but the girl clung to her.

"No, it was not a dream. I heard it clear and loud like a quick cry. I
was so scared I waited a while, and then I went to her room--but she is
not there! I could see the bed was empty, because Dinah had left the
night lamp burning in the passage. What can it mean?"

"Grandmother is often restless, and goes out on the colonnade, where the
fresh air relieves her oppressed breathing. No doubt she is there now.
Baby, do not tremble so."

Clutching Eliza's nightgown, Eglah followed her to the sick room, which
was unoccupied, and waking Dinah, who slept on a cot in the hall, they
searched the entire length of the piazza, the foster-mother shielding
the light with her hand. Turning to re-enter the house, they were
startled by the howl of a dog, answered instantly by a scream from
Herod, roosting on one of the arched chimney tops. Eglah was so
terrified she threw her arms around Eliza, thereby dashing the candle
from her trembling hand.

"She must be in the general's room, and old Hector is there also."

Swiftly they crossed the halls, and found a light shining through the
partly open door of the memorial chamber. A candle burned low under the
portrait over the mantel, and Hector, with his head thrown back against
his mistress's knee, howled feebly. She sat in her husband's easy chair,
her head pillowed on his dressing gown, where a fresh Cape jasmine
gleamed, and over her lap flowed the yellowed lace of Marcia's
christening robe, half hiding the baby shoes of white kid. She had laid
one hand on the Confederate uniform folded on the couch beside her
chair, and about the long, white fingers of the other were wrapped
strands of vivid red seed-coral--the necklace and bracelets of her only
child. Stern lines and shadows of sorrow had faded forever from the
frozen face, where eternal peace set its blessed seal, and in the wide
eyes fixed on her husband's portrait was the rapt expression that comes
only with the lifting of the veil as the soul drifts through its windows
of flesh. The icy shiver that runs across the world when day dawns grew
into a windy gust from the west, extinguishing the fluttering candle
flame and blowing the lace curtains out eastward like white sails
bearing away the happy spirit to crystal seas. At the edge of the sky,
where the morning star burned, a thread of orange glowed in the soft
pearl grey of the new day, and only the crowing of the game cocks from
their cedar thicket broke the silence that death consecrates.




CHAPTER IV


Were it possible to probe the recesses of cerebration by some
psychological process as searching as the Roentgen ray, many strange
beliefs would be dragged from secret chambers sedulously guarded, where
mental fetiches are worshipped. Those who knew Eliza Mitchell well
considered her a very pretty, dignified, reticent young widow, who won
respect by her adherence to mourning garments--never laid aside after
her husband's death; but her rigid observance of the strictest phase of
Methodist discipline presented a certain austerity of character that
appeared to rebuke quietly even the members of her own denomination who
indulged in "the putting on of gold and costly apparel, and taking such
diversions" as aforetime were considered appanages of the "flesh and the
devil."

Keenly observant and silently contemplative, she had grown shrewd as a
judge of character, and laid the tribute of her confidence at the feet
of few; yet this little woman, eminently practical and rigidly orthodox
in the faith of her father, had surrendered to one belief that dominated
heart, soul, and mind--that ruled her absolutely, and that she jealously
guarded from all but her God. Her most intense and precious conviction
was that the soul created and intended for her baby boy, who never
breathed, had been assigned to the body of Marcia's infant girl born a
little later. She was assured that her child had never known life on
earth, and had been in his coffin but a few hours when Eglah first
opened her eyes. Souls never die. What of the soulless still-born? Would
God deny any Christian mother reunion with her innocent baby in the
world of spirits? From the hour that Marcia's wailing child was laid on
Eliza's bosom she accepted it as an incarnation of the soul of little
Elliot, adrift in space but housed at last in the form committed to her
fostering care. Whether this phantasmal belief sprang from feverish
conditions under which she first felt the baby's warm lips at her
breast, Eliza never questioned; and as the years passed the conviction
strengthened, until she easily explained all Eglah's waywardness by the
hypothesis that a boy's soul fretted under the limitations of a girl's
body. Ignorant of the complex elements that fed her devotion to the
child, even Mrs. Maurice could not fully understand her idolatrous
fondness, her perfect and marvellous patience that condoned all errors,
and only Eglah could have told how often she was fondled as "my Elliot"
when cradle songs were crooned in the sanctuary of the nursery.
Notwithstanding Mrs. Mitchell was zealous in missionary work, and when
she read her reports as treasurer of the "Hindustan" fund, she dwelt
feelingly on the benighted superstition that worshipped idols and
believed in transmigration of soul.

After Mrs. Maurice's death, Mr. Whitfield as administrator closed
Nutwood, leaving Aaron and his daughter Celia custodians, and Eglah and
Eliza went to Washington, where two small rooms were selected for their
occupancy in the fashionable "apartments" leased by Senator Kent. His
daughter now enjoyed every educational advantage that a governess for
modern languages and a tutor for Greek and mathematics could supply,
while teachers in the entire range of feminine accomplishments were
eager to encourage cultivation of any special talent. In dancing and
riding she was found surprisingly proficient, and as Senator Kent was
desirous she should enter as early as possible a "woman's college" in
his native State where one of his sisters was professor, the child was
industriously coached to achieve this purpose.

Standing as it were on the rim of a new world, strewn with the flotsam
and jetsam of shattered political, ethical, and domestic systems, where
all nations and social conditions found representation, Eglah and Eliza
confronted novel customs, strange beliefs, and cosmopolitan diction that
clashed sharply on the conservative standards of old Southern usage.
Tethered to the pivot of her Methodist discipline, Mrs. Mitchell swung
around the narrow circle of conscientious orthodoxy; but Eglah made
alarming excursions into ecclesiastical provinces, and their first
serious altercation arose from the announcement that the girl had
decided to join the class for confirmation in the Episcopal church where
Judge Kent worshipped.

"Confirmation? Oh, no; you are too young to take such an important
step."

"Now, Ma-Lila, would you say that if I asked to join the Methodist
Church?"

"That would be different, because you know more about the Church in
which you have been raised."

"I know the Episcopal catechism from cover to cover, and I like the
service, and the choristers, and the candles used in some Episcopal
churches, and----"

"Dearie, you merely want to follow your father, and, moreover----"

"Did not you follow your father? You are what you are just because your
father was a Methodist preacher, and a chaplain who was killed bringing
my grandfather off the battle-field. What are fathers for, if not to set
us examples?"

"Do you forget your dear grandmother, and her love for the church you
were christened in, and could you who owe her so much defy her wishes?"

"Grandmother is so glad to get away and be in heaven that she never will
worry over me any more; and if I am only good enough to go where she is
when I die, what difference will it make to her how I got there? Seems
to me, Ma-Lila, all this strife over different faiths is as foolish as
denying people their choice of routes when they go travelling in summer.
If we have perfect right to trust our bodies to our favorite railroad,
we ought to feel as free to take tickets for our souls on any line that
leads to God."

Eliza took the girl's hands and pressed the soft palms to her own
cheeks, as she said, in a voice that faltered despite her will:

"My darling, let us wait. Promise me one thing; do nothing for another
year at least. For my sake, baby, I beg of you."

Eglah saw unshed tears in the black eyes that had always shone tenderly
on her, and rising she stole one arm around the nurse's neck and kissed
her unsteady lips.

"Please don't fret about it. You shall have your wish. Of course I will
wait a year if you think it best; but you must help me, because somehow
it is harder for me to be good here than it was down at home."

"It is a sacred promise you make me now."

"I told you I would wait. Did I ever deceive you? You ought to know me
better than Mrs. Kent, and even she told father yesterday she had been
trying to find out whether I had most talent for the piano or the
mandolin, and she concluded I really had no talent for anything--showed
only genius for telling the truth."

Thenceforth Mrs. Mitchell redoubled her efforts to control the spiritual
aspirations of the girl to whom she had devoted her life, and the
bargain she made with her conscience was that Judge Kent had the right
to train and develop and decorate the body of his daughter, even along
lines she deemed Philistine, but the immortal spark--the soul intended
for her little Elliot--was immutably hers, to be saved eternally in the
faith to which her own hopes were anchored. That night, when she had
brushed and braided Eglah's golden-brown hair that no one else ever
arranged, she suddenly caught the slim form in a straining embrace.

"God bless my Elliot--my own precious baby!"

"It has been a long time since you called me Elliot, and it sounds queer
to give me the name of your boy. Why should you?"

"You are my boy, and my Eglah also; two in one, and my only joy in all
the world. Don't argue, dearie; go to sleep."

She lifted her into bed and tucked the silk quilt carefully about her,
as though crib days had not ended.

"Ma-Lila, if we should all meet in heaven--and I do hope that somehow I
shall get there--I am afraid I shall feel puzzled to know who really is
my mother, because it seems to me I belong more to you than to anybody
else except father; but then grandmother will certainly be there, and
she will carry me straight to that special spot--the heavenly
'west-end'--where all the Maurices dwell, and hand me over to her
Marcia: the beautiful one I never saw, my own mother, who would not wait
in this world long enough to look at me."

"Hush, my lamb! Good night."

In the adjoining room she sat down at a table where books were piled,
and opening one read a marked passage:

"The story was told by the owner of a shop where was sold the
amber-tinted syrup of malt given to young children when milk could not
be obtained. A pale woman in white came very late for many nights to buy
a cup of this syrup--_midzu ame_--but never spoke.

"One night, when she beckoned him to follow, he went with her to the
cemetery, where she suddenly vanished in a tomb, and he heard a young
child crying under ground. On opening the tomb there was found the
corpse of the woman, and by her side a young infant smiling, who had
been fed from a cup of _midzu ame_ in the hand of the corpse. The woman
had by mistake been prematurely buried. The child was born in the grave,
and love--stronger than death--compelled the ghost to provide
nourishment for her baby."

Eliza closed the volume and tossed it across the table.

"As if we needed old heathen Japan to teach us the length and breadth
and depth and deathlessness of maternal devotion, when we know from the
Bible that though God in heaven forsook His Son, the earthly mother
clung to Jesus!"

       *       *       *       *       *

It was an intensely cold, windless, brilliant moonlight night in
January, two years after she came to live in Washington, and when the
clock struck eleven she heard a quick but cautious step in the corridor
and a slight tap at her door. Mr. Herriott stood at the threshold and
beckoned her to the head of the steps.

"Is Eglah asleep?"

"I think she is."

"Come downstairs quietly."

In the lower hall, where the lights burned brightly, she saw that he
looked pale and troubled.

"Mrs. Mitchell, a terrible blow has fallen upon us. Mrs. Kent went
sleighing with some friends, and the horses became uncontrollable. The
sleigh was overturned, and poor Nina, thrown against a stone wall, was
killed instantly. Will you do what is best when she is brought home?
Don't rouse little Eglah. I am going to find Senator Kent, who is in
committee meeting, and break the news as gently as possible. Poor, dear
Nina! So merry, so kind hearted! Laughing and chaffing me for my
awkwardness when I tucked the lap robe about her feet."

Once more death levelled a wall that in some degree barred Eglah from
her father, and from that wintry night she dated the beginning of her
happy reign over his undivided affection--a monopoly she had long
coveted as the supreme privilege and crown of life.




CHAPTER V


"Has the success of the experiment justified the labor and enthusiasm
you spent upon it?"

"Yes, Noel, the result far surpasses my hopes, and I am impatient for
you to visit us, not only to understand fully the complete success of
the work, but to receive the grateful acknowledgments of every member of
the Order."

"Then you bar your doors against me, because any expression of thanks is
annoying, and the great pleasure I gave myself in deeding the property
to you would be marred. Remember, Vernon, I am not a well-rounded
character, measured by your ecclesiastical tape-line, and one of my ugly
angles is aversion to thanks. If you have drained the marshland and
reclaimed the house from mildew and mice you have made your neighbors
debtors."

"The same Noel Herriott of college days!"

"Only more so, if you please. Nothing human is immutable, and if a man
does not improve he grows worse. By the way, is your reverence still
'Brother' Temple, or have you climbed the ladder of spiritual
promotion?"

"I am always Vernon to you, but the world knows me as 'Father' Temple.
When will you come to us at 'Calvary House' and inspect the rich harvest
from the seed you sowed? I long for the one thing you have
withheld--your deep, hearty sympathy in my grand and holy work."

"Meaning that nothing less than the three vows will assure you of my
safety?"

"That is beyond all that I ever dared to hope, but your cordial
approbation would cheer me more than the indorsement of any other man.
Generous though you are in financial assistance, your mental attitude
toward our Order is that of the smiling tolerance with which one watches
a child building a house of cards."

"However tentative my opinion relative to the scope and permanence of
your religious movement, you cannot doubt that I earnestly desire the
success to which the sanctity of your motive entitles you. Partial as I
am to gymnastic methods, I allow no athletic feats in my mental
processes; I neither run nor leap to conclusions, and you must give me
time. You and I always approach vital questions by different paths: you
lean generally to collectiveness; I usually prefer the slower leverage
of individualism. You are burning the candle of life at both ends, and
trying to realize your noble ideals; I plod far behind, with only a
feeble taper and indulge no higher hope than to idealize my realities."


"When will you come to the lovely home you have given us? There is one
room we have called 'Founder's,' and set apart for you; and, Noel, no
sun sets that has not brought us to our knees in prayer for you who made
it possible for us to own a chapel. When shall we welcome you?"

"Not now. I must go home, where matters need attention. Strange, is it
not, that the magic of a name should outlive all it represents? That
lonely old stone house staring at its shadow on the lake has no vital
element of home except my horses and dogs, and one Maltese cat that
sleeps in my arm-chair. When Nina married Senator Kent the last thread
that tied me to anything like domesticity snapped, and I followed my
bent and prowled from land to land."

"Why do you not marry some sweet, gentle woman and settle yourself?"

"Scarcely the advice one might expect from the priestly Father of an
Anglican celibate order. Has your creed narrowed to such alternatives?
Either a cell at Calvary or the snare and disillusions of marriage?
Unfortunately for me, women have exerted only a traditional influence on
my life. My own young mother died before I could remember her, and I was
consigned to tutors when I should have been trundling hoops. I went
early to college, and after father's second marriage was rarely at home;
hence my acquaintance with women in the home circle is nebulous and
legendary. As a boy I disdained sweethearts; as a man they disdain me.
The only woman I ever really cared for would no more marry me than a
stone slab in a cemetery; so, with many thanks, I cannot utilize your
counsel, and it only remains for you to keep a cell for me at Calvary.
Some day at eventide I may creep in, and you will kindly shrive and
bless me."

Mr. Herriott had been leaning back in his chair, with his hands clasped
behind his head, and when he rose he towered six feet two inches,
smiling gravely at the upturned face of Father Temple, whose sombre
clerical habit contrasted vividly with the white yachting flannels worn
by his friend.

"Ah, Noel, what a Viking you look! Save prize fighting, is there
anything in the realm of athletics you have not accomplished?"

"I fear you would not compliment me with even that civilized exception
if you had seen a skirmish, minus weapons, that I had with a hairy,
tattooed Dyak in a Borneo jungle where I hunted orchids. Vernon, if you
trained your muscles more, and let up a little on your soul, allowed it
a breathing spell, you would not look so flaccid and anaemic. Don't
prefer monkish Latin to Juvenal: _mens sana in corpore sano_! You
observe, respect for your Reverence prevents my offering you the
Rabelais parody. Come, dine with me to-night."

"No, thank you. I am to give a brief 'retreat.' Tell me about my cousin
Eglah; you crossed the ocean in the same steamer."

"You have not seen her?"

"For a few moments only. She is a beautiful girl."

"What remains to be said--since you accord her the mantle of beauty,
whose folds, broader even than charity's, hide all defects? Where shall
I begin? Being her cousin, you must know what I have merely heard: that
she swept through college like a southern tornado--or should I have said
like a meteor?--carrying off the honors, and was the youngest graduate
who had ever turned the heads of the spectacled lecturers. Yet it
appears she values her trophy merely because her laurels pleased her
father, at whose feet she sits in adoration. In her physique, gymnastic
training leaves nothing to be improved; she won badges, and can hold her
own at basket-ball, tennis, rowing, and swimming. Is not the catalogue
complete? So much for mental attainments and physical perfection, but in
the domain of womanly emotions she is simply an unknown quantity--a
latter-day sphinx, fresh and fair before drifting desert sands deface
her. If a lover should ever win her heart he will certainly be entitled
to it, by the supreme right of discovery. Her affection for Judge Kent
absolutely rules her, and in one respect she is unique, she is as
utterly incapable of flirtations as an unfledged owl."

"On account of the family connection you have been thrown so intimately
into her society that I hoped you could tell me something of her
religious tendencies."

"I am such a confirmed tramp that my visits to the family have been
brief and interrupted by long absences. Eglah always appealed peculiarly
to my sympathy because of the pathetic antagonism of her environment.
Your cousin, Judge Kent, was very much disliked at the South, where
sectional political rancor was, is, and will be rife, and his child
suffered keenly on that account. When she came north to live, her social
surroundings were even worse, because she furiously resented every
reflection upon the people of the South, where the Maurices were
conspicuous in war records. Her efforts at loyalty all around the circle
have not made smooth sailing for her, and her motives were doubtless
complex. You are curious about her 'religious tendencies'? If you are
wise you will not stir any Calvary leaven into the pure sweet flour of
her soul, unless you covet war _a outrance_ with that nondescript
personage Mrs. Mitchell--an anomalous blend, alert as a lynx, wary as a
fox, stealthy as a cougar--who serves Eglah in divers and sundry
capacities: an amalgamated foster-mother, housekeeper, maid, companion,
chaperon, and confidante. She is a Simon-pure puritan, prim as
Priscilla, and her processes of reasoning are quite as broad as the edge
of a razor. That she viciously opposes all forms of 'ritualism' I happen
to know from listening to a discussion between her and Eglah, in which
the whole bundle of dogmas was thrashed out, from 'historic episcopate'
and 'confession' to incense, candles, and 'reservation of the
sacrament.' What a pile of chaff they built! Eglah's appreciation of
sensuous beauty and classical music inclines her to gorgeous vestments,
jewelled windows, and the rhythmic chanting of choristers that lift
their chins like Raphael's cherubs, but Mrs. Mitchell finds in the
severe simplicity of her own tabernacle an added sanctity, and your
Calvary House will be to her that of Rimmon. In Rome Judge Kent had a
touch of fever which frightened Eglah into telegraphing for me at Basle,
where I was attending a scientific congress, so we came home together."

"If Eglah's enthusiasm could be aroused in our mission work, she would
wield an incalculable power for good."

"Vernon--pardon the lapse into argot--'don't!' Let the child pick her
own way to peace. She is not addicted to enthusiasms: one attack long
ago destroyed her susceptibility to subsequent seizures; she can be
enthusiastic over only one teraph--her father. Must you go? Wait a
moment. Friendship is frank, and I am sorry to see you losing the vigor
that in college days distinguished you. Fast less, and sleep more. Come
home with me and hunt and fish and row, and let other people's souls
enjoy a vacation."

As they shook hands Father Temple asked:

"And what have scientific congresses done for your soul, Noel?"

"Drawn me closer, I hope, to the Creator whose subtle and inexorable
laws are best revealed to the faithful student that fearlessly analyzes
His universal work. The sole aim of scientists is 'to admit nothing
false, and to omit nothing true.' Vernon, have faith in me as of old,
and keep a cell whitewashed for me at Calvary House. Truly--

    "So many paths lead up to God,
    'Twere strange if any soul should miss them all."

With his hand on the stair rail the minister paused and looked back.

"One thing I wish to ask is whether Eglah had any special admirers
abroad? American heiresses are attractive."

"She had as many beaux as she chose to permit. Two attaches of American
legations were particularly attentive, and a handsome English naval
officer whose father is a duke will doubtless cross the ocean to renew
his acquaintance. Possess your soul in patience. Her heart is as sound
asleep as when she dreamed in her crib, and the man who wakes and wins
it will travel no macadamized road. Before Lent she will be in New York
for a week, and when Congress adjourns the family will come to me on the
Lake for a visit."

Given a man of thirty-three, unusually good-looking, possessing by
inheritance a large fortune, dowered with infinite leisure upon which no
professional duties laid intrusive claim, handicapped by no church
obligations, and the world assumes that he has inevitably run the gamut
of those iniquities set by Satan as snares for the idle rich. Intensely
virile as was Noel Herriott, his polished placidity of manner and
courteous conservatism masked in some degree the strength and tenacious
obstinacy of a character that presented enigmatical phases to those who
knew him best. Heredity and education had combined in kneading him
physically, mentally, and morally along rather peculiar curves during
the plastic period of boyhood, and the finishing touches that determined
the mould came from his parting interview with his Presbyterian father,
when Fergus Herriott sent him away to college.

"My son, God gave you a remarkably fine body. Neither neglect nor abuse
it, but be sure you master it from the start, else you will be the slave
of your own flesh. Bad habits are the leeches that would suck a Hercules
to effeminacy. Steer as clear of the sins labelled "Thou shalt not" as
you would of that leper island down in the Pacific. The ten commandments
are equal links in the moral chain, and it is no man's privilege to pick
and choose which he will break or which he will keep; because if he
violates one, it is merely a question of temptation, necessity, and
opportunity when he will transgress all. If he bears false witness and
lies, he will steal money as he filched character; if he covets his
neighbor's wife, the time comes when he murders her husband. _Falsus in
uno, falsus in omnibus._ You are going where you will hear much fine
talk about 'lofty, broadening, philosophic ideals' and 'progressive,
altruistic standards of humanitarianism and honor.' Now mark you, God's
laws are not 'progressive,' they are absolutely fixed, and when you are
as old as I am you will have learned that 'man's honor,' unless based on
them, is merely a sliding scale set up on a quicksand. My boy, try to
lead such a clean life that when the mirror of records is held up to you
in the final judgment you will not squirm and want to look the other
way; and now, my last word is, you had the great misfortune to lose your
dear, sweet mother in this world--be sure you deserve to find her in the
next."

During the journey to college he found in his well-filled pocket-book a
folded sheet containing additional memoranda in his father's cramped,
old-fashioned writing.

"Be honest first, then generous--never wasteful. Pose on no pedestals
and you will escape falls. Avoid priggishness, which is detestable
mental dry-rot; and flee from cant, the convenient domino of hypocrisy.
Cultivate genuine sympathy for all suffering humanity, and remember that
a man's safest companion is his own conscientious, incorruptible
self-respect."

Doubtless in the years that followed Noel realized that indeed

    "Souls were dangerous things to carry straight
      Through all the spilt saltpetre of the world;"

but that he succeeded fairly well might have been inferred from a
certain scar on his throat, received while chastising two of his
classmates who had caricatured him in doggerel under the title of "Sir
Dandy Galahad." Misled by the quiet reserve of his manner, and an inborn
courtesy that made him as good a listener as talker, strangers never
suspected the existence of a temper fierce and, when fully aroused,
well-nigh implacable. In his third collegiate year the death of his
father left him untrammelled in the selection of a profession, and soon
after he entered into possession of a fortune so large that its golden
key would have opened the door of almost any career he might have
chosen. His mental trend was toward scientific studies, and his dominant
scheme of investigation embraced the elusive problems of anthropology.
His individual and favorite hypothesis involved the genesis of
aboriginal American man, and to secure all prehistoric and especially
pre-glacial data he had attended post-collegiate lectures at several
European universities, supplemented by sojourns in Central America,
Pacific Islands, and British North America.

Since the death of his stepmother, Mr. Herriott had established
temporary headquarters in New York in "apartments" not far from the old
Herriott house, which by provision of his wife's will was now the
property of Judge Kent. While the family of the senator usually remained
in Washington, Eglah and Mrs. Mitchell frequently spent a week in New
York, and on such occasions, if Noel chanced to be in the city, they
relied upon him to serve as escort when needed. That he had successfully
run the gauntlet of Eliza's years of cautious, suspicious observation,
and finally commanded her admiring confidence, contributed in some
degree to the easy _camaraderie_ maintained between Eglah and himself:
on her part a genuinely trusting friendship, pure and simple; on his
that cool, watchful quietude that holds in leash the one deep passionate
love of a strong nature and a lonely life. From the day he first saw the
little quivering white-clad girl standing in the sunset glow that
flooded the fragrant, flower-filled dining-room at Nutwood, he had
opened the empty temple of his heart, and where no image dwelt--save the
memory of his father--he lifted this child to a pure altar, and offered
silent homage.




CHAPTER VI


"Of course, Mr. Herriott, you are vastly amused by my ambitious
pretension."

"Why Mr. Herriott? And why assume amusement which I certainly have not
expressed?"

"Not verbally; but I quite understand that look in your eyes, when by
sheer force of will you hold your lips from smiling. Only courtesy keeps
in check your contempt for our 'higher education.'"

"Eglah, be a little more just in your generalizations. If the education
be really 'higher' and thorough, no reasonable man could afford to
disparage it. You have spent the morning over volumes of tedious
statistics, extracting figures on _ad valorem_ and 'specific' schedules
that only a custom-house clerk or a tariff expert could utilize by
eliminating nonessentials and compiling valuable tables. Why waste this
perfect day over metric puzzles--dekameter, hectoliter, myriagram?"

"Father wished the exact figures, and to work for him is my greatest
pleasure."

"Do not confound motive and accomplishment. Your father's secretary
would have collected the statistics in half the time and in a more
satisfactory form, simply because he has been trained for such search,
as dogs are taught to hunt truffles."

"Mr. Metcalf was needed in Washington, and as father has tried me
sufficiently to trust the accuracy of my work, he asked me to make this
investigation while I was in New York. Mr. Noel, to help him even in
trifles is my very life; he is my world, my all."

Mr. Herriott lifted his hat and bowed.

"Your devotion is beautiful and sacred, and Judge Kent should feel proud
of the list of rivals he so successfully defies. Perhaps it has not yet
occurred to him that in chaining yourself to his library desk you are
restricted to sawdust diet."

"Varied now and then, you must admit, by banquets of opera, germans,
receptions, teas, theatre parties, and the embassies. When I was working
so hard at college I looked forward eagerly to 'coming out,' as to a
magical door that would swing suddenly open into a wonderful world,
where, because of new conditions, I should become a different person,
and shed my girlish ideas as serpents slip their skins; but since the
'open sesame,' and I have 'arrived,' I seem to have lost nothing of the
past, and my old, tiresome self is tyrannous as ever."

"Is social life in Washington disappointing?"

"That is scarcely the right term. Life is certainly very brilliant, and
gay and panoramic, and I enjoy music and dancing, and some dinner
parties; above all, I find keen pleasure in following a spirited debate
in the House, or listening to speeches in the Senate, but sometimes I
catch myself wondering if this is indeed all--the veritable kernel of
society, politics, diplomacy, or merely the shell partly cracked. Life
here and in Washington does not seem so absolutely real as it was at
home, at Nutwood."

They were driving in Central Park, and Eglah shared the front seat of
the trap where Mr. Herriott held the reins of his spirited horses, and
brought them down to a steady, rapid trot. It was a cold but sunny day
in February, and as he laced his way in and out of the stream of
vehicles, he and his companion were the theme of much comment from the
passing throng. Fastidious in the matter of clothes, he was always
remarkably well dressed--a fact accentuated by his unusual height and
erect carriage--and at the two fashionable clubs to which he belonged he
was generally regarded "as all around, the best looking member." The
dark steel-blue grey eyes--with no hint of yellow--which his Scotch
father gave him, lost something of their penetrating brilliance under
the long jet lashes that, with black brows and thick clustering hair,
his mother had contributed, and his naturally clear olive skin had been
weather-tanned in various climates to a browner tint. In profile his
face resembled a bronze medallion, and when he smiled his well-cut lips,
that in repose seemed ominously thin, showed curves of rare beauty
around a faultless set of teeth. The sun of prosperity had ripened and
mellowed his manhood, and, as yet, no acid of cynicism had invaded his
nature.

Gowned in a fur-trimmed cloth of hunter's green, Eglah wore a velvet
toque of same hue, that failed to conceal the mass of golden-brown hair
burnished by sunshine into the similitude of a white-oak leaf dyed in
autumn. Under delicate, level brows, her large dark eyes--_chataigne_ in
some lights, almost black at times--were set rather far apart in an oval
face whose exquisitely clear, pure pallor was stained only by the
healthy rich red of slender lips, that had a treacherous trick of
quivering when any strong emotion stirred the deeps of her heart. By the
accepted canons of art and cultured taste her form and features had been
adjudged "beautiful," and some great-grandmother of the far South had
dowered her with a peculiar grace of movement--not languid, nor sinuous,
nor Delsartian--a natural idiosyncrasy that made the manner of her
steps, the lifting of head and motion of hands, unlike other women's.
Only one gift--most potent of all--had been withheld from her
birthright: she was absolutely devoid of personal magnetism, and her
habitual cold indifference approached haughtiness, that the world
resented. A certain aloofness of manner hedged her around even in the
midst of the social whirl, and though in conversation the lovely eyes
appeared to meet frankly those confronting hers, people were vaguely
conscious that some veil was rarely lifted from their soft, shining
depths.

Sudden congestion in the line of equipages, stretching far ahead, had
caused a temporary halt, and when the knot dissolved, and the impatient
horses sprang forward once more, Eglah said:

"I thought you loved good music too well to lose last night's opera
treat, and until the final act I expected you."

"Shall I flatter myself that even in the midst of the select party
occupying my box you really missed me?"

"Certainly I missed you--all the more because some of them chattered,
and you would have hushed the tattle."

"Am I so successful in the role of ogre as to over-awe my guests in an
opera box?"

"Your quiet way of setting an example of good breeding is sometimes
contagious among thoughtless people."

"My lucky star is surely ascending: you have paid me two compliments,
and I am puzzled to know whether I shall be expected to balance my
account at _ad valorem_ rates on the basis of your assessment or mine?"

"Oh, you and I established free trade long ago, and I can always tell
you the truth without pausing to weigh words as do legation attaches,
and as father does when wily lobbyists intercept him on his way from
committee rooms. Mr. Noel, had you any special reason for absenting
yourself? The lovely lilac orchids were, of course, far more ornamental
in your empty chair, and you must not think me lacking in appreciation
because I am so tardy in thanking you for them."

"An unexpected change in the date of a lecture given by one of my
friends kept me away, when I had hoped to join you. As I had promised to
attend, there was no alternative when a belated note informed me that
last night had been selected for its delivery."

"Tell me about it."

"If I should so afflict you, most certainly you would vote me a bore, or
fall asleep in self-defence."

"When you say that, you know curiosity always covets the forbidden."

"At your peril then! It was a monograph on the autochthonic origin of
American races, and by way of ornamentation bristled with such graceful
trifles as cephalic index, _brachycephalic_, and _dolichocephalic_, and
was sprinkled with the curry of _Votanic_ legends, and choice tid-bits
from the Quiche _Popol Vuh_ and from _Codex Chimalpopoco_! Sounds spicy,
doesn't it? Piques your appetite for a larger slice?"

"No, thank you. Yet you preferred that tiresome jargon to listening to a
superb tenor solo?"

"In a way--yes. We all ride hobby-horses from the nursery to the
cemetery, and it is merely a question of individual taste what blood
strain or pedigree we choose. My racing stable is not so generously
supplied as yours, which embraces colts of various breeds: reports of
fisheries commissions, bounties, American tonnage from 18-- to 18--, and
a vast----"

"Sarcasm does not fit you becomingly, Mr. Noel; it hangs askew, like a
clown's cap on a cowl. What have you registered your own special toy,
that you canter so vigorously around the world? Is it called ethnology,
or totemism, or anthropology?"

"When I have finished trying all its gaits, and find the sum total
satisfactory, I shall label it, and fit a comfortable side saddle and
introduce you formally. Now, Miss Kent, come to confession. Did you see
the list of passengers who arrived on yesterday's steamer from
Liverpool?"

"I did not."

"Can you recollect a certain prophecy I made at Cowes, anent a handsome
naval officer who entertained us at luncheon on his father's yacht?"

"Cassandra was a woman, and men should not trespass on the one feminine
right of 'I told you so,' that has descended to us intact from Hecuba's
daughter. But, Mr. Noel, if you mean----"

She turned and looked up into his eyes.

"Yes, I met him this morning at the club, where Ogden introduced him,
and I saved him a useless journey to Washington by telling him you were
here for a few days."

"I can only say I am sorry to hear it."

"While he is in New York I must, in part, return the hospitality shown
us, and your father will pay the remainder of the debt in Washington. I
have arranged a dinner for this evening, and later we shall see
'Hamlet,' then a supper afterward at Delmonico's. Will you join us at
the theatre, if I call for you, bringing Mrs. St. Clair as chaperon?"

"Thank you, I much prefer not to be one of the party; besides, I have a
previous engagement. I am going with my cousin, Vernon Temple, to a
meeting of shop girls, a sort of night school established by some of his
lady friends."

"What class does he teach?"

"I believe he 'talks' now and then on 'feminine arts,' and to-night
there will be a lecture on lace making and tapestry guilds, illustrated
of course by a sketch of the inevitable Matilda and the indestructible
'Bayeux.' I am trying to classify this new cousin, who seems to me a
queer blend of mediaeval monk, pre-Raphaelite reformer, and socialist. He
is altogether unlike any one I ever knew, but his beautiful, sad face
reminds me of a picture I saw in Munich--a young priest administering
the viaticum to his dying sweetheart, whom he forsook for holy orders."

Lowering his eyelids, Mr. Herriott glanced keenly at her.

"You find Temple wonderfully magnetic at times?"

"Scarcely that. 'Magnetic' implies so much and really explains so
little. When I see his ceaseless struggle to keep the heel of his spirit
on the neck of his flesh, it suggests a fanatical rebellion against that
equipoise God saw fit to establish. Like Joubert, 'he seems to be a soul
that by accident met with a body, and tries to make the best of it.' My
cousin Temple is fond of you."

"Despite much difference of opinion on many questions, our friendship
has survived the 'storm and stress' period, and I honor a man whose
battle cry for humanity is:

    "'Make trade a Christian possibility,
    And individual right no general wrong.'

Have you noticed the expression of Mrs. Mitchell's face when they happen
to meet?"

"Haven't I! It is too funny to see her narrow her eyes and look at him
as if he were some unclassified beast whose method of pouncing on his
prey had not yet been warningly advertised. She is convinced he is an
ecclesiastical infernal machine trying to wreck our family orthodoxy. I
asked him----"

She stopped suddenly at sight of two gentlemen approaching on horseback,
and Mr. Herriott smiled, as he whispered:

"Lo! the second son of a duke!"




CHAPTER VII


In a quiet and unfrequented cross street--equally remote from the
thronged thoroughfares of trade and from fashionable avenues lined with
palaces--stood the low and unpretentious Chapel of St. Hyacinth, marked
by neither spire nor belfry. The old stone front receded sufficiently
from the pavement to permit a short flight of shallow steps that led to
an arched door in a pillared portico with a cross on its pointed roof,
which hung over the entrance like a sullen, frowning brow. A northeast
wind came fitfully in hissing blasts, dashed with fine sleet; but when
Eglah passed through the swinging inner door a warm atmosphere spiced
with resinous incense infolded her as in a fragrant mist, through which
glimmered brass lattice screens, rows of tall candles, the gilded
carving of the white altar, laden with lilies, and the marble statue of
the Virgin, at whose snowy feet a red light burned in a silver lamp. On
each side of the wall below the brass lattice that barred the chancel
was a "confessional" of dark wood surmounted by a cross, and the
clustered lights in the centre of the concave ceiling formed a crown.

On the right and left of the altar the white surpliced choristers filled
several seats, and the quivering thunder of the organ ceased suddenly,
as if to listen to the marvellous voice of the boy soloist, that swelled
and rose as if the singer felt himself "hard by the gates of heaven." A
slender child of ten years, grasping his music with waxen hands almost
infantile in size, while his head, covered thickly with shining ripples
of golden hair, was thrown back, and his blue eyes almost purplish, like
a periwinkle, were raised in contemplation of the crown glowing above
him. The colorless face was delicate and beautiful as if wrought out of
ivory, and a certain pathetic sadness of expression inherent in fragile
childhood was for the moment dominated by the radiant exultation of his
wonderful eyes, that seemed made to dwell between the wings of a seraph.

Father Temple left the altar before which he had knelt in prayer, and
advancing to the steps of the chancel, stood with one hand on the brass
railing and briefly explained his unexpected presence. A telegram had
summoned the rector of St. Hyacinth's to the deathbed of his father, and
the request to officiate in his absence had been received too late to
permit the preparation of a regular sermon; hence the patient indulgence
of the congregation was invoked for some desultory remarks which might
not prove entirely fruitless. After a few exordial sentences, he
repeated slowly the opening ten verses from St. John xv., and waited a
moment.

"For text let us consider: 'I am the true vine,' said our Lord, 'and
ye, my brethren, are the branches.'"

Then followed a recitative of various selected passages from the "Sermon
in the Hospital," in tones so musical and liquid, and with a repose of
manner so profound, yet full of subtle magnetism, that his audience
gazed in sympathetic wonder at the slight figure clad in the sombre
habit of his order--at the thin, pallid spiritual face where large,
deep-set black eyes burned with the preternatural light of consecrated
but consuming zeal. The folded arms attempted no gestures--what need,
while that rhythmic wave of sound flowed on?--until the end, when the
clasped hands were lifted in final appeal:

                "... the Cross of Christ
    Is more to us than all His miracles.

           *       *       *       *       *

    Thou wilt not see the face nor feel the hand,
    Only the cruel crushing of the feet
    When through the bitter night the Lord comes down
    To tread the winepress. Not by sight, but faith,
    Endure, endure--be faithful to the end."

Unconscious of his movement, and irresistibly drawn, the young soloist
sitting in the front row of choristers had risen, and leaning far
forward, looked up into the face of the priest, like one mesmerized, his
parted lips trembling in a passion of ecstasy. Then the organ boomed,
and the boy fell from paradise and joined the choristers chanting as
they marched away behind the uplifted cross.

A lady stepped into the aisle and touched Eglah's arm.

"So glad to see you here, Miss Kent. Shall always welcome you to my pew.
What a delightful elocutionary _tour de force_ Father Temple gave us! He
would make a fortune on the stage of secular drama."

"Yes. Fra Ugo himself could scarcely have been more impressive when he
talked to the sick and dying on hospital cots. To my cousin Vernon this
world is only a hospital of sick souls. Mrs. St. Clair, I should like to
meet that little boy who sang so beautifully. Can you help me?"

"Very easily. Come back with me now to the vestry and we may find him.
Did you notice how that lovely boy seemed almost hypnotized?"

Only two of the larger choristers lingered, chatting with the
choirmaster, and as they turned toward the rear stairway leading to the
street, Mrs. St. Clair exclaimed:

"Mr. De Graffenried, stop the boys. We want to see the soloist. Call him
back."

"Madam, I think he is still in the chancel."

Lifting the velvet curtain that concealed the altar from their view, she
beckoned Eglah to her side.

Father Temple had been detained by one of the church-wardens, and as he
turned to hasten away the boy, standing near, caught the black skirt of
the priest.

"Please, sir, may I speak to you?"

"Certainly. I am glad to be able to thank you for the music to-day. Your
solo gave me great pleasure."

"I could have done better, but my throat is sore; it bled just now. I
told nobody, because I am the only one who can reach that high C, and so
I tried not to fail. I want to ask you how I can learn all the words you
spoke? Oh, if I could, I would set them to a chant; they would lift my
heart out of me if I could sing them."

"You shall have them. What is your name?"

"Leighton Dane."

Father Temple took his tablets from an inside pocket and made an entry.

"Where do you live?"

"Oh, a long way off. Far down in East ---- Street; but, please sir, if
you would leave the poetry here, I could get it at next rehearsal."

"My little man, how do you know it is poetry? The words do not rhyme."

"Rhyme? I do not understand that word--but I feel poetry. I always know
it by the way my blood beats, and the little shiver that runs down my
back, and the joy that makes me cry sometimes."

"I will send you a printed copy, in care of the rector. Dear child, God
has given you a wonderfully sweet voice, and I am glad you use it in His
service."

He laid his thin hand on the boy's golden head, and smiled down into the
wistful blue eyes, where tears glistened.

The childish fingers, holding two snowy spikes of Roman hyacinth, were
lifted and placed on the priest's hand, pressing it timidly against his
curls.

"Thank you, sir. Please take these. They smell like the heavenly
gardens, and I have nothing else to give."

"Were they not on the altar?"

"Yes, I slipped out two from the cluster there."

"Then they belong to God. By what right do you touch sacred gifts
brought to Him?"

"They were mine. I bought them last night and laid them yonder when I
came to-day--and God can spare just two, when I have nothing else to pay
you with. Did you--oh! did you think I--stole--them?" A sob shook him,
and tears followed.

Father Temple stooped and drew the little white-robed form to him,
pressing the head against his breast.

"Forgive me, I did not quite understand; and I am sure the dear Father
knows what is in your grateful heart. God bless you and keep you. I
shall put the hyacinths between the leaves of my Bible."

Eglah stretched an arm across Mrs. St. Clair's shoulder and dropped the
curtain.

"Come away. Some other time I may talk to him, not now."

The following day Eglah returned to Washington, and two hours before the
departure of the train she drove to Twenty-third Street, where she and
Mrs. Mitchell usually made their purchases of damask, ribbon, and lace.
While the latter bent over boxes of wools and crochet cottons, Eglah
seated herself at the handkerchief counter. When she had selected the
desired number, the saleswoman filled out her index sheet and rapped
sharply with her pencil.

"Cash! Here, cash!"

Several minutes elapsed.

"These cash boys are so tiresome. Cash, cash! I had to report one last
week. Cash--here he comes at last. Now, do hurry up; you are a regular
snail."

In the boy who hastened away Eglah recognized the soloist of St.
Hyacinth's, and noticed a bandage around his throat. When he came back
with the parcel and counted the change into the palm of the saleswoman,
Eglah touched his arm.

"I heard you sing yesterday, and want to tell you how much I liked your
voice."

"Thank you, ma'am, I----"

A spell of coughing interrupted, and she noticed how wan and weary he
looked, and how heavy were the greyish shadows under his lovely eyes.

"I am afraid you are not well to-day. Are you an orphan?"

"Oh, no. Mother is living, and she says a mother is worth forty
fathers."

"Will you tell me her name, and where she lives?"

"Mrs. Nona Dane, and she has the glove counter at ----, Fourteenth
Street."

At this instant the floor-walker strode forward, and a frightened
expression crossed the boy's white face as he turned quickly, but Eglah
laid a detaining hand on his head as, rising, she confronted the
floor-walker.

"If he loitered it is not his fault; I kept him. If he missed a call I
am to blame. Good-bye, Leighton; shake hands. When I come back to New
York I hope to hear you sing again at St. Hyacinth's; and if I miss you
here, I shall buy elsewhere."

His hot fingers quivered in her clasp, and, pressing a folded bill into
his hand, she joined her foster-mother and left the store.

"What a frail, beautiful boy, and what genuine golden hair! Looks as if
it had been dipped in a pot of gilt. Dearie, don't you think it a shame
these young children are chained up in stores when they ought to be
romping and playing ball?"

As their carriage turned from Twenty-third Street toward Broadway, that
always crowded angle was even more than usually thronged, and during the
brief pause Mr. Herriott came out of Maillard's with a box of bon-bons.

"I am just going to the ferry to wait for you. Are you not too early, or
has my watch gone astray?"

"Come with us, Mr. Noel, we have ample room. Yes, it is early; but of
course at the last minute I must needs shop on the way."


As he seated himself in the carriage he handed a package to Eglah.

"The latest Paris 'Revue,' and your favorite _marron glace_ and
chocolate."

"Thank you heartily, for both. I wonder if I ever shall cease to be a
spoiled child--in your eyes?"

"Whatever you may be in my eyes, you certainly will always remain."

"How discouraging, that you should feel quite hopeless of any
improvement in me. Driver, I wish to stop in West Fourteenth Street,
at ----. Gloves, Mr. Noel, always gloves."

"Will you bet a pair of best driving gauntlets that I cannot tell you
exactly why you go there to-day?"

"Certainly; silk-lined, fur-tipped gauntlets. I told you my errand was
gloves; pray what other reason?"

"You are going to get a glimpse of 'Juno.'"

"Juno? Nearly everything comes to New York sooner or later, but really I
never imagined she could step out from the books of mythology. I hunt no
goddess. When you pay your wager, be sure to select delicate fawn color,
that will match my spring jacket."

"The debt is yours. Confess, Eglah--honor bright--you are curious about
the woman who sells gloves in Fourteenth Street."

"I will present to you a witch's skirt, cap, and broomstick. But why
'Juno'?"

"The matter was thrashed out at the club last week, where Vandiver told
us some artist had compared her to a print of the Ludovisi Juno hanging
in Goupil's window. Hence her elevation to Olympus."

"Then you know all about her?"

"On the contrary, I never saw her; but she seems to be the magnet
drawing people to----just now."

The carriage stopped, and Eglah walked into the department store.

"Come in, Mr. Noel, and pick out your gauntlets."

"Not to-day. Juno indulged in tricks that made even Jupiter keep one eye
on her wiles, and I shall merely admire at a safe distance."

In front of the glove counter half a dozen women clustered, and on the
outside of the group three men lounged--one evidently a foreigner, with
bushy beard, coarse, hairy hands, and furtive eyes, small even behind
very large spectacles. Among several busy saleswomen it was easy to
discover the centre of attraction--a finely developed form, tall and
graceful in every movement, and a face of surpassing beauty, lighted by
dark violet eyes, flushed with the glow of perfect health, and crowned
by a braided mass of glittering yellow hair heaped high on a shapely
head, that held it as an empress wears her tiara. In its vivid coloring
the face suggested a tropical flower, but, looking closer, one thought
of a frozen tulip under a sheet of ice, so hard was the cold gleam of
the defiant eyes and the proud compression of red lips that had
forgotten how to smile, that seemed never to have known curves of
tenderness. While Eglah waited, the foreigner leaned across the counter.

"Some black silk gloves. Number eight and a half."

"In the next room. Men's department."

"You got the papers for the league?"

"Yes, that is all arranged. Meeting will be at ten o'clock to-night. You
can't talk here."

He touched the rim of his hat and walked away, and she looked toward
Eglah.

"Grey kid gloves, stitched with white silk."

"What size?"

"Five and a quarter."

The voice had a sharp metallic ring, with an impatient inflection, and
as she turned, lifting her arms to a box on an upper shelf, all the
lovely outlines of her figure were shown most advantageously, and Eglah
glanced over her shoulder at Mr. Herriott. He was watching the woman
behind the counter with an intensely curious expression, as though
disagreeably perplexed. She found the desired number.

"Shall I stretch them?"

"No, it is not necessary."

"Do you wish them fitted on your hands?"

"I will not give you that trouble. What is the price?"

"It is part of my business to fit them. Two dollars and a quarter. Here,
cash!"

Eglah's desire to mention the chorister of St. Hyacinth's was quickly
extinguished by the pronouncedly repellent bearing that plainly
proclaimed all intercourse must be restricted to the business of the
counter, and as she returned to the carriage, Mr. Herriott said:

"Well, you college girls are nothing if not severely classical, so I
presume you will offer a ewe lamb, all garlanded with willow and
dittany, and prinked out in pomegranate blossoms, on the Junonian
altar."

"I am glad Jove tied her hands and hung her up above the earth and below
the heavens, with anvils on her ankles, where she could do no more
mischief. That goddess of yours has the most cruelly cold, hard face I
ever looked at, and yet--in a way--so beautiful. Evidently she has not
even the shadow of a soul--must have given it all to that angelic boy?
What is her history? Of course she has one."

"It has been said happy women have none, and in this case adversity must
have curdled very early the stream of her youthful joys. Vandiver
investigated her--from a distance he says, as she froze him when he
attempted acquaintanceship. He has a protege in the constabulary who
learned through police channels all that she will allow to be known of
her life. Some years ago she drifted here from the far West--part of the
human flotsam annually stranded in this city, and she found work in a
cloak manufactory. Later she incited a strike among the cloak cutters,
which resulted disastrously for the workers, and when all the strikers
submitted, she alone was refused re-employment, and doors were closed
against her. She secured a position in a large bric-a-brac
establishment, but when a valuable antique vase disappeared, she was
suspected and arrested. While in prison a day and night awaiting trial,
the vase was found in a pawnbroker's shop, and the colored porter of the
bric-a-brac dealer acknowledged the theft. The firm very honorably made
ample public retraction of the unjust charge, and endeavored to
compensate and appease the injured woman, but she shook the dust of the
house from her feet and betook herself to Brooklyn. Recently she
accepted her present place."

"Do you mean to imply that she is--is--Bohemian?"

"That depends upon your interpretation of a very flexible term. I am
told she conducts herself with strict propriety, reports Mr. Dane dead,
and receives attentions from no one; but she is avowedly a socialist of
the extreme type: belongs to labor organizations, attends their
meetings, makes impassioned addresses, and, in fine, is a female Ishmael
whose hands are much too pretty for such savage work. Did you notice an
odd-looking, shambling man with preposterous spectacles who spoke to
her? He is an agent of a band of Russian Nihilists seeking aid from
sympathizers here. She is reported as possessing some education,
advocates 'single-tax' and all the communistic vagaries that appeal
to the great mass of toiling poor, the discontented and morose, as
colored balloons captivate the fancy of children at a circus door.
She frequents a hall down on the East Side, where at night the clans
of the disgruntled assemble, and long-haired men and short-haired
women--who absolutely believe that the only real 'devil is private
property'--denounce wealth and preach their gospel of covetousness. Here
we are at the ferry, and just in time to meet the boat."




CHAPTER VIII


Distinctly a _poseur_, Senator Kent had studied his physical good points
with sufficient attention to establish the habit of exhibiting them
advantageously, and to-night, as he leaned back in his easy chair,
persons who knew him well understood that the fine leonine head was
always turned adroitly to the right because a defect in one drooping
eyelid found semiconcealment in the shadow of nose and brow. Political
and financial prosperity had prevented or erased the lines that usually
mark countenances of men of his age, and his smooth, handsome smiling
face seemed to defy and rebut the testimony offered by grey hair and
white mustache.

Suave and conciliatory, tactful yet tenacious of purpose, a carefully
cultivated air of frankness ambushed subtle craftiness that rarely
failed to accomplish schemes which the unwary never suspected.
Unhampered by scruples, he had scaled the heights of success, climbing
the ladder of cautious expediency, and claiming allegiance only to
principles and policies that beckoned from the rung just above his head.
Proverbial good nature, voiced by a musical, hearty laugh, won him
social popularity, and even in congressional debate he never laid aside
the polished armor of imperturbable courtesy. Despite the keen scrutiny
of Eliza Mitchell during many years of intimate association, his
character had remained a baffling enigma, and her suspicious distrust
was allayed, in some degree, by his genial equanimity and amiable
abdication of control in domestic details. That he wore a mask she had
always believed, yet it fitted so perfectly she could not penetrate the
steel mesh, and in no unguarded moment had its springs loosened.

The luxuriously furnished library was bright and warm with fire glow and
gas light, and sweet with the breath of white azaleas heaped in a
pale-pink bowl on the low mantel shelf. Only the click of the typewriter
disturbed the stillness until Eglah rose from the instrument, covered
it, and numbered the written pages, arranging them in a sheaf.

"All ready now, father, and Mr. Metcalf can incorporate these tables in
the report you will need to-morrow. Do you wish to verify the figures?"

"Not necessary, my dear. You are usually accurate."

"Thanks for the sugar plum. You know exactly how sweet is your praise."

Coming forward, she sat down on the carpeted foot-board attached to his
reclining chair, leaned her head against his knee, and stretched her
fingers toward the fire. He laid one large dimpled hand on her shoulder,
and she turned her cheek to touch it. After the lapse of some minutes
the clock struck, and Eglah sprang up.

"Barely time to dress for the Secretary's dinner! Has the carriage been
ordered?"

"Yes. I can doze a while longer, as I have to change only my coat, vest,
and tie."

"Eglah, do you need my help in dressing, or will Octavia suit you best?"
asked Mrs. Mitchell, who sat at a small table near the hearth, matching
silk squares for an afghan.

"You can revise me finally, and punctuate me with additional pins when I
come down. Don't let father oversleep himself."

Senator Kent straightened the folds of his padded dressing-gown, and
through half-closed eyes watched the small hands hovering over silken
scraps, and wondered, as he had often done before, what manner of man
could have been the "overseer" husband for whom this grave, pretty,
reticent, demure widow still mourned in black garments, relieved only by
narrow white ruches at her throat and wrists.

The clock ticked softly, and the senator seemed asleep, when the ringing
of the door bell roused him. Some moments passed before the library door
opened and a servant entered.

"A note, sir. It was laid on top of the bell knob, and the messenger did
not wait, for I looked up and down the street."

"Evidently of no importance, else the delivery would not have been so
careless."

He lazily took an envelope from the silver salver and held it up.

    "Senator Allison Kent,
        Washington, D. C.

    "_Strictly Personal._"

Both the address and contents were type-written.

Intent on her patchwork, Eliza was bending over a mass of scarlet satin
ribbon, when a strange sound startled her: not a cry, nor yet a
groan--an anomalous smothered utterance of pain, as from a strong animal
sorely stricken.

He had struggled to his feet, and the large, heavy body swayed twice,
then righted itself, and he stood staring blankly at the red lily dado
on the opposite wall, as though their crimson petals spelled some such
message as foreshadowed doom to Babylon. One hand crushed the letter
into an inside pocket of the dressing-gown, the other clutched his
mustache, twisting it into knots.

The swift, inexplicable change of countenance could be compared only
with the startled alertness of a drowsing fox when his dim, snug covert
echoes the first far-off blast of the coming hunter's horn. In every
life some alluring vision of Arden beckons and beguiles, and to this
successful man, basking in the golden glamor of a satisfying attainment
of his aim, came suddenly an ominous baying of the bloodhounds of
retributive destiny.

"You have bad news, Judge Kent?"

He made no answer, and she seized his arm.

"What is the dreadful news that distresses you?"

As he turned his eyes upon her, all their light and color seemed faded
to a dull glassiness, and his voice shook like a hysterical woman's.

"News--did you say? No--I have received no news. None whatever."

"Then what ails you? I shall call Eglah."

She turned, but he clutched her skirt.

"For God's sake, don't ever tell her! Why grieve the child? The truth
is--" He caught his breath, and a sickly smile showed how his mouth
trembled, as he swept his hand across his brow.

"You are sick?"

"Oh, yes--sick; that is it exactly. Sick--sick indeed. Some oysters I
ate, and cheese; later I very foolishly drank ale."

"Then, sir, you must go to bed, and Eglah will send an explanation of
your unavoidable absence from the dinner."

Upstairs a door was opened, and a sweet, girlish voice trilled two bars
of a Venetian barcarolle.

Judge Kent threw out his arms appealingly.

"I must go to-night. For God's sake, don't let her know anything! Say
nothing. I shall tell her I was a little faint from indigestion. Vile
compound--oysters, ale, Roquefort! Promise me to hold your tongue; not
for my sake, but hers. I am obliged to attend this dinner, and it would
spoil her evening if she knew how deadly sick--I--really was a moment
ago. Promise me."

"Very well. I suppose you know best what concerns you most. I promise."

"You are the only woman I ever knew upon whom I could rely to hold her
tongue. Now, quick as you can, bring the decanter of brandy to my room.
Amuse the child with her frills and finery while I dress. I must have a
little time."

When she carried the brandy to his door, the hand that grasped it was
icy, and the other tugged ineffectually at his white tie.

Humming her boat-song, Eglah trailed silken draperies down the winding
stairs and into the library, where she courtesied low to Eliza and swept
her train--like a peacock's plumes--up to the grate, putting one
slippered foot on the brass fender.

She was gowned in green crepe of an uncommon tint, that held
multitudinous silvery lights in its crinkled texture, and when she moved
they glistened and played hide and seek in the clinging folds. Around
her fair, full throat a rope of emeralds coiled twice.

"Am I all right--ready for publication and criticism? The damp weather
makes my hair so curly I can scarcely keep it in line. Ma-Lila, the
clasp of my necklace feels a little rickety, so I must ask you to move
it around in front, and cover it securely with this."

She held out a diamond butterfly, and Eliza fastened it in the gold-wire
links of the emerald chain. As she settled the jewels in place, she
stooped and kissed one lovely white shoulder.

"Solemn little mother! I know exactly what you are thinking. That I am
as frivolous a creature as grandmother's heirloom butterfly? You should
not lose sight of the psychic symbolism of this much slandered and
despised insect. Little white butterflies whose wings are all powdered
with shining star-dust are the souls of babies----"

"Pagan nonsense that I won't listen to. Moreover, you ought to be
ashamed to jest about your immortal soul as if it were yours
exclusively--to play with as you would a ball."

"You darling Puritan! If you do not unlace yours it surely will smother.
Really, I thought it was orthodox to believe that in the very last
analysis and final adjustment of personal property one's own soul was
one's solitary chattel that defied and survived the confiscation of
death. Motherkin, don't scold! Kiss me good night, and help me with my
cloak, so that I shall not muss all this lace jabot. Is not father
ready?"

Eliza laid her long, white velvet cloak around her and tied the ribbons
under her chin.

"What keeps father so long? I heard the front door bell ring; is there a
visitor?"

"No visitor. Only some document left for the Judge. He is dressing."

Eglah went to the door of an adjoining room and rapped.

"Father, we shall be late. Unpardonable, you know, at a formal dinner."

"Almost ready. Old men need more time for repairs than young beauties."

When he came in, walking briskly, with his overcoat on his arm, Eliza
saw that he had rallied surprisingly. Brandy reinforced his nerves, and
the cautious, defensive tactics of a lifetime availed now to readjust
and restore his equipoise of manner. A flush showed on the full cheeks,
and his eyes shone like those of a cat in some dim corner.

"Inexcusably late, father! What can we say?"

"Come, my dear; leave that to me. I shall simply apologize by telling
the truth--a spell of indigestion delayed me, but I felt sure one of the
Secretary's famous cocktails would rejuvenate me."

Women, secure in their heritage of personal charms, resent as the most
unpardonable of affronts to their mental acumen explanations that do not
explain, and Mrs. Mitchell was thoroughly exasperated by the flimsiness
of the deception which she was expected to accept with unquestioning
credulity. Silence under strenuous conditions she could have condoned,
because it left her the resource of conjecture; an honest confession of
vitally grave business complications she would have regarded as
confidential, and loyally held inviolate, but "oysters, ale, and
Roquefort" was a stinging challenge to her feminine intuitions. Judge
Kent's arrested assertion: "The truth is--" recalled Mrs. Maurice's
estimate of his veracity when she had applied to him the sarcasm: "He
holds truth too precious to be wasted on everybody." That he cowered
under some unexpected blow she was quite sure, but her solicitude
included him only as his interests involved Eglah's welfare, and any
intimation of coming disaster fluttered this foster-mother, as the
faint, grey shadow of a hawk high in the heavens startles a hen into
signalling her brood. Ignorant of the quarter whence trouble might
approach, how could she shield Eglah, whose safety had been committed to
her guardianship? Had she the right to discover the contents of a note
that "contained no news"? Did his falsehood entitle her to pry into his
correspondence? All the smothered distrust of years was acutely
intensified, and she rose and walked to his room. A bright light shone
through the transom, but when she turned the bolt she found the door
locked. During her residence in the house this precaution had never
before been taken, hence she knew the note had not been destroyed.
Returning to the library, she rang the bell, and the butler responded
promptly.

"Have you locked up the silver? Bring me the key. Close the house for
the night. Judge Kent will be out late. Tell Octavia to have good fires
upstairs, and then she need not wait for Miss Eglah, as I shall sit up
till she comes; and, Watson, you can go home. Should the front door bell
ring, I shall be here."

More than once she had suspected that the senator was interested in
financial speculations, and, though Eglah's fortune had been carefully
tied up beyond his reach, she began to fear he might by some devious
process jeopard it. "Hypothecating securities" was a bristling phrase
she had never quite comprehended, but it symbolized an ogre she must
outwit.

In one corner of the library stood a tall, brass-mounted chiffonier
filled with papers, and above it hung an engraving. Behind, and entirely
concealed, was a door opening into a small bathroom that formed an
alcove in the senator's apartment. After an hour had passed, Mrs.
Mitchell placed her shoulder against the chiffonier, that rolled easily
on its castors, and she slipped behind it. There was no key in the lock,
but a slender steel bolt slid horizontally under her hand, and the door
opened a few inches only, barred by a table, which she succeeded in
pushing aside. Lifting the portiere inside, she entered the
sleeping-room, and found the _robe de chambre_ hanging over the back of
a chair. The pockets were empty, the drawers of the bureau locked, but
under the pillow on the bed she thrust one hand and drew out the object
of her search. It contained neither date nor signature, and was
type-written in purple ink on thin paper bearing no water-mark.

     "A friend to you and to yours believes it a genuine kindness to
     inform you that the identity of 'Ely Twiggs' has been
     discovered, and hopes an early knowledge of this fact may be
     useful to you."

She replaced the note beneath the pillow, returned to the library, and
rolled back the chiffonier. After all, she had ended her quest in a
cul-de-sac. Turning the gas jets low, she sat watching the blue flicker
that danced like witch-lights in the grate, and once she smiled at her
own discomfiture, realizing that her attempt was futile as would be the
trial of a Yale key to open a "combination" vault lock, the arrangement
of which was unknown. Keenly alert, she heard the rattle of the
night-latch, the closing of the front door, and, after a moment, Judge
Kent came slowly into the room. At first he did not notice her presence,
and in this brief unguarded interval she saw the countenance without its
habitual mask--a face gloomy, perturbed, unnaturally flushed, with
restless eyes gleaming like those of a jaded, hunted forest animal.

"Ah--Mrs. Mitchell! Sitting up for Eglah? Didn't she tell you she was
going from the dinner to the cotillon? Herriott will see her home. It is
a shame to have kept you up, but girls are so thoughtless."

"Eglah is never that, and I knew she would be late at the cotillon. I
waited downstairs solely to see you."

"Very kind, I am sure; but I feel much better, thank you. Indeed, I may
say I have fully recovered from that sudden, intolerable spell of
nausea. You are very good to worry over that little attack, but pray
think no more about it. I shall abjure Welsh rarebit and oysters in
future. At my time of life, pneumogastric nerves get their innings."

Brightening the light in the gas globe over the mantel, she approached
and confronted him.

"Judge Kent, I am not 'worrying' over the condition of your digestive
organs, but I do feel deeply interested in the nature of the trouble
that has come upon you so unexpectedly, and I cannot sleep until I tell
you what I have done to-night. Whatever injures you wounds Eglah, and
solely on her account I felt justified in taking a step that no weaker
motive could have sanctioned. I sat up to tell you that when I found you
would not trust me with the truth, I hunted it by reading the note that
fell this evening like a bombshell. I have no hesitation in confessing
the fact. I am here for that purpose."

She set her small, white teeth grimly and clasped her hands behind her.

He looked down at her, as a mastiff at a barking pug, and, throwing back
his head, laughed heartily, clapping his hands softly.

"Bravo, Methodist burglar! You seem an expert, and find locked doors no
barrier. What would Eglah think of your breaking into my room, and into
my correspondence?"

"Shall we ask her? Only my promise not to mention this matter to her
prevents me from telling her as quickly and frankly as I have told you.
May I speak to her?"

"Madam, you possess an arsenal of mental reservations, and I doubt
whether you can keep a promise."

"I can be silent against my will, and even in defiance of my judgment.
Try me."

"Then consider yourself on probation. Where is my hoax of a note?"

"Under your pillow, where you left it."

His eyes twinkled, and his voice shook as with suppressed laughter.

"A woman's curiosity cost us Eden. My dear little lady, what did you
discover in my anonymous letter?"

"That 'Ely Twiggs' is a terrible menace to your peace of mind."

"Would you like a translation of that ugly occult phrase? It is merely a
telegraphic cipher. You have conjured up a malignant chimera; rest
assured it is only a dingy red-paper balloon, with a flickering taper
inside. Good night. Pray allow no compunctious qualms to disturb the
peace of your Methodist conscience."

"No church is responsible for errors of its members, and I wish I could
believe it possible that your Episcopal conscience will allow you a
night of refreshing sleep. For my dear child's sake, I hoped you would
confide in me, and I regret that you withhold the truth. Good night,
sir."

"Little foster-mother, remember your promise."

He held out his hand, but she declined the overture and walked away.

"My Methodist promise will bear any weight laid on it."

       *       *       *       *       *

Without premonition, a sudden storm had swept over the city that night,
and at two o'clock, when Eglah and Mr. Herriott went down the steps to
enter their carriage, the stone pavement held tiny pools and rills of
water.

"Wait, Eglah, your slippers will be soaked."

"I can run across on tiptoe."

"You shall not! Permit me."

He stooped, lifted her from the lower step, and placed her on the
cushioned seat.

"How strong you are!" she said, laughing, as he entered the carriage and
sat down opposite, not beside her.

"Physically--yes. If my force of will equalled my nerves and muscles, I
should be a much happier man."

"Infirmity of will? You,--the most obstinate man I ever met! How little
you know yourself!"

"You are so sure you read me aright, perhaps you understand why all the
strength of my manhood has not saved me from staking my earthly hopes on
a venture that may be fatal. Can you explain?"

"Is it some scientific scheme? Some theory that may prove a delusion?"

"It is simply the possibility that the woman I love will not give me her
heart. Eglah, I have been patient. I wished you to see and know other
men--to form your own ideal, to compare me with some more brilliant and
attractive--before I asked for your love. Since the day I first saw
you--a grieved child--at Nutwood, my heart has been entirely yours, and
all my future is gilded with the hope of a home in which you will reign
as my wife. I bring you the one unshared love of my life. May I have the
blessed assurance that you will accept it?"

For some seconds Eglah neither moved nor spoke; then she slipped down on
her knees and laid her head on his hands, that were folded together.

"Mr. Noel--dear Mr. Noel--I will never marry. Only one man in all the
world is necessary to my happiness, and he is my father. What you tell
me now is a surprise--a painful surprise to me--because I never thought
of you as of some who flattered and even some who have asked my hand.
You were always my best friend, my wise, sympathetic companion, and I
never could think of you as desiring or needing any woman's affection.
You have seemed unlike other men I meet in society, and I believed you
cared most for books and scientific experiments, though I thought you
always felt a very kind, friendly, brotherly interest in me. Oh, I am so
sorry you have uttered such words to-night! You must know I am not like
other women in our circle, and I have no intention of marrying. If I
should select any man to love it might be you, because I respect and
trust you so profoundly; but that could never happen to me. What have I
inadvertently done to make you misjudge my feelings? You must forgive
me. I never suspected."

As she pressed her face against his hands he felt her lips trembling,
and his struggle for self-control was short and fierce. After a moment,
he raised and replaced her on the seat and sat beside her.

"I can reproach only myself for a delusion that costs me more than you
will ever know. In my loneliness the dream was so beautiful. I could not
resist its fascination. Dear little girl, you are the only one I ever
wished or asked to be my wife, and because you are so precious to me I
will not surrender my hope, unless you force me. Remember the long years
I have waited for you. In time, perhaps, you might learn to care for me.
May I entreat you to try?"

"Mr. Noel, I trust you, I admire you--in a way I feel attached to
you--but I must tell you the truth. I shall marry no one, not even you."

"Then I shall never repeat my folly. Be sure I will vex you no more; but
there is something you can do to lessen my pain. If trouble or disaster
or sorrow overtake you, will you promise to confide in me, to allow me
to share it, as if I were indeed that elder brother you have tried to
believe me?"

"Yes, Mr. Noel. After father I will always turn next to you, and you
must not condemn me because, unintentionally, I have been so unfortunate
as to hurt you."

"For several reasons I wish your father to know at once all that has
been said to-night. He is aware of my intentions, and kind enough to
approve them. One final request I trust you will not refuse me. The
visit to my house on the Lake has been definitely arranged, and I
particularly desire that no change of plan should be made. Henceforth no
word of mine will ever recall this interview, and during your stay under
my roof I assure you no allusion to my dead hopes shall annoy you. Trust
me, and come."

       *       *       *       *       *

The carriage stopped at Senator Kent's door. As Mr. Herriott led her up
the steps, she noticed he barely touched her arm, and when he rang the
bell she caught his hand between both of hers.

"Dear Mr. Noel--you do forgive me?"

A neighboring lamp shone full on his handsome face, pale and set, and a
sudden consciousness of the unusual charm of his noble personality
thrilled her. Withdrawing his hand, he held it behind him, and, as he
looked down at her, his lips twitched.

"You have done me no wrong by simply following the true, womanly
dictates of your pure heart. Marriage without genuine love is a
degradation to which you could never stoop. I will love you always,
always; but I find it hard to forgive myself for making utter shipwreck
of a man's dearest aim in life. Good night."

As Mrs. Mitchell opened the door, he turned away and went swiftly into
the street.

"Eglah! What is the matter? You are crying."

"How can I help it when I have hurt the noblest man in all the
world--except father? My one true friend, who never failed to be good to
me!"

"You have refused to marry Mr. Herriott? My baby, you will never find
his equal. Your father can scarcely forgive this defeat of his pet
scheme, dating from the time you were ten years old."




CHAPTER IX


"Herriott, I owe you an apology for coming so late, but feel quite sure
you will pardon a delay that was unavoidable. I have kept your dinner
waiting half an hour."

"No matter, provided you bring an appetite that can defy overdone fish.
I am glad it is only delay, and not total failure. Vernon, you look so
spent, may I venture to offer your reverence a tonic--club-labelled
'cocktail'? It is the best antidote I dare suggest for the slow method
of suicide you have adopted."

"Thank you--no."

"Then come in to dinner."

"I wasted the whole afternoon trying to find a boy down on the East
Side, but when at last I reached the house I was told he had moved from
that neighborhood. He is a soloist at St. Hyacinth's, and I had promised
him a booklet."

"Leighton Dane?"

"Yes. What do you know of him?"

"That he will sing no more at St. Hyacinth's. Henceforth his solos
belong to choirs beyond the stars. The boy is slowly dying of
consumption."

"When did you see him?"

"A few days ago. He is at No. 980 ---- Street, Brooklyn. Your cousin
Eglah asked me to keep an eye on him. Poor little lad! His battle with
pain and loneliness is pathetic, and I rather think the end is not far
off."

"Loneliness? Who takes care of him?"

"His mother is away all day at her work, but an old German and his wife
living on the same floor of the tenement look after him as best they
can."

"Could you deliver the book to him?"

"If you wish it; but why not make another effort to see him?"

"My hands are so full. In two days I must run down to Washington, and
then back home, where I am needed. How luxurious your quarters are! Less
like a bachelor's den than one would expect."

"Next week I give up these rooms, and when I chance to be in the city
shall live at the club."

"Is not this decision rather sudden?"

"No. For some time I have contemplated another expedition to Arizona and
Montana, in quest of prehistoric records needed for an anthropological
paper that Professor De Wette asked me to contribute to the next volume
of Reports."

"What date have you fixed?"

"About the middle of July, immediately after the visit to 'Greyledge,'
which Senator Kent and Eglah have promised as soon as Congress adjourns.
I am sorry you could not arrange to join the small 'house party,' and
rest yourself by fishing in the Lake, instead of the turbid pools of
humanity."

"What about Calvary House? We expect you there."

"That pleasure must be deferred; but I have thought a good deal about
your need of more ground there, and believe I have found just what you
want. Come into the library, it is cooler, and I have some papers for
you. You know the Ravenal lands--some twenty acres--lie across "Tangled
Brook," west of your lines. The property was sold recently by the
trustees and my agent bought it. Now you can easily bridge the stream,
using the foundation of the old paper-mill dam, and by extending your
fences cover the whole. I know the old farmhouse was burned years ago,
but those pasture lands are fine, and that hill sloping south will make
a good vineyard. Here are all the papers, and my deed to the
Brotherhood. Stop! No thanks, not a word, or I cancel the transfer. Some
day, when I visit you, I may not be welcome, because I promise you now,
if your stewardship does not suit me and things seem mismanaged, I will
most certainly turn you all out."

Father Temple laid the bundle of papers on the table and grasped Mr.
Herriott's hand, pressing it warmly, but something in the bright, steady
grey eyes warned him to attempt no verbal expression of gratitude.

His host lighted a cigar, and drew from a stand near his elbow a
portfolio tied with purple tape.

"Does your reverence ever waste time now in sketches and water-color?"

"Life is far too strenuous for such trifling."

"How do you know that some day you will not be required to dig up that
buried talent and answer the charge of neglecting to bring in the
expected interest? Nature intended you for one of her artistic
interpreters, and if you had been loyal to her commission you might rank
to-day as R.A. Last summer I was searching an old trunk for a college
text-book, when I happened to find some of your drawings, that were
packed by mistake with my luggage in the bustle of leaving the
university."

From the pile of loose sheets he held up one, and, after a moment's
survey, in which he turned it at various angles, he handed it to his
guest.

Father Temple was leaning back in a cushioned arm-chair, and against the
violet velvet background his pale, placid, scholarly face was sharply
silhouetted. Listlessly raising the sketch sidewise, so that a gas jet
on his left shone upon it, he looked at it. The profound repose that
habitually rested on his countenance broke up swiftly, as a sleeping
pool shivers when a stone is hurled into its motionless depths. His lips
whitened, and he laid the paper as a screen over his eyes. Mr. Herriott
crossed the floor to the door of the dining-room, and, loitering
deliberately, ordered coffee. When he came back, followed by a servant
bearing coffee and liqueurs, the priest was standing at an open window,
and in the clenched fingers of the hands clasped behind him the sketch
quivered as though shaken by the wind.

"Close the door, Hawkins, and when I want you I will ring. Come, Vernon;
I remember your fondness for coffee, and this is good and piping hot."

The thin figure in the girded cassock shook his head and leaned out of
the window, staring up at the golden stars throbbing above the roar and
din of the crowded street.

After some minutes, during which the host rattled cups and glasses,
Father Temple walked up and down the room, then came back to the table.
The despairing sorrow in his deep, soft eyes made Mr. Herriott rise
instantly.

"Vernon, have I wounded you by my reminiscent babble of college days?"

Without a word, the arms of the priest were lifted to the man towering
over him, and he laid his head on the shoulder of one who had never
failed him.

"Temple, forgive me, dear old fellow, if I have broken rudely into some
sacred, sealed chamber."

"You have done me a priceless kindness in restoring my picture, but with
it comes the hour of humiliation I always knew must sooner or later
overtake me. Noel, your good opinion is so precious to me I shrink from
losing it. I have dreaded your condemnation next to that of my God. You
always trusted and respected me, even in what you deemed foolish monkish
extremes, and yet--and yet----"

"Sit down, and pull yourself together. You have fasted and prayed your
starved nerves into a fit of womanish hysteria. I am no father confessor
for you, and if you are not the true, loyal man I have believed you all
these years, then, while you are under my roof, I prefer not to find out
that you are a hypocrite."

He pushed his friend back into the easy chair, and handed him a glass of
chartreuse, but it was put aside.

"Noel, you must hear me. After the first bitterness I shall feel
relieved that you know literally all I can tell, and then you will
understand many things in my life. To-day I am what I am, simply and
solely in the hope of expiating the sin of my youth. Noel, the sin of my
youth found me out early, and this life I lead is an attempted
atonement. Do you begin to understand?"

Mr. Herriott held up the sketch, and, as he struck it sharply with his
fingers, his face darkened.

"Whose portrait is this?"

"The woman--the young girl--whose life I blighted."

"Good God! Blighted? Is your villainy so black?"

"I am Father Temple, vowed to celibacy, and somewhere in the wide, cruel
world a wife and child of mine may have gone down to perdition because I
was a coward--a vile coward, too base for a brave man to recognize. I
knew you would despise me, and I kept silent as long as I could. Do you
wonder?"

Mr. Herriott stood over him like an avenging Viking.

"You betrayed a woman? Wife, or victim of----"

"Both. I married and I deserted her."

"The marriage was legal--no swindling sham?"

"Legal in form, though I was a minor and she a mere child."

"And you ensnared her deliberately, intending to----"

The priest sprang to his feet and his eyes flashed.

"I loved her, and married her secretly, and intended no wrong; but
before I could publicly claim her--before I was of age and dared to face
my father with the fact of my marriage--I lost her. She disappeared as
completely as if the ocean rolled over her."

"Is this the unvarnished truth? There is nothing worse, nothing more
heinous than what you have told me?" Mr. Herriott breathed quickly, as
his keen, cold eyes searched severely the wan face before him.

"I have told you the whole, bitter truth."

"Then I have not entirely lost my friend. Now sit down; begin at the
beginning of this black business, and let me try to share your load of
trouble. Don't hurry--be explicit. Keep back nothing. If you intended no
wrong, there must and shall be found some way to right it."

"Too late! If you take a white flower and inhale its perfume, and then
carelessly drop it where hurrying crowds are sure to trample it into the
dust, what hope that, search as you may, you will ever find it, or,
finding it, be able to restore the torn, soiled, ruined petals? Wherever
she is, no matter what she has become, what sin and shame stain and
defile her, she is my wife. I swore before God I would take her for my
wife, 'for better, for worse,' and though it is my fault--and mine
only--that I did not publish the marriage, I have kept my vows, and am
dedicated to life-long celibacy. My boyish cowardice--what awful
shipwreck it has made of two lives! You want the details? It is a
shameful story, but not long. In the early summer of my nineteenth year
I spent vacation in the far Northwest, at an advanced army station,
Post ----, where father was in command of his regiment. Hunting was fine
but dangerous, as Indians on the frontier were ugly just then, and
several tribes were painting for the war path. One hot afternoon,
tramping back to camp with my rifle on my shoulder, I went down a steep,
wooded hill to drink at a spring, and as I parted the thick growth I saw
a cow chewing her cud, while a bare-footed girl stooped and milked into
a cedar pail. She sprang up, much alarmed, and stood against a glowing
background of scarlet rhododendrons. Her calico bonnet had fallen off,
her sleeves rolled up showed her white, dimpled arms, and all over her
head and shoulders the gold-colored hair was twisted into little curls
and waves and tendrils that glittered like gilt wire. As she stared at
me with large purplish-blue eyes, her bright red lips trembled, and--"
He paused, and involuntarily wrung his thin white hands.

"I had seen handsome women, and many lovely girls, but never so
exquisite a creature as this, and from that moment I lost reason,
prudence, everything but conscience, and my heritage of honorable
instincts. Nona Moorland was the daughter of a teamster attached to
father's command; a brutal, rough man, whose second wife--a selfish,
jealous virago--made the step-daughter's life a cruel burden. They
occupied a log cabin just outside the Post parade grounds, and the girl
was never allowed in sight of drill lines except when under convoy of
the stepmother she assisted in carrying to headquarters the freshly
laundered clothes of the officers. Having been forbidden, under threat
of corporeal punishment, to speak to or be seen with any soldier, save
in her father's cabin, she was terrified at the danger of a discovery of
our acquaintance; hence our interviews were secret, and adroitly
arranged to elude suspicion. Her extraordinary personal beauty and
gentleness of deportment more than compensated for illiteracy and humble
origin, and after a few days I planned a clandestine marriage, to which
she readily assented. The Post chaplain had made a pet of me, because I
aided him in some botanical and geological tramps close to the frontier,
and finally he consented to help us, provided his agency was never
betrayed. We both swore we would not divulge his name or knowledge of
our scheme, and so one starry night he and Hill, a private soldier who
went as witness, stole out, and met Nona and me in a dense grove of
trees near Moorland's cabin. There we were married according to the
ritual of the Episcopal Church. I was not quite nineteen, she a slender
girl just past her fifteenth birthday. Under the quiet stars that shone
as our altar lights, we took solemn, life-long vows as husband and wife,
and there, when a written certificate had been given to Nona, we all
joined hands and pledged ourselves in the sight of God to keep the
secret until I was of age, or thought it prudent to publish the
marriage. To her I meant no more wrong than to myself, and kept to the
form of law, knowing we were minors, and that no license legalized the
ceremony which I believed and argued the Church sanctified. You knew my
father sufficiently well to remember how terribly stern he was, how
morose he often seemed, and I dared not defy him. For three weeks life
was a brief vision of heaven to Nona and me. She was so lovely, so
tender, so humbly conscious of her social inferiority and lack of
education, so fired with an ambitious zeal for culture and improvement
to fit herself for the circle where Colonel Temple's son was born to
move. Then the bolt fell. A courier from the nearest telegraph station
brought news that father had been promoted, was ordered to Washington,
and would soon go abroad on some military commission. I begged to spend
the remaining days of my vacation at Post ----, but was sharply refused,
and all things were ordered in readiness for our departure next day at
sunrise."

Some overwhelming memory arrested the narrative, and Father Temple held
the portrait sketch toward the light. Then he crossed his arms on the
table and bowed his face upon them. The room was very still, and there
seemed suddenly a startling insistence in the harsh sound of an organ
that began to grind out "O promise me," on the pavement below. Mr.
Herriott threw down a coin, closed the window, and resumed his seat.

"Noel, you must think me weak and unmanly. You are so strong yourself,
you can scarcely----"

"Strong? I think if I had to carry your burden I should go out and hang
myself."

"That last interview is a perpetual nightmare no noon sunshine ever
dispels. Nona was frantic at the unexpectedly sudden separation, and she
clung to me like a drowning child; but by degrees she accepted the
inevitable, and her trust in me was supreme. She would be patient, and
study books the chaplain would provide, and rely on him to forward her
letters, and receive and find means to deliver mine. A full moon showed
me her tearful face when we stood up to say good-bye. Oh, beautiful,
tender, devoted, and pure as any lily God ever set to bloom in a wicked
world! As I took her in my arms, she kissed me repeatedly, and I felt
her lips tremble on mine as she sobbed:

"'No matter what happens, you must trust me as perfectly as I trust you.
If we keep true to each other, all the world can't part us long.'

"That farewell vision abides with me--sleeping, it walks as a living
presence through my dreams; waking, it thrusts itself between me and my
God; and when I kneel before the marble image of the Mother of my Lord,
her holy face is hidden by that of my fair, sweet young wife. It has
become an obsession from which I cannot escape. After I went east, two
letters reached me; then, in the late autumn when father had sailed, I
was stricken with typhoid fever, that kept me prisoner for three months,
and the inflammatory rheumatism that followed it so completely wrecked
me, I was carried to the country home of an aunt in Massachusetts, in
whose care father left me when he went to Europe. In my convalescence I
wrote repeatedly under cover to the chaplain, signing only my middle
name, Pembroke, but heard nothing until the next June. While still on
crutches, I went for a day's visit to college to collect and pack my
belongings, and there I found one dusty, mislaid letter from Nona, full
of sad forebodings. The chaplain had wandered too far away to a mountain
range, accompanied only by an orderly, who reported on his return that
his companion had been scalped by Indians while he was examining some
rock ledges, and that he had barely escaped by desperate riding. A
cavalry troop, sent out to recover the body and avenge the death, was
ambushed in a wooded defile and four troopers were killed, among the
number Hill. The letter had been written in January--five months before.
Both witnesses of our marriage in the grave! Anxiety and distress
brought on renewal of rheumatic fever, and I was crippled in hands and
feet for six terrible weeks. One day, as I was trying my ability to walk
about the room, a delayed letter was forwarded from college--the last I
ever received from Nona. Her father had died very suddenly from
congestion of the lungs, and his wife returned immediately to her family
in Arkansas; but because of my poor Nona's condition, which had
subjected her to severe abuse and horrible accusations, the stepmother
had cast her off, refused her recognition, and abandoned her. Because
she refused to divulge the name of her husband, her declaration that she
was a wife only increased the torrent of insults that swept her beyond
the pale of respectability. She wrote that one friend--the only person
who believed her assertion that she had been lawfully married--was just
then leaving the Post for his old home, his time of service having
expired, and he had kindly carried her in a covered wagon to a small
village some days' travel east of the Post, where he found shelter for
her until after the birth of her child. She begged I would send money to
pay her board and also to enable her to travel east and live near me,
because she was so terror-stricken among strangers. The same day my
father summoned me to Europe, having decided I should attend lectures
in Germany and at Oxford. By express, I forwarded the money to
Nona, in accordance with her directions--"Care of Delia Brown,
Thompsonville, ---- Territory"--and I wrote her, explaining all the
circumstances, assuring her I would join her as soon as I could travel,
and that henceforth we should never be separated. A few hours later I
was laid up with a severe relapse, and when, finally, I started west in
September, I was still so lame any movement was torture. At last the
stage coach put me down at the cluster of log houses called
Thompsonville, and by the aid of crutches I found my way to a low, dark
cabin of two rooms, where Delia Brown made a scanty living by washing
and ironing for men attached to a party of prospecting miners. She was
a gaunt, sinister looking woman from Maine, with small, deep-set, faded
yellow eyes that bored like a gimlet, and as she took a pipe from her
ugly bluish lips and greeted me my heart sank. Where was Nona? Gone--with
the man who brought her there, and who 'paid well for her keep.' When?
Several weeks ago. Did she receive my letter, and had the money reached
her? Yes, the money had been delivered to her--Delia Brown--and she had
given it to the woman Nona, in the presence of one Josh' Smith. My
letter had seemed to terrify the woman, and as soon as she knew I was
coming she went away suddenly, saying she was going to New Orleans, and
she and the man could take care of the baby. What was the man's name? He
called himself Lay' Walker, but she doubted 'if he was not somebody else,
and folks had their suspicions about the whole affair.' The baby boy was
four months old when the man and woman took it away, but it was 'such a
poor, puny, ailing child it had little chance to live.' What I suffered
then only God will ever know, but faith in Nona sustained me while I
went from cabin to cabin, receiving on all sides confirmation of Delia
Brown's statements from women who had met her, and also from the mail
and express agent--Josh' Smith--who assured me he had delivered the
letter and package of money addressed to Nona Moorland, care of Delia
Brown, to the latter, and exhibited her receipt. Lay' Walker was
described as a very 'handsome Spanish-looking young fellow,' and he and
the woman seemed fond of each other. He spent his money freely on her,
and talked about Florida and banana growing, and said they wanted to get
to New Orleans, where his friends had a schooner running in the West
India fruit trade. After an exhaustive search, I made my way to New
Orleans and engaged police assistance, but no clue could be found. Then I
arranged advertisements to run six months, and went on to Pensacola and
to Tampa. I advertised in two Florida newspapers, asking Nona Moorland
to write to me, care of my father's lawyer in Boston. No response, no
word, no hint ever reached me. When December arrived and I had no
tidings, I deposited money in a Boston bank to the credit of Nona
Moorland, and leaving instructions that all mail matter should be
forwarded promptly to me, I sailed for Europe, shattered in body, almost
hopeless, and the tortured prey of remorseful regret at the awful
consequence of my midsummer madness."

A nervous shiver seized him, and he lifted the chartreuse to his
colorless lips.

Mr. Herriott's sinewy brown hand closed over the cold white fingers half
hidden in the folds of the black cassock.

"And the woman, Delia Brown? What became of her?"

"How should I know?"

"There lies the crux of this dreadful entanglement. She duped you."

"Possibly. When I left Thompsonville she was preparing to remove to
Maine, where she had relatives. I doubted her as long as I could; but
nearly eleven years of cruel silence have slowly destroyed every vestige
of hope, or of faith in Nona's loyalty. Understand, I do not accuse
her--I dare not--I accept the blame. The fault was mine; she was an
innocent, ignorant child, and what she considered my heartless, wicked
desertion has thrown her into the jaws of destruction. If her soul is
lost, God will require me to answer for the ruin--and that is the
bitterness of my intolerable life. The immortal soul of my wife, of the
mother of my child--a homeless, nameless, fatherless waif! I hold
marriage indissoluble by human enactment, and while Nona lives I regard
her as my wife, no matter what she has become, no matter into what
shameful career she may have been driven by my cowardly course of
action. When she believed I had abandoned her, the poor girl doubtless
grew desperate. What I have told you is known only to my confessor, to
the Superior of our Order in England, where I took my vows, and to my
father, to whom I promptly confided everything when I joined him in
Germany just before his death. That he refused to forgive me you will
readily believe. This sketch you have restored to me was enlarged from
one I made at Post ----, and its loss greatly grieved me. Oh, Noel,
stinging memory is more merciless than sharp-set hair shirts that fret
the flesh. When I see happy mothers and children, their laughter smites
my heart like an iron hand; and while I minister to the suffering
outcast little ones in pauper homes, my bruised soul seems to hear the
accusing, piteous cry of my own forsaken, lost lamb--thrown out to
hungry wolves."




CHAPTER X


Sabbath quietude had laid a finger on thousands of metal lips that
screamed the song of labor on other days, and the great city seemed
almost asleep as Mr. Herriott entered his carriage at ten o'clock and
gave the order, "Brooklyn--Fulton Ferry." After a restless night, spent
in searching an old diary for dates and notes, he had gradually untied
some knotted memories--vague and conflicting--and straightened a slender
thread that might possibly guide to the identification of an elusive
personality. On the seat in front of him a basket of purple grapes added
their fruity fragrance to the perfume of a bunch of white carnations,
and during the long drive the expression of perplexity which had knitted
his brows relaxed into the alert placidity that characterized his strong
face.

Summer heat, blown in by a humid south wind, touched the sky with an
intense blue, against which one long, thin curl of cloud shone like a
silver feather, and Brooklyn parks and lawns shook their green banners
of grass blades and young, silken foliage. In the middle of a block of
old brick tenement houses, Mr. Herriott entered an open door, where two
children fought over a wailing black kitten, and went up the inner
stairway to a narrow hall, on which opened several doors bearing cards
inscribed with the name of occupants of the rooms. At one, labelled
"Mrs. Dane," he rapped. It was opened partly, and held ajar.

"Well, who knocked?"

"One of Leighton's friends. Can I see him?"

"Not to-day. He is not well enough for visitors."

"May I come in and see you?"

"Why should you? What do you want?"

Before he could reply, a weak voice pleaded:

"Please, mother! It is Mr. Herriott: let him in. He has been so good to
me--please--please!"

"If I do, you are not to talk and bring back that spell of coughing."

The door was swung fully open, and Mr. Herriott confronted "Juno."

"You are Mr. Herriott, as I supposed. Walk in, and excuse the confusion
of the rooms. I was up all night, and have not put things in order."

She wore a dark skirt and white muslin sacque, loose at the throat,
ungirded, and the sleeves were rolled up, exposing the symmetry of her
dimpled white arms. A rich, lovely red stained her lips and
cheeks--perhaps from embarrassment, probably from the heat of the
oil-stove, on which, evidently, breakfast had been recently prepared.
She pointed to an adjoining room, where Leighton lay on a cot close to
the open window.

"Oh, sir, are they really for me?" as Mr. Herriott laid the basket and
flowers beside him.

"Look, mother! Grapes, grapes! And the smell of the carnations! Was
there ever anything so sweet? I don't know how to thank you, sir. I wish
I could say something, but when my heart is full I just can't tell it."

His little hot hand caught Mr. Herriott's, and the thin fingers twined
caressingly about it.

"You are not to thank me, and you must not talk. Remember, that was the
condition upon which I was allowed to see you. Eat your grapes while
your mother tells me about you."

"You will spoil him. I can't give him such luxuries as hothouse fruit
and flowers, though now and then he has his bunch of violets."

"When was the doctor here?"


"Friday. He changed the medicine, but I can see no benefit as yet."

"If you think it would not tire him too much, I should like to take him
out for a drive."

"Thank you, but I could not consent to that."

"Why not? The fresh air is balmy to-day, and would do him good. I have a
carriage at the door, and if you are unwilling to trust the boy with me,
I should be glad to take you also. May I?"

Her blue eyes glittered and her lips straightened their curves.

"Most certainly not."

"Pardon me, madam; my interest in your child----"

"Does not justify a man of your position in taking a 'department store
saleswoman' to drive on Sunday through public places."

"Perhaps you are right. Then I shall efface myself promptly, and you and
Leighton can keep the carriage as long as you like."

"Such favors I accept from no man."

"Not even to help your sick boy?"

She put her hand on the child's shining curls, and a world of tenderness
glorified her velvet eyes.

"Not even for my very own baby could I incur such an obligation."

"Smell them, mother--like spice! Don't they make you think of the
carnation garden in San Francisco, where Uncle Dane used to carry us?"

"How long ago was that, Leighton?" asked Mr. Herriott, watching the
woman's face.

"Oh, it was when I was a little chap and wore frocks."

"Were you born in San Francisco?"

"No. He was born in ---- Territory."

"Mrs. Dane, can you tell me what became of the artist Belmont?"

"Why do you ask me that question?"

"In order to get an answer. He painted your face for his 'Aurora,' and
the picture was photographed."

"Yes; I needed money, and Mr. Dane permitted him to come to our house
for the sittings. That was my first and last experience as a model."

"I have met you before."

She straightened herself, and answered defiantly:

"Probably I have sold you gloves, or socks, or handkerchiefs--certainly
not the right to meddle with my personal affairs."

"I went with a San Francisco friend to see a night school for women,
which his mother had established. You were there."

"Yes, I was there two winters. Now, sir, have you a police badge hidden
inside your coat? Are you playing reporter--disguised as a benevolent
gentleman--hunting up the details of last night's meeting and riot at
Newark? You know, of course, that I made a speech there?"

"Indeed? I had imagined you sat up all night with your sick boy."

"There is a strike on down there, and I spoke against arbitrating labor
grievances, and against the ghastly sham of getting the rights of the
poor from a picked judge and a packed jury. Bombs and boycott make the
best mill for grinding out justice to starving, over-worked men and
women."

"How long have you been an 'anarchist,' or perhaps you prefer the term
'socialist'?"

"From the day I was sixteen years old, and learned how rich men trample
and betray and despise and insult the ignorant, helpless poor."

"It must have been a terribly cruel grievance that transformed into a
fury one who was intended for a loving, gentle woman."

She laughed, and her beautiful teeth took hold of the glowing under lip.

"Grievance? We all have one--we are simply born to suffer, as to
breathe--but the unendurable the unpardonable comes from the grasping,
murderous, fiendish selfishness of rich men. You have been so kind to my
boy, I have tried hard to believe genuine benevolence--what you are
pleased to call 'Christian philanthropy'--inspired your visits to him
during my absence, but you are all alike--you gilded society
sultans--and you come here with some cowardly design carefully smothered
under flowers, fruit, and candy. So, Leighton, make the most of to-day,
for we will see no more of your Mr. Herriott."

"Madam, I shall be as frank as you have shown yourself. There is one
woman in this world whose wishes rule me absolutely, and because she
requested me to see your child now and then, I have come several times,
until my sympathetic interest equals hers. With your career in New York
I am acquainted. For your radical views and utterances I have neither
respect nor toleration, yet, if you will permit me to explain, there are
reasons that lead me to believe I can do you a very great service."

"I am not in need of service from any man. Your formula has not even the
ring of originality; I have heard such sickening reiterations of it from
false, bearded lips."

"That you have been a cruelly wronged woman I feel assured, but I am
equally certain that your worst enemy was no man--was one of your own
sex. For your own sake, will you answer two questions?"

"For my own sake, I distinctly refuse to be catechised by impertinent
strangers."

"Oh, mother; please mother! He has been so good to me, how could he mean
harm to you? Don't worry her, Mr. Herriott. She can't abide men; they
fret her, and she hates them--unless they are starved and ragged. Please
let her alone, and look at my doves. They come for the crumbs on the
window sill. See! Here is a new one, pure white. Mother, scatter some
bread on the sheet and they will come in."

She sprinkled some scraps of cake close to his pillow, and, after a
little coy skirmishing, the pigeons fluttered in to the feast; but just
then a spell of coughing shook the fragile form on the cot, and with a
flash and whirr the flock vanished. Mrs. Dane lifted the boy and fanned
him, wiping away the moisture that beaded his clustering curls, and Mr.
Herriott piled the pillows and cushions behind his shaking shoulders.
When the paroxysm ended, and Leighton lay wan and spent, the visitor
leaned over him.

"I should like to do several things for you, but your mother will not
permit me. Miss Kent wishes you to know she remembers you with interest,
and hopes to hear you sing again. The stranger who preached at St.
Hyacinth's has not forgotten the poem he promised you, and will bring it
soon. I saw him last night. Now, I must say good-bye for to-day. Don't
try to speak, I understand everything."

Silently Mrs. Dane followed him to the door. Across the threshold, he
turned and lowered his voice.

"A sea voyage is the only thing that will prolong his life. With your
consent, it can be arranged at once."

She shook her head.

"Madam, I find I must revise my ideals of maternal devotion. You punish
your innocent child for the sins of those who blighted your youth? You
harangue a rabble in favor of 'justice' and deny it to a dying boy."

She caught her breath, leaned against the wall, and covered her face
with her hands. When he saw it again the color had ebbed, the lovely
eyes were darkened by unshed tears, and the lips were beyond her
control.

"My baby--my fatherless little one! Ever since he was born I have
struggled so hard to keep his mother's name clean--his mother's name,
all he had--clean and beyond reproach! Do you suppose that now, at the
last, I would put myself under obligation to a rich man? We may die
paupers, he and I, but when we go to the Potter's Field--the only
undisputed land labor can claim--we go free, honest, and unblemished,
and if there was a God, I could hold up my baby and demand why He had
cursed us both in our innocence."

"I am sorry that the circumstances coloring your life have destroyed
every vestige of confidence in man's honor, yet I have no alternative
but to accept your decision, and I wish you good morning."

He lifted his hat, and had gone half way down the stairs, when she
followed and touched his sleeve.

"I did not thank you for much goodness to my child, but I do want to say
I am not ungrateful; only I have had so little to be thankful for, I
don't quite know how to phrase gratitude. The world has been so hard to
me I am suspicious of every rich man in your social circle. You see, my
face has handicapped me always----"

She set her teeth and struck one palm resentfully against her cheek, and
the passionate, pent-up cry of years of suffering broke through the next
words.

"Yes, my face has been my curse, and it was the steel trap that snapped
chains on me when I was only a child. Kindness to my Leighton is the one
thing that touches what is left of my heart; and how do you suppose I
can bear now to listen to his sobbing yonder, because he thinks I have
rudely driven you away? Oh, my pretty baby! My own beautiful little one!
Cast out, with only his girl-mother to fight for him against this cruel
world! And now if I lose him, if my all is taken away from me----"

She wrung her hands, and the blanched face was upturned as if
challenging her God.

"Madam, I understand fully, and I intend to help your boy; but be sure I
shall visit him when you are absent. Tell him I shall come, with your
consent, while he is alone; and some day I think you will trust me, even
despite the fact that I happen to have money. Good-bye."

He held out his hand, but she seemed not to see it, and as she turned
and walked wearily up the steps he went down to his carriage.




CHAPTER XI


"Miss Kent, it is quite evident that you do not approve of us."

"Will you be so kind as to explain to whom 'us' refers?"

"Our great social world, including government, congressional and
diplomatic circles, club life, and all that 'progress' stands for.
Instead of moving abreast with the 'advance' current, you have drifted
aside into an eddy as contracted, as pitiably narrow as--pardon me, we
emancipated new women dare now to speak the brazen truth--as narrow as
the hands and feet you Southerners boast as sign of aristocratic blood."

Eglah lifted her grey-gloved hand, examined its outlines critically, and
placed it within a few inches of the broad, thick palm which Ethelberta
Higginbottom had laid on her own lap as she sat in the gallery of the
Senate chamber.

"Thank you very much, Miss Higginbottom. It is traditional in my family
to admire slender fingers, but we are not so intolerant as to deny
others the privilege of occupying as much space as their digits can
cover, and we never brand people as absolutely disreputable because they
wear number six shoes and number seven-and-a-half gloves. If degrees of
latitude determine the height of insteps, what manifest injustice has
been meted out to longitudinal lines that you Westerners so proudly
claim? Probably you have forgotten that my father is from New England,
and he owns a silver caddy--two hundred years old--that was empty at one
time because 'fish drank tea in Boston harbor.'"

"Oh, but your mother was Southern and you represent not heredity, but
sheredity, a sociological factor of immense potency, which must be
reckoned with, let me tell you, in the near future, when women fully
emancipated come to enjoyment of all the rights so long withheld from
them. Then mothers, and not fathers will wield the destiny of this great
country; and already female colleges are fast spreading the blessed
gospel of free and equal rights. Last week some one asserted that you
were a graduate of ---- College, but I contradicted it flatly, as
impossible and absurd."

"I am sorry I do my dear _Alma Mater_ such lamentable discredit; but,
unfortunately, we were not taught to wear our diplomas on our hats as
advertisements of scholarship."

"You certainly amaze me!"

"Perhaps you will excuse my frankness in assuring you that sensation at
least is mutual."

"With your educational advantages, to lock up your mind in a stockade of
provincialism! Desectionalize yourself!"

"May I ask whether you spell your last verb with an x or a ct? I should
prefer first to ascertain which process is demanded of me."

"Your Southern bigotry is a mill-stone around your neck. The very word
'emancipation' is a red rag to old slaveholders and their progeny. You
never can forgive us for breaking the shackles of groaning millions held
in bondage."

Eglah laughed.

"Pardon me, but it certainly is ludicrous that one possessing your
'broad culture and desectionalized' horizon of thought should really
believe in that old worn-out 'raw-head and bloody-bones' figure of
speech which has done duty so long. It surely is entitled to decent
interment where all dilapidated scarecrows cease from troubling. We
Southern people no more want our negroes back as slaves than you desire
the return of hordes of Indians whom you so completely dispossessed of
their native lands in your 'wild and rapacious West,' and whom a 'white,
fatherly' government is rapidly reducing to extinction by its beneficent
agencies. The white South is 'emancipated' from the moral responsibility
of elevating the black race now so happy in 'national' tutelage, where
their guardians taught them the system of bookkeeping and all the subtle
processes of the 'Freedmen's Bureau.'"

"How lonely you must feel in Washington. You have no more regard for the
rights of your own sex than for--" She stammered and coughed.

"Indeed, I have the most affectionate and jealous regard for every right
that inheres in my dower of American womanhood. I claim and enjoy the
right to be as cultured, as learned, as useful, and--if you please--as
ornamental in society and at home as my individual limitations will
permit. I have no wrongs, no grievances, no crying need to usurp lines
of work that will break down the barriers God set between men and women.
I am not in rebellion against legal statutes, nor the canons of
well-established decency and refinement in feminine usage, and, finally,
I am so inordinately proud of being a well-born Southern woman, with a
full complement of honorable great-grandfathers and blue-blooded,
stainless great-grand-mothers, that I have neither pretext nor
inclination to revolt against mankind."

"Miss Kent, you have rather pretty eyes, but you are so steeped in
Southern--what do you call it--_dolce far niente_, or _laissez faire_,
or semi-stagnation of soul that you are too lazy to open them wide
enough to see the thrilling vista of woman's triumph that illumines----"

"Thank you; my much flattered eyes are sufficiently open at this moment
to perceive the behavior of that nondescript creature in feminine
garments who is flirting so undisguisedly with Senator Smallweed yonder,
on your right; one of the early emancipated--an advanced lobbyist."

"You mean that piquant, charming little Mrs. Morrison? Dear soul! She is
a pathetically tragic object lesson. Had to get a divorce from a brutal
husband and become a bread-winner. Why should not women lobby? They are
so nimble witted, nature fitted them admirably for such work."

"And gave them the adroitly nimble fingers to fit the pockets they
pick."

"That is some cowardly man's cruel slander. My creed is always to defend
my own sex; it is only Christian charity and genuine feminine justice."

"Provided it be not merely lax morality. Sometimes the distinction is
not clear to very 'advanced,' zealous people."

"At least your father does not share your narrow harshness. He and Mrs.
Morrison are quite 'chummy,' and I happen to know he sees her often."

"How could he avoid it? Shoals of sharks swim in Washington, and since
your friend belongs to the 'emancipated' variety, doubtless she indulges
an 'elective affinity' for the largest senatorial prey in sight, and
hungrily shadows him. Yesterday that 'Bison Head' bill she is working
for came to grief in committee, and will be buried to-day. Even sharks
occasionally miss a meal."

"Oh, you are not up to date! Before the decision was announced one of
the committee weakened, asked for reconsideration; another hurried
meeting was held last night, and the bill will not be reported this
session. Not killed you understand, just tenderly pigeon-holed, securely
wrapped up in parliamentary camphor to scare away opposition moths, and
allowed to sleep while its pretty guardian angel has another session in
which to smooth the way for its final passage."

At this moment a messenger boy brought a note to Miss Higginbottom, and
Eglah rose.

"You do not suspect who the _weakening_ member was?"

"If I cared to ask, I dare say your fair _divorcee_ friend would be able
to enlighten me, but the petty political schemes engineered by lobbyists
do not interest me."

"One moment, Miss Kent. You did not come to my _musicale_. I have only
one olive twig left. We entertain a few friends to-morrow night in honor
of a famous Western woman, who will lecture next season on 'Civic
Problems,' for the purpose of raising money to build a vast, up-to-date
club temple, where women can proclaim their views on female right to
suffrage and expansion. May I have the pleasure of presenting you?"

"You are very kind, Miss Higginbottom, but as we leave Washington at the
end of the week, I regret that I shall not have time for any new
engagements. Pray accept my thanks for several courtesies."

"I used to wonder why you are so unpopular, but it soon ceased to be a
mystery, and it will be no sacrifice to you to give up Washington, in
retiring from public life. When Senator Kent formally resigns--as is the
burden of a little bird's song that utters no false notes--he will,
doubtless, consign you to a more congenial circle of friends."

"In saying good-bye, I shall find some solace in the assurance that at
least you will not mourn inconsolably because of my final departure.
Please present my best wishes to Mrs. Higginbottom, who has shown me
much kindness, and whom I may not be able to see again. Good-bye."

She stood a few seconds, smiling mischievously into the florid face of
the large-featured woman of most certain age, whose light-yellow eyes
flashed back unmistakable malice, then, amid the roar of applause that
greeted the peroration of a white-haired senator in the chamber below,
she quietly stole out of the Capitol, and sought a favorite corner of
the Smithsonian grounds.

Walking slowly, she asked in a spirit of self-chastisement why she had
allowed waspish stings to provoke a retaliatory tone, at variance with
that cool repose of well-bred urbanity and imperturbable courtesy on
which she prided herself; and was not the condescension of retort an
unladylike and mortifying weakness?

Now and then come radiant days when a noon sun shines hot, and no
faintest film flecks the stainless blue, yet one grows vaguely conscious
of waning brightness, and gradually the horizon blanches to a deadly
grey, while leaden clouds creep into view like spectral fingers of some
vast hand groping across the sky to smother the sun. Shadows projected
by the invisible unnerve natures that fearlessly face tangible,
well-defined danger, as 'the sallow, weird light preceding an eclipse is
more menacing than its total darkness, where friendly stars still
shine.' For Eglah, the clock of fate had begun to chime that _mauvais
quart d'heure_ which Mrs. Maurice had known would inevitably overtake
her, and the preliminary whirring of the hidden cogs had found her
unprepared. Blind faith in her father's sagacity, political
steadfastness, and incorruptibility, had built a pedestal from which he
smiled down benignantly upon her, making life a festival; but when the
needle of doubt pricked the fine veil love spun across her vision, and
she dared allow herself to question, a shivering and nameless dread
shook her happy young heart, as unexpectedly blighting as a shower of
sleet on an August passion-flower. When Jove nods his worship wanes.

Since the night of the cotillon, several inexplicable circumstances,
comparatively slight yet cumulative, had perplexed this fond and loyal
daughter, who began to find the maze of Senator Kent's political methods
too tortuous for her exploration.

Startled by his abrupt reversal of judgment on more than one important
question involving party allegiance, she had sought an explanation,
which he laughingly evaded, and, when she pressed the matter, his
avoidance was marked by an irritability of speech and gesture hitherto
unknown in the domestic circle. The undisguised graciousness of his
demeanor toward Mrs. Morrison had surprised and annoyed her, and she was
painfully astonished by his efforts to conciliate Senator Higginbottom,
who belonged to the opposite party, and was a loud, aggressive, and
hirsute apostle of the silver gospel so dear to his constituency, and so
conducive to his individual interest as a mine owner. Mrs. Higginbottom,
a plain, kind-hearted, motherly old woman, who knew much more of
sheep-shearing and beehives than of fashionable etiquette and diplomatic
technicalities, Eglah had found it possible to receive cordially, but
the daughter, Ethelberta, was an intolerable offence to all her feminine
instincts, and when Judge Kent insisted, with some asperity, that the
"Higginbottoms must be cultivated," the ordeal of playing hostess to
this "advanced and emancipated new woman" proved peculiarly unpleasant.
A certain watchful restlessness in her father's manner did not escape
her notice, nor the recent accession of sphinx-like non-committalism in
Mr. Metcalf, and she pondered uneasily a question of Mrs. Mitchell's:

"Dearie, did it ever occur to you that in some way Judge Kent seems
rather afraid of Mr. Herriott, or perhaps I should say is always so
guarded in his presence?"

"Never! Impossible and absurd. He has supreme confidence in him, and
once, not long ago, he scolded me sharply because I could not consider
him head and shoulders above all other men."

The session of Congress was within two days of its close, and that
morning, as Senator Kent rose from an untasted breakfast, he astounded
Eglah and Eliza by the ejaculation, "God knows, I shall be glad to get
out of this grind!"

Fearing sickness had robbed him of his appetite, Eglah followed him to
the library, but he waved her back.

"Metcalf is waiting to show me a paper, and I must not be interrupted.
My dear, my time is not my own--even for you."

Hitherto she had never been an interruption, and it seemed as if some
iron door was shut suddenly between her life and his. "The Bison Head"
purchase bill, for which Mrs. Morrison flitted to and fro, had been
fought by Senator Kent in committee room, where the contest was close,
but Senator Higginbottom was chairman, and when Miss Ethelberta
announced that a member had "weakened" and the bill might be saved by
postponement, Eglah knew who had changed front, and she began to realize
how ancient pilgrims felt when, at Delphi, the oracle said no to-day and
yes to-morrow. Idolatrous habit was strong; the pedestal trembled, but
it was a far cry to its overthrow, and she wrestled stubbornly to defend
inconsistencies that humiliated and staggered her. Time, the master
magician, would perhaps show her the Senator's reasons woven into a
crown of laurel--as unexpected as the garland of glowing roses that
spring out of a naked sword blade, at the gesture of a juggler. To-day
she recalled her grandmother's softened face with eyes of tender
compassion on that morning when the news of the second marriage had been
brought to Nutwood. After all, was there just cause for the old lady's
contempt and aversion, and were the rumors rife in Y---- shadows of grim
and disgraceful facts that must cling to her father's name, fateful as
the philter of Nessus? The thought stifled her, and she put her hand to
her throat with the old childish habit that always betrayed intolerable
pain. She could not go home--must not meet Eliza's eyes until she
strangled this crouching horror. Through the Smithsonian she wandered,
apparently examining its treasures, but now she saw only the pitying
countenance of her grandmother, and now the malicious triumph in Miss
Higginbottom's eyes, as she exulted in some impending misfortune.
"Formal resignation"--adumbrated by more than one innuendo--portended
the summary collapse of a political career that she had believed would
culminate in elevation to a Cabinet seat during the next administration.
For her, obstinate confidence was to-day the sole refuge, and she set
her teeth as she verified Mrs. Maurice's prediction: "'Though he slay
me, yet will I trust him.' My own father cannot betray the faith of his
loyal child."

Dreading Eliza's scrutiny, it was with a feeling of temporary relief
that she recollected an engagement to attend a "lawn party" held that
afternoon at a residence whose owner was laboring to raise an endowment
fund for a local charity. When she reached home, a change of costume
gave time to marshal all her defensive forces; and, as she came
downstairs to join her waiting chaperon, Mrs. Mitchell forbore to
comment on the unusual color that burned in her cheeks.

"Little mother, don't sit up for me. I promised Mrs. Ellerbee to assist
at the flower table, and may be kept late. Be sure you get your beauty
sleep."

Dinner was delayed an hour beyond the usual time, but Senator Kent did
not appear, and as such deviations from domestic rule had recently
occurred often, and were explained by congestion of business at the
Capitol, incident to approaching adjournment, Mrs. Mitchell took her
meal alone. It was prayer-meeting evening at the Methodist Church in her
neighborhood, and, after the exercises ended, she walked home, took up a
magazine, and tried unsuccessfully to read. The political atmosphere was
so charged with electricity that she felt a crisis was imminent, and
only the extent of the storm was conjectural. How much Eglah suspected
the foster-mother merely surmised, because some inexplicable barrier
seemed, within the past fortnight, built up to limit their free
interchange of thought. It was a sultry, sombre night; city walls and
pavements sent up their garnered heat in quivering waves, and the stars
were blurred and faint as they retreated behind a dim haze that was not
mist. At eleven o'clock the street corner light showed her Senator Kent
walking rapidly. She went into the dining-room to arrange the salad and
cold tea he always enjoyed after missing his dinner, and while he
lingered in the hall Eglah returned. She was bare-headed, very pale, and
her lips fluttered, but a brave, tender smile lighted her eyes, and she
put her arms about his neck and kissed him twice.

"How tired you poor national Solons must be! But I know one whose day's
work is not yet ended, and who must pick a whole flock of crows with me,
right now. Why did you change your vote on the 'Bison Head' purchase?"

"Who says I did?"

His face was deeply flushed, but he laughed and pinched her white cheek.

"The chairman has a daughter."

"A leaky gossip. Congressmen ought to be bachelors or childless
widowers; but then, my dear, how could I possibly exist without you?"

"Father, what induced you to favor a measure you have condemned so
emphatically?"

"Several good reasons I am much too tired to discuss. Don't forget your
Emerson, who says 'a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little
minds, adored by little statesmen,' and remember, also, 'a wise man
sometimes changes his mind, a fool never.' The bill will not be reported
till next session, and conditions alter, so _apres moi le deluge_!"

She walked toward the dining-room, and on the threshold Eliza saw her
put both hands to her throat. Drawing her breath quickly, she turned
back and threw her arms around him.

"Oh, father! Was it kind, was it merciful to let me learn by chance from
strangers that you have determined to resign your senatorship, to end a
glorious career in which you know my dearest hopes and pride centre?"

For a moment he made no reply, only clasped her closely, pillowed her
head on his breast, and kissed her cold cheek repeatedly.

Then he spoke in a husky tone, as a nervous surgeon might, uncertain of
his own diagnosis.

"My darling girl, I confess it was a cowardly dread of the pain I knew
my decision would cause you, and I very weakly put off the evil day as
long as possible. Immediately after adjournment I intended to tell you
all the plans that seem best for our future, and did not anticipate this
premature disclosure, which is presumptuous impertinence in its author.
In quitting public life even temporarily, my brightest compensation is
the prospect of spending my time in the sweet companionship of my
precious, incomparable daughter. Forgive your old father the arrant
cowardice of keeping silent for a few days."

She clung to him like a frightened child, and he felt her trembling as
one in an ague.

"Why must you resign? Why step down when you have a right to expect the
new administration will offer you a place in the Cabinet? Why? Don't
keep back anything from me now."

"My love, I don't wish to distress you; I shrink from exciting any
alarm, but you certainly have a right to the truth. My health does not
permit the amount of canvassing work that I believe will be required for
my re-election, because our State legislature will be much divided this
presidential campaign over vital issues, both local and national. As my
term expires soon, I think it best to resign now, and avoid grave
complications that threaten our party organization in the State
legislature. Recently I have had premonitions that drove me to consult
Dr. McLemore, and he advises me to withdraw from active political life,
at least for a season. He believes complete rest and freedom from public
responsibility are all that my health demands. I did not wish you to
know this, but you are such an inquisitive monkey, such an arbitrary
minx, that nothing less than the whole truth will satisfy your exacting
reason. Now kiss me, my pretty chestnut burr, and let us pick no more
crows."

"You have been ill, and we--I--never suspected it?"

She caught her breath spasmodically, stifling a sob. Her father glanced
significantly at Eliza, who stood beside the table, lifting a pitcher of
iced tea that clinked against its sides in her nervous grasp.

"I see Mrs. Mitchell--always admirably reliable--has kept her promise to
me. Now she can tell you I had a very severe attack the night we were so
late at Secretary P----'s dinner, and you could not understand my delay
in dressing."

"Ma-Lila! You kept me in ignorance of father's danger, when you should
have warned me?"

"Your father positively forbade any mention of the matter to you, and as
I never saw or heard of a recurrence of what he assured me was merely
the result of imprudent indulgence in oysters, cheese, and beer, I had
no excuse for disobeying his command to keep silence."

The little woman's eyes sparkled, and an involuntary curl of her lip did
not escape Eglah's questioning sorrowful gaze.

"Come, my dear, do not quite strangle what is left of a very tired old
man. Now that explanations are completely over, I feel as happy as a boy
just returned from the dentist's where he left an aching tooth; and
since you know absolutely all that can be told, I should like some tea
dashed with cognac, for I have had a hard, tedious day."

He unwound her arms, patted her head, and took his seat at the table.

Eglah squeezed a lemon into a goblet of tea, Eliza stirred the
mayonnaise, and Judge Kent helped himself to an anchovy sandwich, while
he asked whether they had heard the sad news of the sudden death of a
popular attache of one of the legations, who had been killed an hour
before by the accidental discharge of his own pistol. Heroic efforts
were made by all to avoid the disturbing theme upon which the Senator
had peremptorily rung down the curtain, and to relieve the tension the
trio separated as soon as possible.

How much of the perfunctory explanation either woman credited neither
could determine, but each refrained from probing the other, and both
endeavored to bridge the crater by that golden silence that knows no
pangs of regretted speech. Lying wide awake, Mrs. Mitchell noted the
slow passage of the heavy hours, and day was just below the eastern sky
line when the sudden shrill trilling of a canary in the adjoining room
told that some restless movement of Eglah's had aroused it. Eliza longed
to go and comfort the suffering girl, but every heart has a sanctuary
which not even the tenderest affection should dare to violate, and the
subtle sympathy of the overseer's wife taught her love's duty was to
guard, not force the entrance. After a few moments, Eglah opened the
door and came on tiptoe to her bed.

"What is it, dearie? Nobody can sleep on such a suffocating night."

She sat up and put one arm around the white figure, which, instead of
yielding to her clasp, held back straight and stiff as steel.

"I thought I heard you stir, else I should not have ventured to disturb
you. Ma-Lila, the thought of father's ill health weighs terribly on my
heart. Will you please tell me the nature of that attack which you both
kept from me? What were the symptoms?"

"He had been dozing in his chair, and quite suddenly sprang up, pale,
and evidently much agitated. I wished to call you, and urged him to
abandon the idea of leaving the house, but he insisted I should not give
you even a hint, and asked for the decanter of brandy, which he was sure
would relieve a severe fit of indigestion caused by imprudence at
luncheon. He went to his room, and when he came out you saw no sign of
serious indisposition."

"He had been annoyed by no visitors?"

"He had seen no one but Watson and myself."

"Do you think there was heart trouble that night? Tell me frankly."

"Yes, most certainly there was; but, my baby, heart trouble comes from
various causes, and I really do not think your father's physical
condition justifies any serious uneasiness. He is evidently alarmed, but
nervous strain and mental worry are sufficient to produce all his
symptoms, and you will find that retirement from congressional
complications expedites recovery in such cases."

The girlish form relaxed, and a hot cheek was pressed against the
foster-mother's face.

"Don't comfort me with false hopes, unless you are sure I am unduly
frightened."

"Listen to me. I am absolutely certain that Judge Kent's health need
cause you no alarm in future. Now, shake off that nightmare, and go to
sleep like a good child, or I will certainly dose you with bromide."

She kissed her softly, and with an arm about her waist led her back to
her bed.

"Ma-Lila, I want to forget the last three weeks. Won't you help me?"




CHAPTER XII


"What is the urgent necessity? I have just held my afternoon mission
service, and I am very tired. Noel, why are you so insistent?"

"Perhaps it has been borne in upon my 'subliminal consciousness' that if
you wait too long you may possibly regret it. Once or twice I have found
profit in following a rule my old nurse taught me when I wore kilts:
'Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day.' No 'daemon' squats
at my ear, and I claim no mantic illumination, still I should be glad to
know you will make that visit at once."

"You fear the poor boy is dying?"

"Not immediately, but he appears hopelessly ill, and needs all the kind
words you may find yourself better able to utter than any one else.
Moreover, it would be well that you should see his mother, who is away
at work during the week, and as you expect to leave the city so soon,
this will be the most suitable opportunity for you to meet her at home.
Poor, fierce, bitter soul! She has no milk of human kindness left; it
soured and has become acrid--intensely mordacious."

"She belongs then to the unhappy class of frail women who go swiftly to
utter wreck in all large cities, where sin is arrayed in rose color and
gilt. Strange that the boy of such a creature should remind one of the
infant St. John or a seraph of Angelico's."

"Some fragments of her history lead me to believe that she is as
trustworthy and pure as any woman to whom you preach. Her morality is
beyond cavil, but theoretically she seems to have gone wild among the
hedges and ditches of socialism."

"You consider her a conscientious, good woman?"

"As far as I can ascertain she lives irreproachably, bar associating
with anarchists. I surmise some man has treated her cruelly, or she
thinks so, and now she----"

Mr. Herriott rose, looked at his watch, and laughed.

"Temple, do you recollect one summer night under the elms, when
rehearsing for the Greek play, Prescott Winthrop declaimed the
herdsman's message from the 'Bacchae,' and emphasized the portrait of
Agave in the frenzy of the _Thiasus_ strangling a calf and fondling a
wolf's whelp? To-day Leighton's mother recalled that scene, but she is
not dancing to meet Bromius--only hunting revenge on all mankind. Ah,
you are going? I suggest a cautious approach. Leave the carriage out of
sight, and boldly flourish the promised book as an open sesame. You of
the cassock clan enjoy privileges denied to us, the ungirdled sons of
Belial. After all, you may prove the _deus ex machina_, and through the
poor little lad may be able to lay a healing touch on the mother's sick
soul. Come to my rooms after your visit, and we will say good-bye until
I get back from my long jaunt."

An hour later Father Temple made his way into the tenement house,
through a noisy mob of children romping on the pavement, and when he
entered the narrow hall outside din was conquered by the deep, swelling
music of "Quis est Homo," wailing from a violoncello held between the
knees of a man sitting half way up the stairs, a thin, stooping old
figure with shaggy grey hair, and bearded as a Welsh harper. The priest
ascended, and the musician edged closer to the wall to allow him passage
way, but he merely nodded his bowed head, and the solemn strains rose
and fell like the sobbing moan of waves settling to calm after lashing
blasts. Father Temple lifted his finger.

"Mrs. Dane lives on the next floor?"

"Go ub. She vill see no briests, but her door is oben for de child to
hear de music he loves. Dear leedle boy is sick, and my cello sounds
more better here dan closer."

He shut his eyes and continued playing. Opposite the undraped west
window of the room above, an alley stretched, making clear pathway for
the sinking sun that poured a parting flood of radiance into the
apartment, and upon the cot where, propped up with pillows, the boy
clasped his arms around his knees, and listened, quiet and happy.
Between cot and window his mother sat, facing the back of her chair, on
top of which she rested one arm, leaning her brow upon it, while the
other hand, lying on the cot, slowly stroked Leighton's bare feet.
Having washed her hair earlier in the day, it was now brushed out over
her shoulders to dry in the sunshine, and the bright mass of waving
tendrils seemed to clothe her with light. On the floor were scattered
several newspaper sheets--"The Chain Breaker"--and across her knee lay
an open copy of "Battle-cry of Labor." Only the mellow voice of the
cello sounded, and the room was sweet with the breath of Mr. Herriott's
white carnations nodding in a blue bowl on the table. Standing a moment
at the threshold, Father Temple's eyes fastened on the veil of golden
locks falling to the floor, and his heart leaped, then seemed to cease
beating as he recalled a vision of the far West, where just such
glittering strands had been twined around his fingers.

"Oh, my St. Hyacinth's preacher!"

At Leighton's glad cry his mother raised her head, started up, and,
moving forward a few steps, swept back her hair, holding it with both
hands. Before her stood the tall, thin figure in the long, black habit
of his Order, cord-girded at the waist; with a soft wool hat and book in
one hand; a clean-shaven face, pale, sensitive, scholarly, and
suggestive of "lauds and prime," of asceticism without peace, and of
brooding regret.

He recognized every line in her lovely features, from the large pansy
eyes and delicate, over-arching brows to the perfect oval molding of
cheek and chin, and the full, downward curve of scarlet lips. Love is so
keen of vision it pierces the changes wrought by ripening years, and he
knew the dear face. She did not suspect, love had been dead so long, and
she had buried all tender memories in its neglected grave.

"I am surprised a Romish priest wastes his time coming here, and I have
no welcome to offer you, because I wish no visitors."

With a swift movement he closed the door, dropped hat and book, and came
close to her. The sudden glow on his cheek, the light of exultation in
his sad eyes transformed him.

"Look at me. Don't you know me? Look--look!"

Eye to eye they watched each other, and at the sound of his deep,
tender, quivering voice recollection smote hard upon her heart, and a
vague, shivering pain drove the blood from her face, but she fought the
suggestion.

"You are unknown to me."

"I am Vernon Pembroke Temple, and you are Nona, my wife! My Nona--my own
wife----"

Words failed him, and he held out his arms. She recoiled, throwing up
her hands with a gesture of loathing, and stood as if turned to stone,
so strangely hard was a face where eyes kindled and burned with the pent
hatred and scorn of long years of sore trial.

"You had not sins enough to sink your soul without adding hypocrisy? A
preacher! A priest! Cowardice, perjury, moral leprosy, skulking under a
long cloak as black as what is left of your vile heart!"

Each word fell like a red-hot flail, but he did not wince, and neither
father nor mother heard the low wail from the cot where childish arms
covered a face white with horror.

"You think, you believe I intentionally and pre-meditatedly deserted
you, and in your ignorance of facts you certainly had cause to despise
me, but----"

"Think--believe! As if it were possible to doubt the villainy planned!
The crime you so carefully committed against a mere child, knowing she
was a helpless victim, believing she could never redress her awful
wrongs. As if you had set a trap and caught an innocent, happy bird, and
then broken its wings and tossed it to screaming hawks! Coward--coward
as you always were--how dare you face me?"

"Nona, dear Nona--" He put out his hand appealingly, but she struck it
aside with stinging force, and stepped backward.

"Out of my sight, or I call the police."

She pointed to the door. He turned, locked it, put the key in his
pocket, and his eyes steadily met the challenge in hers. The banked,
smouldering fires that flashed up must burn lower before he could plead.
So they stood: he flushed, smiling, happy; she shaken by a tempest of
rage that blanched her to a livid pallor and set all the glittering
rings of hair quivering, as if innumerable golden serpents coiled and
uncoiled around her trembling form.

In the pause he lifted the hanging ends of the knotted cord.

"Do you understand what this habit means?"

"Don't I? A holy cloak to hide every sin that makes this world a hotter
hell than even God could fashion--if God were possible. You drape it
over the ten commandments, blotting them out, while you sing psalms, and
rob the toiling poor, and ruin young lives, and murder innocent souls.
Oh, yes, to my sorrow, I understand all it means!"

"It means my consecration to celibacy when you fled from me, and I had
exhausted all efforts to find you."

"Celibacy! Celibacy! I needed no nunnery to help me keep clean and pure,
but you ran behind monastery walls to protect yourself from retribution
at a wronged woman's hands. Coward from first to last! When I fled from
you? You must indeed be possessed of the devil to dare such language to
me."

"Nona, there has been some awful mistake----"

"Yes, a mistake that I was not scalped, or that a merciful bolt of
lightning did not strike me dead that day--that cursed day--when first I
set my eyes on your false, treacherous face! If you could only know how
I hate, despise, utterly despise the bare thought, much more the
horrible sight of you!"

"No wonder, since circumstances were apparently all against me at----"

"Circumstances are no shelter for honest, honorable men, if there be any
left; and the hard, bitter, murderous facts of your shameful life would
find you out if you dodged under the very throne of the God you
blaspheme by professing!"

"Will you listen to the truth?"

"You could not speak it if you tried. I listened to you once too often,
and you wrecked me, and I am no longer a fool."

"Why did you leave Thompsonville after you received my letters, and the
money I sent you, and when you knew I was coming there to take you away
with me?"

For an instant she looked at him with startled curiosity, then laughed
hysterically.

"I left Thompsonville because you wrote no letters, sent no money, and
took no notice of my frantic appeals for help in my hour of horrible
trial. A sick woman with a frail, feeble baby, facing starvation,
abandoned, slandered, and trampled in the mud, I could only snatch at
the hand held out to me by the one man I have found honest, honorable,
loyal, and true, as he was pitying and kind."

"But when I reached Thompsonville Delia Brown told me----"

Her scornful laugh drowned his words.

"'When you reached Thompsonville' in your dreams--after a night's
carousal at college! Even a congenital idiot would sicken at that."

No shadow of impatience crossed his happy countenance; the intensity of
her scoffing bitterness was part of his punishment--the harvest that
sprang from his own sowing--and he must not complain until she
understood fully.

"I can prove that I went to Thompsonville, and I have the sworn
testimony of Delia Brown that she delivered into your hands my letters
and the package of money I sent to her care through the express agent.
On a scrap of paper I have also a receipt in pencil from you to Delia
Brown."

She shook her head and smote her palms together.

"Forgeries one and all. I would not believe you on your oath, unless the
grave yawned, and Leighton Dane--dead six years--came back as witness in
your favor."

"'He was the handsome Spanish-looki

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